“I asked him to admit that there was not a rhinoceros in the room, but he would not,” Bertrand Russell said, on Ludwig Wittgenstein’s refusal to believe his own eyes.  The 18^th century Scottish skeptic in his analysis of the problem of causation denied that if a brick fell from your hands one hundred times, we would have no reason to assume that it would fall on the one hundred and first time.  Whatever intellectual merit this theory has, it is negated by the violence that it does to common sense and scientific repeatability while encouraging mysticism.  An equally plausible premise is that there always is a connection between any two disparate events, although we may be blind to what that connection is.  This idea informs most conspiracy theorists and investigative journalists.

         Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica done in collaboration with fellow mathematician Alfred North Whitehead is a benchmark of 20^th century philosophy.  He wrote that “the skepticism that I advocate amounts only to this: (1) that when the experts are agreed, the opposite opinion cannot be held to be certain; (2) that when they are not agreed, no opinion can be regarded as certain; (3) that when they all hold that no sufficient grounds for a positive opinion exist, the ordinary man would do well to suspend judgment.”

          Let us apply our skepticism to this credo of skepticism.   First, I’m not impressed with appeals to authority and the condescending phrase “ordinary people” juxtaposed to “experts.”   I’m a lot less trusting in experts than Russell is.  Here are some famously wrong predictions from some eminent experts:   

I won’t say that experts are always wrong, but I will say that they can be wrong, especially when they are dealing with life and death issues such as birth and terminal sickness—or really any ethical issue.  Secondly, on what grounds do we need to rely on either a consensus of opinion or even any opinion to establish any kind of truth?  Thirdly, why exactly would we “do well to suspend judgment” in the absence of certitude?  The entire statement, actually, is replete with fuzziness to make it worthless as a guide. But Lord Russell’s broad point is valid-- that we must test what we know in the fires of doubt.  It means that we must constantly doubt what we read, hear, and see.

          The internet is a spawning ground for misinformation, and here is an e-mail I got recently, which I deleted with a snort:

“Hello,

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The Internet is such that its lies out race the truth, and the lies are often more interesting and more viral than the truth.  And the danger is more than political or religious special pleading with dating and financial service sites galore.  Never do we have to be more aware of how to distinguish truth from falsehood then in this age of the “global village”.

     Journalism above all taught me to revel in hard facts and gave me the cub reporter’s curious eye.  It also taught me that sometimes we don’t need more answers.  We just need better questions.  Gertrude (“a rose is a rose is a rose”) Stein on her deathbed was asked, “What is the answer?”  She replied: “What is the question?”   Someone once asked me, “Why do you always a question with another question?”  I answered:  “How else should I answer?” 

    I suppose if you ever wanted me to leave town, you could burn a question mark instead of a cross on my front lawn.  

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