Topics Knowledge

Question Last week, I read a book called "Sophie's World" about a young woman who receives philosophy lessons in the mail from a secret source. Toward the end of the book, Sophie (the young woman) realizes that she is a character in a book, and her philosophy teacher proposes that her author might be a character in a book as well. Sophie's reality begins to change in preposterous ways, inviting characters from other books, sea monsters, etc., and we are introduced to a second girl who is reading about her, as we are reading about that girl. I "realized" with building panic that I, too, could be a character in a book, and felt sapped of free will. The fear evolved into a fear that nothing around me really existed, including (with intense regret) the minds and hearts of friends and family-- that it could all change or disappear against the "laws" of physics at any moment. How do we know that just because an experiment works once, it won't suddenly stop working? How do we know, for example, that a clock won't turn into an ice cream cone, just because it never has before? I decided that what I feared must be change or death, but that if change came I would deal with it then, and that if death came, that would be the end and I wouldn't have to worry about it... then I began to fear not just death, but the possibility of eternal damnation, independent of moral choices we make in life. I now find myself anxiously investing nothing but fragile, faltering faith in things I used to take for granted as fact, like gravity, my memory, and human consciousness, and cannot seem to banish the fear that everything will turn on me. I have written papers about "reality" and existentialism before, and have somehow never been bothered by these thoughts, because I've told myself that we make our own meaning, that meaning can derive from the examination of meaninglessness and the human will to create meaning from it... but I've never doubted the existence of other people or the predictability of the world around me. Is there a way of logically or philosophically thinking myself out of this hole so that I can give my heart a break? Thank you so much in advance for even considering this very weighty block of text. I hope that most minds are sounder than mine and won't be equally upset. Thank you, Samantha (19, college student)

Accepted:
August 9, 2012

Comments

Not sure you are going to feel much happier after you read my answer to your question, but let me try at least to tell you what philosophers generally do in response to this sort of question these days.

Your question raises the specter of what is called global skepticism--the idea that we can't or at least don't know anything at all. There are different sorts of responses one might have to this claim, but also different sorts of responses to the kinds of existential questions that you are associating with the skeptical threat.

So let's try first to do what most contemporary epistemologists actually don't do, and that is to grant the threat of skepticism and concede that we cannot remove it. OK, so you don't know anything! Well, the main reason you would think that is because you have in mind extremely high standards for what can count as knowledge. Alright, so maybe we can't meet such high standards. Does that mean it would be reasonable to worry that "a clock might turn into an ice cream cone," and all the rest of your worries? I suppose it depends on what you mean by "might." I assume what you mean is that it is what philosophers call an "epistemic possibility" that this could happen--in other words, it could happen for all you know. But that is because you don't know anything (according to the skeptical hypothesis), and so saying that such a thing could happen for all you know doesn't make that epistemic possibility anything very interesting or different from anything else you might imagine, since you don't know that either.

Put it a slightly different way: It seems reasonable only to worry about things that are more likely that mere possibilities. If the world really is the way we tend to think it is, then we have good reasons to acknowledge that all kinds of truly weird stuff might happen. I could get hit by lightening today. It could happen, right? But is it sensible for me to worry about that (genuine, though slight) possibility? Come on! Don't I have anything better to think about, for heaven's sake? Even if we accept that we don't know anything, why does it follow that we don't at least have some very good reasons to believe some things, rather than others, and why is reasonable belief not good enough to put the kinds of worries you mention to rest?

Briefly, to sum up this response, if the standards for knowledge are super high, then is anything really lost, from the point of view of practical reasoning, if we simply forget about knowledge but then go about our business in life by following what we at least have some good reasons to believe (from experience, from science, and so on--none of which we know on this hypothesis, but all of which still supplies good reasons for belief)?

So then you say, but how do we know that such reasons are good ones? Well, once we accept global skepticism, we don't know this. But why does global skepticism show that believing what we have good reasons to believe is irrational? I don't see why this inference is valid. Just because we don't know that some reason is a good one doesn't make it not a good one, and doesn't disqualify whatever evidence we have for thinking that it is a good one. Following evidence that we don't know is true, but which nonetheless qualifies as reasonably taken as evidence, is what rational people do all the time, even if they don't know anything!

So, even if you don't know anything, chill out! All is well and there is no reason to worry about things the way you describe such worries.

But maybe we should take a closer look at the premise I conceded above, namely, that the standards for knowledge are so high that we can't or don't know anything at all. Most contemporary epistemologists are what are called "fallibilists" these days. There are different ways of formulating what fallibilism is, but the basic idea is that wwe can know things even if the ways in which we come to know them (or, our evidence for them) falls short of guaranteeing infallibility. The idea is that we could have been wrong about something, but as long as we didn't get it wrong this time, and have done our epistemic business in all of the appropriate ways, then it counts as knowledge.

But wait! How can we know that we didn't get it wrong this time? Same reasoning applies here. Maybe we could have got it wrong that we didn't get it wrong...but as long as we didn't get it wrong that we didn't get it wrong...and so on. This may sound somewhat fishy to you (it does to most epistemology students when they first hear it), but the point is that fallibilists will simply not accept challenges to their knowledge based on the idea that something could have gone wrong.

One way to think of this is to imagine a fallibilist turning the challenge back on the challenger: OK, maybe something could have gone wrong, but why should I think it actually has gone wrong, and if you have no reason to offer me for thinking that it actually has gone wrong, why should I listen to your challenge, or take it seriously? Following this way of thinking about knowledge, then, why does the fact that someone wrote Sophie's World give me a reason to think that you or I are (only) characters in a book. "But it could be!" you say. And I reply, "Well, maybe, but why should I think that it is really that way, and if you don't give me some reason for thinking that it is really that way, then why should I take that scenario seriously or worry about it?" As a fallibilist, I would claim that I know it is not this way, even if there remains some sense in which it could be this way. But if I know it is not this way (because no one can give me any reason to think I am wrong), then I also know that there is nothing to worry about!

To complete my little argument then, we might also reject the skeptical premise, in which case, chill out--there is nothing to worry about.

Conclusion: Either way, chill out. There are some truly scary things out there, but clocks turning into ice cream cones is not reasonably thought of as one of them! Now, climate change...hmmm, yeah, that worries me!