Taking a cue from Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean, I talked about humility as a balance between too much confidence, which produces deliberative arrogance, and too little confidence, which produces timidity. We can generally recognize the extremes when we see them (and especially when we encounter them in dialogue), but it’s a lot harder to know when confidence is just right.
Finding balance is a worthwhile undertaking, so let’s get mean.
In section 12 of the Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Hume argues for a “moderate” skepticism about human knowledge, so that’s a nice parallel to our theme, especially because Hume’s discussion includes some practical advice.
For Hume, the notion that we could have certainty in our knowledge of the external world was problematic — and not because we might not try hard enough or because we might not be smart enough. The problem is actually methodological. Consider practically any claim about the world. For convenience, let’s use “Sugar tastes sweet.”
How sure can we be about this claim? Notice first of all that this is not about semantic parlor tricks. You know, like “Well, tongues taste sugar and some tongues are in shoes, so we can’t be sure.” No, it’s more like, you reach for sugar to sweeten your tea because, uh, Sugar tastes sweet.
But what do you have to know about the world to be in a position to know that sugar tastes sweet? Hume points out that we have to know that, when we’re talking about the effects of things in the world, the future closely resembles the past. How do you know sugar tastes sweet? Because when you’ve tasted it in the past, it tasted sweet. And because it tasted sweet in the past, it will sweeten the tea I’m about to drink.
Now ask yourself the obvious question (obvious if you’re a philosopher): How do I know that the future closely resembles the past? Is it because it just does? Like, accept it because I said so? What if you want a firmer foundation than that? What if you look deeper?
Suppose you argue that the future resembles the past because, in the past I used the past as a guide and it worked. Let’s apply this reasoning to the sugar:
- Yesterday, I was just about to taste some sugar, and I said to myself, this sugar will taste sweet because it has tasted sweet in the past (prior to yesterday’s taste).
- Sure enough, when I tasted the sugar yesterday, it did taste sweet.
- So, applying the conclusion from yesterday to now, Sugar will taste sweet.
For those of you following along closely, what’s wrong with this argument? If you said it’s circular, give yourself a high-five. Why is it circular? Because the move in #3 requires us to know already that the future will resemble the past — and that’s what we’re trying to prove!
So, according to Hume, certainty about the external world is out, not because we didn’t try hard enough, but because certainty requires us to know things that we can’t know.
On the other hand, it’s not useful to go nuts in the other direction either. Suppose I say to you, “Given the impossibility of certainty, I’m going to adopt a policy of skepticism about everything.” This sounds great in a philosophy classroom, until you start having trouble breathing or step out in front of an oncoming subway. Then, I’ll bet you’d like for me to take at least a little of my sense experience seriously and give you a hand. And the same goes double for me: A policy of utter skepticism makes survival until Friday extremely unlikely.
Hume’s point about moderate skepticism resonates with Aristotle’s idea that excellence is about finding an appropriate balance between extremes. In spite of Hume’s focus on what we can know about the world, he ends up applying a criterion that takes seriously what we can do about the world. There’s something proto-pragmatist about Hume — but that’s another conversation.
The lesson for us this month is that, to the extent that the excellences of mind are about kinds of “doing” that we call deliberation or thinking, we can’t operate successfully at the extremes of confidence. Too much and too little don’t make for good porridge, as Goldilocks discovered.