An Argument Against Skepticism

The skeptic claims that we are wrong to credit ourselves with knowledge. Our belief that we possess knowledge is a false belief: we make an error when we ascribe knowledge to ourselves. But why do we make this error? On this question the skeptic is strangely silent: we are not told what the source of the error is and why we fall into it. This is unsatisfactory: surely an error this large, this persistent, should have an explanation. The skeptic owes us a theory of the error he imputes. The error that the earth is stationary lasted for millennia and was difficult to dislodge, but it is an understandable error, given our location and the facts of physics (inertia etc.). Not for no reason did people cling to the error in question. Similarly for the error (if it is one) that objects are objectively colored, which was not detected until the seventeenth century (initially by Galileo). This error can be seen to arise from the way objects look: they look objectively colored. In general errors have explanations; they are not gratuitous, groundless, inexplicable. If we cannot explain the error, the claim that it is an error is pro tanto dubious, especially if the claim of error rests on convoluted argument. So, the skeptic needs to meet this challenge or else concede weakness in his position; at the very least the question should be acknowledged and addressed. Why do we falsely believe that we have knowledge if the skeptic is right in saying that we demonstrably do not? The arguments for skepticism are not complex and can be easily grasped, so why have they not undermined the belief in knowledge long ago? Why do we even have the concept of knowledge if the concept is never (or seldom) instantiated? Is it perhaps that the skeptic is wrong and we do have knowledge in the cases where we believe we do?

            Here is a possible explanation: we are under the illusion that we have knowledge. There are well known visual illusions that produce false beliefs, and we can envisage more pervasive types of visual illusion (such as the illusion that objects are objectively colored). But this is not a plausible explanation: for we don’t perceive instances of knowledge by means of the senses. It isn’t as if it looks as if knowledge exists but it really doesn’t (like the proverbial pink rats). We don’t perceive knowledge at all, so there can’t be sensory illusions of knowledge. Nor is it plausible that the word “knowledge” encourages the error: we don’t believe we have knowledge because the word intimates that we do; it isn’t that the word is a very vivid name that conjures up a non-existent referent. So, it is a mystery why we commit and persist in the error, finding ourselves shocked when the skeptic mounts his assault. And the skeptic never concludes his assault by saying, “And the reason you commit the error I have just exposed is X”, where “X” stands for the error theory we are searching for. Moreover, we don’t typically respond to the skeptic’s argument by saying immediately, “Oh silly me, how could I have made this error for so long?”. On the contrary, the alleged error is remarkably resistant to revision (as Hume pointed out); we don’t simply abandon the belief in knowledge forthwith. In other cases of error, even ancient and universal error, reason prevails and the error is corrected; but skepticism has made little progress in removing the erroneous beliefs it attacks, though it has been around for over 2,000 years. We just don’t respond to it as one whose error has been convincingly exposed. What is the skeptic’s explanation of this resistance—if not that there is really no error that is being exposed? It’s surely not simple dogmatism and arrogance—epistemic overestimation—since it really does seem to us that we know things about the world. We sincerely believe that we have genuine knowledge of things; it’s not that we only act this way in order to impress others. That is why skepticism comes as a shock to the system.

            Note that this point doesn’t tell us what is wrong with the skeptic’s arguments; it merely suggests that something must be wrong. The next task would be to identify precisely what that something is. But it does indicate what is peculiar about skeptical doubt, namely that it is removed from ordinary sources of error. In the normal course of things, we experience no difficulty in recognizing error, explaining it, and revising our beliefs accordingly. For example, we might come to see that we were subject to a visual illusion that gave rise to a false belief, so that we were wrong to think that we had knowledge. It is well within our powers to change our attributions of knowledge to ourselves. Here there is no problem with supplying an error theory and changing our epistemic beliefs because of it. But what explains my erroneous belief that I know there is an external world? It isn’t that I have recently discovered that I am a brain in a vat—that would certainly explain my false belief that I know there is an external world! But the problem is that there is no such explanation of why I erroneously believe that I know there is an external world, even if there is. Maybe I don’t know this, as the skeptic argues, but why do I believe that I know it to begin with? Why didn’t I recognize before that my belief that I know is shaky or baseless? Why did it take the skeptic to make me aware of this? What if skepticism had never been invented so that no one ever questioned their general beliefs about things (the external world, the past, other minds)? What would explain such massive error, on the assumption that I simply don’t know such things? Why do human beings so confidently believe that they have knowledge when they don’t? The error seems utterly inexplicable (if error it is). Isn’t it more likely that there is no error and we really do know? False astronomical beliefs are easy to explain, or false biological beliefs, but false epistemic beliefs are not like this—why are we wrong in our beliefs about what we know? To put it differently, why are we so wrong about which of our beliefs are justified? Maybe we are wrong, but we need to be told why we would make such a basic mistake. Are we just stupid? But lots of very smart people think we have knowledge, so it can’t be a matter of low IQ. Is it that we have such beliefs by instinct and don’t question them? Is the explanation that we are programmed genetically to believe we have knowledge? But what reason is there to believe that, and why can’t we rationally question such an instinct once reason gains a foothold in our minds? Nor is the belief instilled in us by something akin to religious indoctrination. None of the standard explanations for error works, so the skeptic has an undischarged obligation. We are guilty of a conceptual error, according to the skeptic, but what explains this error has yet to be diagnosed.[1]

Colin McGinn

[1] A similar challenge is faced by the opponent of free will: if there is no free will, why do people think there is? But here there are viable options: people might be confusing genuine freedom with mere freedom from coercion, or there might be a phenomenology of freedom that coexists with actual determinism. In the case of skepticism, however, nothing suggests itself, so the skeptic is left with an unexplained error, and one that cries out for explanation. Not that skepticism lacks intuitive force and powerful arguments in its favor, but it also faces intuitive and powerful counterarguments. I am just adding a further consideration into the mix, not trying to resolve the issue one way or the other.

Novels

Someone once described my first novel Bad Patches as a “punk existentialist” novel. I thought this an apt description. Written in the early Eighties, when punk was still alive and kicking in the UK (“Anarchy In”), the central character, Dave Green, is abrasive, abusive, resentful, unpleasant to be around, and generally repellent—though not without a certain rough charm. He wants to make it in modern England as an artist, but is condemned to be either unemployed or working in an off-license in Earl’s Court (where I used to live). He drinks a lot, chases girls, and says nasty things about his friends (Mick, in particular, a big violent lad, perpetually drunk). But he is also an existentialist of sorts: a stranger in an alien world, uncertain of his values, but above all authentic. Oh, he is authentic all right, authentic to a fault. Dave speaks his mind, he acts freely and with abandon, he doesn’t sugarcoat it. He is an artist, after all—a believer in the truth, no matter how ugly. He is brutally honest, a Johnny Rotten of the art world (and off-license). He belongs with the characters in the TV sit-com “The Young Ones” (a parody of the earlier Cliff Richards pop song of that name). The novel itself is a comedy, though certainly of the wincing and whining kind. It is of its time, politically and philosophically. John-Paul Sartre meets Rik Mayall: nausea and nastiness (but you have to laugh).

            My second novel, The Space Trap, written in the early Nineties, is very different. The central character, Alan Swift, is a dull dad working in an insurance office. He lives in his imagination and dreams of escape. There is nothing punk about him (post-punk, you might say). He is persecuted by his humdrum environment: the moths that invade his flat, the shattered windscreen, the annoying co-workers, the demanding and unsympathetic wife (as he sees it). He’s gotta get outta this place. His world resembles that of the British TV series The Office, which came along several years later. Like David Brent, who also works in a dull office but lives in his imagination, Alan Swift is subject to unconscious forces he cannot control. As it happens, Ricky Gervais studied philosophy at University College London, where I used to teach, but he came along just after I had left. I have often wondered if he read my novel, because the office I describe is remarkably like the one he created. But in my novel Alan does escape to the world of his imagination—he moves to New York, leaving his family behind and not telling them he is going. I used to call this novel a Kantian soap opera: not punk existentialist but working stiff psychoanalytic (Kantian because of the emphasis on the inescapability of space). It also is a comedy, though gentler than Bad Patches, more sad-sentimental and domestic-depressing (but you have to laugh).

Easy and Hard Problems

It has become customary to speak of “the hard problem of consciousness” and “easy problems [of consciousness]”. I think this is an unhelpful way to talk; it is too simple-minded. In the first place, we should not say that consciousness itself is a hard problem; rather, its relation to the brain is a hard problem. That is, the brain-consciousness problem is a hard problem. There is nothing about consciousness as such that is particularly perplexing; it’s not like the quantum world or the behavior of schizophrenics. On the contrary, much of consciousness is well known to us and not a source of puzzlement (we don’t wake up every morning and feel bemused about our consciousness). Consciousness is only a major problem in relation to the brain, and only because of the “explanatory gap”. The problem is how the brain could produce consciousness (if “produce” is the right word): so, it is really a problem about the brain. We should be speaking of “the hard problem of the brain”, i.e., the problem of how the brain contrives to generate consciousness. We can explain how the brain produces behavior (more or less), but we can’t explain how it produces conscious experience. It is the mind-brain problem that is hard. But is there any easy part of that problem? Don’t say, “Yes, because explaining behavior is (relatively) easy”; that isn’t an aspect of the mind-body problem. I suggest that there are no easy explanatory mind-body problems to speak of; all the problems are hard. True, it is relatively easy to establish psychophysical correlations and psychophysical causation, but these are not explanatory problems. Nothing about consciousness is explained by brain science: not its subjectivity, not its intentionality, not its rationality, not even its propositionality. So, there are no easy mind-body problems of an explanatory nature—though there are easy behavior-body problems. There are, however, easy problems of consciousness: its general characterization (“there’s something it’s like”), its contents at a given moment, who has it and when, its various types (perception, thought, emotion, sensation, etc.). It is therefore quite misleading to say baldly that consciousness is a hard problem; or that some parts of the mind-body problem are easy. Some (most?) of consciousness is easy, and all forms of the mind-body problem are hard. We do better to speak of easy and hard problems of the brain: behavior easy, experience hard. Also, we should not give the impression that only the conscious part of the mind raises a hard mind-body problem; the unconscious mind raises one too.[1] All in all, the usual way of talking these days is massively misleading and should be abandoned.

There are other defects in the received terminology. First, it is too dichotomous: we are offered a two-way distinction between easy and hard problems. But surely, we need finer distinctions than that: we need really easy problems, easy-ish problems, pretty hard problems, hard problems, super hard problems, and terminally hard problems. Difficulty clearly comes in degrees and is not binary affair. Maybe the various mind-body problems vary in their degree of hardness, while all being pretty damn hard. Second, the standard talk makes no allowance for the possibility of subject-relative hardness:  perhaps no problem is hard simpliciter but only hard for this or that form of intelligence. Then we should speak of the “hard-for-us problem of X”. Third, the use of “hard” here fails to signal an essential feature of the type of problem it purports to describe, namely that the thing in question is a mystery. When Chomsky first introduced the division of question types into two kinds he spoke of “problems” and “mysteries”, not of “easy” and “hard” problems. This avoids suggesting that serious scientific questions are easy to answer, and it signaled that some questions move into a region beyond the merely “hard”: these questions completely baffle us, are difficult even to formulate, and suggest no workable methodology for their eventual solution. The word “mystery” captures this category of questions perfectly.

A question seldom asked by those who favor the “easy-hard” terminology is whether it generalizes beyond the case of the mind-body problem. I would say yes (though preferring the “problem-mystery” terminology). There are easy problems of matter and hard problems of matter: how to calculate a trajectory is easy, understanding quantum theory is hard. And there are other problems in physics that deserve to be called hard, which have been discussed elsewhere.[2] There are also hard problems in biology, notably the origin of life on earth, compared to easy problems (what species humans evolved from, for example). Some fall between these extremes, like the question of why sex evolved (this one might be categorized as “surprisingly hard”). Then we have moral problems: it is easy to see that one ought to return what one has borrowed but hard to decide what we owe to future generations. Again, we must avoid binary thinking and allow for all manner of gradations and varieties of difficulty, but it is certainly helpful to rank outstanding problems on a scale of hardness. I myself think that intentionality is an easier problem than subjectivity, though both are up there in degree of difficulty. The simple “easy-hard” distinction is really a way to avoid serious thinking not an example of it. Like many a catchy label, it hampers rather than helps.[3]

Colin McGinn

[1] See my paper “The Mystery of the Unconscious” in Philosophical Provocations (2017).

[2] See my Basic Structures of Reality (2011) and We Have No Idea, by Jorge Cham and Daniel Whiteson (2018).

[3] It is true that in “Can We solve the Mind-Body Problem?” I described consciousness as the “hard nut of the mind-body problem”, but I never subscribed to the “easy-hard” distinction as it came to be formulated subsequently. Nor did I ever use the phrase “the hard problem of consciousness”.

Existentialist Ethics and Value Realism

By “existentialist ethics” I mean ethical theories according to which ethical precepts or principles are determined by the moral agent’s acts of choice and have no basis in objective reality. They are imposed not encountered, invented not discovered, projected not detected, endogenous not exogenous, subjective not objective, human not extra-human, internal not external. Existentialist ethicists include Sartre, Ayer, Hare, Mackie, and anyone who thinks that values spring from us and not the world outside of us—anyone who thinks values spring from our attitudes.  By “value realism” I mean the view that values exist independently of our acts and attitudes; they are in the world as it is prior to any choices, decisions, or posturing on our part. They are the basis of our moral beliefs not the product of them. They are objective facts of nature, as real as anything. Awareness of them is what grounds our moral attitudes and practices. I will argue (a) that value realism (VR) is the only alternative to existentialist ethics (EE), and (b) that EE is demonstrably inadequate as an ethical theory (or type of ethical theory). So, it is either moral nihilism or moral realism, with nothing in between.

       Philosophers and others have certainly felt that those two alternatives are unacceptable and that it is possible to contrive less rebarbative moral theories. Thus, we have emotivism, prescriptivism, divine command theory, utilitarianism, deontology (Kantian and other), virtue ethics, and contractualism–in opposition to full-blown Sartrean existentialism. I think all these are the product of wishful thinking: their flaws are easy to discern and are really doomed attempts to avoid the dilemma I sketched above (nihilism or realism). The common problem is that all these theories introduce deep arbitrariness into moral thought (unless they are taken to presuppose VR): since there is nothing (allegedly) objective to ground moral thought, it is left as a free-floating enterprise subject to no rational constraint. This has been a constant refrain in reaction to such theories, but I don’t think the depth of the problem has been properly appreciated: it is pervasive and principled.

Let’s go over the theories in question, beginning with classic Sartrean existentialism (I will try to be brief). This theory maintains that we live in a value-free world, so that we must fall back on our own free decisions, which reflect the nothingness of human nature (“existence precedes essence”). We freely choose in an ethical void; we commit ourselves to values that have no objective validity. Authenticity is facing up to the inescapable absence of objective value and simply choosing what values we shall live by. The problem is that such a choice must be inherently arbitrary: you can choose any value system and not be accused of error. Since you choose in a vacuum, anything will be as defensible as anything else: there is nothing to stop you simply reversing ordinary bourgeois morality and replacing it with such precepts as “murder is right”, “stealing is good”, “genocide is meritorious”. We cannot say that anything is wrong in itself, only that we choose to describe certain things as wrong on no other basis than that we so decide. Anything else is deemed “bad faith”.

       It is easy to see that the same problem afflicts emotivism and prescriptivism. Since nothing objective (“factual”) grounds our emotional reactions, there can be no reason to prefer one kind of evaluative emotional reaction to another, except such considerations as convenience, popularity, and prejudice. If a person reacts emotionally to murder with a kind of cold thrill, then there can be no objection to him: that’s just the way he feels. If you feel an emotional solidarity with the Nazis, who is to gainsay your emotion? There is nothing out there to show that you are wrong. Prescriptivism has the same difficulty: you can universally prescribe anything so long as your prescriptions are consistent; there can be no such thing as a false prescription. You can choose your prescriptions according to whim, which means the choice is arbitrary. There is no objective criterion of correctness for moral prescriptions. We cannot say that only certain prescriptions follow from what objective values require, these being the morally right prescriptions to make.

       You might think divine command theory avoids the problem of arbitrariness, since we can appeal to God’s commands to ground our moral beliefs: we prescribe what God prescribes, and feel what he feels. The problem here is not that God doesn’t exist; it’s that the same objection applies to God. He could choose otherwise and then that would become the moral law (the Euthyphro problem). God’s ethics is essentially an existentialist ethics. If God is a prescriptivist about moral language, then his moral prescriptions are as arbitrary as ours, there being nothing that grounds them except free choice. He too is shooting in the moral dark.

       Surely utilitarianism is not subject to the same problem, since it identifies goodness with pleasure and badness with pain (or something similar)—and these are clearly facts about the world beyond the judging subject. Indeed, but that is to be a value realist; it doesn’t suppose that value is a freely given human projection onto the world. On the other hand, if you insist that value is so projected, and is not intrinsic to pleasure and pain, then you are back with the arbitrariness problem. For again, the projection may not follow the standard distribution: we could project goodness onto pain and badness onto pleasure without violating any objective facts. Absurd, no doubt, but not contrary to the EE playbook. Either pleasure and pain are intrinsically, objectively, good or bad, respectively, or they are so only by means of free decision—so it’s either VR or EE with nothing in between.

       What about deontological ethics?  Again, we have the same problem: are our duties and obligations inherently good or is it a matter of free decision? If the former, then we have VR; if the latter, then we have EE and arbitrariness. Is promise-keeping good in itself or is it only good because we deem it so? Does it have intrinsic value or only imposed value? If the latter, then there is no basis for erroneous deeming; any deeming is as good, or bad, as any other (subject to consistency requirements).

       Virtue ethics is the same: either the virtues are inherently good (virtuous) or they are good because we decide they are, projecting goodness onto them; and the same for the vices. The former is a type of VR, the latter a type of EE. Clearly, we can’t just stipulate what is to be a virtue—as if we could decide that it’s virtuous to protect rocks but not children. But why not if being virtuous is something freely conferred by suitable mental or verbal acts? Virtue ethics is not an alternative to VR or EE, but presupposes one or the other of these positions.

       Contracts are freely entered into by consenting parties and may contain all sorts of agreements; so contractualism will be open to the arbitrariness objection. You and I may both agree that I can whip your children if they trespass onto my property so long as I feed them afterwards, but that would hardly be a sound moral rule. Only if we build correct values into our contracts can they be expected to produce sound moral conduct; the contract by itself cannot do this. Contracts can’t confer values by themselves, so they can’t be the basis of morality. Contractualism is really a kind of social EE: not the solitary subject legislating value, but the social group willing value into existence by mutual consent.

It seems, then, that all the standard theories fall into one camp or the other: they either tacitly assume value realism or they endorse some form of existentialist ethics. There is no middle ground—no non-realist account of morality, as we have it. Morality implodes under existentialist principles. But we cannot infer from this that realist ethics is victorious, attractive as that may seem; for it may be that there are fatal objections to VR. In that case, moral nihilism would be the indicated conclusion: there is just no such thing as right and wrong. It can’t be a matter of objective mind-independent values because there are none such, and it can’t be a matter of humanly imposed values because that would be to make morality arbitrary; so, it can’t be anything. Obviously, then, we must enquire into the viability or otherwise of value realism, which I leave to a separate paper (“Value Realism and Metaphysical Mystery”).[1]

[1] Obviously too, there is a substantial historical background to what I say here; I make no claim to originality. It was Iris Murdoch  who first pointed out the similarities between Sartre and various Oxford philosophers (Ayer, Hare).