Rational Philosophy

There is no certainty. Or, everything is certain.

Descartes compressed these two ideas into one when he declared “I think, therefore I am” (cognito, ergo sum). Our certainty is our awareness of our existence, and yet this certainty is based on something as elusive as our awareness.

This concept plays on my mind this evening. We live with uncertainty every day. We are frustrated by our lack of certainty, by the elusiveness of certainty. My wife and I are looking at purchasing a house. We place a bid. We want the house. We can even imagine ourselves living there. But we have no certainty that we will. This dream of living there is no more real than a dream I had two nights ago in which my unmarried friend told me that his wife was pregnant. The same friend who told me in an e-mail today, with a semblance of certainty “this will happen more and more.”

The philosophy of certainty is also elusive. Descartes with masterful ingenuity and perceptiveness, turned the target sideways on, and placed the emphasis of certainty on the perceiving “I,” rather than the perceived “it.”

Nothing other than the impression of perception is certain. And the impression of perception in a dream is no more real than the impression of perception in waking life…

But is this so? Can’t we distinguish a dream from waking life? Some have quibbled that we can’t be certain of the difference between the two. Some have been lured into the definitiveness of this perspective.

However, if we instead think about certainty as a spectrum, we can approach it differently. I expect that certain impressions will follow other impressions. The degree of predictability of these impressions can be estimated and compared to the actual progression. When I estimate a high degree of likelihood, I become more certain of the outcome.

For instance, I connect the impression of my hand upon the cold stone countertop with the impression of “coolness” against my hand. (I’m skipping the interim impressions of my hand.) It is possible that this connection, the next time I place my hand on the counter, won’t exist. However, I estimate that it will exist with a high degree of certainty, because it correlates so well to the way I’ve perceived that impressions follow other impressions.

If we follow this approach, we find that the world is not completely in focus, but neither is it completely a-jumble. We can use our perceptions and impressions to predict other impressions and predictions. On this rests the foundation for reason and logic.