Following on from the previous discussions about education and teaching I got thinking about Descartes, solopsism and the anti-realist perspective.

In particular I got thinking about authority, should we trust teachers, or should we assign to them the same doubt that we would our imperfect senses?

In his first meditation Descartes sets about a methodic skepticism. The first target for his doubt is his senses, they are prone at times to decieve him. Now considering that Descartes wishes to eliminate doubt and to establish certainty he realises that he cant trust his senses, even though predominantly they appear to be offering a truthful perspective.

He could of course be dreaming, and all that he percieves to be real could be but the constructions of the unconscious mind. And of course he could be mad, and imagine that things are not as they really are.

All of these recieve some attention. But finally Descartes looks at something supernatural. What if, he asks, God is decieving us? Very quickly, and then again systematically over the course of the following meditations he dismisses this idea. It seems that for Descartes the idea that God is not good, or truthful is a thought too hard to bear. But nonetheless he still has to address the idea that we are being deceived by some supernatural source. So instead of God decieving us, Descartes turns his attentions to the evil and deceiving demon . In many ways this decieving demon is similar to a deus deceptor, a decieving God, for it would appear to possess omnipotent powers in order to suceed in its deception. But thats material for a different discussion.

Descartes posits that this evil demon has the power to thoroughly decieve us and present to us an illusion of external reality so convincing that we should believe it to be real, and should have no means of knowing whether this ‘reality’ was any more or any less ‘real’ than another kind. A more modern reinterpretation of the evil genius can be found in the ‘brain in a vat’ thought experiment.

Considering the evil demon, and our recent discussions on education and teaching and most importantly free-thinking, I got to meditating on the idea of existential uncertainty. By this I meant to consider not only the untrustworthiness of our senses (though very important) and not only the possibility that we are being decieved by an evil genius, but what about the possibility that we are being deceieved by our fellow human beings, including our families and friends? What if everything that we are taught and gradually learn and comfortably assume to be true is in fact fabrication? In fact what if just some of what we are taught and learn and assume to be true is in fact fabrication? (After all in Descartes method of skepticism if something is partially untrustworthy then we should be skeptical of it all).

I must admit that my thoughts moved at this point from the philosophy of The Matrix to that of The Truman show. But on a serious note should we not challenge the very basic assumptions of our own existence. Are our parents our own? Were we conceieved naturally or artificially, are our siblings fully or only partially related? All of these speculations are quite important, there was a recent news article that said that research undertaken in light of the recent trend towards unearthing ones genealogical history demonstrated that a great many people had uncovered seemingly unpalatable truths about their ancestry. Dark secrets, skeletons in the closet, and downright lies. Some extraordinary figures emerged, 6% discovered secret adoptions, 7% a convicted criminal, 14% someone who has abandoned the family name.

If one were to discover at a late age that you were adopted, or that you had brothers and sisters, or even children of whose existence you were ignorant, wouldn’t such a discovery shake the very foundations of the assumptions upon which previously you had built your life? I should imagine so. And this is a phenomena that occurs to a not inconsiderate number of people.

Now of course I must point out that I am not adovcating a breakdown in trusting relationships, and that we must begin to suspect everything that our familes and friends have told us, for much if not all is probably true. But what I am proposing is that like the anti-realist, and the solopsist, we should treat all truths as impermanent and temporary. And not allow ourselves to get carried away by notions of certainty.

What relevance has this then towards teaching? Well I was pondering the nature of logic and the endless list of fallacies that formal logic presents. One of which is the fallacy of arguing from authority. This says that it is fallacious arguing to present evidence as being anymore factual because it has been presented by someone who is in a position of authority. This would seem them to rule out teachers (and by some irony the author of the fallacy, and perhaps even the invoker of such a fallacy when used in an argument). But this would also have a detrimental effect upon the credence that we give to our parents, family and friends, who do indeed teach us certain things.

It is interesting that Descartes used the idea of an evil demon; a devil as his supernatural deciever. For the greek word for the devil is diabolos, which means slanderer and accuser and also has roots in the terms the deciever and the liar. Thus at the conclusion of this meditation my thoughts are that although methodical doubt of our senses, our sanity, our being dreaming, or our not being a brain in a vat, not to mention our assumption that we are not under hypnosis, or under the influence of hallucinogenics, are all valuable sceptical points of view, perhaps the most crucial and underestimated is the possibilty that those whom we trust and love the most are (for whatever reason, and at this point we must abandon judgement) decieving us, in a way that radically alters the world in which we think we live.