After slogging through On Certainty for a while, I found something that really resonated with me. He had already written 'doubt presupposes certainty', but that in itself was not enough.
What can we 'know'? Our knowledge is based on a loose foundation of assumptions, essentially. Even the most unshakeable pieces of knowledge, such as how many fingers I have, are essentially just concretely held assumptions. I can imagine a situation in which people contrived to convince me otherwise - that I had 4 or 6 fingers, perhaps. If they put sufficient effort into their endeavor, they could very well succeed. But if I then doubted the number of fingers I have, then how could I have been said to 'know' that number in the first place? To know is to be infallible, at least philosophically, but clearly then there is not much, if anything at all, that we can know.
I think this is pretty important. We 'know', for instance, that solids do not just disappear. However, is it not technically possible? There is a probability that a given atom will interact with anti-matter or simply release itself from its bonds or any number of other things. On the order of the number of atoms that comprise a macroscopic object, these probabilities fall to zero. Well, almost. There is still a nonzero chance that a tree, for example, could simply vaporize. Empirically, we know this does not practicably happen. So we say, we 'know' it cannot happen. But this is a fallacy.
Logic and knowledge are concepts that I am interested in reading more about. After Wittgenstein perhaps I will try Russell or Moore.
What can we 'know'? Our knowledge is based on a loose foundation of assumptions, essentially. Even the most unshakeable pieces of knowledge, such as how many fingers I have, are essentially just concretely held assumptions. I can imagine a situation in which people contrived to convince me otherwise - that I had 4 or 6 fingers, perhaps. If they put sufficient effort into their endeavor, they could very well succeed. But if I then doubted the number of fingers I have, then how could I have been said to 'know' that number in the first place? To know is to be infallible, at least philosophically, but clearly then there is not much, if anything at all, that we can know.
I think this is pretty important. We 'know', for instance, that solids do not just disappear. However, is it not technically possible? There is a probability that a given atom will interact with anti-matter or simply release itself from its bonds or any number of other things. On the order of the number of atoms that comprise a macroscopic object, these probabilities fall to zero. Well, almost. There is still a nonzero chance that a tree, for example, could simply vaporize. Empirically, we know this does not practicably happen. So we say, we 'know' it cannot happen. But this is a fallacy.
Logic and knowledge are concepts that I am interested in reading more about. After Wittgenstein perhaps I will try Russell or Moore.
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