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February 5 - November 28, 2021
“What can one know and when can one know it?”
Who, if anyone, can claim to have knowledge, and under what circumstances? When is it legitimate for me to say “I’m right and you’re wrong!” and to act accordingly?
But we ignore questions like, Who should decide what kind of questions to ask, what kind of research to do?
Plato the epistemologist understood that truth is elusive for all of us, but Plato the realist understood that some of us can come closer to it than others.
He searched until he found one proposition which was clearly beyond doubt: that he thought and thus knew he existed.
Descartes nonetheless achieved an important advance, not with his conclusion, but with his method. Systematic criticism was the key.
This kind of skepticism says cheerfully that we have to draw conclusions, but that we may regard none of our conclusions as being beyond any further scrutiny or change. “Go
This attitude does not require you to renounce knowledge. It requires you only to renounce certainty,
your knowledge is always tentative and subject to correction.
we must all take seriously the idea that any and all of us might, a...
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to adopt the attitude that you can never be completely sure you are right is a decision, a positive step—
If you are not inclined to doubt, you never even reach skepticism—it is simply not an issue; you simply believe without asking questions.
Hidden in the pages of the skeptical philosophers’ tomes is a radical social principle. It is the principle of public criticism.
No one, therefore, is above critical scrutiny, nor is any belief.
A society which has accepted skeptical principles will accept that sincere criticism is always legitimate.
No one gets the final say.
If any person may be in error, then no one can legitimately claim to be above being checked by others—ever.
No one has personal authority.
Nothing would be out of bounds for critical scrutiny. No one would be entitled to declare what was true knowledge and what was false opinion.
the fires cleared the ground for a new and extraordinarily powerful game—the game of liberal science.
The Royal Society of London in 1660 proudly took as its motto the phrase Nullius in Verba, meaning “No man’s word shall be final.”
We do not in principle allow any statement whatever to be immune from doubt.
The skeptical rule is, No one gets the final say: you may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it.
principle of falsifiability.
The empirical rule is, No one has personal authority: you may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement.
Who you are doesn’t count; the rules apply to everybody, regardless of identity.
The views of experts, no less than those of laymen, are expected to withstand checking.)
The system may not fix the outcome in advance or for good (no final say). • The system may not distinguish between participants (no personal authority).
this particular game has the two distinctive characteristics that define a liberal game: if you play it, you can’t set the outcome in advance, and you can’t exempt any player from the rules, no matter who he happens to be.
To the law of fallibility, the law of no final say, there are no exceptions. That is why liberals, whether religious or not, cringe in revulsion at the self-inflation of preachers and priest-dictators who claim certainty for their every whim.
The empirical rule has made knowledge public property and thrown the philosopher-king out the window as a fraud and a shaman.
attempts to claim a special kind of experience or checking for any particular person or kind of person—male or female, black or white, tall or short—are strictly illicit.
After a woman was raped by a gang of teenagers in New York City, the Reverend Al Sharpton said that there was no proof that a rape had occurred, because the victim was being attended by white doctors. In other words, white checkers’ findings do not count.
Believers in miracles argue that miraculous events can be witnessed and understood properly only by those to whom God chooses to reveal himself.
Plato’s regime of philosopher-rulers who have special access to truth? Prohibited, renounced, condemned.
Each one will set himself up as a little prophet; that is, a little “crank,” a half-witted victim of his own narrowness.
There is no way I could “prove” that the pope, say, has no final say; I can only say that, in a liberal intellectual regime, papal infallibility is strictly illicit, even immoral.
Liberalism’s great contribution to civilization is the way it handles conflict. No other regime has enabled large and varied groups of people to set a social agenda without either stifling their members’ differences or letting conflict get out of hand.
Bertrand Russell once said that “order without authority” might be taken as the motto both of political liberalism and of science.
In biological evolution, no outcome is fixed or final—nor is it in capitalism, democracy, science. There is always another trade, another election, another hypothesis.
Knowledge comes from people checking with each other. Science is not a machine; it is a society, an ecology. And human knowledge, like the species themselves, is a product of the turmoil of the interreactions of living organisms.
The genius of Locke (and, later, of Adam Smith and Charles Darwin) was to see, as Plato had not, that social stability does not require social stasis; just the opposite, in fact.
Just as no one is absolutely entitled to claim the right to rule, so no one is absolutely entitled to decide what is true. Just as not even a king may infringe on basic rights, so not even the wisest or holiest man may claim to be above error.
No: however certain you may feel, however strongly you are convinced, you must check.
Locke preached the sermon which every generation learns with such difficulty and forgets with such ease: “We should do well to commiserate our mutual ignorance, and endeavor to remove it in all the gentle and fair ways of information, and not instantly treat others ill, as obstinate and perverse, because they will not renounce their own, and receive our opinions. . . . For where is the man that has incontestable evidence of the truth of all that he holds, or of the falsehood of all he condemns?”
This, finally, is why the Constitution protects the speech of Nazis, Communists, racists, sexists, homophobes, and Andy Rooney: they may be right.
the notion of empowering a vast, amorphous, unsupervised mass of voters and traders to make crucial social decisions defies all common sense and intuition.
open-ended, decentralized decision-making systems are perpetually unsettling.
The only constant is change, and change is unnerving and sometimes painful and wasteful.
But the advantages of the two systems are enormous. They are flexible, which means that they adapt readily to change. They are broadly inclusive, and so make the most of human diversity. (Anyone can vote, anyone can own.) Yet by and large they are stable, despite being both flexible and broadly inclusive.
