"Nothing is obvious."--a post by my philosophy tutor

"Nothing is obvious", I often say in class. Let me explain a little, while I'm stuck in bed with antibiotics and my old Faye Wong records.

Red lights flash, sirens flare, but mostly my eyes glint when someone says that a philosopher is "obviously" wrong. It's a good sign that, hidden from view, there lies a larger battle between their philosophical aims and assumptions. That's why I urge caution when you read an old text. If Meno's paradox of inquiry looks obviously silly to you, don't assume that Plato (or Socrates) is a fool. He must have good reasons for accepting the paradox and talking about past lives. Look elsewhere. Does Plato share our assumptions about knowledge? Is he using these concepts in the same way? Is he solving a different problem? If Descartes' argument from fallible senses seems obviously self-defeating, why doesn't he think so? Look again.

Last night, I came across the same message in an essay by the American philosopher John Rawls:

"I always took it for granted that the writers we were studying were much smarter than I was. if they were not, why was I wasting my time and the students' time by studying them? If I saw a mistake in their arguments, I supposed those writers saw it too and must have dealt with it. But where? I looked for their way out, not mine. Sometimes their way out was historical: in their day the questions need not be raised, or wouldn't arise and so couldn't then be fruitfully discussed. Or there was a part of the text I had overlooked, or had not read. I assumed there were never plain mistakes, not ones that mattered anyway." (with my italics)

Autobiography--the same book I'd recommended extracts from

This problem of obviousness takes an odd twist with Descartes' Meditations. We often find his arguments, rather than his errors, too obvious. "Oh, it's just the Matrix."; We agree too quickly with Descartes' conclusions (even when we don't take them seriously). Or, if we disagree with them, we accept too readily his procedures. We rehearse them carelessly, much like National Day songs we don't quite believe in.

Meditations, that "the least bit of doubt on any point will suffice for complete rejection". What counts here as a legitimate doubt? I emphasized during tutorial the 17th Century obsession with "method". They had nothing like our modern view of science with its official hypothetico-deductive slogans. They were struggling to fit new scientific practices into old Aristotelian models of knowledge. What is science? What is a proof? How do we judge evidence? What is justification?--These were open questions for Descartes and his audience. Nothing should be taken for granted; he is not pointing to any clear-cut sceptical procedure which we can apply, unthinkingly, to our beliefs

Descartes proposes a new model of knowledge based on his standard of absolute certainty. What counts as "absolute"? Does it even make sense to think of an absolute level of certainty? He tried to show us in the rest of the Meditations, drawing on a contrast with the standards of reasonableness and probability. The tricky bit: in the "First Meditation", that new model and its standard are insinuated into the four stages of doubt. The epistemic standard assumed in the Fallible Senses and Dreaming Arguments is the very one they persuade us to adopt. They wouldn't make sense without the very standard they justify. The arguments seem, in a sense, circular; but are they any worse for it? What might this say about Descartes' project? If his arguments work, that is also because we accept (at the same time) the possibility or coherence of that absolute standard. Must we?

Here is a related worry about the "First Meditation". In the painting analogy, Descartes suggests that there are "still simpler and more universal things" which cannot be cast into doubt by dreams. He goes on, quite blithely, to list several metaphysical and mathematical concepts. But are these obvious choices? The Aristotelians, for instance, would deny that "corporeal nature in general", time, place and number are somehow more basic than the things we ordinarily see and touch. How do we decide that they are "the simplest and most general things"? Can we not dream that 2 + 3 = 6? Or that a square has five sides? Why not? What is Descartes up to? What madness is he courting?