Knowing that you could be wrong, is very different to thinking it is impossible to know what is right. The latter in my opinion is the great poison of modern philosophy. It seems to be that it is often used as a way to excuse lazy reasoning and irrational behaviour. Better to pretend that truth can't be known, than earnestly seek it out, etc. The irony of course, is that people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right.
"people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right."
Great comment.
It is very rare, in my opinion to find anyone who isn't acting on beliefs as if they were knowledge. 99.999% of people are unable to understand that what they think is 'knowledge' is actually a set of unverified assumptions. These assumptions are presented as true at school, in work, on TV, etc and they see that everyone else treats these assumptions as true, so... well they are true, right?
People cannot accept holding something as a hypothesis. They may even say they do this, but they do not change their hypotheses when they get new information. If pushed, they may state something to be a 'hypothesis' and that they use the word 'know' as a shortcut to that - all fine - but then if they are presented with additional information they cannot take it on and will reject it. Cognitive dissonance has no place in their minds - it is a tension that is unacceptable. Apparently most of us seek certainty and prefer a certain story to just resting with the evidence.
The idea of 'believing we know' permeates our lives, and is why I argue that science is religion. And beliefs held as true operate on fundamental levels, despite a lack of verified evidence.
> The latter in my opinion is the great poison of modern philosophy.
Gettier problems are an example of the difficulties in knowing conclusively that you are right. More generally, humans are prone to cognitive error. I'm not sure its possible to have 100% justified certainty about many real world issues. This goes back to Descartes (perhaps further, my education is incomplete).
> It seems to be that it is often used as a way to excuse lazy reasoning and irrational behaviour.
I can agree with that!
> The irony of course, is that people who don't think truth can be known, often act with a great deal of certainty about things they believe to be right.
Yeah, I'm not arguing that it is easy to know the truth, but the issue I take with many modern philosophies is that they argue it is impossible to know the truth. Which to me is a self-defeating argument.
I have had plenty of interesting discussions with people at dinner-parties/gatherings that start out on the surface as being a disagreement over morality or a different political leaning, but then once you get right down to first principles they admit that actually they think it's impossible to know the truth, so what does it matter anyway? This is always so frustrating, but it's important to get to this point so that you can debate the real issue, rather than going back and forth on the surface level issues that ultimately don't address the underlying disagreement.
1. Knowing that truth exists but we won’t ever know we found it or be 100% sure that we did
2. Knowing that there is no truth
In both cases we are stuck not knowing what we know. Furthermore, #2 may only apply to only subsets of truths. Ie., this book is real. This iPhone is “true”. Yet not knowing what’s outside of the universe or knowing it can’t be known does not seem to influence the day to day.
My perspective, is truth as a goal in itself is not useful. An interesting way to talk to people is see the consequences of their beliefs on them, not on the theoretically world where everyone does or doesn’t believe as they believe.
I’ve met too many good Christians who acted poorly. I’ve met many asshole non-believers. In the end their faith or lack their of doesn’t appear correlated with how they treat their mother, their father, or others. In the short time we have on this planet I emphasize how I’m actually being treated.
> then once you get right down to first principles they admit that actually they think it's impossible to know the truth
I've heard somewhere that one can bootstrap from this point by making contingent statements since logical consequence is something that can be known with reasonable certainty. I freely admit that I'm getting out of my depth here. I just mean that if you can find a point of agreement with your interlocutor you may be able to build from there by referring to that with your next statement and so on.
Its also the case that science has done a great job of finding a way (Popperian falsifiability) to get asymptotically close to truth in my opinion.
this is ironic because that's a very stereotypical and lazy take on modern philosophy straight out of a Jordan Peterson book. If we came closer to the truth every time someone on the internet mirepresents modern or postmodern philosophy as "we can't know anything bro" we'd have ascended to some higher plane of existence by now.
I didn't mean to generalise all modern philosophy, but I think it's fair to say that unlike philosophy in the past (e.g. The philosophy of antiquity) I think it's fair to say that this is one of the defining characteristics of modern philosophy.
