Integration vs. Insulation

After we came out of the church, we stood talking for some time together of Bishop Berkeley's ingenious sophistry to prove the nonexistence of matter, and that every thing in the universe is merely ideal. I observed, that though we are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it. I never shall forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded from it -- "I refute it thus." Boswell: Life of Samuel Johnson[1]

Should our common, everyday beliefs and actions have an affect on our theoretical and philosophical beliefs? Or is there a layer of insulation between them, so that although we may doubt the reality of time and matter, we will still schedule dental appointments for next week and avoid walking into brick walls? (In the interest of conciseness I will refer to the former view as “integration” and the latter as “insulation” in this essay.) Myles Burnyeat considers this question from the viewpoint of ancient and modern attitudes towards the kinds of skeptical arguments advanced by Sextus Empiricus.[2] He notes that although the modern attitude seems to be that everyday beliefs are not in fact affected by our second-order philosophical theories, this kind of notion would be foreign to the ancient, medieval, or renaissance philosopher.

Burnyeat points out that Sextus relies on our everyday views affecting and being affected by our philosophical views in his overall project of using all manner of arguments to induce the suspension of judgment and to produce tranquility. He argues that for Sextus and his predecessors, there is no separation between first-order questions such as “is this action just?” and second-order theoretical questions such as “what is justice?” (Burnyeat 115). This is because our first-order statements involve the use of theoretical concepts such as good, evil, place and time; and if those concepts are called into question, then so are the first-order statements that make use of them. Thus, Plato may refute Protagoras’ famous dictum on grounds of self-refutation, and in a similar manner G.E. Moore may argue against skepticism concerning the reality of time and space by observing that “it is true that yesterday my body was for some time nearer the mantelpiece than the bookcase” (quoted in Burnyeat 93).

This integral view of Moore’s, however, is not widely shared today, and Burnyeat embarks on a brief overview of the history of philosophy to determine when this became the case. After going through many of the early moderns and showing how their various arguments against skepticism rely on the integration of our common beliefs with our philosophical theories, he arrives at Kant, and concludes that it is he that is responsible for first making a strict demarcation between the two. Burnyeat concludes that while Sextus “innocently” discerns no insulating gap between the empirical and the transcendental, Moore does so “naively,” since he cannot behave as though Kant did not exist.

And this is where Burnyeat leaves us, with the dictum that once lost, innocence “can never be regained” (Burnyeat 123). But on Burnyeat’s own account there are modern philosophers such as Quine who will not have “anything to do with insulation” (Burnyeat 93), and as Quine seems to escape the charge of naivete (although Burnyeat remarks that affirming a belief in integration is one thing, actually living it out is another), perhaps it is after all possible or desirable to unlearn what Kant has taught. Further, Descartes was able to maintain his views on the integration of common beliefs and theory in the face of Gassendi’s and Montagne’s insulating “country gentleman” interpretation of Sextus, so perhaps the position of Moore (and Quine) is not as untenable as Burnyeat makes it appear.

Additionally, it would seem that the integral view has certain advantages: chiefly among these is the consideration that it does seem more internally consistent that my beliefs about this or that object being in a certain spatial relation to me be informed by (and inform) my beliefs about bodies and space. After all, if my theories are not influenced by my experience of the external world, even if they are internally coherent it is an open question as to whether or not they are likely to be true.[3] Finally, I will note that the integral view forces the skeptic to deal with the apraxia objection head-on, rather than deflecting it by finding refuge in his ordinary experience.

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[1] For an interesting philosophical interpretation of this scene, cf. Douglas Lane Patey, Johnson's Refutation of Berkeley: Kicking the Stone Again. Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 47, No. 1. (Jan. - Mar., 1986), pp. 139-145.

[2] Myles Burnyeat and Michael Frede, ed., The Original Sceptics: A Controversy. Hackett, 1998, pp. 92-126.

[3] Cf. the input objection against coherentist theories of justification and the move to introduce an observation requirement: e.g. in Laurence Bonjour, Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses. Rowman & Littlefield, 2002, p. 208.