Unger's general strategy in this paper is the following:
Knowledge > Certainty > Severe characterization > Unreasonable.
That is, knowledge claims are claims of certainty, and under the severe characterization of certainty, certainty is dogmatic and unreasonable. So knowledge claims are always unreasonable.
I might be inclined to accept that knowledge claims are claims of certainty, and to accept that certainty under the severe characterization is unreasonable. And yet I think knowledge claims are fine. So I must give something up, and one place to look is whether the severe characterization is accurate. Unger states:
". . . one's being absolutely certain of something involves one in having a certain severely negative attitude in the matter of whether that thing is so: the attitude that no new information, evidence or experience which one might ever have will be seriously considered by one to be at all relevant to any possible change in one's thinking in the matter."
There are two separate questions here: what certainty is and when it's okay to be certain. To the latter, we might say that if the denial of p entails p, then it's okay to be certain that p. And we might say that if p is necessarily true, then it's okay to be certain that p. But this doesn't answer the first question of what does it look like to be certain of something.
(I've heard the distinction made between 'epistemic certainty' and 'psychological certainty', but I'll set that aside. I'll also set aside questions about what it means to believe or to have credence.)
Here's a less severe characterization of certainty: I am certain that p just in case I cannot imagine p being false. This doesn't entail a dogmatic attitude, because I am open to the idea that you could change my imagination regarding p if it's really the case that you can imagine p being false. In other words, I am open to my imagination becoming like yours.
Now, Unger has something to say in response to this: That I basically just admitted that I'm not absolutely certain of p. After all, if I were absolutely certain of p, then I should say that there's no chance of my imagination being changed such that I come to believe differently about p. If I say there is a possibility that my imagination could be transformed such that I now see that p is false, then I admit that there is some possibility of p being false, which is to admit that I'm not absolutely certain that p is true.
And this exposes the commonsense definition of certainty: to be certain that p is to believe that there is a zero percent chance of p being false, or P(~p) = 0.00.
But the idea of psychological probability feels vague in my mind. "There is a zero percent chance of p being false to me" – What does this mean? Maybe it means, among other things: I cannot imagine p being false.
My response is that there are many beliefs where apparently not only can I
not imagine them being false, but no one can. So if my imagination were to be changed to be like that of anyone else's, I still would not be able to imagine p being false. So this gives me the best of both worlds: I keep both my certainty and my open-mindedness. By being certain that p, I admit nothing more than that I cannot imagine p being false, but I can be open to my imagination being changed if you can imagine p being false. If you can't, then it turns out that it's not possible for my imagination to change such that I now see that p is false, at least with respect to your imagination. If no one can imagine p being false, then it turns out that it's not possible for my imagination to change such that I now see that p is false with respect to anyone's imagination.
The key is that I'm not assuming that there really is a chance that p is false, and that someone out there sees that p is possibly false; for all I know, no one can, has, or ever will see that p is false exactly because p cannot be false. You can't know what's not true. So if it's not true that p is possibly false, then you can't know that p is possibly false. And if you can't know that p is possibly false, then you can't see that p is possibly false. And if you can't see that p is possibly false, then you can't imagine p being false. So if p cannot be false, then you cannot imagine p being false.
Side note:
***
I would apply this to belief in God. We might say, initially, that we can imagine both God existing and God not existing. But if we buy the logic of ontological arguments, it will turn out either that God must exist or cannot exist. So it will turn out that p cannot be false where p is either "God exists" or "God does not exist".
My response is that we cannot imagine God existing if God cannot exist, or we cannot imagine God not existing if God must exist. This is not strange; many people claim to know God on a personal level, or claim to know that God exists. If it turns out that God cannot exist, then these claims will be retrospectively mistaken, just like claims about the imaginability of God will be retrospectively mistaken if God turns out to be an impossible being.
To give an illustration of this, let's say there's a race of beings who think they can imagine a square circle both existing and not, and so they are agnostic about square circles. One day they realize that square circles are impossible beings, and so they realize that they actually weren't successfully imagining square circles; they just couldn't yet see the impossibility of them.
This is where the distinction between 'epistemic possibility' and 'metaphysical possibility' is brought up: the existence of a square circle was epistemically possible to these people even while metaphysically impossible. Likewise, God's existence or non-existence can be impossible without our epistemic access to that impossibility.
This suggests that imagination is a success term: it's not enough to take oneself to be imagining something; you have to succeed in imagining it in some sense.
Side note 2:
Because p's being false's being impossible entails that it cannot be imagined, my inability to imagine p being false is evidence that p cannot be false. This gets tricky if I have epistemic peers who say they can imagine p being false. If these peers are nowhere to be found, then quickly the best explanation for why we cannot imagine p being false becomes because p cannot be false.
***
I'm just giving a simple conditional: If there really is someone who can truly imagine p being false, then, and only then, could my imagination in theory become like theirs and I have a change of mind; but even then I will remain unable to imagine p being false until my imagination has been so changed. But if it turns out that no one can truly imagine p being false, then the antecedent isn't true, and we are all stuck unable to imagine p being false. I'm being no more dogmatic than everyone else in that case.
This then hinges on what it means to imagine a proposition being true or false. For example, could someone imagine...
p = at least one thing exists.
...being false?
Let's say someone says, "Yes, I can imagine it turning out that nothing at all exists, not even one thing. I can imagine that I am guilty of a verbal mistake and confused about the verb 'exists', and it turns out that nothing does it. So I can imagine p being false."
Either this person is lying, mistaken, or telling the truth. I cannot imagine p being false here, so I'm stuck with my certainty that p is true. This means I also cannot imagine it being the case that this person is telling the truth.
But if this person is right, and they really can imagine p being false, then I grant the possibility of my imagination becoming like theirs and me having a change of mind. But if they are lying or mistaken, then there might be no such possibility, and if it's the case that anyone who similarly claims to be able to imagine p being false is also lying or mistaken, then there is no such possibility at all.
This way I keep both my certainty and open-mindedness. In fact, this appears more open-minded and less dogmatic than skepticism, because it's open to certainty.
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