Blogosophy

EpistemologyWhat do we know, and

Epistemology

What do we know, and how do we know it? The first challenge to any account of epistemology usually comes from skeptics, who ask "How can you know that?" The typical immediate response is along the lines of "Bite me."

A somewhat more philosophically sophisticated dialogue might go something like this:
Setting: a symposium in the Garden
Epicurus: All our knowledge ultimately comes from the senses, and we can trust the senses when properly used.
Skeptic: How can you know that?
Epicurus: Come again?
Skeptic: How do you know that your senses aren't deceived? Can you prove that you can trust them?
Epicurus: We can make a provisional judgement, which can later be corroborated or disproved by further sensory evidence.
Skeptic: But that's assuming what you're trying to prove. For all you know, further sensory evidence could be just as deceptive as the original evidence.
Epicurus: That seems unlikely; our experience shows a high degree of correlation between sense experiences at different moments. If they were deceptive, you'd expect them to hardly correlate at all.
Skeptic: You might be being systematically  deceived. Or your memories might be wrong. You can't ever prove that you're not, without appealing to something other than your senses as evidence. Pass the wine.
Epicurus: Which wine?
Skeptic: That wine right by your elbo--D'OH!
Epicurus: It seems pretty hard to live consistently as a Skeptic, without starving to death.
Skeptic: More like dying of thirst. Give me that. I still claim that you can't know anything for sure.
Epicurus: You're certain of that?
Skeptic: Positi--D'OH!
Epicurus: More wine?
Skeptic: Ok, you can't know anything for certain except  that you can't know anything for certain. No contradiction there, and you can't deny its truth.
Epicurus: Yes I can. I deny it categorically.
Skeptic: No you can't deny it.
Epicurus: I never have denied it.
Skeptic: You just did.
Epicurus: That's untrue.
Skeptic: Of course it's true, I heard you with my own--D'OH!

And that, in a nutshell, is the traditional Epicurean response to skepticism: it's impossible to live consistently as a skeptic; the proposition that knowledge is impossible is self-defeating; and even if it weren't the skeptic isn't entitled to use terms like "truth" and "knowledge" without giving some account of how it is that he knows what they mean, which he can't do without appeal at some level to sensory evidence. Posted by joshua at May 16, 2003 10:56 AM