Doubt
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In defence of doubt; a much-maligned force for good in the world.
From our first law lectures, we imbibed the fundamental interests and objectives of a liberal modern legal system, prominent among them being a profound wish for legal certainty. This is a matter of basic jurisprudence: we hear it, we think, “oh, yes; well, of course,” and nod along to as our professor continues on his mellifluous way.[1]
Thereafter, we are taught with every breath to strive for certainty: to plunge as deep into the detail as we can before our lungs burst; to explore it, to unpack it, to revel in its granularity, to the exclusion of all other considerations. This spirit have carried through our education into our professional practice. Being an unattainable ideal, there is no end to our quest; we can only aspire to carry on, exhausting as any nefarious possibilities as we can unravel before our fingers bleed. But we know we will always fall short of the perfect.
And when our energies subside we have the little pitons that we can jam into nearby fissures for yet further purchase on certainty: is there one amongst us who has never once whispered for the avoidance of doubt, not even to break some tedious impasse?
Such is our institutional hatred of doubt. Note the terminology of that dreadful piece of hack lawyering: “avoidance”, as in “void” — as if doubt is so repulsive to our collective morality we should evacuate it from our bowels, ab initio, and flush it away, and only then can we repose in our cosy, sterile, pristine world of certainty.
Yet you need not be a great visionary of our halting course through the cosmos to notice that however hard we have lunged for definitude, we have had a hard time finding it. Shit still, resolutely, happens.
So here, readers, I present you a spirited, against-the-run-of-play, defence of doubt.
There are logical, psychological, commercial and philosophical grounds. Bear with me.
- Certainty in the sense of being solved: if you have solved the puzzle no-one wants to play the game. This is trivial to understand for noughts and crosses; we fancy we can get there with checkers, but chess and go while, technically capable of being solved, have not got there yet. But if at any point on the board there is an optimal move — and in a zero-sum game, there must be — then that includes the first move. In which case, there is no longer a point in playing. It becomes not a competition of wits, but of memory and data processing. That’s no longer interesting.
- Certainty in the sense of utter truth: If there is a single truth and it is deductible, then any inconsistent view is at best sub-optimal: wasteful and possibly dangerous. There are objective grounds for suppressing any views other than the true one.
- Certainty in the sense of favouring the paper over the relationship: A contract, remember is a second-order derivative account of a business relationship. We hope, once it is inked, one will not have to look at it again. A sense of certainty about the contents of the contract disincentives proactive management of a relationship which, being a relationship, and all, is a dynamic thing. Hence how retrograde the idea of a no oral modification clause: this is to afford a static written memorial priority over a living, organic relationship.
- Certainty as a function of a simple system: If we take it that truth is a property of a sentence, not of the world[2] and a sentence is an artefact of a language, then language would have to be a closed logical system, to which both (or all) parties to that truth were fully conversant. Not only, typically, are they not — languages are quite loose things and hard to draw boundaries — but languages are not closed logical systems. This we owe to Goedel. We can, with our wordgames, minimise indeterminacy (legal language is a good example of where we do this, by convention eliminating metaphor, avoiding slang and informal construction and where, even after that, there is potential ambiguity, minimising it with definitions, but even there, the best we can hope for is that our static document can describe the order, state and function of a simple, or complex system. It cannot describe a complex system (essentially one where individual agents with conflicting interests and language structures interact. But commerce occurs in exactly that type of environment.
See also
- ↑ Mine was especially mellifluous: Hello, Professor Rowe, if you are reading, 32 years later!
- ↑ Richard Rorty: Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.