Reference no: EM133382952

Topic Introduction: In his "A Brain in a Vat", the philosopher John Pollock tells the story of...wait a minute, the article is only like 1.5 pages long, so please go read it before attempting this prompt!. At any rate, Pollock ends the article with a humorous line, but the joke relies on you having come to the following epistemological insight: you can never gain absolute certainty when it comes to knowledge you gain from mere observations of the world around you (including observations of your own body and brain). As you will read in the excerpt of his Meditations, the Renaissance philosopher Rene Descartes believed such certainty was necessary to gain any knowledge about anything, but most philosophers since him have drawn a very different conclusion: if we are to have knowledge about this world, then knowledge cannot require certainty. While we can gain certain knowledge concerning many mathematical, logical and (arguably) moral claims, any claim whose truth comes to us only after observing the external world (what philosophers call an a posterior claim) seems unable to avoid the threat posed by skeptical scenarios like Pollock's brain in a vat or Descartes' evil demon hypothesis. So which way should we go? Should we think of knowledge as requiring absolute certainty, as Descartes argues (with the rather unfortunate implication that we have little knowledge outside of math or logic or morality)? Or should we instead think that we can still know stuff about our world (e.g., the Earth is round, the entire universe is older than 6,000 years old) even if we can never be absolutely certain about this knowledge?

Discussion Prompt: For your original post, I'd first like you to briefly explain why the last line of the Pollock article is a joke (remember the epistemological insight). Then I'd like you to pick a side: team-certainty-needed or team-no-certainty-needed when it comes to having knowledge about the world. Do you think Descartes is right that any real knowledge must come with certainty? If so, why? If not, why not? For your reply posts: you can use your replies to help defend your chosen team against a challenge or question raised by another student, or you could challenge or raise your own questions towards students who defend a different team than you on this question, or you could simply play the advocate of one or the other team without taking a personal stance either way.