Sometime ago, I thought it might be interesting to learn a bit about philosophy. I think this was borne out of listening to a number of so-called “public intellectuals” make several excursions into the realm of philosophy. Well, I have now, and I thought to share some of my rather brief experience.

As human beings and social beings in particular, reasoning forms a major part of our being. In daily exercise of our reasoning capabilities, we are often anchored on a variety of factors which may not be evident on our daily exercise of it. I think this is where philosophy step s in to help us think about thinking. For those who have taken time to learn a bit about thinking (now including myself), you will agree with me that there is a lot to uncover about human reasoning. Also, one may appreciate how far we have come as thinking beings through the eons. The following sections will discuss some of the few areas i explored, the insights therein, and as is typical in philosophy, further germinating questions. The article wraps up with some of my personal thoughts. In every day communication or reasoning, we make arguments which may be classified as deductive - when the process of reasoning is such that the conclusion follows necessarily from the premise, and inductive in the case when the truth of the premises is intended to provide good reason to believe the conclusion. We would love to think that we always make sense with our arguments, unfortunately, we fall into errors more often than we realize. We sometimes make conclusions that do not necessarily follow from stated premises, or when they follow, the premises are known to be false on a more careful look. Inductive arguments are even more common, and these are your fraught with various errors which I will not bother to mention here. In spite of our proclivity to make these errors, we mostly acknowledge the need for making rational and sound arguments. Philosophy also goes further to probe some of the things we could take as common knowledge. What does it mean for us to know something? And can we truly claim to know anything?. A deeper dive into these questions reveals how contentious they really are. In fact, many of such questions and related ones remain unanswered. Most of our knowledge is necessarily anchored on some “foundational truths”. But how do we ascertain the truths of those as well?. This quickly leads to the hopeless infinite regress problem. This is a major considerations for the sceptics.

Philosophers like Augustine and Descartes however thought that self knowledge was without doubt. This is expressed in the famous statement by Descartes - “Cogito, ergo sum”, that is “I think, therefore I am”. It is self-contradictory to say that “I doubt that I am thinking” which is akin to saying that I do not think that I am thinking. This makes the Cogito argument seem necessarily true. As far as arguments go however, the Cogito argument is questionable in itself. It assumes that the statement “I think” implies someone must be doing the thinking. How about scientific claims? As much as we will like it to be, is the world we investigate independent of the minds of those investigating it? The famous physicist Weiner Heisenberg once said, “what we see is not nature, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning”.

“what we see is not nature, but nature exposed to our methods of questioning”.

This is insightful, considering for instance what we know about colors and also the fact that other organisms “see” differently. According to Descartes, the role of the sense is physiological, not epistemic.They may not be relied upon for the truth about the world.

Another interesting reality is our inclinations to make certain errors which turn out to be really difficult to detect - cognitive biases. These are manifested in everyday discussion resulting in the different fallacies. Common ones include confirmation bias which makes us more inclined to pay more attention to those ideas or things that align with our prior beliefs. Anchoring bias leads us to appealing to some initial data point in decision making despite the irrelevance of the data point. Framing is another form of bias with a subtle but powerful effect. It occurs when words are used to frame a conversation in a manner that influences opinion. Others include the post hoc ergo propter hoc, Dunning-Kruger effect and the Bandwagon effect.

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Science and knowledge approximation

Despite all of these however, we could still make do with some approximations for practical purposes. On settling for a viable approximations of knowledge, working together as social being has been a major success factor. This is exemplified in the scientific method. Having others verify our reasoning is important since it has become clear how vulnerable we could be to errors in reasoning. While the system isn’t perfect, a in the peer-review in science, it has helped towards out attainment of knowledge for sometime. Given what we know about the failures of scientific theories - the norm rather than the exception, we ought to however be skeptical about scientific claims. In fact, science appears to thrive on a healthy dose of skepticism.

It seems to me that many inquiries often end up in one form of infinite regress as we seek a foundational truth. The question of knowledge, the question of truth, the question of rules. As a mere mortal, i doubt we may ever strike the underlying rock that is the “truth”. Good enough, we actually do not seem to require all knowledge to be happy. In fact, whether acquiring the knowledge will make for a better humanity is questionable by itself. I am also curious about all of the chaos and our imperfections as humans. Is it a feature or a bug?. In other words, If everyone thought rationally for instance, how great would that be, relative to where we are now. I realize this is in itself a philosophical question which we may never truly be able to answer. In all of these however, I have learnt and I am willing to accept that striving for truth by itself is a worthy endeavor.