Consider two claims. Firstly: university is difficult, much more so than school. Secondly: at university your peer group will be much smarter than they were at school. What is the usual inference which people draw, upon hearing these two claims? From what I can tell, it’s that the first is a corollary of the second. University is difficult because suddenly one is in competition with a much larger pool of really smart people.
This is completely wrong, and the second claim—that one’s peer group at university is much smarter than at school—is only trivially true.
Let’s start with that second claim. In the British school system, we have ’sets’. Somewhere around the age of fourteen, one is placed into a set, or tier, for each subject that one is taking for one’s GCSEs (school leaving exams, essentially, towards which one studies for two years, completes coursework, and ultimately takes examinations in). The people one meets at university are generally smarter than most people at school; this is true. But if, like me, you were in the top sets, the people you meet will probably not, in general, be any smarter than your peers in those sets. This is why this claim is only trivially true. To expect one’s actual peer group—the people one works and studies around—to change much is wrong.
The first claim is that university is much harder than school. This one is true, but it’s not made true by the second claim. In fact, the real error in our inference (I say ‘our’ because I have been as guilty as anyone of making it) was to connect the two claims at all. University is harder than schools for reasons that are almost nothing to do with the intelligence of one’s peer group. University is hard because one has to do work that demands one actually take in a large amount of information and process it; because there’s a lot of work, a lot of reading; because the onus is on the student to turn up and learn stuff. All of which is really nothing to do with how smart the people in one’s seminar group are. In fact, I would argue that the smarter the people surrounding one are, the easier university is.
To carry on with the seminar group example, if there are a bunch of clever people, then the chances are better that there will be a good discussion, that you’ll learn and remember things. If all you have are a bunch of idiots who stare at their feet, shuffle nervously, and stay silent the whole time, then it’s not much fun and you’ll learn less than if people argue with you.
Ultimately, all of this is of relatively little consequence. However, what it says about the way we process certain socially-accepted ‘truths’ is both interesting and worrying. What seems to happen is that two claims are made, and made in such a way that there is an implicit connection between the two. As we’ve seen, this ‘connection’ is in fact a spurious one, a logical misstep, and one of the claims is only true when we parse its context more broadly than perhaps we ought to. And yet, such claims exert a great influence on our attitudes. Attitudes are what we act on; they are the social assumptions on which we base our projections for the future on. We are damaging our understanding and our prospects by accepting claims with such dubious provenance.
Philosophers are not sceptics. The sceptic is, if you like, a role that we play sometimes; it’s a tool we use to further our understanding, to root out false or possibly false beliefs, to firm up our epistemic foundations. No one can truly be a real sceptic all the time; there are certain things that we will believe, that we must believe, if we are to live any semblance of a life. However, if we’re not to be tripped up by the lies—or at least the falsehoods, since lying implies a level of intention I’m not sure is present—that society tells us, we need to be philosophers, to engage in scepticism and use it. Scepticism can help us understand our world better, and understanding will allow us to function better in it, succeed more, and not get sucked in by the litany of falsehoods that are seemingly endlessly repeated in our ears.