Skepticism

[Music] hi today i want to talk to you about skepticism skepticism is something you find all over the place there are many people who count themselves skeptics about particular areas you might be skeptical of people's claims about the coronavirus for example you might be skeptical about anybody's view concerning the existence or non-existence of alien beings you might be skeptical of reports of ufos or a variety of other things there are many people who are skeptical about religion or about particular religious claims at any rate there are many people who are skeptical about all sorts of things they just distrust them and so what does it mean to be a skeptic about such a particular area well it really means to believe that nothing is known or in an even more extreme sense that nothing can even be rationally believed about that sort of area you might for example be a skeptic about the existence of life on other planets and say look i i don't see how really we could have any significant evidence for or against the question so i'm skeptical i suspend judgment i have no idea and i don't think anybody else does either so there's a couple of different ways of thinking about what skepticism itself is often in a modern context it's described as the view that nothing is known in fact francisco sanchez a spanish skeptic put it in exactly that way said let this be my creed that nothing is known however ancient skeptics tended to have a broader and even more extreme view they thought it wasn't just a question of not knowing anything after all you might say well i don't really know but i think i have pretty good reason to believe this instead they said you don't that is to say there is no such thing as rational belief you have no reason to believe something as opposed to its opposite no matter what the question is they thought and that brings us to the second really important distinction it's one thing to be skeptical about a particular topic a particular area a particular kind of thing it's quite enough to be skeptical about everything philosophical skepticism is the view that we can't be sure of anything that we have no reason to think we know anything that well let's be more careful here that there's no such thing as reasonable belief about anything it's meant to be a global skepticism as we'll see it doesn't always achieve that but the general idea of a philosophical skepticism is we're skeptical not just about this area or that area but about everything we think it is impossible to have rational belief about anything at all we can characterize skepticism in a couple of different ways we could think of it as focused on knowledge as many philosophers do these days and think that it amounts to the claim as sanchez put it that nothing is known or we could say it's actually even more rapid than that it's really about reasonable belief it is never reasonable to believe one thing as opposed to its opposite so we could say nothing is even reasonably believed now that's a pretty extreme view there's another distinction we can make with respect to skepticism in the ancient world it was known as the distinction between academic skeptics and peyronian skeptics pirro being the founder of that particular approach to skepticism the academic skeptic says nothing is known knowledge is impossible or even rational belief is impossible there's never any reason to believe one thing as opposed to its opposite now notice the academic skeptic is making an assertion they're claiming nothing is known essentia says let this be my creed nothing is known they are claiming that rational belief is impossible they're in short putting forward a claim and so the academic skeptic is someone who is making an assertion saying this now it makes them vulnerable to a certain kind of charge wait a minute uh are you sure like do you know do you think it's reasonable to believe that there's no such thing as reasonable belief that sounds like a contradiction and indeed there's a famous statement of socrates reported by diogenes laertes where socrates says i know only that i know nothing now when you think about that you might think that doesn't make any sense at all what do you mean you know only that you know nothing if you know that then you know something so you can't possibly know that there's something incoherent about the very thought now there might be a way of actually fixing this requires a little bit of self-reference but maybe i can say well i believe only this only what socrates what i just said i believe this and this alone okay that might be consistent but there's something very strange about it and it's hard to imagine how that alone could be a reasonable belief and so if we think of things in that term you might say yeah academic skepticism seems odd the academic skeptic is forced to assert something like nothing is known or nothing is reasonably believed but either that seems arbitrary or it seems in some sense contradictory at least if you think the commitment underlying that assertion that nothing is reasonably believed is that it's reasonable to believe that nothing is reasonably believed the pyronian skeptic therefore doesn't make any such assertion but instead says do i know anything do i have reason to believe anything i don't know i don't think i have any reason to believe that i do i don't think i have any reason to believe that i don't so the peronean skeptic is really even more extreme than the academic skeptic do you know anything you ask the academic skeptic they say no ask the peronian skeptic and they say i don't know i don't know if i know anything so that's something that is at least consistent now some academic skeptics think well wait a minute surely this is some kind of trick because in giving us arguments for your position you really are claiming to know something or at least have reason to believe something even if the conclusion from that is that there is no such thing as reasonable belief but the peronean skeptic sometimes retreats to saying actually i can make no assertions at all there's another problem we might say that faces skepticism however we think of it along peronean lines or academic lines and that is to say that almost always skeptics want to make some kind of recommendation on the basis of what they say they don't simply leave it at hey nothing is known or there's no reason to believe anything instead they go on to say so and then make a claim something like so we should suspend judgment so have peace of mind relax don't make any commitments and however they do that and by the way there are a variety of recommendations they make some say for example it's impossible to know anything so have faith substitute faith for knowledge others like santiana will say well at the end it's there's just animal faith we can't know anything we don't even have any reason to believe things ultimately but nevertheless our animal natures force us to act as if we did have beliefs just go with it that's something that is a kind of recommendation and on the basis of what so you might think the skeptic makes some kind of thesis statement like this and then makes some recommendation and then a variety of things fall in there so suspend judgment so relax have peace of mind so have faith whatever it is but the point is there is presumably some connection between the thesis and the recommendation so diesel a striker for example has talked about the problem of how we would get from here to here is the skeptic in effect saying that if these things are true that it's reasonable to believe in the recommendation if so it looks like that undercuts the thesis and so it's not entirely clear whether we can formulate skepticism in a fully coherent way but we might be able to and a variety of skeptics have argued that we can sometimes they think that the only recommendation we can make is to be silent they think to assert something i've gotta at least have reason to believe it i never have any reason to believe anything they think or at least i have no reason to believe that i ever have reason to believe anything and so we might say um at most i should just be quiet other people think no there is a way to live that follows from the skeptical assumption the peronean skeptic sometimes because of this problem makes no recommendation simply says i don't see how i have reason to believe anything so i believe i have no reason no i don't even believe that i don't think there's any reason for that i have no reason well gosh i can't even say this that's the problem can you even articulate the position often what this sort of peronean skeptic does is what nagarjuna and other madhyamaka buddhist skeptics do in india they simply say look if i were to make a proposition then i'd be an error but i make no proposition therefore i am not an error in fact they say look i'm not making any assertion at all you guys make assertions you dogmas and then i attack you i try to show that on your assumptions it all falls apart but then if you turn and say well what do you think the garjana what's your view i say nothing okay i make no assertions i wait for you to make assertions and i attack you and i try to show that you're not justified believing what you believe but then you say well what do you think a mom i say nothing and so that's one strategy another is the strategy of sexist empiricus he says look i'm not making any recommendation but i am telling you that peace of mind for example simply follows from adopting a skeptical attitude and there's a marvelous quotation from sexitus that goes like this the skeptic in fact had the same experience which is said to have befallen the painter of pellis once they say when he was painting a horse and wished to represent the painting the horse's phone he was so unsuccessful he gave up the attempted flung at the picture the sponge he used to wipe the paint off his brush the mar of the sponge produced the effect of a horse's phone so too the skeptics were in hopes of gaining quietude by means of a decision regarding the disparity of the objects of sense and of thought and being unable to affect this they suspended judgment and they found it quiet food is it by chance followed upon their suspense even as a shadow follows its substance so the point is look it's not an assertion that you ought to have peace of mind you want to suspend judgment there is no claim here that suspending judgment will lead to peace of mind or that the difficulties in coming to a reasonable belief should lead you to suspend judgment no instead there's simply an observation just hey here's what happened to me i thought about these arguments i suspended judgment i became tranquil i attained quiet i had peace of mind am i making any claim about anything else no okay i'm not claiming anything about the world here's another way and i think a deeper way of thinking about skepticism why should we think that there's a difficulty about knowing anything or about coming to a reasonable belief about anything there is a gap between our beliefs or our perceptual states in general our mental states in the world so one way of thinking about the problem of skepticism is to think that here we have the world and it's really a problem about mind and world here i am let's say and i have these thoughts about the world and i'd like to think there's some relationship between those thoughts in the world now sometimes it's a question of a belief or a thought that i'm entertaining about the world it might be a perceptual state maybe a visual perception an auditory perception some kind of experience i have but in any case here i have a mental state and down at this level is a state of the world the way things really are and now the question is well do these match up and do i have any reason to believe that they match here's the worry that the skeptic is going for and that all skeptical arguments i think are structured around why should i believe that there's such a match in a case where there's a match and by the way i don't mean anything mysterious here and i don't think the skeptic means anything mysterious sometimes i see things that are really there other times i might see something and it turns out it's not there and so i i see what i thought was a flash of light but i turn around there's no evidence of a flash of light no one else saw it i end up concluding huh that was some weird kind of illusion and in fact that's going to be one of the main arguments for skepticism the argument for an illusion but that might be a case where gosh that's a perceptual state that might not match the world at all and so that mismatch is possible sometimes i have beliefs that turn out to be wrong if i believe that concord is the capital of new hampshire that's a match it really is the capital of new hampshire but if someone believes that concord is the capital of vermont well they're wrong that's montpelier they've got the wrong state or the wrong city and so that's not a match lots of our beliefs turn out to be wrong in that way they don't match the state of the world our perceptual states can fail to match the state of the world and so these kinds of mismatches can take place now do we in general have a way of telling when our perceptual state or our belief state matches the world we don't at least that's the claim of the scout and in fact they might go even further they might say it's not just that in a particular case we might be wrong we might be globally wrong and so we're going to look at arguments for global skepticism that say it's not just that in this particular case or in that particular case we become convinced there's a mismatch and gosh that could be happening to us at any point in time they say actually there's the possibility that all those beliefs are wrong at once and that's an even more radical claim but it's really about this question of how our mental states connect to the states of the world and so many skeptics not all but many skeptics will say i'm not really worried about the problem of mental states about my own mental states now i might also be often wrong about the mental state i'm in but even if i'm pretty sure that that looks green to me or that this looks blue fine i'm not really interested in challenging that most skeptics say i want to challenge whether i have any reason to believe that my mental state matches the state of the world and so that's a problem that i think any philosopher has to deal with it is the problem of mind and world why should i think there is any particular connection between the way my mind is and the way the world is between my mental states and the state of the world it's a hard problem and if even if it is possible for them to match up even if it's possible for me to have reasonable beliefs about that matching and about the connection i need to know what that connection is so this is one aspect of a general problem about how mind and world relate the skeptic is in a sense taking an extreme position about that saying we can't say anything about how they relate we have no way of knowing how they connect and so we're really better off assuming nothing about the state of the world and simply reporting our own mental states but not giving any indication about the world because every time we do that we're in danger

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

Views: 1,545

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: AnI2v9LIt1A

Length: 16min 44sec (1004 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 31 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/tsdguy]

How about some context why I’d want to watch this?