One reason I decided to study philosophy at an academic level—the reason I suspect Wittgenstein would appreciate most—is that I found I couldn’t stop thinking. There were moments that the Buddhist/Dharmic (and I can’t say a word like that without my raised-in-the-‘90s brain interjecting “yoga flame!”) ideal of clearing my mind was achievable and desirable, such as in moments of crippling self-doubt, but, as much as I wanted those moments to stop, I wanted more that I should continue, that I should not let the venomous thoughts and feelings swallow me whole, that I should think my way through them. Thinking was and remains a useful pastime that I cannot help doing. It only made sense that I should apply whatever talents I had for it to the recorded thoughts of the great minds from the ancient, medieval, or contemporary world. It was through my schooling that I was introduced to the analytic and continental schools of philosophy inquiry. So as not to overwhelm you with digressions, I shall make understanding the difference between the two a sub-topic for another day, but it will suffice and oversimplify to say that the former is more purely scientific and the latter artistic. I have been trained more thoroughly in the former, but my preference by far is the latter.
The portion of my mind trained in the analytic tradition sees this question simply as a kind of absurd paradox. While I am not skilled enough to formulate the question in formal logic, I know the basic structure would be something like, “If x, then how would you know not-x?” The easiest way to answer this is to disregard the human experience of sentences, by which I mean all one need do is to chop off the antecedent in the conditional, as the truth value thereof will be the same even if all that is addressed is the consequent. It is then a simple epistemological question that will be answered differently by rationalists, empiricists, and Kantian lambs who will soon serve as my dinner.
That isn’t very fun, though, is it?
No, indeed, and it’s only half-right.
It is an epistemological question cloaked in an absurd paradox, to be sure, but it is only by taking into consideration the antecedent, the head we chopped off, that the question can be answered thoroughly. Curiously, a thorough answer is quite short:
“If you did then how would you know you didn’t?”
Whatever way you would otherwise know you didn’t.
Now, I’m about as hardcore a skeptic as they come, especially where epistemology is concerned. The senses are not wholly reliable, reason is not wholly reliable, and the two acting in concert can be a death trap. I’m a stickler about certainty, and certainty is a concept relying to whatever degree on objectivity, which I do not believe exists. This is all to say I am in no way the best person to ask. That said, there are certainly rationalists and empiricists and Kantian lambs who will read these words and they will answer according to their methodology, regardless of any epistemology that I might propose. The easiest part is that there is no verb attached to the question, so anything can be supplied.
For example:
“If you made, how would you know you made not?”
Let us expand:
“If you did make, how would you know you did not make?”
Simply:
You probably would not, provided there was no alarm set up to alert you that you had not made.
Back to the original, this time as dialogue:
“If you did then how would you know you didn’t?”
“I would know I didn’t if there were a wire tripped to let me know I didn’t once I hadn’t done, but I did. Relax.”
With care,
~ Grigori