The Problem of Skepticism

Can we really know anything except a kind of passing parade of unconnected sensations?

Locke had persuaded the intellectual world that all we human beings can know anything about is what we learn from our sensory experience. And yet he found it hard to give up the notion that there was a something that lay beneath the sensory qualities of things -- their matter or material substratum.

But Berkeley had no problem about dumping this notion of a "stupid somewhat", as he called it, and concluding that all we need to admit as existing are sense data and the minds which know them--and, of course, a God to sustain their existence when nobody is looking.

But Berkeley's idealism didn't prevail very long; the great skeptic, David Hume, raised the following very logical objection: if all we know is learned from sensory experience, then how can we know anything about minds? or about God? What was worse, at least for some, was that we do not see what the scientist calls the causal connection. We may see event A, and then event B, and over and over we notice that A is always followed by B, and so we conclude that A causes B. But the inference is not logically necessary, and depends entirely on our perception of their constant conjunction and our habit of associating them together.

For example, we see the cue ball hit the eight-ball, and we see the eight-ball speed away toward a pocket. We see this happen so often that we form a habit of associating the two events and calling one the cause and the other the effect. But we also know that this- connection is not deductively, logically necessary. In principle the eight ball could refuse to budge, or rise up in the air, or go off in some entirely unexpected direction.

This argument dashes the belief of the rationalists that the world is a tightly-knit deductive system, but it also reduces empiricism to a complete skepticism. For we are left with no knowledge of matter, self, God, or science; and all we can be sure of are reports of our sense impressions-a red patch here, a squeak there, a musty smell, a soft texture, a bitter taste.

Can we really be sure of anything more than our sense impressions?

Bibliography

Hume, David. An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, The Liberal Arts Press,New York, 1955.

Locke, John and George Berkeley and David Hume, The Empiricists, Anchor Books, Garden City, N.Y., 1974.

McNabb, D.G.C., "David Hume," Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Collier-Macmillan, New York, 1967, Vol. 4, pp. 74-90.