on Nov 11th, 2007Reliable Skepticism
I am writing this post so I can feel around with some ideas about the epistemological theories of Skepticism and Reliabilism. I will not pretend that I am bringing anything original or inspired to this discussion.
To catch everyone up really quick Skepticism in Epistemology generally refers to a view that we can not know some things or all things (there is a range of what we can and can not know in various theories). The theory suggests that because we can not know something we should suspend judgment. If I said there was insufficient evidence for who was the greatest writer of all time, then I should suspend judgment on that question. Radical skeptics (those who hold an overall skeptical world view) would then suggest that not only can we not know who the greatest writer of all time is but that we can not know anything at all.
Reliabilism on the other hand suggests that we can know something if it is true and we form the belief in a reliable manner. Suppose that my vision has proven to be reliable to me, I therefore can form a belief about something based on my vision and if it is true than I know that proposition. In reliabilism if I see something and form a true belief about it than I know it. When comparing these two theories you might wish to point out that skepticism appears to be extremely impractical in nature and the skeptic might bring up the arguments know as “Brain in a Vat” and “Barn Facade County.”
To address the issue of practicality. The argument would be that if a person can not know anything, believes they can not know anything and suspends judgement on all things then what would stop the person from walking into trees and jumping out windows. Obviously the skeptic can not know that there is a tree in front of him or that the window is not a door. So why does the skeptic not walk in front of busses and eat poisons? My answer would be common sense. The skeptic would most likely believe that walking into a tree would hurt. He would come to believe this perhaps from a reliable mechanism such as memory and sense perception.
The Skeptical arguments though are very powerful, sometimes counterintuitive but very powerful. First of all the skeptic can attack sense data as being reliable. That arguments goes approximately like this: The only tool you can use to check your senses is your senses, and if they are unreliable they might not report themselves as unreliable. This leads to the brain in the vat argument I mentioned earlier, basically the BIV argument is the matrix, a simulated world that is indistinguishable from reality to the point that you think you are in reality. However if every thing is a simulation than you are deceived into not forming any metaphysically true beliefs because you believe your senses to be reliable when they are not. BIV is a modern twist on the evil demon argument found in Descartes.
Another argument against reliabilism is the story of a man driving through the country side with his toddler child. He points things out and tells his child there name. He sees a barn, points to it and says that is a barn junior. He formed the belief through a reliable and causal method of seeing a barn. Now suppose that he is in a county with only one true barn and the rest are barn facades. If he points out the real barn he has a true belief formed in a reliable method, however he could just as easily pointed to a fake barn. Do we then say in this example that he doesn’t know that it is a barn or does?
At the core of these two theories though are opposing world views, one we label internalism and the other externalism. The internalists demands internal justification of a belief. He has to have access internal access to some metaphysical truth to know it. The externailsts might say that I don’t have to be able to prove something is true for me to have a knowledge of it, it just has to be true. This means that the internalists would think that he has to know he is not in barn facade county to know if he is pointing at a real barn, the externalists would say that it only has to be true that he is not in barn facade county. Internalism is often said to lead to skepticism because it eventually becomes impossible to know whether or not you are a brain in a vat or in barn facade county. This comes back to my earlier question of what we want out of knowledge. If we want some perfect infallible metaphysical truth than we might be internalists, if we want knowledge for practical reasons than we might be willing to be externailsts.
That has been your weekend epistemology, please stay tuned this week when I plan on discussing portraits.