Can We Really Doubt Everything?

Doubt is often treated as the starting point of independent thought. But if we genuinely doubted everything, what would remain for us to doubt with?

In the First Meditation, Descartes subjects sensory experience, dreams and even the possibility of being deceived in reasoning by an “evil demon” to doubt. His aim is not to remain permanently doubtful. It is to withhold assent from questionable beliefs for a time and search for foundations of knowledge that can survive the test. Methodic doubt is therefore a procedure of examination, not a claim that the world does not exist.

Wittgenstein’s late work On Certainty approaches the problem from another direction: how can doubt itself have meaning? If I doubt that a table exists, I still use the shared language of “table”, “existence” and “doubt”. I also rely on memory, rules of inference and practices for distinguishing better evidence from worse. This does not make those background commitments eternally correct. It means that a particular doubt must allow some things to stand fast for the moment, or even its object cannot be identified.

My view is that total doubt can work as a thought experiment but is difficult to inhabit as a real epistemic condition. When dealing with news, AI-generated material or personal memory, reason does not demolish every floorboard at once. It specifies what is in doubt, what evidence supports the doubt and what standards would permit revision. The value of doubt lies not in its quantity but in whether it makes judgement more testable. Doubt without limits eventually removes the conditions for both error and correction.

References
René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy (1641)
https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/descartes
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Descartes’ Method
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-method/
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Ludwig Wittgenstein
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/#Cert