Master Pretense: Perhaps we should take a brief diversionary stroll into confusing context?

Grasshopper: Does this get us back to the village atheist?

Master Pretense: According to the Zen text, The Gateless Gate, “Shogen asked: `Why does the enlightened man not stand on his feet and explain himself?’ And he also said: `It is not necessary for speech to come from the tongue.’ “

Grasshopper: What does that have to do with anything?

Master Pretense shrugs.

Grasshopper: Ugh

Master Pretense: We often get frustrated studying people like Pyrrho because they seem to confirm to our stereotypes of French post-existentialist intellectuals talking about the how “otherness of fluid motion proves the sexism of science” or the pot head talking about “how do I know anything is real?”

In Simon Blackburn’s book Truth: A Guide (Oxford, 2005, p xiii), he gets to sort of pulling tensions in philosophy:

There are real standards. We must fight soggy nihilism, scepticism and cynicism. We must not believe that anything goes. We must not believe that all opinion is ideology, that reason is only power, that there is no truth to prevail. Without defenses against postmodern irony and cynicism, multiculturalism and relativism, we will all to go hell in a handbasket.

So thunders the conservative half of us–of each of us. But perhaps the thunder and conviction betray an anxiety. We may fear that there is another side to it, that our confidence is dogma, that our bluff may be called. There are people who are not impressed by our conviction, or by our pride or our stately deportment. They hear only attempts to impose just one opinion. They hear nothing but the machinations of power and attempts at suppression of alternatives. They hear bluster, the usual disguise for insecurity . . . .

The sides in this conflict have various names: absolutists versus relativists, traditionalists versus postmodernists, realists versus idealists, objectivists versus subjectivists, rationalists versus contextualists, Platonists versus pragmatists. These do not all mean the same, and some people who stand on one side or the other would be choosy about allowing them to apply to themselves. So for the moment they simply act as pointers.

Pyrrho and the methodological skeptic would appear to be on different sides of that hypothetical divide set-up by Blackburn. But is this fair? For one thing, methodological skeptics often don’t actually share a common philosophical framework. Some of probablists and pragmatists who love science and believe that gives us the most probable answer.

But the love of science, and the methods of science, were an attempt to bridge the divide between empiricists and rationalists, Platonism and pragmatism. The controls, the experiments, the falsifiable hypotheses, the distrust of social hierarchy. All of this was an answer to the gap here.

We can see that there is something to both of those impulses–the want to say all ideas are ideology, or that if there isn’t that is true in an opinion, then there is no criteria for judgment. Science doesn’t answer all those questions either. The methodology is about how and what, not so much about meaning and why.

Blackburn makes the further point:

For first, the conflict is not only between different people, but grumbles within the breast of each individual, as we find ourselves pulling us to one side or the other. And second, the conflict is about the our conceptions of ourselves and the our world . . . Today, the stakes in this war are enormous. Relativism in the ancient world typically issues in scepticism, whose main result was the suspension in judgment. . . Today’s relativists, persuading themselves that all opinions enjoy the same standing in the light of reason, take it as green light to believe what they like with as much force and much conviction as they like.(xiv)

Grasshopper: So the ancient philosophical skeptic and the relativists may make the same arguments, but they doing so for VERY different reasons.

Master Pretense: Yes.

Grasshopper: And the methodological skeptics still see themselves as fighting the dogmatists, who ironically are using arguments that ancient skeptics used against the dogmatists in the past.

Master Pretense: Yes.

Grasshopper: And most people, including most methodological skeptics, are not philosophically consistent. So we have people fighting skepticism with skepticism and dogma with dogma.

Master Pretense: It appears so.

Grasshopper: But the absolutists, the believers in objective truth, are they right?

Master Pretense: Only an absolutist can answer that.

Grasshopper: Cop-out.

Master Pretense: I’ll let Blackburn talk again.

[Willaim] James describes the absolutists as having a religious temperament, whether the object of his religion is some traditional text or deity, or a new one, such as The Market, or Democracy, or Science. This may also seem surprising, since religious lives can be full of doubts and worry and dark nights of the soul, and as we have already seen, in the modern world, it is the relativists as much as the absolutists who belong to cults. But James may be right to see absolutists as suffering from something very like a religious ambition . . . He [the absolutist] wants communion with higher authority, a provider of guarantees that, acting and thinking as he does, he is at the same time acting and thinking rightly. (xvii)

So the absolutist can end up just confirming his own biases. And the problems with modern skepticism is that both methodological skeptics and the people they oppose to flip and flop between relativism and absolutism depending on the context and the question.

Grasshopper: I have a question?

Master Pretense: Yes?

Grasshopper: Why do you spell “skeptic” with a k and Blackburn spell it with a “c”? And why does English have a “c” at all since its sounds are already covered by K and S.

Master Pretense: One the first question, Blackburn is English and they like C. On the second question, I’ll resort to historical reasoning for this: blame the French.

Grasshopper: Really? Are they why that “I” before “e” rule applies less than it does.

Master Pretense: Probably. I don’t really have any idea.

Grasshopper: So back to the Greeks then.

Master Pretense: Back to the Greeks.

To be continued.