The Mouse Who Ate The Cheese

Title: The Mouse who ate the Cheese and Those Who Believed, Those Who Knew, Those Who Doubted
Author: Dr. Stuart Fowler, Educational Consultant, Penrith, Melbourne, Australia
Class: Theory of Knowledge
Category: In Class



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This article was about a guy at a party (claiming he was not hallucinating or drunk), seeing a mouse eat the cheese. His friends who know what type of person he is, believes him because they do not think he would lie to them and so they trust them. However, the guy hosting the party doubts Bill (the guy who claims to have seen the mouse eat the cheese) and says there are no mouse in his house. All of these characters have their reasons for thinking/believing what they think/believe.

As I read this article, many questions popped into my mind. First of all, how did Bill know he was not hallucinating or that he was not drunk? Most people are not aware of when they are drunk or hallucinating, instead they believe what they claim to see. Here, Bill is doing the same thing. He claims to have seen the mouse eating the cheese but he could have easily been hallucinating or drunk. He does not know he is not hallucinating or that he is not drunk, he believes this to be true.

Another question that came up as I read this article was, how did his friends (Virginia Turner, Adrian Small) know that what Bill had said was reliable? Like I said, he could be hallucinating, or lying, or claiming what he assumed to be true. How did they know he was speaking the truth? Is trust enough to justify one’s belief as being true?

With Bill’s claim, I came to wonder, ‘How does he know that there are no mice in his apartment?’ Does he really know this? Or is he simply trying to convince himself of this being true? He uses experience to justify his thought. He states that he had exterminators come and check his house frequently. He relies on these people to have made sure there are no mice in his house. But then, how does he know his money is being used effectively? The exterminators could have pretended to check cautiously, or could have even pretended to spray toxic liquids in order to kill the mice when it was simply water. These are all possibilities.

All of the characters in this article use different ways of justifying their thoughts and beliefs. Bill uses empirical reasoning (observation) while Virginia and Adrian use rational reasoning (trust) to justify their beliefs. Both of the reasonings are effective and one is not better than the other. Some may argue that empirical is more reliable because we can justify it with what we saw. But then, how do we know what we saw? How do we know we were not hallucinating? We weren’t imagining? We can’t. We just need to believe what we know and from there, we can proceed in learning and believing and questioning and living life.