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A NECESSARY DOUBT: When a person says: 'We can have no certainties, no-one can be certain about anything', he is unwittingly displaying his tendency to illusion, ignorance, and stupidity. For were he not inclined to this kind of self-deception, he would know that certainty and doubt are antithetical, that the one cannot exist without the other and, consequently, that there must be a degree of certainty in the world.

When I say: 'Mr Smith is a man and Miss Brown a woman', I am absolutely certain about the nature of their respective genders. Even if I didn't possess the concepts 'male' and 'female', I could still be confident that they looked fundamentally different, and that would constitute a certainty. Similarly, when I say: 'The sun provides the heat and light upon which the survival of natural life on this planet so heavily depends' I am again expressing a certainty. Were I to call it a doubt, other people would have sound reason to consider me mistaken.

But there are, of course, things about which it is impossible to be certain, like changes in the weather, who we will bump into on the pavement, what we will dream in our sleep, where we will be in ten years' time, how much money we will waste over the next six months, and so on. The doubts we have about these 'uncertainties' effectively enable us to be 'doubtless' about the various certainties about which it is absolutely imperative to be certain. Otherwise one may eat the poison berry.