Q&A: Is There a Limit to Skepticism?
Is There a Limit to Skepticism?
Question
With God’s help
Hello Rabbi,
Throughout the 18th century and onward, many skeptical claims were heard about the capacity of human inference, from proponents of the actualist approach.
So much so that Einstein sarcastically asked Bohr whether he really believed that when he was not looking at the moon, it did not exist…
But I wanted to ask: after those people dealt such broad and severe blows to the capacity of human thought, why didn’t they cast doubt on the correctness of thought altogether? (Or at least become postmodernists.)
That is, why didn’t they “throw away the intellect” (to use the common religious expression) and move over to emotion? Or at least, as the Rabbi calls on them elsewhere, move on to French philosophy…
Answer
In my books Two Carts and Truth and Unstable, I explained the connection between modernist skepticism and postmodernism. I explained there that a social process takes time to mature. At first, it seemed to people that necessary arguments could be presented, until they internalized that this was not so. See there and there at length. Especially see the three stages of maturation that I discussed on the site as well. See column 204 on the site, section B.
Discussion on Answer
Indeed.
On the psychological plane, you can end wherever you like. But denying the laws of logic is philosophical nonsense. A person can say that he accepts the existence of round triangles. The mouth can tolerate anything. The question is what is actually in the mind when one says that.
I’m not sure that every denial of the laws of logic is philosophical nonsense to the same degree.
Sometimes there are contradictions that exist only in their meaning but not in their properties. For example, a round triangle is a “severe” contradiction.
But knowledge and free choice—I know that you say this too is a contradiction, but not so for many philosophers. I think you understand why I mean that it’s not to the same degree.
In any case, where does your great certainty in the laws of logic come from, even more than Berkeley’s idealism?
It is exactly to the same degree. A logical contradiction is a logical contradiction. One can argue and claim that there is no contradiction here (which I do not agree with), but there is no difference at all between the contradictions.
There is indeed some distinction that I define here, but it is not a logical contradiction. See this article:
https://mikyab.net/%D7%A9%D7%95%D7%AA/%D7%91%D7%99%D7%9F-%D7%A1%D7%AA%D7%99%D7%A8%D7%94-%D7%90%D7%A4%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%95%D7%A8%D7%99%D7%AA-%D7%9C%D7%90%D7%A0%D7%9C%D7%99%D7%98%D7%99%D7%AA/
My certainty in the laws of logic stems from the fact that they are the framework for every idea or utterance. To say something beyond them is just moving your lips with no meaning. That’s all. Someone who doubts the laws of logic also does not doubt them to the same degree, and also believes in two-winged fairies even though their existence is impossible and also possible in his eyes. If the sentences I wrote here have meaning in your eyes—good for you.
I agree that I find no meaning or intelligibility in them in my own thinking.
But the claim of many ordinary people is that just because I find no intelligibility in them, that doesn’t mean they have none.
And I strongly claim that almost every kind-hearted triangle is located 100 meters above the wavelength of a sound wave in a vacuum. And if you think that has no meaning, that doesn’t mean it has none. Maybe it does.
Interesting, so you’re saying that there is an evolution in the scope of the implications of the skeptical position, and that it indeed ends with today’s postmodernism.
So in practice, anyone who doesn’t want to adopt those approaches has to give up in advance on holding on to the horn of certainty and move to a sense of probability, while accepting basic assumptions about the world without grounding—even at the price of inventing new sensory tools. Just as the verse says: “This is what we’ve got, and with this we’ll win.”
I also wanted to ask whether the conclusion of postmodernism ends with Berkeley’s idealism, or whether it can also be extended to denying the “laws” of logic.