David Hume delivers a succession of explanations for why scepticism should be expressed any conclusion based upon reasoning reliant on sensory perception (Hume, 1898). Hume’s “A Treatise of Human Nature” ultimately reaches a conclusion unfathomable to those who bank on logic explaining everything. Indeed, Hume insists that when forced into a face-to-face confrontation all the logical explanations capable of being processed that many if not most humans are still capable of stubbornly clinging to even the most incomprehensibly illogical beliefs. Knowing that the earth has been steadily warming over the past few decades based on the logical connections reached as a result of combining statistic data with incontrovertible geographical evidence is not capable of producing actual knowledge of this fact for some because the accumulation of such evidence creates an untenable conflict with their most cherished beliefs. Judgment of climate change denial from the perspective of whether a single way of knowing carries the capacity for producing knowledge has the unintended effect of undermining the argument for scepticism and leads to one fundamental question: at what point does scientific scepticism become unschooled ignorance?

The man who has been referred to as the “Medieval Hume” is Nicolaus of Autrecourt; so-called because of ultimately conclusion that nothing satisfactorily logical can be purchased solely through perception (Copleston, 1993). The philosophical foundation of Nicolas of Autrecourt is actually a direct response to an earlier conceptually unambiguous theory proposed by the philosopher Bernard of Arezzo that intuition is fully capable of producing knowledge (Weinberg). Bernard’s suggestion that it is possible to intuit an understanding of something extends even to the capability of understanding something that does not actually exist. The logical extension of this concept can diverge down two distinct paths: the power of conjecture or the problem of schizophrenia. If Bernard of Arezzo is correct, then a person can know that a Kardashian is capable of winning a Nobel Prize simply through the process of conjecture. If Bernard of Arezzo is wrong, then a person knowing that a Kardashian is capable of winning a Nobel Prize is indicative of the symptoms of schizophrenia.

We have now reached a state of abstraction where knowledge is not only incapable of existing through a single way of knowing, but that knowing by definition must also include the ineffable. Or, if one takes the approach of Nicolaus of Autrecourt, it may be argued that a clear intuition of something in no way guarantees that this something exists anywhere outside the mind of the person intuiting it. This view can obviously be taken to its most illogical (or should that be logical?) extreme with the skeptical injunction that if any knowledge can be known merely through intuition, how can anyone ever be sure that anything is real? Such a single way of knowing produces not knowledge, but solipsism. Perhaps Bernard wasn’t describing either conjecture or schizophrenia, after all, but was rather a postmodern genius so far ahead of his time that his philosophical view of knowledge was actually a Hollywood treatment eventually transformed into the screenplay for the film The Truman Show. Everything that Truman knows in that movie up until the revelation of the truth of his situation is perfect example of the knowledge gained by the single way of knowing through intuition.

To deal with such extremes of skepticism that could remove the basic sensibility of knowledge from the act of using what it referred to as “experience” Hume provides three stipulations to knowing through the act of observing. Stipulation number one is referred to as the aspect of constant conjunction which requires causation and effect to exist in an extant state both spatially and constantly. Next, the cause must have occurred prior to the effect itself. Then there is the stipulation of necessity, meaning that in order for the observation to truly indicate that a thing is known, it is necessary to logically explain why the cause produce the effect.

Knowledge is therefore very much like the tree that falls in the forest. If no human being is around to observe or perceive the causation that from determining how an effect resulted, it is forever impossible to actually know not only the source of the causation, but for that matter to prove that there was a cause or observe the effect in the first place. The psychological construct of the mind that results in the discipline of philosophy ultimately contains within it the possibility that everyone should actually reach such a state of skepticism about the condition of knowledge apprehended through sensory perception that we should ask whether we can actually know anything for sure. The introduction of logic allows for the safe assumption of apprehending knowledge.

References

Copleston, F., 1993. A history of philosophy. Volume III, New York: An Image Book.

Hume, D. & Green, T.H., 1898. The philosophical works of David Hume, London: Longman's,
Green, and Co.