Cognitivism Vs. Skepticism in Philosophy

by Farzin Mojtabai

Differing Views in Philosophy

The claim that people changing their minds about right and wrong overtime meaning there is nothing to figure out is not a logically valid inference. The fact that people change their minds simply demonstrates a constant desire to correct the wrong and move over to the right. The change in people&rsquos minds indicates identification of wrong by such a person engaged in a specific mentality and exhibits a striving towards a better way. If people really had everything figured out and there was nothing left to know about right and wrong than why would any change even transpire at all? There would be a clear understanding according to the skeptic king such an argument and change would not need to take place. If “x” changes his mind about right can not necessarily mean that right and wrong is simply an opinion and there is nothing to figure out, rather it can mean that opinions and feelings towards right and wrong vary among people and can change with time and knowledge.
A counter example to the skeptic view would be the sacrifice of humans in some ancient cultures to please the sun gods and ensure it’s proper rising. With modern science and knowledge of the concise orbit of the sun and it’s pattern it was realized that such sacrifice of human life serves no purpose. Before obtaining this knowledge of the sun’s orbit no culture could claim right or wrong, because not enough was made evident and proven, meaning some validity could be ascribed unto such a practice. However, after acquiring the correct knowledge of the sun, the practice was halted and many lives were ultimately spared. This clearly demonstrates that there is a great deal to know and clearly a right and wrong in certain situations, many times seeing change in people indicates and acknowledgement of the right and an end to the right.

A cognitivist is one who believes that there is a clear right and wrong to be figured out, however does not claim to always know what that right and wrong is. Just because there is right and wrong does not necessarily mean that it is known, rather we are striving to figure it out. When looking at the history of mankind, it is through experience, many times painful that one’s understanding evolves regarding right and wrong. It is through seeing pain and hardship of slavery and the holocaust that we identify slave labor and genocide and being wrong. Whether we act upon stopping all instances of wrong is one thing, but we still figured out they are wrong by the mental and physical abuse orchestrated upon people by other people. How could we even identify what slavery is if we didn’t see and experience it. Under the skeptic view knowledge is simply what someone thinks, where that assumption is off point. A cognitivist could claim people did not identify the wrong in such acts in slave labor early in human history because not enough of it had occurred to develop a
proper feeling that this action is wrong because it inflicts harm on people. The idea is to learn from history and formulate better and morally acceptable way of living based on the mistakes of the past. Early humans had nothing to judge their actions against. They also lacked the clear knowledge indicating these things were wrong, which the cognitivist knows is there, but simply needs to be discovered. For instance, human sacrifice as mentioned above came in many forms and many times, not with the intentions of harming but under misguided beliefs like the sun will rise or something. Once people were more privy to things like the sun rising or the lack of need to sacrifice all widowed women causing a dwindling population, they escaped their wrongful mentality. Or people could say the as long as it benefits certain people and gets things done that it is okay to use a certain population for slave labor, who are unfortunate or different. However as such customs grew and spread to various lands, more and more were suffering and more empathy was obviously taking place. People began to draw on experience and learn and change their ways.
Good reasons to study and form moral assessments about other cultures is to compare that against your own standards, to have a more objective view of your own cultural practices from a different perspective. How can you ever know whether your own society is morally in the right if that is all you know. Lack of knowledge can always lead to wrong practices and injustice. To witness other injustice from the view of an outsider and simply observe immorality gives one new look of their own culture, which they never had thought about before. One also can morally assess other cultures in order to attempt to correct moral wrongs perceived by them subsisting in that society. For instance the Sudan genocide where 400,000 people have been slaughtered and millions displaced can be assessed from a foreign perspective as morally reprehensible and can spur action to correct such injustice. Were it not for foreign intervention the Rwanda genocide could have still been occurring today. Above all associations we give to ourselves, we are first and foremast human beings, and to objectively assess others cultures can teach you and them a lot and advance a more universal right and wrong.
I think one might say we should never or should cautiously assess practices of another culture is fear that to critique another’s culture could antagonize that culture and give an impression that you are condescending towards their cultural practices. This cultural relativist idea that what is right is simply what is accepted by the culture as being right aims to slam the door shut on any moral intervention among cultures. The memory of years of colonialism leave people much more cautious when dealing with and interacting with foreign cultures. They fear that a traditional culture practice like trying out ones sword although appearing brutal, might be accepted and looking down on that culture for such actions is beyond our realm.

Skepticism

Skepticism is the Western philosophical tradition that maintains that human beings can never arrive at any kind of certain knowledge. Originating in Greece in the middle of the fourth century BC, skepticism and its derivatives are based on the following principles:

• There is no such thing as certainty in human knowledge.
• All human knowledge is only probably true, that is, true most of the time, or not true.

Several non-Western cultures have skeptical traditions, particularly Buddhist philosophy, but properly speaking, skepticism refers only to a Greek philosophical tradition and its Greek, Roman, and European derivatives.

   The school of Skeptic philosophers were called the "Skeptikoi" in Greece. The word is derived from the Greek verb, "skeptomai," which means "to look carefully, to reflect." The hallmark of the skeptikoi was caution; they refused to be caught in assertions that could be proven false. In fact, the entire system of skeptic philosophy was to present all knowledge as opinion only, that is, to assert nothing as true.

  In this, they were firmly planted in a tradition started a century earlier by Socrates. Socrates claimed that he knew one and only one thing: that he knew nothing. So he would never go about making any assertions or opinions whatsoever. Instead, he set about questioning people who claimed to have knowledge, ostensibly for the purpose of learning from them, using a judicial cross-examination, called elenchus . If someone made an assertion, such as, "Virtue means acting in accordance with public morality, " he would keep questioning the speaker until he had forced him into a contradiction. As in a court of law, this contradiction proved that the speaker was lying in some way, in this case, that the speaker did not really know what they claimed to know. If an assertion can be worked into a contradiction, that means that the original assertion was wrong. While Socrates never claimed that knowledge is impossible, still, at his death, he never claimed to have discovered any piece of knowledge whatsoever.

   After its introduction into Greek culture at the end of the fourth century BC, skepticism influenced nearly all other Greek philosophies. Both Hellenistic and Roman philosophies took it as a given that certain knowledge was impossible; the focus of Greek and Roman philosophy, then, turned to probable knowledge, that is, knowledge that is true most of the time.
   Christianity, however, introduced a dilemma into Greek and Roman philosophies that were primarily based on skeptical principles. In many ways, the philosophy of Christianity, which insisted on an absolute knowledge of the divine and of ethics, did not fit the Greek and Roman skeptical emphasis on probable knowledge. Paul of Tarsus, one of the original founders of Christianity, answered this question simply: the knowledge of the Romans and Greeks, that is, human knowledge, is the knowledge of fools. Knowledge that rejects human reasoning, which, after all, leads to skepticism, is the knowledge of the wise. Christianity at its inception, then, had a strong anti-rational perspective. This did not, however, make the skeptical problem go away. Much of the history of early Christian philosophy is an attempt to paste Greek and Roman philosophical methods and questions onto the new religion; the first thing that had to go was the insistence on skepticism and probable knowledge. So early Christian thinkers such as Augustine and Boethius took on the epistemological traditions of Greece and Rome to demonstrate that one could arrive at certain knowledge in matters of Christian religion. Augustine devoted an entire book, "Against the Academics," to proving that human beings can indeed arrive at certain knowledge.
   Skepticism, however, was radically reintroduced into Western culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The break-up of the Christian church and the bloodshed that followed it led people to seriously question religious and philosophical traditions that had long been unquestioned. Thinkers such as Montaigne in France and Francis Bacon in England took as their starting point the idea that they knew nothing for certain, particularly religious truth. Montaigne would invent an entirely new literary format which he called the essai , or "attempt, trial"; this is the origin of the modern-day essay. The "essay" took as its starting point the idea that the writer doesn't really know what he's talking about. Montaigne would propose an issue, walk around the issue for awhile and consider various alternatives, and then end pretty much where he started: uncertain what conclusion to draw. This is why he called his writings, "attempts" (essais in French), for they were attempts at drawing conclusions rather than finished products.

  The most radical introduction of Greek skeptical traditions back into the Western tradition occurred in the works of Blaise Pascal and René Descartes. Both thinkers refused to accept any piece of knowledge whatsoever as true, and both tried to rebuild a Christian faith based on this radical questioning of truth.

   Descartes set about reinventing Western epistemology with a radical perspective: what if nothing were true? How, if you doubted everything, could you find something—anything—that was true. His conclusion, of course, was the famous cogito : Cogito ergo sum , or, "I think, therefore I am." From this base he built up a series of other true propositions, including the existence of God. In many ways, Descartes was trying to accomplish the same thing that Augustine, Boethius, and other early Christian thinkers were attempting: how do you address the possibility, firmly entrenched in the Western tradition, that there may be no such thing as certain knowledge? How do you reconcile that with religious faith? For that was Descartes' ultimate goal: to prove the existence of God and the validity of the Christian religion.
   Although he saw himself as answering old and vexing questions in the Christian tradition, he actually created a radically new way of approaching the world: systematic doubt. The hallmark of Cartesianism is setting up a formal system of doubt, that is, of questioning all propositions and conclusions using a formal system. Once one has arrived at a certain piece of knowledge, that piece of knowledge then becomes the basis for clearing up other doubts. Descartes systematic doubt became the basis of the Enlightenment and modern scientific tradition. One begins with a proposition, or hypothesis, that is in doubt and then tests that proposition until one arrives, more or less, at a certain conclusion. That does not, however, end the story. When confronted by the conclusions of others, one's job is to doubt those conclusions and redo the tests. Once a hypothesis has been tested and retested, then one can conclude that one has arrived at a "scientific truth." That, of course, doesn't end it, for all scientific truths can be doubted sometime in the future. In other words, although scientists speak about certainty and truth all the time, the foundational epistemology is skeptical: doubt anything and everything.

Skepticism

by Gregory Alter,

Skepticism is a key tool in philosophy. Socrates used it to uncover untruths, false beliefs, opinion and speculation. It is an attitude of doubt or incredulity towards knowledge or assertions. It is closely connected with understanding the limitations of knowledge.

When Descartes discovered his famous philosophical statement “Cogito ergo sum” (latin: “I think, therefore I am.”) he was himself skeptical about how we could know anything. How can we know what is the truth? How can we know that we do know anything, really, truly? All might be an illusion. Descartes asked himself, “how can I know that I exist?” In answer he discovered that since he was able to question his own existence, then he has to exist to do so.

In a way Descartes discovery was the ultimate in skepticism, and indeed it led directly to the ultimate answer; no longer can we doubt our own existence, but that did not help us in determining the existence of everything else. What if the whole universe is an illusion? Alas, the answer to that one is not so forthcoming.

Still it is important, in this modern world, to question everything we are told. Especially anything that involves common sense. This may seem as a paradox, as many people believe philosophy to be 'common sense' but in reality common sense is ingrained within us by the society in which we live and is connected with culture and belief systems. The danger of common sense is that one can be swept off into believing that common sense answers everything and tells us all we need to know about reality.

How do we know that we 'need' to work for example? Those who do not work, may in fact be happy not working (assuming they have social benefits or some other means to sustain themselves) but they will find themselves being subject to a large amount of pressure from society. Helpful friends and relatives will hint, help, and pester them to work, and try to find them a 'job'.

Our ancestors were hunters, and it is now believed that hunter societies had a large amount of free time for themselves and social activities. Would that not be ideal? Free time to do what you like? To enjoy life? These days however the possibility of returning to a hunter gather society is nonexistent, but nevertheless the realization that there are other ways of structuring society are key to the process of overcoming fixed beliefs. In actuality, growing food requires a large amount of labor and time (in comparison to hunting).

It was the transition to settled farming communities which created the need for laborers. In early communities this was a shared task, but as time proceeded communities became larger and the society more stratified, leaving the lowest and poorest with the burden of the work. This state of affairs was amplified throughout human history culminating with the serf of the middle ages.

The consumerism of modern times, one might think, differs from these earlier and barbaric times, but looking closely at the distribution of wealth, one sees that the system is different but we are still ruled by an elite few. We do not notice because we have choices, and a myriad of Orwellian controls, and a myriad of Bradburyian distractions (video walls almost upon us), but it is the way things are. Capitalism takes raw materials, and labor, and combines them to create a product that can be sold. The greater good in Capitalism is profit, and for the creation of that profit, a poorer lass of people are necessary to provide cheap labor (to keep costs down and profits up). And it needs a healthy mobile workforce for it to work (hence we are better off than the serfs of earlier systems). Our whole society is crafted to create the appearance of choice, it is a 'you can do anything you want to' Walt Disney society, which at the same time ignores the deep social problems that are guaranteed to ensure people can't have that freedom at all. If there was no poor, then who would make the goods?

The educational system ingrains in us sets of beliefs that society wants us to have, and these are convenient for society, but not necessarily for the individual. Those who do not go along with society are classed as deviants, and society tries to help them, and if they cannot be helped it shuns them. Back to the analogy of someone who doesn't work, it is assumed that he or she would be terribly bored and needs direction and structure in their lives. Even if that individual had their own sense of purpose, and plenty with which to fill up his or her day, others would not be able to recognize it, because society has taught them a system of beliefs in which the only purpose an individual should have; is to work.

The danger is that most people believe that their common sense is an innate sense of reality. Common sense represents, common reality; the consensus of the mob, it is a form of mass hallucination.

From this one example we have seen the power of skepticism to unravel commonly held beliefs. We may not necessarily be able to do anything about them, we may even have to unravel our own beliefs, and then unravel our own beliefs about our beliefs. But at least we know that it is an illusion, we can draw comfort from the widom being skeptical grants us. Skepticism, scrapes away at everything like an archaeologist brushing fine layers of soil off of a piece of pottery. It is an important and useful tool in the Philosopher's armory.