Friday, October 12, 2018
A Noble Failure?
Many of us in class found Descartes' foundational project to fail. Let's assume that he cannot justify all his claims to knowledge by an appeal to the Cogito. What can we learn from this failure? Should we look for a wider class of foundational beliefs? Should we avoid appeals to a God who is not a deceiver? Should we find a different way to justify beliefs that does not require an appeal to foundational beliefs?
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Descartes’ argument for foundationalism, based on the Cogito, fails because it appeals to pure subjectivity as the foundation for all knowledge. According to Descartes’ foundationalism, absolutely certain knowledge is the basis for all knowledge. He argues that if knowledge can be doubted, it is not knowledge but merely belief. However, Descartes’ argument appears to lead to the very thing, skepticism, that he was trying to avoid. Doubt is a form of thought, which itself is subjective by nature. If I doubt that I exist, then I am thinking that I do not exist. If I am thinking, then I exist, as a thinking thing: the Cogito. The Cogito suggests that Descartes’ argument entails absolutely certain knowledge is purely subjective. How can purely subjective “knowledge” be objective knowledge? Foundationalism fails because it doesn’t actually provide a foundation for objective knowledge. However, one might raise the objection that foundationalism is unnecessary to explain how knowledge is possible. Science draws general conclusions from our observations using our senses. For example, we say that all crows are black because we have only seen black crows, but we cannot prove that every crow is black. Rather, we conclude that it is likely that any crow we see will be black. Thus, our beliefs don’t need to be absolutely certain in order to be knowledge; they just have to be well justified based on our observations. In this sense, knowledge doesn’t have to be absolutely certain for us to make a general conclusion. Hence, it is unnecessary to appeal to a god to explain how knowledge of the external world is possible. So, while we must accept the skeptical conclusion that we can never know with absolute certainty that our subjective experiences correspond to an “objective” world, we can still justify our beliefs well enough to count as knowledge.
ReplyDeleteThe failure of Descartes’ foundational project shows us that we must find a different way of justifying beliefs. It is not necessary to appeal to a non-deceiving God as Descartes does with his use of clear and distinct perception. Rather, it is sufficient to justify beliefs in a way that is consistent with our own experiences—even if we are being deceived. We are able to carry on with our lives even when we doubt the existence of ourselves or the things around us. Few people spend their time having constant existential crises because they lack clear and distinct perception of their experiences. Instead, we rely on our thoughts and memories even when they are thrown into doubt by skeptical arguments. Therefore, one needs not appeal to a non-deceiving God, but rather to common sense. If something is consistent with one’s prior experience, one should accept it as knowledge, even if one cannot prove it to be absolutely true. This is a more useful method of justifying beliefs than foundationalism, which fails to justify most knowledge. Let us consider an example: I accept the fact that gravity exists and causes objects to fall toward the Earth. Every time I have dropped an object, it has fallen down. Therefore, I have little reason to doubt that gravity would cease to function now. Even if gravity is an illusion created by an evil genius, it is a consistent illusion. Of course, there is the possibility that an evil genius is deceiving me about my memory of gravity and that gravity really does not exist. In this case, I may simply cast away my prior beliefs about gravity and form new ones. This new method of justifying belief is concerned with usefulness, not permanence, of knowledge.
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