Category Archives: Certainty and Doubt

Rejecting certainty

19 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Early and Theravāda, French Tradition, Humility, Metaphysics, Self

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I struggle with the Buddhist concept of non-self. I am not sure whether I accept it. But I am confident that Buddhists are able to demolish one of the more influential Western accounts of the self, that of René Descartes.

Descartes, recall, is worried that he cannot be certain of anything. Like Plato before him, he knows his senses are often wrong; he could be dreaming, he could be in the Matrix. Unlike Plato, he is not satisfied to take even mathematics as a certain foundation. It could be that an evil demon (or the creators of the Matrix) had deceived him such that there was no shape or place, and the real world was far stranger. Geometry isn’t certain enough. Arithmetic? Here he comes to real uncertainty:

I sometimes think that others go wrong even when they think they have the most perfect knowledge; so how do I know that I myself don’t go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square?

I think Descartes’s reasoning is right up to this point (as many Buddhists would not). Continue reading →

Pro-choice humility

09 Sunday Dec 2012

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Humility, Morality, Politics, Roman Catholicism

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A little while ago on Skholiast’s blog, Elisa Freschi pointed to an argument from Nicholas Shackel attacking the “pro-choice” position on abortion. Shackel objects deeply to the following claim from the US’s newly elected Catholic vice-president, Joe Biden:

I accept my church’s position on abortion…. Life begins at conception. That’s the church’s judgment. I accept it in my personal life. But I refuse to impose it on equally devout Christians and Muslims and Jews…I just refuse to impose that on others.

As Shackel notes, such a position is hardly unique to Biden. Forms of this position are very common; in many Western countries, they may even be the most common. It is the position one could reasonably call “anti-abortion but pro-choice”. And as far as Shackel is concerned, such a position is ignorant or worse. Continue reading →

How intellectual conversion happens (and elephants)

01 Sunday Jul 2012

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Early and Theravāda, God, Jainism, M.T.S.R., Metaphilosophy, Roman Catholicism, Truth

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One of the reasons I’ve enjoyed reading about Leah Libresco‘s conversion is it’s such a clear, current and vivid illustration of a phenomenon whose existence many would fervently like to wish away, would like to declare impossible. Namely, Libresco is demonstrably intelligent, with an actively questioning mind, and young; and she once actively declared herself belonging to the atheism that she has now rejected in favour of Catholicism. Many people find the existence of such a person really hard to take.

The clearest example of this is JT Eberhard, a young atheist blogger who remains a young atheist blogger. In his reaction, Eberhard proclaims: “I’m reading through all her posts and I’m floored. Leah’s really smart. I cannot believe the things she’s writing are coming from her mind.” Continue reading →

Humility in science and other traditions

17 Sunday Apr 2011

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Humility, Natural Science, Social Science

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I’ve lately been reading and enjoying The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan‘s manifesto against pseudoscientifc beliefs (such as alien abductions). One of the more enjoyable and thought-provoking sections of the book is a discussion of scientists’ humility: “I maintain that science is part and parcel humility. Scientists do not seek to impose their needs and wants on Nature, but instead humbly interrogate Nature and take seriously what they find. We are aware that revered scientists have been wrong. We understand human imperfection.” (32) The ideal scientist humbles herself before the truths about the natural world that she finds in her work. He quotes his wife Ann Druyan to the effect that science “is forever whispering in our ears, ‘Remember, you’re very new at this. You might be mistaken. You’ve been wrong before.'” (34-5) I hadn’t thought of science in these terms before, but I think Sagan is quite right about this – to an extent, as I’ll discuss below. Sagan repeatedly and rightly stresses the importance of uncertainty for a scientist; to live up to the ideals of scientific research requires the ability to admit we are wrong. A scientist must never be too confident in her own rightness; what first seems obvious is often exactly what turns out to be wrong, overthrown by the evidence. I think this is excellent advice for scientists to follow – or anyone else.

After quoting Druyan, Sagan proceeds immediately to add: “Despite all the talk of humility, show me something comparable in religion.” And this is where he goes astray. Continue reading →

Is there certainty beyond logic?

15 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Chanting, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Logic, Meditation, Natural Science, Truth

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Responding to my post on doubt, Jim Wilton agreed that “truth established through thought and logic is always subject to doubt.” But he suggested that not all knowledge or truth is a product of logic – and, he claimed, perhaps this non-logical knowledge can be certain, indubitable.

I agree that not all knowledge is a product of logic. This is one of the reasons I have spent a great deal of time discussing what Thomas Kasulis calls intimacy worldviews, background approaches to philosophy that are not derived from direct argument. I agree with the thinkers in such traditions that truth is not merely something expressed in linguistic propositions.

Where I disagree strongly, however, is on the view that such non-logical knowledge can be a source of genuine certainty. Continue reading →

Certainty requires omniscience

08 Wednesday Dec 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, God, Human Nature, Jainism, Modern Hinduism, Truth

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Under what circumstances can one be absolutely certain of anything? I had intended my previous post to be on that question, but the preliminary inquiries to it were significant enough that I thought they deserved their own post. I end that post, like the earlier “Certain knowledge” post, on a note of uncertainty; I don’t discuss any circumstances under which certainty is possible. So is it possible at all?

I generally lean toward saying no – and an uncertain no. I leave the possibility open that something will be revealed to me that I can be absolutely certain of; but I don’t think one exists. The happy thing about this kind of uncertainty is there’s no contradiction in it. While “there is no truth” is a contradiction because it asserts that the truth is there is no truth, and “we cannot know anything” is a contradiction because it implies that it can be known that nothing can be known, the same is not true about “we cannot be certain about anything.” The last can be asserted as a statement that is merely highly probable; it doesn’t need to be certain to be true, and therefore can be true without contradicting itself.

Still, I do think there’s one circumstance where real certainty is possible – though it is merely a hypothetical circumstance. Continue reading →

Living with doubt

05 Sunday Dec 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Buddhism, Certainty and Doubt, Courage, French Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Leadership

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I’d like to say some more about questions of doubt and certainty, which were central to my recent discussion of Wittgenstein. I explored this question at greatest length in the post called “Certain knowledge”, but the conclusions there were tentative – which is to say, not certain.

To recap a little first: This question was Descartes‘s biggest passion. He wanted one and only one Archimedean point, one firm foundation that could not be doubted, on which he could build the rest of his philosophy. And to doubt that he was doubting would be self-contradictory, so the existence of his doubt and therefore of his own existence became certain. “I think, therefore I am.”

But Descartes was wrong: the existence of the thinking self can be, and is, doubted all the time. Almost all Buddhist tradition rests on just such a doubt: the self is not real. If there is an indubitable Cartesian foundation, one must take it back to “There is thinking, therefore there is being.” But is there even this? Descartes argues that to doubt one’s own doubt (or doubt one’s own thinking) is self-contradictory. To establish this point for certain, however, does require that one accept the logic law of non-contradiction – and accept it as an absolute law, brooking no exceptions ever. Graham Priest’s dialetheist epistemology denies this very point: only by allowing that certain contradictions can be true, he says, can we successfully resolve the liar paradox or Zeno’s paradoxes. Continue reading →

A quick look at On Certainty

17 Wednesday Nov 2010

Posted by in Analytic Tradition, Certainty and Doubt, Consciousness, Daoism, French Tradition, Metaphysics, Natural Science

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It is probably uncontroversial to describe Ludwig Wittgenstein as one of the twentieth century’s greatest philosophers. In my less charitable moods I’d be tempted to say that this is rather like being one of Kansas City’s tallest buildings. Still, his vast influence over the philosophies that come after him is undeniable – but I often wonder why.

I’m led to think about Wittgenstein by a few recent comments from Thill, quoting a text called On Certainty. Readers might recall that in my most extensive reading of Wittgenstein to date – looking at the Philosophical Investigations – the main effect he had on my thought was to push me away from his thought and closer to the thinkers he disliked, like Plato and Augustine. But a brief look at On Certainty does even less for my estimation of Wittgenstein as a thinker. Continue reading →

Monotheists’ humility

04 Sunday Jul 2010

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Christianity, Early and Theravāda, Early Factions, French Tradition, God, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Jainism, Judaism, Mu'tazila, Sāṃkhya-Yoga, Sufism, Truth, Vedānta

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I’ve been thinking some more about the idea of encounter, which I blogged about in these posts and which I take to be central to the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas: the idea that we can never encompass the wholeness of truth, it must remain irreducibly other to us. I’m wondering whether the basic idea animating encounter philosophies is the virtue of humility – a virtue, I think, in both epistemological and ethical contexts. Aristotle, on the other hand, saw pride as a virtue, modesty as its lack – and while I do think humility is a virtue myself, I would remain an Aristotelian in seeing humility, like justice, as a mean. It is far too easy to be too humble in action, to be servile and self-abnegating – an excess which, I’ve suggested before, hurts women’s struggle for equality. And with respect to knowledge, too little humility can lead us to an inappropriate feeling of certainty; but realizing that lack of certainty can spur us to too much humility, leading us into a self-contradictory denial of truth and knowledge.

The issue surrounding encounter, in that case, goes well beyond one’s relationship with God, even one’s relationship with other human beings. Continue reading →

Following science as a layperson

13 Sunday Dec 2009

Posted by in Certainty and Doubt, Epistemology, Faith, German Tradition, Greek and Roman Tradition, Humility, Natural Science, Politics, Social Science, South Asia

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Perhaps the trickiest thing about trying to be a philosopher today is the explosion of information in natural science: we are in the era of “rapid-discovery science,” as Randall Collins calls it in The Sociology of Philosophies. Aristotle could write not merely a Metaphysics but a Physics, and his wide range of general knowledge was enough to make him one of the experts on the subject. Even as recently as the 19th century, Schelling and Hegel could have a decent shot at writing “philosophies of nature,” in which they tried to think philosophically through the whole scope of the way the natural world works. But today, not even a professor of natural science can know all the science that’s out there, even in relatively general terms. To some extent, we need to rely on the authority of experts we trust to know their fields well – what Indian philosophers called the śabdapramāṇa, the source of knowledge beyond inference and personal experience. And even if we somehow could know all the science for a moment, we’d lose it almost instantly as the science changes. Continue reading →

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