This morning in the brisk fall air I sat alone at a bench here at the college reading Bernard Williams’ “Philosophy and the Understanding of Ignorance”. It is an excellent essay on the role of skepticism in philosophy. Williams contends, and correctly I think, that there are at least two types of skepticism available in philosophy. The first we might call the absolute or complete skeptic for whom philosophy is the renunciation of all truth. As Williams comically writes:
“Someone who is genuienly worried whether or not he or she knows that another person is in pain, even if that person is writhing n the floow with a knife in his leg, is someone who should be referred for clinical treatment”.
This sort of skepticism is actually rather dull and uninteresting for the reason that if you know you know nothing about everything, then that is tantamount to saying nothing about everything. The other type of skepticism, more interesting philosophically indeed, is that skepticism which doubts not that we can know anything, but rather doubts the character of what it is we think we know.
“It is only because we can accept large numbers of facts about the past, many of them in themselves very boring, that we can confront the genuinely disturbing suggestion that historical understanding requires narrative, and narrative demands closure, and closure in history is always a fiction and often a lie”
The question becomes increasingly poignant when we ask when it is we can know that we don’t know. For instance, I may not know the middle name of the College Chancellor, but I do know that I don’t know it – or even that he has a middle name. This seems to be a case in which ignorance counts as knowledge. There are other types of ignorance that I can’t even be sure that I don’t know though. For instance, consider a person walking back to their car after shopping for a couple of hours at a market place and cannot find their car. This person will likely say after some time – “I don’t know where I parked”. In this case it seems absurd to say that they do not know where their car is in the same manner in which I might not know someone’s middle name; but on the other hand, there is a similarity in the two cases. Typically, one will retort, the problem is not that you do not know but rather that you cannot remember – this suggestion hangs onto the coat tails of the idea that one cannot be ignorance can never be absolute or complete. For to know of ignorance is necessarily to know something.
If philosophy is to be conceived by some skeptical means, then we must continually remind ourselves that this sort of skepticism will never be complete, nor ought we to think this is so. I conclude with this quotation from Williams’ essay:
“Recent forms of skepticism, drawing in many cases on a very partial reading of Nietzsche, have tried to discredit the notion of truth altogether. In doing this they typically take on a tone of mild heroism about their project of uncovering our illusions… What is disquieting about such positions is not so much their self-refutation, as their false promise of discomfort. What casts suspicion on everything casts suspicion on nothing…”
Read more of Williams here: