Callard's septic skepticism

In an article titled 'What We Believe About Skepticism'-Agnes Callard writes in the NYT

Only other people can force us to doubt the beliefs we hold dear. 

We all develop beliefs regarding things which are of no interest to others and of which they may have no inkling. The neighbor's cat often lies upon the roof of the garden shed and appears to be staring at me. Or so I fondly believe. But sometimes, I doubt this belief. The cat is just a cat sunning itself. It has no interest in my doings. Perhaps, I'm wrong. Maybe if I twerked like Beyonce the cat will be persuaded that I am worthy of its interest. 

It is easy to see that Callard is wrong- at least if you live in England. We have often thought- 'this is going to be a fine sunny day'- only to doubt our belief a few moments later. What forces us to doubt our beliefs is unexpected outcomes or states of the world. Other people can't force us to change our beliefs. We could always believe that whatever force they were applying to us must inevitably have the opposite consequence to the one they intended. 

Descartes’s philosophical journey shows us why.

But nobody forced Descartes to challenge his own beliefs. He just decided on his own to challenge his unreflecting belief in the evidence of his own sense perception. But he was no Pyrrhonist. His cogito is a far cry from the more thoroughgoing skeptical traditions of India.

In fractious times like these, people tend to converge on skeptical mantras:

During COVID, or any other similar national emergency, we understand the need for cohesiveness. We become more intolerant of skeptics. There may be a sharp polarization of opinion. There won't be a 'convergence' on the notion that 'anything goes'.

 “Keep an open mind,” we say. 

Maybe COVID is a hoax. Biden stole the elections. Can you really be sure that the Post Office isn't a cover for a pedophile ring? 

“Adopt a critical distance.” 

Who says that? This may be a 'mantra' used in preparing students for post-grad research but it doesn't exactly trip of the tongue in ordinary conversation.

“Question received opinions.” 

Again, that's something Professors of shite subjects might say. 

Even sharply polarized interlocutors can sing the praises of skepticism and doubt in unison.

They can also mount each other during Departmental meetings. We should discourage them from doing so.

But how does doubt work, exactly?

Doubt is not 'well defined'. It can't feature as the argument of a mathematical function. There may be things associated with it which can so feature. Those things could be said to perform work. 

The 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes is famous for having transformed doubt into a method for directing the mind, for questioning the self.

Descartes is famous for the cogita- i.e. the notion that we can't doubt we are thinking. Yet many feel that the cogito is a pseudo proposition. We doubt it means anything and thus it doesn't really represent thinking. 

What’s less well-known is that when he tried to use his own method, he ran into a serious stumbling block.

What is not known to be a fact at all is that Philosophy is useful. 

Descartes begins his journey into doubt by reflecting on his past errors:

They were inconsequential. The fact is, Reason does not require us to doubt things which are useful. Stupidity- or the desire to shit higher than our arsehole- may lead us to do so. 

 He is disturbed by the discovery that so many of the views he had uncritically absorbed over the course of his childhood had turned out to be wrong. 

Yet everybody else who had absorbed those views did fine. 

What if the remainder of his views were wrong, too?

They were. Still, there was a market for that shite.

Descartes decides that the safest route, as he writes in his “Meditations on First Philosophy,” published in 1641, is to commit to “the general demolition of my opinions,” with the aim of rebuilding his mind on a firm foundation.

He failed. 

So one day, sitting alone in his room, he sets himself to doubting everything he thinks is true.

But this could only be what he thought he thought was true. But even there, there was a doubt. Perhaps he only thought he thought the thought the thing was true. 

But he finds that he can’t do it. 

We may say of a dream, that it seemed real. We may even say 'this moment feels like a dream!' but the great difference between waking and sleeping is that when we are awake we can't sustain the notion that we might be dreaming for more than a brief moment- unless we iz high. 

Descartes's mistake was to think that because dreams can feel real, reality could feel, for any sustained time, dream-like.

He writes: “My habitual opinions keep coming back, and, despite my wishes, they capture my belief, which is as it were bound over to them as a result of long occupation and the law of custom.”

Because he was awake. Still, at least he could keep his stupid shit straight long enough to write it down and gain by it. 

Doubting something you believe is not, Descartes discovered, something you can straightforwardly do.

Yet we do it all the time. Mummy believes kiddie is an angel but keeps a close eye on the little imp. We often find that the most devoted and effective Churchman or Communist, etc, is the one who struggles most with his faith.

Try it yourself and you’ll realize it’s harder than it seems. Choose a widely agreed-upon factual belief — like Berlin is a city in Germany, or two plus two equals four.

Berlin is a city in Prussia. There should be no such thing as Germany. Two plus two is ten in base 4. Doubt is easy.

Or pick one of your own steadfast political beliefs — like all people deserve access to health care, or gun control is an encroachment on personal freedom. 

Coz the guy who raped and killed your kid really deserves expensive medical treatment you pay for from your taxes. Gun control is an encroachment on personal freedom- that's why I'm in favor of it. 

Or pick a belief you’re already uncertain about, though in that case your doubting would be tasked with generating more uncertainty than you already feel. Once you’ve picked your belief, go ahead, flip the switch. Start doubting.

I think Queen Elizabeth II is the monarch of the United Kingdom. I doubt this. I then look the thing up on a Government website. Apparently she is the queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

I’ve tried it many times: Nothing happens. 

That's strange. Most people ask Alexa or Google the thing or do something else to resolve the doubt.

I tell myself, “I’m going to doubt this thing I believe!” “I’m suspending my judgment!” “From now on, I’m not going to assume this is true!” But my pronouncements have the character of the speeches we make to ourselves in our dreams, when we try to convince ourselves that we aren’t actually dreaming.

When we are actually dreaming we often find ourselves unable to do the thing we need to do- e.g. shoot the bad guy. When we are awake, this is not generally the case. Callard did not do what the normal person would do- viz. look up relevant information to resolve a doubt. That's why she felt herself to be paralyzed- as in a nightmare.

Maybe you think you’re different. Maybe you’ve flipped the switch just now and are persuaded that you’re successfully doubting something you once believed in.

The action of verifying information suggests that one has entertained a doubt of some kind. The absence of any such verification procedure suggests that no actual doubt supervened. Callard is like a person who sticks her fingers firmly into her ears and then says 'I'm trying really hard to hear what you are saying.' It is obvious she is either lying or else is an utter imbecile. 

Well, just wait a bit. Sooner or later, you’ll find yourself pointing to Berlin on a map, or checking whether you received the correct change from the cashier, or getting worked up over an op-ed about health care or gun control.

It may be that Callard is not an imbecile. But she teaches imbeciles. She knows if she says to them 'doubt that x is true' they will refuse to do any such thing. Similarly if she says 'listen carefully to what I am going to say' she knows they will promptly jam their fingers into their ear-holes. So she says 'just wait a bit. Sooner or later, you will take your fingers out of your ears and be able to hear what people are saying to you.' 

And when that happens — when you exhibit all the telltale signs of belief, behaving exactly as you did before you supposedly flipped the switch — you’ll come to the same realization Descartes did: Your so-called doubting was all an act. You were just pretending.

Not if you carried out a sensible verification procedure. You have picked up useful information along the way. For example, I now know that Berlin is both a City- like London- and a State. 

Faced with this problem at the time, Descartes, rather charmingly, decides to double down on the act. In “Meditations” he writes: “I think it will be a good plan to turn my will in completely the opposite direction and deceive myself, by pretending for a time that these former opinions are utterly false and imaginary.” Descartes forces himself to imagine that a “malicious demon” is in control of his mind and that all the most basic truths he’s long known about himself and the world are merely delusions wrought by this evil creature. “I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh, or blood or senses,” he writes, “but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”

If this malicious demon got him to see his dear old Mumsy as a dangerous assassin and if he crushed her skull in, then Descartes, on learning the truth, may well have believed himself to have been possessed.

It is the absence of any accompanying action which might reinforce or dispel the belief which causes us to doubt whether any actual doubt was entertained. 

Once again, it doesn’t work. At a crucial moment, the pretense cracks open, and Descartes lapses back into his old ways. A piece of wax in his room attracts his attention and he starts to describe it: “It has just been taken from the honeycomb; it has not yet quite lost the taste of the honey; it retains some of the scent of the flowers from which it was gathered.” “If you rap it with your knuckle,” he continues, “it makes a sound.”

At that time, there was a notion of 'conatus'- which Descartes described as "an active power or tendency of bodies to move, expressing the power of God'- such that all created things tended to preserve their nature over time. Descartes termed this conatus se movendi, or "conatus of self-preservation". However, it was a common observation of the divines, that it is very difficult to persist in a state of contemplative devotion. The mind gets distracted. Thus what Descartes is describing is the problem us mortals face when we try to rise above our petty concerns so as to, as Wittgenstein so eloquently put it, shit higher than our arseholes. 

Strictly speaking, Descartes’s “method” would have required him to doubt not only the existence of the wax, but the hands holding it and the nose smelling it. But Descartes finds that he can’t stop thinking that what he senses is, in fact, really there.

Nor can he keep himself from gassing on about how it mightn't be there at all. 

Which gets at an essential truth: Ultimately, none of us can decide not to believe what seems true to us,

this is false. We can decide to believe that we aren't the most important person in the world- if only to ourselves. A moment may come when a greedy and selfish man, much to his own surprise, decides to push a child out of the path of a truck though he goes under its wheels himself. 

 any more than we can decide what wax smells like.

Yet, any of us might be asked a questions like 'what type of perfumed candle is this one? I've got a cold and can't tell.' You smell it and then have to decide whether it is jasmine or gardenia or whatever. I imagine there might be well-paid professionals employed to do this sort of thing. 

Descartes tells the story of his intellectual development twice. The version in “Meditations” is justly preferred by philosophers for its greater depth of argumentation. But the version in his “Discourse on Method,” published in 1637, contains an important admission about some of the sources of those arguments:

“I took the decision that, as far as the rest of my opinions were concerned, I could freely undertake to rid myself of them. And seeing that I expected to be better able to complete this task in the company of others than by remaining shut any longer in the stove-heated room in which I had had all these thoughts, I set out on my travels again before winter was over.”

What is the 'important admission'? Callard, I assume, is trying to justify her opening statement that 'only other people can force us to doubt beliefs we hold dear'. But, if you are strong and aggressive, you will never meet such people whereas if you are weak and puny you might constantly be accosted by people who want to force you to believe you want to give them a beejay. 

Thinking you’re right about something isn’t a sign of arrogance — it’s a sign of thinking. 

A thing is not generally considered to be a sign of itself.  A thought is a thought. It is not the sign of a thought. The thought that one is right may indeed be an arrogant thought.  But it isn't a sign that any real thinking has occurred.

Changing your own mind isn’t your job; 

This is only true if you are feeble-minded or are studying a worthless subject at Uni because you are as stupid as shit. 

it’s the job of other people, 

Callard, poor booby, thinks she gets paid not to think smart thoughts but to change the minds of imbeciles who think it is their own job to be less stupid. She assures them this isn't the case. People like herself must be paid to do this noisome work. 

Freud invented a marvelous way in which to get healthy people to pay through the nose for 'therapy'. He rigorously excluded the genuinely mentally ill because they tended not to have a pot to piss in.

Callard is arguing in the NYT that nobody need think for themselves. People like her ought to be paid to assure them them of this as often as is required.

of those who disagree with you. That’s because, unlike you, other people are free and able to think you’re wrong.

But, unless they are paid to do so and can beat the shit out of you, they have no great incentive to tell you so. 

 Likewise, it’s ultimately your responsibility to change other people’s minds.

Not unless you have been specifically hired for that purpose.

In polarized times, we’re inclined to fabricate excuses for not being one another’s intellectual keepers in this way. 

'Intellectual keepers' do exist. However, absent a Medical or legal order, nobody has the right to behave towards anybody else as a Guardian or keeper or wet-nurse or whatever. 

On the other hand, it is true that I've, quite unconscionably, used the lockdown as an excuse not to impregnate the hordes of super-models who are dying of lust for my hot-bod. 

One of these excuses is the conceit that the people who disagree with us could pull themselves up by their own epistemic bootstraps if only they were more humble, more open-minded, more willing to detach themselves from their views.

My failure to impregnate super-models is excusable by reason of the despair beautiful women feel when contemplating my pulchritude. They feel they are unworthy of me and on spying me from a distance, quickly cross the road or turn around and run away. 

 We want to send people to their stove-heated rooms with a hefty prescription of doubt: “Don’t come out until you’ve flipped the switch!”

I want supermodels to go to their 'stove-heated room' with a hefty prescription of lust for my hot bod. 'Don't come out till you're really turned on by the thought that for the low low price of a cheese sandwich and a can of Iron-Bru, you too can have your wicked way with me.' 

But there is no such switch. And before we blame 

we should consider whether that game is worth the candle

the myth that there is one — the myth of epistemic self-sufficiency

actually, the myth is that there could be a mathesis universalis- i.e. an algorithmic way to crank out all 'true' knowledge once we have found more basic true 'atomic propositions'. 

 — on Descartes, we should note that there’s more than enough blame to go around: While we may have drawn many important lessons from Descartes’s method of doubt, we’ve drawn precious few from his practice of it.

God alone knows what lessons this cretin thinks important. Still, if she is paid good money to teach then perhaps there really are people with more money than sense. That's a good thing. The existence of wasteful expenditure is a signal that there's spare capacity in the system.