Dr. Seuss and Philosophy - Jacob M. Held [45]
Marco doesn’t merely believe there may be fish to be caught, he acts on that belief. As a carefree youth, little more than a sunburn and boredom is riding on the truth or falsity of his belief. But, we can certainly imagine things differently. Say that Marco hopes to catch his dinner in McElligot’s Pool. Now, it matters if his belief that the pool is inhabited is true, for without good reason to expect to find catchable fish there, he’d be wasting his time and going to bed hungry.
Given that many of our decisions impact the lives of others, it seems important to not merely have correct answers to any particular question but to have good reasons for them. Doctors Galen, Zira, and Zaius may each diagnose that the farmer is suffering from a migraine, but to determine that the headache is due to dehydration—rather than to a brain tumor or demonic possession—leads to a very different treatment and different quality of life for the sufferer. As a practical matter, this difference requires that beliefs be investigated and justified as our chances of performing right actions (in this case, treating the actual cause of the migraine) increases as mere belief is replaced with knowledge.
Epistemology is the philosophical effort to understand the nature, limits, and sources of human knowledge. An epistemologist asks questions like “What is knowledge?” “Is it possible to have knowledge?” “How do we get knowledge?” and “Of what can we be certain?” While it isn’t obvious which of these questions comes first, philosophers have generally focused on sorting out the appropriate link between beliefs and the actual state of the world. In Plato’s phrase, “Knowledge is true judgment with an account.”2 Consider Marco’s claim that the pool may be well stocked with catchable fish of “Any kind! Any shape! Any color or size!” To say he knows—i.e., to change his “might catch” into “will catch”—requires that it’s in fact true that he’ll catch such fish and that he has good reason to believe he will. Plato’s definition of knowledge, usually restated as “justified true belief,” is still with us today. Knowledge requires that what we believe is true and that we can justify our belief that it is true. In this way, the pursuit of knowledge resembles the work of police detectives: it’s not enough to get the right man, you also must have the evidence.3
Tossing Junk into a Small Pool
If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at
least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.
—René Descartes
Seventeenth-century philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) asked just what can be known beyond a shadow of a doubt. He imagined a powerful, evil genius that has dedicated his considerable power to deceiving him. As Descartes put it,
I shall then suppose . . . some evil genius not less powerful than deceitful, has employed his whole energies in deceiving me; I shall consider that the heavens, the earth, colors, figures, sound, and all other external things are naught but the illusions and dreams of which this genius has availed himself in order to lay traps for my credulity.4
Such an evil genius could easily mislead us to believe five is larger than four (or vice versa); that day-old halibut smells pleasing rather than horribly (or horribly rather than pleasingly); or that halibut do (or do not) exist at all. How could anyone have much chance of sorting out the actual from the illusory when every thought we have may well be part of the evil genius’s deceit? The problem isn’t merely with figuring out what is (or is not) an illusion but with figuring out what would count as good reason to accept (or reject) the “evil genius hypothesis” itself.
Skepticism is the notion that no adequate justification for holding this or that belief exists (and so concluding that knowledge is