Certainty and confidence

Certainty is the feeling that you’re right about something. You feel confident and sure, you know you’re right.

Both our intuitive and rational systems have ways of creating the feeling of certainty.

The rational sense of certainty comes from proof: we can verify the chain of steps leading to our conclusions. That is the purpose of rationality, it allows us to slowly check our conclusions. When our conclusions can’t be fully proven, we allow that there’s room for doubt.

The intuitive sense of certainty cannot be independently verified.