One of my friends mentioned one time that philosophy has only taught him that you cannot be sure of anything. I was reading something today that gave me somewhat of an insight into this. I have thought a bit about how different methodologies (history, hard sciences, philosophy) seem to condition a certain worldview for those who employ them. Could it be that "philosophy" is prone to teach that you cannot be sure of anything because of a methodological bias that one learns in philosophy? I am thinking of critical thinking here. You are "taught" to question assumptions, and to try to come up with arguments against those assumptions. It is even taught that one should do this as a pure intellectual exercise even if you agree with the premises in order to detect errors, i.e. make your position stronger.
It seems to me that there are several problems with this. The first problem brings to light a fundamental problem for the methodology of philosophy. Before we even get started in asking about assumptions and beginning the project of criticism, we have the problem of defining what philosophy is--i.e. are we going to critique things that make no rational sense, that do not seem to fit into our experience, or are we just going to be absurdists and play with language all day? It seems to me that the nature of modern philosophy and academia predisposes the "methodology" of philosophy to take on purely a form that is conducive to discursive, abstract, presentation. I heard a philosophy professor--Dr. Jensen--describe philosophy in these terms as he ridiculed those who believed that philosophy really was "the love of wisdom" and said that philosophy is a certain way of going about answering a question, i.e., questioning assumptions, etc. I believe it is structural problem. In other words, the academy is incapable of accommodating an endless variety of definitions of what philosophy is and must naturally lean to one way of doing things. It is therefore doomed to cause people like Alex to only learn to "doubt everything" because that is the natural outcome of the particular methodology of abstract, discursive reasoning.
So the first problem of defining what philosophy is leads to the next problem I see in that "philosophy" (as we've defined it) could lead to sidestepping the question of practical reason and living. If one is focused on whether something is consistent in a logical, discursive format, one neglects empirical realities or subjective positions. This means that philosophy could overemphasize the ethereal, abstract, nature of things as opposed to other approaches such as intuition, emotion, empirical models. In other words, I've noticed that philosophers do not necessarily base their arguments of what is true on empirical studies and surveys of what people think. Just because most people believe in God does not make it true for the philosopher or even an interesting question. I am kind of rambling here, but I feel that there is an important gap here between a practical reality and the philosopher's reality.
Ok. I am going to sum up. Because I do not believe that "truth" necessarily forces itself upon us when it is seen, I feel that the methodology of philosophy may not be necessarily conducive to finding truth, but rather conducive to finding error and only error. So it is similar to the agnostics dilemma in which he is sure that God cannot be proven, but he is also sure that God cannot be disproven. If the agnostic is speaking of what human reason can tell us, then it seems that philosophy only pronounces upon the limits of its own methodology. For those who believe in God, this may point to the fact that philosophy must be combined with other approaches with different premises for what can count as "truth".
Please discuss.
