Here’s the revised version of the first section of my Essay. I expect it to be the shortest, and the least changed, so people who have already commented on the original may not find a lot here.
Descartes the Skeptic
It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon Insufficient evidence. -W. K. Clifford
The value of getting truth can differ significantly from the disvalue of getting falsehood. - Linda Zagzebski
The Allegory of Plato's Cave forms a foundation for how much of philosophy, epistemology in particular, has proceded since his time. In it, Plato presents what some might call a bleak view of human knowledge. According to the allegory, the things of the world that are easiest to percieve- physical things and their most obvious qualities- are the merest, most distorted representations of the Truth. He compares them to shadows reflected by firelight on the side of a cave wall, faint impressions of things much more real than they. We are chained, says Plato, such that all we can see are these shadows. The glimmer of hope that Plato presents through this is that the wise man, the scholar, can come and free us of these shackles, and begin the painful, fearful process of showing us to the light. Plato is the beginning of my examination, and as such, his allegory takes on the air of prediction, hinting at a possible future world and society in which people have been risen up by those who came before them, and in which more and more people can be freed from their chains, if they want to undertake the process. Those free men would be us, the philosophers. Has this come to pass?
It certainly had not by the time of DesCartes, roughly 1800 years later. His first Meditation sets the stage for his examination from that point forward:
But since reason already convinces us that we should withhold assent just as carefully from whatever is not completely certain and indubitable as from what is clearly
false, if I find some reason for doubt in each of my beliefs, that will be enough to reject all of them.
The influence of Plato is clear in this statement- all the world, everything we see in it, is to be held suspect, in the absence of certainty. Especially those things we come to believe without reflection, for example in childhood. Descartes continues:
Some years ago I noticed how many false things I had accepted as true in my childhood, and how doubtful were the things I had subsequently built upon them.
Echoing the Cave, Descartes begins his examinations with the presumption that everything he believes that can be at all doubted must be thrown out entirely- he must have a foundation, something he can claim to be true which cannot possibly be doubted. As we all know, his conclusion was the Cogito, and he sets about developing his system from it. The Cogito does not concern me so much as the assumption of doubt that came before it.
Descartes is pointing out here that his driving goal is the avoidance of false beliefs. This seems like a good enough reason to get started, but it is only half of the picture. A person may devote their energy to avoiding false beliefs, but they may instead (or in addition) devote themselves to gaining true beliefs. It is easy to make the
mistake that this amounts to two ways of saying the same thing, but in fact this is not the case. The differences are the key to what I’m writing about in this paper.
In order to avoid all false beliefs, a person can technically succeed by trying to believe as little as possible. Now, I think it’s clear that most philosophers don’t procede with the goal of believing nothing at all firmly in mind. However, the fact remains that believing very little, or nothing at all, is not in any way a failure if one’s only goal is to avoid falsehood. I think this attitude has crept in and affected much of philosophy since Descartes’ time. The skeptic is certainly regarded as more noble, more
thoughtful than the diehard true-believer. I think they are both equal mistakes rising from opposite assumptions.
In contrast, in order to gain as many true beliefs as possible, a person can succeed by trying to believe every single thing they are exposed to. This simply won’t do either- it’s not a good way to build a philosophical system, since many potential beliefs contradict, and further, it’s probably impossible anyway. Once one firmly believes something, they have no choice but to disbelieve everything that contradicts it- so a person has no rational choice but to be selective about what they believe. Even still, I think an approach that values gaining and maintaining truths as primary (tempered with a milder desire to avoid falsehood) is a markedly different approach than what I see dominating in philosopher, and it’s also a better approach in many ways. Let me illustrate by returning to DesCartes.
He has begun his examinations with a heavy leaning towards avoiding false beliefs. He carries along Plato’s presumption that the mental life of the child (and by extention, the unexamined life of the adult) is characterized primarily by believing a great many false things that must be set right. Though he is discussing philosophy, he seems to apply this theory to all aspects of life, so much so that he resolved to not believe anything at all until he finds the one thing that cannot be doubted. DesCartes’ process of eliminatation leaves him with almost nothing at all- no belief in his senses, his memory, the more complex deliverances of his reason. Since he has been mistaken at least once in his usage of all of things, he is left with only the thing about which it seems to him he can never be mistaken- that he is something thinking these thoughts. The Cogito- a starting point. What he has done is made Plato’s flexible allegory concrete by tying it to the analytic process. It’s important to note that while Plato seems to have been on DesCartes’ mind, this was a creation all of his own. Plato’s allegory has been seen as a metaphor for the relationship between student and teacher, God and man, the Government and it’s subjects, and many other things. Descartes gave birth to the idea of universal skepticism in his attempt to refute the same thing. Philosophy has flowed since in his time in much the same style, and while the principals discussed have changed, the general approach often goes completely unexamined. How many thinkers have began with a tiny foundation of one or two hopefully undeniable axioms (the Cogito or something else) and tried to work their way back from there into the full, robust collection of truths that the common man takes themselves to have to begin with? Too many to name, indeed, many who’s names were never recorded.
Hume was the first clear sign that there was something wrong with this process. His dissection of DesCartes reveals that we cannot be certain even about the Cogito- all we have is the perception of thought, and there is no direct connection between this thought and the assumption that anything like ‘I’ is connected to these perceptions. Thomas Reid pointed out that the notion of a thought without a thinker was patently absurd, and I would tend to agree. However, Hume’s argument is perfectly well founded in the system DesCartes began- a system of links between observations and analytic truths. Hume has simply removed the links in that chain, with two more notions that have endured the test of time for the most part- first, that certainty is only a characteristic of analytic truths, and second, that analytic truths tell us nothing real about the world. DesCartes purely rationalistic examinations are thus completely cut off from the world we observe- and since observation is the only source of non-tautological information according to Hume, the path for universal skepticism is laid. Kant offered a solution, the synthetic a priori statement, showing that deductively true propositions could be linked to actual useful claims about the world, through non-tautological analysis such as mathematics. However, this approach concedes almost everything to Hume- the central problem, and the axis that skepticism revolves around, is DesCartes’ assumption that a belief must be positively proven through deduction before it can justifiably be believed. What Kant has done is attempted to hurdle what Hume presented as an impassable wall, and whether or not he succeeded in this leap remains a matter of debate into the present.
Because of this debate, even the most basic questions of the world around us, such as the existence of free-will, other persons, and extension, must remain perpetually in debate as well. In the sections that follow in this essay, I would like to argue first that a starting point like DesCartes is not only unncessecary, but unreasonable. Second, I would will argue that such an approach is intellectually dishonest, and presents biases of it’s own, where skepticism has been generally thought of the approach most free of biased, as opposed to credulity. Finally, I will propose a new approach to exmaination that can take the place of the assumption of skepticism, and offers promise to resolving some of the most basic perennial problems of philosophy.