In the previous lecture, we looked at the skeptical regress problem and I kind of
introduced three different ways of solving that problem in practical life
namely reassuring, guarding, and discounting.
Those are three ways to solve the skeptical regress problem in practical
life. And in the next three lectures what we're
going to do is look at each of these in much more detail, more carefully, so as
to understand how they work. Let's begin with assuring.
Here's an example. I assure you that smoking is bad for your
health. If I say, I assure you,
then I'm trying to get you to accept that claim on my authority.
Now, I might have some reason for saying that smoking is bad for your health.
Namely, I've read the U.S. Surgeon General's Report, which sites the
scientific evidence to show that smoking is bad for your health.
But notice I don't actually say it, when I say well, it's obvious that
smoking is bad for your health, or everybody knows that smoking is bad
for your health, or I assure you certainly.
Clearly, smoking is bad for your health. Then what I'm doing is I am trying to get
you to accept that premise without actually citing the Surgeon General, or
anybody. I haven't cited the evidence, I simply
have indicated to you I do have evidence. I do have a reason to believe that
smoking is bad for your health. But I haven't given you what the reason
is. So what good is that?
It's a lot of good, because what it means is that if I don't
give the reason, you can't question the reason.
If I simply say, everybody believes it, it's certainly true, then, you can't ask
whether those people who believe it have any reason to believe it, or whether I
have any reason to be so certain about it.
If I don't give the reason, I've cut off your attack on the reason that I would
give. So, assuring is kind of tricky.
I say I assure you and if you can trust me, that's fine.
But if you can't trust me, then you should be asking, well, what kind of
reason does he really have. Now there are many ways to assure people.
There are three kinds that we're going to look at.
Authoritative, reflexive, and abusive. Let's start with authoritative.
Authoritative is just what it says. It cites an authority.
So I might say. I assure you that smoking is bad for your
health. The Surgeon General, has shown that
smoking is bad for your health, and I cite an authority, the Surgeon General.
Okay. Fine, but, have you seen the studies?
Have I cited the numbers? Have I told you when the studies were
done, how many subjects, under what circumstances, which statistical tests
were used? How do you know its causation instead of
correlation, and so on and so on? No, I just say the Surgeon General has
shown this and you're supposed to take my word for it, that those are good studies.
Unless, of course, you share my assumption that The Surgeon General is
trustworthy. So that's the way an authoritative
assurance works. It sites an authority that the audience
shares as authority with the other person.
They share the assumption that, that authority is trustworthy.
Now sometimes it's the Surgeon General and the Surgeon General is pretty
reliable, but you also get this kind of thing from reporters.
They say an unimpeachable source close to the President, has assured me that the
President's plans are such-and-such. And they cite an unimpeachable source,
but they won't tell you what the source is.
And they won't tell you how the source knew it was true.
So they're citing an authority, but they're not telling you what the
authority or what reason the authority has for what the authority claims.
Now if you trust that authority then that's fine.
And if authority's reliable, then you might be safe.
But if you don't know who the authority is, or where they got their information,
there can be problems. Oh, and here's my favorite, here's my
favorite. I sometimes hear students say, but,
Professor Shannon Armstrong, my teacher in the other course said that, blah,
blah, [COUGH] blah, blah, blah. Well, why do you trust your professors?
Why do you trust me? You shouldn't be trusting me or your
other professors, anymore than you are trusting an unimpeachable source close to
the President. So, you have to trust somebody sometime,
and you have to decide who you're going to trust.
And then it's going to be okay to cite an authority in this kind of assurance, but
you have to watch out for tricks when people start citing authorities that
aren't really authorities, because even the best authorities sometimes do studies
that aren't very careful and might even be wrong.
A second kind of assurance is what I call reflexive, reflexive because it's talking
about yourself. I believe that.
I know that. I am certain that.
I feel sure that. And your citing something about your own
mental state. You feel sure.
Great. You feel sure, but why do you feel sure?
Notice however, that this assurance works because, people don't want to question
what other people feel sure about. If I say, well I feel sure that this is
going to happen. In many societies, it's going to be
impolite to go, well, I don't feel sure.
Matter of fact, I think you're wrong. Or, why do you feel sure?'Cause because
then you're questioning the person. And, if that's impolite, then using this
type of phrase, I am certain that, will get people to shut up and not say
anything. But my favorite is when people say you
know, I've held this opinion for years or I've thought about it year after year.
It's really bothered me and you know, after careful consideration I've come to
the conclusion that blah, blah, blah, whatever.
And, you are supposed to say well since you've thought about it so much I'll save
myself a lot of trouble of thinking about it and trust you and go along with what
you say. Well if you let other people do your
thinking for you, then that's up to you. But you're going to be misled in some
cases, because they've thought about it for
years and years and gotten themself in a tizzy and ended up with the wrong
conclusion. So the fact that somebody has thought
about it for years doesn't necessarily mean it's right.
But somehow in conversation when you say I've thought about it for a long time and
checked all the sources I could then, people take the fact that you've reached
a certain conclusion to be okay for them to reach the same conclusion.
And that's how this reflexive type of assurance works.
The most fun of all is the abusive assurance.
Here's another example from Monty Python. No, no nonsense.
Maybe he's right. Maybe it is nonsense,
but the point is that he gets you to except what he believes by abusing you
and calling it nonsense. An the same thing happens when somebody
says, nobody but a fool would think that!" Everybody knows this.
If you say, everybody knows it, then you're saying, well if you don't know it,
then you're a dummy. And, so, they are abusing you in order to
get you to agree with them by making a conditional abuse that applies to you
only if you don't agree with them. And you don't want to be a dummy you
don't want to speak nonsense you don't want to say something that's stupid.
So, when somebody says you'd have to be stupid to disagree with me about this
then that's going to incline you to agree with them.
Some of these abusive assurances are a little bit more subtle so, it's worth
mentioning one that's used all the time. And this is what might be called, appeal
to common sense. So it's just common sense that such and
such. It doesn't matter what the such in such
is. The point here is simply, that if you
deny that, then you're telling that person that you lack common sense.
Nobody wants to lack common sense. So if I said, it's just common sense
that, it's just plain common sense. People say it all the time.
But what they're doing is they're abusing their opponents, by saying that their
opponents lack common sense. So it's a little bit more subtle, but it
shows that abusive assurances occur, either suddenly or openly, all the time.
So we've seen three different types of assurances.
Okay? The first is authoritative.
The second is reflexive. And the third is abusive.
And their all used in common speech to stop the skeptical request problem.
So why do we need any of these assurances in the first place?
And the answer is, we've got limited time.
You know, you can't go out and check every study.
You can't go out and look into every issue.
You've just got to accept authorities and listen to other people and learn from
them. Or you'll never be able to figure out the
issues that matter to you in life. That tells you why assurances are needed
in general, but what about particular cases?
Well when you're talking to a certain audience, if they share your trust of a
certain authority, or if they trust you when you give a reflective assurance,
or if what you're saying really is something that everybody with common
sense believes in, then again, it can be perfectly fine to use an assurance.
It saves you the time of having to go check out every issue, and it helps you
avoid the skeptical regress problem in a very practical way.
So assuring can be a really useful tool in argument.
But you have to be careful because assurances are also subject to a lot of
tricks that you have to learn to watch out for.
We've already seen that you can sight authorities that are trustworthy and
that's kind of obvious. But something that maybe a little less
obvious is that people use assurances at points in their argument in order to
distract you. If something really is questionable, they
often say, well that's obvious. In order to get you to not pay attention
to it. So when someone says that's obvious, it's
certain, I'm sure. It's worth looking carefully, at what
their so sure about, and asking yourself whether you agree with them?
Because people try to paper over the cracks in their arguments, with these
assurances. At least in some cases, and you have to
learn to watch out for that. Another trick is when assurances get
dropped. People will start off saying, you know,
he believes this, I believe that. And then they drop it, and start talking
as if it's true. Now, my favorite example of this was a
case a few years ago, when there was a person caught in Germany, for
cannibalism. And it started off with the reporters
saying, well, he, the person accused of cannibalism, says that there are lots of
other cannibals in Germany. And then it becomes it is reported that
there are lots of cannibals in Germany. and then it became sources have said that
as if the source are reliable. And, pretty soon they were saying there
are lots of cannibals in German. And it moved from he believes it to there
are lots of them. And that's the trick of dropping the
assurance in a way that can be illegitimate.
So assurances can be useful and they can also be misleading.
And that's going to be true of all the different ways of stopping the skeptical
regress. There can be uses and abuses of all of
these tricks. For assurances we want to have an
assurance when. First of all, somebody might question it.
Second, the audience accepts the authority that is being referred to,
and third, it would be too much trouble to actually cite the study and all the
evidence and the particular people. Assurances are not appropriate when
nobody would question the claim anyway then why are you wasting your time
assuring people? When the authority that you are basing
your assurance on is not really trustworthy because then why should they
believe your assurances. And third when you've got plenty of time
and it would be really easy to give the reason straightforwardly instead of
simply assuring them. So, you've got good and bad uses of
assurances and I hope we understand what they are and how to distinguish them, but
lets just do a few examples just to make sure that we've got the general idea.