If I had to compile a list of famous declarations from philosophy, I might stick Descartes’ cogito – “I think, therefore I am” – at the top. Descartes arrived at that conclusion after indulging in a “method of doubt” where he attempted to strip himself of all preconceptions and examine every way he might be deceived in his ideas about what is true. He finally reached the point where all he could say was that since he experienced himself thinking, he must, at least as a cognitive entity, exist. From there, he attempted to reconstruct all his other ideas about reality (although honestly his arguments from that point are a tad suspicious, and I think most people who’ve read the Meditations would agree with me). I for a long time admired this willingness to strip back one’s experience of reality to its bare bones, to keep asking the critical question – “Why do I believe what I believe?” – until the most basic, solid truths were obtained.
Except then I started studying math. I was at first enchanted by the rigorous system of logic that mathematicians use to draw complicated (yet at the same time, beautifully simple) conclusions from a set of initial rules (axioms). I thought maybe this was a way to discover fundamental, capital T Truths about the way the universe is set up. But that was before I came across baffling results like Gödel’s incompleteness theorems or realized that the system of logic commonly used in mathematics, and generally in other fields like philosophy, is itself an implicit assumption that forces us to take another step back from Truth. Yes, if you start with the right system of logic and the necessary axioms to construct the real numbers, you can end up with the fundamental theorem of calculus (and a bunch of other fun things), but that’s only because you set things up exactly so you would be able to do that in the first place, and does that really tell us anything fundamental about the nature of reality?
Looking more closely at Descartes’ statement in this light, even the seemingly simple and obvious “I think therefore I am” becomes specious. What do you mean by “I?” What does it mean to “be?” How do you know that the words strung together there mean the same thing to you as they do to me? Descartes didn’t go deep enough; he stopped just short of epistemological rock bottom, the point where everything ceases to make sense (and where my mom would tell me to just stop thinking about this).
The philosopher David Hume is famous, among other things, for what is sometimes called “Hume’s problem of induction.” The thinking goes something along the lines of the following:
Why do you think the sun will come up tomorrow?
Well, it has come up every day that I can remember, so I can conclude that it will probably come up tomorrow as well.
But you’ve implicitly assumed that future events will resemble past events. How do you justify that belief?
Well, in the past, past events have always resembled future events, so I can assume that this will be the case moving forward as well.
That’s a circular argument: you’ve assumed your conclusion as a premise.
This, of course, applies to more than just the question of whether the sun is going to come up tomorrow, and I really don’t see a clear way out of this – it would appear that inductive reason and belief in causality cannot be rationally justified. The behavior of the universe seems to have followed ordered laws up to this moment, but how can we be assured that that trend will continue?
We can try working our way out of this conundrum by appealing to some fundamental principle, say Occam’s razor (basically, that all else equal, simpler explanations should be preferred to more complicated ones). But such principles are themselves matters of taste, to some extent. Like the principle of induction, Occam’s razor seems to “work” well, but I’m not sure how you’d go about rationally justifying its use.
I could give more examples of this sort of thing. But basically what I am trying to get across is that if we aren’t afraid to continue asking, “Why?” and demanding solid answers, we will eventually arrive at a point where we’re forced to throw up our hands and say something like, “I don’t know; it just works, I guess.”
I like to make a distinction between different types of truth claims that people commonly make: I call logically justified claims “type 2 truths” and intuitive-type claims that cannot be logically justified “type 1 truths.” (This is in some sense a positive/normative distinction.) Based on the sort of thinking I’ve laid out above, I do not think that we can justify our beliefs on a purely rational level without accepting a system of logic and some set of axioms as a basis for our reasoning. That is, type 2 truths do not exist in a vacuum; they need type 1 truths to back them up. (I’ll admit the possibility that there may be some sort of objective, type 2 reality, but I don’t see how we could access that short of some flavor of unfathomable mental magic or divine intervention.)
To someone interested in discovering capital T Truth, accepting subjective or unjustifiable type 1 truths may seem maddening, but what else are you going to do? Do you really have any better alternatives? If you don’t accept that the universe is going to continue behaving like it has been behaving, does that really help you out at all? If you don’t start by determining what your type 1 truths are – what you value, what logic you use, what principles you will base your rationality upon – you will be completely stuck. In any case, who’s to say that type 1 truths are any less true than type 2 truths on any fundamental level? If I think something is beautiful or find a logical principal intrinsically attractive, I cannot write a proof to justify that. But that doesn’t mean it’s not true; it just means it’s not a type 2 truth.
I will make the (type 1) claim that there are some situations in which it is inappropriate to accept type 1 claims: namely, if something can be examined on a type 2 level, you should do so. This is something that I see goes wrong a lot especially with people’s religious beliefs: for example, it’s okay to make type 1 claims about a book of scripture being in some way inspiring or personally meaningful or valuable, but if you want to know whether or not the stories that book describes or the claims it makes about how the world works are accurate, that is something that should be examined from a type 2 level.
As I’ve argued previously, morality is another thing that should be approached at the fundamental level from a type 1 perspective: we should start by asking what it is we really want, then use our rationality to determine how best to achieve that. No amount of logic can tell you what is intrinsically good or valuable.
I’ve tried to make the case here that even the most careful logical analyses are insufficient to answer the most fundamental questions, and that, rather than being paralyzed by this fact, it may be better to take a “leap of faith” of sorts and embrace (to some extent) your personal subjective certainty. I’m not sure that this is the only way to confront epistemology’s hard rock bottom, but I think it is at least a brave and beautiful response.
Cuando Dios no quiere darte las respuestas,
dile que se vaya a la mierda, y sigue tu propia verdad.
There is no such thing as cold, disinterested logic; Truth refuses to dictate what to love.