This may push the "there are no stupid questions" boundary, but how is Skepticism different than Nihilism? It seems there is a similarity between them. This may be too board a question for this forum, but if you could provide a resource that would also be appreciated.
This comment probably shows my ignorance of current work in epistemology, but I don't see what is so all-fired hard about infinite regress. Coming from a background in Computer Complexity theory, I am quite comfortable with infinities, especially countable infinities like Peano Arithmetic, which is what applies here, since knowledge is usually assumed to be expressible in language, and language over an alphabet is countable.
But there are different notions of infinity. An infinite regress that is based on a simple generator function is probably a no-no ("it's turtles all the way down"). But there are more subtle notions of infinity. What I have in mind is a web - in particular the World Wide Web. Seen that way, we have an infinity of justifications, but they are not a simple series. Each node in the web is different and each node has its own unique justification. Thus, "what do we know" and "how do we know" are two different nodes in the web, and they have their own semantic link that relates the two. What's wrong with that?
Now, it might be argued that this approach is a no-no because it has thrown out all the rules - there is no simple series of infinite regressions. Instead there is a transversal of the Web of Knowledge where every jump has its own semantic justification, which is actually a pointer from an edge (the justification) to another node (the knowledge about the justification). It gets complicated, and it is hard to formalize. But, given that we can presume that the knowledge is expressible in language, this foundation provides a formalization, at least in terms of expressibility (knowledge is stated as a phrase in a language, not by mystical Direct Experience, say). This is nice, but it then pushes the problem into the realm of Kolmogorov Complexity, where each concept is enumerable by its compressed formalization, but there is no generating function that enumerates all canonical concepts. But, hey, that's life. I can see the relationship between "how" and "what" in each unique, individual case, but it is provable that you can never generalize over all units of knowledge. You just have to go out and traverse the Web - become your own inner Spider and explore.
“… pause for a moment and reflect that really smart people have considered the problem of the criterion seriously for over twenty centuries. What are the chances that they were all fooling themselves?”
Uhmm, pretty high?
In the first place, twenty centuries show that the problem of finding a Criterion of Truth is irreducible. The reason it is irreducible is that the perception of this as a problem occurs because of the self-referential quality of language universals. It’s an artifact of the human mind conflating language universals with some presumed veridical reality. We create language categories and then talk about them as if they exist, even as we are denying their existence.
So actually, the question of why the quest for Truth and Knowledge captures “really smart people” is the interesting part of this. We learned from Darwin that there is no intelligent designer. But that doesn’t stop the human mind from perceiving a sort of teleonomy in the organized structure in the world we inhabit; we can’t escape a sort of intelligent design inference. We are evolved to look for cause and effect; it’s adaptive. Looking for root causes, prime movers, first principles, grand unifying theories, Truth, Knowledge---all habits of the human mind.
One argument for particularism, that our senses are at least provisionally reliable is evolution. That is, our senses, while not always reliable have been reliable enough to get us to where we are now. We can trust in general that we can reliably distinguish day from night because we evolved to modify our behaviors in part because of the day/night cycle.
Similarly for such sensations as touch (exquisitely sensitive both for our own health and for sociability) , taste (bitter foods are likely non-nutritious or worse--our taste for them is cultural) and so on.
These are thin reeds, but we could have (and have) built upon them structures for apprehending the world.
Hume is instructive on this point: "But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence."
Hume of course did not have the additional support of evolutionary theory to place humans in a graspable environment. Having rejected theories of Providence, he falls back upon the facts of existence. These are a strong enough argument for him, even without the support of evolutionary thinking.
The skeptic wins, so how does he/we progress?
This may push the "there are no stupid questions" boundary, but how is Skepticism different than Nihilism? It seems there is a similarity between them. This may be too board a question for this forum, but if you could provide a resource that would also be appreciated.
The problem is unsolvable and should not be disccused w/o a few pitchers of beer going arround.
This comment probably shows my ignorance of current work in epistemology, but I don't see what is so all-fired hard about infinite regress. Coming from a background in Computer Complexity theory, I am quite comfortable with infinities, especially countable infinities like Peano Arithmetic, which is what applies here, since knowledge is usually assumed to be expressible in language, and language over an alphabet is countable.
But there are different notions of infinity. An infinite regress that is based on a simple generator function is probably a no-no ("it's turtles all the way down"). But there are more subtle notions of infinity. What I have in mind is a web - in particular the World Wide Web. Seen that way, we have an infinity of justifications, but they are not a simple series. Each node in the web is different and each node has its own unique justification. Thus, "what do we know" and "how do we know" are two different nodes in the web, and they have their own semantic link that relates the two. What's wrong with that?
Now, it might be argued that this approach is a no-no because it has thrown out all the rules - there is no simple series of infinite regressions. Instead there is a transversal of the Web of Knowledge where every jump has its own semantic justification, which is actually a pointer from an edge (the justification) to another node (the knowledge about the justification). It gets complicated, and it is hard to formalize. But, given that we can presume that the knowledge is expressible in language, this foundation provides a formalization, at least in terms of expressibility (knowledge is stated as a phrase in a language, not by mystical Direct Experience, say). This is nice, but it then pushes the problem into the realm of Kolmogorov Complexity, where each concept is enumerable by its compressed formalization, but there is no generating function that enumerates all canonical concepts. But, hey, that's life. I can see the relationship between "how" and "what" in each unique, individual case, but it is provable that you can never generalize over all units of knowledge. You just have to go out and traverse the Web - become your own inner Spider and explore.
“… pause for a moment and reflect that really smart people have considered the problem of the criterion seriously for over twenty centuries. What are the chances that they were all fooling themselves?”
Uhmm, pretty high?
In the first place, twenty centuries show that the problem of finding a Criterion of Truth is irreducible. The reason it is irreducible is that the perception of this as a problem occurs because of the self-referential quality of language universals. It’s an artifact of the human mind conflating language universals with some presumed veridical reality. We create language categories and then talk about them as if they exist, even as we are denying their existence.
So actually, the question of why the quest for Truth and Knowledge captures “really smart people” is the interesting part of this. We learned from Darwin that there is no intelligent designer. But that doesn’t stop the human mind from perceiving a sort of teleonomy in the organized structure in the world we inhabit; we can’t escape a sort of intelligent design inference. We are evolved to look for cause and effect; it’s adaptive. Looking for root causes, prime movers, first principles, grand unifying theories, Truth, Knowledge---all habits of the human mind.
Thank you Massimo, could you recommend physics book? Trying to understand the basic principles of quantum theory and particle decay.
One argument for particularism, that our senses are at least provisionally reliable is evolution. That is, our senses, while not always reliable have been reliable enough to get us to where we are now. We can trust in general that we can reliably distinguish day from night because we evolved to modify our behaviors in part because of the day/night cycle.
Similarly for such sensations as touch (exquisitely sensitive both for our own health and for sociability) , taste (bitter foods are likely non-nutritious or worse--our taste for them is cultural) and so on.
These are thin reeds, but we could have (and have) built upon them structures for apprehending the world.
Hume is instructive on this point: "But a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the contrary, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail. All discourse, all action would immediately cease; and men remain in a total lethargy, till the necessities of nature, unsatisfied, put an end to their miserable existence."
Hume of course did not have the additional support of evolutionary theory to place humans in a graspable environment. Having rejected theories of Providence, he falls back upon the facts of existence. These are a strong enough argument for him, even without the support of evolutionary thinking.