Ancient
Greece & You
Joe Greenwald, Champlain Valley
Union High School, VT
Certainty (Latin certus, sure)
First to understand certainty,
I believe it is important to look up its meaning from a few different
sources. In the Webster’s dictionary we are told it is "the
condition or quality of being certain; freedom from doubt; sureness.
A clearly established fact." The New Cassell’s dictionary
gives us a very similar definition, "the state of being
certain; sureness." I also decided to look the word up in
a thesaurus. According to the Webster School Thesaurus, its related
words are belief, credence, faith, absoluteness, definiteness,
dogmatism, positiveness, firmness, staunchness, and steadiness.
Since the whole philosophy
of certainty is some what hard to understand, it can be broken
down into two categories; the first, assurance and psychological
certainty which would more of a guarantee or confidence, second,
logical and propositional certainty which would be using rational.
The first type of certainty may be justified (argued or proved
right or wrong). The second type is never justified or unjustified
(cannot be proven right or wrong). It then follows that certainty
may or may not be easy to attain. Many people in the past have
claimed to be certain on a particular deed or incident only to
find out their certainty has only been what they believe is true.
Certainty must not be viewed as truth, because it does not follow
that a statement can be viewed as certainly true (as often is)
because it would contrast to have something as certainly false.
It dose however, figure to have a connection between certainty
and knowledge because knowledge is what you believe to be true
and certainty can be viewed as what you believe to be true.
Many times we say we
are certain of a fact or incident, but we are not able to justify
why we are certain of it. With religion we say we are certain
of our beliefs, yet we cannot base our beliefs on solid evidence
that we can truly know to be certain. Our certainty comes from
with-in us and then only what we believe to be certain. Therefore,
it figures it may not be certainty at all. To be fair, we can
say there are various degrees of certainty, and what we believe
may fall into one of those levels.
Principal Doctrines
The belief among many
philosophers is that there are two kinds of statements that admit
certainty. First, those asserting claims of reason and second,
those expressing immediate experience. However, this like many
other controversial issues is still held with much difference
of detail and skepticism. Those famous for positions of skepticism
in the past would be namely Pyrro and Timon. On the reverse scale,
those associated with the unskeptical positions would be Aristotle,
Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, Hume,
Kant, and Mill. Of all these the Pyrrhonist held the most skeptical
position, to say that not only was certainty was ultimately achievable,
but also that it was achievable in every type of situation. However,
on the other extreme we find that no statement can be viewed
as certain, and therefore we must ask ourselves what are the
terms "certain" and "uncertain" in the first
place. It could be that we have developed them to make up for
our own area of unknowing and unbelief, or on the reverse side,
our stated knowledge and belief.
Something to thing about
in regard to certainty;
"We need not reflect
long to see that there is no question of the tone middle C being
soluble or not being soluble in water, for a tone is not a sort
of thing about which one may ask in reference to solubility.
Skepticism as to
Reason
As claims of reason become
more complex, the likelihood of certainty becomes less likely
to be defined. In simple form it is easier to diagnose whether
a claim of reason is or is not certain. Certainty can often be
defined by the laws of logic. A2+2 =4. is a plain logical truth.
To believe otherwise would be to reject the fundamental principles
of logic. It becomes skeptical when demonstrations are needed
to explain the reasoning instead of an instant understanding
of the concepts.
Certainty exists in both
claims of reasoning, the drawing of conclusion from known facts
and in statements of immediate experience, coming to a conclusion
from a demonstration. The problem with a statement of immediate
experience is that it can only provide an illustration, it can
not provide evidence. It will give a visual aid of what happened
but not actual data. If I claimed to have seen what looked like
a UFO from outerspace flying in the sky, I can not be certain
unless I gathered facts about where the UFO had come from.
In a demonstration there
is much more room for error. If a car turns a corner on an icy
road going 100 miles an hour it is not 100 percent true the car
will crash. If the claim is to be proven in an experiment, a
car may crash every time, but that does not necessarily mean
that a car is certain to crash. The likely hood of certainty
increases after repeated trials. Accuracy is greater when taken
from a greater number of trial samples. If what is claimed to
be certain does occur in the first trial it may not occur in
the fifth trial, which therefor would disprove the theory.
There are problems with
the theory of repetition. A trial can be given an infinite number
of times. The car may crash every time in a trial given a million
times, but yet one can not be certain that it is not a phenomenon
the car has crashed in each trial. Repetitious trials for complex
theories of reason may disprove the existence of certainty. With
an infinite number of trials results can not be definite to prove
a claim of reason.
