cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/3172656
Couple of days ago I saw a post about on atheist community about a quote saying atheist can’t base their morals on anything.
I commented that if religion didn’t accept some premises like god, they wouldn’t either. Some said I am wrong and downvoted me. So I decided to post here about to what extent can I be skeptical about premises, to see where I am mistaken (or commenters).
Before that post, for a while I had an idea that even the analytical truth/necessary truth (whatever you name it) like “a is equal to a” are premises which can not be proven (since they are the basics of our logic, which will we be in use to prove claims) even though they seem us to be true by intuition. They just have to be accepted to be able to further think about other things.
So my question is since we can question the correctness of basics of our logic and cant find an answer, we can not justify or learn anything. Also, there lays the problem of do we really understand the same thing from the same concepts, and does language limit us?
If I am mistaken, which is highly probable, please correct me and don’t judge. I am not much of a philosophy reader.
I would really appreciate it if you could share some resources (video, article, book, anything…) about limits of our understanding, logic, language and related topics.
Thanks in advance…
Schools of Skepticism seem to fall into two camps: Soft Skepticism, which acknowledges that some knowledge might exist and is attainable for humans, and Hard Skepticism, which either negates the existence of true knowledge or the human capacity to grasp true knowledge. Thus Soft Skepticism would by default allow for at least this one piece of knowledge, namely that we know that we know nothing. Hard Skepticism would even doubt this and state instead, that we know nothing, not even that we know nothing.
I’ve had similar experiences as the ones that you described, when bringing up epistemological nihilism/skepticism in an argument. The common response being to attack skeptic arguments by applying them to themselves - “If you can not know anything, then you can not know that you know nothing. Therefore your claim refutes itself. Reductio ad absurdum”.
The reductio ad absurdum attack however reveals the circular reasoning of its speaker, which you already pointed out as well. The beliefs that a “non-epistemological-skeptic” has are based on assumption whose trueness is in turn in some way or another derived from those very beliefs - e.g. The Bible is true, because it is God’s word, and God exists, because the Bible says so. This is what I would refer to as (positive) circular reasoning, because the arguments posit each other. The ad absurdum fallacy against skepticism seems to be part of a type of (negative) circular reasoning, because the arguments negate each other. This is the same problem with a lot of paradoxes and it seems to be caused by self-reference. Self-reference thus seems to be an area where our logic breaks, which gives some credence to the idea, that our theory of logic is not yet complete or fundamentally flawed. Thus even the one area of human wisdom pointed to as a counter argument for hard skepticism seems to fail.
The Münchhausen trilemma or Agrippa’s trilemma addresses this issue by positing that every proof falls into this or two other categories:
- Circular reasoning - as explained above
- Infinite regress - continuously and infinitely expanding dependence of arguments
- Dogmatic assumption - reduction to an unjustifiable base assumption
… and thus, that true (objective/un-assumptive) knowledge is unattainable.
Even if we assume that knowledge might be attainable, there may be limits to what we can know. This is called Cognitive closure and it posits that biological or physical limitations exist regarding what thoughts we can conceive and what we are capable of knowing. We are for example incapable of visually imagining four or higher dimensional space - Although the case could be made, that we do not even perceive three dimensional in the first place, but that our perception is entirely two dimensional.
You already mentioned a similar limitation: Linguistic relativity. Our language does to some extent influence how we perceive the world and what thoughts we can formulate. Studies have however shown that this extent is not near as strong as Whorf originally claimed - A language missing temporal conjugation does not mean that a speaker of that language has no concept of time. There are however strong indicators that language shapes how we perceive/think about color, spatial relations, social relations… like a cognitive framework for processing our perceptual input. This does not however mean that language is an actual limitation, since language gives us the ability to conceptualize abstract thought in the first place. It is more akin to an enabler with some languages being better tools for certain cognitive processes than others. I would even argue, that all languages are perfect to process the environments of their corresponding speakers, shaping their perceptions and in turn being shaped by their cultural interactions based on their perceptions.
In summary: No knowledge can be inferred without an assumption. Skepticism does not refute itself, but the assumption that it would seems to point to a flaw in our theory of logic. There seem to exist biological and physical limits on what humans can think and our perception of our world is shaped to some extent by our language.
I hope this answers some of your questions and provides you with a good basis for further research - even though nothing can truly be known ;) - and I would love to hear your further thoughts and ideas on the matter!
You really put effort in this, I don’t know how to thank. Simply put, you are awesome.
Firstly, I would like to ask a question about self reference. I hope this won’t sound stupid, but we use language to give the verdict that states “We do not know anything”. And this results in contradiction as you mentioned but can’t this be caused by the limit of our language or our definition and understanding of those words and concepts. I mean when we use the word “anything” how do we ensure “knowledge”, the thing we define by our own language create by use, is included in this set. It is like that everything is so abstract that you miss some things that lead you to see the statement as a contradiction. One way it came to my mind is that: while you are stating “We do not know anything” it is not knowledge. It is nothing that will become knowledge when it has been stated. So when you say “anything” you refer to things that you name “knowledge” but not the all other things that labeled as knowledge. Let me give you an another example from other self-reference paradoxes: “This sentence is a lie.” when we say “this” there is nothing to refer which means this is not a paradox, this is just nonsense since this does not refer to anything:
- You should have something that can be referred when you want to refer something
- To be able to create a self-reference paradox, you should a have a conclusion that gives a verdict about itself(and possibly some other things or some other conclusion/conclusions that gives a verdict about it).
- Let us take an example like “This sentence is a lie.”
- The part that refers to something is “this sentence” and it refers to “This sentence is a lie.”
- But when you call out “this sentence”, the thing that’s being referred does not exist, yet.
- If something refers itself, the thing we call “itself” should just be a reference to itself, like: “This three word”, “This sentence”
- Because to be able to refer something, it should exist so a statement that refer itself can not be longer that reference of itself
What’s the mistake I make here? I could only find that it may be the way I interpret the sentence. I interpret it as it was under the effect of a linear interval. But if the statement is being given(whether it crosses on your mind or by mouth) it does happen in a while. One may can reject this by saying it doesn’t need to be read or thought, it is knowledge without being processed; but “knowledge” and “sentence” are concepts created by human beings, without them, they aren’t significant or have a meaning for someone or something.
Thanks for mentioning about “The Münchhausen trilemma”, it is exactly what I was thinking about the knowledge. I will certainly do further reading about it.
I would really appreciate it if you could recommend me some resources(book, video, podcast, anything…) on cognitive closure.
Again thank you for your comment, it certainly helped a lot.
You raise a very good point. I think there are several ways this can be caused, some of which you already mentioned yourself:
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Our definition of knowledge is itself subject to the trilemma. Every statement we make about not-knowing is just as much in need of a dogmatic assumption, an infinite regress or a circular reasoning as statements about knowing. If we take apart the statement “We do not know anything”, we will find that multiple of its parts are based on the assumption, that something exists, which itself is a textbook example for the trilemma. Thus we can not know that we do not know anything, while at the same time knowing, that we can not know anything.
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The subject matter of paradoxes is imaginary. Does the sentence “This sentence is a lie” really exists, if it is entirely located in a latent space of common understanding? What makes it be a thing that can be referred to? Our reference can only be made into this latent space of linguistics and common understanding, but this applies to every piece of knowledge.
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Logic theory doesn’t hold up when faced with self-reference, which would be better dealt with using unconventional logic systems like Paraconsistent Logic.
There are probably more…
I would really appreciate it if you could recommend me some resources(book, video, podcast, anything…) on cognitive closure.
Difficult. There are many different concepts of cognitive closure and some may be more to your liking than others. I personally like Kant’s approach in Critique of Pure Reason. He introduced “categories”, which are mental frameworks that shape our understanding of reality, and argued that certain aspects of reality may be inaccessible to us, because we lack the categorical framework for those.
On linguistic relativity, I highly recommend Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: why the world looks different in other languages. It’s an overview of the entire research within this field, which challenges every linguistic theory regarding how language shapes our understanding of the world and thus debunks “common” linguistic myths.
You really put effort in this, I don’t know how to thank. Simply put, you are awesome.
Thanks for mentioning about “The Münchhausen trilemma”, it is exactly what I was thinking about the knowledge. I will certainly do further reading about it.
You are welcome!
You really do understand me. I mean I couldn’t find anyone out there, in flesh to speak about these but here I am discussing it with a complete stranger on internet. I really appreciate your effort, thanks again.
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@[email protected] 's answer is a very good and complete one !
On a side note, I would add that this is a problem that kinda divides philosophers (and people more generally). From my own experience, it is very common to discredit skepticism as a useless philosophy/reflexion, maybe because it seems to be pointless to a lot of people. But it has been used through the whole history of philosophy :
- In Ancient Greece, there were different Schools of Skepticism, as explained in other answers
- It was quite common during Renaissance, typically with Montaigne, or Descartes (though he was using a skeptic method to assert the existence of knowledge)
- To me, skepticism is one of the influences that led to the emergence of philosophies like phenomenology, as they try to describe our experiences as subjects without asserting facts about an external world.
- As i studied logic and epistemology, i discovered that skepticism has influences in those fields. For exemple, the epoche, the suspension of judgment used by skeptics, is used in modern epistemology, with theories such as Equal Weight View. They also talk a lot about limitations of language, formal logic being some slight kind of remedy to it.
So in the end, while i feel like skepticism has a really bad reputation, i also find very common to accept the idea that every truth/belief/knowledge/reflexion needs unprovable premises, which seems to me like a skeptic root. It is not often the main subject, but i frequently find signs of it around me.
I really don’t understand why skepticism take this much discredit. It just asks question, it just does what we do to reach knowledge. Isn’t the whole point of philosophy is asking questions and trying to find answer.
Thanks for your reply
To what extent can I be skeptical?
I commented that if religion didn’t accept some premises like god, they wouldn’t either
Yes but that’s the problem, the atheist does not accept any premises, therefore cannot reason to any agreed upon morality; the theist does, hence can
I think the religious view would argue such premises to be necessary to accept, and hence confusion or skepticism may only be possible by rejecting such “obvious truths”, leading to confusion
