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Preservation of Truth as a Methodology
By: Ryan Smith

The Assumption of Doubt

It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone to believe anything upon insufficient evidence. -W. K. Clifford

The value of getting truth can differ significantly from the disvalue of getting falsehood. - Linda Zagzebski

The Allegory of Plato's Cave presents what some might call a bleak view of human knowledge. According to him, the things of the world that are easiest to perceive - physical things and their most obvious qualities - are the merest, most distorted representations of the Truth. Men - almost all men - sit chained to this false reality, able only to perceive a reflection of a reflection. The glimmer of hope that Plato presents through this is that the wise man, the scholar, can come and free us of these shackles, and begin the painful, fearful process of showing us to the light. Plato is the beginning of my examination, and as such, his allegory takes on the air of prediction, hinting at a possible future world and society in which people have been exalted by those who came before them, and in which more and more people can be freed from their chains, if they want to undertake the process. Those free men would be us, the philosophers. Has this come to pass?
It certainly had not by the time of DesCartes. He writes in his First Meditation:

But since reason already convinces us that we should withhold assent just as carefully from whatever is not completely certain and indubitable as from what is clearly false, if I find some reason for doubt in each of my beliefs, that will be enough to reject all of them.

It is DesCartes who says earliest and most clearly that notion which I wish to examine in this paper - that notion that has driven much of philosophy from the time of Plato through to the present - the notion that philosophy is primarily about the quest for certainty, and that this quest begins with a stance of skepticism towards all that which can be doubted. I will argue for an alternative - a process that hopefully puts skepticism in its proper place as one more tool in the philosopher's toolbox, and not as some sort of default.
Why does DesCartes begin this quest in the first place? Thankfully, he has included this in his first Meditation. It is disguised as an anecdote about his childhood, but in fact reveals something very important.

"Some years ago I noticed how many false things I had accepted as true in my childhood, and how doubtful where the things I had subsequently built upon them."

Descartes is pointing out here that his driving goal is the avoidance of false beliefs. This seems like a good enough reason to get started, but it is only half of the picture. A person may devote their energy to avoiding false beliefs, but they may instead (or in addition) devote themselves to gaining true beliefs. It is easy to make the mistake that this amounts to two ways of saying the same thing, but in fact this is not the case. The differences are the key to what I'm writing about in this paper.

In order to avoid all false beliefs, a person can technically succeed by trying to believe as little as possible. Now, I think it's clear that most philosophers don't procede with the goal of believing nothing at all firmly in mind. However, the fact remains that believing very little, or nothing at all, is not in any way a failure if one's only goal is to avoid falsehood. I think this attitude has crept in and affected much of philosophy since Descartes' time. The skeptic is certainly regarded as more noble, more thoughtful than the diehard true-believer. I think they are both equal mistakes rising from opposite assumptions.

In contrast, in order to gain as many true beliefs as possible, a person can succeed by trying to believe every single thing they are exposed to. This simply won't do either - it's not a good way to build a philosophical system, since many potential beliefs contradict, and furthermore, it's probably impossible anyway. Once one firmly believes something, they have no choice but to disbelieve everything that contradicts it - so a person has no rational choice but to be selective about what they believe. Even still, I think an approach that values gaining and maintaining truths as primary (tempered with a milder desire to avoid falsehood) is a markedly different approach than what I see dominating in philosophers, and it's also a better approach in many ways.

Let us return to Descartes, then. He has begun his examinations with a heavy leaning towards avoiding false beliefs. He carries along Plato's presumption that the mental life of the child (and by extention, the unexamined life of the adult) is characterized primarily by believing a great many false things that must be set right. By eliminating all about which he cannot be certain, he is attempting to escape the world of Plato's design - the world in which almost everybody is wrong about almost every thing. He views the elimination of all non-certain beliefs to be key, because above all else, he fears that he will be building falsehoods upon falsehoods if he does not do this. DesCartes' process of elimination leaves him with almost nothing at all - no belief in his senses, his memory, the more complex deliverances of his reason. Since he has been mistaken at least once in his usage of all of things, he is left with only the thing about which it seems to him he can never be mistaken - that he is something thinking these thoughts. The Cogito - a starting point. What he has done is made Plato's flexible allegory concrete by tying it to the analytic process- how many thinkers have began with a tiny foundation of one or two hopefully undeniable axioms (the Cogito or something else) and tried to work their way back from there into the full, robust collection of truths that the common man takes themselves to have to begin with? Too many to name, indeed, many whose names were never recorded.

Hume was the first clear sign that there was something wrong with this process. He has given us two more notions that have endured the test of time for the most part - first, that certainty is only a characteristic of analytic truths, and second, that analytic truths tell us nothing real about the world. This reaffirms the truth of Plato's allegory, with some adjustments - yes, we are stuck in a world of half-truths and falsehoods, but no, there is nobody that can pull us out of it again. Kant offered a solution, the synthetic a priori statement, showing that deductively true propositions could be linked to actual useful claims about the world. However, this has only cemented the role of deduction as primary in philosophy - certainty is only a quality of deduction, so therefore only deduction can save us from falsehood. There have been detractors and
critics of this metholodolgy, but this in a nutshell has framed the dominant views of today's analytic thinkers - skepticism remains a powerful force, and not only that, but an accepted, if not the accepted default position to any unexamined idea.

In summary, then, much dominant philosophy begins with the assumption that the unexamined life is defined primarily by falsehood, which means the truth seeker ought to be skeptical towards everything they believe, until it can be shown to be certain through deductive process. One begins his investigation from a position of skepticism, in which the truth vs. the non-truth of a position are considered of equal standing, until certainty is reached. It is against this dynamic that I wish to propose an alternate approach.

The Credibility of First Beliefs

I will begin as Descartes did - looking back upon my younger life. Now, I am a rational, critical person who seeks to find truth. As a child, I was not capable of such things. Whether this change occured at a definitive point, or was a gradual development is besides the point - noetically, I behave differently now than I did then. Before my age of reason, I came by my beliefs in all manner of inappropriate ways - I trusted the words of family, friends and strangers, with no examination of my own. I came to wild conclusions based on observation alone - with no interest or capability in thinking things through. There are also beliefs, such as my belief in external, material reality, that I could not say at all where they came from - I had them as far back as I can remember, far before I was able to 'earn' my beliefs through any proper philosophical process.
However, let me also make an observation that Descartes did not. I survived this period. More than survived, even - I thrived. If I am capable of philosophy today, that can be traced back in large part to the life I led before today, including my ignorant childhood. I took myself to be learning, developing, and the end result is the person I am today - for better or for worse, if I consider myself capable of criticizing the beliefs of my past, I must also admit that the beliefs of my past have at least allowed me that capability. If I do not at least admit this, then there is no point in proceding - the beliefs of my past have doomed me to be irrational and wrong no matter what I do from here.

This leads me down a different path than Descartes. I have no special reason to fear the falsehoods of my youth. For while there are doubtless things I believe that will turn out false under examination, I have no reason to believe that any of them are so catastrophic that they will keep me from that discovery. So then, let me not procede with the disvalue of falsehood as my dominant drive. Instead, let me procede with a desire to discover true things. I will not discard everything about which I am not certain - or rather, I will not equate certainty with justification. My belief in math, in my own free will, of the Cogito, and that there is a material substantial world exists in accordance with the way my senses present it to me, I will take as true. Why? Because my aim is to discover important truths, and these truths are all among the most important there could ever be. I will not cast myself into doubt about them without cause. What is a good cause? Since I am operating from a position of desire to
learn rather than fear of error, the best cause will be when it is likely that doubting something I believe presently will open the way for me to discover a greater truth than I possessed before. Now, I am ahead of the game - I can put to rest examining things that have been obvious to me since infancy, and get to work straight away on investigating and discovering new truths.

Now, there is a place for the avoidance of false beliefs, but I want to put it as subservient to the goal of believing truth. Believing something false is undesirable, so we ought not do it when we see an easy opportunity to avoid doing so - we especially can seek to root out false beliefs if it seems there is one impeding us from acquiring some new truth. So, the proper method, I submit, is to aim primarily at gaining new truths, with the avoidance of falsehood only as a consideration to that end.

The Proper Role of Skepticism

It will be said that I am advocating naivety over philosophy. I'm aware that that's probably the strongest argument against my position- that it's simply an attempt to skip philosophy and to believe without evidence or proper examination. I don't consider this to be true at all, and so I must devote considerable time and detail to explaining what, exactly the proper role of skepticism is, and where its limitations are when improperly applied.
Let me say first that skepticism is welcome in my house. Skepticism may introduce itself, show off what it's selling, and plead its case the same as any of my other guests. What it cannot do, however, is play the role of bouncer. When something that I believe is beginning to show an ugly side - when loyalty to a belief is making it hard to discover the solution to some other problem, or when many wise people present arguments and evidence that counter what I believe, then all the fullness of the logical process should be applied - scrutiny, deduction, intuition, everything in the usual bag of tricks. Skepticism and investigation definitely have their place in my system.

One of the most important roles of skepticism is that it allows a person to see other perspectives. Suppose I want to be able to convince people that God exists. In order to do this effectively, I have to examine theism critically, I have to treat it as though it were not true, and anticipate what an actual critic is likely to say. I must have evidence, and proper argument- and developing those things involves researching an issue. In my investigations, I may even come across some alternative to theism that has greater explanatory power or greater appeal of another sort, and then I could investigate in earnest- not just to learn how to argue for what I believe, but because there may actually be a good reason not to believe it anymore.

Also, from time to time I will be presented with new ideas with which I disagree, and want to argue against. Of course in that case I'm using skepticism as well- treating a belief as though it's not true, because indeed I don't think it is true, and tabulating all the evidence and argument in its favor to see how certain of a case for the position can be made.

The argument will be made that this is not intellectually honest - to choose first what one wishes to believe, and apply skepticism to either attack other positions or defend one's own instead of using it fairly and universally as a tool to find the truth of things. First let me say that I am not meaning to apply this process to those rare situations when we are presented with an opportunity to believe something we would like to believe - but only those situations in which we quite accidentally find ourselves with a belief - either from childhood, or from some sudden presentation of sense or reason that makes denial impossible for us. For example, suppose the idea is put to me that Tom would make the best president. Suppose further that it would be quite beneficial for me if Tom were the president. I am not arguing that I am in my epistemological rights to treat "Tom would make the best president" as true, and defend it from all detraction. For my goal is still to gain as many truths as possible- not to believe whatever I like. All else being equal, "Tom would make the best president" is as likely to be false as it is true (at best). Furthermore, believing that Tom would make the best president would prevent me from having a true belief about who the best president would be, in the case that it was someone else. So in a case like this, the claim that "Tom would make the best president" should be met with the sort of skepticism that considers it as likely to be true as false - evidence and argument should be taken into account.

Also, the universal application of skepticism can be abused as well. If a philosopher claims that there is no material world, or that our faculty of memory is not reliable, and looks for his shoes in the morning right where he took them off the night before, is he not being intellectually dishonest? Isn't a hard determinist that calls for the arrest of a criminal or the punishment of a child being intellectually dishonest? I submit that there is an intellectual dishonesty rampant in the institution of philosophy that is so wide-spread that it's taken to be inevitable. Anyone who cannot live as though the world is just as they claim it to be in their philosophy is being intellectually dishonest. My system seeks to eliminate this - a truth so great that we cannot help but live in it's shadow is truly great, and it would take the presentation of an equally great truth to give us cause to doubt it.

The Bias of Questions

Consider the familiar situation of being asked a question by a philosophy professor. We can think of many seemingly innocent questions such as "Is this table really here?" "Is anything really immoral?" "Do you freely choose your own actions?" These are questions that have simple, obvious answers in our day to day lives, but they become deep, perplexing associations through the magical context of philosophy. Under the popular view of skepticism as the default, the very asking of these questions becomes something full of treacherous bias.

Let me use the example of the Free Will debate. If one is asked, in the context of a philosophical discussion, whether or not he has free will, I believe an interesting thing occurs. If one has the assumption that unexamined beliefs are likely to be false beliefs, then they will be compelled to hold free will and determinism as equal options - both respectable sides in a controversy. The fact that one has most likely believed in their own free will before thinking about the issue very much may even put one in a position of feeling obligated to be skeptical of free will, for no reason other than the ease of its acceptance. And here is where I will get speculative - I believe that people ignore evidence unconsciously in order to make the sides feel equal, because of this false obligation.

In the case of free will, the strongest, most present evidence for its existence is our own present and constant awareness of ourselves making choices. This evidence is so basic and powerful that I believe that anybody who reflects upon it as I have should be compelled by it - I do not believe the free will debate is a fair one. So compelling is this evidence, that when one is asked "What is the evidence for free will?" I believe the implied question is "Other than your constant perception of your own choice, what is the evidence to free will?" The answer to that implied question is "Not very much, I'm afraid", and it is upon that fact that the whole argument revolves. Return to my original question "How do you know this table is really here?" If a philosopher asks you this, isn't the impulse to actually respond to "Other than the fact that it appears to your senses, how do you know this table is really here?" Without that implication, the question is so easy a baby could answer it - and answer it correctly. So then, asking a question in philosophy implies that the question is difficult, and the implication that a philosophical question must be an unanswerable question leads us to ignore the very greatest sources we could go to get that answer.
All of this, because of the basic assumption that the unexamined belief is probably wrong, and that avoiding falsehood is the point of philosophy. I believe that if the staring desire is instead to gain and preserve truths, and one accepts that the things they currently believe are at least good enough to let them reflect, things become much simpler. With these new assumptions in mind, the answer to the Free Will question becomes "Yes, of course I believe in free will, for I choose things all the time." The table: "Yes, of course that table is really there, I know because I see it." Once the presumption that a philosophical question must ba a hard question is lifted, and once we are motivated by a desire to keep our old truths and gain new ones, rather than a primary desire to root out all potential of error, the logical possibility of incorrectness in these matters becomes just as irrelevant as the possibility that the Moon has a caramel center. Acknowledging that it is logically possible for something to be the case does not lead us to properly consider it as the case, or even as a live option. Without fear of falsehood as our center, we can also say that acknowledging that something may logically be false does not lead us to properly consider it as though it is probably false, or even as-likely-as-not false.
Again, let me point out that I am not being anti-philosophical, or advocating belief disproportionate to the evidence. To the contrary, I am trying to bring things back into proportion. I think that the fact of our choices IS a set of very strong evidence for the existence of free will, and is underestimated in part because of the natural reactions to asking the question, combined with a methodology that seeks to avoid falsehood more than it seeks to obtain truth. If keeping an gaining truth were our starting point, questioning the existence of material objects and free will would be the result of some conclusion or discovery - it would be discovered that these things are not only in doubt, but that there is some plausible, consistant alternative to them (that explains the illusion on their presence). In other words, the potential of a new truth would be discovered first, and it would be shown that the old ways of free-will and a material world are in the way of it. Instead, we have a situation where these things can be question purely on the basis of the individuals ability to defend their belief with logical argument - which is a subjective capability that differs across individuals.

The Methodology in Action

The last thing I would like to cover is a particular problem that I believe my approach is best in helping us solve. It is the problem of the evaluation of our faculties. Hume is the most notable example of a philosopher that has argued that things like memory, perception, and so on cannot be proven using the one tool of certain knowledge he admits to- deductive argument. Even with Kant's granting of the synthetic a priori, this issue remains controversial enough that it would be reasonable to say that there probably is no deductive argument that shows the reliability of sight, or memory, for example. This problem is compounded by the fact that we can know little or nothing important about the world without reliance on these seemingly-irrational faculties; without seeing, hearing, memory and so on, we would have very little to reason about.

The methodology that aims at certainty requires us first to account for why we believe in the reliability of our faculties. Greco does a good job giving a reason for this through his application of virtue ethics, pointing out that it's not necessary for our reasons to be grounded in some general or particular principal that connects sense experience to reason. I would back it up a step further than that, even, and suggest that the actual reasons for our belief are a secondary consideration altogether, and that emphasizing them is in fact a mistake.

The common application of reason goes directly to the reason for our beliefs, and examines these reasons to determine likelihood of truth. If the reasons do not meet some criteria of justification, then it is improper to continue holding the belief, or so we have been taught. But notice the emphasis here- the belief is assumed guilty until it can be proven innocent. This wouldn't be a bad thing necessarily, except that the brute fact is, most things that we believe, we don't believe for what would be considered logically valid reasons. I cannot tell you when I started believing my memory, hearing, and so on were reliable - it certainly happened before I was capable of applying logic to the beliefs. Even if I devised some elaborate justification like Greco, it would be incorrect to say that this is the reason for my belief. Even worse, if my argument for the reliability of my senses was defeated, I cannot say I would thusly abandon my faith in my senses- so my arguments do not even serve the auxillary purpose of support. They are purely rhetorical, and create a level of seperation between how I operate in reality, and how I must claim to operate to satisfy the skeptic- in other words, it is disingenuous.

But before we give up on sense experience and 'consign it to the flames', let me apply my methodology of the persuit and maintenence of the truth. We have seen that we must assume the beliefs I got from my childhood must be mainly true, or at least close enough to true that they do not hamper my ability to reason. Thus, there are likely to be truths in my pre-rational noetic structure worth hanging on to. The reliability of sense perception (RSP) comes from such a time. The first consideration through my methodology is this: If true, is belief in RSP a great truth? Is it useful, does it tell me something important about universe, does it serve as a tool through which I can aquire many other truths? I think it's clear that RSP is a very great truth (if true) indeed. In fact, by the criterion I just gave, it is no doubt one of the greatest truths we could possibly attain. So then, RSP is gravely important to maintain - ceasing to believe in it would be the loss of a great truth, and would negatively impact my ability to discover new truths.

The next step would be to ascertain what other truths we stand to gain through the rejection of RSP. Is there some great statement about reality, great tool for discovering more about reality, that the skeptic offers in place of the rejection of RSP? If so, I have never been told of it. The skeptic asks us to reject RSP, and offers nothing at all in it's place- the contradiction to RSP "sense perception is not reliable" tells only something infinitely small about the universe, since it is a negative. It does not provide any tool or route through which to obtain new truths. So, it seems when it comes to the rejection of RSP, we have everything to lose and nothing at all to gain.

The final step is to look at the best arguments against RSP. To date, as far as I know there are no such arguments. That is, there is no good argument that concludes "Sense perception in fact gives mostly false conclusions". The arguments that deal with RSP address the issue of certainty- they do not show that RSP is false, but only that we cannot know for certain that it is true. The proper response to this reality through my methodology is simply to acknowledge it and move on.

Yes, I cannot be certain that my sense perceptions are reliable. However, belief that the world is basically the way I percieve it is an incredibly important truth, through which I can discover many other important truths. Furthermore, there is apparently no similarly great truth that I am missing out on through believing the deliverances of my senses, so belief in the reliability of my senses is not hampering my ability to discover new great truths. Finally, there is no good argument for an alternative to the reliability of my sense perception, and no obvious incoherency implied by believing it. Thus, I am justified in believing in the reliability of my sense perception. The question of certainty is irrelevant, and the reasons for my belief are irrelevant as well. I propose that my methology as demonstrated in this paper is a more useful, more intellectually honest way of discovering great truths about the world than common, skepticism-centric philosophy, and will be particularly useful in
setting to rest some of the perennial problems of philosophy.

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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