had cause today to follow up with a group i haven’t thought about or dealt with in years… heh. the skeptic’s society. their ‘mission statement’ so to speak, lives here:
http://www.skeptic.com/about_us/discover_skepticism.html
and it was to this item that i was motivated to reply as follows…
At your site, upon the ‘About Us’ page, there is a very reasoned and
enjoyable read about the society, its interests and goals. The ending
to this piece is a modified quote that reads:
Sum Ergo Cogito — I Am Therefore I Think.
The skeptic in me giggles, of course, realizing the provisional
knowledge of ‘I Am’ in light of the defined difference between
objective knowledge and experiential knowledge.
Do we know that we exist because we are here? Or because others
witness us being here? What truly objective evidence is there outside
what is experienced? Is personal experience the best baseline, the
only baseline? And if so, how do we, as skeptics, function at all
within the parameters of our own definition of what we are, what we
do, how we do it, and why?
I posit that scientific method is, itself, afflicted by the very
subjectivity that all humanity is and, due to it, is just as incapable
of knowledge beyond the moment than anything or anyone else.
I posit that the very nature of the observable is the thing that
confines and constrains all the world and each of us from ever knowing
a thing more than a moment.
I posit that provisional knowledge is, at best, our collective coping
mechanism… and, if anything, it is our resilience in the face of
consistent, repeated error and our ability to continue, contain, and
correct (combined with a certain innocent arrogance that permits us to
repeatedly say, ‘Ah HA! Now we know!’) that is responsible for our
survival.
There is no more objective evidence from which to say ‘I Am’ than
there is to say ‘This is’ or ‘That is not’. The real question is, ‘Why
do we feel the need to know?’ and ‘Is there a means of knowing that
exists outside the realm of the subjective?’
If we are honest, all of this heavy certainty would be obliterated
and, in its place, perhaps, comfort in many things… since we are, in
every moment, confining not only ourselves, but our future, in the
lines and boundaries with which we constrain ‘what is possible’ and
‘what is not’.
So perhaps that pithy saying deserves yet another revision… for we
neither know we are, nor do we know that we think. Were we to be
truthful, that would read:
Cogito Sum Ergo Sum Cogito
I Think I Am Therefore I Am… I Think.