In a sense. Virtue is a type of knowledge, though of the "techne" (skill) rather than the theoretical kind. But the question remains: how do we know about virtue? Epistemology really seems to be the first stop in any philosophical argument.
Yep ok. Either way. Sceptic wins but we still need to live our lives. So, how does one live as a skeptic? How does one decide the best course of action as a skeptic. Maintaining an agnostic position to attain ataraxia only gets you so far. Can we move toward a more hypothetical or pragmatic approach. Not pragmatic in the sense of a claim truth, but pragmatic in that it appears to allow us to live a good life - it seems to work.
Pete, yes, one can live a life as a skeptic. The ancient skeptics were asked that very question, of course, and they had different answers depending on whether they were Pyrrhonists or Academic Skeptics:
Pyrrhonists: suspend judgment only on "non-evident matters," i.e., things you cannot immediately perceive with your senses. On everything else, follows your society's customs, the advice of experts, and your own natural urges (like, if you feel hungry, eat!). I don't find this very satisfying for a number of reasons, but it is a coherent response. Suspension of judgment then applies to things like political issues, metaphysics, science, and a host of other things.
Academic Skeptics: these did *not* actually advocate suspension of judgment, but rather going with what appears to be more probable, given the available evidence, acknowledging that you may be wrong and that as new evidence comes up you may need to change your mind accordingly. For instance, a new drug is released that has not been properly tested. It's reasonable for you to be skeptical. But then lots of people use it, new data on its efficacy and safety come in. At some point it becomes more reasonable for you to take the drug, if potentially helpful with a condition of yours.
Hold on. Hume’s scepticism about induction means there is no rational basis for arguments from experience. So, the skeptic could not appeal to what “appears to be more probable” or even to the experience of lots of people using a drug. Unless it’s something like “that is all we have got to go on” type argument. Or it’s either that or nothing. Or let’s bet nature will be uniform, otherwise we may as well just flip a coin.
This may push the "there are no stupid questions" boundary, but how is Skepticism different than Nihilism? It seems there is a similarity between them. This may be too board a question for this forum, but if you could provide a resource that would also be appreciated.
Andrew, nihilism is the notion that there is no purpose anywhere. For a Pyrrhonian Skeptic that would be a dogmatic position, and we should suspend judgment about it. For an Academic Skeptic that position would conflict with our striving for virtue and good human relations, which is where we create purpose. So, no, I don't think there is a close similarity between skepticism and nihilism, though a number of people do react to the possibility as you did.
This comment probably shows my ignorance of current work in epistemology, but I don't see what is so all-fired hard about infinite regress. Coming from a background in Computer Complexity theory, I am quite comfortable with infinities, especially countable infinities like Peano Arithmetic, which is what applies here, since knowledge is usually assumed to be expressible in language, and language over an alphabet is countable.
But there are different notions of infinity. An infinite regress that is based on a simple generator function is probably a no-no ("it's turtles all the way down"). But there are more subtle notions of infinity. What I have in mind is a web - in particular the World Wide Web. Seen that way, we have an infinity of justifications, but they are not a simple series. Each node in the web is different and each node has its own unique justification. Thus, "what do we know" and "how do we know" are two different nodes in the web, and they have their own semantic link that relates the two. What's wrong with that?
Now, it might be argued that this approach is a no-no because it has thrown out all the rules - there is no simple series of infinite regressions. Instead there is a transversal of the Web of Knowledge where every jump has its own semantic justification, which is actually a pointer from an edge (the justification) to another node (the knowledge about the justification). It gets complicated, and it is hard to formalize. But, given that we can presume that the knowledge is expressible in language, this foundation provides a formalization, at least in terms of expressibility (knowledge is stated as a phrase in a language, not by mystical Direct Experience, say). This is nice, but it then pushes the problem into the realm of Kolmogorov Complexity, where each concept is enumerable by its compressed formalization, but there is no generating function that enumerates all canonical concepts. But, hey, that's life. I can see the relationship between "how" and "what" in each unique, individual case, but it is provable that you can never generalize over all units of knowledge. You just have to go out and traverse the Web - become your own inner Spider and explore.
Antony, interesting analogy. However, the web metaphor is usually deployed by coherentists, not infinitists. And it does work pretty much the way you described it.
But then again, we are talking about a situation where, as you put it, we have a number of cross-pointers, which means that there is no ultimate justification. In a sense, the web bootstraps itself, which is hardly satisfying.
Is it the best we can do? Yes. And the Academic Skeptics would in fact use this type of concept to say that we can assign differential probabilities to any particular statement. But not absolute knowledge.
"the web bootstraps itself, which is hardly satisfying"
This is an intriguing statement. I suppose in terms of emotional valence, a rational argument should "feel right" - that is be satisfying. Which is different from Satisticing.
Personally, I find the idea of the web bootstrapping itself very satisfying. But I have lived with this notion of a semantic net for decades. I don't think that knowledge has an ultimate justification in any absolute sense. The Tao just is.
This goes to show my ignorance of epistemology as an academic discipline, so thank you for informing me. My graduate work was in Artificial Intelligence back in the mid-1970s, and my attempt to take a philosophy course was stymied - my advisor forced me to stick to Computer Science courses. As an undergraduate in Physics, I flunked the Ancient Greeks, so I didn't have the prerequisites for the fun stuff like Epistemology and Aesthetics. I was reduced to taking courses like Philosophy of Science and Advanced Logic for my minor.
So, in AI, ultimate justification and absolute knowledge is not the point. Instead ""decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world." Which reduces the justification of knowledge to a form of constraint satisfaction. Which I guess can be expressed by differential probabilities.
Antony, I think we are in broad agreement. But I didn't mean "satisfactory" in an emotional sense, but rather in an epistemological sense. As you say, ultimately a web of knowledge is the best we can do, there is no ultimate justification. As you put it, the Tao just is. The skeptics understood this over two millennia ago, but a lot of moderns still haven't come to terms with it.
“… pause for a moment and reflect that really smart people have considered the problem of the criterion seriously for over twenty centuries. What are the chances that they were all fooling themselves?”
Uhmm, pretty high?
In the first place, twenty centuries show that the problem of finding a Criterion of Truth is irreducible. The reason it is irreducible is that the perception of this as a problem occurs because of the self-referential quality of language universals. It’s an artifact of the human mind conflating language universals with some presumed veridical reality. We create language categories and then talk about them as if they exist, even as we are denying their existence.
So actually, the question of why the quest for Truth and Knowledge captures “really smart people” is the interesting part of this. We learned from Darwin that there is no intelligent designer. But that doesn’t stop the human mind from perceiving a sort of teleonomy in the organized structure in the world we inhabit; we can’t escape a sort of intelligent design inference. We are evolved to look for cause and effect; it’s adaptive. Looking for root causes, prime movers, first principles, grand unifying theories, Truth, Knowledge---all habits of the human mind.
Very Wittgensteinian of you, F_F! But of course a Wittgensteinian solution is yet another example of not being able to meet the skeptical challenge. Not sure what you mean by "irreducible," but if you mean that the challenge can't be met, I agree. Which is why it's humbling.
Like the part about the human condition Fit, reading the article my intuition kicked in and thought, well we have all these theories that can manipulate particles to give us a tools to see into things, but we still gone remain blind and stumbling. How much of wishing to improve is an avenue for acquiring knowledge similar to seeing?
One argument for particularism, that our senses are at least provisionally reliable is evolution. That is, our senses, while not always reliable have been reliable enough to get us to where we are now. We can trust in general that we can reliably distinguish day from night because we evolved to modify our behaviors in part because of the day/night cycle.
Similarly for such sensations as touch (exquisitely sensitive both for our own health and for sociability) , taste (bitter foods are likely non-nutritious or worse--our taste for them is cultural) and so on.
These are thin reeds, but we could have (and have) built upon them structures for apprehending the world.
Hume is instructive on this point: "But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence."
Hume of course did not have the additional support of evolutionary theory to place humans in a graspable environment. Having rejected theories of Providence, he falls back upon the facts of existence. These are a strong enough argument for him, even without the support of evolutionary thinking.
Brian, good points, but I do think Hume missed the point regarding Pyrrhonism. The Pyrrhonists famously said that they suspended judgment about "non-evident" matters. While we could have an interesting discussion about what exactly that means, they also said that for most everyday matters we just follow our senses and societal customs, thus bypassing Hume's criticism.
As for particularism being rescued by evolution, perhaps. But that doesn't defeat the skeptical challenge. After all, the skeptic doesn't claim that we cannot have knowledge. She only claims that we can't tell for sure if and when we do have it. So, yes, presumably our senses evolved to be reliable (within very strict limits having to do directly with survival and reproduction), but are they being reliable right here, in this particular instance?
That "interesting discussion" is what would avoid us begging a question. That is, the response that radical skepticism is fit only for those matters which are non-evident is the entire game.
Can we respond that we begin from matters that are "evident"? (And no, I don't mean Descartes "clear and distinct" propositions). I mean proceeding, as it were scientifically from matters of fact upon which there is no reasonable disagreement to matters that logically or even merely practically follow from those. All conclusions are provisional, but we've gotten to the Moon with no more than Newtonian mechanics to guide our craft, even though that provisional theory has been overcome.
Our reason to trust our senses' reliability isn't within an individual. What makes the senses provisionally reliable is that our conclusions from sense data can be interpersonally communicable, meaning that our conclusions may be reliable because they can be checked by others, especially others who are skeptical. Of course this can go wrong, spectacularly, but we can at least be certain, then, of what is NOT the case.
We can discard the stepping stones that have brought us to the state of (provisional) knowledge that we do possess: Newton's opticks don't stand up to quantum mechanics, yet provided us with the telescopes and microscopes that have brought us quite far, even though they've also now been surpassed by instruments their very discoveries had brought into being.
I might assume that the Skeptics would discount cosmology or cosmogony, not to mention theology and theogony. I don't think we need to throw up our hands at the one, which though it might be beyond our reach isn't beyond our efforts to see whether that inaccessibility is the case. As for the latter, there's a place where the skeptics are correct, if only (leaving aside the string theorists) because we can play our cosmology game with a net.
Brian, remember that there are two very different kinds of skepticism: Pyrrhonism and Academic. It's the Pyrrhonists who say that we should suspend judgment about non-evident matters. The Academics would assign probabilities to everything, including our scientific theories.
However, a radical skeptic (third category) cannot really be defeated. It doesn't matter how many people check your sensorial perceptions, because you could be a brain in a vat, or live in the Matrix, in which case those "people" themselves would be illusions.
Radical skepticism, of course, doesn't claim that we live in the Matrix, it just raises the logical possibility in order to instill a bit of humility in what skeptics call "dogmatists," i.e., people who are so darn sure they are right.
The skeptic wins, so how does he/we progress?
Pete, you may need to be more specific. How do we progress in... epistemology? In terms of virtue? Both?
Virtue in the first place, i guess.
In a sense. Virtue is a type of knowledge, though of the "techne" (skill) rather than the theoretical kind. But the question remains: how do we know about virtue? Epistemology really seems to be the first stop in any philosophical argument.
Yep ok. Either way. Sceptic wins but we still need to live our lives. So, how does one live as a skeptic? How does one decide the best course of action as a skeptic. Maintaining an agnostic position to attain ataraxia only gets you so far. Can we move toward a more hypothetical or pragmatic approach. Not pragmatic in the sense of a claim truth, but pragmatic in that it appears to allow us to live a good life - it seems to work.
Pete, yes, one can live a life as a skeptic. The ancient skeptics were asked that very question, of course, and they had different answers depending on whether they were Pyrrhonists or Academic Skeptics:
Pyrrhonists: suspend judgment only on "non-evident matters," i.e., things you cannot immediately perceive with your senses. On everything else, follows your society's customs, the advice of experts, and your own natural urges (like, if you feel hungry, eat!). I don't find this very satisfying for a number of reasons, but it is a coherent response. Suspension of judgment then applies to things like political issues, metaphysics, science, and a host of other things.
Academic Skeptics: these did *not* actually advocate suspension of judgment, but rather going with what appears to be more probable, given the available evidence, acknowledging that you may be wrong and that as new evidence comes up you may need to change your mind accordingly. For instance, a new drug is released that has not been properly tested. It's reasonable for you to be skeptical. But then lots of people use it, new data on its efficacy and safety come in. At some point it becomes more reasonable for you to take the drug, if potentially helpful with a condition of yours.
Hold on. Hume’s scepticism about induction means there is no rational basis for arguments from experience. So, the skeptic could not appeal to what “appears to be more probable” or even to the experience of lots of people using a drug. Unless it’s something like “that is all we have got to go on” type argument. Or it’s either that or nothing. Or let’s bet nature will be uniform, otherwise we may as well just flip a coin.
Sounds good. Thanks for your reply.
Or at least a less stressful life with a greater sense of well-being.
This may push the "there are no stupid questions" boundary, but how is Skepticism different than Nihilism? It seems there is a similarity between them. This may be too board a question for this forum, but if you could provide a resource that would also be appreciated.
Andrew, nihilism is the notion that there is no purpose anywhere. For a Pyrrhonian Skeptic that would be a dogmatic position, and we should suspend judgment about it. For an Academic Skeptic that position would conflict with our striving for virtue and good human relations, which is where we create purpose. So, no, I don't think there is a close similarity between skepticism and nihilism, though a number of people do react to the possibility as you did.
On nihilism, I recommend this: https://iep.utm.edu/nihilism/
Thank you!
The problem is unsolvable and should not be disccused w/o a few pitchers of beer going arround.
This comment probably shows my ignorance of current work in epistemology, but I don't see what is so all-fired hard about infinite regress. Coming from a background in Computer Complexity theory, I am quite comfortable with infinities, especially countable infinities like Peano Arithmetic, which is what applies here, since knowledge is usually assumed to be expressible in language, and language over an alphabet is countable.
But there are different notions of infinity. An infinite regress that is based on a simple generator function is probably a no-no ("it's turtles all the way down"). But there are more subtle notions of infinity. What I have in mind is a web - in particular the World Wide Web. Seen that way, we have an infinity of justifications, but they are not a simple series. Each node in the web is different and each node has its own unique justification. Thus, "what do we know" and "how do we know" are two different nodes in the web, and they have their own semantic link that relates the two. What's wrong with that?
Now, it might be argued that this approach is a no-no because it has thrown out all the rules - there is no simple series of infinite regressions. Instead there is a transversal of the Web of Knowledge where every jump has its own semantic justification, which is actually a pointer from an edge (the justification) to another node (the knowledge about the justification). It gets complicated, and it is hard to formalize. But, given that we can presume that the knowledge is expressible in language, this foundation provides a formalization, at least in terms of expressibility (knowledge is stated as a phrase in a language, not by mystical Direct Experience, say). This is nice, but it then pushes the problem into the realm of Kolmogorov Complexity, where each concept is enumerable by its compressed formalization, but there is no generating function that enumerates all canonical concepts. But, hey, that's life. I can see the relationship between "how" and "what" in each unique, individual case, but it is provable that you can never generalize over all units of knowledge. You just have to go out and traverse the Web - become your own inner Spider and explore.
Antony, interesting analogy. However, the web metaphor is usually deployed by coherentists, not infinitists. And it does work pretty much the way you described it.
But then again, we are talking about a situation where, as you put it, we have a number of cross-pointers, which means that there is no ultimate justification. In a sense, the web bootstraps itself, which is hardly satisfying.
Is it the best we can do? Yes. And the Academic Skeptics would in fact use this type of concept to say that we can assign differential probabilities to any particular statement. But not absolute knowledge.
"the web bootstraps itself, which is hardly satisfying"
This is an intriguing statement. I suppose in terms of emotional valence, a rational argument should "feel right" - that is be satisfying. Which is different from Satisticing.
Personally, I find the idea of the web bootstrapping itself very satisfying. But I have lived with this notion of a semantic net for decades. I don't think that knowledge has an ultimate justification in any absolute sense. The Tao just is.
This goes to show my ignorance of epistemology as an academic discipline, so thank you for informing me. My graduate work was in Artificial Intelligence back in the mid-1970s, and my attempt to take a philosophy course was stymied - my advisor forced me to stick to Computer Science courses. As an undergraduate in Physics, I flunked the Ancient Greeks, so I didn't have the prerequisites for the fun stuff like Epistemology and Aesthetics. I was reduced to taking courses like Philosophy of Science and Advanced Logic for my minor.
So, in AI, ultimate justification and absolute knowledge is not the point. Instead ""decision makers can satisfice either by finding optimum solutions for a simplified world, or by finding satisfactory solutions for a more realistic world." Which reduces the justification of knowledge to a form of constraint satisfaction. Which I guess can be expressed by differential probabilities.
Antony, I think we are in broad agreement. But I didn't mean "satisfactory" in an emotional sense, but rather in an epistemological sense. As you say, ultimately a web of knowledge is the best we can do, there is no ultimate justification. As you put it, the Tao just is. The skeptics understood this over two millennia ago, but a lot of moderns still haven't come to terms with it.
“… pause for a moment and reflect that really smart people have considered the problem of the criterion seriously for over twenty centuries. What are the chances that they were all fooling themselves?”
Uhmm, pretty high?
In the first place, twenty centuries show that the problem of finding a Criterion of Truth is irreducible. The reason it is irreducible is that the perception of this as a problem occurs because of the self-referential quality of language universals. It’s an artifact of the human mind conflating language universals with some presumed veridical reality. We create language categories and then talk about them as if they exist, even as we are denying their existence.
So actually, the question of why the quest for Truth and Knowledge captures “really smart people” is the interesting part of this. We learned from Darwin that there is no intelligent designer. But that doesn’t stop the human mind from perceiving a sort of teleonomy in the organized structure in the world we inhabit; we can’t escape a sort of intelligent design inference. We are evolved to look for cause and effect; it’s adaptive. Looking for root causes, prime movers, first principles, grand unifying theories, Truth, Knowledge---all habits of the human mind.
Very Wittgensteinian of you, F_F! But of course a Wittgensteinian solution is yet another example of not being able to meet the skeptical challenge. Not sure what you mean by "irreducible," but if you mean that the challenge can't be met, I agree. Which is why it's humbling.
Like the part about the human condition Fit, reading the article my intuition kicked in and thought, well we have all these theories that can manipulate particles to give us a tools to see into things, but we still gone remain blind and stumbling. How much of wishing to improve is an avenue for acquiring knowledge similar to seeing?
Thank you Massimo, could you recommend physics book? Trying to understand the basic principles of quantum theory and particle decay.
Maks, I'm afraid that's not really my field. But here is a good book I read about that topic: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53437150-quantum-reality
One argument for particularism, that our senses are at least provisionally reliable is evolution. That is, our senses, while not always reliable have been reliable enough to get us to where we are now. We can trust in general that we can reliably distinguish day from night because we evolved to modify our behaviors in part because of the day/night cycle.
Similarly for such sensations as touch (exquisitely sensitive both for our own health and for sociability) , taste (bitter foods are likely non-nutritious or worse--our taste for them is cultural) and so on.
These are thin reeds, but we could have (and have) built upon them structures for apprehending the world.
Hume is instructive on this point: "But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence."
Hume of course did not have the additional support of evolutionary theory to place humans in a graspable environment. Having rejected theories of Providence, he falls back upon the facts of existence. These are a strong enough argument for him, even without the support of evolutionary thinking.
Brian, good points, but I do think Hume missed the point regarding Pyrrhonism. The Pyrrhonists famously said that they suspended judgment about "non-evident" matters. While we could have an interesting discussion about what exactly that means, they also said that for most everyday matters we just follow our senses and societal customs, thus bypassing Hume's criticism.
As for particularism being rescued by evolution, perhaps. But that doesn't defeat the skeptical challenge. After all, the skeptic doesn't claim that we cannot have knowledge. She only claims that we can't tell for sure if and when we do have it. So, yes, presumably our senses evolved to be reliable (within very strict limits having to do directly with survival and reproduction), but are they being reliable right here, in this particular instance?
That "interesting discussion" is what would avoid us begging a question. That is, the response that radical skepticism is fit only for those matters which are non-evident is the entire game.
Can we respond that we begin from matters that are "evident"? (And no, I don't mean Descartes "clear and distinct" propositions). I mean proceeding, as it were scientifically from matters of fact upon which there is no reasonable disagreement to matters that logically or even merely practically follow from those. All conclusions are provisional, but we've gotten to the Moon with no more than Newtonian mechanics to guide our craft, even though that provisional theory has been overcome.
Our reason to trust our senses' reliability isn't within an individual. What makes the senses provisionally reliable is that our conclusions from sense data can be interpersonally communicable, meaning that our conclusions may be reliable because they can be checked by others, especially others who are skeptical. Of course this can go wrong, spectacularly, but we can at least be certain, then, of what is NOT the case.
We can discard the stepping stones that have brought us to the state of (provisional) knowledge that we do possess: Newton's opticks don't stand up to quantum mechanics, yet provided us with the telescopes and microscopes that have brought us quite far, even though they've also now been surpassed by instruments their very discoveries had brought into being.
I might assume that the Skeptics would discount cosmology or cosmogony, not to mention theology and theogony. I don't think we need to throw up our hands at the one, which though it might be beyond our reach isn't beyond our efforts to see whether that inaccessibility is the case. As for the latter, there's a place where the skeptics are correct, if only (leaving aside the string theorists) because we can play our cosmology game with a net.
Brian, remember that there are two very different kinds of skepticism: Pyrrhonism and Academic. It's the Pyrrhonists who say that we should suspend judgment about non-evident matters. The Academics would assign probabilities to everything, including our scientific theories.
However, a radical skeptic (third category) cannot really be defeated. It doesn't matter how many people check your sensorial perceptions, because you could be a brain in a vat, or live in the Matrix, in which case those "people" themselves would be illusions.
Radical skepticism, of course, doesn't claim that we live in the Matrix, it just raises the logical possibility in order to instill a bit of humility in what skeptics call "dogmatists," i.e., people who are so darn sure they are right.