A Message for Extreme Skeptics and Relativists

Philosophy Forums Philosophy
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This post is intended for those who are big fans of skepticism and relativism, who are deep thinkers and question everything and are extreme critical thinkers, but who may not have a strong enough background in epistemology to have convictions about what knowledge is or how to get it.

A lot of things in this world can be rationally doubted. You can argue against God, by saying there is none. You can argue against love, by saying it gets you hurt. You can argue against wisdom, by saying it’s impossible. You can argue against science or even some mathematics, by saying they are founded on false assumptions. You can argue against being good, by saying good and evil are illusions. You can argue against success, by saying it corrupts you. Etc. etc. etc.

But there are certain things you can’t assert any grounds for denying without being a walking, talking contradiction. You have to grant these things in order to have a conversation at all. I’m going to give a few examples.

You have to grant truth; that truth-claims are at least possible. You cannot undermine truth without relying on truth.

You have to grant meaning and intelligibility and coherence. Otherwise we are just making sounds and tricking ourselves with everything we are saying and cannot know anything or have reason to do anything.

You have to grant a distinction between good reasons to think something is true and bad reasons to think something is true, or between reliable methods of getting truth and unreliable methods of getting truth. If you do not grant this, you can have no cause at all for believing one thing over another.

Because of this, you have to grant that there is valid reason and logic. Logic is simply the study of good and bad reasoning. You don’t have to agree with all the common logical principles, but you had better have some kind of logic, otherwise you have no rules, no coherence and no cause for participating in any conversation.

You need to grant that something exists. If you don’t grant this you can have no ingredients to build anything you would need to do or say anything.

You also need to grant that there is such a thing as thinking and that thoughts can be expressed in language. If this is not the case then there is no conversation to be had.

There may be some other things, but that’s a start.

So I would argue that extremely skeptical or relativistic stuff like Gorgias’ “Nothing exists; even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and even if something can be known about it, it can’t be communicated from one person to another”, is poetry at best, and provides no possible foundation for a genuine search for truth.

I also have a warning. If you hit one of these foundation stones, and you question it and undermine it and doubt it too much with self-contradictory cleverness, it can literally cause madness and lead you to a psych ward. That’s what happened to me. And not only will you be in a psych ward, you will have a cancer at the bottom of your belief-structure that undermines every other belief you could possibly have. And no one will be able to talk you out of it, unless they are bringing you this kind of message I’m bringing.

These examples I gave don’t come from nowhere. They are a result of doing a conceptual analysis of what knowledge could be. Some things definitionally cannot be known. These examples, such as “Nothing is true”, “Nothing exists”, and “There are no valid reasons for anything”, work by trying to assert something while at the same time denying the possibility of asserting anything. They achieve nothing, basically, except to undermine the most basic principles which allow us to make sense of the world.

There is room for debate over precisely what all these terms mean, such as which theory of truth is correct. But there are only so many options. For instance, you can debate whether knowledge is true belief, true belief that is justified, that and something else in addition, or something a bit different but fairly similar. You cannot debate, however, that knowledge is a potato. If you try to do so, you are clearly not talking about the same thing we are. We are interested in the concept, not the English word that refers to the concept.

I hope this is helpful to somebody and if you have an argument with anything I’ve said please make it. Rational argument is a great source of understanding.

K_R

1 Like
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“Demon” (misnomer) likes to debate that the Earth is shaped like a potato.

I really think it’s shaped more like an egg, but I declined to tell him that.

Earth is like knowledge in that both are like an egg (shell, white, yolk).

Gotta go for now.

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Tell Demon can they please prove that the Earth exists, and we’ll go from there.

See you later

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There are no examples here.

It’s like you are laying the ground to make some sort of statement, but you never do.

So yeah. There is good and bad logical, But the only thing you claim is that there has to be “coherence”.

So where are your examples?

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Ok, I will try to briefly restate the point.

There are certain statements one can make that inherently contradict the nature of knowledge, and so cannot be asserted as true.

These include the following:

“There is no truth at all.”
“Language is completely meaningless.”
“There are no good reasons for believing anything.”
“There is no valid logic.”
“Nothing at all exists.”
“There is no such thing as a thought.”

To claim that any of these statements is true is self-defeating. It is also, in my experience, a potential mental health crisis.

These statements are all attempting to assert something while at the same time undermining the conditions for asserting something. If anything at all can be asserted as true, the negation of these statements must be true.

We may consider those negations, such as “Something exists”, “Something is true”, and “There is valid logic of some kind”, to be a priori truths (truths we can know by rational insight, without needing to appeal to experience).

Take the statement “There is no truth (and that is true)”. If it’s true, it must be false, and if it’s false, its negation must be true. So we seem perfectly justified in saying its negation is true.

Basically, by analysing what knowledge is, we can reject certain statements that cannot possibly be knowledge, and by believing the opposite of those statements, we can get a bit of a “free lunch” epistemologically - a foundation on which to build knowledge.

Inverting the previous examples, we get:

“Something is true.”
“Language has meaning.”
“There are good reasons and bad reasons to believe something.”
“Some kind of logic is valid.”
“Something exists.”
“There are thoughts.”

These are a priori, couldn’t be otherwise, or we couldn’t talk at all.

So there… I believe I have actually said something, and the content of my post is not empty, and though it may to some be regarded as trivial, it is quite fundamental. It also answers extreme skeptics and relativists who want to say that every possible perspective is equal - an abhorrent position that makes it possible to do or say or think absolutely anything.

If there is a practical conclusion to what I have said, it would be that truth, meaning, and reason are three of our most incontrovertible values. They are part of the glue that holds together the foundations of our belief-systems, and it is psychologically destabilizing to reject them.

K_R

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I exist …I don’t exist are the binary processing outputs of the dead biological machine bot. in which you reside Josh.

It exists because it needs to exist to claim that it doesn’t exist and it doesn’t exist because it doesn’t possess life.

The SELF (Soul) is separate from this dead biological machine bot.This machine bot. converts electromagnetic energy waves emitted from vibrating matter into binary software which is then converted into machine bot. thoughts which the SELF (Soul) interprets.

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Hi Jupiter,

You have presented, if I’m not mistaken, a picture of what we are that relies on the mind-body dualism thesis. This is a thesis (in philosophy of mind) that has to be argued for and proven. There are alternative theories such as materialism and idealism.

What I have presented does not even presume that we have a body or even that we have a self. I made extremely fundamental statements. So in essence, to build upon what I said you have to find a way to prove (establish with good reasons) that we have bodies and we have souls and they are separate and the self is a particular way and we have reasons to believe in biology and physics and electromagnetism and all these other things.

That is the project of building knowledge from the very ground up.

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I agree with everything except possibly this one.
It would all depend on how many people conceive “Truth”, as if there can be a sort of truth that is absolute, eternal and independant of those that utter words that they claim as “Truth”.
You can say a thing is true of false but “truth” is often used as a word which asserts a grader concept beyond simple correlation of experience and observation.

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Yeah, we have to be a bit careful not to put too much metaphysical baggage on the word “Truth”. There are deflationary theories of truth that philosophers take seriously, which argue truth itself does not have much of a nature and may even be fairly redundant. Since to say “x is true” is exactly the same as just saying “x”.

I don’t think deflationary theories are much of a threat to what I have said though, because I do not require metaphysical baggage that says truth must be this independent thing that has a, b, and c properties. All that is required is that truth-claims are at least possible. Because if they’re not, well… you can’t really make any believable statements, about truth or anything else, if there’s no possibility of saying something that’s true.

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Don’t be silly Josh ..You are spirit and have a soul which resides within a lifeless binary processing biological machine bot. which exists and doesn’t exist and computes as such.

The spirit is separate from the soul which is separate from the binary processing machine bot.

All proven scientifically.

You are a very very naive and cognitively biased +=- and -=+ philosopher.

Nothing more.

Stop embarrassing yourself like Sculptor.

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Even relativists and skeptics can say what is and is not “true”.

The point here, I think, is that what you just said is a relativists claim.

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Well all I am doing is using the agreed-upon definitions of knowledge to exclude what can’t be knowledge. “Nothing at all is true” can never be knowledge since knowledge relies on the concept of truth. Without truth there is no knowledge.

To say there is an alternative relative claim that we can know and that makes sense is simply to deny that knowledge is true belief. The only premises in my argument are the definitions of the terms… and the presumption of using basic logical laws like non-contradiction and identity.

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Hey Jupiter,

We’re talking about epistemology, not metaphysical ideologies that you won’t even give reasons for. Get with the program.

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You have nothing to say worth listening to Josh.

The whole of the physical is lifeless binary and can be proven scientifically.

It was designed that way by God.

Get with the program.

Your pointless and boring ideology has been heard countless times before.

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I have absolutely zero confidence that you could tell me what my “ideology” even is.

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Truth-theories are deeply subjective. I would argue that “Truth” is a subjective experience entwined within life as Experience. To deny Truth absolutely would be to deny Experience absolutely. So, almost nobody does that. The best doubts which humanity and philosophers demonstrate, from the past, is that the best anyone can do is doubt the “Reality” of Experience, but not the Truth of it.

Herein what people refer to as True or Untrue (False), are understandings which do not Resonate (therefore cause Dissonance) in their minds. People can be convinced of a truth emotionally and/or rationally. Something that is neither, is unconvincing, to the point of Absurdity. Absurdity is something that cannot be understood, and therefore cannot be judged to be true or false.

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Hey RealUn,

Thanks for your reply.

What do you mean by the word “Reality” when you say philosophers have doubted the reality of experience, but not the truth of it? Do you mean such things as saying we might be in a dream or in a simulation? Because even these ideas can still preserve that there is some reality, even if we don’t have direct access to it.

One of the statements I listed as implied by the definition of knowledge is “Something exists.” i.e. something is real. This is definitely the most metaphysically interesting of the statements. If “something exists” is an a priori truth, what does that say about the possibility of “nothing exists”?

Is there reason to think “Something exists” is a necessary truth?

I will have to do more research in metaphysics to approach a firm opinion on that kind of question.

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When I attempt to imagine “Nothing Exists”, I consider it a state of non-existence as if I’m unconscious. If I’m asleep, before I’m born, or after I’m dead, then that seems like it would be Non-existence.

However, the trick of “Reality” is that Existence is not dependent upon my awareness, consciousness, life, experience, or memories. So it is either something greater, lesser, or in between Existence.

I can then doubt the Reality of my mental awareness and subjective experience, but not the supposed “Existence” of it.

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You have nothing to say Josh …we’ve heard countless ideologies based upon a cognitively biased +=- and -=+ philosophy.None of it makes any sense at all.

There is no life or truth in the mere physical.All you can do is explain scientifically how it works.

You are wasting your time.

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I like this take your fist one; " There is no truth at all" you claimed a truth. The whole thing holds on there is no priori. Th truth any truth is not out there waiting for us. All truths are constructs of the mind, yes even those scientific evidential ones as well!