The Othello Effect

The purpose of this essay is to explicate a developmental course along which young persons commonly are led to question their own standards of belief entitlement. Utilizing as a source model a counterpart sequence of traditional philosophic concerns, a train of increasingly disabling uncertainties is described that, once set in motion, routinely carries such adolescent epistemologists through familiar stations of objectivism, dogmatism, and nascent skeptical doubt. The effect of this effort to reread the common crises of adolescent development as automatic by-products of the struggle to achieve some intellectual authority in a relativized world is to normalize and add dignity to a process that is too often written off to hormonal imbalance or a flight from adult responsibilities.