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Massimo Pigliucci: How to Think Clearly Without Certainty · The Stoic Handbook with Jon Brooks

• 0:00
  Jon Brooks: So uh your book, I'm about halfway through How to Be a Happy Skeptic.
• 0:06
  Jon Brooks: Uh I am loving it so far.
• 0:09
  Jon Brooks: Uh I'm listening to an Audible and uh I'm gonna buy the the hardcover as well.
• 0:14
  Jon Brooks: I love skepticism.
• 0:15
  Jon Brooks: I've been in interested in like modern skepticism for a number of years.
• 0:18
  Jon Brooks: And I love the kind of combination of self-improvement and skepticism because often self-improvement can kind of take you down some strange avenues that they don't, it doesn't really back, it isn't backed up by evidence much.
• 0:30
  Jon Brooks: Um I love that you're kind of combining skepticism with stoicism and ancient philosophy.
• 0:36
  Jon Brooks: Uh so the first question for you is why do you have happy in brackets in the title of the book?
• 0:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yes.
• 0:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: We we wanted to with the editor, we wanted to highlight it because there is this, I think, misconception that skeptics are kind of sour people or, you know, it's sort of negative about things and don't believe in anything.
• 0:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: They're cynical about all sorts of stuff.
• 1:02
  Massimo Pigliucci: While in fact, the word skeptic comes, of course, from the Greek skepticos, which means inquirer.
• 1:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: A skeptic is somebody who strives to keep an open mind and trying to figure things out.
• 1:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: It accepts uh truths only provisionally.
• 1:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's a probabilistic kind of epistemology, as a philosopher would say, meaning that, you know, I know I'm fallible as a human being, and therefore I'm gonna hold whatever position I'm holding with a little bit of detachment.
• 1:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's like, okay, this is what I think right now, but should the evidence or the arguments change, I'm gonna change my mind.
• 1:36
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I think that actually skepticism makes for a happy life in the sense of a eudaimonic life, which was the term that the Greco-Romans uh used.
• 1:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: So happiness, today even psychologists tend not to talk about happiness because it's a little bit of a you know variable concept.
• 1:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: It means different things to different people.
• 1:57
  Massimo Pigliucci: It often refers to a feeling, an immediate feeling.
• 2:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, I'm happy to see you or I'm happy to eat a gelato or whatever it is, right?
• 2:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's not what we're talking about.
• 2:06
  Massimo Pigliucci: We're talking about eudaimonia, that is uh a life well-lived.
• 2:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh the kind of life you get to the end of it, and you say, yep, that was not wasted, or you know, that sort of stuff.
• 2:17
  Massimo Pigliucci: In that sense, I think skepticism is a good uh component, at least, of a life well-lived.
• 2:25
  Jon Brooks: Yeah, I love in the book that you highlight certain words uh as like paying particular attention to, and I think eudaimonia is one of them.
• 2:32
  Jon Brooks: Can you maybe explain how we might know if we've lived a life well-lived?
• 2:38
  Jon Brooks: Is there some way of measuring it, or is this something that you have to kind of get to the end of life to kind of be able to weigh things up?
• 2:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, uh we we cannot know with a capital K, meaning if you want certainty, no, that's not uh that's not gonna happen.
• 2:52
  Massimo Pigliucci: I'm sorry.
• 2:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh but we certainly can do something about about it, meaning we can in fact study quantitatively.
• 2:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, the ancient the Greco-Romans uh derived their philosophy of the philosophies of life and their ethics from observation of human nature.
• 3:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, in a sense, they were kind of anti-literum psychologists, right?
• 3:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: Except, of course, that they had not invented the scientist the modern scientific method, so they was that they were not doing systematic observations and experiments.
• 3:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: We can.
• 3:22
  Massimo Pigliucci: And in fact, there is a number of modern research projects about happiness.
• 3:27
  Massimo Pigliucci: Probably the most famous one is the happiness, the Harvard Happiness Pro uh project, uh, which has been going on for decades, in fact.
• 3:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: And these are people who are interested in quantifying, as you say, you know, what works and what doesn't work.
• 3:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, work by what standards?
• 3:43
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, there are a couple of standards that you can use.
• 3:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: One is subjective, meaning, you know, people ask.
• 3:49
  Massimo Pigliucci: Psychologists ask people, do you think your life was worth living?
• 3:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right?
• 3:54
  Massimo Pigliucci: They get, they get to the end.
• 3:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: There's a number of um studies that look at interviews of people that are uh, you know, older or they're even very close to the end of their lives.
• 4:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: And, you know, there's detailed questionnaires about self-reported happiness, right?
• 4:10
  Massimo Pigliucci: Are they are these people uh happy or not?
• 4:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: And there are certain things that that emerge, certain patterns that emerge from these kind of interviews, and I'll get to that in a second.
• 4:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: The other one is uh more objective uh and in or I should say probably inter-subjective.
• 4:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: You can measure things like, you know, uh are people uh suffering from stress and depression and you know, anxiety, things, or not?
• 4:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh are there you know, there are physiological parameters and psychological parameters that you can use to determine whether somebody is actually living a life that seems to go to flow uh more or less normally or or not.
• 4:50
  Massimo Pigliucci: So those kinds of studies reach a couple of major conclusions, which are probably not surprising, especially again if you read the Greco-Romans, you definitely wouldn't be surprised.
• 5:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: But it's nice to have the data.
• 5:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: And it turns out that uh the major thing that makes people happy is relationships.
• 5:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right.
• 5:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, yeah, again, big surprise.
• 5:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: We're social animals.
• 5:14
  Massimo Pigliucci: So uh, you know, we we think when we think back to our uh to our lives, we are happy about it.
• 5:22
  Massimo Pigliucci: We are you we feel euthodemonic if we had good, constructive relationships with you know our children, if we have any, our partners, our friends, and so on and so forth.
• 5:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: So relationships is a big component of it.
• 5:36
  Massimo Pigliucci: The second big component of it, uh, of a sort of happy life or a life worth living is um meaningful projects, having been able to embark on meaningful projects, either as a career or outside of one's career.
• 5:49
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, what counts as a meaningful project, right?
• 5:52
  Massimo Pigliucci: Because that that's the that's where the situation becomes a little bit more complicated.
• 5:57
  Massimo Pigliucci: As it turns out, meaningful projects are projects that involve and benefit other people.
• 6:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, stamp collecting is not a meaningful project.
• 6:06
  Massimo Pigliucci: It could be fun, right?
• 6:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um, but it's not it's not a meaningful project, meaning that you can, it's something that you can certainly do.
• 6:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: There's nothing wrong with engaging in stamp collecting or or money, you know, uh coin collecting or whatever it is.
• 6:19
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um, but it's not the kind of thing you look at the end of your life and you say, yeah, that was really worth doing.
• 6:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: That was certainly something that added meaning to my life.
• 6:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: On the other hand, projects that are outward, you know, uh involving other people, outward oriented and involving other people are, of course, if you're talking about professions, you know, things like doctors, nursing, uh uh teaching, uh, writing, uh, artistry of any of any kind, you know, performances of any kind, um, you know, or uh even lawyering, if it if done well, or or or political uh careers, again, if done well.
• 6:58
  Massimo Pigliucci: If if you're not spending your career sort of trying to corrupt the system, but in fact helping people, then then that actually is a meaningful career.
• 7:06
  Massimo Pigliucci: Outside of one's career, uh projects that involve volunteering for organizations locally, nationally, internationally, if you have the opportunity starting new organizations, you know, nonprofit organizations, things like that.
• 7:19
  Massimo Pigliucci: Those are the kinds of things that make a life meaningful, a life happy in the sort of broad sense of the term.
• 7:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: Pleasure also enters into it.
• 7:29
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, we are seeking pleasure animals, we are hedonistic animals.
• 7:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: However, surprisingly perhaps for some, not so for the likes of Cicero, uh, pleasure is is good when it's a spice on the main dish, not when it's the main dish.
• 7:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right?
• 7:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: So if you're if you spend your entire life seeking pleasures one after another, you know, uh physical or or otherwise, uh you risk getting to the end of your life and you say, Whoa, boa, this is this was definitely a waste of time.
• 8:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: So think of think of pleasure as you know, the the salt and pepper then you put on your dish.
• 8:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh you wouldn't want to have a whole main meal made of salt and pepper.
• 8:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: That would be disgusting.
• 9:07
  Jon Brooks: Right.
• 9:07
  Jon Brooks: Yes.
• 9:07
  Jon Brooks: Okay.
• 9:08
  Jon Brooks: And uh on the top on the topic of pleasure, you know, some people they kind of put pleasure on a pedestal.
• 9:15
  Jon Brooks: Would the Stoics say that lots of people would the Stoics say that they are sort of um just not valuing things correctly if they actually examined things, they would see things differently.
• 9:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah, I think not just the Stoics, but a lot of the Greco-Romans, of course, except the Epicureans who were hedonists.
• 9:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um but uh but even the Epicureans actually would probably uh criticize the modern conception of hedonism because Epicurus thought that uh a good life was mostly the result of lack of pain, physical and and mental.
• 9:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: And uh, even though Epicurean Epicureanism has this um reputation of being the sex, drugs, and rock and roll of philosophy, of ancient philosophy, that's definitely not the way Epicurus describes it.
• 9:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: He in one famous letter that he writes to a friend, he says, uh, bring over a piece of cheese, I'll I'll I'll I'll add some watered-down wine, and then we'll have a feast.
• 10:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's like, so this is not exactly hedonism as is understood in in modern times, or it has been understood throughout the centuries.
• 10:16
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, wait, the Stoics and other ancient, but not just in the Western traditions, uh, Buddhists will tell you the same thing.
• 10:22
  Massimo Pigliucci: Confucian Taoists would tell you the same thing.
• 10:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah, it's a wasted life.
• 10:27
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh it's you're you're making because you're making the wrong judgment.
• 10:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, we live in a society, especially in the West at the moment, where people don't dare telling other people that their judgment is incorrect.
• 10:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's like, who are who are you to tell me that I'm wrong?
• 10:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, I'm trying to help you.
• 10:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's that's what you what I what I'm trying to do.
• 10:43
  Massimo Pigliucci: And I'm trying to help you on the basis of, again, number a number of ancient traditions, most ancient traditions throughout the world, arrive at the same conclusion that pleasure is at best a spice on your life, not the main dish.
• 10:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: Some traditions go so far as saying that you actually should stay away entirely from pleasure because it's distracting and corrupting.
• 11:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: I I don't go that far.
• 11:06
  Massimo Pigliucci: I think that, you know, I like my glass of wine before dinner, you know, at dinner or something like that.
• 11:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: But um moderate pleasure is is certainly a component of a good life, but not the main component.
• 11:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: And as I said before, modern research backs that up with empirical, quantitative empirical evidence.
• 11:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: So what else do you need?
• 11:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, of course, uh, you know, one can only give advice to people, and then people can do whatever they want, right?
• 11:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: But this notion that people can even get offended by uh the the idea that somebody else might actually have advice to give to them about um what counts as a good life, I find very bizarre.
• 11:43
  Massimo Pigliucci: I I like to have good advice about how to live my life.
• 11:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: I don't I don't reject it out of hand.
• 11:49
  Jon Brooks: Um that's just yeah uh yeah, on that uh on that uh point, all of the books that you've written, I'm sure you go through the world kind of seeing um folly and uh faulty judgments and maybe questionable ways of living.
• 12:08
  Jon Brooks: Does that kind of bother you?
• 12:10
  Jon Brooks: Do you ever feel the need to kind of speak up?
• 12:12
  Jon Brooks: Do you ever speak up to people or do you kind of what's your approach to giving advice yourself?
• 12:16
  Jon Brooks: Do you kind of only wait until you're asked for it or do you just give it freely?
• 12:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, first of all, I make plenty of mistakes and bad bad judgment calls myself.
• 12:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh is hopefully, especially in the past, you know, you get older and you you reflect on your mistakes and you learn a little bit.
• 12:31
  Massimo Pigliucci: So hopefully you're gonna make less and less.
• 12:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um, but so it's not like I'm putting myself on some kind of you know pedestal where where I'm a sage and everybody else needs to learn from me.
• 12:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: So that's the first thing.
• 12:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: When I was younger, I would certainly give unsolicited advice because I was arrogant.
• 12:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um, and also I didn't appreciate the nuances of human psychology.
• 12:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: These days I give advice only when people ask for it.
• 12:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: So you know, if because uh the the the fact is, this this is a fact about human nature.
• 13:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh people have to be receptive to the advice, otherwise, not only does it do any good uh if it is unsolidated and unwelcome, it actually does some bad probably.
• 13:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: Because the the reaction of somebody who doesn't want the advice is not only to reject the advice, but to do kind of something like the opposite of it.
• 13:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: So in fact, you might be pushing people even further away from where they should be going.
• 13:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so, no, I'm not doing that.
• 13:27
  Massimo Pigliucci: So when people ask me, you know, when when uh people write to me or um occasionally, especially in the past, I did um regular counseling, philosophical counseling for people.
• 13:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh now I write books and uh articles and stuff like that.
• 13:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, you know, if you want to read them, go ahead, read them.
• 13:44
  Massimo Pigliucci: Happy, happy to be helpful.
• 13:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: If you don't want to read them, it's just as fine with me.
• 13:49
  Jon Brooks: Yeah.
• 13:49
  Jon Brooks: Okay.
• 13:50
  Jon Brooks: Yeah, I love that.
• 13:51
  Jon Brooks: Um so you've been uh sort of like a skeptic within the stoic movement for I feel like a decade plus.
• 13:59
  Jon Brooks: Uh when I was reading the book, it sort of felt at times like a battle between stoicism and skepticism, and sometimes in the harmony as well.
• 14:10
  Jon Brooks: Like it kind of I felt both sides.
• 14:12
  Jon Brooks: Do you kind of see yourself as a stoic now or more as a skeptic, or what is your relationship to to these two philosophies personally?
• 14:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah, that's a good question.
• 14:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh fair question.
• 14:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: I I still think of myself as a stoic primarily, but with a skeptical twist or a skeptical attitude, or whatever you want to do it.
• 14:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I I don't think skepticism itself by itself is a philosophy of life.
• 14:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's an epistemic stance, it's a it's a an attitude toward knowledge, right?
• 14:40
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so it can be applied to everything.
• 14:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: Whether you are a stoic or or Buddhist or anything else, I think you should be skeptical.
• 14:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh, meaning that you should inquire.
• 14:50
  Massimo Pigliucci: Again, you should be open to the possibility that this or that other notion that you are taking on board might turn out to be incorrect.
• 14:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, take Cicer himself, right?
• 15:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: Caesar is the protagonist of my book.
• 15:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: And he was a skeptic, yes, he was a member of the uh Platonic Academy.
• 15:09
  Massimo Pigliucci: Plato was dead by that time, but the academy founded by Plato.
• 15:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: During something called the skeptical period, there was a period of the Academy of for several decades where the practice was essentially inclined towards skepticism.
• 15:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: Nevertheless, these were Platonists.
• 15:27
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, Cicero thought of himself as a Platonist.
• 15:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: So he was a skeptical Platonist, right?
• 15:32
  Massimo Pigliucci: But not just a skeptic.
• 15:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: So his philosophy of life was Platonism.
• 15:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: As in fact, it turns out, and as I argue in the book, he was actually more of a Stoic than a Platonist, because a lot of his ethics comes on the Stoics.
• 15:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: And he says so explicitly.
• 15:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: He mentions one of his most famous and most important books is On Duties, which is uh a book about the kind of duties that we should all have in society when dealing with other people.
• 16:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: We should keep in mind not just the fact that we have rights, which everybody these days talks about.
• 16:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, I have a right to do this or that or the other.
• 16:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yes, you do, but you also have duties toward other people, right?
• 16:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: Rights, rights come with duties, they're coupled with duties.
• 16:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so in On Duties, Cicero goes through, you know, the kind of life uh that public life, meaning life oriented toward the people that we should be living.
• 16:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: And he says right at the beginning, these are Stoic ideas.
• 16:29
  Massimo Pigliucci: He says, you know, I I've I'm writing on the basis of readings that I've done of the Stoics, specifically Paninius, who was one of the Middle Stoics.
• 16:38
  Massimo Pigliucci: So even though Cicero thought of himself as a skeptical Platonist, arguably he was more of a skeptical Stoic than anything else, in terms of, you know, in practical terms.
• 16:50
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I don't think there is any contradiction there in thinking of yourself as following, broadly following a particular philosophy.
• 16:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: Again, that may be anything from Stoicism to Buddhism or whatever else, and at the same time practicing with a little bit of skepticism, which means essentially with open mind, with the with the notion that, you know, not everything that is currently accepted by that philosophy might turn out to be correct or useful.
• 17:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so if I find out otherwise, I'm gonna change my mind.
• 17:24
  Jon Brooks: Do you think skepticism is compatible with religions as well?
• 17:28
  Jon Brooks: Or do you think that's like a different category from philosophy?
• 17:31
  Massimo Pigliucci: That is an excellent question.
• 17:32
  Massimo Pigliucci: No, I don't think so.
• 17:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um, I mean, if if you become start becoming a skeptical, a skeptic within a religion, you're very likely going, in my mind, you're very likely going to leave that religion at one point or another.
• 17:44
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, that said, that's my opinion.
• 17:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: There are clearly people who think that they can practice skepticism within a religion.
• 17:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: But it seems to me that there is a much more of a tension between skepticism and religion as opposed to skepticism and philosophy.
• 18:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: So the major difference between philosophies and religions is that philosophy, at least ideally, philosophies are based on argument and evidence.
• 18:10
  Massimo Pigliucci: Certain things work or don't work.
• 18:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: And you argue one way or the other.
• 18:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: You say, oh, we should do this because you provide reasons for it, right?
• 18:19
  Massimo Pigliucci: And since you're providing reasons, you're opening yourself to rebuttals.
• 18:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's the Socratic, the Socratic approach, right?
• 18:27
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, oh, you're saying uh that this is the definition of courage.
• 18:31
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, let me put to you this alternative.
• 18:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: What do you think?
• 18:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: And it goes on as a conversation, as a dialogue, as a kind of dialectics.
• 18:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: In religion, typically you don't do that because the source of knowledge, such as it is, for religions, usually is revealed texts or revealed appearances of some kind of supernatural entity.
• 18:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: Or people just say things.
• 18:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: This is the way it works, period, without giving you any reason for why that actually is the case.
• 19:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: So if you start being skeptical about that, then you know, you start, I mean, that's what I did when I was young.
• 19:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: I grew up Catholic, right?
• 19:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: And uh so I went to catechism and I was I started asking questions to my priest.
• 19:14
  Massimo Pigliucci: And initially was kind of happy, kind of welcomed the whole challenge because he thought, you know, this is a kid.
• 19:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: I'm gonna, it's gonna be easy to, you know, take care of it.
• 19:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: And then it turns out, you know, I was beginning to get annoyed because annoying, because uh, you know, I will ask things like, so wait a minute, let me get this thing straight.
• 19:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: The doctrine of transubstantiation, for instance, in Catholicism.
• 19:38
  Massimo Pigliucci: This is the notion that when I go to communion and I drink the wine, in Italy you actually drink the wine, not like in places in certain places in the United States where you drink grape juice.
• 19:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: Forget the grape juice, you actually eat drink wine, even if you're a kid.
• 19:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: So you drink the wine and then you eat the the you know the little holy wafer kind of thing, right?
• 19:56
  Massimo Pigliucci: Okay, uh, so you are telling me, you priest, are telling me that I'm not actually drinking wine, I'm drinking the blood of Christ.
• 20:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: And you're telling me that I'm not eating the wafer, I'm eating the flesh of Christ.
• 20:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: First of all, disgusting.
• 20:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: But setting that aside, um are you telling me that this is metaphorically what I'm doing?
• 20:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: Because that I can buy, right?
• 20:22
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's okay, this is this is a ritual, and metaphorically that's what you're doing.
• 20:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: And my priest said, No, I'm telling you that in reality that's what you're doing.
• 20:31
  Massimo Pigliucci: That that literally is the blood and the flesh of Christ.
• 20:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: And I said, Bullshit.
• 20:36
  Massimo Pigliucci: This it doesn't taste like blood, and it doesn't taste like flesh.
• 20:40
  Massimo Pigliucci: So no, I'm sorry, you're just you know making stuff up.
• 20:43
  Massimo Pigliucci: That was the beginning of of the end of my Catholic journey.
• 20:48
  Jon Brooks: Oh wow, that's a great story.
• 20:50
  Jon Brooks: Um you you mention in the book uh a story with your daughter when you're in Yellowstone and you need to get fuel, yeah.
• 20:59
  Jon Brooks: And she asks, How do you know that?
• 21:03
  Jon Brooks: And you said to her that might be the mo one of the most important questions you'll ever ask.
• 21:08
  Jon Brooks: Um that that little story kind of uh it lays the ground for a lot of the book, I think.
• 21:16
  Jon Brooks: You know, just coming back to that question.
• 21:18
  Jon Brooks: Um is there anything, if you turn that question on yourself, is there anything that you used to believe with a lot of confidence as an adult, let's let's just say, that you then later took apart with skepticism or this type of inquiry?
• 21:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: Oh yeah, plenty, plenty of things.
• 21:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: In fact, uh until a few years ago, um I had a a blog.
• 21:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now I write for Substuck, but I used to have a blog where every few years I would actually on purpose put out a post that said, here's what I changed my mind about over the last five years or you know, something like that.
• 21:50
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I I should go back and and actually download and take another look at those um at those articles.
• 21:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: First of all, let me go back to my daughter.
• 21:57
  Massimo Pigliucci: So my daughter was at the time eight or nine when we were uh when that episode happened, and she certainly took that lesson to heart because today she's a journalist for the BBC and she keeps asking questions, embarrassing questions or uncomfortable questions, you know, how do you know these kind of things?
• 22:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, on what basis are you believing that?
• 22:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: And you're absolutely right when you say that that question, I think, is fundamental to the book.
• 22:19
  Massimo Pigliucci: It was fundamental to Cicero.
• 22:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh Cicero uh asked that question in one of his uh major books.
• 22:27
  Massimo Pigliucci: He said, you know, first of all, we have to agree on how do you we know things.
• 22:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: Because if you don't have an answer to the epistemic question, as a philosopher would put it, you know, how do you know stuff?
• 22:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: On what basis are you going to make certain claims or others, then nothing else is relevant.
• 22:43
  Massimo Pigliucci: You can't defend anything else.
• 22:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: You cannot tell me anything, it doesn't matter what you tell me about what you believe or don't believe, or you know, what kind of philosophy you follow or don't follow, because I I don't know why you're doing that.
• 22:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: First, you have to tell me what is your epistemic warrant.
• 22:58
  Massimo Pigliucci: How do you actually know uh stuff?
• 23:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, in terms of what I changed my mind about, yeah, plenty of things.
• 23:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh, for instance, uh uh, in terms of sort of philosophical positions, I changed my mind about uh free will.
• 23:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: I used to be open to the possibility that we actually have free will.
• 23:17
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now I don't.
• 23:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: I I I've I've right to the conclusion after several years of sort of ups and downs, uh, that no, the universe uh really does look like it's it's a universal cause and effect.
• 23:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: And if and if by free will you mean a will that is independent of causality, which is what standardly the phrase means, then no, I think that's an illusion.
• 23:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: That it's something that just does not exist.
• 23:44
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, now that may seem like a technical issue in philosophy, but that has plenty of consequences in practice because it actually affects your behavior.
• 23:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: There are studies showing that people who don't believe in free will tend to be kinder and more ethical than people who do believe in free will.
• 24:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: Wow.
• 24:02
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah, which is interesting, right?
• 24:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: And the reason for that is because if you believe in free will, like let's say a lot of most Christians do, that the fact that free will is one of the fundamental tenets of Christianity, then you're more inclined to blame people.
• 24:16
  Massimo Pigliucci: What you did was your decision, it's your responsibility, so down to hell you go, right?
• 24:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: And if you don't believe in free will, you said, oh, that person made a misguided judge, had arrived at a misguided judgment because his brain or her brain was not working properly.
• 24:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: So it looks like I should pity that person and try to help them more than uh, you know, condemn or talking about it.
• 24:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: This is, by the way, the stoic position, uh, as a matter of fact.
• 24:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: In fact, one of the things that that gradually convinced me of the non-existence of free will is reading Epithetus.
• 24:52
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh Epictetus says very clearly, and what there is a point in the discourses, very in the first book of the discourses, where one of his students says, you know, shouldn't we just eliminate these people, these, these, these uh uh thieves, for instance, you know, robbers and stuff like that?
• 25:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: And Epithetus says, whoa, whoa, slow down.
• 25:10
  Massimo Pigliucci: What do you mean, these these robbers and thieves?
• 25:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh what you mean is these are blind people.
• 25:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: Blind, not in the sense that, in the literal sense that they cannot tell black from white, but blind in the sense that they lost the ability, or maybe they never had the ability of telling right from wrong.
• 25:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, don't you think that instead of killing them, I should try to help them if I can?
• 25:31
  Massimo Pigliucci: And maybe I can't help them and I do need to make sure that they don't hurt other people, but still, that doesn't mean I should hate them.
• 25:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: It doesn't mean that I should think of them as evil.
• 25:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: They're just misguided and they're, you know, they're in a sense, they need to be pitied because they don't that unlike the rest of us, they don't understand how the world actually is supposed to work.
• 25:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I find so that's one of the major things I changed my mind about.
• 25:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um there are also some nuances in terms of like political positions, for instance, that I changed my mind about.
• 26:02
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um, when I was young, I was um uh far more left-leaning than I am now.
• 26:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh I still consider myself a left liberal progressive kind of person, but I've started to look at skepticism at even some of the positions in that on that um side of the spectrum.
• 26:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: I think that uh I've experienced in firsthand how well-intentioned uh people on the left progressive side of the spectrum can be just as intolerant and just as close-minded as people on the right.
• 26:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so I was like, okay, that that's not an equivalence.
• 26:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: I uh because as an equivalence, it would be false.
• 26:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: I still think the fascism is much more uh dangerous than uh than most of the things that uh the modern left can do or or is willing to do.
• 26:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: Nevertheless, I don't like close-mindedness, I don't like uh intolerance, and uh, even when it's couched or understood in terms of um uh justice and and fairness and all that sort of stuff.
• 27:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: You can think that you're just and fair, but in the fact at the same time, you uh you're actually being close-minded.
• 27:10
  Massimo Pigliucci: So those, you know, there's a couple of major things that I change.
• 27:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: Not to mention a number of other issues that are more pertinent to my work uh in philosophy of science or in science itself.
• 27:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: So so yeah, there's plenty of examples.
• 27:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, I'm sure that I probably should have changed my mind about other things that I did not, but you know, that's that's an ongoing process.
• 27:31
  Jon Brooks: So Yeah.
• 27:33
  Jon Brooks: Um yeah, I kind of want to go back and look at some of those posts as well, but the things you change your mind about.
• 27:39
  Jon Brooks: Um perhaps I'll link to some.
• 27:40
  Jon Brooks: I love that as just a practice, just like making it stand and saying, like, here I've done a review, here are some things I think about differently now, and updating your beliefs.
• 27:49
  Jon Brooks: Is there anything that you can do to nurture skepticism in children?
• 27:54
  Jon Brooks: As someone with with children myself, and I'm sure many people watching this will have children.
• 27:58
  Jon Brooks: And there there are fears now with AI thinking for young minds, school is gonna be different, university is gonna be different.
• 28:05
  Jon Brooks: How can we help younger people think for themselves?
• 28:08
  Jon Brooks: Is there anything that you would recommend for that?
• 28:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: Oh, yes.
• 28:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh, there is a lot.
• 28:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: First of all, I would keep kids as much as possible away from social media and AI.
• 28:19
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um, and that is because those technologies are uh I think they're dangerous even for mature adults, for minds that are not formed and not capable yet, that have not developed yet um the tools of critical thinking, that that can be a disaster.
• 28:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, that said, you know, it's impossible to keep kids completely out of, you know, completely shielded from things.
• 28:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, you can you can you can negotiate things, you can say, okay, an hour in social media, but no more, and that kind of stuff, right?
• 28:52
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, but one thing it would be on the negative side, I think the best thing to do is to minimize people uh kids' exposure to those kind of technologies.
• 29:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: On the positive side, the advice is simple, although most people don't actually want to follow it.
• 29:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: Read books.
• 29:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: Make your children read books.
• 29:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: Of course, good books, right?
• 29:14
  Massimo Pigliucci: Not just any trash that comes out there.
• 29:16
  Massimo Pigliucci: Most of most stuff that is out there, whether it's on social media or in in in in uh bookstores, is in fact trash.
• 29:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: But um, you know, uh we're talking about education, essentially.
• 29:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: And education is not something that parents should be uh willy-nilly just just just uh leave out to uh you know schools.
• 29:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: Schools are certainly an important part of education.
• 29:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh, you know, the the better school you can send your kids to, the the better your kids are are gonna be.
• 29:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: But that doesn't doesn't excuse you from doing your part as a parent.
• 29:52
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right?
• 29:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: So and part of that that duty is I think to try to expose kids to things that are valuable and try to shield them as much as possible for things that are not valuable.
• 30:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: It also depends on the age, right?
• 30:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, uh when they are very young, four, five, six years old, then you just say, no, that's it.
• 30:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: You're not doing that.
• 30:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: End of story, because there is nothing to reason there.
• 30:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, this is pre-reasoning abilities.
• 30:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: Once they get to the age of reason, which psychologically speaking is about seven, eight years old or something like that, then you start gradually replacing the straightforward no, this this straightforward prohibition with uh arguments, with reasons, right?
• 30:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, no because.
• 30:36
  Massimo Pigliucci: And then when they get into you know early pre-teenage and teenage, then you hopefully you've established the basis on the uh on on which you can actually build a conversation, even though, of course, you all you also have to remember that the goal is not to create a copy of yourself or is not to to mold uh something in your in your own image.
• 30:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: The goal is to allow them to grow in whatever direction they want to grow.
• 31:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: So they're gonna disagree with you.
• 31:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: And you have to be okay with that.
• 31:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, the older they get, the more likely that's gonna happen.
• 31:10
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, but I think that reading books is something that is a simple answer, of course, a partial answer, but nevertheless, a simple answer that lots of people these days just don't even consider.
• 31:22
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, uh, Seneca, as you know, one of the one of the big stoics, uh says at one point in one of his letters to Lucilius that reading books, he's talking about philosophy books, but the same goes for any kind of you know, fiction, nonfiction, classics, whatever you whatever you have in mind.
• 31:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh, reading books is like having a conversation with the best minds that humanity has produced across cultures and across time.
• 31:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: Why not take advantage of that, right?
• 31:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: There's there's lots of those people and lots of those minds out there.
• 31:56
  Massimo Pigliucci: And uh, you know, reading books when I was a kid uh was was not only one of the most interesting and important experiences that I had at the time, but certainly one of those that molded my character and my worldview.
• 32:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: I had I was lucky enough to grow up, not with my parents, but with my grandparents.
• 32:16
  Massimo Pigliucci: And uh my my grandfather uh made a point very early on.
• 32:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: I was I was still pretty pretty young, I was like seven or eight years old.
• 32:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: When he made a point, every weekend we would go into one of Rome's major bookstores, and I would be let free to roam the bookstore and I would be allowed one book of whatever.
• 32:36
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right?
• 32:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, he would give suggestions, you know.
• 32:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: Oh, maybe you want you considered this, but uh at it at the end of the day, I was the one choosing, and so I would come come home with a book and I would read the book before the following Saturday because I knew that that was the condition in order to get another one.
• 32:52
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right.
• 32:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: So uh that had a huge impact on day.
• 32:56
  Massimo Pigliucci: And uh I I think that um we should do more of that.
• 33:01
  Jon Brooks: Excellent.
• 33:01
  Jon Brooks: And when you say read books for children, are you talking about fiction and nonfiction, just you know, as long as it's like good thinking, good writing, or are you talking more about nonfiction books?
• 33:11
  Jon Brooks: No, I'm talking about both.
• 33:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um literature, good literature, of course.
• 33:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: Again, the the the parenthetical qualification here should be good, because as I said, unfortunately there's a lot of trash out there, uh, an increasing amount of which is actually generated by AI.
• 33:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: But um, both literature and non-literature, because uh sorry, yes, fiction and non-fiction, because literature is just has always been just as important.
• 33:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, the the the ancient uh Greco-Romans were reading Plato, but they were also reading Homer.
• 33:40
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um so you know, they they were uh going to theater and listening to Euripides or or Aristophanes or, you know, things like that.
• 33:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: So uh fiction, certainly good again, good fiction, what we call classics today, or or their modern equivalent, certainly uh is is helpful.
• 33:58
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um the the problem, as I said, is that it becomes increasingly difficult to tell the good stuff from the bad stuff.
• 34:06
  Massimo Pigliucci: But you know, there is help.
• 34:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: There's lots of lists of books out there that are worth reading and and so on.
• 34:12
  Massimo Pigliucci: One issue that I think one needs to be um careful about is this idea that um how how should I put it?
• 34:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: Um when you read something, as I said, you should get into a conversation with that author.
• 34:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: So you shouldn't be reading passive.
• 34:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, reading too often is a um is considered a passive activity.
• 34:40
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's not.
• 34:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's you're you're supposed to be engaging with the reading, right?
• 34:44
  Massimo Pigliucci: Take notes, uh, highlight passages, you know, talk to other people about it, have a conversation about books with other people, join a book club, in fact, if you if you had there's plenty of that stuff out there, right?
• 34:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: Because that makes it a dynamic, active way of participating to uh to the general conversation as opposed to just you know.
• 35:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: Oh, one thing that I would add, so there is, of course, children literature, right?
• 35:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: And you know, there is age-appropriate literature.
• 35:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: However, most of the stuff that I read when I was a kid was not children literature.
• 35:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh, it was things that were pushing my certainly not when I was seven or eight, but definitely when I got to 12, 13, or something like that.
• 35:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: One of the things that I think has been a bad idea is the so-called young adult gen.
• 35:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna generate a lot of enmity by saying this, but that's okay.
• 35:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: I'm all right with that.
• 35:36
  Massimo Pigliucci: I think that the uh young adult literature is a big mistake.
• 35:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: It it belittles um teenagers, it treats them as if they were idiots that couldn't be possibly interested or capable of reading real books.
• 35:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so I'm gonna write a watered-down version of stuff where the story is much simpler and when the, you know, the characters are much more cartoonish so that you can understand it.
• 36:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: Like, no.
• 36:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: I I started reading actual literature when I was in middle school.
• 36:06
  Massimo Pigliucci: And that was no problem.
• 36:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: Even if you don't get the whole thing, you know, you might you might be reading some, you know, I don't know, Dickens or Dostoyevsky or something like that.
• 36:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: You might not get the whole thing when you're 13 or 14 or 15.
• 36:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: It doesn't matter.
• 36:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: You're you're getting into the notion that there's something to get there, and then you come back to it, you know, 10 years later or 20 years later.
• 36:28
  Jon Brooks: Yes.
• 36:28
  Jon Brooks: Uh that's yeah, such good advice there.
• 36:31
  Jon Brooks: Um I have a I have a seven-year-old, a nine-year-old, and a 10-year-old.
• 36:36
  Jon Brooks: And uh yeah, reading is a big, big part of like what we do at home.
• 36:40
  Jon Brooks: And I think it it does kind of show in quite a big way.
• 36:43
  Jon Brooks: And I'm always trying to push them to read things that are a bit challenging as well.
• 36:47
  Jon Brooks: So yeah.
• 36:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: And you model it.
• 36:49
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, one of one of the other things is you know, you can't be hypocritical about it.
• 36:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: You can't spend your your evening in front of the TV or playing a video game and then tell your kids to read a book.
• 37:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's not gonna work.
• 37:02
  Massimo Pigliucci: You have to model yourself.
• 37:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: So they have to see you that you actually enjoy reading books in your spare time, or you read to them, right?
• 37:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: When we tend to read to you know, parents uh read to children when they're very young, but then somehow that kind of uh the practice stops.
• 37:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: And it's like, why?
• 37:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: You you you should continue it reading uh with to another person.
• 37:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's a great idea, it's a great way to spend time together.
• 37:29
  Jon Brooks: Yes.
• 37:30
  Jon Brooks: Yeah, absolutely.
• 37:31
  Jon Brooks: Um some of my best memories have been reading to my son at nighttime.
• 37:35
  Jon Brooks: It's just since he's been two, we've been doing it, it's been amazing.
• 37:38
  Jon Brooks: Right.
• 37:39
  Jon Brooks: Uh I want to switch gears to um some of the philosophical themes in the book.
• 37:44
  Jon Brooks: So a lot of people think that skepticism, they have this kind of knee-jerk reaction to skepticism, uh, as as you alluded to as being kind of cold and being like hyper-rational and just disagreeable for the sake of it.
• 37:58
  unknown: Right.
• 37:58
  Jon Brooks: Uh I was wondering if you could give uh an explanation about skepticism as a philosophy and the difference between the academic skeptics and the pyronists as well.
• 38:09
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah.
• 38:09
  Massimo Pigliucci: So so one of the things that it's interesting to me is that the observation that um most of the words that were used that with a positive connotation in antiquity to characterize different schools of thoughts have acquired a negative connotation in modern times.
• 38:27
  Massimo Pigliucci: So think about it, right?
• 38:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: A stoic today is somebody with a stiff upper lip who suppresses emotions, which is not what the ancient Starks were trying to do.
• 38:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: An Epicurean, as we were saying earlier, it's a sex, drugs, and rock and roll kind of person, which is not what Epicurus meant.
• 38:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: A skeptic today is somebody who doesn't believe anything, which is not what the ancient skeptics were going about.
• 38:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: And a cynic today is somebody who has a sour attitude over everything and does it also doesn't believe anything.
• 38:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: And the ancient cynics weren't anything but that.
• 38:55
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I blame actually Christianity for uh those changes of um of uh meaning, because of course all those schools pretty much ended uh at uh with the rise of Christianity during the late uh Roman Empire, right?
• 39:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: And of course, Christianity, once it became dominant, it also became intolerant.
• 39:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: One of the standard uh virtues of Christianity is supposed to be tolerance, but in fact, Christianity historically has been one of the most intolerant religions uh that have uh blessed uh our planet, so to speak.
• 39:29
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so one of the things that they did was to try to undermine the credibility of everything that came before them, right?
• 39:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: Including the major schools, philosophical schools, because uh they they wanted to replace them.
• 39:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I think that at least in part, that's what happened.
• 39:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: That kind of the the words m changed meaning in a pejorative way, in a negative fashion.
• 39:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, back to ancient skepticism, so the the positive meaning of the term.
• 39:56
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yes, you're right.
• 39:57
  Massimo Pigliucci: There were two major schools of skepticism in the Western tradition.
• 40:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: Skepticism is something that appears also in other traditions.
• 40:04
  Massimo Pigliucci: There's been a uh, for instance, a strong school of skepticism with it within um uh Indian thought and and within Buddhist uh thought.
• 40:14
  Massimo Pigliucci: So it's not like skepticism is just an invention of the West.
• 40:17
  Massimo Pigliucci: It pops up uh in other places, although it's always been a minority position because it's difficult to actually practice, I think.
• 40:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, it does it tells you that you don't have certainties, that you have to constantly be on guard to revise your opinion.
• 40:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's a lot of work.
• 40:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: So many people are not inclined to follow the skeptic path.
• 40:38
  Massimo Pigliucci: The two ancient Greco-Roman schools were the Pyronists, as you say, and the academic skeptics.
• 40:44
  Massimo Pigliucci: The Pyronists came first, although not by much, uh by you know, basically a generation or so.
• 40:50
  Massimo Pigliucci: The founder of that school was Pyrrh of Ellis, who is a pretty mysterious figure.
• 40:56
  Massimo Pigliucci: We don't know much about him, other than he was a real figure, it was a real historical figure.
• 41:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: He followed Alexander the Great in India during Alexander's expeditions, there are military expeditions there.
• 41:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: And in fact, Pyrrhot did come in contact with some Indian sages.
• 41:14
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh the uh the Greeks referred to them as gymnosophists, which literally means naked, uh wise men.
• 41:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so, because of that detail, naked, uh people think that these were early Jainists, because we know that some sects of Jainism do practice the uh going around in the forest basically naked.
• 41:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: So it's possible that that's what Pyrrh um encountered.
• 41:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: Anyway, Pyrrhonism is uh it's really not a uh modern philosophy at all.
• 41:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: It has not really, I mean, there are some a few people today who consider themselves Pyrrhonists, but it's not really a relevant presence uh in the modern world.
• 41:49
  Massimo Pigliucci: But it is interesting for a number of reasons.
• 41:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: The first thing is that the Pyrrhonists developed some of the early skeptic techniques that is, you know, how do you actually keep yourself a skeptic, right?
• 42:01
  Massimo Pigliucci: How do you keep an open mind?
• 42:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's easy to say I have an open mind, but that there's a there's a big difference between just saying it and actually having an open mind, right?
• 42:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: One of the techniques that the early skeptics, the Pyronists, and then later on uh this was adopted by the academic uh skeptics, developed was this notion of um arguing both sides.
• 42:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh there is a Latin term for this, inutramque partum, which is actually used today in when people teach rhetoric uh in law school, for instance.
• 42:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: But the idea is, let's say that uh, as I said before, right?
• 42:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I don't believe in free will.
• 42:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: How do I keep myself from entrenching my position from being close-minded about it?
• 42:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, from time to time, I might uh go through the exercise of writing a page or two arguing for the opposite position.
• 42:52
  Massimo Pigliucci: Or I might have a conversation with a friend where I say, you know what, let me defend the opposite position.
• 42:57
  Massimo Pigliucci: Let me defend the position that there is, in fact, framework.
• 43:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: As it turns out, so this this keeps you on your on your toes because it gives you a better understanding of the opposite position.
• 43:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: And as it turns out, uh, this is a technique that is used in modern pedagogy, and there is very good quantitative evidence that shows that it does open people's minds.
• 43:17
  Massimo Pigliucci: Some people change their mind when they're forced to defend a different opinion, or even if they don't change their mind, at least they come to a better understanding and more tolerance for the opposite position.
• 43:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: So the in-utranque partum approach or technique is something that was invented by the Pyronists and then transmitted to the early academic skeptics.
• 43:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: The academic skeptics invented something else that is very interesting and I think very useful today, and which I devote an entire chapter uh in the book to.
• 43:49
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh, one of the academic skeptics was a guy named Carniades, he was arguably the most influential of the academic skeptics.
• 43:57
  Massimo Pigliucci: And he introduced this notion of the uh what in Greek is called pitanon, which trans translates to persuasive.
• 44:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: What is persuasive?
• 44:09
  Massimo Pigliucci: So he said, look, um things don't come in yes and no, true or false, zero or one.
• 44:16
  Massimo Pigliucci: They come into degrees.
• 44:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: There are some things that are barely credible, there are other things that are significantly more credible, there are st still other things that are you know almost certain, and so on.
• 44:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: And in fact, it it describes four levels of these Pitanon, uh which are equivalent to the situations where the first one, the lowest level, is a situation where I find something potentially true, but I'm not really I don't have a lot of evidence in favor.
• 44:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: So let's say more than 50 50, but not much.
• 44:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: I'm not gonna bet a lot of money on that.
• 44:53
  Massimo Pigliucci: Notion.
• 44:54
  Massimo Pigliucci: The second level of the P Tanon is something that I find significantly believable, you know, convincing.
• 45:02
  Massimo Pigliucci: I'm not definitely not certain, but I now find that I have I have pretty strong reasons to believe it.
• 45:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: So this would be something like, you know, let's say a 70% or 80%, you know, acceptance.
• 45:14
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I'm now willing to bet more money on that notion, but not the house.
• 45:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: A third level of Pitanon is something that Carniele said is not only convincing, but as he put it, undiverted, meaning that it actually, there's nothing you know that that that contradicts it.
• 45:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: So not only it's a notion that you find convincing, but as far as you know, there is no other notion that goes contrary to it.
• 45:40
  Massimo Pigliucci: There is nothing that undermines it.
• 45:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now you're now your level of acceptance is higher, like 90%.
• 45:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now you can bet a significant amount of money on the truth of that particular notion.
• 45:50
  Massimo Pigliucci: And then finally, there's a fourth level of the Python, which he calls thoroughly explored, meaning that people who actually know what they're talking about have spent a significant amount of time and energy checking this out.
• 46:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: So it would be the equivalent of modern scientific knowledge.
• 46:07
  unknown: Okay.
• 46:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now you can go, if if something reaches level four of the Pytanon, now you're at about 99%.
• 46:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now you can actually bet the house.
• 46:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: Let me give you two examples just to uh to put this in concrete terms, right?
• 46:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: If you invited me um to go to the movies, and I'm not so sure that the movie that you suggested is really that good, right?
• 46:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: I'm barely, barely into that territory, like 50 above 50%, but not much.
• 46:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, it's not that important.
• 46:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, after all, the main reason is to go out and hang around with you, and if it waste two hours because the movie turned out wrong, bad.
• 46:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's not a big deal, right?
• 46:44
  Massimo Pigliucci: So I don't need a high level of confidence.
• 46:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: I don't leave a high level of pita none in order to agree that, sure, let's go and see the movie.
• 46:51
  Massimo Pigliucci: However, if we're talking about, I don't know, vaccinating my kids, well, now I want scientific evidence that vaccines work.
• 46:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right?
• 46:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: Because otherwise I'm risking people's lives, my own life or my kids' lives.
• 47:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: So now the degree of confidence has to be much higher.
• 47:09
  Massimo Pigliucci: Importantly, however, that degree of confidence never reaches truth with the capital T.
• 47:15
  Massimo Pigliucci: It never reaches 100%.
• 47:16
  Massimo Pigliucci: Why?
• 47:17
  Massimo Pigliucci: The skeptic said, because all of our knowledge at the end of the day comes from two sources and two sources only.
• 47:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: Our senses, you know, things that we see, touch, smell, hear, and so on, and our reason.
• 47:31
  Massimo Pigliucci: And we know from experience that both our senses and our reason can occasionally go wrong.
• 47:38
  Massimo Pigliucci: We can make, you know, we can reason incorrectly about things, or we can see things that turn out not to be there, or we might be mistaken about what we thought we saw, and so on and so forth.
• 47:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: So if the only two sources of knowledge we have are at least occasionally fallible, then we can never be sure 100% of what we believe.
• 47:56
  Massimo Pigliucci: But we don't need 100%.
• 47:58
  Massimo Pigliucci: We need just a high degree of confidence depending on what is at stake.
• 48:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: If if nothing much is at stake, you don't even need a high degree of confidence.
• 48:07
  Massimo Pigliucci: If a lot is at stake, then you want to raise your bar so that you're only doing things that are actually worth doing, that had to come with a certain uh degree of confidence.
• 48:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: Now, I use the word, the Greek word pitanon, which we don't use today, of course.
• 48:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: Cicero translated Carnieris.
• 48:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: And one of the goals of Cicero's life was to translate, uh to render Greek philosophy in Latin, because the Romans uh were far behind the Greeks in terms of philosophy.
• 48:38
  Massimo Pigliucci: In fact, Cicero is one of the early uh Roman philosophers.
• 48:42
  Massimo Pigliucci: And often there was no equivalent term.
• 48:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: He had to make up words, you had to adapt Latin words to the original meaning.
• 48:50
  Massimo Pigliucci: And he brilliantly, I think, as it turns out, uh translated Pitanon with the Latin probabilis, from which we get probability, right?
• 49:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: And that is what the skeptics were talking about.
• 49:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, what is the probability that this is a good movie or not?
• 49:06
  Massimo Pigliucci: What is the probability that vaccines work or not, and so on and so forth.
• 49:11
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so one of the things that I suggest the readers do um in the book is to always ask yourself, what level of confidence do I have in this, in this particular notion, and why?
• 49:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right?
• 49:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: We were we started out this conversation by saying, by talking about uh my daughter's question, you know, how do you know this, right?
• 49:32
  Massimo Pigliucci: So if I have a high degree of confidence in a particular notion, let's say the vaccines work, why?
• 49:40
  Massimo Pigliucci: Where does that confidence come from?
• 49:43
  Massimo Pigliucci: And in asking yourself those two questions, number one, how confident am I about this thing?
• 49:49
  Massimo Pigliucci: And number two, why I am I have that degree of confidence, that goes a long way, I think, toward guiding your you in life in making decisions.
• 50:00
  Jon Brooks: Yeah.
• 50:01
  Jon Brooks: Yeah, wow, that's super helpful.
• 50:03
  Jon Brooks: I love the lists as well, like the the list there, the four-part list and the there.
• 50:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: And if people don't remember the names, you know, the specific terms that that that um uh Carnegis uses, just use level one, two, three, or four.
• 50:16
  Massimo Pigliucci: Just think about, you know, level one is barely acceptable, two a little bit more, three significantly more, four is the highest you can get.
• 50:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: So ask yourself, this notion that I'm entertaining, what level is it?
• 50:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: And that that already forces you to think in a more systematic way instead of saying simply true or not true, uh, then you answer yourself in a in a more nuanced uh way.
• 50:40
  Massimo Pigliucci: And that is the beginning of something as opposed to the end of inquiry.
• 50:47
  Jon Brooks: There's uh a case uh that I want to talk about and get your opinion on.
• 50:52
  Jon Brooks: So there are certain types of people that are overconfident about everything, and then the the use of skepticism is obvious there.
• 50:59
  Jon Brooks: And then there's another type of individual where they may be full of self-doubt, questioning everything to the point that they are stuck.
• 51:06
  Jon Brooks: You know, they go down to do work and they're asking, what am I trying to do?
• 51:09
  Jon Brooks: Can I even do it?
• 51:10
  Jon Brooks: What's the point in anything?
• 51:12
  Jon Brooks: And they go down a spiral, right?
• 51:14
  Jon Brooks: Uh is skepticism, this philosophy, useful to help this kind of person who's, you know, overthinking and and in doubt all of the time?
• 51:22
  Jon Brooks: Is there a healthy version of that?
• 51:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah, you would think that that skepticism might be a problem for those people, right?
• 51:29
  Massimo Pigliucci: Because skepticism does uh suggest that you should pause and think a little bit more carefully about what you're doing.
• 51:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: These people are already, in a sense, uh the way you describe them, overdoing it, but they're overdoing it in the wrong way.
• 51:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: Right?
• 51:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: So it's one thing if your doubt comes from the fact that you're not, you don't have confidence in yourself, right?
• 51:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's a psychological issue.
• 51:49
  Massimo Pigliucci: If you don't have confidence in yourself, you might need that, you might need help from a professional who, you know, can address that that specific problem.
• 51:58
  Massimo Pigliucci: The kind of confidence the skeptics are talking about is confidence in the evidence.
• 52:05
  Massimo Pigliucci: Again, the answer to the question of how do you know this, right?
• 52:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: So it's not about you.
• 52:10
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's not it's not about your self-confidence, it's about how confident am I that whatever I'm believing or not believing, accepting or not accepting, actually corresponds to reality.
• 52:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: It is actually true.
• 52:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: So it's about the external evidence and how you assess it.
• 52:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so I don't think that there is an issue with insecure people embracing skepticism because they're really kind of two different things.
• 52:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: There's this, it's one thing is to ask yourself about the epistemic warrant that you have about certain beliefs.
• 52:45
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's another thing entirely to ask yourself, do I believe in myself?
• 52:49
  Massimo Pigliucci: Although, of course, you couldn't uh approach things from a skeptical perspective even at that level and ask yourself, why don't I believe in myself?
• 52:57
  Massimo Pigliucci: What kind of empirical evidence do I have that I'm unreliable, let's say, or incompetent or anything like that, right?
• 53:04
  Massimo Pigliucci: And that actually is what a cognitive behavioral therapist would ask you.
• 53:08
  Massimo Pigliucci: If you go to a CBT session, that they will challenge your beliefs.
• 53:13
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, the whole idea, it's a major part of the idea of cognitive behavioral therapy, is challenging the beliefs of the client, right?
• 53:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, oh, everything's gonna catastrophe.
• 53:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: Why?
• 53:26
  Massimo Pigliucci: Why do you think that everything is a catastrophe?
• 53:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: I'm not good at anything.
• 53:29
  Massimo Pigliucci: Why?
• 53:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: On what basis do you think that you're not good at anything, right?
• 53:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: What are what are your reasons for that?
• 53:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: And that's how the therapist will challenge you and and will therefore challenge your your beliefs.
• 53:41
  Massimo Pigliucci: And so, in a sense, even CBT is a type of skepticism because it's asking you to actually inquire into why you believe certain things and revise your beliefs if it turns out that your evidence is actually not backing them up, right?
• 53:59
  Jon Brooks: Right.
• 54:00
  Jon Brooks: Yes, that makes a lot of sense.
• 54:02
  Jon Brooks: Um just playing devil's advocate a little bit.
• 54:06
  Jon Brooks: Uh, there are a lot of people that might be listening to this thinking, I'm I have common sense.
• 54:12
  Jon Brooks: You know, I'm I must I'm I believe I'm sensible.
• 54:15
  Jon Brooks: I believe I'm I look at evidence and I'm open-minded.
• 54:18
  Jon Brooks: What is different about this way of looking at things versus the philosophy of skepticism and how might it help even people like this?
• 54:28
  Massimo Pigliucci: Well, one of the issues with common sense is it's actually not that common.
• 54:31
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh it's, you know, lots of people think, as you just said, uh, think that they have common sense, whatever that means.
• 54:38
  Massimo Pigliucci: But what they actually mean is I have the same opinions that most people that I know have.
• 54:44
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's not common sense, nor is it critical thinking that's going with the heart.
• 54:48
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's just being comfortable uh, you know, adopting the beliefs of people in your in your immediate surroundings, your family, among your friends, or in society at large, because you feel uncomfortable challenging them.
• 55:02
  Massimo Pigliucci: But one of the things that the skeptics will remind you, so the original skeptic was was Socrates.
• 55:09
  Massimo Pigliucci: And Socrates was certainly not somebody who really accepted uh societal bullets without questioning them, right?
• 55:16
  Massimo Pigliucci: So he was always questioning things.
• 55:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: That doesn't mean that he thought that he had the truth.
• 55:21
  Massimo Pigliucci: I mean, he famously went around saying that he actually didn't know anything.
• 55:25
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's not true.
• 55:27
  Massimo Pigliucci: He actually, it turns out he didn't know a few things here and there.
• 55:30
  Massimo Pigliucci: But um, at least his attitude was open, right?
• 55:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: So, okay, let me ask a question.
• 55:34
  Massimo Pigliucci: You you're the expert.
• 55:35
  Massimo Pigliucci: I'm gonna ask you what uh what do you think about this?
• 55:38
  Massimo Pigliucci: I don't I don't know myself.
• 55:39
  Massimo Pigliucci: So common sense can be an excuse for complacency.
• 55:44
  Massimo Pigliucci: It can be an excuse for making you feel comfortable in your cocoon and and not actually asking questions that lead you down uh a path that might actually be uncomfortable.
• 55:56
  Massimo Pigliucci: And look, if that's what you want to do, fine.
• 55:59
  Massimo Pigliucci: I said, you know, you can't force people.
• 56:00
  Massimo Pigliucci: They people have to do it on their own.
• 56:03
  Massimo Pigliucci: But at the same time, it is my experience, and it also comes out of systematic studies that people really do like, do really cherish the truth.
• 56:14
  Massimo Pigliucci: You know, very few people say, Oh, I don't care about the truth.
• 56:17
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's like, I don't, I don't care.
• 56:18
  Massimo Pigliucci: Whether I'm wrong or right, I don't care.
• 56:20
  Massimo Pigliucci: Uh most people would say, yeah, I'd rather be right than wrong.
• 56:23
  Massimo Pigliucci: Okay, well then ask yourself, do other people believe differently, especially people who seem to know what they're talking about?
• 56:31
  Massimo Pigliucci: And if so, and if so, what would you say to them?
• 56:33
  Massimo Pigliucci: And on what basis would you defend your uh your opinion?
• 56:37
  Massimo Pigliucci: So just being open-minded, it simply means be open to the possibility that you could be wrong and ask other people what they think.
• 56:46
  Massimo Pigliucci: That's it.
• 56:47
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yeah, I love that.
• 56:50
  Jon Brooks: Well, uh the time has flown by.
• 56:53
  Jon Brooks: I know you have uh places you need to be.
• 56:56
  Jon Brooks: Uh I've probably got through like a third of all the different topics I wanted to talk to you about, but I I still have more of the book to finish, and I'm sure some themes will come up there for me.
• 57:06
  Jon Brooks: Uh it's been a big honor to talk to you today.
• 57:09
  Jon Brooks: I really appreciate the time.
• 57:11
  Jon Brooks: Is there any way people could find out more about what you're working on?
• 57:14
  Jon Brooks: Um, first of all, thanks for having me.
• 57:17
  Massimo Pigliucci: It's been it's been a pleasure.
• 57:19
  Massimo Pigliucci: Yes, uh, people can find my books, of course, wherever books are sold online or or or in person.
• 57:24
  Massimo Pigliucci: And then uh most of my writings aimed at a general public can be found at my Substack, which is called Figs in Winter.
• 57:32
  Massimo Pigliucci: And everything else that I do, including my technical uh stuff in science and philosophy, can be found at massimopigliucci.net.
• 57:42
  Jon Brooks: Yeah, and I will say as well, uh Figs in Winter is super high quality.
• 57:47
  Jon Brooks: Uh I was actually for a time just reading articles as as just a way to kind of learn about philosophy in general.
• 57:53
  Jon Brooks: Uh yeah, so I I thank you.
• 57:55
  Jon Brooks: Fully, fully recommend that.
• 57:57
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 57:58
  Jon Brooks: Uh well, thank you very much.
• 57:59
  Jon Brooks: And uh yeah, hope you have a good rest of the day.
• 58:02
  Jon Brooks: Thanks.
• 58:03
  Jon Brooks: You too.
• 58:04
  Jon Brooks: Great.
• 58:05
  Jon Brooks: Okay.