Epistemological Metaphors Part I

In a 2007 debate between Richard Dawkins and Oxford colleague John Lennox, Lennox espoused the view that atheists can be moral but that only believers can have a foundation for morality. Atheists can of course be good, in Lennox’s view, but only a theist can tell us why we ought to be good by appealing to a metaphysical foundation for moral beliefs. In fact, a good atheist, it is claimed, can only be good because of tacitly smuggling in theistic foundational beliefs without acknowledging them as such. Likewise, the Christian notion that Jesus is Truth itself is often put forth as a necessary foundation for scientific beliefs as well. Scientism also includes such a premise that all knowledge needs to rest on something unshakable and that this view spells the doom of scientism. Under scientism, the scientific method is put forth as an alternative foundation to counter the likes of Lennox. As explained previously and as Lennox might be quick to point out, since the scientific method itself cannot be verified through the scientific method, scientism fails to serve as the sort of foundation to compete with the Christian one that Lennox claims. However, Plato's Euthyphro Dilemma preemptively demonstrated that the Christian moral foundation has the same problem of not being able to support its own weight. 

Atheists frequently also buy into the view that in order to make knowledge claims both ethical and factual, we need to reject pragmatism in favor of realism and the correspondence theory of truth. Consider for example Sam Harris's desire to find a way to say “that stoning women for adultery is really wrong, in some absolute sense.”  He seems to be demanding the sort of foundation for knowledge that Lennox says atheists are lacking. But do we need to accept the premise that we need to always think of knowledge in terms of architecture? Granted, if we do, then it indeed seems that a failure to find some bedrock on which to construct our tower of knowledge puts our whole belief structure at risk. Our tower of knowledge--the set of all our other beliefs when thought of as derived from foundational beliefs--would be no more secure than the foundational beliefs upon which all our other beliefs rest. But is knowledge construction, as the foundation metaphor suggests, really all that much like building a tower from the ground up? 

Skepticism 

The foundation metaphor for knowledge hearkens back to the father of modern philosophy, Rene Descartes, who set a standard for knowledge as only that which is “based on a reason so strong that it can never be shaken by any stronger reason.” He distinguished knowledge from mere conviction, the state of being persuaded where there “remains some reason which might lead us to doubt.” Knowledge then must be rooted in beliefs that we simply cannot doubt.

    

Generations of philosophers followed Descartes in thinking that beliefs must be founded on unassailable first principles before we ought to be comfortable in claiming to know anything. That imperative and the fact that no such principles seem readily available have left many of us feeling very uncomfortable indeed since we can find few beliefs if any that cannot ever be doubted. This discomfort is what Richard Bernstein called “Cartesian anxiety” (a term we saw earlier). In spite of all the broad success we have had in coordinating our behavior through language use to get what we want and in disregard of our ever-increasing ability to meet our needs and improve our lives through the use of our beliefs and reasoning, Cartesian thinking still leaves many of us fearing that perhaps we still don’t actually know anything at all. We could all be bodies fooled into thinking that they are having experiences that are really just part of a simulation as in the movie The Matrix.

    

Does Descartes himself who taught us to demand such a foundation for our knowledge even meet his own demand? Consider Descartes’ thought experiment from his Second Meditation:

“I have convinced myself that there is absolutely nothing in the world, no sky, no earth, no minds, no bodies. Does it now follow that I too do not exist? No: if I convinced myself of something then I certainly existed. But there is a deceiver of supreme power and cunning who is deliberately and constantly deceiving me. In that case I too undoubtedly exist, if he is deceiving me; and let him deceive me as much as he can, he will never bring it about that I am nothing so long as I think that I am something. So after considering everything very thoroughly, I must finally conclude that this proposition, I am, I exist, is necessarily true whenever it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind.”

And there you have it. Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am. With his apparent uncanny knack for skepticism, it seems Descartes could perform the impressive feat of doubting even the existence of his own body, but he could not, alas, doubt that he thinks. Upon this indubitable foundational belief, Descartes carefully deduced that he must in fact exist. He then “proved” the existence of God (not worth going into) and went on to reason his way to knowledge that he has a body without merely accepting at face value the reports of his possibly unreliable senses. (His argument hinged on the fact that a benevolent God would not have given him senses that were completely unreliable.) As must be obvious, it didn’t take long for philosophers to find ways to doubt the premises and chains of reasoning that Descartes had claimed were indubitable. 

What remained long after Descartes—that which warrants his designation as the father of modern philosophy—was not an edifice of beliefs we could thereafter claim as true knowledge having met the demand for solid reason resting upon an indubitable foundation. Philosophers have been able to find fault with  Descartes’ “basis on which it seems to me that all human certainty can be founded.” What remained, instead of any specific claims to knowledge, was his systematic way of doing philosophy and the belief that we really must have such an unassailable foundation to be able to claim knowledge.

    

Sam Harris was afraid that if we all became pragmatists it would be “a recipe for End of Days chaos,” because we would all then lose the conviction that we can know anything—“about anything,” he emphasized in the throes of a particularly dramatic case of Cartesian anxiety.  Harris fears that we would all have to be extreme skeptics if we were all pragmatists. I find that claim ironic because pragmatism actually began with anti-skepticism—with C. S. Peirce’s essay “The Fixation of Belief” where he pointed a way out of this Cartesian skepticism.

    

Peirce noted Descartes’ method, doubt everything!, is not something we can ever do. Though Descartes is to be admired for questioning and defending his basic assumptions rather than taking too much for granted as so many of his predecessors had done, we can get along without the radical skeptic. We can only hold beliefs in doubt with respect to beliefs to which we remain committed. There is simply no way to follow the philosopher’s dictum, “doubt everything,” and one wonders how Descartes ever convinced himself that he had done it.

    

In Peirce’s account of inquiry, there is “real doubt,” which is the irritation that moves us to inquiry, and then there is Cartesian “fake doubt,” which need not and cannot be satisfied because it doesn’t arise out of any real dissatisfaction. The aim of inquiry is always to satisfy our real doubts rather than to achieve the perfect certainty of indubitable beliefs. Peirce was convinced that inquiry has as its aim the satisfaction of doubt because when this irritation is satisfied through the course of inquiry, inquiry ceases.

   

If inquiry is concerned with satisfying the doubts we actually have, rather than being concerned with resting on a position that simply could never be doubted, then our position is very different from the one Descartes imagined in his thought experiment. We are justified in claiming knowledge when we have considered the available evidence, arguments, and counter-arguments yet have no real doubts rather than only when we are in a position to say that our beliefs could never be doubted. All beliefs can, in principle, be doubted. What we claim to know is what we have good reason to believe and have no good reason to doubt; yet all of our beliefs can be held in doubt, and any one of our particular beliefs may in fact turn out to be false. That doesn’t mean that we can never have good reason to think that our beliefs are true. Science, for example, is quite comfortable with Peirce’s notion of fallibility—that we could be wrong. The fact that scientists are willing to hold any belief in doubt if only for the sake of argument is part of what makes science so successful at finding new and better beliefs and correcting false beliefs. At least some of our beliefs are almost certainly false, but given our broad success in life, we just can’t be as wrong about the majority of them as a Cartesian worrywart might fear.