The meaning of Skepticism

Last updated 03/18/07.

Published on: January 1, 1998

Skepticism is a multi-valued term, with meanings ranging from assorted schools of philosophy to (very simply) disbelief. It's a significant, large philosophical issue that cannot be well organized into a short essay. But I'll essay an introduction....

The principle of skepticism is to require revellation of the root reasons for believing an idea.

Most ideas are presented in finished form: this is a very efficient form for transmission. But ideas are abundant and conflict, human brains can only cope with a small total number, and we have a practical interest in adopting only the best ideas. Skepticism is one of the approaches for coping with this problem of cognitive dissonance, conflicting ideas.

There are many other systems for choosing between ideas. Deference to authority, tradition, commonsense, spirituality, prejudices, etc. Skepticism's virtue is that it attempts to apply rationality to systematically get to the bottom of ideas in the great objective: the quest for reliable knowledge. All these systems, including skepticism, use rationality to some degree, and are prone to some degree of inconsistancy and failure. So judgements that skepticism (for example) is best, are at best quantitative.

One of the foremost living skeptics today is Paul Kurtz. He's been a veritable Ralph Nader of skepticism, likewise pursuing his goals by founding numerous (skeptical) organizations. (Fortunately, the one big field he hasn't addressed, children, has been well handled by that great inspiration to skepticism, MAD magazine.)

His book The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge (Prometheus, 1992) classifies philosophical schools of skepticism into three categories.

Nihilism, or total negative skepticism, essentially states that all knowledge is impossible, and is based on unrestrained application of skeptical questions to all base assumptions. Interestingly, this form of skepticism is self-contradictary: why shouldn't we be skeptical of this skepticism?

Mitigated Skepticism, or unbelief, faces the issue that even if knowledge is impossible, we have to make decisions based on something. Carneades, Hume, and others have defended this position.

Skeptical Inquiry, or the New Skepticism (both terms are from Kurtz) a descendent of pragmatism. It's methodology is the application of skepticism to the inquiry at hand (rather than universally) for the purpose of discovering reliable knowledge.

For example: apply skepticism until root reasons for belief are revealed. If those reasons are acceptible, then if the chain of reasoning was also acceptible, the idea is acceptible. One of the root reasons Kurtz suggests as acceptable is intersubjective corroboration (other people observing the same thing.)

Kurtz claims this methodology is not only applicable in the sciences, but also in normative fields such as ethics and politics. Personally, I'm suspicious of this claim. Perhaps I'll write about why later.

Kurtz also strongly endorses the ideas of fallibilism of knowledge (that there must be a way for us to recognize if it is not true) as well as probabilism of knowledge (that if we are not aware of failures, the knowledge is not certain but probable.) These come from the origins of skeptical inquiry in Peirce's pragmatism.

One lesson we learn from practicing skepticism is that while it is very hard to know if something is true, it is much easier to know if an argument for an idea is false. Generally, either one of the root reasons for the argument are unacceptible, or the logic deriving the argument is unacceptible. While this doesn't prove the idea is false directly, it allows us to prefer ideas which perform better at this test, either because their root reasons are more acceptible, or because their logic is better.

That's the "negative" side of Kurtz's skepticism. The positive side is concerned with the provision of alternatives for the rejected ideas, because at the very least we still must act. Kurtz has to claim applicability to ethics and politics, and he has written extensively in other books to demonstrate the positive side.

That's more philosophical gabbledegook than most of us have stomachs for (and probably well beyond my personal understanding,) but I hope it gives a brief outline of the basis of skeptical criticism.

In future articles, I hope to present some bits and pieces of the vast skeptical literature that exists, but is very seldom read by mainstream audiences. Counter image omitted.