On the Value of Doubt

Metaphysics & Epistemology
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A while ago, I wrote a short book and then fed it to Chat, which informed me that I was a fallibilist—a term which was new to me. Then it kept yapping Peirce and Popper! Peirce and Popper!

So for those who are familiar with fallibilism, that seems to be where I’m coming from, at least according to the word machine. I don’t see uncertainty as a burden that has to be borne. I see it as a positive quality to cultivate.

Embracing uncertainty even saved my life once.

On my wedding night, at 21, I was suddenly faced with my responsibility to know, and that frightened me. I sat and imagined what it would be like to know things with certainty, and it felt like chaos. I saw myself spending the rest of my life struggling to justify and protect my knowledge. I imagined that it would cripple my curiosity; there’d be places I could not look. So it felt like control of my mind would be taken from me. And that felt like it would be the death of me.

At the climax of this crisis—between my need to know and the thought that knowing would destroy me—an image appeared in my mind’s eye. It was a man-sized boulder standing in a sandstorm, being shaped by the new data.

What a relief.

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I will be that thing.”

Seeing myself as an ever-changing boulder let me live comfortably without knowing. It let my curious nature survive. All I had to do was make my best guesses. I didn’t have to know anything.

Since then, I’ve spent decades at written debate, studying minds and how they deal with knowledge, and I believe I have witnessed the disturbances that I only imagined on my wedding night. We see the same damage in the culture around us. The tribalism, the political certainty, the brick walls who ignore new data in order to retain their shape.

In time, I built a sort of theology out of my experiences—by which I mean that I created a story with the word “God” in it, and in which my stance turns out to be the heroic one. Uncertainty as blessed by God.

So I’ve come here to test for holes in my theology of doubt, which is to say holes in my worldview. Thanks in advance to anyone who can uncover one or many.

I’m available for any question, but I’d like to start with a question of my own which I composed during my debate years. It is meant to examine a particular stance that we humans tend to take toward knowledge, often without realizing it.

If I know A is true, and you know not-A is true, which one of us really knows it?

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Sorry for the ugly formatting. I’ve tried to re-do.

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Notice that the boulder is being shaped? Hence there is already a boulder.

Doubt only takes place against a background of certainty.

In remains unclear what god is doing in any of this.

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Sure. I already existed, at least that’s how it felt, plus the whole mirror thing. People would even react to me as if I were real. I could ask for a Coke, and sometimes the thing I asked for would seem to appear.

I’m not sure why we would call a physical body ‘certainty’, if that’s what you’re meaning. We would have to dig into the word.

I lived in an apparent reality and interacted with it according to the system my brain had been building all along, yes. But I see certainty as a psychological state. That’s mostly what I mean by it. I accepted that my state would be malleable.

Right. I didn’t want to overload the system in one Great Dump.

When stripped down to its essence, “God” seems to mean “Whoever or Whatever got out of bed one day and made rocks and then life.”

So I wrote a story in which uncertainty was a quality which suits God’s purpose (if God and if God has a purpose, I mean, of course.)

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Could you fill in A with an example? The example would tend to shed light on how you’re using “know” here.

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I know that Jesus came in the flesh and is my personal lord and savior. You know that Jesus never existed.

But let’s skip that one and go for the carnal.

I know there is a lion behind that tree. You know there is no lion behind that tree.

Which one of us really knows?

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One of us is mistaken.

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Probably so. Which one?

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You, probably. But there is insufficient information.

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I can’t say, based on the example. But that’s because I don’t have enough information. There is an answer, I assure you.

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So if you had sufficient information, you could discern which of us really knows and which doesn’t?

But what if I disagree? What if both of us have studied the information, and I still know that A is true while you know that not-A is true?

Which one of us really knows?

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Just to be clear, you believe that it’s possible for you to distinguish which person actually knows and which one only thinks he knows… outside of your opinion, I mean?

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The one who’s belief is true. That we don’t know which that is, does not ame both true.

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Agreed. It doesn’t make both true.

I’m just asking which one really knows the true thing.

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The thing about a modal scenario such as this is that you provide the interpretation in setting up the circumstances — and here you haven’t yet told us which is true.

So it’s up to you; it’s your story.

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I don’t know which one is true. How could I know? That would be cheating, and it would be no puzzle at all.

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…you are the one making up the story.

There is a difference between which one is true and which one is believed to be true. Keep that in mind and have another think. If, as you surmised, the whole story is either A or ~A, then only one of them can be right, since only A or ~A can be true.

This is just how a binary truth functions. It’s true, or it is false, and usually despite what anyone believes.

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Where did you encounter X Knows(P) and Y Knows(not-P)? Not in mathematics I hope.

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I think sometimes it is better to reach the midpoint in these cases.

There might be a scenario where the OP [@BestGuessYet] is right, and then there might be a scenario where @Banno is right.

Therefore, I believe you are both correct and mistaken, but it depends on the perspective.

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The trouble, of course, is the explosion caused by (A & ~A) ⊃ B. Permit such things and everything turns out to be true.

Not good.

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