I agree that not all knowledge is a product of logic. This is one of the reasons I have spent a great deal of time discussing what Thomas Kasulis calls intimacy worldviews, background approaches to philosophy that are not derived from direct argument. I agree with the thinkers in such traditions that truth is not merely something expressed in linguistic propositions.

Where I disagree strongly, however, is on the view that such non-logical knowledge can be a source of genuine certainty. Jim’s first example of such knowledge is the “eureka” moments of natural science: points where a discovery is made in a flash, a leap. I agree that such moments, though likely impossible without a long and disciplined prior process of rigorous logical reasoning, themselves include something more than logic; this example is an important argument for an intimacy worldview. The question is: are such moments free from doubt? I think the answer must be no. I don’t think one would have to probe the history of science very long to find a “eureka” moment whose resulting insight turned out to be largely false. I remember that writing my dissertation involved moments of insight which later reflection revealed to be untrue.

Jim refers to the knowledge faculty that produces such moments as “intuition.” He attempts to define “intuition” as a knowledge based on direct perception. But it seems to me that direct perception is among the most unreliable of all sources of knowledge – mirages, ropes misperceived as snakes, eye diseases or whatever example of illusion one might wish to cite.

I suspect that the underlying question in this discussion might be the kind of knowledge derived from mystical experience, the kind of wordless realization obtained in meditation. That possibility came up in the discussion that led to my old post on certainty, where a friend claimed that he reached absolute certainty in his Sufi chanting. But I said then and say now: such experiences lead to a feeling of certainty, but it could be a felt certainty of falsehood rather than truth. I suspect any of us could find a militant fanatic, of whatever stripe we disagree with, who derived his fanaticism from a cultivated vision.

Direct perception, intuition, mystical experience, aha experiences: I don’t intend to denigrate any of these as potential sources of knowledge. But are they sources of certain knowledge, indubitable knowledge? The answer must be no. Indeed, I would argue that they are less reliable sources than is boring old logic; for logic can proceed with the kind of inexorable rigour that rules out impossibilities. As I’ve said before, if there is certain knowledge to be found, it is likely to be there, in the kind of logical certainty sought by Plato.

Still, I want to note an important point of agreement between Jim and myself. In a comment on another post he claimed: “From my point of view (and I think Amod’s as well), doubt is more an openness to what exists than a negative statement or a disagreement.” I like this claim and I think it expresses something true and important. I see doubt as essential given our status as imperfect, non-omniscient beings – there is always more to be learned. Doubt is an intellectual manifestation of the key virtue of humility – a key virtue for monotheists and other encounter traditions, taken a step further by doubting even God. And so too with mystical experience and its directly perceived or intuited cousins: this, too, must be doubted. It is as capable of generating improper pride and arrogance as any of the works of logic and reason. We should not and will not find true certainty there.

The friends claimed certainty about things that I don’t think we can reasonably be certain about. One claimed to have achieved certain knowledge through the Sufi practice of dhikr; I argued that this could be a feeling of certainty about falsehood rather than about truth, so that one needs standards of truth external to the mystical experience. The other claimed that we could know with certainty that we are awake and not sleeping; I wasn’t ready to grant that. I’m ready to grant the basic point of Descartes’s skepticism: although we can be relatively confident that the things of the world are as they seem, it’s possible they could all be a dream, or the creation of an evil demon – or even the Matrix. (What a gift that movie is to teachers of introductory philosophy!)

Now Descartes himself thinks he can have certain knowledge in spite of all this doubt, or in a certain sense even because of it: he believes that the one thing he can’t doubt is the fact that he is doubting. His doubt would be logically self-contradictory, for its very existence would require the presence of a doubter, namely himself. Thus, “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum).

My Buddhist readers will probably be unsympathetic to Descartes’s argument, and rightly so. Descartes tries here to prove the very thing that the Buddha of the Pali suttas – and the vast majority of later Buddhists – would be at pains to deny, namely the existence of the self. I would argue that a Buddhist critique knocks Descartes down quite effectively. Descartes may have established the existence of doubt, but not of an agent of doubt, of a doubter. That’s an error, a reification. As a popular book on Buddhism has it, there are thoughts without a thinker. Even if one disagrees with Buddhist deconstructions of the self – and I am often skeptical of them – one must surely still acknowledge that they at least cast doubt on the self, the thing Descartes thought could not be doubted.

Nevertheless, there’s a route to certain knowledge that one can still follow from here. The basic Buddhist critique knocks down certainty about the thinking self; it does not knock down the more basic pursuit of foundations and certainty in the face of skepticism. Descartes had a basically sound insight in one respect: while you might doubt the existence of a doubter, you cannot doubt the existence of doubt itself! If Descartes was really aiming for a completely certain foundation to stand on, he would have been better off saying: “There is thinking, therefore there is being.”

It’s there, in thought itself, where I would look for certain knowledge. Thought must be possible; the existence of the idea that thought isn’t possible implies that it is. Even in the Matrix, thought must be possible; it cannot be otherwise. Moreover, the existence of thought seems to require something like Aristotle’s laws of logic; without them, thought cannot make sense. Everything is what it is (the law of identity); and nothing can both be and not be in the same time and in the same respect (the law of non-contradiction). Less sure about his third law, the law of the excluded middle (everything either is or is not); that one’s been quite plausibly challenged by contemporary intuitionistic logic, and before that by Madhyamaka Buddhists like Nāgārjuna. But a denial of identity or non-contradiction effectively invalidates itself.

Here, in the realms of thought and logic, is where I would look for certainty. (Plato’s venture into mathematics is also a plausible place to look: even in the Matrix, one would think, 2+2 is always 4.) The possibility of thought, the law of identity: these things seem incontrovertible. But that’s just the problem: maybe they only seem incontrovertible. Descartes thought that the existence of the self was an ironclad, logically irrefutable foundation; but he turns out to be wrong. As far as I can tell, the existence of thought or the law of non-contradiction are irrefutable. But couldn’t I be missing something the way Descartes was?