It is said that in every group of philosophers, one will be driven entirely mad by their revelations, by either taking them too seriously or being unable to get around fundamental difficulties that derail their entire outlook on life. In my A level philosophy class it is definitely going to be me. For months I have maintained a policy of utter and complete scepticism. I have an argument (which some day I will polish up and post to this blog or my main site) that in my view shows that at present (based on some flimsy concept of time that I can’t be certain about either), no argument available can show that there is no possibility of doubt in any claim at knowledge, and thus we don’t know anything if knowledge requires certainty. I’m not going to defend that argument right now as indeed that previous sentence is full of holes, but instead look at the consequences of holding such a view.

For practical purposes us sceptics like to say that we use a looser and less rigorous definition of knowledge that allows us to proceed through the world without collapsing into a well of utter despair. I quite like to use coherentism - the idea that knowledge is justified when it coheres with other beliefs held in a patchwork quilt of justification - to work through this world that my five senses (if I have them) like to tell me about. Most of us realise at some point in our lives that the physical world might well not be here, and I’m only being slightly more original (although of course it’s all be done before) by saying that I doubt even things such as “there is something that exists that I recognise as being myself, in some form or another”. But then we move on and try to continue living as things appear to us because that is all we really know how to do. I am concerned that this may not be possible for me for much longer.

Put simply, I increasingly find my scepticism translating into a refusal to do philosophy or to present theories and start discussion, and this is scepticism gone wrong. “We can’t know anyway and there may be some external factor we don’t know about that throws this all out of the water so we might as well stop bothering.” This is not especially constructive because of course I do not accept scepticism absolutely as to do such would be just as bad as any more naive approaches to how much knowledge we have. I need to be more willing to challenge things and argue because otherwise I’m going to end up like a famous sceptical philosopher who I forget the name of who had to have a band of followers around him at all times to stop him putting himself in danger because he simply didn’t care. Even if we can’t know we can pretend to and have an argument about it, and this is what I should be doing more before dangerous knowledge (or lack there of) does indeed send me mad.