THE ASSURED AGNOSTIC
I do not know the true answer. I have devised an answer that satisfies me for the time being, and I shall repeat it here in the briefest outline. But I wish to impress upon my reader my impression that this is a problem that has troubled many in the past and does trouble many at present.
Many thinkers have felt that a total global agnosticism, a total skepticism on the large scale, precludes all assurance on the small scale. That, conversely, the existence of any assurance on the small scale is evidence enough (perhaps a transcendental proof, even) that somewhere, somehow, assurance exists also on the large scale. And I wish to deny just this.I think the starting point is Kant’s synthetic a priori, which is now better known by such words as the conceptual framework, an overview, a general view, even a welt-anschauung or world view. We have to perform two operations on the conceptual framework to de-Kantianize it. It has to be socialized: it has to be identified with what the sociologist says a member of a given society has internalized in order to share his peers’ outlook. And it has to be completely deprived of all privileged status of validity, knowledge, or whatever else. The second step has been taken already by Solomon Maimon; the first is new in the philosophy of science though it has Marxian origins. (Marx himself blew it: he was a relativist.)
Once we deprive our conceptual framework of its finality, we can add to it incentives for change in the form of canons for internal criticism. Among these we should count not only those listed by diverse authors from Plato to Popper but also the canons of commensurability. Let me explain.
Some frameworks are, or at least are meant to be, incommensurable: they include the rule: prefer me over all others. Traditionally, I suppose, Judaism is the paradigm here. Other canons differ.
For example, both Newtonians and Einsieinians declare Einsteinism better: the Newtonians had to convert to Einsteinism while following their own canons. Oh, yes, some philosophers have declared that no two conceptual frameworks are commensurable. They illustrate their view with historical facts that conflicts with their views. But at least their conceptual frameworks contain no canons of criticism, so that they can stick to their view: the doctrine of incommensurability (of Duhem, Evans-Pritchard, Polanyi, etc. etc.) is, indeed, incommensurable, very much like Judaism (though the leading thinkers just mentioned were Catholics of diverse sorts).So much for the alterability of the framework. But, as it is an institution, it cannot alter so fast as to deprive citizens of their need for assurance. And within any conceptual framework there are all sorts of standards of assurance. There are commerical assurances, including banks and banking insurance, and insurance companies and federal reserves; there are social assurances, there are government agencies to test patent medicines and all sorts of inventions, including, in particular, safety gadgets; travel safety, expecially by air; etc. etc. Hence, Popper’s theory of corroboration is patently false: it does not operate within any specific conceptual or legal framework but in a social and scientific vacuum.
Finally there is the great old wisdom: diversify; do not put all your eggs in one basket. It means that if my system collapses at a point and, say, my electric system goes bust, I can depend on yours; but we may go down together electricity-wise and have a total blackout. In such a case we need a substitute which should be available right how. We thus construct our system so that each detail is connected to other detail and with the framework too. This does insure that the detail is kept afloat, but at the cost of making the whole framework heavy and capable of sinking all in all.
This was realized recently with the series of ecological crises which have led to mass hysteria and to attempts to go back to Mother Nature.
But, as I have explained, this runs counter to Free Man’s Worship, which is still the modern enlightened man’s manifesto. We can try to criticize and improve the conceptual framework; we can only seek assurance within it while realizing that there is nothing by which to justify our enterprise as a whole.