Grasshopper:  So what’s with the classical skeptics rejection of sense data?

Master Pretense: Pyrrho of Elias held that acatalepsia led to ataraxia.   You may recognize ataraxia as the primary goal of the Epicureans as well.  It means freedom from worry.   Pyrrho is said to have thought that is you admitted that you couldn’t really know things, you would be free from worry. At least, that’s was what Diogenes Laertius had him say.

Grasshopper:  So these ancient skeptics thought you should be agnostic about everything?

Master Pretense: Basically.

Grasshopper: Doesn’t that make science as we understand it impossible?

Master Pretense:  It makes drawing any conclusions from science impossible. The Pyrrhian skeptic would still engage in such things like science and religion. Ultimately, Pyrrhian thought that convention should guide one’s life, but we should avoid assigning truth value to those conventions.

Grasshopper: How is that different from nihilism?

Master Pretense:   How should I know. Nihilism is a vague word. Meaning either nothingism or “anything the user of the said word doesn’t really like.” Anyway, Peter Suber may put it in more understandable ways and also get to the ironic relation to methodological skepticism:

Historically, we know it was for a reason like this, with an ironic twist, that made the inquiry for truth a decisive part of skepticism. The Greeks sometimes called skepticism, Pyrrhonism, after Pyrrho, an austere teacher of serene non-commitment. He was not a pure skeptic himself, in the epistemological sense, but his teachings led directly to what we now call skepticism.

Pyrrho was born a little over a century after Socrates. Plato was about 60, and Aristotle about 20, when Pyrrho was born, and Pyrrho lived to see both of them die. Pyrrho lived to see the rise and fall of Alexander the Great, the civil wars in his empire, and the opening of the Eastern world to the West. This meant that Pyrrho witnessed the splintering of Platonism and Aristotelianism into many bickering schools. He travelled to India with Alexander’s army and witnessed the spectacle of novel Eastern customs, at once utterly different from the Greek but equally civilized and supported by a reflective philosophical tradition. He witnessed the social and political chaos, war, and strife that followed the death and succession of Alexander.

(Socrates 470-400 BCE, Plato 428-348 BCE, Aristotle 384-322 BCE, Pyrrho 360-270 BCE, Alexander 356-323 BCE.)

Some scholars find a political origin to Pyrrho’s skepticism in this, on the theory that traumatic periods produce disillusionment and resignation, the souring and obsolescence of traditional beliefs, a tenacious relativism of beliefs, virtues, and habits that will not assign absolute superiority to any, and a need for new methods of coping in a hectic world.[Note 3]

There is probably some truth in this, and it does seem that skepticism recurs through history in the periods of greatest upheaval and dissolution. But it is unfair to skepticism to reduce it to the play of historical forces and forget that it has its immanent ‘reasons’ that have a claim on all of us, regardless of our circumstances. That is, philosophies have grounds, not just causes. Pyrrho’s own biography, scanty as it is, gives a good idea of how these reasons operated in his life.

Pyrrho began his intellectual life as a student and disciple of the Stoics, who taught that peace of mind was the highest end of life and that a knowledge of truth was required to attain and maintain it. Pyrrho accordingly sought truth. But he heard the Stoics say one thing was true, the Pythagoreans say another, the atomists another; he heard many versions of Plato’s truth and of Aristotle’s. He heard disagreements among the disciples of Anaxagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides, Empedocles, and Protagoras. For every question of interest to philosophy he heard the Stoic doctrine contradicted by dozens of other doctrines, all of which also differed among themselves. What was worse, each position had reasons and evidence to support itself and to subvert and refute its opponents. To Pyrrho it was a standoff. He gave up in despair and admitted to himself that he could not decide among them and did not know what was true.

Voila! He discovered that his confession of ignorance had given him peace of mind. He had ironically attained the goal of all Stoicism by giving up and reversing its means. He had found a tranquillity in honestly confessing his ignorance. Moreover, his tranquillity seemed as durable and serene as the Stoical peace of mind that presumed to depend on true knowledge —and that embroiled the Stoics in endless disputes and other perturbations.

Grasshopper: What is the sound of one-hand clapping?

Master Pretense smacks him on the forehead and laughs.

To be continued.