Articulate Hesitation

Have you ever looked into the mirror and wondered how people ‘truly’ see you? Perhaps you can take a photo, but that’s just a snapshot. You could record a video of yourself, from half a dozen feet away, at eye-level, and re-enact some memorable portion of yesterday's conversation. Our natural insecurities dictate that whether it be a single poorly-groomed strand of hair or an unhealthy blemish, to us it appears as an unfair stain on our true appearance. Those of us who are particularly insecure will fixate upon an unusually large, small, wide, thin, long, short or plastic section of their face. Those of us who aren't so insecure will assert the same biases but in reverse, by disregarding a genuine physical oddity as ‘just one of my cute quirks’.

The point is that you can get pretty close, but you will never get it perfectly. You, as a human, have seen yourself so many times that you have warped your own perception of your own appearance. You cannot see yourself from another perspective without the lens of your own biases. You have a narrative, and more often than you'd like to admit, you will see what fits it. How else could you justify being so insecure if you did not have a large nose? It is not only appearance that works this way.

From an evolutionary perspective, there are good reasons as to why we are this way inclined. We are pattern-detection machines, and building narratives allows us to organise information into neat piles. Narratives are not inherently bad, nor unusual, but they must be recognised. If we don't recognise them, we risk our ability to think clearly and find truth.

For a very long time it was often biologically advantageous to tag other people with simple labels, “trustworthy” or “not trustworthy” which, practically, became “to hunt with” or “not to hunt with”. In an age of heightened moral concern and material abundance, however, the stakes need not be so high. We are able to recognise now that people who share obvious characteristics can nevertheless behave entirely differently. As well as this, some misplaced trust today is much less likely to result in the barbaric kidnapping of your entire family, and much more likely to result in some hurt feelings that can be easily resolved with a Chinese takeaway meal. Our moral concern is stronger, our material abundance is greater, but unfortunately the complexity has scaled upwards too. No longer are we tasked with assigning labels to a small selection of single humans, but to entire groups of people. Never before has it been socially-mandated to feel outrage at so many different groups of over a million people, sometimes even into the hundreds of millions, all for the same reason. “How could they vote for him? How could they support that? How could they try to ban that? Those people must be monsters”.

Most of these people we haven't even met, by the way, and the information we receive about them is given to us by other people we haven't met, who also probably haven't met the people they're talking about. Doesn't this seem... ineffective? It would be very tempting to give up, at this stage, and understandably so. It is simply not feasible to identify and measure the biases and narratives behind your own opinions, never mind behind everyone else's. So, what is the answer? Is certainty impossible?

Bertrand Russell discusses the concept of ‘articulate hesitation’ in his 1940 book An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth. He placed the phrase beside its evil twin: ‘inarticulate certainty’. If you've taken a driving test recently, or have any memory of it whatsoever, you may remember hesitation as a fault. A fault which, if repeated three or four times (or only once, in particularly blatant cases), would result in failure and needing to book another test. Fortunately, Russell does not treat hesitation the same way. Whilst driving, you are expected to act confidently and decisively because the circumstances demand it. In intellectual life, though, the danger is often exactly the opposite - acting confidently and certainly when the circumstances do not demand it. In Russell's opinion, hesitation, provided that it is articulated, is not an enemy of knowledge but in fact a virtue.

To think like Russell, you must recognise that your knowledge is incomplete. You must calibrate your confidence according to the strength of your evidence. Your narrative is likely already built-in and your biases intact. You must become aware of it and hesitate. Going one step further, if you can express why you believe something, what information the belief stands upon, and what new information would be required to change your opinion, you have articulated your hesitation. Can you identify exactly what you would like to believe? What would suit your narrative, and what would make you feel most comfortable? Perhaps the least-comfortable thought is exactly the challenge your narrative needs.

Naturally, you can also take it too far the other way. You can doubt absolutely everything, and entangle yourself in a paranoid web the shape of a marijuana leaf. “What's actually real, man?” isn't going to be helpful either, and that isn't what this article is written in aid of. Reality surrounds us; we just can't access it as clearly as would be convenient. Only by attempting to understand our own narrative, can we attempt to level the playing field.

As I'm sure some readers have already objected, this article is inevitably impacted by the author's narrative. I am not exempt from the problem that this article describes.

So, the next time somebody is rude to you, consider that perhaps they are having a bad day. This isn't exactly groundbreaking. What might be more groundbreaking is considering that, if they've been rude to you every day for a year, their supposed rudeness may not be the only ingredient in the recipe that produces your emotions. Perhaps they are simply rude, it's definitely likely. Or perhaps not, is there a language barrier, or is there a cultural difference, or perhaps you were rude to them first and you didn't even notice it, is that an impossibility? You aren't doing anything unusual by assuming they're rude, it's the simplest, most likely and most convenient explanation. To be able to give them the benefit of the doubt, though, that would be spectacular.

And if a single article convinces you to dislike, or look down upon any group of people in as little time as it takes to read just the headline, you are also victim to the problem. In fact, if you have managed to identify a single group - political or otherwise - who you think commits that sin more than others, your narrative has shown itself to you.

Polish filmmaker Pawel Pawlikowski said recently, at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival “I just try to show how complicated it all is, which I think is a very healthy thing to tell people today, that it's all complicated. If you know absolutely that your narrative is right, it's dangerous.”

As humans we are very intelligent creatures, but still just creatures. Despite our shiny moral compasses we are not much less tribal than the apes we evolved from, and that isn't going to change for quite some time. Our eyes evolved over millions of years, eventually allowing us to see ourselves in a mirror. This should not be taken for granted, but one must recognise the image is still not yet perfect. In recognising this, you may unlock a much clearer image of the world around you.