Some Platitudes about Reality, Truth, Knowledge, and Understanding. And Skepticism.

"Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four." – George Orwell, 1984

Key Concepts Related to Thinking: Some Platitudes

I. Reality

1.     Reality is what exists, whether or not we perceive it.

2.     Reality is not reducible to our thoughts, wishes, and feelings.

3.     Reality does not change because we want it to.

4.     Reality is the same for everyone, even if people see it differently or highlight different aspects of it.

5.     Reality is that which resists our attempts to reduce it to our wishes, needs, constructions.

6.     Reality is intelligible, at least in part.

7.     Necessarily, we cannot know whether reality as a whole in all its aspects is intelligible to us.

 

II. Truth (Epistemological Relation to Reality)

8.     Truth is the disclosure of something real.

9.     For any x (thought, representation, judgment, feeling, etc.), if it is true, it is true because it is adequate to something real.  

10. Reality makes something true or false; not our opinions, wishes, needs, etc.

11. Truth depends on reality, not on what we think, wish, or feel.

12. Reality is the measure of truth.

13. To find the truth is to find out how reality is.

14. Something is true if its reality or an aspect of its reality becomes present to us.

15. Truth shows what is real (or an aspect thereof); lies or errors cover up what is real.

16. Truth is what is, whether or not anyone knows it.

17. Something can be true even if no one believes it.

18. Something can be false even if everyone believes it.

19. Truth is the same for everyone, even if beliefs about what is true differ.

20. Truth is discovered, not invented or constructed.

21. Believing something does not make it true.

22. Doubting something does not make it false.

23. There can be many opinions, but not many truths about the same thing.

 

III. Knowledge (Relation to Truth)

26. Knowledge is a belief that has been justified as true.

27. To know something is to be able to justify the belief in it.

28.  To learn is to come to know something you didn’t before.

29. Knowledge is largely tentative, subject to revision based on further knowledge, given that few beliefs can be justified absolutely.

 

IV. Understanding (Deeper Grasp of Knowledge)

31. Understanding is grasping how different things cohere.

32. Understanding is more than knowing isolated facts.

33. Understanding connects parts into a whole.

34. You can know something without fully understanding it.

35. Understanding is often a form of making sense of something.

36. To make sense of something is to find an order or plausible meaning in it.

37. Understanding brings scattered facts together into something that makes sense.

38.  To understand something better than you previously did not understand is to learn something about it.

39. If something does not make sense to us, it means that we do not fully understand it, or that it is either logically incoherent or entails absurd consequences.

40. Understanding is by degrees; we can’t understand most things that matter absolutely; we (finite and mortal) can continue to deepen understanding without end.

 

Skepticism

1. Denial of Reality’s Independence

(Skepticism about reality)

The claim that we cannot know reality as it is, or that reality is nothing apart from our ideas, feelings, or constructions. Either our minds (and experience) are like prisons that cannot open up, or reality is like cookie dough, i.e., has no intelligibility.

 

2. Reduction of Truth to Subjectivity

(Radical Subjectivism)

The claim that what is true is necessarily nothing but what an individual believes or experiences to be true, without an independent standard.

 

3. Relativization of Knowledge to Perspectives or Cultures

(Relativism)

The claim that all knowledge and understanding are always absolutely determined by social, cultural, or personal frameworks, and that no framework can claim greater access to reality than another.

 

4. Substitution of Construction or Ideology for Discovery

(Constructivism / Ideologism)

The claim that all knowledge and understanding are necessarily nothing but an arbitrary construction or the result of power structures, with no necessary relation to what is objectively real.

 

5. Reduction of Knowledge to Non-Knowledge

(Reductionism about Knowledge)

The claim that knowledge and understanding are nothing but conditioned belief, perception, linguistic convention, psychological habit, or social utility, i.e., denying that knowledge and understanding constitute a genuine relation to truth about reality.

 

*Radical skepticism is self-refuting. Any consistent radical skepticism undermines itself, because it must assert as true that knowledge is impossible, thereby claiming to know something about reality, i.e., the very thing it denies.

Radical skepticism (not in the sense of ‘extreme,’ but ‘at the root’ or ‘all the way down) must be distinguished from local skepticism.

 

1. Radical Skepticism

• Definition: A denial of the possibility of knowledge in general, or in principle, either about all of reality, or all of truth.
• Scope: Universal.

·         Logical Status: Self-refuting. It claims that we can know that we cannot know – an internal contradiction.

Examples:

"We cannot know anything."

"Reality is unknowable."

"Truth is purely subjective."

 

2. Local Skepticism

• Definition: A recognition that in certain domains or under certain conditions, knowledge is difficult, fallible, or even currently unattainable.
• Scope: Particular.
• Logical Status: Coherent, usually contentious

It does not deny the possibility of knowledge in general, only warns of limitations in certain areas.

Examples:

"We cannot know what Julius Caesar ate for breakfast on January 1, 45 BC."

"It is difficult to know someone's true intentions with certainty."

"Our current scientific understanding of consciousness is incomplete."

“We can’t know anything deep about religion, metaphysics, or even history, since we have no adequate way of impersonally justifying any important belief in these domains.”

 

 

The Root Logical Cause of Radical Skepticism

    Radical skepticism arises from the idea that because we cannot step outside our own conscious experience and directly compare it to reality as it is in itself, we have no ultimate justification for trusting our experience or beliefs about the world. This theoretical possibility has been suggested by many thought experiments.  

·        Descartes' evil demon, who generates an illusory world that we are deceived into believing to be real.

·        For all we know, we could be brains-in-a-vat: our experiences might be caused by a computer simulation, not reality.

·        The Matrix: our conscious world might be an elaborate illusion programmed by an Artificial Intelligence that has become conscious and needs to exploit our bodies for energy.

 

All the forms of radical skepticism above follow these thought experiments (e.g. ‘power’ is logically like the evil demon of Descartes; ‘culture’ is analogous to the Artificial Intelligence of the Matrix).

 

The argument:

Premise: We only ever have access to our conscious experience.

Premise: We cannot step outside experience to compare it with an independent reality.

Conclusion: Therefore, we cannot know whether our experiences correspond to reality.

 Critical Analysis

• True: We cannot step entirely outside our experience.
• False: It does not follow that reality is unknowable.

 

   Our experience is not "sealed off" from reality; it is already an engagement with reality, even if partial, fallible, and interpreted. The very possibility of error (e.g., the evil demon, the Matrix, ‘power’ etc.) presupposes some reality that distinguishes truth from illusion. If there is an illusory world, there must be a real world. The goal is not to stop thinking but to put our fantasies to the test by inquiring. Thus: The impossibility of getting 'outside' consciousness does not entail the impossibility of knowing reality; it only reminds us that knowledge happens within a living relation, not from an impossible view-from-nowhere.

 

 

 Epistemological Consequences

1. Epistemological Humility

• Because our knowledge and understanding are partial, historical, and fallible, we must approach claims to knowledge and understanding with humility.
• Humility means here: a) Being willing to revise beliefs when evidence or deeper understanding shows their limits. b) Recognizing that even our strongest current insights might be incomplete or partly mistaken. c) Acknowledging that others (past, present, future) may see what we miss. d) Caring about learning more than being right.
• Humility is not weakness but a condition of expanding knowledge and deepening understanding: Only a humble mind can learn more.

 2. Rejection of Radical Skepticism

• Even though we are fallible, we do know many things, at least in part.
• Everyday life, science, history, some art, and reason all provide reliable, if imperfect, access to reality.

Radical skepticism (the view that we know nothing or can know nothing) is self-defeating: To claim "we cannot know anything" is itself a claim to know something. Therefore,  we recognize our limits without denying that we can genuinely get deeper.

 

3. Rejection of Relativism and Subjectivism

• Our partial and differing perspectives do not imply that truth itself is relative.
• Reality remains independent of how we think, feel, or desire.
• Differences in opinion reflect our imperfect access to truth, not the nonexistence of truth.
• Therefore: Our beliefs may vary; truth does not.

Understanding may be relative to the knower; reality is not reducible to the knower. (The Trump phenomenon should be a clear enough refutation that reality is nothing but a construction; that whenever we don’t like some fact we can just construct some alternative facts.)

Local skepticism is consistent with the platitudes about reality, truth, knowledge, and understanding.

 

4. Enduring Commitment to Truth-Seeking

• Because truth cannot be reduced to our wishes or prejudices
• And because our understanding is partial, our task is to seek truth continually, with patience, courage, respect, and humility.
• Truth-seeking is not arrogance (pretending to know everything),
• Nor despair (giving up on knowing anything),
• But a faithful human vocation.

 

That is my vision of the university.