What is mind? No matter. What is matter? Never mind.
Homer Simpson
I have always approached any kind of academic/intellectual endeavour by trying to be organized. Instead of memorizing a bunch of facts that I will probably forget or mix up, I try to look for underlying patterns and principles. The same applies to philosophy. I have tried to tackle the big questions in a methodical way. One thing I realized early was that for any important question, there are people wiser than me who feel strongly on both sides. I also came to suspect that many philosophers started with certain biases and built their philosophies to support those biases. That gave me the confidence to trust my own judgment and come to my own conclusions.
First off is the basic questions ‘What exists and what can we know?’ These are related but separate questions and I will start with the second.
René Descartes (1596-1650) in his Meditations on First Philosophy started out by concluding that the only thing that he could know for certain was his own existence. That was all well and good, but I don’t think he was comfortable with his own conclusion so he went on, with more questionable reasoning, to show how we can know that the outside world exists as we perceive it.
My own belief is that Descartes was correct in the beginning but should have stopped sooner. I am a skeptic in the sense that I don’t believe that absolute knowledge (with the possible exception of my own existence) is possible. This is a very simplified definition of skepticism. It is a philosophy with many variants and subtleties. My own preferred flavour is ephectic Pyrrhonism (named for Pyrrho of Ellis, c. 360-c.270 BC). I believe that there is no way of knowing for certain either way and the way to achieve ataraxia (freedom from worry: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) is to accept that we cannot know and suspend judgement.
The problem with skepticism is that, if we can’t know anything even exists, how can we live our lives. If everything might be an illusion then why eat food? Why not walk into traffic? The answer to this lies in the first question: What exists? This is the difference between ontology and epistemology. Ontology is the study of ‘what is’. Epistemology is the study of what we can know.
Even as a skeptic, I believe (but without complete certainty) that the real world exists pretty much as it seems. I come to this conclusion through a process known as abduction. Put simply, abduction means coming to the best conclusion based on the available evidence. It is not as logically rigorous as deduction or induction and two people may come to different conclusions based on most of the same evidence. Unfortunately most, if not all, of the big questions in philosophy can only be decided in this way. If anyone is interested in a good book on this topic, I highly recommend ‘The Justification of Religious Belief’ by Basil Mitchell (Oxford University Press, 1981).
Often people feel that they know things with absolute certainty, but two people may have opposite viewpoints and both feel that they know that they are right with no trace of doubt. It is also sometimes the case that someone may feel that they are certain on a certain point but later may change their opinion. The key word in both of these examples is ‘feel’. I suggest that certainty is not a logical position, but an emotion.
If we accept that even those ‘facts’ of which we are most confident may be incorrect then we may be better off. If we consider certainty to be an emotion then we are less likely to feel backed into a corner when the evidence suggests that our most closely held beliefs may be wrong.
Next month I will talk about more of my personal philosophy.
Wayne
March 2025
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