Scepticism

A friend asked me how do you deal with scepticism after my last post. Thought about it for more than a week. 

There exist multiple definitions of scepticism . The most common one is what most people understand - doubt as to the truth of something. The other definition is known to students of philosophy and can be broken into two chains of thought (thank the Greeks for this ; like many other philosophical thoughts. Though one must say that the thoughts closely resembles Hindu and Buddhist thought). 

Let’s try and understand it - what do you know for sure ?  When you start feeling inclined to doubt that you have knowledge , you are being attracted towards scepticism. 

When the sensory inputs about the world around you; which are considered to be foundations of knowledge don’t actually enable you to know anything, and The reason why you don’t actually know anything is due to cognitive bias and or impressions that are imperfect . This argument is what is known as academic scepticism. It is very close to Hindu or Buddhist though which considers the world at large to be “Maya” I.e illusion. Ergo one can never have true knowledge because what you see and experience is an illusion. 

The other chain of thought stretches academic scepticism further by continuous questioning and doubt. Including doubt of the conclusion that academic sceptics make i.e doubt even the result knowledge is impossible. This chain of thought is known as Pyrrhonism - named so after Pyrrho. It is very close to a Buddhist thought called “Two Truths Doctrine”. Simple put it considers that there is provisional knowledge that is based on what you experience and then there is the ultimate truth and real knowledge.  

There are multiple ways to deal with sceptical arguments and one of the most popular method is to use the Cartesian method developed by Rene Descartes. This method states that knowledge can be derived from innate ideas through deduction. This assumes that the mind is not blank at birth but contains concepts that are universal to humanity I.e they are universally true and one does not need to experience them in order to understand that they are true. Simply put I think therefore I am as famously said by Rene. The other way is to use the empirical method initially developed by Aristotle. This method states that knowledge or the conclusion of knowledge has to be derived empirically based on the evidence presented. This method is the basis of all scientific progress. 

Now to the question originally posed by my friend. How can you be confident when you cannot be certain of the outcome. In other words if your knowledge can be questioned then you cannot be certain of the outcome and therefore the confidence could be built on very shaky foundations.  

This is how to overcome this philosophical quagmire. 

First one has to agree that the knowledge might be wrong or untrue.

Second step is to argue that there are enough reasons and evidence to say that the knowledge is correct. Of course one might still say that the empirical method used here is incorrect because it is based in an illusion; however the empirical method is true for everyone under the same circumstances and so has a higher likelihood of being real; remember scepticism itself is a remote possibility of knowledge not being real knowledge. 

A is always A and I think therefore I am. 

C