Q&A: Skepticism
Skepticism
Question
Hello Rabbi,
I wanted to ask a very specific question: every person thinks that what he believes to be true is also justified. But for many of those very subjects about which he thinks he is right, there are other people who also think they are right. Even on subjects into which each side has invested a huge amount of time and thought, such as the existence of God.
So one could compare this to a device that receives input and outputs: "true." Would you trust it? It seems that the very existence of disagreements is a strong positive reason not to trust the feeling of being right. Just like the fact that we have seen that there are no demons when we are in a dark place at night gives us the insight that there is no reason to trust the feeling of fear at night.
I’d be glad to understand why I’m wrong here 🙂
Answer
See column 247.
Discussion on Answer
I don’t understand.
If many contradictory inputs produce the same output, "true in my eyes,"
which objectively should not be identical given those different outputs,
then the machine is problematic.
The machine isn’t perfect, but it works very well. The disagreements are at the margins.
By the way, this is exactly the same question as the one discussed in the column.
How are the disagreements at the margins if on almost every subject there will be someone else in the world who thinks the opposite of you?
In any case, that’s not what is discussed in the column, because there it’s about a disagreement between peers. And then the claim is that the other person is entrenched.
I’m claiming that even if we assume that one side to the disagreement is not a peer at all, you still can’t prefer the claim that you are superior to him for the following reason: the system itself is problematic, because for any given input (which differs from one system to another) it outputs, "this seems true to me"—and the proof is that many times he thinks exactly the same thing about you.
I’ve completely lost you.
What is there to lose here?
You ask: when there are two peers, how can a person maintain his position in light of the existence of a disagreement?
You answer that as far as is known, “peer” is conditional; you called it being entrenched. (He isn’t really your peer specifically here.)
I’m asking even in a case where the other person is not your peer, so that ostensibly you don’t need any justification at all to remain in the same position.
There is still a skeptical question that arises here.
How do you know that the other person is not your peer, when the peer also thinks that the other person is not a peer?
In other words, given a certain set of assumptions, that person thinks he is right and everyone else is wrong.
Even if it is true that, on the individual level, there is justification here for the single side when he thinks the other person is not a peer, the question still remains.
I don’t think that answers what I asked.
Rather, it answers a different question: how a person can hold on to what he holds despite the existence of a peer.
I’m asking about a case where it is not known whether the person opposite you is a peer. Even if we assume he is completely not a peer, still the very fact that I see the machine outputting "true" even when, in my view, it is not true shows that something is flawed about the machine.