Doubt: Difference between revisions

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 ''[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_certainty 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.<ref>Mine was especially mellifluous: Hello, Professor Rowe, if you are reading, 32 years later!</ref>

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, unravelling and exhausting as many nefarious possibilities as we can find before our fingers bleed. We know we will always fall short of the perfect — they are the essences, the εἶδος; our worldly grapplings are but an imitation.  

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 at the notional definitude, we have had a hard time finding it. Shit still, resolutely, ''happens''. Were it not so deeply buried in the foundations of our self-mythology, we might even wonder whether it wasn’t the problem, not the solution.

There are logical, psychological, commercial and philosophical grounds. Bear with me. Let us start with the elephants and turtles.

==={{t|Epistemology}} of certainty===

Can we take Descartes as read? It gets more interesting a little later on.

*'''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<ref>Richard Rorty: {{br|Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity}}.</ref> 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.