TL;DR: I think, therefore I am. Is there anything else? Will things continue to be? Do other things think? What’s the deal with memory?
Have you ever met a really inquisitive kid who kept asking "Why?" over and over again? That's basically what epistemology is. Philosophers of epistemology never grew out of asking "Why?". They want to know where (or if) it all bottoms out. Is there a reason for everything? Or is it just turtles all the way down? This post will be a summary of some basic problems in epistemology, problems that ought to vitiate the confidence most people have of their most certain beliefs.
Let's start by erasing our minds of any beliefs not held to be indubitably true. Let's rid ourselves of all assumptions and start from first principles. However improbable, the sun might not rise tomorrow, and the stars might fall from the sky. But is there anything that we couldn't possibly deny? The 16th century philosopher, Renee Descartes came up with one candidate: I exist. Even if I were massively deluded about the physical, biological, and historical facts of nature, I couldn’t doubt that I exist. For in the act of doubting, I would be affirming the existence of something doing the doubting. Hence, Descartes' famous phrase: "I think, therefore I am."
Still, this hardly seems like a generative starting point for building up our knowledge about the world. The knowledge that I exist implies nothing about what I have been or what I will be. It also implies nothing about what others are like or what's in my immediate environment, much less what's happening in places far removed from me like Kazakhstan. And yet I think I clearly do have knowledge about these things, so how can I arrive at this conclusion from the mere fact of my own existence? Unfortunately, Descartes is unhelpful in answering these questions, and I’ll be of equally little help. This is a post on the problems of epistemology, not the solutions.
However, two directions are worth considering. One is an appeal to self-evident truths, truths which require no proof or grounding for their affirmation. Various philosophers have suggested, for instance, that our immediate sensations have this character. To illustrate this, suppose I am hallucinating a green rat in front of me. I would be mistaken in believing there is actually a green rat in front of me, but I cannot be mistaken that I am having the experience of a green rat. Similar things have been said about bodily sensations like pains or itches as well as propositional mental states like conscious beliefs and desires. A final, and perhaps the most important, category of putative self-evident truths is the truths of logic. I know without need of justification that A=A. I know that a square can't also be a circle. I know that there either is or isn't a computer in front of me. Appealing to so-called self-evident truths, however, is rife with problems. What feature of these propositions make them self-evident, if in fact they are self-evident? What does "self-evident" mean? Can self-evident truths tell us anything about non-self-evident truths? The rabbit hole goes much deeper.
Another proposed way to climb out of the hole of radical skepticism is to change how we conceive of the demandingness of knowledge. Perhaps, contra Descartes, knowledge doesn't require overcoming all possible doubt. Instead, perhaps all that's needed is overcoming reasonable doubt. What, though, counts as reasonable doubt? How justified does a proposition have to be for our belief in it to count as knowledge? To my knowledge, no philosopher has seriously tried to argue for a determinate threshold of justification, say 80% or 85% or 90%, since any specific level would seem arbitrary. Moreover, even if there were a determinate threshold, it's not clear why greater justification wouldn't be desirable nonetheless. Ultimately, I think a combination of the above two strategies allow us to escape radical skepticism, but that discussion is immaterial for now. There are other problems to consider.
Let's tentatively accept that things other than ourselves exist. Moreover let's suppose that our immediate experiences combined with our faculty of reason allow us to make justified claims about the world beyond ourselves. (It bears emphasizing that these are huge assumptions in the field of epistemology.) Suppose, for instance, that I let go of a pen in the air expecting it to fall to the floor. How can I know that the pen will actually fall? Readers may respond by saying, "In the past, when you've dropped a pen, it's fallen down. So now, when you drop a pen, you can justifiedly expect the same to happen." This kind of reasoning is known as “inductive” reasoning. To simplify, we can rephrase the justification as follows: “We know the pen will fall by induction.” Of course, the pen is just an illustrative example. The more general principle of induction might go something like this: The future resembles the past. But, again, why? We might imagine a hypothetical gravity-denier asking why we are justified in believing in induction. One response might be that induction has worked in the past all those times we’ve dropped a pen, so we’re justified in believing in induction now. But here the gravity-denier will have a quick rejoinder: “Aha! Your argument is entirely circular. You're using the fact that induction worked in the past to justify thinking it'll work in the future. You're using induction to justify induction!"
It’s hard, if not impossible, to come up with an argument for induction without devolving into circularity. If this is true, though, then it seems using induction would be an unreasonable way of justifying our belief about any future events. A similar argument might be made against our beliefs about any unobserved events whatsoever. The upshot of this skepticism is that even if we take ourselves as having justified beliefs about the external world, we would have no way of knowing about anything about the future or about things that are presently unobserved. We wouldn’t be able to justifiedly say that a pen would fall when dropped or that the sun will rise tomorrow. Though this conclusion appears extremely implausible, finding a cogent justification for induction has proved challenging for over 200 years.
There is another question in epistemology quite independent of the foregoing discussion of induction: How do we know anything about other people’s minds? Again, we’re supposing here that we have justified beliefs about the external world. But how does this let us know anything about what’s going on in another person’s head? I’ll only make cursory remarks here because I’ll be writing another post later in the year about the basic problems in philosophy of mind. For now, let’s take the most vivid example we can to show why this is such a big problem. Suppose I look out my window and see a boy riding his bicycle over a large rock and suddenly falling off and landing on his knee. His leg is bloody; a bone might be protruding from it. The boy is grasping at it, crying and pleading for help. All of what I’ve just seen intuitively seems like very strong evidence that the boy is in serious pain. But why? I would have no doubt about it in the moment, but on reflection, it’s difficult to come up with an adequate justification for this belief.
Here’s a potential one: I can remember a time when I’ve fallen down on my knee, and I remember feeling extreme pain when that happened. So I infer that when the same event occurs to this boy, he’s also feeling the same thing. For people who themselves haven’t fallen on their knee, they might refer back to memories about injuring some other part of their body and feeling pain. The more general point is that I notice a correlation between some observable event and my own inner mental reaction, and I infer that another person’s mental reaction will be similar given a similar observable event.
Like I said, it’s hard to come up with an adequate justification for our beliefs about other minds, and the above paragraph only confirms what I’ve said. The problem lies in the fact that I can only observe the correlation between the mental states and observable circumstances of myself, one person out of the potentially billions of other cases for which this argument is supposed to apply. Perhaps trillions if animals should be included as well. By analogy, suppose I were to make a claim about all trees based on my observation of only one example. The weakness of that claim would be all too easily demonstrated. The consequence of the above argument’s failure, however, is that we’re left mostly unjustified about other people’s mental states; we’re left saying there’s little reason to believe that the child outside my window really is in pain. That seems extremely implausible, but, again, this is a post about problems not solutions.
The Problem of Memory Knowledge
The Problem of Memory Knowledge
I’ll end by noting one final problem in epistemology, the problem of memory. Everyone has occasional lapses in memory; we know our memories can be mistaken, but we have a general sense that many, if not most, of our memories are largely correct. They represent something true about the world. Why? How do we know that all of our memories aren’t entirely false? There are two ways our memories could conceivably fail us. First, the encoding or retrieval of our memory could be mistaken. That is, we correctly perceived something, but our memory process itself introduced an error. Second, we may have incorrectly perceived something and encoded that incorrect perception into our memory. How do we know this hasn’t happened to all our beliefs dependent on memory? It’s important at this point to note how dire a skeptical answer to this question would be. Without an adequate answer, it seems the only things we would be justified in talking about would be things in our immediate experience and the self-evident truths discussed above. Is there any non-circular way to address this? That is, can we appeal to our memory-independent experiences and reasoning to come up with a justification for the truth of our memories and the faculty of memory itself? At first glance, it appears not. After all, as BonJour puts it, “memory must play an essential role in assembling and keeping track of the resources for a justification of any but the simplest, most immediate beliefs. Any argument of any complexity...cannot all be held in mind at once, but must be collected and juxtaposed and reviewed over a period of time, using memory.” This has been and continues to be a persistent problem for epistemologists. How might we solve it?
It’s worth noting that this wasn’t even close to being a comprehensive survey of the problems in epistemology. More than any other area of inquiry, perhaps by definition, epistemology challenges the most basic assumptions that people have. Some notable areas left untouched were the problem of testimony and problems associated with morality, science, and God. There are surely more. A decent, though somewhat technical, introductory book that addresses these questions is Robert Audi’s Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge.
BonJour, L. (2009). Epistemology: Classic problems and contemporary responses. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
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