It's an Ancient Russian Proverb

skepticalempiricist:

It is not that I wish to throw the shadow of uncertainty upon the existence itself. In fact, I think it’s at least as clear as mud that what I was trying to convey is that this is probably the only certainty we’ll ever have. The problem is, our definition, association and any other delineating facets of our concept, idea or notion of ‘existence’ is soo vague as to be virtually useless. Because no set of associations or definitions can be certain, given the preceding arguments, and we can’t rightly have much of a concept without them, it would seem our ‘existence’ is doomed to eternal obscurity. As to the question of question begging posed in regard to the use of the verb ‘to be’ in my statement of ill-definition, my reply is somewhat unexciting. Simply put, my argument leads to the conclusion that we can mentally shout ‘SOMETHING!’ and of this we can be certain. There our certainty stops. We can’t even effectively attach a verb to it let alone any further nouns. This is part of the crucial difference between my argument and DesCartes’. That being said, I used a more descriptive statement a la ‘There somethings a something such that something is something’ with the intention that it would more fully convey the idea at hand, lacking as I do the proper written markers to convey the emphatic and vague mental shout ‘SOMETHING!’ in the way intended. However I now see that by embellishing in this way I have effectively created greater confusion than clarity so I will retract the description in favor of ‘SOMETHING!’.

skepticalempiricist:

The first mistake is the identification of doubt as the undismissable entity. If I may doubt anything, or, if you like, if I am uncertain whether I am being systematically and seamlessly mislead by a demon of unlimited powers, then it seems unlikely I can be certain of my notion of doubt. How can I be certain as to the nature of doubt. The meaning I have assigned it. How it has attained such meaning. Whether it is even related to the kind of thing I believe it to be. If I can answer none of these questions with certainty then I must admit that my notion of doubt in very insecure indeed. Descartes might attempt to step back from doubt at this point and generalize to thought or consciousness but the same uncertainty applies to these. Indeed the very notion of existence and ‘the self’ are subject to these same concerns. Given this it would be suspect to even claim the simple E(x). To say ‘There exists and X’ is to presume too much. To be clear this is not because I do not firmly believe there exists an x. Instead it is simply to point out that such belief fails to derive any absolute certainty from my inability to dismiss the concept from my musings. Now there is perhaps a single word that could be uttered with certainty. ‘Something’. ‘There somethings a something such that something is something’. A truly vague notion of being wrapped up in the fact that, regardless of how confused and misguided we might be, there is enough of something such that some entity is involved in something which encompasses the accurate or inaccurate perceptions entailed in our questions. It may be comforting that at the bottom of everything we can be certain of something but our certainty in this case grasps only in the most tenuous of ways something so ill-defined and amorphous as to be utterly inaccessible and completely useless in any practical human enquiry.