I was reading Yablo’s “No Fool’s Cold: Notes on Illusions of Possibility” (That’s not a typo: “Cold”) that continues the theme of modal skepticism when I came up with a radical possibility. Of course, if someone thinks up something in the 21st century it likely has been thought a thousand times before, and this is no different. But let’s start at the beginning and check out whether there is anything new to be discerned.

I might initially think that the contents of my thoughts are the only thing I can truly be confident about since all the world of the senses could be an illusion. Given such a starting point it would be wise to try to understand the relationship between my thoughts and what is perceived by starting with the phenomenon of thought. I immediately become skeptical of my thinking, however, since I am unconscious nearly a third of the day, often accompanied by strange hallucinatory imagery in my dreams. More, I tend to agree with these zombie-intellects who inhabit this society-thing projected on my sensorium-thing and claim to study biases and perceptual trickery. Those perceptual-psychologist-patterns seem right, too, given the number of times I’ve been startled by faces coalescing out of twilight shadows or my overly generous past assessments of my own competency.

Thoughts seem unreliable.

But what is reliable? Some Platonic ideas, geometry, math in general, deductive proofs (uh oh, coarse premises as well as the indeterminacy of synonymy creep in here), and then scientific results (tentatively), perhaps. Let’s take the latter, though, and start with the notion that science contains a methodology that distills out many biases and misperceptions, arriving at a tentative model that is of higher truth value than simple guesses, traditions, and feelings.… Read the rest