the virtue and limits of skepticism
personal log // entry 0006
sol 392
I always say the absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence. Simply because you don’t have evidence that something does exist does not mean you have evidence of something that doesn’t exist.
— Gin Rummy
Perhaps you consider yourself a skeptic. Perhaps you’ve encountered self-identified skeptics before. Maybe you’ve met Facts Man, perhaps the world’s preeminent skeptic. Skeptics seem to come out of the woodwork to make their voices heard whenever they encounter something new and unfamiliar, perhaps even radical. But is skepticism really all that useful? What does it mean to be skeptical?
Skepticism is, at its heart, weaponized doubt. Skepticism requires an attitude of incredulity; it demands a high standard of evidence in exchange for belief in the validity of a given claim or position. It is the rejection fo faith and dogma, the value of evidence over everything else, the knowledge that knowledge is only as useful and accurate as the methods used to gather it.
What skepticism is not however, is natural. Human psychology tends to value anecdotes and emotions over epistemological truth. I believe this breezy, innate, flawed way of thinking can be best described by the word truthiness, coined by Stephen Colbert to describe an empirical lens that values gut feelings over facts. “We are divided,” he said, in character as the fictional conservative pundit that shares his name, “between those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart.”
What Colbert was doing here is clear: his spot-on satire of those who would have you trust your ‘common sense’ (whatever that is) rather than facts or evidence is poignant specifically because of how accurate it is. It was accurate in 2005, and it’s even more accurate today. Well-meaning folks are taken in by this kind of reasoning all the time, and it demonstrates how susceptible we are to such appeals to emotion. Gut feelings are often wrong, though they come as easily to us as anger or love. They are the results of millions of years of natural selection equipping us to cut corners and save on brain fuel, and to use our prior experiences and our senses to make guesses about the future. Skepticism seeks to curb and counter those gut feelings by digging deeper than the surface layer. Skepticism is, at its core, a philosophy of doubt, and that’s exactly how it started.
The origins of skepticism can be seen as far back as the ancient world. In India, Ajñana philosophers espoused the benefits of skeptical thinking, and in turn influenced much of early Buddhist thought. Greek philosophers like Pyrrho, Gorgias, and Socrates recognized the importance of questioning how you know what you know, and were highly influential for one of the most important figures in Western philosophical thought: René Decartes.
Decartes sought to prove that true knowledge, not just suspicion, is possible, a statement in direct opposition to many of those Greek philosophers. His route to get there involved doubting everything: if there was even the slightest chance that something taken for granted may not actually exist, or might be a mere illusion, from other people to the universe itself, he would assume it wasn’t real until he could prove otherwise. He eventually realized the only thing he couldn’t doubt was the existence of his own mind, since his mind was the thing doing the doubting. Cogito ergo sum; I think, therefore I am.
While this realization is without a doubt one of the more interesting mental exercises ever devised, this line of thinking is ultimately a dead end. If you internalize that nothing else exists save your own mind, separate from your body, then you will ultimately be unconcerned with material outcomes altogether, and a society built on that principle will quickly crumble. There must be a degree of openness to new ideas, and science stands as the best way of finding them and seeing if they hold up.
In order to seek truth, it is necessary once in the course of our life, to doubt, as far as possible, of all things.
— René Decartes
The saying goes to be open-minded, but not so much that your brain falls out. Conversely, if you doubt everything, even when confronted with clear and tangible evidence that supports one obvious conclusion, you will never learn anything and never come to any understanding of the world. It’s not our natural state to believe nothing; at the end of the day, your brain must settle on some overarching narrative to make sense of its environment, and skepticism is the empirical razor cutting away the weak assumptions and falsehoods that our flawed psychology loves to cling to.
There seems to be an attitude among some modern thinkers that science and skepticism are diametrically opposed to one another, that to be a scientist is to throw out skepticism entirely, and that to be a skeptic is to disregard the scientific consensus altogether. This is, in a word, garbage. Skepticism and science are two sides of the same coin, synergistic methodologies for determining truth and rooting out falsehood. Science, and the wonder of discovery, helps us understand the world by making predictions and then testing their accuracy, and skepticism helps to keep us grounded by revealing where our methods are flawed and our cognition limited.
I believe in evidence. I believe in observation, measurement, and reasoning, confirmed by independent observers. I’ll believe anything, no matter how wild and ridiculous, if there is evidence for it. The wilder and more ridiculous something is, however, the firmer and more solid the evidence will have to be.
— Isaac Asimov
But does skepticism have limits? You bet it does. In her video titled “Transphobia: An Analysis”, actress, YouTuber, and philosopher Abigail Thorn makes a point that when followed to its logical conclusion, skepticism toward everything, whether honest or malicious, can come at the expense of other people and their rights. She cites Talia Mae Bettcher, who posited that the sort of metaphysical skepticism — the philosophy that anything that can’t be gleaned using our own senses cannot be known — espoused by thinkers like Decartes, is (at least nominally) at the root of the sort of casual transphobia common in Western society.
A conversation with such a krypto-bigot might go something like this: “Oh, you feel you’re a man even though your doctor assigned you female at birth? That’s nice for you. You should be able to call yourself whatever you want.” This is a tacit attempt to be ‘tolerant’ toward transgender people, while implicitly believing that their knowledge of who they are is inherently, metaphysically wrong: “Well, they can’t prove they’re a man, so I’m just going to play along. That’s the nice, tolerant thing to so.” The root of the bigotry remains, founded in the belief that, since this person can’t materially prove their gender identity to you personally, they are not who they say they are.
But ultimately, the question is: does it matter if a trans person can prove their gender identity or not? And the answer is: no. Trans people deserve to be taken at our word, since it’s no skin off anyone’s back to let us live as happily and comfortably as we can, without the sense that the people around us are just tolerating us and that they don’t really care for our struggle. Skepticism can put you in a bind, and there are some instances, such as when confronted with the existence of trans people, where the right course of action is to simply be okay with not having definitive proof.
An interesting trend in recent years has been the appropriation of the aesthetics and language of skepticism to cast doubt on the well-backed scientific consensus about basic things, like how the humans are the primary driver of climate change. So-called ‘climate skeptics’ like to insist that they are ‘just asking questions’, when in fact the questions they ask have already been clearly answered, and these folks, whether out of ignorance or malice, do nothing but muddy the waters of knowledge.
Skepticism, even when honest, can sometimes hinder the progress of knowledge when taken to the extreme. Besides leading to mistrust in the core principles of science itself, extreme skepticism can also lead to elitist thinking. In his book, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, which is essential reading for scientists and skeptics alike, astrophysicist and educator Carl Sagan has this to say about modern skepticism in 1995:
The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you’re sensible, you’ll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.
I haven’t seen this attitude as much in 2021, besides maybe some prominent outliers in the larger atheist community. Sometimes, I see misguided ‘skeptics’ taking the road to doubting the entirety of the modern knowledge-gleaning machine, which leads them down the rabbit hole of conspiratorial thinking. Often too, I see an unquestioning faith in the scientific consensus, without so much as a lick of personal research on the side of the believers. None of this to say that trusting the scientific consensus is a bad idea; on the contrary, it’s the best thing you can do if you’re not an expert in that field. But though it can be extra legwork, merely trusting the consensus isn’t enough, if you don’t know how that consensus was reached.
Case in point: starting in 1965, the sugar industry, in the form off the Sugar Research Foundation (SRF), began a campaign to sponsor researchers friendly to them, leading to a series of papers published during ’60s and ’70s which downplayed the by then well-known role of excess sugar consumption in causing the growing obesity crisis, instead pointing the finger at dietary fat consumption.
In recent years, fat has been partially vindicated, and the sugar-obesity cover-up was publicly exposed, largely thanks to an analysis published in JAMA Internal Medicine of internal documents from the SRF.
I don’t use this to cast doubt on science as a whole: science is the best method we have to determining objective truth. But science is done by humans, and humans sometimes do things like manipulate and cherrypick data to suit their agenda, or the agendas of those who fund their research. Skepticism can help shed light on human failures like this by scrutinizing the methods behind the research, spotting potential biases or omissions that could creep into scientific studies and skew the results. I don’t know if more peer review or public scrutiny could have helped expose the flaws in those SRF-sponsored studies, assuming there was enough transparency to facilitate such scrutiny, but a certain amount of healthy skepticism can only help when interpreting scientific findings.
For the average citizen, skepticism can help filter out the bullshit that we are bombarded with on an hourly basis, between social media, traditional media and the news industry, and the millions of new non-fiction books published every year, not to mention the bullshit people around you will spew unprompted and unchallenged. It is, as Carl Sagan put it, a ‘baloney-detection kit’. Skepticism has its limits, but so does science, and while truthiness is certainly appealing and requires little effort, viewing the world through a lens of healthy skepticism is the most effective way of separating truth from untruth, whatever that truth may be.
Echo out.
