Question Does certainty suggest or indicate truth?

Accepted:
May 4, 2011

Comments

I presume that in asking whether certainty suggests or indicates truth, you mean whether an agent's certainty about some proposition is a mark of its being true. If this is correct, then in order to answer the question, one needs to get clear about the kind of certainty at issue. It certainly does not seem to be the case that an agent's psychological certainty, or confidence, in some proposition, is a mark of its truth, since one can be confident about the truth of some proposition that isn't true. If the proposition, by contrast, is certain--if, for example, the proposition is a necessary truth, or a proposition that is the object of what Descartes in the Meditations calls the 'natural light', or reason, and hence can be said to be metaphysically certain, then the certainty of the proposition would indeed be a mark of its truth. It seems to me, however, that the propositions that we, as epistemic agents, are most interested in aren't metaphysically certain--_pace_ Descartes, I fear that we lack a 'natural light' that yields metaphysical truths about the nature of the mind, God, and the material world--but are contingent truths; since I don't think that one can infer from one's certainty about some proposition that it is true, as mere psychological certainty does not seem to be a mark of truth, it would seem that certainty should not be taken as a substantial mark of truth.

Descartes sought certainty because he thought that if we know something with certainty, then it must be true. And he was right, if only because 'S knows that p' implies p, so that in 'We know with certainty that . . .' the phrase "with certainty" is redundant; there is no such thing as uncertain knowledge. I suspect that the sense of your question may be Cartesian: is it the case that certainty implies truth? There are several concepts to sort out here: 'We know for sure, or for certain, or with certainty that . . .', 'I am certain (sure) that . . .', 'I feel certain, sure, that . . .', 'It is certain that . . .' (but not 'It is sure that . . .') There is a very useful paper by G.E. Moore called "Certainty" that might be helpful here, which is sensitive to distinctions of this kind. Sean is right in his response above that psychological certainty or "feeling certain" may not be a mark of truth, though I wonder whether anyone has troubled to test the correlation empirically in humans, and whether it makes sense to think about testing it in animals. On the other hand it also seems correct that if something is indeed certain, e.g. that 7×9 = 63, then '7×9 = 63' is true.

Question Does certainty suggest or indicate truth? Accepted:May 4, 2011

Question Does certainty suggest or indicate truth?

Accepted:
May 4, 2011