Doubt

Part 1 of a discussion of certainty and its importance.

Are we certain we know what we think we know?

Think about all the things we think we know without ever asking ourselves this question.

This will be the first of two posts about the nature and importance of certainty. As I hope I’ve just demonstrated, certainty is something that is taken for granted so often as to become almost invisible to conscious consideration. But far from being a merely academic or philosophical topic that holds no value for most people, investigating the nature of certainty will turn out to be the cornerstone of all ethical practice. 

But first, how do we come to know anything at all? There are really only two ways: direct experience or received experience. Direct experience offers a kind of certainty in the sense that there’s no doubt that we’re having a particular experience, but on the other hand, at one time or another we’ve all been mistaken about what is “actually” happening to produce that experience. This is the nature of illusion, and it reveals the crucial (and fragile) relationship between experience and interpretation in the creation of knowledge. Mere observation is not sufficient for knowledge; we must also interpret what we observe. Received experience suffers from the same vulnerability to mistaken interpretation, but compounded at every degree of separation from direct experience. So is there any reliable means by which we can achieve any kind of certainty about the world?

One possible answer is: science. It’s the method we’ve developed to try to safeguard our knowledge from the distortions of illusion or preconception. And what, ultimately, is science? Observation, yes, but even more importantly it is a method for resisting biases. Science allows its subject to reveal itself without interference by our own notions of what we’re looking at. Unlike superstition, science is the determination to observe and be taught by reality rather than impose oneself on it or try to fit it into the system of one’s own preconceptions.

However, this doesn’t actually address the problem of interpretation inherent in both direct and received experience. If we have followed the scientific method, we can know that we have obtained a particular result via a particular means of testing, but it is exactly in the work of designing the test and interpreting the results that doubt can creep back in. The way that a particular experiment is designed may allow our preconceptions to confirm themselves with a particular result.

Perhaps an even deeper problem is determining whether a particular instrument or experiment can reveal what it claims to. What means would we use to verify the means by which we verify something? And how would we verify those means? Either, we end up with an infinite regress that would seem to preclude any certain knowledge or, as is more often required by pragmatism, some means is used to verify another, which in turn verifies the first, and we get a closed loop of certainty in which our system is self-consistent but not grounded on anything.

And what about our results? They’re like unconnected snapshots without our interpretive work of fitting them together into a whole, but the whole is never something we can properly observe. This is because experience—any kind of experience—is always constrained by perspective: there is no way to see everything from all sides at once while occupying no particular position. We therefore run the risk of inferring that the whole must be nothing other than what we see in our particular results, because those particular results are all we have. This is scientism: the unjustified inference that all of reality must be the kind of objective, quantifiable thing that can appear in a particular kind of experiment.

So, science is not a means to achieve absolute certainty. It can give us the tautological certainty that its results are its results, and that some of its tools confirm the results of other of its tools, but ultimately it is a circle surrounded by our preconceptions about what we think we’re looking at. But then, so what? No one can doubt the accuracy of the predictions obtained by science (at least, those about the “natural” world), and even if I don’t know every detail of, say, a tree—its molecular composition, its scientific classification—I know not to walk into it. Don’t I already know what I need to know? Don’t I already know the important things? 

Well, how would I know? How would you know?

How can we know what’s important? How can we know that we do know what we need to know? Questions like this, about epistemology, are often dismissed as idle philosophy, but if you can’t be sure you even know what’s important, what’s good and what’s bad (or what those terms even mean), then we’re not just talking about epistemology anymore—it turns out that we’re also talking about ethics, about why anyone ought to do anything at all.

Unfortunately, if this question of certainty, with all its ethical significance, is not dismissed as idle or naive, then it is likely to be dismissed as insoluble. Hume, the empiricist, claimed that certainty is impossible because it’s not something we can ever observe. We think we see things interact, see one thing cause another, but all we actually have are the snapshots of our observations, as with the results of our scientific experiments. We do not see causality or regularity—we infer them from repeated observations. They are the narratives, the interpretations, that we apply to our observational data. But there is no certainty here. There is nothing we can observe in the world that can guarantee that the next rock we drop won’t fall up.

Kant thought he could achieve a kind of certainty by putting Hume’s insight on its head: whatever is “actually” happening between objects, it's going to look like causality to us. He argued that human experience, by its particular nature, imposes logical structures of certainty—structures like causality—onto the reality we encounter. But this is a dubious certainty, and one which Kant takes great pains to constrain. However certain we may be about the structure and content of our experience, we can say nothing at all about what reality “actually” is. And even our own subjective faculties are suspect, for how could we ever get outside them to evaluate them? We see the same problems we encountered in considering scientific experimentation: either infinite regress or circular reasoning. Our reasoning might demand that there be an ultimate ground of certainty on which to base our knowledge and our ethics, but without encountering such a thing in our experience, we may have to conclude that such a demand is just a quirk of reason, something it has to believe in order to make everything else hang together. If Kant is right, we can never ultimately know anything; he claims that reason is capable enough to determine its own limits and is indeed sovereign within them, but we can never know anything about where reason or consciousness actually comes from, or whether there is any ultimate purpose to anything that we do. All we can know are the rules that our form of consciousness plays by. As Kant infamously boasted: “I have therefore found it necessary to deny knowledge, in order to make room for faith.”

I find this deeply unsatisfying, and so does Hegel. He describes the Kantian argument this way:

Although we do not have cognition of things in themselves, nevertheless, within the sphere of appearance we do have correct cognition…This is like attributing right insight to someone, with the stipulation, however, that he is not fit to see what is true but only what is false.

This is the argument Hegel hopes to overcome, and why his ideas are worth discussing despite their famous difficulty. He proposes a way back, or down, to certainty—a certainty that is not “merely” philosophical or subjective, but something on which to build an ethical practice. And the method he employs he calls, not accidentally, a science. Namely, a Science of Logic. But this will not be the empty formal logic you’d likely encounter in a college course with that name; rather, it will deal with the very shape of reality itself and how we can come to know it intimately.

Next week, we’ll explore what the Science of Logic can tell us about the nature of certainty and how it can impact our ethical practice. If you’ve been reading any of my posts so far, a lot of it is going to sound familiar. See you then.