Misconceptions about Skepticism
aka: Stop beating the dead straw-man!
Skepticism has to be one of the most widely misunderstood views in all of philosophy. It is understandable that the folk-concept of skepticism (i.e., the average everyday person’s concept) is somewhat vague and generally wrong. However, I recently came across a journal article (that was actually published) which summarized arguments (from a book by the same author) that allegedly refute skepticism, but the arguments only serve to knock down the folk-concept-derived straw-man of skepticism. What bothers me is not that the average person may think about skepticism along these lines, but that someone published a book on it! Needless to say the author is not a philosopher, but when you go out of your way to get your ideas published you should at least run it by someone who works in the relevant field. Anyways, I thought I’d present the bad arguments and explain what’s wrong with them because, well, someone should.
Before “refuting” skepticism the author explains his position:
“critical realism”: a world exists independently of human minds (realism), but sifting, judging, and discerning (critical) are often required in the knowledge process. This sifting enables us to discern between appearances (mirages, optical illusions, dreams) and the way things are, between truth and falsehood.
I take this to be almost everyone’s metaphysical position, I have only heard it referred to as “direct” or “naive” realism. We all believe that there is a real world and that our perceptions are generally reliable. This position (as presented by the author) is question-begging; to say that we have knowledge about reality because we can discern between appearances and reality is already to presuppose that there is a difference between the two (i.e., that there is such a thing as ‘objective reality’). Anyway, the author presumably has an argument for realism and that is a fine position to take. But problems arise as soon as he attempts to describe skepticism. He writes:
[T]he skeptic often wrongly assumes that if another alternative is even logically possible, then you should question your beliefs, no matter how well-grounded. But this just doesn’t logically follow at all! How is it the case that if it’s possible I’m wrong, therefore I am wrong?
The “logically possible” alternatives to which the author refers are things like Descartes’ evil demon scenario, or the possibility that you are really in the Matrix, etc. However the skeptic does not use these possibilities in order to make you question your beliefs, nor do they claim that since you could be wrong, you are wrong. The skeptic has all of the same beliefs that you do regarding regular everyday things. The possibility that you could be wrong only shows that you may not, in fact, know what you think you know.
[The skeptic argues that] we can’t distinguish between plausible and ridiculous views, but that position is clearly silly. [...] there’s no reason to reject what seems so obvious to us in favor of less-obvious alternatives.
This passage is where the author comes closest to getting skepticism right, and naturally he misses the point entirely. The skeptic’s claim simply is that all of our evidence is compatible with an infinite number of possible metaphysical explanations about reality. One possibility is that our perceptions correspond to reality – that when we see a chair, there really is a chair that exists in roughly the way we believe that it does. Another possibility is that an all-powerful evil demon is toying with our minds and there is no chair at all. One view seems plausible to us while the other seems ridiculous – but can we distinguish between the two? Obviously not; there is no way to check for evil-demons and there is no way to check for ‘actual’ chairs. All we have in the way of evidence is the conscious awareness of our own perceptual states; the whole point of the skeptical scenarios is that they are 100% compatible with the whole of our evidence. Yes, it would be silly to believe that the demon-possibility is not only possible but actual, but no one believes this (skeptics included).
[S]kepticism tends to eliminate personal or moral responsibility since it systematically ignores or evades truth, which is a crucial component of knowledge.
Here, again, the author nearly makes a good point. The skeptic never claims that our beliefs about reality are false, only that it is impossible for us to know that they are true. This is the fundamental problem that the skeptics are trying to point out: truth is indeed a crucial component of knowledge, yet it is the one evading us (not the other way around)! The skeptic neither ignores nor evades the truth (whatever that would mean), since we do not have access to anything resembling objective truth. As for the odd claim about skeptics being immoral, I have never known a skeptic to make any claims beyond the realm of epistemology, so I’m not sure where the author is coming from on this point (unless he takes skepticism to entail moral relativism). I will just say that one does not need to be certain that they know appearances correspond to reality in order to believe in and act according to some concept of moral responsibility.