Every person has also in his moral backside which he does not show except under the stress of necessity and which he covers as long as possible with the pants of good breeding. To be in doubt about a proposition is to withhold assent both from it and from its contradictory. Although people sometimes withhold assent with no reason for doing so and persist in this even after conceding that they have no reason doubt is rational only when one has a reason for it and reasonable only when the reason is a good one. Doubt may be accompanied by various feelings, but it seems unlikely that there are specific feelings uniquely associated with it; in general, the feelings associated with distrust are anxiety or hesitation, which are identified as feelings of uncertainty when they arise in context involving questions of belief. The motives for our actions may be arranged like the thirty-two winds, and their names may be classified in a similar way, e.g., Bread-bread-glory or Glory-glory-bread. I did not come to bring peace but a sword. If you are sensitive to God’s way, your message as His believer will be merciless and insistent, cutting to the very root. Otherwise, there will be no healing. We must drive the message to the house so forcefully that a person cannot possibly hide but must apply the truth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

In any case, philosophers are not ordinarily concerned with psychological characterizations of a doubter’s state of mind. Their attention is primarily devoted to understanding the conditions under which doubt is reasonable and to defining the limits of reasonable doubt. Whether it is reasonable for a person to doubt a proposition cannot always be decided solely by considering the evidence which the person possess relevant to the proposition or, in a situation in which the purportedly noninferential knowledge, by considering his ground for assent. Doubts that are reasonable in another, although the available evidence or ground is the same in both cases. For example, special caution is appropriate when the penalties for error are particularly great; hence, an ordinarily acceptable basis for assent may be inadequate if much depends upon avoiding error, although the gravity of the risk does not in itself constitute evidence. Moreover, a basis for assent that would be entirely compelling in normal circumstances may be insufficient if otherwise remote possibilities of error must be taken seriously because of threats posed by a resourceful deceiver. Deal with people where they are until they begin to realize their true need. Until, at last, the buttons tore from the pants of his patience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

Nowadays, failure is much praised—the failed start-up has become a badge of honor among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs—and rightly so. Failure is part of the process, the error in “trial and error,” trying repeatedly for success. Originality requires venturing out into the unknown, dwelling in uncertainty, and learning an instance of wrong or improper conduct. And the more inventive a product, the less one knows about its chances of success. Innovation drags one into the realm of ambiguity—a continuous area or expanse that is free, available, or unoccupied. The dimensions of height, depth, and width within all things exist and move. In some scientific fields, experiments fail more than 70 percent of the time. Between more than 70 and 80 percent of new food products are failures. Venture capitalists, film producers, book editors, video game programmers, and pharmaceutical researchers all face extraordinarily high average failure rates. Failure is central to the discovery and creativity, and failures are more common than success. Today’s economic instability and globally competitive markets have also made remaining positioned on the top of someone or something harder than ever. The average time that a company spends in the S&P 500 index in 2016, is 25 percent of the average time in 1936. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

The long-term health of [the American] economy and full economic recovery depend upon finding ways to encourage far more innovation. Only innovators and entrepreneurs will be safe from losing their jobs to automation or outsourcing. In a World where, say, a refrigerator instruction manual can be edited cheaply and proficiently by an English teacher in the country of Afghanistan, and where tax preparation can be done by algorithm, the people most likely to succeed and flourish are those who are creating new economic opportunities. Tomorrow’s workforce needs to handle the uncertainty and failure that go along with innovation. Unfortunately, today’s students are woefully unprepared. When is one entitled to regard a proposition as indubitable? It might be maintained that one is not entitled to do so as long as anything which can serve as evidence relevant to the proposition remains unexamined, on the ground that when this evidence comes to be examined, it may turn out to require an alteration of belief. When you are not playing eighteen holes of golf, you have to be inventive. You do not hit the same shot twice in a row with the same club. You are switching clubs, the slopes of the course are changing, and the ball is always in a different position relative to the hole. A better way to practice at the golf range, would be to train to face new and shifting challenges.  #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

The practice range has it uses, of course. For building basic skills, repetition is great. Hitting buckets of call is what you should be doing. Golfers have to learn the baseline mechanics before they can apply them, just as physics students need to memorize basic equations. By virtue of the empirical and logical connections among facts, the truth-values of an unlimited number of proposition are relevant to that of any proposition to examine each of these other propositions, no proposition could ever be regarded as indubitable if it were first necessary to examine everything that may serve as evidence relevant to its truth-value. On the other hand, it seems that this impasse can be avoided only if it is possible to settle in advance the important matters that have not been examined. Instead of treating technique as the be-all and end-all, I emphasize training to face playing situations. Ideally, I want players to practice on the widest range of golf courses under different conditions, but that is not so realistic in terms of resources. We can viably transform the driving range into a place where golfers do not just learn to hit shots mechanically, but also prepare to adjust fluidly while something or someone is operating or moving. One has to simulate the unpredictability of the golf course by switching clubs, alternating distances, and playing out different scenarios. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

It is best to prepare of competition by withholding feedback, something that many pupils and even fellow teachers are initially uncomfortable with. Whenever a golfer hits a shot, he or she gets nonverbal feedback from how the body feels, how the ball moved, and how it sounds. Golfers perform better during training if they can adjust to a coach’s constant feedback, but that very feedback can be a crutch, hurting them later on when they have to think for themselves. Since it is impossible to examine each of these other propositions, no proposition could ever be regarded as indubitable if it were first necessary to examine everything that may serve as evidence relevant to its truth-value. On the other hand, it seems that this impasse can be avoided only if it is possible to settle in advance the important of matters that have not been examined. The impossibility of checking all the consequences of an empirical proposition must always remain dubitable. Graduates confronted with a labor market that increasingly puts a premium on creativity, exploring uncertainties and learning from failure, yet many college professors still act like antiquated-school golf instructors focused on automatically applying skills, rather than helping students learn to deal with the challenges of invention. The current education system was designed and conceived and structured for a different age. Western education system has become obsolete; it is preparing workers for a World that no longer exists. Can we not do better? #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

Under what conditions is it reasonable to make such a requirement of incorrigibility—to arrange that nothing count as evidence against a certain proposition? In some cases (for instance, when a geometrical proposition is supported by a well-understood proof, or when a basic proposition is grounded in immediate experience) it may seem fairly clear that the conditions are satisfied. However, philosophers have failed to provide a general account of these conditions; instead they have usually limited themselves to identifying particular instances of their satisfaction. Some philosophers have claimed with considerable plausibility that certain elementary mathematical propositions (such as that 2 + 2 = 4) may be regarded as indubitable without proof, but they have done little to explain systematically why this should be so. Today’s pedagogic driving range is the university lecture, the standard form of teaching in higher education for six hundred years. In a typical classroom, students are neatly arranged using clear, declarative statements. Lectures are not usually designed to help students grapple with ambiguous problems. Professors do not generally include gaps in logic for students to fill in, or contradictions to workout, or pauses that encourage students to reflect. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

That is because teachers get nervous or impatient and then answer their own queries. With regard to empirical propositions, neglect of the problem of clarifying the conditions in which they may be accepted as indubitable has resulted in part from widespread controversy over whether the problem properly arises at all. It is estimated that ten second usually elapsed between their questions and then the professor resumed speaking. Another study revealed a stunning ratio of teacher-to-student questions: an instructor in one causes posed eighty-four questions, while students asked only two. A more general obstacle to a sound understanding of the basis of indubitably lies in a tendency to look for it in the wrong place. Lectures do little to inspire interest, encourage conceptual or active thinking, change students’ minds, or help students learn how to respectfully disagree with their peers (since they are not discussing material with another). A proposition is indubitable when there could be no reason to doubt it, but this impossibility is not in general inherent in the logical character of the proposition itself. indubitability is an epistemic property which depends on the relation between a proposition and the evidence or ground for assent with which it is considered. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

In particular, dubitability and indubitability must not be confused with logical contingency and logical necessity.   The logical contingency of a proposition may reasonably be doubted by someone who is not in a position to appreciate its necessity and who therefore must concede the possibility that further inquiry will uncover evidence against it. Moreover, it is a mistake to suppose that evidence for a proposition it not conclusive unless its conjunction with the denial of the proposition is self-contradictory. To be sure, a proposition is indubitable if and only if no basis for assenting to its alternative is conceivable, but something may be inconceivable even though it contradicts neither itself nor what has already been established. To support the claims that a certain proposition is indubitable, it is not sufficient to understand the conditions in which such claims are justified; it is also necessary to know what the conditions are fulfilled in the particular case in question. The regress supports no more than the mordant comment that it is never reasonable to insist that the question of whether one is being reasonable is entirely closed. Lectures are often as good as reading the textbooks. They convey facts. The role is fitting, since in the Middle Ages, a lecture meant that a professor would read aloud from an original source. The problem is not with the lecture, but comprehension and discussion of the material. You may need to spend five years in Kappa Tau Gamma and Omega Chi Delta or Zeta Beta Zeta. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9