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Mini-Course in Philosophy The Epistemological Question |
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Section 2: Various Doctrines of Certitude Topics:
a) Skepticism Skepticism is the doctrine which denies the possibility of achieving certitude. It is called absolute skepticism if it denies that man can have even probability, that is, a justified opinion, about reality. It is called qualified skepticism if it accepts the possibility of attaining knowledge that is probably true. After all, there can be only two fundamental doctrines about the possibility of achieving certitude, that is, about the value or trustworthiness of human knowledge. One of these doctrines holds that certitude is possible, the other holds that it is not possible. Between skepticism, on the one hand, and what is called (perhaps regrettably) dogmatism on the other, there is no room for new doctrines. Hence, every doctrine on certitude will be either skeptical in character or it will be dogmatic. We shall advert to this fact when we come to the description of the several doctrines we are to discuss. Skepticism as a theory of knowledge, or rather as a theory of the nonexistence of true knowledge, offers the following arguments: (a) Our faculties -- that is, our knowing-powers -- often deceive us. Experience is proof sufficient of this fact. We may think we see a thing when as a fact we do not see it; we may judge that a distant mountain is ten miles off and then find to our surprise that it is thirty miles off; we may judge a wheel which whirls with great rapidity to be standing still; a child at its first motion picture show thinks the pictures are real persons. Since, then, our faculties are at least sometimes deceiving, we have no assurance in any instance that they are giving us truth. Just as a man who is known to be a liar cannot be trusted in any utterance, even if he be actually telling the truth, so our faculties are never to be trusted. In other words, we never can have certitude. Even if our faculties sometimes actually tell the truth, we have no means of knowing that this is the case. Therefore, the quest of certitude is vain. Man must be content to remain in ignorance or, at best, in doubt. (b) We cannot know but that we are the creatures of a Power that delights to see us milling about hopelessly in tangles of doubt and error. (c) To know a thing with certitude we must have proof or evidence that the thing is true. But then we must also have proof or evidence that the proof or evidence is reliable. And then we must have proof for this proof. And so we go on endlessly. Now, it is acknowledged on all hands that one cannot build a solid argument on an endless series of proofs. There cannot be a useful "progress unto infinity" in argument. There must be some solid starting-point, some absolute ground on which the whole edifice of evidence rests. But, as we have seen, there can be no such solid ground. Therefore, the mind cannot achieve certitude. Such are the arguments of skepticism. We must look into them to see whether they are of any value. But, before all, we must notice these facts:
By his own confession, the skeptic is confounded as well as confuted. We may tell him that, by his own argument, skepticism is not a true and certain doctrine as he professes it to be. In a word, the skeptic contradicts himself; one part of his doctrine cancels out the other, and the result is zero. A sincere skeptic has no recourse but silence. The minute he speaks to explain his doctrine he makes factual declaration of these things:
Therefore, the skeptic cannot speak; he cannot express his doctrine without denying it; he cannot defend his position without showing it to be false. Only in absolute silence, in which he must doubt the existence of his own doubt, can the skeptic steal away from reality. For if a man has not even certitude of the meaning of his words, how shall he dare to ask us to listen to them? Since skepticism is thus ruinously self-contradictory, we have no need to investigate its arguments for the purpose of refuting it. But we have need to investigate these arguments for our own enlightenment and to equip ourselves for the charitable task of keeping unwary minds from being taken in by them. Therefore we shall glance at them briefly. (a) Our knowing-powers deceive us, says the skeptic, but he is wrong. Our knowing-powers, used rightly, are infallible. When we are deceived, it is because we make a headlong judgment without waiting for our knowing-powers to bring in their evidence. Or we use our knowing-powers for purposes they were not meant to serve. Or (in the case of the senses) we fail to make allowance for organic defects or for the conditions under which the knowing-powers should operate, like a colorblind man making decisions on tints and shades or a person matching colors under dim or tinted lights. Our faculties do not deceive us, but we frequently misuse our faculties. The man who "thinks he sees a thing" (as at a magician's trick show) when he does not see it, asks more of his eyes than they were given to report; for, as we shall see in a later part of this study, the sense of sight is for one essential purpose and no other, the perceiving of colored surfaces. Similarly, when we judge distances by the eye, we may be wrong, especially if we are in an atmosphere rarer or less rare than that in which our ordinary daily experience is gathered; but distance-judging is not the proper work of the sense of sight. Nor is it the first and proper business of the eye to discern rest and motion, nor to determine at once whether a movie-image is a picture or a person. In all these cases, the deception is in the judgment of the mind, not in the eye or other senses, and it is there by our fault, not by the fault of the mind itself. We judge rashly, precipitately; we do not wait to test conclusions; we make them headlong. But we could wait, we could test, we could find solid evidence and true certitude. Therefore, the assertion of the skeptic that our knowing-powers deceive us, and the instances offered in proof of the assertion, come to nothing. This argument is manifestly valueless. (b) Perhaps we are the creatures of a Power that delights to see us deceived. The sane answer to one "perhaps" is another "perhaps." We might dismiss this silly assertion by saying, "Perhaps not." But we need not be so abrupt. No normal man can look upon existence as a hopeless confusion, a milling about in toils of error and deception. Nature is constant; the farmer plants wheat in confidence that the crop will not turn out be be pineapples; the child grows into a man and not into a griffin. Our knowing-powers serve us well for business and even for pleasure; we can add up the bill at the grocer's and know when we have been given the correct change for the money we offer in payment. And why should a malign Power to to the bother of furnishing to man sense-organs of most wondrous design and delicacy, admirably adapted to what we call their normal use, if these things were to be utterly meaningless and if man could be plunged into witless miseries and contradictions without them? (c) That there must be an endless series of proofs to establish certitude is an untrue statement. There are certain fundamental truths which need no proof, and which cannot have proof, for they are their own proof. These are self-evident truths which it is impossible either to doubt or to deny. These are lightsome truths as the sun is lightsome; and one needs no lantern or searchlight to go in search of the noonday sun or to identify it when it is discovered. These self-evident truths are the basis of all certitude; they give us the ultimate ground for evidence which skepticism mistakenly says we cannot find. In recognizing these truths the mind by one and the same indivisible act sees the truth and the evidence or proof of the truth. Such fundamental and inevitable truths are:
These truths cannot be doubted or denied. Try, for example, to deny the fact of your own existence. Say, "I do not exist." Then what right have you to say "I"? What you say amounts to this, "I'm here to say I'm not here." Or try to doubt your existence. Say, "I doubt whether I'm here." You words mean, "I am certain that I am here and that I am entertaining a doubt about my being here." Thus any attempt at doubt or denial of a self-evident truth results in an affirmation of the truth. Such a truth is inescapable. It is not only a truth which contains proof; it is its own proof which you cannot evade. Hence the statement of the skeptics that every truth requires a proof other than itself is a fallacy, and upon that fallacy the who case for skepticism is wrecked and forever shattered. But what of qualified skepticism, the skepticism which admits that man can attain knowledge that is probably true and certain? Well, it hasn't a leg to stand on. For the man who says that the best we can achieve is probability is a man who denies certitude, and thus be is an absolute skeptic in spite of himself. If he cries wildly that he is not, and attempts to explain his position in such way as to give value to what he calls probability, then he is actually a dogmatist and not a skeptic at all. There is no middle ground between the positions described by the contradictory judgments, "We can achieve certitude" and, "We cannot achieve certitude." Since they are contradictories, these judgments exhaust the possibilities. For the rest, there is no conceivable probability which does not rest upon things certainly known. The man who says something is probable affirms the fact that something else is absolutely sure, just as the man who thinks it probable that the local politicians are a tricky lot, bases his opinion upon facts which he has certainly observed; the probability is in an interpretation of data which are not merely probable but certain.
b) Idealism Idealism is a kind of blanket-term for all doctrines (and their name is legion) which in any way minimize reality and tend to turn things into thoughts or mental images, that is, to make reality a kind of dream in our own minds. Sometimes this sort of doctrine is called subjectivism (for the person who knows, or thinks he knows, is called the knowing subject), and sometimes it is given a special name by the person who professes it, as, for example, in the case of Immanual Kant who called it criticism. But all doctrines of whatever name which minimize reality and make things into thoughts or images or ideas in the knowing subject, are idealistic or subjectivistic. It is manifest that idealistic doctrines are also skeptical. For if man's knowledge is subjective and not trans-subjective, if it is a home-product of the mind, if man is walking in a dream-world, then his certitudes about things are really not certitudes at all but errors, and certitude is unobtainable. And here we are back at the untenable position of skepticism. In whatever form it may appear -- whether in the theories of Hume, Berkeley, Kant, Hegel, von Schelling, Fichte, or in the will-philosophies and power-philosophies of the later Germans from Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to Hitler, or even in the so-called practical doctrines of the pragmatists and the neo-realists -- idealism fails to come to grips with reality. Even sensism or positivism which in one way is the opposite of idealism is like it in another way; it fails to recognize a tremendous primal reality, the reality of mind as well as the reality of what the mind represents. Idealistic doctrine cuts away its own foundations. For if reality is ultimately reducible to states of the mind, what basis have we for accepting as reliable or real the states of the mind? If the world is all a dream, is not the dreamer a part of the world and therefore a part of his own dream; and have we not then a dream in the void without a real dreamer? Surely there can be no more complete skepticism than this. Again, the idealist, like the skeptic, must be forever silent. For if he talks about reality, even to deny it, he affirms reality. The idealist supposes that his words have real meaning, and that his theories deal with something that is there, even as he endeavors to deny that it is there and to assert that it is all in his viewpoint, or all in his mind, or all in an unconscionable image. There is one type of idealism (rightly called so since it minimizes the reality of common experience) known as relativism or the relativity of truth. This doctrine refuses to recognize the existence of solid reality as a knowable thing, and makes truth dependent upon "the way you look at it" or "the way you experience it." Relativism holds that what is true for one may not be true for all, or may not be true for one in all circumstances. Thus I may truly say that today is hot; but at the same moment in the far north an Eskimo may truly say that today is cold. All this is mere foolery. For manifestly any statement of concrete fact necessarily takes in the pertinent circumstances of that fact. What I say when I declare that today is hot is that here and now it is hot; so the Eskimo in his far abode says that there and then it is cold. There is no conflict in these statements; one does not deny the other. Neither I nor the Eskimo spoke for all times and places, but each for his own place and time. And what was said was true and eternally true; for unto eternity it remains true that in one precise place and at one precise time it was hot, and in another precise place at a precise time it was cold. As for truths of the rational order, such as the truth that two and two make four, or the truth that any effect must have an adequate cause or sum of causes, these truths are independent of concrete circumstances and are in so sense relative to place, time, or other material factor. You should be on the alert for the pernicious doctrine of relativism, and you will have many opportunities of noticing how prevalent among unthinking people is this idealistic theory. You will hear people talking of "philosophy suited to the needs of our times," as though philosophical truth were relative to the progress of centuries or the multiplication of mechanical devices or the tastes of men in employment and amusement. You will hear people say that certain teachers are men or women of "advanced thinking" as though truth were relative to some kind of foot-rule; you will hear of "liberal views" as though fact depended upon the way it is viewed, and were relative to the viewpoint. All such idealistic theory is tainted with the fundamental insanity of skepticism.
c) Sensism Sensism (often identified with Positivism and Empiricism) is the doctrine which relies upon the senses, and minimizes the value of the reasoning mind. Thus, upon the face of things, sensism is the opposite of idealism. But we have seen that sensism is itself idealistic and subjectivistic inasmuch as it minimizes the reality of mind. Sensism is, as a philosophy, wholly inarticulate. We have seen that the skeptic and idealist dare not talk, for they open their mouths only to contradict themselves. But the sensist cannot talk, for talk is an expression of reasoned thinking which, for the sensist, has no value. Our senses are wondrous channels of knowledge. Their value is in no way to be minimized. Without their service, intellectual knowledge would be unavailable in this life. But sanity demands that we recognize both senses and mind. For if it is only by the service of the senses that the mind can find materials to work upon, it is only by the mind that the value of the senses can be estimated and recognized. A man makes himself a cripple if his philosophy of left-footism denies the existence of the right foot, or if his theory of right-footism denies the existence of the left. The sane man is grateful for two feet, and he uses them both to walk in safety. The laboratory technician who relies upon test-tubes and physical analyses, and says that his task is merely one of observation and experiment; that he amasses data, but reaches no reasoned conclusion upon his findings, is not telling the truth. For one thing, he has some intelligible program which directs his choice of experiments. For another, he has some rational scheme of collating his findings. It is, indeed, impossible for rational man to live or to experiment in a wholly sentient manner, excluding the mind and the value of its reasonings. For the rest, we are quite well aware that many, if not most, of the wild theories which startle the world every day or so, and are forgotten a day or so later, come bounding out of the laboratory which professes to fight shy of all theorizing or "indoctrination," and to concentrate on the amassing of data. Of course, the sane laboratory technician does not profess to be a philosopher, and happy is he if he can overcome the temptation to philosophize. But his science, to which we owe a great deal that makes for convenience and comfort, and even a great deal that makes for the extension of knowledge and the enlightenment of the mind, is taken by the sensist (who professes to be a philosopher) as an embodiment or expression of the sensist theory. We trust, says the sensist, the positive findings of the senses, and of experimental science; we deny the value of your reasonings, your metaphysics. Well, as we have seen, the sensist must offer reasons for the rejection of reason; he does, and they are inadequate as well as contradictory of his own thesis. The sensist must transcend sense, and even become metaphysical, for the purpose of casting a slur at metaphysics. In all this we observe (in the best scientific manner) the self-contradiction of skepticism, the "suicide of thought," the abandonment of all certitude even as the theory presents itself as certain.
d) Traditionalism Traditionalism is a theory which asserts the incapacity of individual minds to reach truth and certitude. We must rest upon the racial reason, upon the strong reasoning power of the whole human race, and not upon the weak reasoning power of Tommy or Jane. Now, the reasoned certitudes of the race are handed on from age to age by the human tradition; hence the name of this theory. If the minds of individual men are like the threads of a tapestry there might be some value in this theory. But the minds of men of successive generations are rather like the links of a chain; and no chain is stronger than its weakest link. A series of weak links will never make a strong chain. If you cannot rely upon individual reason, and the evidence it can discover and offer, you cannot rely upon an agglomeration of many individual reasons, for the character of the thing in either case is the same. Even if the minds of men were like threads in a tapestry, you could only have a tapestry if each thread would bear some weight, however slight. But the traditionalist will not admit that the individual reason can achieve any certitude, however slight. You cannot make a tapestry of threads too weak to bear their own weight. If the individual human mind has a value of zero in the establishing of certitude and in the recognizing of certitude with clear assent, then the agglomerate reasons of all mankind suffer the same defect. A sum of zeros, however large, still comes to zero. It is true that what many men have recognized by reason as the truth stands so far recommended to the individual minds of people who come after them. Tradition has a value. But not as tradition merely. Its value lies in its recognizable reasonableness. In religion, Divine Tradition rests upon the recognizable authority of God, and gives the mind absolute certitude; but there is not here any question of Divine Tradition. Here we speak of human tradition. There is a doctrine, allied to traditionalism, which declares that the human mind, as individual or in agglomeration, is incapable of knowing truth with certitude, and asserts that all certitude rests upon an original revelation made by God to man, and handed on by human tradition. The theory which reposes all certitude upon this original divine revelation -- and which declares that man's certitude is always a certitude of faith in this revelation as given to our knowledge by tradition -- is called fideism. This doctrine falls, with traditionalism, under the arguments which show that the minimizing of the natural force and value of human reason below its normal limits is a form of skepticism and is therefore destructive of all value in human knowledge and is self-contradictory. There is another doctrine, called agnosticism, which unwarrantedly limits the field of human knowledge, and declares that, for the rest, we must have human faith. The field of human knowledge is indeed limited. But it is not limited except where there is no evidence to work with and to rest upon. Agnosticism arbitrarily limits knowledge even where evidence is available. Some agnostics are idealists and say we cannot have certitude except about our own subjective states; some are sensists and say we cannot be certain of anything that lies beyond the range of the senses. Both sets of agnostics admit that some reality lies beyond these limited spheres, and that we do well to believe in it, but that we cannot have reasoned certitude about it. Agnosticism falls with idealism and sensism, and ultimately with skepticism. It does not demonstrate its doctrines; it simply declares them. On the other hand, there is a doctrine that the human mind is capable of knowing all reality thoroughly, and that what cannot be known is simply not existent. This theory is called rationalism and ought to be called irrationalism. For the human mind, like the human eye, can take in much and see it clearly, but it cannot take in all. There are hows and whys that lied outside the range of reason just as there are bodily objects that lie outside the range of vision. Indeed, in every question reason must admit the atmosphere of mystery. But mystery is not fog. It is the reach of fact which cannot be fully explained by the human mind.
e) Dogmatism The word dogmatism has a harsh and unwelcome sound in modern ears. But this is merely an accident of speech or rather of the current fashion in the use of words. We here employ the word dogmatism in its ancient Greek meaning of thinking. And a dogma, which literally means "a thought," is here employed to mean a self-evident truth. Dogmatism is the doctrine which holds that the human mind, recognizing, with certitude, self-evident truths, can build upon them a body of knowledge that is certainly true. The critical question, put as an actual interrogation, is this, "Can the mind of man achieve certitude?" Notice, it is not, "Can the mind of man achieve all certitude." Sanity compels us to acknowledge the fact of limitation in a nature essentially limited. But can we have certitude; can we attain to true and certain knowledge? The skeptic says we cannot. The idealist, the sensist, the agnostic, the traditionalist, the fideist, all say that we can have a short of broken or incomplete certitude in certain fields. The dogmatist says, "Yes, the mind can have certitude wherever it discovers solid evidence for its judgments." Dogmatism is a doctrine which finds the mind capable of squaring with reality; in other words, of obtaining logical truth. Dogmatism does not merely assert that certitude is obtainable; it does not even rest on assertion that self-evident truths are known with certitude. It investigates. It looks for evidence. And it sanely accepts evidence. In the judgments which the mind makes necessarily and spontaneously, dogmatism seeks for evidence and finds it in the judgments themselves; it finds that, as a fact, the subject and the predicate of such a judgment are identical, and that alien proof is therefore neither needed nor available. In other judgments, dogmatism looks for evidence in causes, in explanations, in proofs which it weighs and applies by the strict rules of logic. It thinks, it reasons calmly, clearly, consistently, legitimately. It requires evidence suited to the nature of the facts in each case, and sufficient to establish these facts if they are really facts. And it looks only for that degree of certitude which the nature of the facts indicates as possible. Dogmatism never makes blind assertions. It never makes affirmations or denials which the mind is required to swallow without question or investigation. First and last, dogmatism is the doctrine of the possibility of certitude as obtainable by the mind through the presence and power of objective evidence. Thus dogmatism recommends itself to the mind as eminently sane. It involves no self-contradiction as opposed doctrines do. It rests on no blind assumption. It makes no unwarranted limitations or extensions in the field of knowledge. It attaches no value to mere assertion. It seeks to come into clear alignment with reality. It stands alone among all theories or doctrines on human knowledge in the fact that it offers a rounded and complete treatment of the Epistemological Question. Therefore, it stands alone in its intrinsic claims for acceptance as the true theory of knowledge. Now, the certitude which dogmatism shows to be possible, is of three chief degrees. There are no degrees in truth, but certitude is the mind's hold upon truth, and there are degrees in such a hold. Not in its firmness; for the least infirmity in the hold of mind upon truth, the least wavering, would destroy certitude and put the mind into a state of opinion. The degrees of certitude are degrees in the compelling force of the evidence upon which certitude rests. As we have said, there are three such degrees. First, the mind's assent may be absolutely compelled because the predicate of a judgment is found to be identified completely or partially with the subject. When once the mind knows what is meant by a circle, and by roundness, the mind judges with certitude and necessity that "a circle is round." There is no possibility of a circle being anything but round, for roundness is of the very essence of a circle. When the mind recognizes such a judgment its certitude is called absolute or metaphysical. When, however, the evidence is not essential and intrinsic, but rests upon something other than the essence of the things judged, the certitude is not absolute but is relative to the evidence in the case. Now, relative certitude is of two types, physical and moral.
All these types of certitude -- absolute, physical, moral -- are types of real certitude, not of opinion. In each type we have the wholly unwavering assent of the mind to known truth. But the evidence by which the truth is known is in one case metaphysical or absolute necessity, in the second case, it is physical necessity, and in the third case, it is moral necessity. I have metaphysical certitude when my certitude is founded upon the essences of things; I have physical certitude when it is founded upon the natural mode of action of things around me in this world; I have moral certitude when it is founded upon the mode of free activity characteristic of normal men. My certitude that a circle is round or that a man is a rational animal is metaphysical or absolute certitude. My certitude that a dead man will not come back to earthly life is physical certitude. My certitude that a man who knows what he is talking about, and who is no liar, is actually telling the truth is a moral certitude. Dogmatism seeks the degree of certitude which is necessary and sufficient according to the nature of the case. It could not reasonably seek metaphysical certitude for the facts of history, nor physical certitude for the free acts of a person.
Summary of the Section In this Section we have weighed and criticized various types of doctrine on the possibility of achieving certitude. We have considered skepticism, idealism, relativism, sensism, traditionalism, fideism, rationalism, agnosticism, and dogmatism. We have found that the one doctrine which meets the requirements of reality and human reason, and which involves no self-contradiction or unwarranted assertion is the Classical Realistic doctrine known as dogmatism. We have studied a brief description of dogmatism, and have seen that it shows the possibility of achieving certitude. We have noticed the various degrees of certitude.
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