How We Know · ages 9–12
Should you doubt everything?
You can doubt that you are awake. Can you doubt that you are doubting?
Doubt is usually taught as a virtue, and it is — up to the point where it eats the ground you are standing on.
Descartes did the most thorough version anyone has managed. He refused to accept anything he could possibly be wrong about, and pushed until he was left with one sentence: whatever else is true, something is here doing this thinking. He was not admiring doubt. He was using it the way you use a brush to clean a drain.
Sextus Empiricus took the opposite conclusion from the same observation. If every argument has an equally good opposite, then the calm thing is to stop judging altogether. He thought this produced peace. Most people notice it produces paralysis, and that staying undecided between two options is also a choice.
Peirce gave the answer that most working scientists and doctors live by: doubt is not a destination. It is a discomfort that exists to be resolved by looking. If you cannot say what would settle the question, you are not inquiring, you are performing — and Wittgenstein’s extra point cuts deepest of all. You cannot doubt everything at the same time, because doubting one thing requires holding a great many other things steady while you do it.
Try it
Pick one thing you know for certain — that you have hands, that your name is yours. Try to argue yourself out of it. Notice when the doubt becomes a game rather than a reason.
What do you think?
Do you think there is a right answer to this question?
Talk about it
- Does doubting something make you cleverer?
- Can you doubt without any reason to?
- Where does doubting stop being useful?
Yes, but… — the arguments people actually make
A good thinker doubts everything.
Then a good thinker doubts that too, and is left with nothing to think with. Doubt is a tool, not a personality.
If you doubt everything, you can't be wrong.
You also cannot be right, or useful, or interesting. Never being wrong is not an achievement when it is bought by never deciding.
Doubting is just being annoying and refusing to commit.
Sometimes, yes. But notice the difference: doubting because you have found a reason is inquiry, doubting to avoid ever having to answer is a hiding place. They look identical from outside.
What other philosophers think
- René DescartesDoubted everything he could in order to find one thing that survived — and found that the doubting itself proved something was there to doubt.
- Sextus EmpiricusArgued that for every argument there is an equal and opposite one, so the wise person suspends judgement and gets peace of mind.
- Charles Sanders PeirceSaid doubt is not a state to admire; it is an irritation, like a stone in your shoe, that exists to be removed by finding out.
- Ludwig WittgensteinPointed out that doubt needs grounds, and that if you doubted everything at once you would not be able to doubt anything — there would be no standing place to doubt from.
If you want to go further
- Meditations on First Philosophy — René Descartes1641. Doubt taken as far as it can go, and one thing that survived.
- Outlines of Pyrrhonism — Sextus EmpiricusAncient scepticism laid out as a way of life rather than a puzzle.
- On Certainty — Ludwig WittgensteinNotes written at the end of his life, on why doubting everything is not an option.
Most of these were written for adults, which is why it is worth reading them with someone older.