Midgley on our standards of knowledge

The real Cartesian revolution

“Knowledge is now an awkward topic, but it is not one we can avoid. The trouble is that, since the 16th century, the standards by which we in the West judge knowledge have risen enormously, making it look doubtful whether we know things about which people used to be perfectly confident. The dawn of modern science was accompanied by an intense, genuinely enquiring scepticism because it involved a quest for a new kind of certainty–for guarantees of security in knowledge of a kind no other culture has ever looked for. This did involve raising the standards of evidence required for the answers, and therefore rejecting many that had formerly been accepted. Descartes, the 17th-century philosopher who chiefly shaped this movement, instituted his systematic doubt–a relentless sifting of the credentials of all kinds of knowledge–in order to make possible this quest for absolute scientific certainty.”

— Can't We Make Moral Judgements? by Mary Midgley