Was Bertrand Russell right about doubt?

[CTD]

Care to expand?

Not now. Have this sense of having wasted enough time already.

 

[The Paul]

This thought is a keeper. A very keen observation IMO.

The type of doubt Russell is playing with only shows up in philosophical discussions, never in mundane daily life. And, typically, it's only thrown out as a way to sink other people's ideas when no other argument seems to be working.

Yes. Thank you.

So good to encounter someone who can see their own hand in front of their face.

 

[bricklayer]

I've recently finished reading Bertrand Russell's The Problems of Philosophy. He spends the first few chapters of the book debating the basic problem of knowledge: can we know that anything exists? He uses the example of a table. We can see the table, feel it, and so forth. But does the table truly exist? His conclusion is that the table probably exists, but that we should not be totally sure it exists. As he says: "It is of course possible that all or any of our beliefs may be mistaken, and therefore all ought to be held with at least some slight element of doubt."

The more I think about it, the less I can figure out how it would be possible to have some slight element of doubt about the existence of tables and other everyday objects. Like everyone else, I live in a world of physical objects and interact with them all the time. When I put my breakfast down on the table, am I not making a vote of confidence for the table's existence? If I had to uphold "a slight element of doubt" concerning the existence of everything, wouldn't that basically stop me from functioning?

Or let's put it another way. Russell claims that he has a slight element of doubt in everything's existence. But presumably he still ate breakfast off a table and did other things involving material objects whose existence he slightly doubted. In that case, how did Russell with his slight element of doubt in everything's existence differ behavior-wise from a person who has no element of doubt in ordinary material things? And if Russell isn't different from a person with no doubts, then in what way can he be considered to actually doubt at all?

Or in short, was Blaise Pascal instead correct when he said that there was probably never a total skeptic who really doubted the existence of every material thing?

NO

 

[Archaeopteryx]

Russell claims to doubt because he dearly desires to doubt, and perhaps every bit as much desires everyone else to doubt.

If Russell genuinely believed things don't exist, he wouldn't tell anyone. You don't communicate with things you don't believe exist.

Russell's type merely defies everyone to convince them to voluntarily confess things they know. We see a lot of that.

This is one of the milder manifestations of you-can't-knowism, just trying to get the infection started that it may grow into more severe forms of the disease.

Even this mildest statement of the dogma you'll ever encounter defeats itself: "You can never know anything absolutely for certain" ...denies its own absolute certainty.

Why should that be problematic?

"Everything within the capacity of human understanding contains a degree of error, and everything men know to be true is true only to a degree. Everyone is inevitably wrong about something somewhere. We don't know everything about everything. We don't know everything about anything. And what we do know we don't know accurately on all points nor completely in every detail. Honest men admit this." - AronRa