Optimism versus Hope - sketches towards a resolution

Can Dogs Hope? part 4

Separating optimism from hope is a tricky operation, one to be undertaken delicately. As such, I'm going to begin tentatively. The terms are quite clearly not equivalent - what we're interested in is whether being capable of the former means you are automatically capable of the latter.

Let's start simple: hope can be used as a verb, optimism can not. Perhaps the correct phrase should be optimism as against hopefulness, though this may become clunky. Quite what we do when we hope is another question entirely - one I hope to come to soon, just not in this post.

Now, a second difference. One can hope for something without believing it very likely to happen, or - and this is the important one - while believing it less likely to happen than a realistic appraisal of the situation would indicate. This is a measure by which we consider a disposition optimistic - it's got to be than one is more positive about one's chances that one is rationally(1) entitled to be. One can hope, one can be hopeful, and in fact still be pessimistic - because what we're hoping for is in fact a certainty, and its only our pessimism which stops us from seeing this.

And it is possible to be optimistic in such a way that precludes hoping - we can be so optimistic that we feel absolutely certain that we'll get what we desire.(2)

But can we despair, can we be hopeless, whilst still being optimistic? Well, it might be possible to imagine a situation where we have lost all hope for things improving, but in fact we are blocking out evidence that suggests things are going to get one hell of a lot worse. Is it right to call this optimism? I suppose the phrase 'things can't get any worse' sums up the attitude, and I'm unsure quite what to call this! No matter!

Before we go further, I think a consideration of Luc Boven's attempt to clarify what we mean by hope is in order, which I'll do in the next post. I've not quite got to the nub of the issue, but with some luck we'll get there soon.


(1) Depending on what we mean by rational of course - as Seligman shows in Learned Optimism, being optimistic improves your life chances immeasurably, meaning that there's a sense in which being optimistic is always rational.
(2) See my post of A possible paradox of hope for a justification for why certainty precludes hoping.