Epistemology Part 1: The Problem of the Criterion

One of the best arguments for skepticism is the Problem of the Criterion, which consists of two questions. The first question is “what do we know?” and the second is “how do we know anything?” The resulting dilemma is obvious as soon as one tries to answer it and finds that to answer either question requires the solution of the other.

Of course, the usual conclusion to be drawn from this problem is one which is completely unacceptable. I do not mean here that skepticism is unacceptable because it is pointless to assume our powers of intellect are useless or for any other such reason but rather because skepticism is self-contradictory: it is the claim to rationally know that nothing can be rationally known. Of course, a real skeptic could reply that to point out this contradiction is to rely on logic and therefore it cannot be used to refute it. Unlike his opponent, the skeptic can simply refuse to observe his own use of human reason while attacking the use his opponent makes of it because consistency is a demand of the laws of logic whereas the illogical have no laws at all.

Fortunately, there are no real skeptics, only particularists who think that they are skeptics. Neither are there any real methodists (those who choose the second response to the Problem of the Criterion and say that we start out with a criterion for knowledge) but instead there are only particularists who haven’t thought about their epistemology quite long enough. A particularist is one who chooses the third response to the above dilemma and holds that we can have certain items of knowledge without needing to explain why we have them. This is in part because we can sometimes know something but have little confidence in our knowledge or lack an awareness of just how we came to know it but also because in any string of propositions and explanations there must be some collection of final propositions which are themselves inexplicable because they are the basis for all explanations.

The skeptic may claim that the particularist simply begs the question by assuming that we have knowledge but when it comes down to any real skeptic must start off by assuming that we do not. When a skeptic argues through reason that reason is invalid, he is (or would be if there was any possible manner of thinking outside of reason) not actually embracing the premises he describes but is rather pointing out contradictions to invalidate his opponent’s philosophy. Thus both particularists and skeptics have never reached their views as conclusions but rather assumed them both from the very start. Of course this is one again dealing with a hypothetical scenario involving a real skeptic; in reality the skeptic has started with a particularist assumption about knowledge and ended with a refutation of logic that he claims to believe in and an affirmation of logic that he actually believes in. On the other hand there is a way in which the basic assumptions of each side differ and that is in their approach to proofs and their definition of knowledge. To a skeptic, the mere possibility that we are in error in some way is cause to disregard our thoughts on the matter but the particularist takes the more dynamic and positive view that we should not even consider rejecting an idea unless we have evidence that an alternative claim is true.