How Do We Know?

So I'm a skeptic, in almost every sense of the word. Like, epistemology is a trip, man. What is knowledge? I'm not going to pretend I know much about philosophy. My skepticism does not have deep philosophical roots. Or maybe it does. There must be some school of philosophy out there that thinks the way I do. It's just that when I think of possible sources of knowledge, they are all flawed in some way.

Our experiences? Based on our senses, and those are way too easy to fool. Logic? Based on assumptions that can't be proven in the first place, or they wouldn't be assumptions. Science? Hell, science is skeptical to its core. You can never prove anything. What we "know" is just what we haven't disproved yet. Even if we assumed science could provide knowledge, what good would that do most of us? Almost all of what we take for scientific knowledge is not revealed to us scientifically. We're not the ones doing the experiments. We're just trusting what certain people tell us. That's true for the news and history as well. It's not as if people can lie or anything. So what can we know, 100%, for sure?

I suppose there some things we know simply because we've defined them to be true. Blue is a color. Two plus two equals four. But these sort of things strike me as being somewhat tautological. They're just mathematical and linguistic tricks. They don't really reveal anything new about the world.

All of this depends, though, on how we define knowledge. (Then we might be dipping our toes into linguistic waters, and that's just like a whole other thing.) And that's something that philosophers or epistemologists just can't agree on. But now we've reached the real source of my skepticism. If, after thousands of years, we can't even agree on what knowledge is, how can we possibly be sure that there's any to be had?

Skepticism understandably makes many people uncomfortable. How can we know what we're supposed to do if we can't know anything? But skepticism is actually a good thing.  It seems to me that certainty, particularly moral certainty, results in untold human misery and pain. How many of the world's problems are caused by conflict between groups of people who "know" they are right? Skepticism is not meant to prevent us from acting, but it should give us pause so that we can examine a situation from another point of view. It's the starting point of empathy. And unless we can empathize with each other, I'm not sure how we can come together and work out the issues that are tearing us apart.