Ms. Andrea Solomon, Ms. Mary Edsall
Colloquium F2003x
Assignment #12 – Michel de Montaigne Essay
28 October 1999
Measuring Truth and Error
It is perfectly understandable that we, as educated citizens of the atomic and computer age, consider skepticism to be among the “healthiest” virtues. After all, scientific method dictates that we presume something to be false until it is replicated time after time by different experimenters. We value most highly the scientists like Einstein who are reluctant to believe even their own conclusions and beg others to try disproving them. This seems an especially sound policy when we consider all the nonsensical falsities that are set forth by charlatans like telephone psychics, palm and tarot readers, water diviners, and so forth. We laugh at the masses of simpletons who eagerly spend millions of dollars every year on such absurdities. We especially enjoy mocking works by past historians and authors, such as Herodotus or Marie de France, who claimed to believe in fantastical animals which we now “know” never existed. But isn’t our confidence in what is possible and impossible somewhat overblown? How can we know so certainly that something does not exist without searching every inch of the universe to verify that it is not there? And why do we assume that just because we cannot see something that it doesn’t (and didn’t) exist? Are our capacities for detection so sophisticated that if we can’t find it, it probably doesn’t exist?
It seems foolhardy to be certain something is not true or does exist when it is logically so much simpler to prove the reverse by finding one example. Five hundred years ago much of the world’s lands and cultures were being actively discovered by Europeans. They were encountering new plants, animals, and customs so rapidly that to be overly skeptical would have denied them much of the benefit of their exploration. Yet today, people who have lived their whole life in one city are certain they know what is and isn’t possible. We feel that so much is known by the collective humanity (e.g. our ubiquitous expression “they say”) that we educated skeptics are quite confident that ghosts, angels, and extra-terrestrials do not exist. Yet how can we know what exists in outer space when thousands of new, bizarre species are discovered every year right in our oceans and deserts? Perhaps our pride in what we think we know too often stifles our curiosity, which deserves all the credit for what little we actually do know.