© Roger M Tagg 2009 revised 2010
Welcome to FROLIO – a new attempt to merge philosophy and the "semantic web" . This website is under continuing development.
Can we truthfully say that we are certain about anything? People regularly say they are certain about something, whether that is in the past, the present or the future. Regarding the future, all forecasting is subject to uncertainty over chance events that might happen and change things. For the past, our memory can play tricks on us, or our memory may become tainted by what we would prefer to remember. It has been suggested that, as human beings, all we can be 100% certain about is that we will die some time.
The philosopher Wittgenstein left some notes just before his death in 1951, which Anscombe and von Wright edited into a book titled "On Certainty" (Blackwell). An electronic version of this is available from a Russian website. It consists of 676 numbered paragraphs, most of them short and aphorism-like - they are mostly pretty easily readable.
A theory related to Certainty is Fallibilism. The Wikipedia web page on this defines it as "the philosophical doctrine that all claims of knowledge could, in principle, be mistaken. Some fallibilists go further, arguing that absolute certainty about knowledge is impossible."
The term Epistemology is used for the study of what we can really count as knowledge. A book in this area that I have read is "The Pursuit of Truth" by Willard Quine (Harvard UP) - see my highlights. Quine's approach is that the basic units of what we can count as knowledge are "Observational Sentences" - and not the individual words within those sentences (although we may have to ask in what sense those words are being used).
Scepticism is a term for an approach where one does not reckon that anything is certain or "reliable knowledge". A famous extreme form of scepticism is to imagine that we are being fooled even in what we can see, hear etc - by some malevolent power who has put our brain in a box and has simulated everything we sense by some sort of "virtual reality".
We have to get on with things, so it becomes a practical necessity to develop a model of how we believe things in the world work, even though we know that belief probably has lots of holes in it. So, too much scepticism is an indulgence, like too much complaining.
We have to apply what has been called "economy of concern" - we can't get worked up about everything for which there might be some better explanation or method.
A recent example of the opposite to "economy of concern" is the Thatcherite market-style devolution of the 1980s. The process involved an organisation (government or large company) selling off "non-core" activities, and then bargaining for a contract with a now independent supplier. In the instances of this that I observed, it almost always imposed an administrative overhead in negotiating and renewing (or not renewing) the contracts - a factor which was largely ignored by proponents of the policy.
This reminded me of trying to buy certain needed items in Cairo, Egypt - it always seemed to take longer and more angst because of the need to bargain for many of the items.
One way to avoid getting bogged down with epistemology and scepticism is to take an approach based on consensus. Such an approach was what drove me in the days when I worked as a database designer. Typically, a number of different managers and IT analysts suggested models for how the organisation's data should be structured in order to provide a means to generate the data needed by all the different users. To work out whether a data structure was "correct" or even optimal might have taken months more than our project allowed. Also, if there were people who really dug their heels in against a certain "best" structure, the project would probably have failed. So for the same reasons as we limit our scepticism, we limit our seeking of the perfect answer.
Of course consensus may not be correct knowledge - presumably there was a consensus of church people who agreed that the sun went round the earth, before Galileo (following Kepler, Copernicus and Arab astronomers earlier) suggested otherwise.
What I would say is that consensus should always be regarded as "provisional", until we know better. But then, in my opinion, that is the same with most science and indeed with any claim of certainty.
For more see Wikipedia on Consensus Theory, the Heartwood page on Consensus Philosophy, The Concept of Moral Consensus by Kurt Bayertz, Reddit web page on Art and Objectivity (opposing excessive cultural relativism or objective ideals).
How do we stop some patently stupid consensuses from becoming accepted truth, especially when they may lead to disasters and catastrophes? The cases of Lysenkoism and the South African AIDS denial episode are good examples.
There is a branch of philosophy known as Falsifiability, popularized by Karl Popper. As the Wikipedia web page on Popper concludes, “According to Karl Popper, a theory is scientific only in so far as it is falsifiable, and should be given up as soon as it is falsified. By applying Popper's account of scientific method, John Gray's 'Straw Dogs' states that this would have killed the theories of Darwin and Einstein at birth. When they were first advanced, each of them was at odds with some available evidence; only later did evidence become available that gave them crucial support.”
Geoff Millburn (a Canadian) has recently posted a website with interesting results from surveys on Reality, Morality, Controversy and Consensus in Philosophy , including skepticism.
Index to more of these diatribes
Some of these links may be under construction – or re-construction.
This version updated on 2nd February 2010
If you have constructive suggestions or comments, please contact the author rogertag@tpg.com.au .