Meditation 20: To Know or Not to Know

We are everywhere bombarded with information and knowledge claims.  Information includes everything from bus time tables and tide charts to the chemical analysis of complex substances.  Knowledge claims go beyond this.  We find people who claim to know all sorts of things, from the nature of the True God to the way society ought to be arranged for the good of all.  Simple information is not worth worrying about.  We know what it is and how to come by it.  Information can be timely or out of date, accurate or imprecise, but, within limited contexts, we have agreed ways of telling true information from false.  It is another thing altogether when knowledge claims conflict and there is no agreed means of telling what is true. We see these claims argued out in the marketplace of ideas and on the battlefields of the world.

Benign skepticism is an attitude of mind that looks at all the warring knowledge claims and refuses to be drawn into the battle.  It refuses to take sides, but can see both sides.  In the last three or four centuries, philosophical skepticism has been associated with a radical questioning of all knowledge.  I am talking about a different kind of skepticism, one that accepts knowledge with a little "k".  There are things that only a fool would doubt.

In ancient times, there were two sorts of skeptics, the dogmatic and the agnostic. The dogmatic skeptics held that knowledge is impossible, and that even if it were possible, it would be incommunicable.  They argue against the possibility of knowledge. Their role is entirely negative. All dogmatic skeptics can do is to rebut knowledge claims and find ways to argue against the possibility of knowledge in general. To my mind, this is too dogmatic and turns skepticism in to a kind of knowledge, knowledge of the impossibility of knowledge.  The agnostic skeptics, alternatively, do not claim to know that knowledge is impossible.  They are open-minded about the possibility of finding what they seek. In the original sense of the Greek, skeptics are those who seek knowledge and truth. Even if they should spend their whole lives seeking, but never finding, the final answers, still, they will have escaped the morass of conflicting knowledge claims and continued to learn.