Agnosticism (Part One)

Busker Philosophical Shorts

The death of Socrates - he chose hemlock rather than exile.

This is the first in a series of ‘shorts’ dealing with what I consider to be important philosophical issues that are relevant to the situation we all find ourselves in. This may be useful to some. I have already confessed to being an agnostic, a sceptic and an optimist. Here I will explain what I mean by agnosticism and why I believe it to be important. This will involve 4-5 articles no longer than 12 minutes each. If there is sufficient support I will provide a similar series dealing with the bewitchment of language.

A long time ago, a famous philosopher made a stark admission in relation to philosophy. He said:

To teach people to live without certainty, and yet without being paralysed by hesitation, is perhaps the chief thing that philosophy, in our age, can still do for those who study it.¹

This quote from Bertrand Russell perfectly sums up the purpose of this chapter: i.e. to demonstrate the usefulness of adopting an agnostic position with regard to certain truth claims: i.e. with regard to things we are told are true.

Agnosticism is the term used to describe the condition of not knowing whether something is the case or not – or whether something is ‘true’ or not. But to be agnostic does not involve a denial of truth or the claim that we can never know anything: agnosticism is not the same thing as nihilism. Over the years, I have found agnosticism useful both in terms of examining reality and in avoiding the distress that the acceptance of some truth claims involves. Agnosticism is part of that branch of philosophy known as Epistemology.

The phrase: ‘wisest is he who knows that he does not know’, attributed to Socrates, has been interpreted in different ways, but it is clear from Plato’s dialogues² that Socrates is not claiming that we can’t know anything (Socrates was not a nihilist). The Oracle³ had claimed that Socrates was the wisest man in Greece: Socrates set out to prove the Oracle wrong (or so he claimed). He did so by asking people on the streets of Athens whether they knew the meanings of values such as justice, or piety, friendship or courage in the hope of finding someone wiser than he. Through a process of questioning (known as the elenchus) Socrates exposed inconsistencies in the arguments of his interlocutors – revealing the fact that they did not actually know what they claimed to know.⁴ In this fashion, Socrates encouraged people to examine their beliefs critically, which annoyed some, who never thought to reflect on their assumptions.⁵ But for Socrates, the unexamined life was not worth living. ⁶ In Appendix One: The Socratic Dialogues, I examine in more detail the sort of agnosticism Socrates’ implies by this famous phrase and how useful it is.

Generally speaking, people in the modern world are the same as their ancient Greek counterparts in that they rarely examine their own lives or their beliefs – for many different reasons. Furthermore, modern people have the same tendency as their Ancient Greek counterparts to claim knowledge of things with very little justification. An agnostic attitude is important in challenging this tendency. Knowledge and knowing are much more complicated than most people realise, so it is important to examine these concepts in more detail.

It must be appreciated that there are different types of knowledge and different types of knowing. In this chapter, I will be concerned mainly with knowledge of things: i.e. I will be concerned with knowing whether something is the case (is true) or not. But one can know in many other ways. First, one can know how to do something, such as playing the guitar or riding a bicycle. One can know another person: i.e. - by acquaintance (e.g. I know Peter; I meet him when he delivers the mail). Or one can know another person in the sense that one can know his character, his faults, his attributes, his history and so on (I know Peter well: we have been friends since school). Or one can simply know of someone; know that he or she exists, while not knowing them personally or knowing much about them (I know of Peter; I see him delivering the mail sometimes).

With regard to knowing other persons and, indeed, oneself, it may be beneficial to adopt an agnostic attitude as I will discuss later. It is also important to adopt a form of agnosticism in relation to our values, which I will discuss at the end of the chapter.

It is important to note that I can believe something to be true, which turns out in fact to be true, but without actually knowing it would turn out to be true. Many people make unjustified claims to knowledge because something they believed to be true actually happened. If I say, in an optimistic mood, that Cardiff City FC will win 3 goals to nil on Saturday and they actually win 3 goals to nil, I cannot claim to have known that this result would happen; I simply guessed it would happen. On the other hand, if I say that Cardiff City will play in blue on Saturday and they actually play in blue; I can claim to have known this because the team was playing at home and they always play their home games in blue. This knowledge involves reasoning. In this case, my inductive reasoning⁷ based on past experience tells me that the team will play in blue. At the same time my deductive reasoning⁸ tells me the same thing: i.e. ‘All football teams always play all their home games in kit of a certain colour; Cardiff’s home game kit colour is blue; therefore if Cardiff play at home, they will play in blue. Cardiff City are playing at home on Saturday; therefore they will play in blue’. This is not guesswork – and if Cardiff actually play in blue, I can claim to have known that they would.

Of course, I should also say, as philosophers such as Bertrand Russel and David Hume would point out, that inductive reasoning is not infallible. It is possible that a fire destroys Cardiff City’s home kit on the day of the match and they have to play in yellow.

This use of reasoning and experience in making claims to knowledge is vitally important when we examine ourselves and the world around us. If we rely on guesswork to reveal the truth, rather than using reasoning and experience, we could end up in trouble. There is no guarantee that guessing will serve me as well in the future as it has done in the past. I may be able to guess the score of a Cardiff City game once, but not consistently. If we are placing a bet on a second Cardiff City game, after having won a bet for guessing correctly the result of the previous one, we would be unwise to increase our stake because the chances of guessing the results of two games in a row are much lower than the chances of guessing just one result. Betting people know this: we all know this.

Take another example, if I am on a blind date and make guesses about the appearance of the person I am meeting – assuming no photograph or description has been provided beforehand – if these guesses turn out to be accurate, I cannot claim to have known these details in advance of my date’s appearance. I’d like to reassure my wife that I have not been on a blind date and have no intention of doing so in the future.

In a world overfilled with knowledge about all sorts of things the Ancient Greeks could barely imagine,⁹ it is impossible for one person to know everything that can be known. So there are a lot of candidates for agnostic examination out there.

It is important to appreciate that there is a degree of uncertainty about our claims to knowledge; knowledge can rarely be certain; hence the possibility above that Cardiff City may play a home game in yellow. I am not suggesting that truth is necessarily relative; only that our perception of the truth sometimes is. It is worth remembering that it was once thought to be true that the sun revolved around the earth – this was accepted as knowledge. Now we know that it does not count as knowledge. In the same way, something that counts as knowledge at present may turn out to be false some time in the future. Such is the fragility of knowledge and knowing can be even more fragile.

The mediums through which we can access information would also have been unimaginable to the Ancient Greeks, who didn’t possess even a simple printing press. They did not have a phoney world in the sense that we do. Many of our communities have now become divided between those who do not do their own research, do not consult ‘alternative sources’ and those who do. In consequence, some small portion of people inhabit a different reality from the vast majority. So why, you may ask, do only a small number of people challenge the mainstream? This is an almost impossible question to answer and I have no intention of addressing it fully here.

However, it seems to be the case that most people do not question information that comes from sources they have come to trust; from sources they have been persuaded to trust.¹⁰ Most people simply defer to those whom they regard as ‘the experts’ and completely underestimate their own ability to research, understand and make judgements about complicated matters. Most have no inclination to do their own research and some do not have the ability to do so. This disinclination and the complexity of many scientific, economic and political issues make it difficult for most people to gain knowledge about certain things. This would be the case even if it weren’t for the fact that many of the people who control information have reasons or agendas of their own that do not encourage them to reveal the truth and, in many cases, they provide us with misinformation and outright lies (untruths).

Trust in mainstream institutions is one of the major barriers between people and knowledge of anything outside of their local environment; it also accounts for the fact that very often people claim to know certain things that they simply do not know - i.e. for example many believe that the information the media provides them with is knowledge. They believe they already know things, in consequence, so if someone voices disagreement with views obtained in this way they will often fall on deaf ears.

Whereas mainstream institutions such as governments, health services and the Mainstream (legacy) media (sometimes working together) go to great lengths to persuade us to trust them, they also seek to persuade us that information sources other than theirs are not trustworthy. Nowadays, social media providers also support the mainstream narratives being conveyed by governments and reinforced by the MSM and will censor information that conflicts with or challenges these narratives.

Clever use of language is also employed to ensure that people are dissuaded from consulting non-mainstream sources in order to seek the truth. The term ‘conspiracy theorist’, for example, has served the mainstream well over the years. This term, with its negative connotations, labels such people as untrustworthy and a little eccentric - or even mad. It encourages us to forget the fact that they are reasoning human beings. People therefore steer clear of ‘conspiracy theorists’ as if they could catch a disease by associating with them; they are avoided like the plague.

Now, once you have created and defined a derogatory term, you can then redefine it so that it can be applied beyond its original scope. In recent times, even eminent scientists who are pillars of the establishment have been labelled ‘conspiracy theorists’, not because they are highlighting the existence of a ‘conspiracy’ but simply because they present scientific evidence that conflicts with one of the mainstream narratives. I will deal with language as a barrier to knowledge in a later Chapter.

But maybe it is the duty of sceptics (modern Socratics, devotees of Descartes or Hume) to ignore the dubious advice of the mainstream establishment, ask their own questions and carry out their own investigations. This is what I have been doing in earnest over the past years (i.e. since December 2018). In the next philosophical short I will examine a number of so-called conspiracy theories applying an agnostic approach.

If any of this is unclear please let me know.

Best Rob

1. B. Russell The History of Western Philosophy London Routledge: 1991

2. Socrates never wrote anything down so we have only the word of his contemporaries to inform us about his thinking. These include Plato, who wrote extensively about Socrates’ dialogues or conversations with others.

3. The Oracle was a god from Delphi who was consulted through a priestess.

4. Socrates’ exploration of the concept of knowledge is incredibly complex and lengthy and would require many thousands of words to explain. For those who wish to know more about Socrates’ exploration of the concept, please look at Plato’s Theaetetus and any commentaries on this. The discussions here form the basis for some of the great debates in philosophy over the following centuries – e.g. empiricism and rationalism.

5. However, it would be fair to say that many of those involved in dialogue with Socrates were keen to learn from this great teacher – as Edith Hamilton points out in her book The Greek Way (1993): W.W. Norton & Co. New York and London.

6. See The Apology Plato 38a. I have also provide a summary of The Apology in Appendix One, which will help to explain Socrates’ view of his mission to disprove the Delphic Oracle, why charges were brought against him and how he attempted to answer these charges which included the ‘corruption of youth’ and being ‘unholy’.

7. Inductive reasoning is something we all do on a daily basis. It is based on an assumption that our past experience can be a guide as to what happens in the future. Most of the time it serves us well, but it is not infallible, as Bertrand Russell demonstrates in The Problems of Philosophy Martino Fine Books (2013).

8. Deductive reasoning involves two or more premisses and a conclusion that follows from those premisses. For example: Socrates is a man; all men are mortal – therefore – Socrates is mortal. If you concluded that Socrates was therefore immortal, this conclusion would not follow from the premisses and would be wrong.

9. Science in Ancient Greece world was in its infancy so very little knowledge of the natural world had been revealed to the Greeks.

10. Sources we have come to trust could also include political sources such as a Political Party or friends and colleagues whose political views we share. In these cases our sense of loyalty could impede clear thinking - due to a failure to question the truth claims being made by our ‘comrades’.

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