Sameer Rahim wonders what we can know besides our indefinite opinions
When Boswell suggested to Johnson that it was difficult to refute the "ingenious sophistry" of Bishop Berkeley - who asserted that the world existed only in our perceptions - Johnson fam ously exclaimed, as he kicked a stone: "I refute it thus." However, recent scholarship has shown that Boswell often reconstructed scenes and dialogue for his Life of Johnson years afterwards. Can we be sure the incident happened?
Johnson made more powerful arguments for truth. When a clergyman denounced a man who had committed adultery as a "whoremonger", Johnson objected. "You don't call a man an ironmonger for buying and selling a penknife; so you don't call a man a whoremonger for getting one wench with child." Johnson's pursuit of accuracy was part of his discriminating moral sense.
A relativist might claim there are reasons for doubting Johnson. Was the man an adulterer? Is adultery always wrong? But using the framework of truth and falsehood - despite our doubts - might produce the more interesting discussion.
Thinking we are right, however, means we could also be wrong. "I know I have a brain . . . Everything speaks in its favour, nothing against it," wrote Ludwig Wittgenstein. "Nevertheless it is imaginable that my skull should turn out empty when it was operated on." How do we come to doubt the world?
Our parents taught us that all actions have verifiable consequences: running with scissors is dangerous, and eating sweets rots your teeth. Yet, at some point, we might have heard them disagreeing over how to punish us. This made us question the existence of universal moral standards. And then there is Nietzsche's dictum that "there are no facts, only interpretations".
Such relativism is nothing new. Plato recalls Protagoras's argument that "of the things which are, that they are; and of the things which are not, that they are not": in other words, "man is the measure of all things". Simon Blackburn, in Truth, likens this idea to shooting an arrow at a barn door and then painting a bull's-eye wherever it lands. You hit the target every time, but only because the word "target" has no meaning. (If all opinions are equal, asked Socrates, why does Protagoras charge so much for his?) But relativists say they express valid opinions without elevating them to absolute truths. When a proud mother shows you her child's painting, it is pointless to expect her to use objective aesthetic criteria.
What about our observations of the world? Michael Frayn's The Human Touch gives the example of someone asserting that "The cat sat on the mat". This seems believable: but is it, really? Can you be certain that the cat "sat" before you arrived? How much of the mat should it cover before it is truly sitting "on" it? And what if the "mat" looks more like a doily to me? Frayn concludes that "our procedures for determining the truth-value of the result . . . are indefinite, arbitrary and always open to challenge".
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