Doubt is the Key to Insanity (or Inanity)

This is really a sort of everted follow-up to a previous post on a rather vexing question. Apparently, there is a Persian proverb that says, "Doubt is the key to knowledge."

I now have a lot of apprentices running around trying to write 1200-1600 word essays on this topic. But what strikes me is that they don't begin with the obvious — that is, unpacking the metaphor and defining the terms.

What is a key? It is an object (material, insubstantial, metaphorical or otherwise) that is used either to gain, or to restrict, access to what is on the other side of a barrier.

In that sense, doubt must either be the active agent that starts a person on the path towards knowledge, or the active agent that confounds a person who is looking for knowledge. We must then define doubt and knowledge.

Defining doubt is easy; it can be done in many ways. Perhaps it is profitable to frame doubt as an active agent which is related to the ways in which humans 'know' things. A useful definition might then be something like: "A possibly unpleasant sensation of uncertainty with respect to the truth of an assertion or phenomenon, which may either provoke further action designed to quell that sensation, or deter further action because of other considerations."

Defining knowledge is also easy once one remembers that the purpose of establishing definitions in any debate is to dictate the terms of argument in a way that is useful to the person presenting the case. Knowledge, in this case, must be defined so as to make it the object of a pathway of inquiry that can be blocked.

It is therefore useful to define it in terms of the data-information-knowledge sequence: data are inputs received by ways of knowing, which when labelled and/or structured become information; information that is assigned a meaning (whether theoretical or practical, arbitrary or not, in physical act or mental process) is knowledge.

Showing how doubt is the key to knowledge in different disciplines or areas of knowledge then becomes a simple exercise in analysis. The overall outcome is likely to be different in extent from discipline to discipline, and the examples that can be used to demonstrate this range of results are manifold and can be used to make the exercise interesting.

The problem is that most apprentices don't think about writing out the argument outline before they just start writing stuff. So by the end, you are likely to see arguments like, "If you doubt things, then you will wonder a lot, and that will lead you to discover new knowledge. Thus, doubt is the key to knowledge."

I read such things and think that this must be serendipitous knowledge discovery, and that perhaps such people should instead write essays entitled, "Serendipity is the key to discovery. Discuss." Or perhaps, "Random writing is the key to failure. Demonstrate."

Responses 003 (2010-2011)

The third question in the list was this: "'Doubt is the key to knowledge.'—Persian proverb. To what extent is this true in two areas of knowledge?" I laughed when I read it, because it so happened that I had just been reading Amartya Sen's amazing collection, The Argumentative Indian.

In the title essay, Sen argues that doubt, and actively heterodox doubt at that, is the basis of reason. The Indian is argumentative because he very early on realised that all things were dubious (i.e., 'doubtable'). It is the point of the quotation I mentioned earlier, in this post. Hinduism, as I learnt a long time ago, ranges from the pantheistic to the polytheistic to the agnostic to the atheistic; which is why it can sprout a religion like Buddhism, which is semi-atheistic (try comparing Mahayana with Theraveda), or any one of the many other Indian religions, and also obtain insights into reality and science (see, for example, Lokayata).

The point, to put it bluntly (haha) is that if you don't question your perceptions, there is nothing to think about. In modern educational parlance, we say that cognitive dissonance leads to learning; that is, when you have a situation in which things don't match what you know or believe, you have a de facto learning experience. You must doubt either the new input or the old basis. And whatever you decide about the new and the old, you are being presented with potential knowledge gain — either you will learn what's wrong with what you know, or you will learn what's wrong with what you have just received.

In fact, skepticism is a necessary tool in asking questions. This is true of all philosophical traditions, whether South Asian, East Asian, West Asian or Mediterranean. By the time these traditions had finally reached the western shores of the Eurasian continent, it had become firmly established as the single root of all lines of argument about knowledge.

The very idea of epistemology (theories of knowledge) is a list of four questions with their accompanying doubts:

• What is knowledge?
• How is knowledge acquired?
• What do we know?
• How do we know what we know?

The doubts that must underlie these questions are questions like 'Is it ever possible to define knowledge?' and 'Having defined it, how can we know we have it?' If you have no doubts, there is no point asking the questions, and there is no need to differentiate between knowledge and the lack of it.

Doubt, therefore, is indeed the basis of knowledge, in a general sort of way. The problem for someone trying to answer Q3 is to apply this argument to specific areas of knowledge. This is easy. Or maybe not. You should ask the Vedas. Haha...