Doubt is our product: uncertainty used against the conclusions it normally serves.
Doubt
Withholding assent - and the difference between doubt that leads somewhere and doubt that is manufactured to prevent it.
- Theme
- Knowledge, truth and reason
- Tradition
- Cross-tradition
- Term fixed
- 1641
In plain terms
Doubt is not the absence of belief. It is an active state - a question held open, with the discomfort that comes with it.
There are two very different things people do with it. One is methodical: doubt everything you can in order to find what survives, or to find out where a claim actually rests. That is the engine of enquiry, and nothing worth knowing was established without it.
The other is strategic. If you want to stop something being acted on, you do not have to prove it false. You only have to keep the question open, and questions can be kept open indefinitely at a fraction of the cost of settling them. That asymmetry has been understood and used for a long time, and it is the reason doubt is not automatically a virtue.
As a philosopher would put it
Pyrrhonian scepticism uses the modes to generate equipollence - equal weight on both sides - which produces epochē, suspension of judgement, and is claimed to yield ataraxia, tranquillity. It is a practice rather than a doctrine, and the Pyrrhonist does not assert that nothing can be known, which would be a claim to knowledge.
Descartes inverts the purpose. His doubt is methodical and provisional, pushed as far as the demon hypothesis in order to find something that resists it, and the cogito is what survives. Doubt is a tool with an intended terminus rather than a destination.
Peirce attacks the Cartesian version directly: real doubt is an irritation caused by a genuine obstacle, and cannot be produced by deciding to have it. Paper doubt does no work, and enquiry begins from actual perplexity, not from an artificial clean slate. Wittgenstein's On Certainty adds the structural point that doubt requires a background of things not doubted - a hinge on which the questioning turns - so universal doubt is not a stricter position but an incoherent one.
Where you meet it
In 1969 an executive at Brown and Williamson wrote an internal memo on how to respond to the evidence linking smoking to cancer. The line that has been quoted ever since is that doubt is our product, since it is the best means of competing with the body of fact that exists in the mind of the general public.
The strategy was not to prove the link false. It was to fund research that produced inconclusive results, to emphasise the genuine uncertainties that exist in any epidemiology, and to call for more study - each of which is, taken alone, a legitimate scientific move. The documents became public through litigation and were analysed at length by Oreskes and Conway.
What makes the case philosophically instructive is that no individual step was fallacious. Uncertainty was real, more research was genuinely needed, and the demand for higher standards of evidence is normally a virtue. The strategy worked by using the structure of honest enquiry against its own conclusions, which is why identifying it requires looking at the pattern rather than at any single argument.
What is actually disputed
Whether doubt can be universal.
The Cartesian project assumes it can - that one can suspend everything and rebuild. Peirce and Wittgenstein both deny it, from different directions: doubt that is not provoked by a real obstacle is a pretence, and doubting requires a framework of undoubted things to doubt within. If they are right, then the sceptical challenge is not defeated but shown to be unstatable, which is a strange kind of victory.
The practical question is sharper and unresolved. There is no agreed criterion distinguishing appropriate scepticism from manufactured doubt, because the moves are the same moves: demand better evidence, note the uncertainties, resist premature closure. Whether a given instance is rigour or obstruction usually cannot be settled from the argument alone, and requires knowing who is making it and why - which is uncomfortable for anyone who wants epistemic standards to be independent of motive.
Commonly confused with
- Scepticism c. 200 Scepticism is a position or a method. Doubt is the state, and everyone has it without being a sceptic.
Defined against
- Belief Peirce makes the pair a cycle rather than an opposition, with doubt the irritation that enquiry works to settle
Philosophers
- Sextus Empiricus The modes, and suspension as a practice rather than a thesis
- Pyrrho of Elis The founder of the tradition, as far as it can be reconstructed
- René Descartes Doubt as a method with a terminus
- Al-Ghazali A doubt that dismantled his own certainties and had to be resolved otherwise
- Charles Sanders Peirce Real doubt against paper doubt
- Ludwig Wittgenstein Doubt as requiring hinges that are not doubted
Works
- Outlines of Pyrrhonism The systematic account of suspension
- Meditations on First Philosophy Methodical doubt and its terminus
- The Incoherence of the Philosophers Doubt turned against the philosophers by one of them
- How to Make Our Ideas Clear The attack on artificial doubt
- Philosophical Investigations The framework that doubting presupposes
Schools
- Pyrrhonian skepticism Where suspension is the aim
- Academic Skepticism The rival ancient form, which does make claims
- Cartesianism Where doubt becomes methodical
- Classical Pragmatism Where paper doubt is rejected
- Ordinary Language Philosophy Where universal doubt is shown to be incoherent
Related concepts
Scepticism c. 200 · Belief c. 380 BC · Knowledge c. 369 BC · Justification 1641 · Fallibility 1878
The Pyrrhonists made suspension of judgement a way of life; Descartes made doubt a deliberate method with an intended terminus, which is a quite different use of the same act.