Skepticism, as a term in common usage, is a huge mess. Sometimes you’ll see people use skeptic, rationalist, empiricist, scientific, and humanistic as if these terms are all interchangeable. Sometimes Skeptic means Michael Shermer will be on television with six other paranormal event proponents. Sometimes skeptic is someone who is denying a specific area of the “knowedge” consensus. Sometimes it is a person who doubts that knowledge can be meaningful in any epistemologically consistent way. Sometimes skeptic is a code word for “asshole.” When asking someone if they are a skeptic, they may reply “yes” and you still don’t know whether they are a philosophical skeptic, a methodological/empirical skeptic, a denialist, or a using the term as code for naturalist or humanist.

Now, I am involved with this, because I am a part, albeit not a very active part, of the “skeptic’s movement” who considers himself a humanist and who loves science. Still the convolution of the term bothers me because the term Skeptic doesn’t really clarify much in and of itself. Most of the time, I know that people who are skeptics are either methodological/empirical skeptics or denialists. Philosophical skepticism is generally the province of humanities grad students and people who read Nietzsche in the mid-teens. Still there is overlap.

Why the hang up on semantics? I don’t think this is a semantic issue, but a semiotic issue. As an issue about language, not having clear ideas about what the word means that most attempts at “branding” the skeptics movement or even clearly communicating its key ideas this very difficult. That, however, means I will be going several sources, tiptoeing into the history of philosophy, and generally bogging myself and my argument down. So here’s an imagery dialogue to my problem here:

Grasshopper: Is philosophical skepticism really related to methodological skepticism?
Master Pretense: Yes, but I’ll get to how in a minute. Or, more accurately, I’ll let skeptic dictionary get to how.

Grasshopper: Why do some people call what you call what you calling methodological skepticism things like empirical skepticism, rational skepticism, affirmation skepticism, or ordinary skepticism?
Master Pretense: There are several reasons for this–mostly because the overlap of terms has to do with both ideas being related in the history of philosophy. Personally I like methodological skepticism, although there is nothing particularly “wrong” with ordinary skepticism as a term. I just find that later vague.

Grasshopper: Is Methodological skepticism the same as rational skepticism as the UK Skeptics say or empirical?
Master Pretense: I would say that this use of rational is a misnomer or at least incomplete. Philosophical skepticism IS rational–we’ll go into why in a minute. Philosophical Skepticism is just not really scientific. Methodological Skepticism is scientific, rational, and empirical. Note the difference. At least, the Brits get to use the American spelling for the methodology and the British spelling for common and philosophical usage.

Grasshopper: Is methodological skepticism the same as empirical skepticism?
Master Pretense: Empiricism trusts what you see and experience as a demarcation for truth. I find this term problematic because while empiricism is definitely part of skeptical inquiry, you can’t trust you experiences as a sole demarcation for truth. Experimental controls must be added empirical observation to control for bias and logical methodology must be added to control for, well, bat-shit crazy interpretations.

In a way empiricism and rationalism as they are historically understood in Western philosophy as types of localized skepticism of another groups knowledge claim. As Skeptic’s Dictionary says, Empiricists tend to emphasize the tentative and probabilistic nature of knowledge, while rationalists tend to be dogmatic and assert they have found a method to discover absolutely certain knowledge.

Grasshopper: So what is philosophical skepticism?
Master Pretense:  So different strains in philosophy that really developed in early Greek philosophy and manifested in different forms throughout the history of Western Thought. Philosophical skepticism has several major strains: ancient skepticism (both Academic and Platonic), early modern skepticism, and post-modernism.

Standford Encyclopedia of philosophy explains the basic forms of philosophical skepticism as such:

Consider some proposition, p. There are just three possible propositional attitudes one can have with regard to p’s truth when considering whether p is true. One can either assent to p, or assent to ~p or withhold assenting both to p and to ~p. Of course, there are other attitudes one could have toward p. One could just be uninterested that p or be excited or depressed that p. But those attitudes are either ones we have when we are not considering whether p is true or they are attitudes that result from our believing, denying or withholding p. For example, I might be happy or sorry that p is true when I come to believe that it is.

I just spoke of “assent” and I mean to be using it to depict the pro-attitude, whatever it is, toward a proposition that is required for knowing that proposition. Philosophers have differed about what that attitude is. Some take it to be something akin to being certain that p or guaranteeing that p (Malcolm 1963, 58-72). Others have taken it not to be a form of belief at all because, for example, one can know that p without believing it as in cases in which I might in fact remember that Queen Victoria died in 1901 but not believe that I remember it and hence might be said not to believe it (Radford 1966). For the purposes of this essay we need not attempt to pin down precisely the nature of the pro-attitude toward p that is necessary for knowing that p. It is sufficient for our purposes to stipulate that assent is the pro-attitude toward p required to know that p.

Let us use “EI-type” propositions to refer to epistemically interesting types of propositions. Such types of propositions contain tokens some of which are generally thought to be known given what we ordinarily take knowledge to be. Thus, it would not be epistemically interesting if we did not know exactly what the rainfall will be on March 3 ten years from now. That kind of thing (a fine grained distant future state) is not generally thought to be known given what we ordinarily take knowledge to be. But it would be epistemically interesting if we cannot know anything about the future, or anything about the contents of someone else’s mind, or anything about the past, or anything at all about the “external world.” We think we know many propositions about those types of things.

Now, consider the (meta) proposition concerning the scope of our knowledge, namely: We can have knowledge of EI-type propositions. Given that there are just three stances we can have toward any proposition when considering whether to assent to it, we can:

1. Assent that we can have knowledge of EI-type propositions.
2. Assent that we cannot have knowledge of EI-type propositions.
3. Withhold assent to both that we can and that we cannot have knowledge of EI-type propositions.

Let us call someone with the attitude depicted in (i) an “Epistemist.”^[4] Such a person assents to the claim that we can have knowledge of EI-type propositions.

The attitude portrayed in (ii) has gone under many names. I will follow the terminology suggested by Sextus Empiricus. He used the term “Academics” to refer to the leaders of the Academy (founded by Plato) during the 3rd to 1st century B.C. According to Sextus, they assented to the claim that we cannot have knowledge of what I have called EI-type propositions — although it is far from clear that this was an accurate description of their views. (See the entry on ancient skepticism.) Perhaps the prime example was Carneades (214-129 B.C.). Other philosophers will refer to this view as “Cartesian skepticism” because of the skeptical arguments investigated by Descartes and his critics in the mid-17th century. And still others will refer to it as “switched world skepticism” or “possible world skepticism” because the arguments for it typically involve imagining oneself to be in some possible world that is both vastly different from the actual world and at the same time absolutely indistinguishable (at least by us) from the actual world. What underlies this form of skepticism is assent to the proposition that we cannot know EI-type propositions because our evidence is inadequate.

Those assenting neither to the proposition that knowledge of EI-type propositions is possible nor to the proposition that such knowledge is not possible can be called “Pyrrhonian Skeptics” after Pyrrho who lived between ca 365 – ca 275 B.C. The primary source of Pyrrhonian Skepticism is the writing of Sextus Empiricus who lived at the end of the second century AD. The Pyrrhonians withheld assent to every non-evident proposition. That is, they withheld assent to all propositions about which genuine dispute was possible, and they took that class of propositions to include the (meta) proposition that we can have knowledge of EI-type propositions. Indeed, they sometimes classified the Epistemists and the Academic Skeptics together as dogmatists because the Epistemists assented to the proposition that we can have knowledge, while the Academic Skeptics assented to the denial of that claim.

Another difference between Academic and Pyrrhonian Skepticism is closely related to the charge by the latter that the former is really a disguised type of dogmatism. The Academic Skeptic thinks that her view can be shown to be the correct one by an argument (or by arguments). The Pyrrhonian would point out that the Academic Skeptic maintains confidence in the ability of reason to settle matters — at least with regard to the extent of our knowledge of propositions in the EI-class. One way of understanding the so-called problem of the “Cartesian circle” illustrates the Pyrrhonian point: Descartes is relying throughout the Meditations on his power of reasoning to remove the skeptical doubts that he raises, but to do so means that he has exempted the faculty of reasoning from the doubts that he raised in the “First Meditation” about the epistemic reliability of our faculties. A Cartesian reply could be as simple as paraphrasing Luther: Here I stand, as a philosopher with confidence in reason, and as such I can do no other.^[6] Regardless of the adequacy of that kind of response, the point here is that the Pyrrhonians did not think that they had a convincing argument whose conclusion was that withholding assent to non-evident propositions was the appropriate epistemic attitude to have.

So confused yet?

Grasshopper:  Does a skeptical cow have buddha nature?
Master Pretense:  Mu.
.
Grasshopper:  You would answer in koans.
Master Pretense:  Correct, Grasshopper.

To be continued. . .