Corrected By Collegial Commentators: My Beliefs about Beliefs about Disbelief

Abstract

It’s a rare privilege to have seven esteemed scholars devote their attention and expertise to my book Disbelief, and I’m grateful for their exciting and productive commentaries on it. Writing a book (Gervais, 2024) is a strange experience. You’ve got some ideas that you’ve been pondering for more than a decade, and keener minds have been gnawing on for much, much longer. But you’re going to commit your ideas to dead trees for others to think about. Some of the folks will encounter these ideas for the first time, so you have to make everything broadly digestible. Other folks, however, will be encountering your book from the perspective of deep specialist knowledge—in reality, deeper specialist knowledge than you’ve got on a great many facets of the book you’ve written. This latter audience is the one I was most nervous about: how would the real experts react?