Oh, where to even begin. I was sincerely hoping you'd try to tackle this one.
The bent oar and the tower have to be some of the oldest, most cliché examples in the whole tradition at this point, definitely fossils. What if we used a modern example to distinguish between the evident and non-evident instead? Take eyewitness testimony research, people who confidently remember seeing things that were never there, or have their memory of an event reshaped just by being asked a leading question afterward. That's the evident/non-evident line in practice. What someone actually perceives in the moment is one thing, the confident story built on top of it afterward is something else entirely, and decades of courtroom cases have shown us how badly the two get confused.
I've also noticed you're treating Academic Skeptics and Pyrrhonists as basically the same target here, but they're pretty different schools with pretty different mechanisms. It'd be a bit like comparing Epicureans with Cyrenaics, both get called hedonists, but one's chasing immediate bodily pleasure and the other's calculating long-term absence of pain. I wonder, is Pyrrhonism even the right word to file under Skeptic in the sense you mean it in this essay, or is that just lumping two things that don't actually belong in the same box, to make a quicker point?
Do you actually have any objection to the oar and the tower examples and how the Epicureans treat them, other than that they are well worn? I just think of them as classic, straightforward cases for discussing the senses (Lucretius includes them, as does Sextus/Bates). But sure, you could use eyewitness testimony for a similar, though somewhat more complicated example. I think one could easily extend Epicurus' requirements for clarity and physical proximity in trusting our sense perceptions to include things like duration or recency, while other sources of misinterpretation like leading questions or pre-established bias seem clearly on the "distorted opinion" rather than "untrustworthy senses" side of the debate. I don't think such a modern example would change his conclusions.
I allude briefly to differences between Academic Skeptics and Pyrrhonists, but didn't want to go too far down that channel here, for reasons of space and focus. More extended discussion of Pyrrhonism is coming (and I'm glad to get these little opportunities for Pyrrhonist feedback as I lay out some building blocks). In terms of the topic of these particular maxims, however, I think it's still fair to say that both Skeptical schools claimed that the senses were unreliable, in some sense. They had different elaborations of that point, but in both cases Epicurus would have said that their subsequent conclusions were misguided, or at least rather pointless and idle.
I see your point on real versus hypothetical, and that could be an important difference. But I want to point back to something you said in a reply on another post, about pleasure pills and experience machines, that thought experiments are "supposed to isolate particular variables, but in practice usually add in extra, particularly unrealistic factors."
Isn't that basically what the oar and the tower are doing too? They're not just any instance of perception going wrong, they're specifically chosen because they isolate "does perception deceive" as cleanly as possible, stripped away from the messier ways perception actually fails in ordinary life. If isolating the variable is the complaint, the oar and the tower aren't safe from it just because the stick is real and the pleasure machine isn't. I'm curious whether the real/hypothetical distinction is actually enough to clear them, or if there's something else underlying it.
I don't recall emphasizing "real versus hypothetical." Did I use those words? I expressed a dislike for the more elaborate and unrealistic thought experiments like pleasure pills and experience machines, since I don't think that attempting to train human psychology for nonexistent situations is very useful. I don't think the oar and the tower fall into that category; they are examples that very much can exist and which don't add any science-fictional postulates.
I would admit that questions of oars and towers are not particularly important to me. I'm just proceeding in order through the Principal Doctrines and these two maxims were concerned narrowly with questions of sense perception, which I don't think are particularly central to modern Pyrrhonists either. For my ethics-oriented interests, I think the main value of the topic is as an indicator of what really matters to Epicureans: two out of forty Principal Doctrines (5%) are occupied with the certainty of our knowledge, and their advice is basically "just be normal and don't worry about such things. We can recognize the existence of optical illusions and the like without drafting these phenomena into a campaign against the possibility of knowledge."
I think if we’re going to talk about the Principle Doctrines, then we should assume that they written by Epicurus, and that puts a date range on them, in which case the Skeptical Academy is in the future. It also means Epicurus’ target was early Pyrrhonism, about which we know little - just a few quotes from Timon. There’s a range of thinking about the degree to which the Pyrrhonism that we know from Sextus Empiricus and Diogenese Laertius reflects the Pyrrhonism of Pyrrho. One end of the range is that there’s only modest resemblance and that Pyrrhonism as we know it was largely invented by Aenesidemus, who made Pyrrho a figurehead. The other end of the range is that it is an evolved and elaborated version of Pyrrho’s teachings. In either case, we can’t be sure whether Epicurus’ target was something different from the Pyrrhonism we know now. In particular, comparing the Aristocles Passage with Sextan Pyrrhonism, there’s a difference between the two, and the applibity of these two Principle Doctrine differs between them, as well.
PD 23 (If you dispute all evidence of sensation, you will have no standard of reference when you judge those sensations which you say are deceptive.) is easy to address. All sensation is relative. Sensation can be compared with other sensations, particularly those from advantageous positions, as a standard of reference. This is obvious, straightforward, and compatible with modern scientific methods: if a particular observation is in doubt, it can be referenced against other observations to see if they provide disconfirming evidence.
PD 24 doesn’t seem applicable to Pyrrhonism. The first part of PD 24 looks to me like a critique of Platonism, as Platonism rejects the senses in favor of the Forms (e.g., Allegory of the Cave). Pyrrhonism, however, accepts the senses and rejects non-evident stuff like the Forms. The acceptance does come with reservations about the validity of the senses, but otherwise it’s not much different from the Epicurean approach.
It seems to me that your real concern is about what you infer about the Pyrrhonists. Consider this statement:
“Skeptics who inflate the proper puncturing of groundless beliefs into an all-encompassing outlook on life, in which our senses, pains, and pleasures are no longer to be believed, are similarly importing unnecessary difficulties and perplexity into the project of living well.”
Saying that these things “are no longer to be believed” does not accurately represent what Pyrrhonists are doing. It goes much too far. It positions these things as irrelevant. That’s simply not the case. All we’re saying is that one should not be confident that they accurately represent reality; meanwhile, despite that caveat, they’re all we have to go on.
Chronology: Yes, the Principal Doctrines predate the development of Academic Skepticism. I mention the Academy in part because they are part of current discussions (maybe more so than Pyrrhonism with Pigliucci's recent book), and in part because Lucretius addresses the same issues presumably with them in mind, but fundamentally because I don't think the issues Epicurus is raising are limited to any one specific version of Skepticism. In the piece, I don't dwell on the differences for space reasons, but I do make a formal distinction between the Academic Skeptics and the Pyrrhonists in multiple places.
PD 23: Sounds like our interpretations are essentially the same. The difference is that Epicurus considers the existence of disconfirming evidence to imply an ability to distinguish the truth, which I think is more in line with everyday understanding (and usefulness) than Pyrrhonist use of disconfirming evidence as a reason to doubt our fundamental ability to perceive the truth. Technically, how can we say that evidence B "disproves" evidence A unless we are positing that evidence B is correct? (Perhaps you could say that A and B cannot both be simultaneously true and leave it at that, but in reality people are happy to say "no, the oar is not bent.")
PD 24: I think the first half is largely an elaboration of the same point as PD 23. I think those Pyrrhonist "reservations about the validity of the senses" you mention are what is fundamentally under debate here. I acknowledge, in this piece and others, that the Pyrrhonists "accept" the senses in terms of being happy to use their evidence for practical decision-making, but compared to Epicurus, they are clearly less willing to accept them as evidence of objective reality.
My concluding statement: I don't think this is as distorting and unfair as you are taking it. My description of the Skeptical position as asserting that the senses, etc. are "no longer to be believed" was intended, and seems to me, to be in reasonable alignment with your preferred phrasing that "one should not be confident that they accurately represent reality." I am not claiming that the Pyrrhonists are treating the senses as irrelevant. My point was roughly the opposite: that in practice Pyrrhonists *do* rely on the evidence of the senses, so arguing for their unreliability as guides to the truth is an unnecessary distraction.
I don't think this was obscure in the essay. I said that the Skeptics (both Pyrrhonist and Academic):
"all actually use the evidence of their senses to navigate the material world. And they will typically admit this, arguing that they are nonetheless making an important technical distinction about the reliability of knowledge."
What I believe Epicurus was disputing was the importance and value of Skeptical inquiry. To his practical mind, the endless expansion of inquiry was not worth advocating for. That fact that Pyrrhonist arguments about the fallibility of the senses don't prevent them from relying on them as "criteria of action" would not be an excuse or justification in his mind, but rather evidence for the irrelevance or unseriousness of the practice.
I think what Epicurus likely found unsatisfactory in Pyrrhonism was how much it suspended judgment. For example, the Pyrrhonists suspend judgment on the nature of the gods, whereas Epicurus had firm opinions about them.
Yes, this is true. Though the gods are somewhat of an interesting case, since although Epicurus made firm pronouncements about them, the practical effect of those pronouncements was largely to *remove* them from our lives as subjects of concern, which is probably similar to the Pyrrhonist objective.
(And although nominally "firm," those pronouncements are still in some ways vague; there is ongoing scholarly dispute about whether he conceived the gods as 1) literal beings, 2) ideal projections, or 3) nominally literal beings that he only described as such to avoid accusations of impiety, while being essentially atheistic in all his more concrete advice.)
For me at least, the more central contrast is that Epicurus was quite confident that pleasure, broadly conceived, was the most fitting end for human activity. If one does not firmly believe this, one might, for example:
1) Get distracted by things labelled as "virtuous," rather than accurately assessing their hedonistic results.
2) Explicitly disregard painful consequences when considering a course of action (say, engaging in politics without taking the attendant stress and distress into consideration)
3) Live a relatively unplanned life, largely following immediate appearances of pain and pleasure, but declining to make prudent long-term arrangements based on clear and consistent objectives.
While the Pyrrhonists say they will generally "live normally" and react as one would expect to evident sources of pain and pleasure, it seems to me that suspension of judgment about our proper end will inevitably cloud and confuse one's long-term decision-making. While there is always uncertainty about the outcome of any one individual decision (e.g. Daoist farmer stories), Epicurus holds that this kind of lack of clarity will tend to result in more pain and a less happy life over time.
Our "proper end" is a matter of dispute. The Stoics say one thing. Aristotle says another. There's Aristippus, and the Cynics, too. They don't agree with Epicurus.
On top of that, observing their modern followers, I don't see any sort of consistently better outcomes.
Oh, where to even begin. I was sincerely hoping you'd try to tackle this one.
The bent oar and the tower have to be some of the oldest, most cliché examples in the whole tradition at this point, definitely fossils. What if we used a modern example to distinguish between the evident and non-evident instead? Take eyewitness testimony research, people who confidently remember seeing things that were never there, or have their memory of an event reshaped just by being asked a leading question afterward. That's the evident/non-evident line in practice. What someone actually perceives in the moment is one thing, the confident story built on top of it afterward is something else entirely, and decades of courtroom cases have shown us how badly the two get confused.
I've also noticed you're treating Academic Skeptics and Pyrrhonists as basically the same target here, but they're pretty different schools with pretty different mechanisms. It'd be a bit like comparing Epicureans with Cyrenaics, both get called hedonists, but one's chasing immediate bodily pleasure and the other's calculating long-term absence of pain. I wonder, is Pyrrhonism even the right word to file under Skeptic in the sense you mean it in this essay, or is that just lumping two things that don't actually belong in the same box, to make a quicker point?
I thought you might like to chime in on this one!
Do you actually have any objection to the oar and the tower examples and how the Epicureans treat them, other than that they are well worn? I just think of them as classic, straightforward cases for discussing the senses (Lucretius includes them, as does Sextus/Bates). But sure, you could use eyewitness testimony for a similar, though somewhat more complicated example. I think one could easily extend Epicurus' requirements for clarity and physical proximity in trusting our sense perceptions to include things like duration or recency, while other sources of misinterpretation like leading questions or pre-established bias seem clearly on the "distorted opinion" rather than "untrustworthy senses" side of the debate. I don't think such a modern example would change his conclusions.
I allude briefly to differences between Academic Skeptics and Pyrrhonists, but didn't want to go too far down that channel here, for reasons of space and focus. More extended discussion of Pyrrhonism is coming (and I'm glad to get these little opportunities for Pyrrhonist feedback as I lay out some building blocks). In terms of the topic of these particular maxims, however, I think it's still fair to say that both Skeptical schools claimed that the senses were unreliable, in some sense. They had different elaborations of that point, but in both cases Epicurus would have said that their subsequent conclusions were misguided, or at least rather pointless and idle.
I see your point on real versus hypothetical, and that could be an important difference. But I want to point back to something you said in a reply on another post, about pleasure pills and experience machines, that thought experiments are "supposed to isolate particular variables, but in practice usually add in extra, particularly unrealistic factors."
Isn't that basically what the oar and the tower are doing too? They're not just any instance of perception going wrong, they're specifically chosen because they isolate "does perception deceive" as cleanly as possible, stripped away from the messier ways perception actually fails in ordinary life. If isolating the variable is the complaint, the oar and the tower aren't safe from it just because the stick is real and the pleasure machine isn't. I'm curious whether the real/hypothetical distinction is actually enough to clear them, or if there's something else underlying it.
I don't recall emphasizing "real versus hypothetical." Did I use those words? I expressed a dislike for the more elaborate and unrealistic thought experiments like pleasure pills and experience machines, since I don't think that attempting to train human psychology for nonexistent situations is very useful. I don't think the oar and the tower fall into that category; they are examples that very much can exist and which don't add any science-fictional postulates.
I would admit that questions of oars and towers are not particularly important to me. I'm just proceeding in order through the Principal Doctrines and these two maxims were concerned narrowly with questions of sense perception, which I don't think are particularly central to modern Pyrrhonists either. For my ethics-oriented interests, I think the main value of the topic is as an indicator of what really matters to Epicureans: two out of forty Principal Doctrines (5%) are occupied with the certainty of our knowledge, and their advice is basically "just be normal and don't worry about such things. We can recognize the existence of optical illusions and the like without drafting these phenomena into a campaign against the possibility of knowledge."
I think if we’re going to talk about the Principle Doctrines, then we should assume that they written by Epicurus, and that puts a date range on them, in which case the Skeptical Academy is in the future. It also means Epicurus’ target was early Pyrrhonism, about which we know little - just a few quotes from Timon. There’s a range of thinking about the degree to which the Pyrrhonism that we know from Sextus Empiricus and Diogenese Laertius reflects the Pyrrhonism of Pyrrho. One end of the range is that there’s only modest resemblance and that Pyrrhonism as we know it was largely invented by Aenesidemus, who made Pyrrho a figurehead. The other end of the range is that it is an evolved and elaborated version of Pyrrho’s teachings. In either case, we can’t be sure whether Epicurus’ target was something different from the Pyrrhonism we know now. In particular, comparing the Aristocles Passage with Sextan Pyrrhonism, there’s a difference between the two, and the applibity of these two Principle Doctrine differs between them, as well.
PD 23 (If you dispute all evidence of sensation, you will have no standard of reference when you judge those sensations which you say are deceptive.) is easy to address. All sensation is relative. Sensation can be compared with other sensations, particularly those from advantageous positions, as a standard of reference. This is obvious, straightforward, and compatible with modern scientific methods: if a particular observation is in doubt, it can be referenced against other observations to see if they provide disconfirming evidence.
PD 24 doesn’t seem applicable to Pyrrhonism. The first part of PD 24 looks to me like a critique of Platonism, as Platonism rejects the senses in favor of the Forms (e.g., Allegory of the Cave). Pyrrhonism, however, accepts the senses and rejects non-evident stuff like the Forms. The acceptance does come with reservations about the validity of the senses, but otherwise it’s not much different from the Epicurean approach.
It seems to me that your real concern is about what you infer about the Pyrrhonists. Consider this statement:
“Skeptics who inflate the proper puncturing of groundless beliefs into an all-encompassing outlook on life, in which our senses, pains, and pleasures are no longer to be believed, are similarly importing unnecessary difficulties and perplexity into the project of living well.”
Saying that these things “are no longer to be believed” does not accurately represent what Pyrrhonists are doing. It goes much too far. It positions these things as irrelevant. That’s simply not the case. All we’re saying is that one should not be confident that they accurately represent reality; meanwhile, despite that caveat, they’re all we have to go on.
Hi Doug, I'm always glad to hear your feedback.
Chronology: Yes, the Principal Doctrines predate the development of Academic Skepticism. I mention the Academy in part because they are part of current discussions (maybe more so than Pyrrhonism with Pigliucci's recent book), and in part because Lucretius addresses the same issues presumably with them in mind, but fundamentally because I don't think the issues Epicurus is raising are limited to any one specific version of Skepticism. In the piece, I don't dwell on the differences for space reasons, but I do make a formal distinction between the Academic Skeptics and the Pyrrhonists in multiple places.
PD 23: Sounds like our interpretations are essentially the same. The difference is that Epicurus considers the existence of disconfirming evidence to imply an ability to distinguish the truth, which I think is more in line with everyday understanding (and usefulness) than Pyrrhonist use of disconfirming evidence as a reason to doubt our fundamental ability to perceive the truth. Technically, how can we say that evidence B "disproves" evidence A unless we are positing that evidence B is correct? (Perhaps you could say that A and B cannot both be simultaneously true and leave it at that, but in reality people are happy to say "no, the oar is not bent.")
PD 24: I think the first half is largely an elaboration of the same point as PD 23. I think those Pyrrhonist "reservations about the validity of the senses" you mention are what is fundamentally under debate here. I acknowledge, in this piece and others, that the Pyrrhonists "accept" the senses in terms of being happy to use their evidence for practical decision-making, but compared to Epicurus, they are clearly less willing to accept them as evidence of objective reality.
My concluding statement: I don't think this is as distorting and unfair as you are taking it. My description of the Skeptical position as asserting that the senses, etc. are "no longer to be believed" was intended, and seems to me, to be in reasonable alignment with your preferred phrasing that "one should not be confident that they accurately represent reality." I am not claiming that the Pyrrhonists are treating the senses as irrelevant. My point was roughly the opposite: that in practice Pyrrhonists *do* rely on the evidence of the senses, so arguing for their unreliability as guides to the truth is an unnecessary distraction.
I don't think this was obscure in the essay. I said that the Skeptics (both Pyrrhonist and Academic):
"all actually use the evidence of their senses to navigate the material world. And they will typically admit this, arguing that they are nonetheless making an important technical distinction about the reliability of knowledge."
What I believe Epicurus was disputing was the importance and value of Skeptical inquiry. To his practical mind, the endless expansion of inquiry was not worth advocating for. That fact that Pyrrhonist arguments about the fallibility of the senses don't prevent them from relying on them as "criteria of action" would not be an excuse or justification in his mind, but rather evidence for the irrelevance or unseriousness of the practice.
I think what Epicurus likely found unsatisfactory in Pyrrhonism was how much it suspended judgment. For example, the Pyrrhonists suspend judgment on the nature of the gods, whereas Epicurus had firm opinions about them.
Yes, this is true. Though the gods are somewhat of an interesting case, since although Epicurus made firm pronouncements about them, the practical effect of those pronouncements was largely to *remove* them from our lives as subjects of concern, which is probably similar to the Pyrrhonist objective.
(And although nominally "firm," those pronouncements are still in some ways vague; there is ongoing scholarly dispute about whether he conceived the gods as 1) literal beings, 2) ideal projections, or 3) nominally literal beings that he only described as such to avoid accusations of impiety, while being essentially atheistic in all his more concrete advice.)
For me at least, the more central contrast is that Epicurus was quite confident that pleasure, broadly conceived, was the most fitting end for human activity. If one does not firmly believe this, one might, for example:
1) Get distracted by things labelled as "virtuous," rather than accurately assessing their hedonistic results.
2) Explicitly disregard painful consequences when considering a course of action (say, engaging in politics without taking the attendant stress and distress into consideration)
3) Live a relatively unplanned life, largely following immediate appearances of pain and pleasure, but declining to make prudent long-term arrangements based on clear and consistent objectives.
While the Pyrrhonists say they will generally "live normally" and react as one would expect to evident sources of pain and pleasure, it seems to me that suspension of judgment about our proper end will inevitably cloud and confuse one's long-term decision-making. While there is always uncertainty about the outcome of any one individual decision (e.g. Daoist farmer stories), Epicurus holds that this kind of lack of clarity will tend to result in more pain and a less happy life over time.
Our "proper end" is a matter of dispute. The Stoics say one thing. Aristotle says another. There's Aristippus, and the Cynics, too. They don't agree with Epicurus.
On top of that, observing their modern followers, I don't see any sort of consistently better outcomes.