Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Doubt
I find it hard to believe that NO ONE ever questioned reality before descartes. I would guess that doubting started when philosophy started. Why would it be necessary to write down what somthing is until it was questioned on what it might be? Why have I never questioned how computers work? I know my computer can turn on and off although it breaks at times, but why is it that I can somehow plug the machine into a wall and it has life? do I trust this because it happens over and over again? Hume would say you shouldn't trust everything based on repetition, this is what he called "induction fallacy". We also base our lives on trust - I trust the fact that the world is round, but do I know for sure? No I trust the books that say this and every other person on the planet. But I have never doubted these things before now, but I still trust them as being true. Does this mean that we doubt more often now because of descartes and other philosophers views? Or did we always have this capacity to doubt? I believe that its a chain reaction, once one person doubts then more people doubt... and who knows - if everyone doubts reality will the world end up in complete chaos?
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i agree with the chain of doubt, so to speak. there are many things that i just accepted as "truth" and never really thought to question. i wonder sometimes if i didn't bother to question these because such basic things didn't pose any sort of direct threat to my health? it could just be that i had never had the idea given to me to doubt such things as the light going on when i flip the switch. i believe that the brain just automatically accepts simple things that are logical (like 2+2). i think we just weren't given a reason to doubt these things until reading about Descartes, which brings me back to the idea about the chain. i definitely agree with the idea of accepting something simply because it's considered common knowledge.
ReplyDeletei don't think that no one ever questioned reality before Descartes. i must say i don't know how many people before him wrote about the subject, but i'm sure at least a small few have thought about it, even if in a slightly different manner. i find it odd that someone would make that statement anyways, because there's no real way of knowing whether or not people had similar thoguhts before him. thoughts come from the mind, not from paper.
i have a hard time believing that we would get to a point where everyone would truly doubt reality. and even if it happened, i think it would not errupt into chaos because we've existed as such for so long now, that how would our sudden extreme doubt of reality change anything other than how we view things? i think that, despite this whole doubting thing, there would remain a certain number of constants.
Descartes wasn't the first person to doubt anything, but he was the first person to doubt EVERYTHING, at least systematically -- this is why he gets credit for the "method of doubt". It is indeed an important point to note that doubting everything makes it very difficult to live in the real world -- we have to act based on probabilities (that the sun will rise tomorrow, etc.) People who truly doubt everything--who are incapable of trusting in the things most people take for granted every day--are usually considered to be mentally ill.
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