"known facts"

spyman, there are no known facts. Saying you know that one thing is more probable than another is saying you know a fact that you don't.

And I agree that I can't be certain of the meaning of my words. I think all this logical undercutting speaks to nothing more than that logic may or may not actually be a good representation of the "real" world whatever that may be. Unfortunately we can do nothing but use logic so if it is wrong we are trapped.

" we can say that some things are more known to be highly probable"

no, you cannot know that, because that is a factual statement which you cannot know with any degree of certainty to be true.

think for a second why you believe coins come up 50/50. it's your memory, which you believe is a representation of things you saw and felt. both could be dead wrong, therefore you have no idea how probable it really is, a coin coming up 50/50.

in telling you i choose to believe in coins being 50/50 and would not take your bet, i was only telling you why i myself would not take the bet. in no way does that change that i acknowledge that the result of four heads in a row could, in actuality, be the only possible outcome. i just don't know.

there is no "almost certain" there is only uncertain.

A common criticism of skepticism is that although the proposition "nothing is known" is something everyone eventually admits to, it has no practical application and doesn't bear discussing. If this is your criticism let me stop you by saying I already have an answer and can try to send you the information if you want.

Also why has no one taken up my challenge? Tell me something that you know.

I should add also for your understanding, that I am definitely no fan of the idea that nothing can be known. I wish we could know things for certain, in fact I have prayed to the possibly-existent, possibly-omnipotent god that s/he make it possible to know something for certain. no answer so far, or so i think.

the reason then that i defend and advance this set of ideas is that it is truly unassailable in my opinion. no one taught me this stuff, no one raised me this way, it is just the logical conclusion of thinking about things. A lot of philosophers are unsatisfied with that, probably out of a desire not to kill their own profession by admitting its a waste of time, and go on to do other work. (i still dont think philosophy is a waste of time by the way but i think they may have thought that if skepticism was true). Therefore, once I thought of it and indeed realized other people had thought the same things, I couldn't back away from it, simply because I can't think of any rebuttal that satisfies me that anything can be known.

Sextus Empiricus answered the quesiton "can you know that nothing is known" by saying that for the moment he suspends judgment on the question, and will wait to see if indeed he ever does know something. i'm presuming he never did, but i could be wrong of course.

anyone could be wrong about anything. that's kind of the whole point.

nothing is known, i don't even know that nothing is known, however i assume many things. There are many things which are assumed. I assume that my words have the same understandable meaning to everyone else (at least the english speaking world)

I assume that there is a Universe, and that it is the same shared Universe which everyone else sees. I also assume that i am limited in my (assumed) knowledge about the Universe and that i can learn from the perspectives of others... And yes, i find skepicism to be wholey un-useful.

Valid but not overly applicable to my assumed daily life. In fact i think it makes my language/sentence structure awkward.

"* Scientifically* there is no * chaos "

i recall taking a course on chaos and complexity in my physics undergrad, i think that we defined chaos scientifically.

Thucydides, I've already mentioned that very little can be known for certain. It just doesn't really matter because we can be sure of things to different degrees, and often it is helpful to treat a theory we're merely very certain of as though it were 100% true (gravity, evolution).

There are a few types of statements we can 'know', however. I wonder how you'd cast doubt on the assertion that a vixen is a female fox.

Nobody takes up your childish challenge because it's an annoying and pointless exercise in semantic warfare and logic chopping. This is why analytic philosophy killed the entire enterprise. I have no use or respect for skepticism for its own sake. It's an intellectually cowardly and lazy position. We can't know anything so why try, and I don't dare take a position because somebody might point out its flaws. Skepticism is a deeply unscientific enterprise, which doesn't bother to address how we've managed to technologically progress so much or routinely engage in tests which have results predicted by theory. Put your hand on a hot stove and see if it's not "known" that it will burn you. Jump off a building and see if it's not "known" that you'll fall to the ground and experience great pain if not death. There are brute facts in this world which language and consciousness cannot change, as much as the language obsessed logic choppers try.

Anyway, I think Bertrand Russel demolished this whole skeptic meme when he said that in order to be a 'skeptical' there must some kind of shared knowledge to begin with, otherwise no argument is even possible.

Putin33 +1 for the Bertrand Russell argument. Solid.

"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick

"I've already mentioned that very little can be known for certain. It just doesn't really matter because we can be sure of things to different degrees,"

No, not very little, nothing, can be known for certain. Let me clarify once again that you are claiming implicitly to know how likely a statement is to be true. I am saying you don't know that.

The fox thing is tautological and meaningless.

I will repeat it again so that it can sink in: claiming to know how likely something is is itself a claim to knowledge. You cannot be certain of how likely it is that your assertion is correct.

Since I can tell you disagree, and think it is possible to know how likely something is, let me go ahead and show you how you don't know that.

You can tell me, hey, Thucy, it is 99.9% likely that if you tie a cannonball to your leg and jump into Lake Superior you will die, barring someone rescuing you. The 0.1% percent we are presumably leaving in for the incredible and miraculous - God saves me, heretofore unknown physical process kicks and prevents my death... etc.

That's your claim so far, if I've got you wrongly pegged do let me know but I'm going to proceed.

So how is you think you know that this is 99.9% likely? The first thing you'd say is that you know that when other people have done that they have all died too. And beyond that, you say, you also know that being submerged in water prevents oxygen from getting to my body which causes my biological processes to shut down and then I die.

But I must ask how you know all those things? Start with the first. How do you know all those people you are thinking of died? Say you have a big book filled with their stories. Couldn't the book be a lie? Couldn't you be deluded? Hallucinating? Remembering the facts totally wrong? You could, right? Okay.... so we'll put that bit of evidence on hold.

What about the biological understanding of drowning? How do you know that? Oh.... same way. Via memories of perceptions, right? That's what it boils down to. Here are the dependencies your "knowledge" of a likelihood depends on:

1) your memory being accurate and not distorting the facts significantly
2) your remembered perceptions being accurate and not distorting reality siginificantly
3) in many cases, what you are actually perceiving is not even the real event, but an account in a book or a representation and so on. So you have the third tier of can you even trust who is telling you these things.

So. Here are the ways those three things could lead you totally astray.

1) You could have false memories. Even if most of the world is real, you, as a materialist dogmatist, agree that people can lose memories or have false memories or significantly altered memories. So there is this hurdle.

2) Your perception could be flawed in the same way - e.g. hallucinations or insane delusions or some other mechanism totally unknown to you

3) There could be liars or conspirators that alter falsely your worldview.

Okay so that was all to establish that you have a 99.9% certainty I'll drown if I jump in a lake with a cannonball.

But all these evidences that you use to establish this 99.9% certainty are fallible.

So you can take me back one step further and say:

Oh but Thucy... I am 99.9% certain my senses are accurate, and that my memory is accurate.

I ask you - on what basis, other than your senses and your memory, can you make that claim? That is like a Christian fundamentalist telling you he knows the Bible is the word of God because it says so in the Bible.

Do you see sort of what I'm getting at now? Apologies if you already knew what I meant but were just ignoring the argument.



Since you do seem to want to know what application skepticism has on real life, let me quote myself because I am not willing to try to paraphrase myself from memory:

(in next post to break up the longness)

Skepticism as a Useful Philosophy

What is left then, if nothing is known? As someone who believes that I do not actually know anything, what should I do? Some say the truly practicing skeptic would merely sit in silence until something killed him. Others object that under such a system, there is no right and wrong and no reason for action or for existence. Nothing is gained from skepticism, they argue. This is perhaps the most commonly used argument against skeptics. Faced with logic that I truly believe is very hard to deny, people then cling to their knowledge by attempting to dismiss the skeptic’s ideas as irrelevant. I believe that this is not the case, and I will demonstrate why later.

Before that, however, is perhaps the most controversial segment of my philosophy. This is where I admit, that, as a true skeptic, I cannot pretend to know what actions are ultimately best for a person. Thus, perhaps serial killers are rewarded in heaven while all others are punished in hell. One cannot know if this is true or not. Perhaps the best thing for a person to do is to kill himself immediately. Although I cannot deny that this may indeed be the case, and will not pretend to, I would like to point out an important nuance to my position as a skeptic.

Though I know nothing, I am presented all the time with a series of appearances. At present I am presented with the appearance of a laptop screen and some text. I am presented with the appearance that I am getting hungry, and so on. Though it may not really be the true reality, and though I cannot know the reality of it (indeed I cannot know if there even is a reality of it), the one thing I can be said to “know” in one sense of the word is how things appear to me now.

I know that it appears that I am hungry. This is very important. I also know that it seems to me that eating food will allay what appears to be hunger. I cannot even make a statement about how likely or unlikely this may be, but I do know that it appears to me that this is the case. As such, my response is to eat, and not, as some suggest, to sit in skeptical denial until I die of starvation.

Some may cry out that this amounts to a cop-out. Others will ask: Why go to the trouble of defending skepticism if you were going to essentially discard it by saying that the appearance of a thing is as good a thing as any to act on? Because skepticism has something important to teach us.

Sextus Empiricus pointed out that skepticism seemed to lead to quietude. Of course, as a skeptic, he cheekily pointed out that he certainly did not know this was the case, it just seemed always to happen. Though this may seem silly, it is important. I too point out that in the world of appearances, what some call the “real world,” people who adhere to skeptical beliefs gain quietude, or peace of mind. I am not troubled by the woes of the unknown. The philosophical worries that plagued me when I was younger have ended. To attribute this with certainty to my adoption of skepticism would be to fly in the face of all that I have learned, but I do suspect strongly that the two are related events.

So that’s one benefit of skepticism: quietude. Are there others? Certainly. They are manifold. The skeptic’s position, by default, becomes one of moderation, which many would agree is a positive thing. When you cannot claim that any one statement is known to be true, any statement then has equal claim to truth. I will demonstrate throughout this philosophy what is healthy and beneficial about skepticism.

"Building on the Foundations of Appearances"

If I accept that what appears to me now is as good a thing as any to act on, I essentially agree to live in the “real world” as it appears to me. This defines reality as the way things appear. Again, I recognize that there are countless hypothetical situations where this could be false. Being insane, for instance is one of them. If I am deluding myself and hallucinating everything that appears to me to be “real,” then it is certain that reality and my appearances are quite different. But I cannot begin to know that sort of thing.

Thus, working from appearances, I can begin to construct what will look like a mainstream worldview. In my opinion, the only things that I will admit as reliable “appearances” are things in the physical. This leads me directly to materialism, which, like skepticism, plays an important role in my philosophy but is not the main thrust of my philosophy.

Materialism, which is the idea that the only reality is the physical reality, follows from the world of appearances directly. This is precisely because it is the world of appearances only. So things that do not appear, like God, karma, or Plato’s forms, are considered not to exist. Again, it is not that I know for sure they truly do not exist, just that I do not admit them to the world of appearances, which is the world with which I align my life.

So where might this leave me? My critic may again point out the problem of morals, which is just as much a problem in skepticism as it is in materialism, but I will get to that later.

I go on to describe other "implications" for being a skeptic who chooses to live in the world of appearances, like being a "strong" agnostic for instance.

The crux of what I go on to say is that the usefulness of skepticism for a person choosing to live what appears to be a normal life is that although I base much of my behavior off appearances only (especially in morality), the underlying acknowledgment of my own fallibility leads to moderation, respect, and humility for other positions or viewpoints. Sure this has significant real-world applications.

It is also why I am a political centrist valuing compromise over individual ideologies. I could go on but I've talked a lot already. I hope you at least understand, even if you disagree.

Suffice to say though that all of the above that I have mentioned is why you don't find me using skepticism to rebut everyone's arguments in every thread about politics and so on.

I tend not to bring it up in conversation or in this forum unless it comes up, and it usually comes up in a religious or metaphysical context since these are things most sensible people agree cannot be known.

But for everyday and practical discussions like on politics or history, I stick to the "world of appearances" which is a skeptic/materialist hybrid for the most part.

So I do in fact take "positions" Putin, and I also think skepticism is not at all a lazy enterprise. It takes courage I think to admit that you could be wrong.

The mere fact that philosophical skepticism only comes into play regarding metaphysics, shows that philosophical skepticism is worthless.

...how is that exactly?

I think it shows that metaphysics is worthless lol... not the other way around.

They both are.

Whatever dude see above for why skepticism is not useless.

It is not only useless, it is ridiculous, as it disregards the relativity of wrong.

No I agree in principle that there could be degrees of wrongness. The trouble is just that you can't really know how wrong or not wrong you are.

Thanks for proving my point.

There is no point to prove. Do you disagree that nothing can be known? Or do you agree but say one shouldn't bother thinking about it because it has no bearing on real life? I address both points above.

I know everything. I just choose not to prove it. So you are wrong Thucydides.

alas wouldnt that be nice. indeed since i can know nothing it is possible i am the only one with such an affliction. lol

I knew you were going to say that.

"My critic may again point out the problem of morals" Wow Thucy just read my mind. How do you explain morals? I agree that most of what you say makes sence (or at least appears to =D) but I would love to see you come up with an explanation for morals.

Btw you are not the only one. There are are quite a few know-nothings around here ;-)

Also, there is one thing I can say that no skeptic can argue is that I exist in some way shape or form

I address that above Maximus - I agree that I logically follows that I exist due to my thinking (Descartes) but logic and cause and effect are not things I can place total confidence in. There is nothing to justify logical reasoning outside of logical reasoning so if it's wrong, which it could be... then you have a problem.

On morals: essentially, I don't know if I mentioned it, but the morals are derived not from the skepticism but from the appearances (the materialism). This is of course something you could probably expect each and every person to come up with a different answer on but it leads me to a universalist viewpoint. The appearance is that this world is populated by human beings like me, thus, they should be treated the way I would want to be because it appears I am not the only conscious thing in the world.

On that basis I would challenge people who break these morals, because my personal beliefs or my faith holds that these morals should be upheld. All the while I acknowledge, perhaps unfortunately, that people such as Hitler may have in the end been doing the right thing. I hope not, but it's possible, yes. That doesn't change that I have decided to live morally.