Certainty and Personal Confidence, Descartes and Hume.

[kbfc]

This post is inspired by people (mostly religious, although I'm not arguing that this is anything more than correlation) who claim 100% certainty in their beliefs, and David Sklansky's repeated 'appeals' to experts (I'm referring to the "why is it that so many super-smart people aren't convinced by the christian argument?" sorta thing).

In an absolute sense, it is ridiculous to claim 100% certainty about almost anything. The whole point of Descartes' Meditations was to acknowledge this as a foundation, and then search to discover what things, if any, we could be certain of. (I'm a huge critic of Descartes, but I'm willing to give an undeservedly generous summary here.) He got into the whole cogito ergo sum thing, which is great and all, but what I'm interested in here is a problem he runs into fairly early:

How can we rationally justify a confidence in our own ability to reason correctly?

I can calculate and solve a definite integral and be apparently certain of my answer, but should I be? Mentally I can retrace the steps I took, and make sure there were no errors. The problem with this is that the confirmation process is necessarily composed of a sequence of thoughts, and I haven't yet shown that I can be confident that my previous steps were mistake-free based solely on my recollection of them. It is conceivable that I could fool myself into a false confidence about my reasoning process, and I don't really have anyway to discount this possibility.

Descartes solution was to basically wish his idealized version of God into existence and use that as a foundation for confidence. (I'm not being as generous anymore...) Needless to say, the 'solutions' in his philosophy have been thoroughly rebutted and are basically worthless, but the 'setup' in his work still has a lot of philosophical value.

The failing, so-to-speak, of rationalist philosophy is that it dead-ends pretty abrubtly and you're not left with much more than, "right now I know that I'm thinking and I exist, but I'm not really sure what either of those things entails." In this light, when I see people claim absolute certainty about God, etc, warning bells go off; this person really has his head up his ass. If you're starting to question what reason I have to believe that my reasoning in this post is any more valid, here's the answer: I'm not working on this level of abstraction (in this case, technically zero abstraction); I'm working in Hume-land, and I'm considering granting benefit-of-the-doubt priveledges to you crazies as well.

David Hume notes the impossibility of really getting anywhere absolutely using reason. Rather than ending up at some sort of ultra-nihilist position, though, he posits the idea of 'habit and custom' as driving forces behind human reasoning. When I go to sit down on my chair, I have nothing but the memory of past experiences to support the notion that I won't just fall right through it. Yet I still expect it to stop me. It would be a pretty tough life if you needed absolute rational confidence in every task you undertook. Hume effectively introduces a new layer of abstraction (axioms) in which we can use our logical faculties, place some confidence in empirical observation, etc. He doesn't argue that we necessarily should function at this level for any absolute reason; he is simply saying that we do: that's just the way it is.

It seems like a bitter pill to swallow if you value reason and logic highly (as I, and Sklansky, and many others, including all those PhDs in theoretical physics, do) that you can't really justify them in an absolute sense. It's no opening for apologetic christians, though; absolute certainty is basically a prerequisite there. This is the departure point for christians who like to argue from faith; I'll just point to Hebrews 11:1, laugh a hearty laugh, and give the proverbial "have a nice summer." As I said above, though, I'll give the benefit of the doubt to those trying to have honest arguments.

Sklansky is fond of statements along the lines of, "doesn't it give you pause that people much smarter than you don't agree?" While these statements don't prove anything, they are still interesting because they hint at a more personal problem:

When I feel 100% convinced of something, why should I believe that I have any 'right' to feel this way?

Just because you're 100% convinced that something is so, that doesn't make it so; obviously there's a distinct possibility that you're plain wrong. It might be useful in life if there was some objective method of determining someone's personal confidence about something. This seems like a paradox in that 90% confidence about 100% conviction is really just 90% conviction, but I think there's an important distinction. Psychologically, you can be completely convinced, but still recognize that you might be wrong. Important note: when I say 'you', I mean 'you, not me.' An example of this would be showing one of those crazy optical illusions to someone who had never seen one before. (I said 'not me' before, because as in this example, I take for granted a distinction between experience and reality; I don't think this is particularly common.) This can be extended into all sorts of areas outside simple tricks, like math and science, or philosophy and psychology.

Back to the point about determining confidence. There's probably something to David's suggestion that we at least consider what experts have to say on a subject and compare it to our own position. I think there should probably also be some weight given to your 'resume'. I aced the SAT and SAT II Math, as well as a college level symbolic logic class, so I think it's fair to assume a fairly high level of confidence when a problem arises that is fundamentally one of formal logic and/or basic math. On the other hand, that was a relatively long time and many beers and bowls ago, so maybe that hurts my confidence a bit......who knows? There are plenty of subjects where I might feel convinced of something, yet recognize that I really have no right to (Jazz, for example...). When a christian states that he is 100% convinced that God exists, I can say (I hope I'm not getting myself into trouble here, but it's the truth, at least presently) that I am 100% convinced he is full of [censored]. We can't both be right. Who deserves to be more confident? How do we construct a metric that will tell us?

That's enough for now. Anyone? Bueller?