In his new book Timothy Williamson, the Wykeham Professor of Logc at Oxford, writes:
Descartes’ starting point for reconstructing knowledge was his knowledge of his own inner thought. That too still has strange echoes. In March 2003 the United States under President George W. Bush and the United Kingdom under Prime Minister Tony Blair invaded Iraq and overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, claiming that it had weapons of mass destruction (WMD). The claim soon turned out to be false. In a 2004 speech defending his actions, Tony Blair said: “I only know what I believe”. He hadn’t known that there were WMD, but he had known that he believed that there were WMD. He tried to divert attention away from the question of testable evidence out there for WMD to the question of his inner sincerity. (p. 2)
Similarly, Williamson says in a recent interview:
Tony Blair insisted that he had genuinely believed that there were WMD in Iraq, obscuring the key point that he hadn’t known that there were. Epistemological theories that base justifications for belief on introspectible conscious feelings are of little help when one asks whether belief in WMD in Iraq was justified before the invasion. They are looking in the wrong place for justification. The real issues concern publicly or at least interpersonally available evidence.
In reality Blair did not try to “divert attention away from the question of testable evidence”. On the contrary, just before the sentence “I only know what I believe” which Williamson cites in his book, Blair did address the issue of evidence head on:
The evidence about Saddam having actual biological and chemical weapons, as opposed to the capability to develop them, has turned out to be wrong.
I acknowledge that and accept it.
I simply point out, such evidence was agreed by the whole international community, not least because Saddam had used such weapons against his own people and neighboring countries. [emphasis added]
So, rather than attempting to justify himself by shifting to the claim about “his inner sincerity”, we see that what Blair actually said was that the evidence, although it ultimately turned out to be wrong, was at the time massively accepted by many well-informed sources. It may not have been “agreed by the whole international community” (as Blair claims) but his obvious point was that, before the decision about the invasion was made, the available evidence about the presence of weapons of massive destruction in Iraq was so strong that a lot of political leaders, intelligence services and governments found it convincing.
Hence, contrary to Williamson’s charge, Blair did not defend his decision by pointing to his “introspectible conscious feelings” or “inner sincerity”. Quite the opposite, he referred to what Williamson called the “real issue”, namely the “publicly and interpersonally available evidence”, which happened to be very persuasive to many others, besides Blair himself.
Another well-known philosopher, Simon Blackburn, criticized Blair’s attitude toward WMD in a similar way, again unsuccessfully:
What makes it worse is Blair’s self-styled sincerity, as if it’s all right to go about believing stuff for which there is absolutely no evidence, providing he’s sincere. This amounts to what you might call a fatal privatisation of belief – taking it out of the public sphere of rational and conscious control.
Did Blair really assume that “it’s all right to go about believing stuff for which there is absolutely no evidence, providing [one is] sincere”? No reason has been given that would support this extraordinary allegation.
To be clear, I am not here defending Blair’s decision to go to war in Iraq. I am just saying that Williamson’s and Blackburn’s criticisms of Blair’s thinking are without merit since they are clearly contradicted by what Blair himself said. One may object to the decision to invade Iraq on various grounds but it is ludicrous to interpret it as an “echo” of some kind of subjectivist or irrationalist epistemology.
Yes, if momentous political decisions leading to massive loss of life happened sometimes to be the result of deep epistemological errors or confusions, knowledge of philosophy would gain in importance and people would be well advised to pay more attention to philosophers’ musings. But there is little evidence that the adoption of a Cartesian or some other esoteric epistemological theory has ever had catastrophic effects in the real world.
The sad fact is that, as a rule, what happens in philosophy stays in philosophy.
Neven Sesardić 