Practice Problems — Molyneaux Problem & Infinite Regression
Next in Wikipedia’s list of Unsolved Problems in Philosophy is the Molyneaux Problem, which asks the following:
If a man born blind, and able to distinguish by touch between a cube and a globe, were made to see, could he now tell by sight which was the cube and which the globe, before he touched them?
As the Wikipedia article itself states, this is no longer a problem for the academic field of philosophy but rather for science (arguments calling science the “natural philosophy” notwithstanding). I don’t know whether psychology has, on the whole, definitively answered this question, but it seems as though the pieces are all in place to allow a scientific and experimental investigation of the problem, leaving we pedants with time to focus on other problems.
Nextly we come to the problem that has made this post take so long to get written. I simply don’t know what to do with it. The Infinite Regression of Justification notices that, with knowledge defined as justified, true belief, we must ask after the validity of any justification, and we must justify a justification. The infinite regress here is clear, and now we must know how to deal with this.
My only personal approach is to deny binaries and absolutism. For me, a fact that is justified down the entire infinite regress would be considered “absolute knowledge.” The reality of such knowledge is up for debate, but it is not material to this discussion: most of our knowledge is not so infinitely justified, and in this view we can, I think, have a better understanding of our knowledge-base if we accept a sort of Popperian critical approach to knowledge and allow that which we know to always be, in principle, mutable. There will be those facts whose justification is so deep and, perhaps, so widely varied (such as the assurance that the floor will be under our foot when we next take a step) that our assurance of its truth is close enough to total as to be effectively immutable, but so long as we recognize that we might just indeed change our beliefs given the right new justification, we can resolve this infinite regression problem.
I’ve written about this problem as a justification for a deep analytical skepticism in the past, but that was not, I think, correct. I think instead we should not use this infinite regression as an excuse to refuse to every know anything, but rather as a justification to recognize the in-principle limitedness of our knowledge. We can then think of knowledge as a web of related facts, models, and theories that lays atop the objective world and closely resembles it, but does not match it exactly. Learning and study and experience, then, which can refine our beliefs and give us more and deeper justifications for individual truths, can bring our individual webs of knowledge into closer resemblance to absolute reality, but an actually exactly accurate map (which may or not be possible) would basically be identical to, and thus interchangeable with, absolute reality.
I know that this is less an attack on the problem of Infinite Regression and more of a loosely-tied-together rambling on related topics, but this is the closest I have to a response to this problem. It is a pain in the ass of a problem, and I think it may be at the core of the epistemological approaches strangling English-language philosophical creativity. I think the philosopher or school that can break this problem and introduce a new and vital knowledge-model will be a valuable contributor to Western thought.
