Cicero’s life and thought are a testament to the idea of probabilia: we should be confident in our beliefs, but never certain (Massimo Pigliucci for aeon)
The Academic Skeptics called their school the New Academy, to distinguish it from the Old one started by Plato. Arcesilaus and Carneades – the great sceptics of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BCE – had pushed Plato’s and Socrates’ dialogical method toward a radical conclusion: we are unlikely to achieve certainty, because human knowledge comes from our senses and from reason, both of which are fallible.
Crucially, they did not conclude that we should therefore believe nothing whatsoever. Carneades introduced the concept of the pithanon (a Greek word) – the persuasive, the plausible – as the proper standard for action. Cicero translated the word into Latin as probabile (plural probabilia, from which we get the English ‘probable’) and built his whole epistemology on it.
Cicero’s own formulation is plain. In the Academica, he separates his school from the dogmatists in a single sentence: others declare that certain things are settled and fixed, whereas ‘we hold many things to be probabilia, which we can easily follow but can scarcely affirm.’ Follow easily, affirm rarely. The entire method is encapsulated by that asymmetry.
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… on a personal scale, Cicero’s epistemology is an argument against the seductions of fixed identity. The person who has ‘found their truth’ and stopped questioning is not wise; they have surrendered to what Simone de Beauvoir, in The Prime of Life (1960), called ‘that conscious venture into lunacy known as a “philosophical system”,’ from which its adherents derive an obsessional attitude endowing their tentative patterns with universal insight and applicability. The well-examined life is one of continuous calibration and revision: strong-enough commitments to act with integrity, loose enough to update when the evidence changes.
Primary is pleased to present Of Ivory and Flesh, a solo exhibition by Luna Palazzolo-Daboul.
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