Skepticism and Modern Science

Reformation, war, uncertainty

  • The Protestant Reformation in the 16th century plunges Europe into war and division for over a century

  • 16th and 17th centuries saw broad assault on traditional sources of authority

  • Increasing pessimism about:

    • Ability to understand scripture

    • Ability to arrive at religious consensus

    • Trustworthiness of religious leaders

    • Trustworthiness of one’s own conscience

    • Trustworthiness of the mind’s ability to grasp truth at all

  • there is only the seemingness of truth to the mind

Montaigne and Pyrrhonian Skepticism

  • Thinkers like Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592) began to revive an ancient school of philosophy called skepticism

  • Montaigne was skeptical, not about religous faith or authority, but about the possibility of genuine human knowledge.

  • he believes that philosophy and science is incapable of firmly grounding our knowledge about the world, ethics, or even oursleves

  • The role of philosophy, he says, is serving as a check on our pride: good philosophy will demonstrate how inadequate all our reasoning is to establish anything with certainty

    • to show how little we know

    • I’m a little dumb bitch and philosophy will humble me rq

The skeptical argument against sense information

  • This sensory information that we intake is subject to variable from species to species and person to person

    • Different animals, and different humans, perceive the world in different ways

    • At most one way of perceiving the world can be completely accurate

    • There is no way for us to tell whether or not what appears to us to be true is a more accurate way of perceiving the world than that appears to others to be true

    • Therefore, we cannot say thta our way of perceiving the world is the most accurate way

  • From this argument, skeptics conclude that we should not take our senses to be telling us anything about the fundamental natures of things in the external world

The skeptical argument against sense information

  • Different animals, and different humans, perceive the world in different ways

  • At most one way of perceiving the world can be completely accurate

  • There is no way for us to tell whether or not what appears to us to be true is a more accurate way of perceiving the world than what appears to others to be true

  • Therefore, we cannot cay that our way of perceiving the world is the most accurate way

  • From this argument, skeptics conclude that we should not take our senses to be telling us anything about the fundamental natures of things in the external world

the skeptical argument against a criterion of truth

  • A “criterion of truth” is a standard that provides us with some basis for thinking some things true and some things false

    • Suppose there is some criterion of truth

    • If there is a criterion of truth, then there must be a criterion to tell us whether ot not it is a truthworthy criterion

    • If there is a criterion for our criterion, then that must eb either (1) a new criterion or (2) the same criterion

    • If (1), then we get an infinite regress

    • If (2), then we get a circularity

    • So there is no satisfying answer for why the criterion for truth is a good criterion

    • Therefore, we should suspend judgement about the criterion

  • If there is no criterion for truth, the skeptics conclude, we should live based soley on appearances

the scholastic vs. skeptical approach to ethics

Scientific rationalism: historical background

  • Against the background of dissatisfaction with prevailing modes of though, a new philosophy, with its own pretensions to knowledge, arises

  • This philosophy is associated with the Copernican Revolution

  • Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo propose a new geometry with the sun at the center of the solar system

  • This theory is not (initially) any more accurate or useful than the prevailing geocentric view, but it quicky catches on because of its greater simplicity

  • Central tenet of the new science: knowledge of the natural world is based on the ability to identify mathematically clear laws that govern mechanical interactions among material things

Scientific rationalism: the world as machine

  • When designing a machine, we are interested in precise, mathematical descriptions that predict how the machine will work

  • When looking at the physical world, the new scientists of the 16th and 17th centuries were similarly interested in mathematical description and prediction

  • While before, the universe was interpreted under a biological model, now the universe becomes interpreted under a mechanical model