Not all statements are equally believable.
Believability rankings vary as cultural conditions and the state of knowledge
and science change through time. Some things are harder to doubt than others.
For example, the reason that the founder of ancient skepticism, Pyrrho of Elis,
looked strange to his followers was that he doubted his perceptual judgments so
strongly that he was unconcerned about falling over cliffs or avoiding fast
chariots. So far was he from accepting
the evidence of his senses that his followers had constantly to be on watch to
steer him out of harm’s way. Obviously, Pyrrho went further than they could in
doubting the existence and causal effects of an external reality.
It is true that even a mild skepticism
questions all presuppositions that it can find, and finds that there is nothing
that cannot be questioned. I can
question my senses, and find that they sometimes come up mistaken. However, it
does not follow from this that my senses could always be mistaken, since the
very fact that I learn about perceptual mistakes means that they take place
against a background of correct perceptual judgments. We can always tell a story in which the most
seemingly innocent of perceptions is false, but these stories are too
far-fetched for a mild skeptic who recognizes limits to justifiable doubting.
For example, I may be a brain in a vat, or
living in a matrix without knowing it. The computer screen on which I am now
typing may just be a holographic projection, put there while I was made
unconscious by persons unknown. As Russell said, the world may have been
created five minutes ago and we would not know the difference. Other people may
only appear to be human, while they are really robots. How likely is all this?
We must have as good a reason to doubt something as we have to believe it.
The mild skeptic does not have to doubt the
solidity of the arm chair into which she or he sinks after a hard day seeking
truth. (A skeptic is a ‘seeker after
truth.’) The strength of skeptical questioning should be saved for doubting
things for which we have no good reasons to believe in the first place, saved
to combat the voice of dogmatism confidently asserting its truth as ‘The
Truth.’ Skepticism comes into its own in the deconstruction of ideologies, and
all dominant, unthinking, unquestioned patterns of thought. Skeptical doubt is
the first move in a game from which the mild skeptic emerges with a minimum set
of unavoidable beliefs for which practical reasons can be given that have the
backing of time and experience. However, all such beliefs are conditional, and
cannot be held as absolute truths.
The mild skeptic is not bound to doubt
strenuously the existence of a physical reality based on sensory perceptions,
or to make a great effort to question logical or mathematical truths. Of
course, skeptical arguments are nearly always possible, but they stretch
credulity. For example, one of the least persuasive doubts in Descartes’
Meditations is that ‘2+3’ might not add up to ‘5’. Yes, we can be skeptical about long chains of
mathematical reasoning, but about something as simple and intuitive as that
‘2+3'5’ Descartes needs to invoke the magical thought of a Deceiving Demon to
tell us that despite the fact that we cannot see it, we might be wrong in
simple mathematical operations.
Mild skepticism is not doctrinaire. It has
no axe to grind, but is rather an approach to our information saturated world.
The approach is to take everything with a grain of salt, to doubt first, even
if one ends up believing something after all. So one’s first response to a
theory or an idea ought to be doubtful questioning and reluctance to believe,
followed by a need to be convinced with good reasons. Mild skepticism combines liberating the mind
from unquestioned beliefs and ideologies, with a reasonable, non-dogmatic and
minimalist belief structure. This
structure leaves open the question of whether animals like us can ever know
ultimate reality, or even determine whether there is an ultimate reality, while
allowing us to construct a belief structure that has honorably withstood the
non-dogmatic questioning of mild skepticism.
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