Ancient Philosophy - Lectures 8 & 9 (Part Two)
Carneades
Carneades, the fourth head of the Academy after Arcesilaus was interpreted by many of his contemporaries as moving away from the uncompromising epoche associated with Arcesilaus; and Sextus accordingly reports that ‘according to most people there have been three Academies … the third or New Academy [being] that of the School of Carneades and Cleitomachus’ (Outlines I 220).
Essentially it seems to have been Carneades’ elaborate discussion of the different levels of plausibility that an impression might possess that was responsible for the emergence of the view that he was not as strongly committed as Arcesilaus to epoche. However although the emergence of this view had a major impact on the subsequent history of ancient scepticism and may indeed have been responsible for the emergence of the Pyrrhonean school of scepticism, it seems highly likely that Carneades’ invocation of degrees of plausibility was actually nothing more than a move within a complicated piece of ad hominem argument intended to disarm the criticism that epoche of the kind recommended by the Academics was incompatible with voluntary action.
This line of argument, as described by Sextus Empiricus, relies upon a distinction between a subjective impression’s relationship to its apparent source and its relationship to the person having the impression. Sextus presents Carneades as arguing along the following lines. An impression that does not accurately represent an existing object can nevertheless be apparently true, and apparently true impressions are either obscure and indistinct or clear and vivid. Now the impression that is obscure and indistinct fails to work as an action-guiding criterion because this lack of clarity means that it is not of such a nature as to persuade us to form a belief on its authority. However the impression that appears true and appears so vividly, i.e. the plausible impression, can serve as a criterion of action because of its powerful subjective impact on us.
Impressions, though, are seldom judged in isolation from each other, and this leads to the initial criterion of a clear and vivid impression being supplemented by a second criterion; namely, the impression that is both plausible and undiverted. An undiverted impression is, in essence, an impression that coheres well with all the other impressions that accompany it, and the greater the degree of coherence, the more persuasive we find that impression. Even more persuasive than the plausible and undiverted impression, however, is the plausible and undiverted impression that has been thoroughly scrutinized. In this case we actively investigate the background conditions in order to see whether we can find anything that tells against the supposition that the impression will continue to cohere with all our other impressions. If this investigation reveals nothing untoward, then, once again, our confidence in the impression increases.
Now a non-sceptic might find it natural to interpret the foregoing criteria in terms of what it is rational or reasonable to believe when certainty is unattainable. However such an interpretation is not forced upon us: we could also treat Carneades as simply offering a description of what we find convincing and subjectively persuasive. Vivid and clear impressions are psychologically convincing, and undiverted or scrutinized impressions are, as a matter of fact, even more persuasive. Moreover these points can be noted and used to explain human actions even if we are not at all tempted to suppose that they correspond to differences in the objective quality of the reasons for the actions in question.
Thus there is no necessity to interpret Carneades as offering us a probabilistic epistemology that accepts that certainty is unattainable but nevertheless holds that some beliefs are more reasonable and better justified than others. On the other hand it is not surprising that some of his successors did interpret him as moving away from Arcesilaus’ position to such an epistemology. Thus there were eventually influential thinkers within the Academy itself who interpreted Carneades as rejecting radical scepticism and suspension of belief about matters of objective fact in favour of a more common-sense fallibilism.
Moreover this tendency was reinforced by Carneades’ evident willingness in some circumstances to say that there is a sense of ‘assent’ in which it is legitimate for us to assent. His predecessor Arcesilaus, of course, was strongly associated with a stance of refraining from assent: so it might be thought that there must be a clear gulf between these two leading Academics on this issue. However if we turn to Cicero’s account in the Academica (2.104) of what Carneades and his closest followers meant by assent, the difference seems to be merely verbal rather than substantive. According to Cicero, Carneades’ pupil Cleitomachus offered the following explication of the claim that ‘the wise man withholds assent’:
[This] has two senses; one, when it means that he assents to nothing at all; the other when he checks from responding in such a way as to accept or reject something, with the result that he neither denies nor asserts anything. This being so, he adopts the former, so that he never assents, but retains the latter, with the result that by following convincingness [plausibility] he can respond ‘yes’ whenever it is present or ‘no’ whenever it is missing.
It appears, then, that Cleitomachus was prepared to concede that it was not wholly inappropriate to talk of someone who had embraced the epoche espoused by Carneades as nevertheless assenting to some things. However the assent at issue here was merely a matter of being guided in one’s actions by plausible impressions, and acquiescing in some of the verbal responses that would have been forthcoming from an ordinary person who happened to be confronted by similarly plausible impressions. Assent of this minimal kind was, accordingly, wholly consistent with the epoche introduced into the Academy by Arcesilaus: beliefs about matters of objective fact are excluded in both cases.
When, for example, the ordinary person has a plausible impression of, say, a piece of coiled rope on the ground before him, then he will, except in special circumstances, form the belief that there really is a piece of coiled rope on the floor. Moreover if he is asked whether there is a piece of coiled rope on the floor, he will reply ‘Yes’. In contrast, someone who assents to such an impression in the minimal way picked out by Cleitomachus in the passage cited above will merely form the belief that if he were to investigate further, he would continue to have an impression of a piece of rope. This expectation may be all that is required to guide his actions so that they resemble those of the ordinary person, but is not the same as the ordinary person’s belief that there really is a piece of coiled rope on the floor. And this, in turn, means that the person who has embraced the form of epoche defended by Carneades and Cleitomachus will, in philosophical contexts, refrain from saying that there is a piece of coiled rope on the floor. In everyday contexts, however, it would be excessively pedantic and disruptive for such a person to insist on distinguishing his belief about his future impressions from the ordinary person’s belief about a matter of objective fact. Thus if he is asked, in an everyday context, whether there is a coiled piece of rope on the floor, he too will usually reply ‘Yes’.
The final years of the Academy
Cleitomachus became scholarch around 128 BC. He wrote extensively about Carneades and attempted, as we have just seen, to defend the view that Carneades did not regard assent as something that could be rationally justified.
However other pupils of Carneades openly dissented from this line of interpretation and presented him as legitimising assent (‘the wise man sometimes assents’). Metrodorus of Stratonicea is included in this group of people by Cicero, and Sextus also singles out Carneades’ pupil Charmadas.
Around 110 BC Philo of Larissa was elected scholarch, and this event is seen by Sextus as inaugurating the so-called Fourth Academy (with Arcesilaus being thought of as the founder of the Middle Academy and Carneades being treated as the founder of the New Academy). Although Philo had been one of Cleitomachus’ pupils, he is linked with Metrodorus by Cicero; and it seems that upon his election, the epistemological stance officially associated with the Academy became one of epistemological fallibilism. In accordance with this change, Carneades’ appeals to what is plausible (pithanon) were increasingly interpreted as appeals to a notion of defeasible justification that sufficed to make assent rationally acceptable. Moreover Philo eventually moved in an even more dogmatic direction by attempting to defend the view that the Academy as a whole had never gone beyond criticizing the Stoics’ specific criterion of truth. By this point, Philo was apparently prepared to accept that if people employed methods of inquiry other than those advocated by the Stoics, they might even be able to arrive at opinions that were certainly true.
Philo died in exile around 83 BC, and the Academy as an organized philosophical school had by then ceased to exist. It is clear, therefore, that the final years of the Academy would have been dispiriting ones for anyone who found that the investigation of claims left them with no inclination to believe that any specific claim was ever better justified than some contrary claim. Even under Cleitomachus, the Academy seems to have degenerated into a set of factions peddling different interpretations of Carneades’ philosophical position. And after Cleitomachus’ death, the most vociferous exponents of a dogmatic interpretation of Carneades’ views gained a decisive ascendancy.
In the light of these developments, it seems clear that people interested in the harder-edged negative epistemological position we have ascribed to Arcesilaus and Carneades would have had a strong motive for defecting from the Academy. Moreover there is a compelling case for supposing that the first person who can confidently be identified as a fully-fledged Pyrrhonean sceptic, Aenesidemus of Cnossus, was one of those defectors. However a more detailed discussion of this particular brand of extreme scepticism will have to wait until the final lectures of the semester.
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