Why Rational People Obstinately Hold onto Irrational Beliefs: A New Approach

Why does a normal person sometimes obstinately hold onto a belief against independent evidence? Existing approaches often assume that non-evidential factors make the person irrational—either by distorting the way the person collects and evaluates independent evidence or by serving as direct reasons for the person's belief. This chapter proposes a new approach that does not presuppose such irrationality. It suggests that sometimes non-evidential factors may instead contribute to the formation and maintenance of the person's seeming experience. As a result, the person may find herself in an epistemically dilemmic situation: on the one hand, she faces independent evidence against the belief, but on the other hand, she experiences a strong seeming that, in various ways, compels the belief. The reason why she obstinately holds onto the belief is that the compelling seeming outweighs the independent evidence.