Eeyore is a profound skeptic.
“It’s Pooh,” said Christopher Robin excitedly.
“Possibly,” said Eeyore.
“And Piglet!” said Christopher Robin excitedly.
“Probably,” said Eeyore. “What we want is a Trained Bloodhound.”
Not about to jump to conclusions, this old gray donkey. And with good reason. You never can tell, really. It is always better to see for yourself. Look between your legs to make sure your tail is gone before you worry about how to find it.
Eeyore and I have spent a lot of time thinking about what we really know and what we can ever hope to know. This interest in epistemological questions comes from a desire to understand the bewildering world around us. And from too much time alone in the bog.
Most of what we think we know, we learn from other people. This brings up some of the fundamental questions of language. But you have to use language to talk about language. So this ends up a lot like chasing your tail. Those of us whose tails are attached none too firmly, tend to be very careful about chasing them. Wittgenstein told us,
“If you can’t say something clearly, don’t say anything at all.”
(my very loose translation). What he didn’t tell us, is how to measure clarity. I found his works on language about as clear as mud. So by my measure and his rule, he should have shut up. But we are getting off the track here. Back to questions of knowledge.
What does it mean to know something? Skeptics and pessimists tend towards a pragmatic definition. To claim you know something, you must first have some experience with the thing. Then you must have a model of that thing that allows you to explain the past experience and predict future experiences. From experience we generate a model, explain the past, predict new experiences, and refine the model.
With this view, itself a model, knowledge is a relative thing. It is a measure of the quality of our model. How well it explains. More importantly, how well it predicts. Truth is a good model. Useful for explaining and predicting. Absolute truth is only a goal approached. Never a goal attained.
The basis of all knowledge is experience. Some people forget that you can’t just make this stuff up. Or they build elaborate models on the flimsiest of evidence. Vicarious experience makes it possible for us to develop knowledge of things that would be impossible or impractical for us to experience ourselves. Not many of us will get into inter-galactic space. Nor can anyone see the really tiny bits and pieces that make up all matter. Heisenberg gets in the way with his uncertainty principle. With something called an “uncertainty principle”, Heisenberg is, of course, a major deity for all skeptics.
Experiencing things second hand also lets us escape from some of the really unpleasant things in life. For me it was more than enough to hear how a veterinarian in our dinner group had to drink the fluid from the eyes of a dead zebra to keep from dying of dehydration. I would love to see the plains of Africa for myself someday, but this particular experience I can do without. Or actually meeting Rush Limbaugh. In his case, even the second hand experience is too much.
But in lots of cases the second hand experience is a poor counterfeit for reality. Real people seldom behave like characters in sitcoms or soap operas. And even if the second hand experience is relatively accurate it may be vastly incomplete. Watching someone else run a rapid in a rubber raft is nothing like doing it yourself. You don’t wet your knickers watching it on TV.
Sometimes we think the second hand experience will do nicely until we get a chance at the first hand experience. Once when we were wandering through France, we decided to visit the early man sites to see the cave paintings. My daughter had been studying about them in school and wanted to see them. I was less than enthusiastic. I had seen lots of pictures of these paintings and I am a little claustrophobic, so the thoughts of going down into some musty old cave didn’t exactly thrill me. But the experience will stay with me my whole life. The pictures I had seen were two dimensional. So I was surprised to discover that the walls of the cave were not at all flat. The pictures that looked almost childish in two dimensions, suddenly took on a whole new life. The shape of the rock was incorporated into the picture and added shape and body to the drawings of the wild animals. Then they turned off the lights and simulated a flickering fire with a flashlight. Suddenly the pictures were magic. They came alive and even seemed to move. Comparing the pictures in archeology books to the reality in the cave is like comparing a picture of a strawberry pie covered in whipped cream to eating the real thing. Second hand experience sometimes just doesn’t cut it.
The trouble with vicarious experience is that it is not only incomplete but also edited. Editing can change everything. Someone decides where to point the camera. What to show and what not to show. Someone decides which bits to leave in and which to take out. They change the order, add a little music, mix in other material and suddenly it has nothing to do with the original. The editor can have all sorts of motives. She may be trying to make it more exciting, trying to prove a point, or trying to get you to buy something. Skeptics learn to be very careful with second hand experiences. We always try to remember that what we are seeing or hearing or reading may have no relation to reality.
Some forms of second hand experience are better than others. Reading is pretty good. You can’t read with your brain in cruise control. You have to think about things a little. You have to imagine the scene the author is describing, you have to imagine the characters and the events. Maybe its just that your have to scan and parse the words.
Television is pretty bad. This is a little surprising. You would think that the addition of all that visual and audio information would enhance the experience. This does not usually turn out to be the case. I am not sure what all the reasons are. One problem is that television is one dimensional in time. You can’t go back and check what happened on the last page. Of course you can rewind a video tape, but the programs are designed for direct viewing. So things are kept very simple. It is like baby food, all mashed up and ready to eat. No chewing, or thinking, required. I don’t even want to think about what remote controls do to second hand experience.
Not only experiences, but also models are communicated to us from other people. Most of our models like most of our experiences are, in fact, second hand. It’s a good thing. No one could figure out all of science, technology, art, philosophy, and religion on his own. But there are several problems, besides the inherent limitations of language, when learning from other people. They may not know the truth. They may not want you to know the truth. And they may have a conflict of interests. As skeptics, we try to watch out for these things.
There are a lot of things no one knows. Some things everyone realizes that no one knows. Like why you always put an even number of socks in the laundry, but always get an odd number out. It may have something to do with Goedle’s theorem which claims that no system, no even socks, can be entirely self consistent. But no one really knows. Or why anyone would fold the toilet paper into a point.
There are other things that some people pretend to know, even though the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming. Psychologists sometimes claim that they understand how people work or economists claim that they understand how the economy works. They have lots of explanations. But neither of them are much good at predicting what will happen next. These are immensely complicated fields, so predictive models are awfully hard to come by. Part of the problem is that we won’t allow them to experiment. At least not with the real thing. Most of us don’t want people messing with our heads or our money. When dealing with people or the national economy, failure is unacceptable. But you can’t learn much from an experiment if you won’t allow it to fail.
The trouble is not so much what we don’t know, as what we pretend to know that we don’t. There can be various motives for pretending that we know something. It might be your job. You might be professor of something or the other like I was, briefly. Very briefly. You may think it is true because you want it to be true. Because it fits into your world view, or improves your lot in life. Because it will make you more money or make you feel like you are going to recover. You might become convinced that alfalfa pills will cure hay fever because you want so badly to find something to cure your hay fever. I have decided that Pepsi cures just about anything.
Lots of people are willing to share their knowledge with us. Sometimes for a price, sometimes as a step towards selling something, and, occasionally, just because they are nice guys. You should ask yourself, “Does this person really want me to know the truth?” Just because your answer is no, it doesn’t mean the person is lying. You may have mis-judged him. But it does mean you should be skeptical. Wait for a little more evidence before signing up. Some confirmation that paisley ties are really coming back into style. Some evidence that this is really a special deal. Just for you. Just today.
It is not usually too hard to detect people who are deliberately trying to deceive us. Conflicts of interest are harder to detect. In some ways almost everyone has some conflict of interests. Even pessimists. Most of us have to make a living somehow. We have to provide some product or service. And most of us are rewarded for using as few resources as possible. High revenue, low cost. The dream of the capitalist world.
Just because someone has a conflict of interest doesn’t mean he is going to cheat you. It just means there might be something in it for him if he does. A little extra profit. So there is a temptation. A chance to get ahead. Or a chance to save his skin. Which means it takes certain integrity and dedication for him to insure the quality of the product or the service. An integrity and dedication that not everyone has. So here the questions are “Does this person have an ulterior motive?” And, “Can I tell?” Usually it is very hard to tell. So usually, it is very wise to be careful. Skeptical.
It is even more important to be careful of the second hand experience and knowledge that you buy than it is to be careful of the second hand cars that you buy. With the car you can at least tell when you have been had. When the transmission falls out on the freeway a month later, you know that you made a mistake and call the junk yard. Bad knowledge is harder to detect and sometimes harder to clean up. Especially knowledge that we use to run our lives. If you buy “School is a waste of time.”, you could spend the rest of your life working in a fast food restaurant. If you buy “What she doesn’t know won’t hurt her”, you could spend the rest of your life alone. And if you buy “Pessimists are really wonderful people once you take the trouble to get to know them”, you could be incredibly happy for the rest of your life.
We need to be especially careful buying news. Sometimes we think that news is a public service provided by some omniscient and benevolent power for our edification and enlightenment. In reality it is a business. People sell news. There is one of those conflicts of interest here. This doesn’t mean that there are not dedicated, responsible people in the news business. But we should not forget that it is a business. Increase revenue, cut costs, and make a profit. This applies to every business, including news.
Imagine your local news team covering the storm in the hundred acre wood. They dispatch a reporter and a cameraman in the van. They arrive on the scene just as Christopher Robin is pulling Pooh out through the door of what used to be Owl’s house with a rope. So the reporter sticks a microphone in Pooh’s face and starts asking him questions. Pooh, not a particularly articulate bear in the best of circumstances, gets completely flustered. And he isn’t coming through very well on camera. So the reporter looks for someone else to interview. Christopher Robin is still off doing something and Piglet is sitting quietly to the side. So the reporter goes up to Owl who is poking around the wreckage of the house. “Excuse me sir”, asks the reporter, “Did you happen to see anything?” Owl looks up, sees, the microphone and the camera and suddenly his eyes light up. “See anything?”, he puffs, “It was my house.” Then he goes on to explain how Pooh and Piglet had come for help, as they always do, how the tree had blown down, and how Owl himself had saved everyone. The storm in the hundred acre wood gets a minute and fifteen seconds with video on the evening news. And gets it all wrong.
I was trained early in skepticism. My father is an astronomer. Scientists make wonderful skeptics. These days they learn early to question everything. But it was not until they learned to question authority that science got much past Aristotle. He made a great authority. Ancient, respected, and with an opinion about just about everything. It is a little ironic, actually, given the emphasis that Aristotle placed on observation and experience that those who professed to follow him skipped over those hard parts and just accepted everything he said. But eventually scientists begin to observe and then even to experiment and learned that Aristotle got almost everything wrong. This would not have surprised Aristotle. What would have surprised him is that in two thousand years people did almost nothing to gather more experience and improve the models.
Aristotle’s models lasted unaltered for a couple of millennia. Newton’s models lasted for a couple of centuries. These days it is a rare model that makes it through a couple of decades. Partly because scientists have become really proficient skeptics. Back to my father. It was only natural that all this skepticism spilled over into our home life. So at five or six, when we would make some harmless assertion about our world like “Jimmy says that dogs can smell fear”, we would suddenly find ourselves in the witness box, being cross examined, with the terrible burden of proof. How can you tell that dogs smell fear? What evidence is there? How could a mental state give off an odor? Maybe it is just because some people sweat when they are afraid and the dog is smelling the sweat.
It was really scary the first couple of times, but later on we got to like it. By the time we were teenagers, we could not only defend ourselves, but also challenge anyone. Friends, school teachers, Sunday School teachers, even Dad. We would argue happily for hours on end. But you had to be a little careful with Mom because she took things personally sometimes. But mostly she was a good sport. Of course our friends started to avoid us and teachers called us smart asses and once even a “lazy little wart”, and one or two Sunday School teachers had spiritual crises. But all in all, it was good fun.
I miss it a bit. Oh, I am still as skeptical as ever. Just not as vocal and aggressive about it. I never quite made it to being a scientist. Companies don’t like people who argue, even about technical issues. And I married into a family where arguing means you are mad. Where a friendly argument is an oxymoron. And the people at church are less willing to put up with probing questions from someone with a bald head, a paunch, and a mortgage. So to keep my job (which didn’t work), keep my wife happy (which has worked so far), and keep the Mormon Inquisition at bay, I have learned to hold my peace.
But every once in a while, I loose control and ask an impertinent question.
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