Truth, knowledge, skepticism, and stuff…

A standard philosophical definition of knowledge goes as follows:

(I know A) <=> (I have a justified belief that A) and (A is true)

As I write this essay, I’m in the middle of reading Robert Nozick’s discussion of knowledge and skepticism in Philosophical Explanations.  Nozick uses a very specific concept of “truth tracking” which leads to some very interesting results, but is essentially (it seems to me) just a particular approach to defining justification, one that leads to a coherent (I think), but sometimes quite peculiar conception of knowledge.  I find myself working around a rather different rejection of philosophical skepticism.  What follow are musings, not intended to represent a complete expression of a developed idea.

If some particular skeptical scenario (SK: SK => not-A) were true, then A would be false, and I would not know A.  However, A, so not-SK, and I do know A.  The skeptic’s objection fails, because SK is not true.

Truth is outside my direct experience.  It is not something I have direct access to.  To use Dewey’s language from Experience and Nature, it is not something I “have directly”.  All that I have directly is justification (evidence, inference rules, trusted sources, etc.)  There is no way to operationalize truth; I can only operationalize justification.  One reason that theories of knowledge remain so problematic is that knowledge, vs. justification and belief, has exactly zero influence on our behavior at time t = now().  We try to justify our beliefs, and to act on justified beliefs.  Later, we may come to believe that our prior beliefs were not (properly) justified, i.e., were false.  But at any given moment (outside of certain contexts of philosophical inquiry) the question, “Are my beliefs true, or merely justified?” is never a useful one.  The question, “Is this belief justified?”, however, is (always?) an important one.  Operationally, the question of “truth” always devolves to:  from perspective B (perhaps a later one), do the beliefs held to be justified from perspective A still appear justified?

There is no way to operationalize (general, philosophical) skepticism at all.  Skepticism places all logical possibilities on an equal footing.  All available evidence is discounted, and there is no way to distinguish one possibility from another, to prefer one over the other.  Skepticism cannot give any positive plan of action.

Philosophical skepticism of the sort I am referring to (what Hume referred to as Pyrrhonism) must not be confused with a critical evaluation of our methods of justification.  Critical evaluation of our methods of justification is completely operational and is critical to ensuring that they track truth as closely as possible.

P.S.  Nozick, I think, expresses an insight similar to mine above about truth and experience when he says (p. 232 in my paperback copy) “We have said that knowledge is a real connection of belief to the world, [which we call] tracking, and… this view is external to the viewpoint of the knower, as compared to traditional treatments, [though] it does treat the method he uses [to track truth] from the inside, to the extent it is guided by internal cues and appearances.”

P.P.S.  Anticipating certain gleeful but misguided reactions to my rejection of “skepticism”, I want to point out a deviation between a common vernacular use of the word “skeptical” and philosophical skepticism, to wit, the phrase: “Skeptical about God.”  Disbelief in God (or even just doubt) is usually based on a belief that you can trust the evidence to lead you to true conclusions about the world.  Doubt about God stems from observing the lack of positive evidence, and disbelief from observing that the available evidence is incompatible with the God hypothesis.  These methods of justifying belief are exactly antithetical to philosophical skepticism, which holds that no amount of evidence is ever sufficient to justify a belief.  Theists, in fact, often (mis-)apply a skeptical argument when they claim that “You can’t prove a negative result,” not realizing that, if true, this argument merely puts their God on exactly the same footing as being a brain in a vat manipulated by alien scientists in the Alpha Centauri system.

P.P.P.S.  (9/7/2013)  I need to correct my statement that Nozick's concept of "tracking" is just a special case of justification.  (He is at pains to distinguish them on p. 267, by which time I was in a position to realize what he meant.)  Tracking, like truth, is external:  our methods really do track truth.  Justification is internal: we believe our methods track truth, and are therefore reliable or justified.

Irrational Atheists

I've "liked" a couple of atheist pages on Facebook in the past couple of months.  But I'm thinking of unliking them.  People on them seem mostly interested in finding nasty things to say about the religious.  A common theme is to hold religious people accountable for every inane thing that is written in their holy books, as if every Christian were out there burning witches, and all Muslims spent their spare time putting non-Muslims to the sword.

Now I am absolutely convinced that reason demonstrates the non-existence of God with about the same measure of certainty that it demonstrates the annual path of the Earth about the Sun.  And because I think it is shameful to base your world view on an obvious falsehood, I think all people should be atheists.  I could make even stronger statements, but I won't at the moment, because my immediate purpose (anyway) is not to insult theists, but to argue for rationality and balance.

What I don't think (and where these so-called atheists seem to disagree) is that religion necessarily makes one a bad person.  All religions, at least in the Judaic/Christian/Muslim tradition, have some pretty horrible, immoral, anti-human things within their teachings.  But religious people, in reality, show a remarkable ability to pick and choose the tenets they will follow.  Rather amazingly, they do this even when they claim to literally following their holy books, and even when those books specifically deny them the right to pick and choose.  Many Christians, Muslims and Jews treat other people very, very badly in the name of their respective religions.  But others are entirely good people.

What I believe is that one's religion is entirely irrelevant to one's morality.  Despite their vehement protestations, I do not think religious people derive their morality one iota from the religious teachings they subscribe to.  I think they are the people that they are for many reasons - "nature" (whatever that is), their general history and upbringing, the love they had (or didn't have) as children, and other, similar things besides.  They take from their religion exactly what they bring to it.  Messages of cruelty, or messages of love, they find what they go looking for.

But I'm getting tired of atheists who just want to feel superior by ranting against the religious, and doing so in a way that eschews rational argument.  (Whenever I've posted mild suggestions to think more deeply on some topic, they have been ignored.)  I seem to have found the worst of the atheists - in the way that the "God hates Fags" folks are the worst of the Christians…, well, maybe not quite THAT bad... 

I've been told by theists that atheists "hate God".  I've always thought that was silly.  How could I hate an imaginary creature?  I don't even think that religion is necessarily evil - just silly and wrong.  (And the insistence of the religious that they have some kind of special right to be respected for their evidently untenable ideas is really annoying.)   I also, of course, find myself eternally arguing against the old chestnut that atheism is just another belief system, in effect another religion.  (Of course, in reality, atheism is just the result of an honest insistence that the same idea of reason that we apply to answering other questions in the world be applied to the question of God.)  But listening to some of these so-called atheists, I begin to see where my theist disputants got these wrong ideas about atheism.  I guess what I am is a rationalist first, and that leads me inevitably to atheism.  Atheism is a secondary, not a primary, identity.

But maybe I just need to find a better atheist group/page.  (Or start my own.)