Denying Premise

The quest to find out who we are, where we came from, where we will go after we die and what, if anything, controls our world has fascinated mankind throughout the centuries. Famous philosophers have devoted their whole lives to developing theories, and yet the closest any have come to success has been to not have their theories disproved. With the knowledge that no theory has been proven to fact, “I don’t know” may be the only true answer to one of civilization’s oldest questions.

The idea that we can never know the answers to these and many other questions leads to the theory of Skepticism. This theory maintains that we must doubt every single one of our empirical beliefs, as they are from our perceptions like our material body. We doubt them because they are seen from the lens of our own prejudices. For example, just as our senses can deceive us, or our dreams seem real, our experiences can also deceive us. Therefore, we cannot with certainty say that anything is true, and we have no knowledge and we live in the unknown.

However, Skepticism is contrary to one of the most basic of human instincts: the fear of the unknown. The desire to define the world and make order out of chaos and the refusal to accept “I don’t know” as the answer has motivated both scientists and philosophers. Rene Descartes (1596-1650 was one such man. Though brilliant, and the author of Mediations, feared being skeptical of the external world.

Descartes wanted to disprove the skepticism theory. To do so, he first developed two premises for the skepticism theory, and then rejected it by disproving one premise. The first premise is that of Naïve Empiricism. This premise states that all knowledge rests on our perception, our own experiences, and therefore all our knowledge is true. The second premise is the method of Doubt. Descartes claims knowledge is something that is indubitable. That is, for each body of evidence, only one conclusion can be reached. With those two premises, Descartes derives the sub-conclusion that if we do have unique knowledge, then the evidence of our senses must rule out all other possibilities. In short, truth is derived entirely from the empirical evidence we collect.

However, Descartes also had a third premise which undermined the first two. This premise is that of the Evil Demon. This theory states that even with all our empirical knowledge, that there is still no material world.