| T O P I C R E V I E W |
| Tom Trelogan |
Posted - Jun 09 2010 : 10:51:19 AM
This is our next big question. This time, I want to set the stage for the discussion with a lecture specifically on this question. So before you post anything here, you need to go read my lecture. You'll find it in the Reading Room under the title "Philosophy and Reality." Questions or comments regarding the lecture itself could go on its Discussion page, but this is the place where I want us to discuss our second big question: the question that lecture is designed to put clearly before us. So unless you're sure that your comment or question pertains to my lecture only and not to the question about whether philosophers are in touch with reality, post it here.
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| 20 L A T E S T R E P L I E S (Newest First) |
| Tom Trelogan |
Posted - Jul 27 2010 : 2:53:23 PM
There's no single answer to this question, Aaron. You're alive. In and when you see this post, you'll be in a position to say, knowledgeably, "Hey, that's true. Maybe it won't always be true, but it's true right now!). How will you know you're alive at that time and not just thinking that you are? Work that out, and then answer the question: how do you know at that very same time that 1 + 1 = 2? That'll also be true then too (and actually, that will always be true). Then, ask yourself the question whether the way you know that the first of these things is true instead of just being thought to be true is the same as the way you know that the second of these things is true instead of just being thought to be true, and you'll see that you know these things in very different ways. So: there's no single answer to the question that you've posed. |
| Aaron Mund |
Posted - Jul 27 2010 : 11:13:22 AM
I am still curious about my question "How do we know that things that are "true" now are true or only thought to be true?" Is this even possible? |
| Tom Trelogan |
Posted - Jul 27 2010 : 07:48:24 AM
Richard, I agree with almost everything you've just said except for this: "[Y]ears of people consistently referring to the sky as blue makes it true that it is blue." That I don't agree with. Surely what makes it true that the sky is blue is that the sky is blue. Just two very minor questions: (1) what do you mean when you say that "the deduction could be more thorough"? and (2) what do you mean by "reduced" here? Do you mean: shown to be false? |
| Richard Mikel |
Posted - Jul 26 2010 : 11:13:48 AM
Aaron, I think you answered your own question here in a sense. You said, "When the situations are constant it is easy." The sky is blue, is it not? This is more than just because of science. Someone could say, "when the sky is cloudy it's actually grey" but the point remains the same, the sky is blue. "What if you just think it's blue but what we see as blue is actually red?" We aren't all color blind, and our understanding of color makes the sky blue. According to our definition of sky and color, the sky is blue. And years of people consistently referring to the sky as blue makes it true that it is blue. The deduction could be more thorough, but I feel like this is the process we have to follow to have something be true. If it can't be reduced, it can only be thought to be true.
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| Aaron Mund |
Posted - Jul 21 2010 : 2:38:17 PM
How do we know when things are true or when they are only thought to be true now? When the situations are constant it is easy. For example the sky is blue. But with science there seem to be many things that are thought to be true and considered to be true at one time and then weeks, months, years, centuries later are found to be false. So how do we know for sure if something is true or only thought to be true without waiting weeks, months, centuries? How do we know that things that are "true" now are true or only thought to be true?
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| Richard Mikel |
Posted - Jul 19 2010 : 12:15:58 PM
Tom, your insight is helpful here. Something's being true, and its being thought to be true are two very different things. Just because a large group, or the majority believe something to be true, doesn't make it so. If I can convince four hundred people to believe that an orange is actually an apple, it doesn't mean that an orange is an apple, it just mean that four hundred people believe that.
Because of this I take back my remark about statements in the past always being true at the time at which they were made based on reasoned thought. Since the world didn't go through some extreme change from flat to round and it was actually minds that were changed, the original thought and those who believed it were obviously wrong no matter how "reasoned" their beliefs seemed to be. Since we later found through reasoned thought (and science) that the world is round, that's the true belief.
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| Katie Contreras |
Posted - Jul 18 2010 : 7:59:57 PM
Cassie, I see what you're saying now. But, I would have to say that it is not like saying that. I am just saying that I don't believe we can be certain about anything. I am not even certain that we can't be certain about things. Even talking about this can frustrate me terribly. It frustrates me because it feels like a never-ending vicious circle of uncertainty in my head. I just was replying to you, Cassie.
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| Tom Trelogan |
Posted - Jul 17 2010 : 06:15:59 AM
Can a thing be partly true and partly false? That depends on what it is. Theories such as scientific theories can consist of statements some of which are true and some of which are false. Someone's testimony in court can be partly true and partly false. Certain parts of a story or an argument can be true while other parts are false. It can even be the case that some of the parts of a compound statement are true while the other parts are false, but no single statement can be partly true or partly false taken as a whole.
Let's begin with the last of these points first. It's the most tractable, and it may help us to understand at least some of the other with a good deal more clarity than we could achieve without it. It's a fundamental law of logic that every statement is either true or false. This is the law of excluded middle, and it's been recognized as a law of logic ever since the time of Aristotle. It's actually at work even though it hasn't yet been explicitly formulated in everything that Plato's Sokrates says and does. He lives his life by this principle. Either A or not A. That's one way to put it. No one whose opinion on the subject is worth considering seriously doubts it. Now some statements are compound statements. Let's start with the ones that are easiest to understand: the truth-functional compounds. Statements put together from other statements by means of the expressions "...and...," "...or...," "if...then...," "...if and only if...," and "not..." (or "it's not the case that...") are the ones that are most familiar. Statements formed by means of the use of these expressions are called "conjunctions," "disjunctions," "conditionals," "biconditionals," and "negations" respectively. Obviously, compounds of compounds are possible. So, for example, "Either it's raining right now where I am and I'm getting wet right now, or this is not the case" is a disjunction of a conjunction of statements with the negation of that same conjunction." Putting letters in place of the statements and using parentheses as they're used in algebra to group components), we can exhibit the form of any such as follows: "(Either (p and q) or not (p and q))." In modern logic, special symbols are used for conjunction, disjunction, material implication (the relation of antecedent to consequent in a conditional), material coimplication (the relation of the left-hand side to the right-hand side of a biconditional), and negation as follows: "&", "v", "→", "↔", and "¬". Using these so-called "truth-functional connectives", we can tidy up our representation of the form of statements that are disjunctions of conjunctions with their negations to look like this:
((p & q) v ¬(p & q))
Now, the truth or falsity of any such statement -- any truth-functional compound (any statement built up in this way from other, simpler statements using the truth-functional connectives or their equivalents in English) -- is a function (a mathematically describable function) of the truth values of its components. The basic truth-functional definitions of the connectives are as follows: - (p & q) is true if and only if p and q are both true.
- (p v q) is true if and only if either p is true or q is true or both.
- (p → q) is true if and only if either p is false or q is true or both.
- (p ↔ q) is true if and only if p and q are both true or both false.
- ¬p is true if and only if p is false.
Given these definitions, it's easy to see that it's true that the statement "Either it's raining right now where I am and I'm getting wet right now or this is not the case" is a necessary truth: a statement that can't be false under any circumstances whatsoever -- for exactly the same reason that any statement of the form "If p then p" is a necessary truth. It's what a logician would call a logical truth. Logical truths are at least some of the truths of which we can be certain. We can be conscious of the impossibility of their falsity. How do we arrive at this consciousness? By doing the requisite logical analysis. As for their utility, Eliott will still have his questions about that, but we'll set him to thinking about whether the wiring of the logic board on his computer is of any utility and then to meditating on the fact that what it amounts to is a physical incarnation of truths of precisely this sort.
So. Here is a statement -- "Either it's raining right now where I am and I'm getting wet right now or this is not the case" -- that has parts that are such that some of them could be true while others are false that is nevertheless itself true and indeed necessarily true. It's "100% percent true" and we can be "100% certain" that it's true. It's always been true. It'll always be true. We can be certain today that these things are so.
If this presentation is a bit compressed and you'd like things spelled out at somewhat greater length, take a look at this very nice Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on "Propositional Logic."
There are other statements built up from simpler statements in other ways that are harder to give a really tidy account of. Statements of the form "S believes that p" provide us with an example. Here, the whole statement may be true or false regardless of the truth or falsity of p. In other words, the truth or falsity of the whole is not a function of the truth or falsity of p." Contexts of this sort are called "intensional contexts" as opposed to "extensional contexts," and their logic is not all that well understood. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has a nice article on "Intensional Logic." You'll find this article tough going, but there isn't any easy going here.
Arguments -- which you, Richard, also mentioned in connection with this question ("Can something be partly true and partly false?") -- also consist of statements, and those statements, whether truth-functionally simple or truth-functionally compound, will be either true or false, but no argument is itself either true or false. Of arguments, we say that they're valid or invalid, sound or unsound, and so on, but never that they're true or false. So no argument could be 100% true or 50% true or 100% false, though of course all the statements in it could be true, half of them or some other fraction of them could be true (while the others are false), or they could all be false.
Similarly for stories, except that here people get sloppy and call stories true stories in which all the statements are true or all the important ones are true. (Mathematical precision hasn't yet been striven for in talking about stories in the way in which it has been striven for -- and achieved -- in connection with arguments.)
And similarly for someone's testimony in court. Parts of it might be true and parts might be false because here too we're talking about something that consists of a number of statements. Now here one can get confused because of the fact that a person's testimony in court is sometimes called the statement that he or she has made on the stand, but if we think of it as a single statement, we can't think of it as made up of various statements in the same way as the way in which a single truth-functional compound statement is made of its components.
Intriguingly, the very opposite goes for theories (scientific theories, for example) because while these too consist of various statements (the various assertions or theses of the theory), to say of a theory that it's true ''is'' to say that all of its theses are true, so when we're talking about theories (formal deductive theories such as Euclid's geometry or Newton's or Einstein's physics, for example) we think of each of them as equivalent, in effect, to the conjunction of all of its theses (all of its axioms, definitions, and theorems).
What doesn't this yet serve to sort out? No doubt there are questions it doesn't clear up....
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| Tom Trelogan |
Posted - Jul 17 2010 : 04:57:06 AM
Aaron, Richard, and John: the flat-earthers of yesterday who believed that the earth was flat on what they thought were scientific grounds were mistaken. The earth wasn't any flatter then than it is today. It's round, and it's pretty nearly always been round. What's true is that these folks thought that the earth is flat. They believed that it was flat. They may even have thought that they knew that it was flat and that they could be absolutely certain that the earth was flat, but if they did, they were wrong about that too. For the earth to have been flat when it was thought to be flat and for it to be round now that it's thought to be round, it would have had to undergo a rather remarkable change that it hasn't in fact undergone. What underwent a change was people's thinking. The earth has pretty much retained the shape it had in the middle ages, being altered a bit here and a bit there by erosion and by people chipping away at it, of course, but otherwise remaining pretty much as it was. By the way: there are still flat-earthers today, so be aware that if thinking makes it so, then today the earth is both round and flat.
Do you recognize a difference between a statement's being true and its being thought to be true? If not, you're going to have to convince me of the fundamental identity of these two things to bring me over to your side. Since there's a difference between a statement's being true and its being thought to be true, there's also a difference between a statement's being known to be true and its being thought to be known to be true, and I suppose it could be a failure on your part to see the second of these two differences that's responsible for your failing to see the first one -- or for your being tempted to wonder about or to deny its reality.
Actually, I'm not at all sure you all see eye to eye with one another about this. Aaron, you're the one of the three of you who most clearly fails to see or denies the difference between something's being true and its being thought to be true. Your whole position depends on identifying these with each other. Richard, you seemed, for a while, to be of the view that there is a difference, but in your most recent post, I detect a bit of wobbling. And John, as so often is the case, I can't really figure out where you stand -- or even if you're prepared to take a stand, even temporarily -- on the matter at all.
People change their minds about things. But if and when they do, the world remains largely the same. All that changes is what they think and say and, of course, everything else in their lives that's a function of what they think and say (the way they feel about things, for example)! But that's it. That's all that changes.
Similarly, people are of different minds about things -- they disagree with one another. But if and when they do, the only differences between them are differences in the differences between the things they think and say and, of course, between all the other things in their lives that are a function of the things they think and say (the ways they feel about things, for example).
As I say, you will manage to change my mind about these particular things only if you can convince me that a thing's being true and a thing's being thought to be true are the same. |
| Tom Trelogan |
Posted - Jul 17 2010 : 04:40:12 AM
John, only the last nine words of your "quotation" from Emerson were actually written by Emerson. The rest is something by you or by someone else and belongs either inside square brackets (to indicate that it's not by Emerson) or outside the quotation marks (to make it clear that it's by you). Here's the actual passage from "Self-Reliance":quote:
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them.
But why should you keep your head over your shoulder? Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day. In your metaphysics you have denied personality to the Deity: yet when the devout motions of the soul come, yield to them heart and life, though they should clothe God with shape and color. Leave your theory, as Joseph his coat in the hand of the harlot, and flee.
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. -- 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' -- Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
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| John Koban |
Posted - Jul 16 2010 : 5:05:56 PM
This conversation reminds me of a quotation from my favorite transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson: "It is foolish to worry about consistency, because what an intelligent person believes tomorrow, if he/she trusts oneself, may be completely different from what that person thinks and believes today. A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds."
Transcendentalists were funny people, so do not think that people like Emerson carry much philosophical ethos, but the quotation does have something to say about the effect of time on certainty. I do not think that it is possible to be certain about anything that will happen in the future, but also because of time decay, being certain of anything in the past may be very difficult as well.
I think that we are the most certain we can be about anything concerning nature's hard observable facts, things such as gravity, the shape of the planet, the existence of the moon, &c. But if we move way into the future, say, 5 billion years, even our "observable facts" will no longer be true from that point on, and the only they may be true will be as true in the past, but at that point no one will probably care.
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| Richard Mikel |
Posted - Jul 16 2010 : 1:36:00 PM
I'm tempted to say that it will be true at that point in time. But I guess you're saying if it's true now, based on the knowledge we have, then it doesn't remain true later if it is discovered to be otherwise. Does it remain true that "the earth is flat" when that was that was "true to the best of our knowledge"?
"The earth is flat based on our understanding." (Then) "The earth was flat based on our understanding." (Now)
Kind of silly I guess, but I see them as different statements. Both are true though, but proven false. So in a sense we're talking about something that's partly true, while being false.
Can something be partly true or mostly false? If there is something that is either true or false: no. But I think once you begin to move backwards in analysis, there are parts that can be true and parts that can be false in an argument. As you get to the more holistic level of an argument, you may find parts to be true and parts to be false.
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| Aaron Mund |
Posted - Jul 15 2010 : 2:31:38 PM
Richard: good thought there. Time plays a big part in what we know now and what we will know in the future. Your thought about the degrees of certainty is an interesting one. But there are still problems. Can something be partly true or mostly false? Or can we be 100% sure that a statement made today will be 100% true five thousand years from now?
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| Tom Trelogan |
Posted - Jul 14 2010 : 07:13:48 AM
On Sunday, Katie, you asked about how what Richard and Eliott were talking about pertains to the question under discussion, and Eliott, you asked what could possibly be the point of a remark such as "If p then p." There are answers to these questions, but in both cases, I really sympathize with your bafflement. It's almost impossible not to lose one's way in discussions such as the ones we've stumbled into in this particular thread.
I think, in fact, that in this case, the real (?) culprit is the ambiguity of the expression "reality." Why, one might ask, are we even talking now about certainty? What led us to that particular topic? The answer to that question, I think, is that the Cartesian puzzles associated with the question of whether or not any of us is ever in touch with reality (Can't absolutely everything be doubted? Isn't it possible that everything we think we know is false? Do we know that there an external world at all? Isn't it possible that the only things of which we're aware are our own ideas and our own judgments? Isn't realism--the view that there is a real external world--really a highly questionable philosophical view?) are all connected with the problem of the possibility of certainty, largely, I think, because of the fact that Descartes himself connected them with the problem of the possibility of certainty.
So I myself have had the sense for a long time now that the conversation has been off-topic because we started out trying to get clear about whether or not philosophers are in touch with reality in a completely different sense of the term. I don't think it's the least bit surprising, though, that we've strayed from our original question in the way that we have, and it's really interesting -- even instructive, I think -- to watch how this particular straying takes place. It's almost inevitable. It's one of the things that happened in a big way in the history of philosophy itself (this is at the core of what I called some time ago the "mischief" that's been done in philosophy by the idea that the essence of a thing should be capable of being "grasped fully" and "known for sure"), and it's really interesting to see it all happening again.
It's as if a sort of inevitable confusion sets in as soon as one begins to talk about the realities in Sokrates' sense of the term, a confusion that derails thought and traps it in the maze of perplexities of the sort we're talking about right now. Is this a bad thing? I'm not sure.
What's true is that pretty soon one finds oneself really interested in things that post-Cartesian philosophy has spent all sorts of time on -- puzzles such as the ones about indexicals that Richard and Eliott and Aaron have been touching on, the dizzying swirl of possible doubts about the most ordinary things that Katie and Jenna have been exploring, the really interesting question about how we can be certain about the things that we can be certain about (not the question whether we can be certain about anything!) that I think Cassie's been trying hard to get a hearing for, Eliott's question about what the usefulness of logical truths could possibly be, and so on. These are all wonderful, complex philosophical questions on which philosophers have spent enormous quantities of time and effort in recent centuries, and far be it from me to say that they're any of them a waste of time. Still, it's easy to see why philosophy has gotten branded by most folks in recent centuries as an enterprise that's completely out of touch with reality, as an undertaking that's itself concerned with completely pointless questions. Why? Because the conversation is often so hard to follow that once one has headed down a rabbit hole like the one this conversation has gone down, it's really easy to get lost and to be unable to say what what's being talked about has to do even with what the people who are having the conversation were talking about in the first place.
Look! There's Sokrates, just a little over twenty-five hundred years ago, having all those wonderful conversations about life and what living it well entails -- hardly an esoteric topic! And before you know it: indexicals! The possibility of "knowing anything for sure" or of "grasping anything completely"! How it's possible to know anything a priori! The value of knowledge that's completely devoid of informational content! Who cares? Would Sokrates have cared?
Actually, I think he would. He was as good as any philosopher ever has been of following the twists and turns of a conversation into the perplexities in which it often lands even the best of philosophers. But he also would have been conscious of how easy it is for just these sorts of questions -- the kind we're talking about now -- to spawn misology, not only in those non-philosophers who come across philosophers talking about such seemingly ridiculous things, but even in the philosophers themselves. So as ever, I think this is something we need to guard ourselves against.
But the time has come to turn at least most of our attention to our next big question: what turns people on? Conversations of the kind we've been having here in the forum in the last week or two are themselves interesting to think about in just this connection, but I'll just toss this out and not pursue it at length right now. What I've just said about both the allure of these conversations and the way in which they're capable of spawning misology suggests that they are themselves definitely on the list of things that turn some people off and turn some people on! Before the semester is over, we should think about this a little bit. I think the Symposium has interesting things to say about the beauty and ugliness of philosophy: its attractiveness and repulsiveness. I speak here of the beauty and ugliness of philosophical conversation -- the activity of philosophers -- not of hê philosophia, the love of Sophie herself. That, as Diotima has no doubt convinced us all by now, is neither beautiful nor ugly, and also neither good nor bad.
Anyhow, I hope to return to this thread and say a thing or two about some of the particular things you've posted in just the last few days, but that is going to have to wait. Right now, I've got to work on putting together a lecture on our third big question, finishing up the evaluation of the first drafts of your essays, and staying on top of such entirely mundane matters as appointments with the dentist, the eye doctor, and the dean. So that's it for right now, but kudos to you all for digging into the things you've been talking about here in the last few days with the passion and attention to detail that you've shown for the things you've wanted to say! I've been impressed.
Passion and attention to detail! Can you detect the connection right there with our next big topic? You yourselves have been acting just like lovers here in the forum, like people who are divinely inspired! Like people who are just a bit mad. |
| Cassie Vrooman |
Posted - Jul 13 2010 : 6:45:36 PM
Katie, I was not trying to put words in your mouth. What you said was this, "I myself think that we can't be certain of anything. I don't feel that it is possible to be absolutely certain of anything." What I said was this: "If you think about it, you'll see that doing this is like saying: 'I am certain that it is impossible to be certain.'"
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| Richard Mikel |
Posted - Jul 13 2010 : 4:53:04 PM
Aaron, good point. But from my point of view, science is then the variable in your examples. If someone said "why is the earth flat?" at a time when people thought that the earth was flat, the answer would be different from what it would be if someone asked "why is the earth round?" today. Take it one step further and ask (then and now) "What is the shape of the earth?" and you'll get different answers. Finally, if the question is put this way: "why does the earth have the shape that it does?" you'll also get different answers even though they sound the same: "because our science tells us it is flat." The answers are different because what's being referred to as "our science" is different at the two different times: medieval science in the one case and modern science in the other. So I was really just getting at taking the question through an analysis. If you do this, you're likely to encounter variables depending on the circumstances, and this means that the passage of time can change the question, that you're asking even if the sentence you use to ask it remains the same.
Is it reasonable to talk about "degrees of certainty"? I hesitate to put definitions to things in this class, but I think certainty is knowledge-based, whereas something like "being sure" would leave more room for error, like a true opinion. "I'm 95% certain" versus "I'm 95% sure." Thoughts?
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| Katie Contreras |
Posted - Jul 13 2010 : 12:33:11 PM
Cassie, that is a very good question. But not once did I ever state that I'm certain that one can't be certain about anything. If I had, then no, I would say no, that I'm not certain that one can't be certain about anything. I said that I don't know if you can be certain about anything. See, there's a difference. I'm not even certain about not being certain; which is what makes this all so frustrating for me to even think about. Think about what Jenna was saying about her eye color. How are we certain that it is actually brown? Well, I can say that I could be certain because we were taught that the color we call brown, is called brown. But, then I could say that I'm not certain because how can I be sure that that particular color really is brown; as Jenna said, isn't it possible that that's just the way I see it?
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| Aaron Mund |
Posted - Jul 12 2010 : 09:16:06 AM
quote:
Originally posted by Richard Mikel
My thought on whether or not a statement we know to be true right now might be false later on is similar to what Tom said on July 6th: If a statement is true now and untrue later, wouldn't the false statement be an entirely different statement ? Once it has changed, it is no longer about the state of affairs that made it true, therefore it must have some variable, and must be in some way, a different statement.
I like this question. I would have to contradict you though. I think of older scientific ideas like the earth is flat. That was true then and it is untrue now. The science of the day said that the earth was flat. Today, due to our science, we know that is false, but it was fact then. Or take a criminal case in which a man is proven guilty but then set free on appeal on the grounds of new DNA that proves another guy guilty. There are lots of things that are said to be fact that are reconsidered after more research brings new evidence to light, or that the passage of time proves to be false.
Here are the questions and the answers:
Is the earth flat?
Then "yes"; now "no."
Did John Doe do the crime?
Then "yes"; now "no."
Same question, different answers.
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| Cassie Vrooman |
Posted - Jul 12 2010 : 12:31:13 AM
Katie and Jenna: I wrote my essay on certainty and mounted a defense of this claim: "To exclude the possibility of certainty entirely is to prove oneself uncertain." To say that certainty is impossible is to make an inconsistent statement. If you think about it, you'll see that doing this is like saying: "I am certain that it is impossible to be certain."
Do you still think one cannot be certain of anything?
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| Jenna Stimac |
Posted - Jul 11 2010 : 9:23:36 PM
Katie, I agree that we can't really be certain that something is going to happen, but I also see it as not being able to be certain of anything like Cassie had brought up. I feel certain that my eyes are brown, but are they really brown, or is that just how I see them? Or I am certain that it is Sunday, July 11, 2010 and 9:07 p.m., but is it really?
But this might not be what we are really trying to get at. I guess I mean that I can see how an argument can be made about how every situation can be viewed in such a way that it begins to look as if people can't be certain about anything. I guess this leads us back to Cassie's question of whether we can really be certain of anything or not.
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