Last week we discussed two core schools of thought in epistemology: idealism (reality is created purely by one's mind) and realism (reality exists independently of one's mind), but encountered some flawed reasoning in both of them. To attempt to fill in those gaps and understand where we get our knowledge, let's look at skepticism and pragmatism.
Skepticism, or Pyrrhonism (from Pyrrho of Elis, b. circa 350 BCE, the first skeptic), dates back to Ancient Greek Philosophy of Classical Antiquity. Broadly speaking, skepticism is a feeling of doubt towards knowledge – the idea that all the knowledge we think we have is uncertain so we cannot truly know anything. Pretty bleak, right?
David Hume's reasoning for skepticism was largely down to The Problem of Induction. To understand what this is, we have to first recognise that we 'know' is concluded through logical reasoning, which requires deductive and inductive reasoning. Deductive reasoning is where if the premises are true, you will reach an absolute certain conclusion (if a = b and b = c, then a = c). Inductive reasoning is where if the premises are true, you will reach a probable conclusion, but it is not certain (e.g. all known living organisms need water to survive, so if we found a new living organism it would probably also need water to survive). This is the problem of induction – with inductive reasoning you can never reach certain knowledge, just probable conclusions based on previous experiences. For Hume, The Problem of Induction meant that any knowledge gained from inductive reasoning cannot be true knowledge. This where skepticism comes in.
Skepticism is universal doubt – we cannot gain any knowledge from our previous experience; it can only be predicted inductively. But if all knowledge can be doubted, can't we we just doubt the fact that we doubt all knowledge? And if we accept that we can never know anything, isn't that a bit of a depressing way to accept reality?
This is where pragmatism steps in.
Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that proposes that philosophical topics – like the nature of knowledge – are best viewed in terms of their practical uses.
Pragmatism began in the U.S. in the 1870s by Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey (sadly not the same guy who invented the Dewey Decimal System). The pragmatists take a number of arguments against skepticism in favour of a fallibilist picture of knowledge – that propositions concerning empirical knowledge can be accepted even though they can't be proved with certainty (rather pragmatic, hey?).
Peirce argued that instead of looking for reasons to believe something (like the Skeptics do), we should be looking for reasons to doubt. To be pragmatic, we should together agree on what is true, rather than let the individual decide – and even though we could be wrong, this does not imply skepticism (that we can't know anything for sure).
At the end of the day and despite all this jargon, this debate is essentially about truth. How do we know what the truth is? I hope this week's edition has helped you question your own understanding of the truth, so much that you might be able to write about it if you get prompted to in Section 2, or to help you question your arguments and your knowledge to refine them in your essays.
