I wouldn’t interpret Kaj as saying “Go ahead and remember false things for instrumental gain. What could possibly go wrong with that!?”. Truth is obviously important, and allowing oneself to pretend “this looks instrumentally useful to believe, so I can ignore the fact that it’s clearly false” is definitely a recipe for disaster.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. If we attempt to have any beliefs at all, we’re going to be wrong now and then, and the best way to deal with this is to keep this in mind, stay calibrated, and generally look at more rather than less.
It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works. If you try to mislead someone and convince them that a certain thing is happened, they might remember “oh, but I could have been mislead” where as if you do the exact same thing but instead you mislead them to think “you remember this happening”, then they now get this false stamp of certainty saying “but I remember it!”.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. [...] It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works.
I wouldn’t interpret Kaj as saying “Go ahead and remember false things for instrumental gain. What could possibly go wrong with that!?”. Truth is obviously important, and allowing oneself to pretend “this looks instrumentally useful to believe, so I can ignore the fact that it’s clearly false” is definitely a recipe for disaster.
What Kaj is saying, I think, is that the possibility of being wrong is not justification for closing ones eyes and not looking. If we attempt to have any beliefs at all, we’re going to be wrong now and then, and the best way to deal with this is to keep this in mind, stay calibrated, and generally look at more rather than less.
It’s not that “recovering memories” is especially error prone, it’s that everything is error prone and people often fail to appreciate how unreliable memory can be because they don’t actually get how it works. If you try to mislead someone and convince them that a certain thing is happened, they might remember “oh, but I could have been mislead” where as if you do the exact same thing but instead you mislead them to think “you remember this happening”, then they now get this false stamp of certainty saying “but I remember it!”.
I endorse this summary.