The Zimmerman juror who came out on tv and said "Zimmerman was guilty, he got away with murder, but there was no proof", was voicing a very common error in our society: that feelings = knowledge.
Proof is what we poor rational human beings need in order to KNOW. That's the only way we know things. So for her to say she KNEW he was guilty but had no proof of it, is a contradiction, an impossibility.
Now thinking takes effort and time and carries with it the possibility of error. It also carries with it some possible name-calling: egghead, highbrow, snob. We don't like any of that. Much easier and safer to base our knowledge on our personal subjective feelings...which is what this juror was doing without specifically referring to her feelings. What else could it possibly be that would lead her to say, without proof, that Zimmerman was guilty? Nothing.
But your feelings tell you NOTHING about truth, about reality, about what is out there. Feelings are nothing more than how you feel about what you BELIEVE is out there. Problem is: your beliefs, without proof to back them up, may be dead wrong.
What is truly scary is that a person with that wrong a theory of knowledge could be sitting on a jury in a murder case...and might have voted Guilty and sentenced the accused to life imprisonment or worse based on mistaken feelings.
I blame our school system that does not teach children what our species, in the absence of instincts, desperately needs to learn: what is thinking and what is the right way to do it. Kids are taught a lot of things they don't need and will likely never use...when was the last time you used the Pythagorean Theorem?...but not how to use their brain. Maybe some are not likely to use that either.
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