skepticism (again)

Recently my friend the social scientist Frank Pasquale shared with me some of his thinking about skepticism.  This got me thinking about skepticism again. 

Frank:  skepticism goes wrong when pressed to the extreme.

Steve:  philosophers often argue that the end-point of rationality is reason peering into itself, which often leads to paradoxes, but which nevertheless is a kind of proof of reason via the strength of character to direct the big skeptical power to itself.  Anything less would be avoiding the problem.  Habermas argues that when reason looks into reason and undermines itself (as it must inevitably do), this is an example of the performative contradiction.  In order to examine and criticize something, we have to stop examining or criticizing something else, which we will use as the premise in virtue of which we are conducting the investigation.  This is not really a problem, for after we have used a premise to examine something else, we can change assumptions and examine the premise we began with.  The scientific process requires provisional hypotheses instead of unshakable truths.  Seeing this is one of the results of direct reason to itself.

F:  we have to find a balance between skepticism and the social impulse. 

S:  the skeptic detaches from social life to carry on the project of doubt, but after he has made some progress with whatever he is looking at, he can become less a skeptic and more an actor.  You advise striking a balance.  We have to strike a balance between the sense of belonging and the sense of being separate.  The first environment in which we do this is the family. Then we leave the family – educare, to lead away from – and conduct some new experiments in mixing separateness and belongingness.  We have to go on learning.  The skeptical impulse itself, however, doesn't need to strike a balance.  The person as a whole – the living person – has to do this, balancing the loneliness of thought with the solidarity of civic virtue.  Remember that Aristotle argues that although moral virtue strikes a mean between excess and defect, intellectual virtue does not.  Intellectual virtue has to drive to the extreme.  Skepticism has to be pressed to the extreme – thought cannot and should not stop itself from drawing extreme conclusions, but should drive the argument to the end.

F: skepticism sometimes becomes mere ridicule. 

S: Socrates seems to enjoy destroying the confidence of arrogant people.  His enjoyment has seemed to many people morally questionable.  He like doing this – maybe too much.   This kind of pleasure might play into darker human impulses and quickly get out of hand.  Then skepticism simply becomes a mask for arrogance, aggression, lust for power, the competitive instinct.  You advise taking the high road.  I guess my question here is whether taking the high road takes some of the bite out of the process.  We may need the bite to make the point or to feel the point and thus make the change in the way we think.  No bite and nobody feels the sting – no transformation.

F: skepticism often leads to relativism. 

S: doubting universals ends up undermining logic itself, which surely is a universal.  This is again the point Habermas is trying to make.  But it is not that skepticism is too highly concentrated or too narrowly focused.  It is that the scientific process is misunderstood.  We only needed hypotheses, but skeptics who had not thought through their skepticism said that we needed unshakable axioms.

F: skepticism sometimes carries simplicity too far. 

S: Ockham's principle of simplicity is about explanatory principles – what's the simplest way of approaching a problem? – this is likely to be the best (likely to be, but not certain to be).  We can adopt this principle before we start any investigation and we can review the way we are looking at a problem and use this principle at any point in the investigation. Skepticism suggests that we should try to find the simplest way of looking at things.  You advise some caution – maybe we should be wary of making things out to be simpler than they are.  This seems right, and simplifying the problem may end up changing the original problem into something completely different.  It turns out to be a way of avoiding the problem we were trying to understand.

F: skepticism leads to indecision. 

S: this is Hamlet's problem.  Thinking too much dulls the blade of action.  You advise jumping into the fray. I agree.  This is what Ecclesiastes is talking about – "Cast thy bread upon the waters." "He who observes the wind will not sow; and he who regards the clouds will not reap” (11:3-4).  Man cannot wait for certainty if he is to live.  Thus “remove vexation from your mind, and put away pain from your body."  Do what you can “while the almond tree blossoms” – act quickly “before the dust returns to the earth” (12:5-8).  But the problem these days seems more about not thinking at all rather than thinking too much.  Slogans vs. arguments. 

F: the radical skeptic has adopted a non-human standard of correctness. 

S: Yes – we are human beings and ought to adopt a standard that fits our station.  Philosophers sometimes describe the radical skeptic's approach as "high redefinition" – that is, the skeptic has put up a Ideal of knowledge and then shown us that we can't reach it.  But we already knew that.  So, as you advise, we had better get into doing the kind of stuff that we can do, rather than what gods can do.

F: skepticism often becomes cynicism. 

S:  cynicism is a mean spirited deflating of people's pretensions.  It appears to come from someone who has already been disappointed – he has already had his lovely balloon popped.  He's mad, depressed, goofed up inside because he lost the thing he loved.  So now he wants to ruin your illusion too; he's a spoiler. The pain of his loss is motivating his attempt to deprive you of the thing you care about.  His loss drives him to make you lose too. This is an emotional reaction of a person who has lost his little puppy and now can't stand anybody else having a puppy either.  There is no argument here at all – just spite. 

But if we are too reasonable, too moderate, too composed, then we may blunt the edge of skepticism, its bite, its power.  And the world really needs this power.

Addiction to Belief

Recently a student asked me whether I thought it was possible for someone to be addicted to a belief.

This is an interesting question and provokes some real thinking. Here is a beginning – or several.

First, some preliminaries. What is a belief? Lots of things are happening in the brain, or the mind, or in consciousness. There is a whole bunch of stuff bouncing around in our heads -- associations, darting thoughts, memories, impulses just coming into awareness, lots of impulses probably that do not rise into awareness – some perhaps that never do.

What is different about a belief, from all this other stuff, is that in addition to merely being another thought that we entertain in the course of thinking (a wish, a recollection, a flash of anger, a daydream image, whatever) is that – in the case of belief – we add the element of conviction, commitment, affirmation, or some kind of assertion of the thought. Not just: the thought X (whatever it is) but the thought X + the assertion of X (the assertion of this thought). The content of thought, which can be expressed as a proposition (a statement that is either true or false), is asserted as true.

What I mean by this is that belief involves some amount of saying to yourself, and saying to other people if they ask you about it, that you assert a proposition, or hold it true, or mean to defend it – you are putting yourself on the line and saying – yeah, this is right, this is true, I am standing up for this statement. If I believe that 2 + 2 = 4, I am not just thinking this thought, but I am asserting the truth of it. So in effect when I believe something then I have isolated an item in the world of thought (the content of the belief) and I am committing myself to defend this item.

Looking closer, believing a belief seems to involve a bit of confidence, trust, reliability, or some faith that this statement is true. It's as if I was saying to myself: I don't need to worry about this any more. I am convinced, I am on board, I am cool with this and I don't have to stress about it. Thus a belief is a kind of relaxation of tension, it's a calming, tranquilizing, anti-stress, zone-out state of mind. This is why it makes sense to talk about belief in terms of addiction. An addict needs a fix to cool out and not stress about getting his or her next high. When the addict gets high on whatever it is he or she is addicted to, there is a relaxation of tension – now I'm cool.

People talk about physical addiction and psychological addiction. It is possible to be psychologically addicted to a thing or a substance or a person or a routine. When you don't get that thing, you stress out and your body goes through all kinds of shut-down routines. A baby has a blankie. The blankie helps the baby calm down. Psychologists call this a transitional object. The baby is showing addictive behavior, drug-seeking behavior, in relation to his blankie – his transitional object.

Now another piece of the puzzle is that there are degrees of belief. I can believe something a tiny little bit; or with an open mind; I can believe something very strongly; and I can believe something so strongly that my very identity depends on it (this is sometimes referred to as an "aggressive identity" – as in the case where I have to see myself as a Christian and if I do not see myself as a Christian then I do not know who I am any more). In the case where the degree of belief is extreme and I cannot get along without it, then I can be said to be addicted to that belief; you could say that I hold that belief to be sacred; that I am unable to question the belief. This shows that I am not holding the belief as a reasonable person who can look at it objectively and doubt it and question it and perhaps reject it or decide to keep believing it. I am holding onto it like a fix.

It does not make sense to say that any belief that we hold strongly counts as a belief that we are addicted to, because even among beliefs that I hold very strongly I may be able to look at them objectively and question them and discuss them rationally with an open mind. A sign that the belief has an addictive quality and represents a kind of psychological dependence is that I cannot look at it, question it, hold it in suspense, consider alternatives. An addict who is deep in the hole of addiction is stuck and cannot find a way out. A rational person can believe something without going overboard. The American pragmatist philosopher and psychologist William James used to talk about overbelief and underbelief in this sense. James thought that a person who had no conscience suffered from a kind of underbelief. A person with a fanatical religious conviction suffers from a kind of overbelief.

So: Can a person be addicted to a belief? My view on this is: yes, a person can be addicted to a belief. The things that a person trusts and does not have to worry about, stress about, that are settled, and about which the person is cool, are his or her beliefs. Maybe the person is addicted to some of them and maybe not. I believe that I am a decent person and not an asshole, that kindness is better than cruelty, and that 2 + 2 = 4. I do not think that I am addicted to these beliefs because I am willing to look at them and I know that I could be wrong about at least some of them. Experience has taught me that I am wrong a lot of the time. So I am trying not to be a belief addict. I am trying to be more like a believer who has some composure about belief, some maturity, some moderation, some self-consciousness, some humility. I better not believe too much or too strongly because I don't know that much and I have keep the door open about my being completely wrong.

I am trying to get to the point where I do not need belief; but I know that I always need me – that is: I need to be present in my thinking. I need an open mind, I need thoughtfulness, I need patience and many other virtues, and I know that I pay a very high price when I can’t find these things. Instead, I fall back to believing.