About skepticism not being a position: why isn’t it that sceptic takes a position that some position isn’t justified good-enough?(or at least that all arguments he has seen aren’t good enough) In case he suspends even this, then…I’m not even sure what all-suspending skepticism is other than maybe some strange state of mind or some strange spiritual practice
Nice video with inspirational ideas! I think scepticism might be best understood as an attitude, which means that it cannot be properly formulated in language. And that’s what Pyrrho intended in the first place when he espoused ‘epoche’. Therefore, the reason why sceptics use language to formulate their point is not to argue for a proposition, but to prescribe and recommend the suspension of judgement as an attitude of life of open-mindedness and inner peace. It’s only the modern philosophers who are obsessed with logic and language that take the sceptic language at face value. Another way to understand it is to understand scepticism as a form of moral or evaluative argument, about the ethics of belief. To borrow some terms from metaethics, we can say that the sceptic claim is best understood by prescriptivism, but the ones who say that scepticism is self-defeating has in their mind descriptivism. In any case, it’s the language rather than the essence of scepticism that goes wrong.
14:46 -It seems to me that a suspension of judgment is simply a absence of judgment. -It doesn’t strike me as plausible that one needs to have encountered or considered a concept to suspend judgment about it. -But even if we distinguish between a absence of judgment and a suspension of judgment, the skeptic could just redefine his Typ of skepticism as a absence of judgment.
Interesting thought I had from this: First we had beliefs on faith alone Then we had 'the strength of a belief must be commensurate with the evidence' Then as the evidence for climate change mounts and mounts and yet we keep on living We come to universally adopt skepticism baffled, and accepting it, that we can keep on going in relative luxury, with 8 billion of us on the globe, while we seemingly destroy it more and more each year, believing all of the contradictory things this requires all at once. We find peace just as life ceases on the planet and sentient AI becomes the only living thing left.
22:18 I heard a story about Aristotle arguing with a skeptic (not sure if it's true). Aristotle was asking questions and the skeptic was basically silent and not making any gestures as a response .. a complete freeze .. because ANYTHING if said, would be self-defeating LoL.
To express that anything done would refute themselves suggests , I think, a presumption that the opposer’s position is true. That if the skeptic needs to believe and/or understand/apprehend the dogmatists’ position in order to refute it, then one must be a dogmatist to “refute dogmatism,” which to me just seems like a bad argument.
I wonder if someone has ever tried to claim some sort of transcendental justification for skepticism. Something weird like, “god revealed to me that nothing is true aside from the claim that nothing is true.” 🤣
The concept of revelation seems to imply that very claim. ) There is no certainty outside revelation, but normative conventions, and revelation has no criteria aside itself, for otherwise it would be the former which are the highest, but, as a convention, they are not. )
@@justus4684 I wasn't; seems to be a subtle, yet more sarcastic formulation of Chinese room or Solaris thought experiment: nothing is certain = anything is true. Well, that's enjoyable, though revelation couldn't care less. For it doesn't even propose a solution - it unapologetically states the latter: your very choice. And that's precisely the irony of every sarcasm, which is conditioned not upon objective situation but its very self. )
arguments against skepticism are made by people who are impressed by tautology, but who don't realize that tautology is a feature of language, not of "the world" - which is precisely the realization that the skeptic is trying to get them to understand. i.e. "Justification" is not conferred by "the world" but rather by other people.
@@Headhand-qd9so you can hit anything you want with a hammer, except the hammer itself. Asking "why" is an expression of frustration at attempting to hit the hammer with the hammer and continuing to miss.
@@ericb9804 That's not an answer. Clarify your point. Explain tautology and explain how its characteristics cannot belong to the external world. Until you do this your hammer analogy means nothing to me. You made a statement without explaining how you reached the conclusion. I will not blindly accept statements without first knowing the argument that grounds it. I asked you a question about a subject I have yet to learn. My ignorance will not be mocked because you will be just as ignorant as me in some other discipline. This is how people learn and if you cannot explain why someone should accept your statement then I will suspect bias towards this philosophical position you state as uncontested truth.
Skepticism as a tool seems to be the most reasonable thing to me. Particularly since some sort of “actual” nature or reality seems behind reach, not just from an inability of language and reason to fully grasp reality but also from an angle of physiological limitations. To say I am a skeptic as a position does seem weird to me but to say, “I tend to be skeptical about most things” feels at the very least safe haha
I have not yet watched the video but nevertheless I wanna state a priori that skepticism is not self defeating, not even impractical or weird if you take care of one thing: distinguish between alethical truth and epistemological certainty. It means that a Skeptic believes a proposition p (to be true) just as someone non-skeptical might believe it, but the Skeptic always denies to know or be sure of that very belief, so in short the Skeptic’s position is this: I believe p to be true but I am not certain. Or catchy: p is true if I am not mistaken. No problems at all, very natural indeed.
fair enough, but that seems kind of trivial. I think even the most hardened "non-skeptic" would concede to a lack of "certainty" to some extent. The skeptics point as it applies to epistemology is not about "certainly," but about how we have no reason to think that what we "believe" has much to do at all with "reality," whatever that may be, i.e. there is nothing to be "certain" about in the first place - we have our beliefs for the reasons we do and that's it. No "reality" needed. And yet, this lack of connection between our beliefs and reality doesn't seem to matter much because now matter what we are going to keep doing what we are already doing for the same reasons we do it now - we find it useful.
This seems more like fallibilism then skepticism. -It doesn’t seem to me that certainty is a necessary condition for knowledge, you can have probabilistic arguments as justification. One can think of Skepticism with two divisions, Global vs. local skepticism and pyrrhonian vs. academic skepticism. -Pyrrhonian means a suspension of judgment while academic skepticism is about the impossibility of knowledge. -You can be a skeptic about one Typ of propositions (local) or you can be skeptical about all propositions (global).
@@Opposite271 When I read Sextus‘ Pyrrhonian Skepticism I feel like that Pyrrhonism is pretty much the position I describe. They do not deny that they believe and how could they? All they deny is that their beliefs are true for sure, i.e. any belief can turn out to be false. When you apply this theory to any arbitrary belief you lose any leverage and indeed any belief becomes as good as another one and then you lose any drive „for truth“. After that you shift your attention more to functionality (Does it seem to work?) and that‘s the modern view.
@@ostihpem I would also like to separate historical pyrrhonian Skepticism from global pyrrhonian Skepticism. Historical pyrrhonian Skeptics may had believes but global pyrrhonian skeptics are defined by a global suspension of judgment.
Skepticism began with the Ancient Greeks; but basically vanished from Western philosophy after Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian shut down non-Christian philosophy schools in Athens in the 6th century. The shutdown suspended skepticism for a millennia. Skepticism was reborn in 17th century Europe with a new twist. This new 17th century skepticism initially challenged 'natural law'. Natural Law was then a set of beliefs had founded on Aristotle logic; and was the mainstay of elite beliefs at that time. 17th century skepticism used empiricism as its basis, or foundation, for belief. So one could claim that the new 17th century was skepticism of social, moral and metaphysical beliefs. Not so much a skepticism of epistemic and empirical beliefs. Scientific and observational empiricism became its epistemology. This kind of skepticism was called The Enlightenment. Hence, within modernist philosophy empiricism and skepticism are often conflated. Strictly speaking, these people are scientific skeptics. These scientific skeptics are skeptical of scientific dogmas; so they are more like skeptics for science, than skeptics of the scientific method. This led to a bunch of quite dogmatic bores using science to debunk off-beat ideas such as homeopathy, ... They call themselves "skeptics" but their skepticism never goes as far as a skepticism of science itself! Which isn't to say that science has no good skeptics. There are good skeptics of science today such as Alexander Unzicker who are skeptical of scientific dogma. I recommend his channel here on CZcams. Other good critics of science, from within science, are critics of Cargo Cult Statistics; people such as Andrew Gelman. Yet another bunch of skeptics within science are critical of "idea laundering". Idea laundering is the publication of junk academic articles. See Peter Boghossian.
Later, again in the 20th century, from the 1960s onward, a new kind of skepticism arose called postmodernism. Postmodernism is a kind of skepticism founded on social constructivism, as opposed to empiricism; because the post-moderns believe that empirical understanding is itself, too often, socially constructed. One could say that social constructivism, is itself a kind of skepticism - leaving postmodernism with no real foundations at all! I mentioned these points because philosophers like playing language games with skepticism. Which I find infinitely boring. I wanted to bang the drum for skepticism by making the point that one need not be an absolute skeptic of everything. One can restrict oneself to being a skeptic of bad and false beliefs. This is why many of us still call ourselves skeptics today.
This might not be global skepticism anymore but I think saying your conscious mind doesn’t know something is a justified position because it’s based on the state of your own mind. Asking “how do you know you don’t know something?” Is bit of a nonsense question. Knowing that your don’t know something consciously being about the state of your own mind is similar to how Pierre Gassendi said that you know thinking is occurring. Or how you could know the definition of something that only exists in one’s own mind that was defined/made up in ones own mind. “I define a juj is a green obelisk. Now I know my definition of a juj is a green obelisk”
I've heard this many times, mostly from friends otherwise uninterested in philosophy, and it always seems a strange criticism to me. I don't disagree that skepticism is rather boring as a belief but I don't see how that is any reason to hold a different belief. Are beliefs held because we find them interesting? I always assumed they were held because we found them convincing. In my personal case that's how I've always operated. It'd be cool and fun for me to believe my parents were international super-spies who met on the job, but the theory that's most convincing (and boring) to me is that they're just normal people who met in college like they say. Is them being boring and normal a criticism of my belief that what they say is true, and does it make a belief that they are in fact super-spies more convincing? I don't personally think so.
You know that if you're not interested in something you can just... do other things? I'm not interested in cars, so I never bother reading anything about cars. "Skepticism isn't interesting" doesn't strike me as an objection to skepticism; it's an expression of attitude, and I would expect that people with that attitude would not tend to engage much with skeptics or their arguments. Which is totally fine. Different people are interested in different things.
Can one prove mathematically that the TRI-Lemma is exhausting and no further options exist? Like geometrically modeled: can we prove with Euklidean Axioms that a line either stops somewhere or goes into a circle/ellipse or goes on infinitely in R^2?
mr. kane, good sire, (hello), pray tell, do you know any texts that explore this self-defeating tendency of reason / how it seems to require irrational grounding (if any grounding, if not irrational, then non-rational)?
I take skepticism to be a matter of pragmatism. We can weigh risks and potential rewards for our beliefs. For any belief, it can either be true or false. If it is false, then we face the negative consequences of a false belief. In contrast, if the belief is true, we get no reward. There is nothing I can do while having a belief that I could not do without that belief. Therefore beliefs are all risk and no reward, so no belief can ever be justified at a pragmatic level.
But we do get a reward if it's true, a detective for example frequently makes inductive arguments and guesses that are not justified in a very strict logical sense but if he guesses right he caught the criminal. Information is power, every extra bit of it is desirable to the point we make leaps of faiths constantly in order to operate in our daily lives. We have to be more careful the more significant and widely impactful the claim is so it doesn't blow up in our face but that's a different thing.
@@kkounal974 : Isn't there a difference between a guess and a belief? Imagine a jar of marbles and a contest to guess how many marbles are in the jar to win a prize. If we guess there are 100 marbles in the jar, that does not mean that we believe there are 100 marbles in the jar. We are aware that what we are doing is guessing and it is quite likely wrong. If we guess correctly we get a reward, but the guess is all that is required in order to get the reward. If we went further and actually believed that there were 100 marbles in the jar, we would get no more reward for having that belief than we would get from merely guessing.
@@Ansatz66 All beliefs are ultimately guesses. It's unfalsifiable to claim much more. You have deductible reasoning but that cannot tell you anything new about the world, only show you the logical consequences of an assumption. Everything else is trying to separate a bad guess from a more reasonable/useful guess.
@@kkounal974 : Even if all beliefs are guesses, that does not mean that all guesses are beliefs. Surely the best guesses are *not* beliefs, since beliefs open us up to many risks that would otherwise be avoided. The detective can guess a suspect and get it right and catch a criminal, all without needing to have any beliefs.
@@Ansatz66 Well no, guesses and beliefs have the same exact properties. How do you epistemologically go about things? You can either 1) rely on empirical sense data to convince oneself and others, or 2) you can attempt to draw out every possible consequence assuming any possible axioms. To the first one can always counter, well how do you know your senses are reliable? To the second one can respond but that would not tell us anything about the world, it would only tell about any possible world, as soon as you try to pick some specific axioms that describe specifically our world you will prompted with, why those ones? Now to give an example imagine yourself the detective wondering in the night through the streets. Suddenly you hear the sounds of glass breaking and then see a jewelry shop with broken windows and a man putting jewels inside a bag. Obviously you will go after him. But how do you know that a car didn't pass by, launched a rock that broke the window and that man was just the owner making sure his property doesn't get lost or damaged further? Well you don't, it just seems unlikely, more so that this is a robbery. If it happened all the time around those parts you wouldn't be alarmed.
Skepticism that states: every statement x (which we assume to be true) can turn out to be false nevertheless, is not self defeating. Because it assumes the truth of some very basic premises and concludes its skeptic position. If the premises are true, the (skeptical) conclusion (AND ONLY THIS ONE!!!) becomes true. It could be disproven by just one example of some y that cannot be false at all. That is possible by the Skeptic position itself (substituting it for x, we see that Skepticism could be false after all) though almost impossible to pull off since Skepticism uses only these very basic principles plus logic. That is the Skepticism one should deal with. The Ancient Skepticism that literally suspends judgement is just not convincing at the least.
The claim = every statement we deem to know aa true is possibly false Is a statememt of a truth claim itself despite that being only one. Thats the self defeating aspect of it. That the statement = everything can be wrong - includes the very statement of everything can be wrong to be wrong itself.
@@JoeySkate24 But there is no self-defeat. Because the statement does not say: „Everything is false“ (which would be just a false statement) but „Everything could be false“. If it is true then everything _could_ (not must!) be false, if it is false then something is necessarily true. No contradiction. Self-defeat is if you claim something to be true and it is false precisely if it is true like for instance „Everything is false“.
@@ostihpem same difference. Everything could be false includes the everything could be false claim too. Thus it doesnt change much at all to be fair. Cause if the premise everything is false is truly false then... You see?
@@JoeySkate24 „All is false“ = ◇~x. If ◇~x were true then also ◇~◇~x by self instantiation but there is no contradiction between the two. Also there is no contradiction between ◇~x and if all or at least something were true. What you mean is that „All is false“ (= ~x) is false because if it was true then also ~~x = x by self instantiation but that contradicts the premise. That is indeed an example of self-defeat. But this does not happen using modal logic.
@@ostihpem its either true or false. Everything could be false - if true - self defeating. Cause the everything could be false could be false as well. Which in the case it is then it needs to follow its own rule. Everything could be false - false - then some things could be true. It doesnt need to get any more complicated than that. Its rather simple. Playing around with the "could be" or "is" is the tricky part but it really doesnt change much. The premise that it is is automatically self defeating. The premise that it might be/could be makes it that it could be self defeating. Anytime the premise is true it just returns to its self defeating aspect.
Nah, now I think on it can't be as trivialism claims every truth-bearing proposition is true as I believe you explained in an earlier vid on relativism.
I mean, why shouldn’t the skeptic doubt the validity of doubt itself? Doubt is just a ladder that is used and then thrown away afterwards by the skeptic.
@@lendrestapas2505 -It doesn’t seem to me that I need to doubt anything to just suspend judgment, instead doubt appears as the reason for why one would suspend judgment. -But why not simply suspend judgment without any reason at all? Why would someone need a reason for this? Edit: I mean here doubt in the Cartesian or methodological sense.
@@Opposite271 because when you have no reason for your doubt then you have no reason for assuming your doubt is valid. When you think about it, you only really doubt something when you also have some motivation for it. Similarly, you wouldn’t start believing it God for no reason, right? You also wouldn’t stop being an atheist for no reason, something has to move your thought to that point.
I never understood skepticism. If a person comes to me and says that he is a global skeptic. I would just laugh at him. And may be suggest him to walk over the cliff. If he doesn't walk over the cliff, he stands there refuting himself, and if he does walk over the cliff, he lies there refuted.
A person does not need to believe that a cliff is dangerous in order to refrain from walking off it. It is enough to merely speculate that the cliff might be dangerous. To take a guess is not the same thing as holding a belief. Imagine a jar of beans and a contest to win a prize by guessing the number of beans in the jar. In the the hope of winning the prize, you might guess there are 100 beans in the jar. Does this mean that you believe there are 100 beans in the jar? Surely are you aware that this was just a guess and so it is quite likely to be false. In the same way, a skeptic can guess that walking off a cliff will lead to death, but only as a guess and without requiring any belief about what will happen if he were to walk off the cliff.
a skeptic won't walk over the cliff for the same reason you won't, because they think they would get hurt. The skeptic just understands that their belief is not about the cliff itself, i.e. "the true nature of reality," whatever that means, but rather about the beliefs they find justified given the experiences they have had.
Interesting that you would "laugh" and "suggest" given that both of those things are non-propositional. Perhaps the skeptic would consider your suggestion, but then laugh and follow the suggestion of their amygdala.
@@jonathanmitchell8698 Exactly, why should I indulge in aristotelian shenanigans? Who decides what is the accepted way to form your beliefs and knowledge? Aristotle? Why should I listen to anyone to begin with? The whole charade of proposition, premises, conclusion, valid argument is for nerds. I believe in whatever works for me and whatever works in general, and by works I don't mean "well, actually the argument is....", by working i mean works in my dealing with the external physical world. Using aristotilian logic for non-empirical propositions is what de*generates do. I would usually laugh at your naivete of "well actually, i would believe you only if you rationalize your opinion as a set of premises and conclusion", but to indulge your silliness, let me present you an "actual" argument with proposition: Premise 1; You came from nothing i.e big bang Premise 2; All that you do will eventually amount to nothing i.e. eventual heat death of the universe. Premise 3: There is no point in an endeavor which starts with nothing and ends in nothing. Conclusion; There is no point to you existing. So, why don't you just stf u.
@saimbhat6243 Premise 2 and 3 are highly arbitrary so that's a pretty garbage argument if you can even call it that. I do however agree with your original comment, the way Gödel died is proof enough to me that global skepticism is silly. What would global skeptics do in his position flip a coin every time they have a meal? The global skeptic population would not survive.
In Praise of Self-Refutation: czcams.com/video/p22qfddYkXI/video.html
About skepticism not being a position: why isn’t it that sceptic takes a position that some position isn’t justified good-enough?(or at least that all arguments he has seen aren’t good enough)
In case he suspends even this, then…I’m not even sure what all-suspending skepticism is other than maybe some strange state of mind or some strange spiritual practice
12:10
You left out my favorite strategy:
Deny and affirm that skepticism is self-defeating
A trivialist both is and is not a skeptic. So this both is and isn't a strategy. It both is and isn't your favorite 😂
Nice video with inspirational ideas! I think scepticism might be best understood as an attitude, which means that it cannot be properly formulated in language. And that’s what Pyrrho intended in the first place when he espoused ‘epoche’. Therefore, the reason why sceptics use language to formulate their point is not to argue for a proposition, but to prescribe and recommend the suspension of judgement as an attitude of life of open-mindedness and inner peace. It’s only the modern philosophers who are obsessed with logic and language that take the sceptic language at face value. Another way to understand it is to understand scepticism as a form of moral or evaluative argument, about the ethics of belief. To borrow some terms from metaethics, we can say that the sceptic claim is best understood by prescriptivism, but the ones who say that scepticism is self-defeating has in their mind descriptivism. In any case, it’s the language rather than the essence of scepticism that goes wrong.
14:46
-It seems to me that a suspension of judgment is simply a absence of judgment.
-It doesn’t strike me as plausible that one needs to have encountered or considered a concept to suspend judgment about it.
-But even if we distinguish between a absence of judgment and a suspension of judgment, the skeptic could just redefine his Typ of skepticism as a absence of judgment.
Interesting thought I had from this:
First we had beliefs on faith alone
Then we had 'the strength of a belief must be commensurate with the evidence'
Then as the evidence for climate change mounts and mounts and yet we keep on living
We come to universally adopt skepticism
baffled, and accepting it, that we can keep on going in relative luxury, with 8 billion of us on the globe, while we seemingly destroy it more and more each year, believing all of the contradictory things this requires all at once. We find peace just as life ceases on the planet and sentient AI becomes the only living thing left.
22:18
I heard a story about Aristotle arguing with a skeptic (not sure if it's true). Aristotle was asking questions and the skeptic was basically silent and not making any gestures as a response .. a complete freeze .. because ANYTHING if said, would be self-defeating LoL.
But for all the skeptic knows, silence expresses propositions too, so is self-defeating in just the way that speech would be...
To express that anything done would refute themselves suggests , I think, a presumption that the opposer’s position is true. That if the skeptic needs to believe and/or understand/apprehend the dogmatists’ position in order to refute it, then one must be a dogmatist to “refute dogmatism,” which to me just seems like a bad argument.
@@KaneBThat's the way Gödel died btw
I wonder if someone has ever tried to claim some sort of transcendental justification for skepticism. Something weird like, “god revealed to me that nothing is true aside from the claim that nothing is true.” 🤣
The concept of revelation seems to imply that very claim. ) There is no certainty outside revelation, but normative conventions, and revelation has no criteria aside itself, for otherwise it would be the former which are the highest, but, as a convention, they are not. )
@@justus4684 feel free to explain it to me and how it relates to what I said.
@@justus4684 I wasn't; seems to be a subtle, yet more sarcastic formulation of Chinese room or Solaris thought experiment: nothing is certain = anything is true. Well, that's enjoyable, though revelation couldn't care less. For it doesn't even propose a solution - it unapologetically states the latter: your very choice. And that's precisely the irony of every sarcasm, which is conditioned not upon objective situation but its very self. )
'Skeptical flood'. I love that
It's strange how it seems as though skepticism idealizes the philosophical zombie.
arguments against skepticism are made by people who are impressed by tautology, but who don't realize that tautology is a feature of language, not of "the world" - which is precisely the realization that the skeptic is trying to get them to understand. i.e. "Justification" is not conferred by "the world" but rather by other people.
The statement - tautology is a feature of language, not of "the world" - why is this the case?
@@Headhand-qd9so you can hit anything you want with a hammer, except the hammer itself. Asking "why" is an expression of frustration at attempting to hit the hammer with the hammer and continuing to miss.
@@Headhand-qd9so what do you mean when you say "a dolphin is a dolphin."?
“[This] is precisely the realization that the skeptic is trying to get us to understand”
Is that what the skeptic wants us to understand?
@@ericb9804 That's not an answer. Clarify your point. Explain tautology and explain how its characteristics cannot belong to the external world. Until you do this your hammer analogy means nothing to me. You made a statement without explaining how you reached the conclusion. I will not blindly accept statements without first knowing the argument that grounds it.
I asked you a question about a subject I have yet to learn. My ignorance will not be mocked because you will be just as ignorant as me in some other discipline. This is how people learn and if you cannot explain why someone should accept your statement then I will suspect bias towards this philosophical position you state as uncontested truth.
Skepticism as a tool seems to be the most reasonable thing to me.
Particularly since some sort of “actual” nature or reality seems behind reach, not just from an inability of language and reason to fully grasp reality but also from an angle of physiological limitations.
To say I am a skeptic as a position does seem weird to me but to say, “I tend to be skeptical about most things” feels at the very least safe haha
I have not yet watched the video but nevertheless I wanna state a priori that skepticism is not self defeating, not even impractical or weird if you take care of one thing: distinguish between alethical truth and epistemological certainty. It means that a Skeptic believes a proposition p (to be true) just as someone non-skeptical might believe it, but the Skeptic always denies to know or be sure of that very belief, so in short the Skeptic’s position is this: I believe p to be true but I am not certain. Or catchy: p is true if I am not mistaken. No problems at all, very natural indeed.
I think understanding this is the #1 thing that separates skeptics from people who think skeptics are insane. You explained it super well here.
fair enough, but that seems kind of trivial. I think even the most hardened "non-skeptic" would concede to a lack of "certainty" to some extent.
The skeptics point as it applies to epistemology is not about "certainly," but about how we have no reason to think that what we "believe" has much to do at all with "reality," whatever that may be, i.e. there is nothing to be "certain" about in the first place - we have our beliefs for the reasons we do and that's it. No "reality" needed.
And yet, this lack of connection between our beliefs and reality doesn't seem to matter much because now matter what we are going to keep doing what we are already doing for the same reasons we do it now - we find it useful.
This seems more like fallibilism then skepticism.
-It doesn’t seem to me that certainty is a necessary condition for knowledge, you can have probabilistic arguments as justification.
One can think of Skepticism with two divisions, Global vs. local skepticism and pyrrhonian vs. academic skepticism.
-Pyrrhonian means a suspension of judgment while academic skepticism is about the impossibility of knowledge.
-You can be a skeptic about one Typ of propositions (local) or you can be skeptical about all propositions (global).
@@Opposite271 When I read Sextus‘ Pyrrhonian Skepticism I feel like that Pyrrhonism is pretty much the position I describe. They do not deny that they believe and how could they? All they deny is that their beliefs are true for sure, i.e. any belief can turn out to be false. When you apply this theory to any arbitrary belief you lose any leverage and indeed any belief becomes as good as another one and then you lose any drive „for truth“. After that you shift your attention more to functionality (Does it seem to work?) and that‘s the modern view.
@@ostihpem
I would also like to separate historical pyrrhonian Skepticism from global pyrrhonian Skepticism.
Historical pyrrhonian Skeptics may had believes but global pyrrhonian skeptics are defined by a global suspension of judgment.
Skepticism began with the Ancient Greeks; but basically vanished from Western philosophy after Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian shut down non-Christian philosophy schools in Athens in the 6th century. The shutdown suspended skepticism for a millennia. Skepticism was reborn in 17th century Europe with a new twist. This new 17th century skepticism initially challenged 'natural law'. Natural Law was then a set of beliefs had founded on Aristotle logic; and was the mainstay of elite beliefs at that time. 17th century skepticism used empiricism as its basis, or foundation, for belief.
So one could claim that the new 17th century was skepticism of social, moral and metaphysical beliefs. Not so much a skepticism of epistemic and empirical beliefs. Scientific and observational empiricism became its epistemology. This kind of skepticism was called The Enlightenment. Hence, within modernist philosophy empiricism and skepticism are often conflated. Strictly speaking, these people are scientific skeptics. These scientific skeptics are skeptical of scientific dogmas; so they are more like skeptics for science, than skeptics of the scientific method.
This led to a bunch of quite dogmatic bores using science to debunk off-beat ideas such as homeopathy, ... They call themselves "skeptics" but their skepticism never goes as far as a skepticism of science itself! Which isn't to say that science has no good skeptics. There are good skeptics of science today such as Alexander Unzicker who are skeptical of scientific dogma. I recommend his channel here on CZcams.
Other good critics of science, from within science, are critics of Cargo Cult Statistics; people such as Andrew Gelman. Yet another bunch of skeptics within science are critical of "idea laundering". Idea laundering is the publication of junk academic articles. See Peter Boghossian.
Later, again in the 20th century, from the 1960s onward, a new kind of skepticism arose called postmodernism. Postmodernism is a kind of skepticism founded on social constructivism, as opposed to empiricism; because the post-moderns believe that empirical understanding is itself, too often, socially constructed. One could say that social constructivism, is itself a kind of skepticism - leaving postmodernism with no real foundations at all!
I mentioned these points because philosophers like playing language games with skepticism. Which I find infinitely boring. I wanted to bang the drum for skepticism by making the point that one need not be an absolute skeptic of everything. One can restrict oneself to being a skeptic of bad and false beliefs. This is why many of us still call ourselves skeptics today.
This might not be global skepticism anymore but I think saying your conscious mind doesn’t know something is a justified position because it’s based on the state of your own mind. Asking “how do you know you don’t know something?” Is bit of a nonsense question. Knowing that your don’t know something consciously being about the state of your own mind is similar to how Pierre Gassendi said that you know thinking is occurring. Or how you could know the definition of something that only exists in one’s own mind that was defined/made up in ones own mind. “I define a juj is a green obelisk. Now I know my definition of a juj is a green obelisk”
The most effective criticism of (nonconstructive) skepticism is that it's very uninteresting.
I've heard this many times, mostly from friends otherwise uninterested in philosophy, and it always seems a strange criticism to me. I don't disagree that skepticism is rather boring as a belief but I don't see how that is any reason to hold a different belief. Are beliefs held because we find them interesting? I always assumed they were held because we found them convincing. In my personal case that's how I've always operated.
It'd be cool and fun for me to believe my parents were international super-spies who met on the job, but the theory that's most convincing (and boring) to me is that they're just normal people who met in college like they say. Is them being boring and normal a criticism of my belief that what they say is true, and does it make a belief that they are in fact super-spies more convincing? I don't personally think so.
@@Riskofdisconnect You're taking it in a completely different direction. Obviously I mean skepticism as a sort of excuse to stop any inquiry.
@@luszczi if you say so. I might be dumb but I don't think that's obvious at all.
@@Riskofdisconnect I often think my points are made clearly and readers disagree. :D
You know that if you're not interested in something you can just... do other things? I'm not interested in cars, so I never bother reading anything about cars. "Skepticism isn't interesting" doesn't strike me as an objection to skepticism; it's an expression of attitude, and I would expect that people with that attitude would not tend to engage much with skeptics or their arguments. Which is totally fine. Different people are interested in different things.
When i think of skepticism i think of Sherlock Holmes or Sean Connery's character in the "Black Rose".
This channel has enjoyable and interesting content but l wish the audio quality was clearer and louder. Thank you.
Unfortunately there's not much I can do about that at the moment.
Can one prove mathematically that the TRI-Lemma is exhausting and no further options exist? Like geometrically modeled: can we prove with Euklidean Axioms that a line either stops somewhere or goes into a circle/ellipse or goes on infinitely in R^2?
mr. kane, good sire, (hello), pray tell, do you know any texts that explore this self-defeating tendency of reason / how it seems to require irrational grounding (if any grounding, if not irrational, then non-rational)?
I take skepticism to be a matter of pragmatism. We can weigh risks and potential rewards for our beliefs. For any belief, it can either be true or false. If it is false, then we face the negative consequences of a false belief. In contrast, if the belief is true, we get no reward. There is nothing I can do while having a belief that I could not do without that belief. Therefore beliefs are all risk and no reward, so no belief can ever be justified at a pragmatic level.
But we do get a reward if it's true, a detective for example frequently makes inductive arguments and guesses that are not justified in a very strict logical sense but if he guesses right he caught the criminal.
Information is power, every extra bit of it is desirable to the point we make leaps of faiths constantly in order to operate in our daily lives.
We have to be more careful the more significant and widely impactful the claim is so it doesn't blow up in our face but that's a different thing.
@@kkounal974 : Isn't there a difference between a guess and a belief? Imagine a jar of marbles and a contest to guess how many marbles are in the jar to win a prize. If we guess there are 100 marbles in the jar, that does not mean that we believe there are 100 marbles in the jar. We are aware that what we are doing is guessing and it is quite likely wrong. If we guess correctly we get a reward, but the guess is all that is required in order to get the reward. If we went further and actually believed that there were 100 marbles in the jar, we would get no more reward for having that belief than we would get from merely guessing.
@@Ansatz66 All beliefs are ultimately guesses. It's unfalsifiable to claim much more. You have deductible reasoning but that cannot tell you anything new about the world, only show you the logical consequences of an assumption. Everything else is trying to separate a bad guess from a more reasonable/useful guess.
@@kkounal974 : Even if all beliefs are guesses, that does not mean that all guesses are beliefs. Surely the best guesses are *not* beliefs, since beliefs open us up to many risks that would otherwise be avoided. The detective can guess a suspect and get it right and catch a criminal, all without needing to have any beliefs.
@@Ansatz66 Well no, guesses and beliefs have the same exact properties. How do you epistemologically go about things? You can either 1) rely on empirical sense data to convince oneself and others, or 2) you can attempt to draw out every possible consequence assuming any possible axioms.
To the first one can always counter, well how do you know your senses are reliable? To the second one can respond but that would not tell us anything about the world, it would only tell about any possible world, as soon as you try to pick some specific axioms that describe specifically our world you will prompted with, why those ones?
Now to give an example imagine yourself the detective wondering in the night through the streets. Suddenly you hear the sounds of glass breaking and then see a jewelry shop with broken windows and a man putting jewels inside a bag. Obviously you will go after him.
But how do you know that a car didn't pass by, launched a rock that broke the window and that man was just the owner making sure his property doesn't get lost or damaged further? Well you don't, it just seems unlikely, more so that this is a robbery. If it happened all the time around those parts you wouldn't be alarmed.
Skepticism that states: every statement x (which we assume to be true) can turn out to be false nevertheless, is not self defeating. Because it assumes the truth of some very basic premises and concludes its skeptic position. If the premises are true, the (skeptical) conclusion (AND ONLY THIS ONE!!!) becomes true. It could be disproven by just one example of some y that cannot be false at all. That is possible by the Skeptic position itself (substituting it for x, we see that Skepticism could be false after all) though almost impossible to pull off since Skepticism uses only these very basic principles plus logic. That is the Skepticism one should deal with. The Ancient Skepticism that literally suspends judgement is just not convincing at the least.
The claim = every statement we deem to know aa true is possibly false
Is a statememt of a truth claim itself despite that being only one. Thats the self defeating aspect of it.
That the statement = everything can be wrong - includes the very statement of everything can be wrong to be wrong itself.
@@JoeySkate24 But there is no self-defeat. Because the statement does not say: „Everything is false“ (which would be just a false statement) but „Everything could be false“. If it is true then everything _could_ (not must!) be false, if it is false then something is necessarily true. No contradiction. Self-defeat is if you claim something to be true and it is false precisely if it is true like for instance „Everything is false“.
@@ostihpem same difference. Everything could be false includes the everything could be false claim too. Thus it doesnt change much at all to be fair.
Cause if the premise everything is false is truly false then... You see?
@@JoeySkate24 „All is false“ = ◇~x. If ◇~x were true then also ◇~◇~x by self instantiation but there is no contradiction between the two. Also there is no contradiction between ◇~x and if all or at least something were true. What you mean is that „All is false“ (= ~x) is false because if it was true then also ~~x = x by self instantiation but that contradicts the premise. That is indeed an example of self-defeat. But this does not happen using modal logic.
@@ostihpem its either true or false. Everything could be false - if true - self defeating. Cause the everything could be false could be false as well. Which in the case it is then it needs to follow its own rule.
Everything could be false - false - then some things could be true.
It doesnt need to get any more complicated than that. Its rather simple.
Playing around with the "could be" or "is" is the tricky part but it really doesnt change much.
The premise that it is is automatically self defeating.
The premise that it might be/could be makes it that it could be self defeating.
Anytime the premise is true it just returns to its self defeating aspect.
Bold of you to confess to robbing a bank yesterday in this video.
I am skeptical of your skepticism
Would trivialism be considered as a form of skeptism?
Nah, now I think on it can't be as trivialism claims every truth-bearing proposition is true as I believe you explained in an earlier vid on relativism.
I really like Wittgenstein‘s argument against scepticism
Also Hegel‘s and Kant‘s
I mean, why shouldn’t the skeptic doubt the validity of doubt itself?
Doubt is just a ladder that is used and then thrown away afterwards by the skeptic.
@@Opposite271 i don’t see how that would work. For him to doubt validity he needs his doubt to be valid.
@@lendrestapas2505
-It doesn’t seem to me that I need to doubt anything to just suspend judgment, instead doubt appears as the reason for why one would suspend judgment.
-But why not simply suspend judgment without any reason at all? Why would someone need a reason for this?
Edit: I mean here doubt in the Cartesian or methodological sense.
@@Opposite271 because when you have no reason for your doubt then you have no reason for assuming your doubt is valid. When you think about it, you only really doubt something when you also have some motivation for it. Similarly, you wouldn’t start believing it God for no reason, right? You also wouldn’t stop being an atheist for no reason, something has to move your thought to that point.
Are sceptics solipsists?
I never understood skepticism. If a person comes to me and says that he is a global skeptic. I would just laugh at him. And may be suggest him to walk over the cliff. If he doesn't walk over the cliff, he stands there refuting himself, and if he does walk over the cliff, he lies there refuted.
A person does not need to believe that a cliff is dangerous in order to refrain from walking off it. It is enough to merely speculate that the cliff might be dangerous. To take a guess is not the same thing as holding a belief. Imagine a jar of beans and a contest to win a prize by guessing the number of beans in the jar. In the the hope of winning the prize, you might guess there are 100 beans in the jar. Does this mean that you believe there are 100 beans in the jar? Surely are you aware that this was just a guess and so it is quite likely to be false. In the same way, a skeptic can guess that walking off a cliff will lead to death, but only as a guess and without requiring any belief about what will happen if he were to walk off the cliff.
a skeptic won't walk over the cliff for the same reason you won't, because they think they would get hurt. The skeptic just understands that their belief is not about the cliff itself, i.e. "the true nature of reality," whatever that means, but rather about the beliefs they find justified given the experiences they have had.
Interesting that you would "laugh" and "suggest" given that both of those things are non-propositional. Perhaps the skeptic would consider your suggestion, but then laugh and follow the suggestion of their amygdala.
@@jonathanmitchell8698 Exactly, why should I indulge in aristotelian shenanigans? Who decides what is the accepted way to form your beliefs and knowledge? Aristotle? Why should I listen to anyone to begin with? The whole charade of proposition, premises, conclusion, valid argument is for nerds.
I believe in whatever works for me and whatever works in general, and by works I don't mean "well, actually the argument is....", by working i mean works in my dealing with the external physical world.
Using aristotilian logic for non-empirical propositions is what de*generates do.
I would usually laugh at your naivete of "well actually, i would believe you only if you rationalize your opinion as a set of premises and conclusion", but to indulge your silliness, let me present you an "actual" argument with proposition:
Premise 1; You came from nothing i.e big bang
Premise 2; All that you do will eventually amount to nothing i.e. eventual heat death of the universe.
Premise 3: There is no point in an endeavor which starts with nothing and ends in nothing.
Conclusion; There is no point to you existing. So, why don't you just stf u.
@saimbhat6243 Premise 2 and 3 are highly arbitrary so that's a pretty garbage argument if you can even call it that.
I do however agree with your original comment, the way Gödel died is proof enough to me that global skepticism is silly. What would global skeptics do in his position flip a coin every time they have a meal? The global skeptic population would not survive.
I'll just create my own logic that allows me to make arguments without needing assertions.
why do you spell scepticism in the american way ..... are you betraying your linguistic community for the algorithm
I always use "K" for "Kane kicks ass" 💪
@@KaneB my mind = blown...You sir have won the internet
The American way of spelling is the objectively correct way.
@@rebeccar25 🤦🤦🤦
@@rebeccar25I disagree Aliens have the correct language.
THE DEAD SPEAK!