Doesn’t it take faith to believe in the reliability of
our senses?
Sometimes, religious people seem to act like giving any examples
of something that requires “faith” for anyone to get through their day makes it
perfectly justified to have faith in a specific God. One of the common examples
of this is the fact that we generally trust that our senses are reliable. Personally,
I don’t just assume or blindly trust that my senses are reliable; I think it’s
much more rational to operate with the awareness that they might not be at any given
time. And yet, it’s true that I still need to trust their reliability to some degree,
at least as a provisional conclusion. Religious people will argue that this is purely
a matter of faith or presupposition, because the any attempt to validate or justify
the reliability of your senses would still require the use of your senses. I don’t accept this, because you can use one
of your senses to confirm another. If you see a wall in front of you (sense of sight),
you can put out your hand and feel to confirm that the wall is really there (sense
of touch).
Someone might object, “but that’s still using your senses to
confirm your senses!” Maybe I’m just missing some basic philosophical
implication that’s obvious to everyone else, but I don’t see why the senses
should all be bundled together in the consideration of their reliability. The
sense of touch is not the same as the sense of sight; why must our judgment of
their reliability be all-or-nothing? If I took off my eyeglasses, I will have
good reason to distrust the reliability of my sense of sight; but that doesn’t
give me any reason at all to think that my other four senses have become
deficient as well. On the contrary, studies have shown that a brain which lacks
the reliability of one sense (i.e. being blind or deaf) will rewire itself so
that the other senses are more heightened.*
Thus, I see no basis for the mindset that we must judge the reliability of “our
senses” as an all-or-nothing packaged deal. I contend that it’s perfectly reasonable
to validate the reliability of one of our senses using another one of our
senses.
And lest you argue that this just moves the issue back a
step (because I would then need to justify what validates the second sense that
validated the first), I see no reason why the senses can’t mutually validate
each other. Let’s say I’m not sure whether I should trust the reliability of my
sense of sight, so I use my sense of touch to validate it. In doing so, I’m not
assuming (or taking on faith) the reliability of my sense of touch; if the
sensory data of my sight and touch didn’t match, I wouldn’t just assume one was
correct and the other was wrong, so I’m not placing any faith in either sense’s
reliability there. Rather, it is the fact that they agree which validates both
of them.
Think of it like scientific experiments. When one scientist
conducts an experiment, the accepted scientific method is for someone else to
go along and reproduce the experiment to double-check the first scientist’s
findings. If the findings of the two experiments don’t agree, the accepted
scientific method is not to just arbitrarily decide, “well, the first one was
done right, so the second one must have some mistake,” or vice versa. They don’t
just assume that either one was correct. Even so, if both experiments turn out
the same way, then it is taken as good evidence that there is something to the
results of that experiment (while always leaving the door open for additional
data to be added). So I don’t think there’s anything circular or irrational
about using two sources of data to validate each other.
I would go even further and say that this is a perfectly
common practice. If there are two witnesses to a crime (or perhaps two suspects
who are pleading innocence), then investigators will question them for details
separately, and then see how well the two stories align. If they don’t match
up, the detectives may not treat either testimony as reliable, but if they do
(especially if the police are sure they didn’t have an opportunity to discuss
and plan out their cover story together), then that will give them both some
validation as being reliable, even though neither of them had been validated
individually beforehand.
Now, I will grant that it’s even better if the investigators
have some external way of verifying their stories. I’m not saying that this
type of mutual validation is the best
warrant for a belief we could ever possibly have. But in the case of judging
the reliability of our senses, I think it’s more than adequate. Then again, I think
we actually do have an external source of verification; our continued survival.
Think about the illustration of seeing and feeling a wall. If our senses were completely unreliable, how many times would we run into walls, or fall into holes, or otherwise interact with our environment in dangerous ways, before it killed
us? Unless we all have unreliable senses in an unperceived world that is
completely safe and docile, then I can see no way that our senses being unreliable wouldn’t prove fatal very quickly. I don’t need to have implicit
faith in the reliability of my senses to see that the fact I’m alive at all demonstrates
that they’re doing the job well enough.
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