The Question of Contradictory Reality

What is wrong with the following statement: “We can know nothing about reality.”

A sharp minded person would notice that there is a logical problem: the statement is contradictory. The statement is making a definitive statement about reality, yet it claims nothing can be known about reality. While it is true that the statement is contradictory, I don’t think that would make the statement wrong. The statement, “We can know nothing about reality,” would mean that reality may be contradictor. If we knew that reality was not contradictory, then we would know something about reality, right? So the statement would not be invalidated because it is contradictory, because accepting the statement as true opens up the possibility that reality is contradictory.

What can we say to people who say, “We can know nothing about reality”? These same people will doubt their very senses, for after all, if they can know nothing about reality, how can they trust their senses? Well, I am sure even the person who accepts that he can know nothing about reality to the point that he doubts his senses still lives his life as if he could perceive the world around him. For instance, I would bet that such a person would still duck if he saw someone swing a baseball bat at his head. He may give a philosophical reason why he doesn’t know that the baseball bat actually exist, but when the baseball bat is about to impact his life (more specifically, his head), suddenly, he doesn’t care about the philosophical implications and acts as if the baseball bat is real. Thus, we can conclude that a person who says that, philosophically, he can not know anything about reality, is being a hypocrite, since he lives his life as if he does know something about reality.

However, this brings us back to the first problem: if a person who claims to not know anything about reality is fine with reality being contradictory, then there is no problem with him living his life as a hypocrite. After all, if the world may be contradictory, why can’t his life be contradictory? So I am not sure that these people can be convinced that reality exists by reasoning. However, I do think that if these people continue to deny that reality exists, even when they live their lives as if reality does exist, and even though everybody in the entire world lives their lives as if reality exists, if they can’t see that maybe, just maybe, everybody lives their lives as if reality exists for reason, then we should just treat these people as dumb as a barrel of bricks.