The Mischief Lieth Here: Arguments for Philosophical Skepticism

As there either is not, or I cannot find, a way to post essays, I will post my philosophical essays as "Stories". Perhaps that constraint is a well discovered improvement in accuracy?

“Hylas:  I was considering the odd fate of those men who have in all ages, through an affectation of being distinguished from the vulgar, or some unaccountable turn of thought, pretended either to believe nothing at all, or believe the most extravagant things in the world.  This however might be borne, if their paradoxes and skepticism did not draw after them some consequences of general disadvantage to mankind.  But the mischief lieth here; that when men of less leisure see them who are supposed to have spent their whole time in the pursuits of knowledge, professing an entire ignorance of all things, or advancing such notions as are repugnant to plain and commonly received principles, they will be tempted to entertain suspicions concerning the most important truths, which they had hitherto held sacred and unquestionable.” 

~George Berkeley

                To ‘tempt you to entertain suspicions concerning that which you had hitherto held sacred and unquestionable’, is the goal of this essay.  The position for which I will argue I will call ‘skepticism’.  I will employ this word as Berkeley did in his famous dialogs: “He then who entertains no doubt concerning some particular point, with regard to that point cannot be thought a sceptic.”; where ‘doubting’ is taken to mean a suspension of affirmation or denial.  To raise the stakes, however, to a degree that ought catch the attention of most epistemological gamblers, I will ask you to consider some arguments to the effect that one ought ‘doubt’, in this agnostic sense, every ‘point’. 

                To briefly survey some historical context of skepticism for the purposes of clarification of my position: The word itself is of Greek descent; from skeptikos, commonly translated as ‘to consider, examine’ and skepsis, ‘inquiry and doubt’.  A powerful case can be made that skepticism is the prime mover of western epistemology.  There were already strong currents of skeptical attitudes before Plato, most famously by the Sophists; who infamously valued argument and rhetoric for their own sake, if not profit’s.  

                Plato himself, through his characterization of Socrates, grappled with various skeptical arguments in his epistemological dialogs including the Meno (where he considers the paradox of inquiry), the Apology (wherein is considered explicitly Socrates’ style of examination and its purpose), and the Theaetetus (where we find a discussion of cultural relativism).  

                But we don’t get to the first important expression of a skeptical worldview until the works of Sextus Empiricus, who discusses Pyrrho (another of those frustrating Greeks who did not believe in writing down his philosophy) who has been subsequently dubbed by many as the first skeptical philosopher.  Pyrrhonian skepticism was of a practical kind, whose goal was to cultivate a personality which was utterly free from judgment; to meet the contents of experience as they come, without the imposition of theory between the world and consciousness.  As we know it today, Pyrrhonian skepticism was about the achievement of ataraxia ‘freedom from worry’.  A quote often attributed to Pyrrho summarizes this clearly: “By suspending judgment, by confining oneself to phenomena or objects as they appear, and by asserting nothing definite as to how they really are, one can escape the perplexities of life and attain an imperturbable peace of mind.”

                As Sextus tells it, the skeptical philosopher is not guided by arguments but rather by noticing, and taking seriously, experiences from daily life which appear to indicate that one shouldn’t claim to know anything objectively.  These are called ‘modes’ and some of them are as follows: (1) Different people profess to experience ‘the same’ objects in different ways, (2) Different objects appear differently to the same person at different times, depending on both internal and external context, (3) A variety of social factors (ethics, culture, myths) appear to influence our beliefs and judgments. 

                The other ancient Greek school of skepticism is called the Academics, and their position is often now characterized by the ‘I know there is no knowledge’ paradox, and they are not taken as seriously in most epistemological literature, as many feel that one cannot consistently assert this sort of ‘dogmatic’ skepticism.   

To avoid this elementary logical paradox: Pyrrhonists stress the point that there are ‘non-assertive linguistic modes’.  For example the sentence “There is a bull in the pasture” could be used to tell a joke, to make an offer, to express fear, or to warn someone.  (example taken from Popkin)  They think that every claim a skeptic makes should not be considered as in the ‘assertive mode’.  In addition, they think that when the dogmatist says ‘It is raining’, they do not necessarily need to take the opposite stance of denial, ‘No it is not!’, but rather can question the person making the assertion without themselves taking a position of affirmation or denial. 

                After a few centuries where religion dominated the world so thoroughly that barely any philosophical work survived, skepticism was brought back into prominence by Rene Descartes and traveled through Hume, Kant, C.S. Pierce, and Quine (among others) to the literature of today. 

                One nearly universally agreed premise, and one that I will importantly lean on in my arguments which follow, is that one cannot be properly said to know that which is false.  This is the driving force behind Cartesian skepticism, which asks us to consider the possibility that anything we currently believe, by virtue of sense experience, may not be actually occurring in a dream, or better yet, as the machinations of a ‘demon’ tricking us into false perceptions.  The modern version of this being the ‘brain in the vat’ hypothesis, popularized in the Matrix franchise of moving pictures.  The argument is simple:

1.       If one cannot know something that is false, and

2.       It is possible that any given belief  is false because the belief could be caused by an illusion

3.       Then, one might not know anything after all!

Hume is often now referred to as the most skeptical modern philosopher, whose most enduring argument is his argument against knowledge of causation which runs something like this:

1.       Knowledge must arise either prior or subsequent to experience

2.       Knowledge of ‘cause’ does not arise a priori; there is no logical or necessary relation between cause and effect, but only that which we experience

3.       But we do not experience causes (or ‘hidden powers’) either, only a conjunction between sensory events

4.       Therefore, it doesn’t appear we can have any knowledge of causes at all!

Causal relations are extremely important, most obviously in science, but also in any more ordinary inferential activity.  Hume’s argument goes so far as to claim even this sort of reasoning illegitimate: Last time I was hungry I was nourished by a sandwich, I’m hungry now; so I will eat a sandwich.  A hearty skepticism indeed.  Hume’s skepticism is now entitled ‘mitigated skepticism’ because Hume’s practical attitude toward skepticism went little further than when he had his ‘philosopher’s hat’ on, Hume acknowledged the necessity of causal reasoning to human survival, even if it is not strictly ‘justified’ in his view.

As Richard Popkin, a 20^th century philosopher who wrote extensively on skepticism, said, “To the ordinary person, such doubts may seem fantastic and bizarre.  Yet the train of reflection leading to them may seem, upon careful scrutiny, to be without flaw…One thing we can say categorically: In the history of Western Philosophy, philosophical skepticism has been taken very seriously.  It is unquestionably one of the fundamental traditions on Western thought.”

My opinion is that we should take arguments seriously.   I think that, at the very least when we are ‘doing philosophy’ if not always, if there are sound arguments in favor of a position we are intellectually obligated to consider that position, or perhaps even adopt it until it can be shown to be flawed.  My challenge to the dogmatists consists of the following series of arguments, and the invitation to either show me how they are flawed or to be compelled to seriously consider skepticism as the ‘best’ epistemological attitude available at this time. 

Here are Five Skeptical Arguments which I have constructed, inspired by but not identical to some of the historical arguments sketched above.  

The Maybe Argument (inspired primarily by Descartes and Quine)

 

1.      X’s totality of evidence for P is E

2.      E is consistent with Q

3.      Q and P are exclusive

4.      Therefore: From X’s epistemic position; Maybe P is the case, Maybe Q is the case.

The Evolutionary Argument (inspired primarily by Hume and Sellars)

1. The content of any synthetic belief is at least partially determined by a cognitive interpretation of sensory data
2. Cognitive interpretations of sensory data are 'theory-laden'
3. The theories 'hard-wired' into our cognitive systems by natural selection have 'survival' as their primary value
4. 'Survival-value' does not entail 'truth-tracking'
5. Therefore the content of synthetic beliefs is at least partially determined by a system whose primary value is not 'tracking truth'

The Linguistic Argument (inspired primarily by Korzybski and Whitehead)

1. All propositional knowledge exists in some natural language or other
2. All natural languages contain structural commitments to a metaphysics/ontology
3. The structure of any natural language is determined in part by natural (memetic) selection
4. Therefore, any propositional knowledge in a natural language is committed to the assumptions of that language, which may or may not be truth-tracking

The Blind Mouse (inspired by Plato's Meno, Sextus Empiricus, and Albert Einstein)

1. At the outset of inquiry, X and Y do not know the set of true propositions in regards to the question Q
2. At the conclusion of Inquiry I, X believes the set of Propositions S in relation to Q because of I
3. Y undertakes Inquiry 2 (I2) in regards to Q; which causes Y to believe a set of propositions S2
4. S1 and S2 contain mutually exclusive propositions
5. In regards to Q and X's and Y's ignorance of Q (from 1), X and Y have no method to determine the superiority of S1 in regards to S2 beyond cooperation
6. Any number of members of a society can potentially agree to something false
7. One cannot know something false
8. Therefore, X, Y, or anyone else can agree about the results of inquiry, but cannot know as a result of inquiry

Hume’s River (inspired by Hume and Thales)

1.      If both the world and the epistemological agent are always in flux

2.      And if the meaning of terms is determinate, either internally or externally

3.      And if the past does not justify knowledge of the future absolutely

4.      Then any propositional candidates for knowledge have an indeterminate truth value at any given time

5.      If ‘knowledge’ is diachronic property (applies across time)

6.      Knowledge cannot, at any given time, properly apply to any given propositional belief

It seems to me that, to the extent that these arguments are sound, the epistemological attitude we ought to employ is that of skepticism.  I see no obvious objections to our skepticism being of the ‘mitigated’ variety; These arguments are not intended to advocate the actions of the Pyrrho of myth who is said to have been pushed, by a friend, from the thoroughfare as a heavy cart with a team of horses bared down on him as he merely stood passively looking up, refusing to theorize that his death was imminent.  That is not my sort of skepticism. 

The lesson I take from skeptical argumentation is the adoption of an attitude that Robert Anton Wilson calls ‘Model Agnosticism’.  This is the position that the patterned information-bearing behavior of our nervous system that we call ‘thinking’, or ‘cognition’ is considered to be a set of ‘models’ of the world.  Some of these models appear to work better for some tasks some of the time, and part of our job as epistemic agents is to be ‘conscious of’ these models, and to select among them at our will.  To successfully do this, none of the models can be given a special status as ‘The True Model’, aka ‘Knowledge’.  But rather that every model ought to be treated ‘agnostically’ (a-gnosis, ‘without knowledge’) as a heuristic, pragmatic, interpretational, hypothetical suggestion as to What Is Going On Around Here, which we can choose to employ for awhile if it should please us. 

Author's Note

Any comments on form, content, or ad hominem attacks are welcome. My only request is that the reviewer read the piece first.

Reviews

[Lilly Negoi]

i think i'm going to stop a little on Hume's argument against knowledge of causation, which, in my opinion, is partially true. we may not know anything at all of a list of primary causes - but isn't it true that all effects, in time, become causes at their turn? can't we therefore assume that something that happened due to causes that we had no knowledge of, becomes at its turn the cause for something else? do we totally out-rule deduction in the process of learning things - causation included?
and there is always the other side - Plato's "learning is remembering", which could very well be supported by religion's "have faith". in the end, it is all a matter of modelling one's patterns of perception. and since everything is relative...