Free essays and podcast episodes are published every Tuesday, and paid subscribers receive an additional essay and episode on Thursdays.
Epistemology is a branch of philosophy that is primarily focused on the nature of knowledge: in particular the sources of knowledge, the methods by which we establish the truth of knowledge, the structure of knowledge and beliefs—where beliefs come from, basically, and how we come to understand and believe them—and whether or not objective knowledge can actually exist.
Those first three premises—where we get knowledge, how we check its validity, and what knowledge consists of—make a good deal of reflexive sense. But that last one, regarding the possibility of there even being such a thing as non-tinted, undistorted knowledge, warrants explanation.
Most skeptics, in the literal and traditional sense of the term “skepticism,” either aim to suspend judgement about something due to insufficient evidence, or they question the possibility of knowing something, completely.
In most cases, skeptics limit their philosophical scope to a particular field or other locality: they don’t think we can truly know what happened at the beginning of the universe, if such an event actually happened, and thus they don’t believe theories on the topic are valid or particularly productive.
So-called radical skeptics, on the other hand, believe that knowledge as a whole, about anything, is impossible.
Any possible belief about anything, including seemingly provable and proven scientific knowledge, still comes with some amount of doubt. Thus, it makes sense to doubt everything, always, lest we fool ourselves into thinking we actually know something that is inherently, according to their estimation of the nature of perception and knowledge, unknowable.
Radical skepticism is, to most serious thinkers, a philosophical pit trap.
Yes, it’s technically true that there’s the potential and perhaps even necessity for doubt in anything we might aspire to know and understand.
That doesn’t mean we cannot establish frameworks that allow us to know with a solid degree of certainty that something will behave in a particular way given certain conditions most of the time—with “most” holding so consistent that, even if still vulnerable to doubt, it operates at a statistical level as if there is no doubt.
In other words: it’s important to be wary of unknowns even when we have good reason to believe we know, but it’s unproductive and often a little simplistic to just say “we can’t possibly know, therefore there’s no point to trying,” because that would leave us unable to function as individuals or as groups of individuals.
Baked into the assumption that nothing is knowable and as a result there’s no point to even trying to know things, is the more legitimate concern that what we seem to know is filtered through the lens of our subjective perception.
Everything we think we know is biased because of how we perceive the world. The pure objectivity that is ostensibly necessary to do serious science and philosophy, then, is impossible because of the nature of our minds.
That’s the theory, at least. And it shares a lot of history and assumptions with another philosophical concept called “solipsism.”
A solipsist believes that the only thing that exists for certain is their own mind.
The fact that they can think in the first place is evidence of their own existence, but the rest of the world—from tangible reality to the other supposed minds that exist within that world—are up for debate. Those other living things might just be figments of their imagination or sensory data fed to them by an unperceived source.
This is a tricky concept to tackle because it’s seemingly not disprovable, but it can also lead to some negative beliefs and behaviors in those who take it literally, rather than as a philosophical lark or thought experiment.
If you believe that your mind is the only real mind, and that everyone else you encounter is a philosophical zombie—an entity that behaves as if it has an internal life and thoughts like you do, but which does not—it could serve as an excuse to treat those other people like empty, clockwork husks, rather than fellow thinking, feeling, experiencing beings.
Fortunately, most people who seriously entertain solipsistic ideas do so as part of a brain in a vat-style thought experiment, pointing at the flaws in our conception of knowledge by asking whether we’d have any way of knowing if we were just brains in vats being fed sensory information by a computer.
Because everything we think we know is perceived through the lens of our senses, and because our sensory information is filtered through metaphorical lenses in our brains before being compiled into an understanding of ourselves, other people, and existence as a whole, this is a legitimate question to ask.
The Occam’s Razor response to solipsistic thinking, however, is that although it could be true that nothing exists beyond our own minds, because the seeming reality in which we exists presupposes that there is a reality beyond our minds, it’s probably prudent to behave as if that’s the objective truth rather than a subjective belief being mainlined into our brains by gods or aliens or whatever else.
This is the most rational approach to this question of doubt, it’s been posited, because the consequences of behaving otherwise could be quite deleterious to us and to other potential thinking, experiencing, conscious beings, but also because even if reality is an illusion, it’s an illusion we occupy and one that has rules that presuppose a certain way of behaving.
Even if we’re in a fake reality beamed into our brains, in other words, that fake reality has all the traits of a true reality. And “true” in this case is such a wobbly concept that it’s not clear what the difference between a fake and not-fake reality would be, anyway.
Enjoying Brain Lenses? You might also enjoy my news analysis podcast, Let’s Know Things.
There’s also a podcast version of Brain Lenses, available at brainlenses.com or wherever you get your podcasts.