Saturday, February 14, 2009

Scepticism

Scepticism is defined generally as the denial that knowledge or rational belief is possible. For those of you not familiar with the more formal aspects scepticism you can see examples of it in action in films like the Matrix. Neo had no way in his original life to know whether what he experienced was real or a computer generated interaction with his brain. Other famous examples of this type are the 'brain in a vat' (you are held by aliens and your brain is put in a vat and fed computer generated input for your senses) and Descartes demon (early Matrix).

Scepticism seems unbeatable. If we are unable to answer scepticism it undermines the world to the point where we cannot know anything at all. But we do seem to operate on a day to day basis so how do we answer scepticism?

There have been a number of attempts. One is to not start down that road. I.e. avoid the argument. Someone outlined a method to me to achieve this which leaves me unconvinced. They talk about context sensitivity of language. While we are familiar with the context sensitivity of terms like here, there, I etc (we are able to understand that if someone says "it is cold here" that they mean the location they are in and not necessarily the location the listener is in).
It is argued that other words are context sensitive and one of those is the term 'know'. They argue that two versions of 'do you know that the table in front of you is there?' can be read in different contexts to mean different things. In a sceptical way (academic) it means different to our ordinary experience context.

I am sceptical about this argument.

I have a different option. Sceptical arguments are nearly always used to test or criticize other philosophical positions. If every sceptical argument is unbeatable it undermines most other arguments. One way around this is to examine what claim a sceptical argument is actually making.

Traditional interpretation is the definition above. But this claim makes no sense. A sceptical argument undermines everything it is applied to but adds no value. It is not a counter argument. It just debunks.

I think that we can get around this because if we look at the sceptical claim differently we can work around it. Rather than stating that the sceptical claim is about how knowledge is not possible I would claim that the sceptical argument is about proof. The sceptic is actually saying not that knowledge is not possible but that the ability to prove knowledge is not possible.

This is a subtly different definition of scepticism but one that is still as powerful as the original but one that does not undermine the existence of knowledge. We can see that the ability to prove a belief or prove knowledge does not undermine knowledge itself. We can know that there is a table in front of me but I may not be able to prove it.

The next stage would be to look at what provability means for knowledge. If we define knowledge as true justified belief then can we still make a claim to knowledge that is unprovable. Godel had proved that there are things that are true and unprovable (See Godel numbers). So it seems that provability is not only not necessary for truth in all cases but in many cases proof is simply not possible.

So we can easily dispatch scepticism in this way.

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