Where do they differ?
When, if ever, does scepsis become unpractical?
One needs assumptions to live and thrive, even at fairly minimal levels. We would probably all disagree about which particular skepticisms are counterproductive, but we should be able to agree that it can become a problem. Doubting all of one’s memory is problematic. Doubting that one’s body will move in the desired way is problematic - if chronic, rather than in specific instances. Doubting all perception as a rule will mess you up.
Life demands apriori, intutions, trusting some authorities - or to put this another way, trusting one’s ability to suss out fairly good authorities. I mean, are we really going to try to repeat ALL empirical research that underpins all products, technology, practices we use?
Me personally. I don’t have time.
If you can’t trust your own intuition at all, there is certainly no point in arguing in favor of skepticism with others.
Practicality and scepsis certainly have a lot of overlap, but just as certainly are not equivalent to one another. Where threat represents the unknown, and where mitigation of threat is of paramount utility, perhaps here we start to see this overlapping space delineated. Scepsis would certainly seem a function of (our perceived) practicality, for it is hard to imagine a scepsis arising that does not fill some certain utility or momentary expediency. So where man has risen to a height far beyond all concerns with mitigating threats of the unknown, where man has fortified his existence against certain ranges of destabilizing forces and is thus able to open himself up before these, perhaps here we see where scepsis starts to become unpractical. . . . and certainly where heights are reached where a positive orientation toward and into the radical negative unknown gains for us a supreme practicality, scepsis would appear as almost entirely unpractical. Yet where fatal dangers still move in the shadows of the edges, scepsis still plays a role in serving our practicality, namely a practicality of basic maintainence and survival.
Once we’ve generated a function wherein the practicality of scepsis is pushed to the margins, walking that increasingly fine line separating the unpractical from the practical of scepsis would become a measure of our real progress and real risk. How and in what direction we skew this line might indicate what level we are at, and where we go next. And of course that sort of subjective demarcation quickly becomes extremely practical on its own.
I like where you’re taking this, if I understand you correctly.
A trajectory towards more direct discerning, away from the assumptions of probably false / probably true (scepsis vs. anti-scepsis).
Indeed, scepsis is most useful in conditions where we have to acquire the majority of knowledge from the radically unknown, when we are walking in the dark. Where we rely on a solid ontology of self, which is the only ontology that is possible as far as I’m concerned, we can already infer from our attraction / attention towards a thing or concept, that it probably has some type of value.
The less we can predict of our own perceptive/interpreting “faculties”, the more scepsis is necessary to filter out value from rubbish.
In a hypothetical end, a human who has a comprehensive understanding of his own consciousness, would have need of the most radical gambling to attain new value at all.
Yes, this is a clearly justified scepsis toward scepsis.
Where would you say that scepsis begins to be necessary?
We may be able to define both where it becomes practical, and where it becomes unpractical. The range in which scepsis must be operative - the field(s) of thought where Occams razor belongs in the most basic toolset.
To run ahead somewhat, I propose that experiential meaning is a terrain where the razor has no place. It is mostly of use in polishing the methods by which we may relate different such meanings, to create a meta-meaning, method, logic, and grammar. It makes things so they are to difficult, so that much can be accomplished. Quantity is put above quality by Occam - effectivity above depth.
The politics of legislation is perhaps where his method finds its most valuable result: different subjects are related to each other based on the assumption that are all equal.
There is for me no question that this idea has merit.
But in science, the principle can be misleading – as we are still holding to the consensus that science deals with that which “simply is”.
We have no regard for our instruments, no eye for our preferences.
Occam allows us to think that whatever is the most simple, is “reality”.
There would be no problem, if we did not automatically, intrinsically interpret this reality in therms of our valuations! There is no escaping this, that is why we will necessarily interpret what we see as what we expect to see - or, if impossible, explicitly as a surprise, a not-expected, undefined. It is either obvious, or not at all. Things are made obvious, our conception of existence demands and produces this nature.
As Nietzsche says in so many words, philosophy prescribes a nature onto being.
Essencing, causing essence to be a property of a thereby isolated part of the splintered and shared all-experience, is unavoidable.
The razor can only make these essences workable, but it cannot “run” them - by their being an essence they must run themselves. Occam in legislation says that all human essences are the same ---- this judgment is not a definition of this shared value. The total value of a human is clearly quite ambiguous, if not completely indeterminable except by cumulation of all the experience of which he was a cause, and which he himself has lived. If we believe in the butterfly effect, this would mean that we may quite often need to take into account all of the world to determine a persons value. If a person is worth the world, it takes a world to define a person. And this is not a view I would dispute. Ideally, this is what a world would look like - no person in a same role, no one who is not a freely roaming spirit. By then we would have come to a perfect order - the order that would be the most complicated to describe. Objectivity would have no ground except in motion.
I hope that a technical philosopher will be able to object to this in real-world terms. In any case our economists have succumbed to the belief (have been created out of the belief) that the razor is indeed the engine of the world, the creator of meaning.
Practicality would then only mean the combined verb ‘observing’ and ‘acting’.
with the adjective ‘sharp’.
In other words, scepsis is only practical where there is no clarity of purpose.
A-priori scepsis is unnatural, and unwise if clarity is the aim – unless it is a condition of a still more fundamental assumption – namely, that what one will find under this scrutiny is value.
All this is certainly clear, but the point is that scepsis is perhaps applied a bit too prematurely. If anything science proves this - - it is at root a fanatically confident rush through the jungle of the unexpected. It’s power is taken too seriously (with reason of course) to observe its full scope, if it is allowed to unfold.
We must allow science to have a purpose - it will suggest itself to us, caused by who we are, in the words of Sauwelios: “The good is good because it inspires love in us.”
To combine science and love – philosophy – all science will come to serve art.
The world shall be rid of the disease of objectivity – the future and the past will be no longer of the essence to the now – and replaced by a clear understanding of what they always were – the realm of imagination
I don’t think there is a general rule. IOW it depends so much on the current beliefs of the person in question and their own intuition. You have to use intuition in the application of skepticism. This is the only way to make most choices about when to become skeptical and when to accept a belief one already has or a belief/assertion one is being presented with. Sometimes glaring counter examples will let you know you need to rethink something, but often it may be simply nagging feelings or flashes of insight that instigate the process.
I have a lot of problems with Occam’s Razor, but most of these arise interpersonally. Where one person tells another person they can get by without this or that belief. That a lower number is sufficient. It can be useful between people with very similar experiences and paradigms and certaintly intrapsychically by one person with him or herself.
I would agree to a point, that unmediated universal scepsis is unpractical where there is clarity of purpose. But what I was also trying to hint at is that scepsis is not one thing nor another, it is an attitude that can manifest as applicable to the wide or the small, can be used as a hammer or a chisel. I propose using it as a chisel, and not as a hammer. I think scepsis becomes “unpractical” to the degree that we win for ourselves the ability (and necessity) of willfully applying the chisel of scepsis to increasingly subtle regions of our self-experiences, carving out the pure unknown and its potentiality, carving into and around it.
Yes and this is the assumption of empirical science that takes a priori scepsis as its starting place. This science is incredibly valuable, so we must ask ourselves, why? How is a priori scepsis capable of generating value? I believe the answer is that a priori scepsis is the sort of initial position that is required if we are to set out on the path to self knowledge. Making the turn toward honesty of self-experience firstly requires massive and vast turnings away, away from held false conceptions and conveniences, from objectivism, moralism, dogmatism, apathy and resignation. Not only can a priori scepsis serve our end of purging these falsehoods from within, but it can also stir within us, as we are so experiencing the pain of being “stripped before the light” in such a manner, an energy of desire and purpose, an overcoming of apathy and resignation. Pain often has this vitalizing effect on the body of stirring it to action. Especially at the beginning, we probably require this sort of being “whipped into shape”.
The difficulty is that later we no longer need these practicalities from a priori scepsis since at a certain point we create a sufficiency of honesty of self knowledge, positive affirmation of purpose and become the “self propelling wheel” of which Nietzsche speaks. I propose empiricism vis a vis a priori scepsis is useful at first, but later must be progressively refined into increasingly limited application.
I think you’re seeing quite far into the future here, my friend, where this sort of movement and overcoming applies to “the world” as a whole and not just to our own selves. This is indeed a wonderful image you describe, a good way to visualize this movement. But as I see it, this trajectory of growth is possible only within the individual, and at least for now this individual is a very rare minority among men.
Precisely. To allow Nietzsche to illuminate us again, “The most comprehensive soul, that can run and stray and roam furthest within itself; the most necessary soul, that out of sheer joy plunges itself into chance.”
Or to put a spin on the famous words of Einstein: God always plays dice.
I would even object to the notion that a priori scepsis is th ebasic necessity for knowledge – I believe that it comes intpo play when we begin to assimilate different knowledges and infer theories from them.
I think that in all first movement sof science, rather the opposite of scepsis is necessary – the prodound belief that one will find what does not yet exist.
We have come to the point where scepsis is believed to be something which it is not - the root of knowledge. But it becomes only relevant in the politics of knowledge.
Indeed my projection stretches across millennia. But the first movement is already possible, has been made possible by the imasse in which we find ourselves, as scientific creatures. It is either a muddle of compromise and half-facts, or it is the outright realization that the scientific impulse is a form of art, and to draw consequenes from that.
I have come to the conviction that precisely the fact that we do not see science as art, manipulation based on a sense of aesthetics, is the reason for our lack of control of the structures of power we bring into the world.
These are important notions – therapeutic even!
The more comprehensive one is, the more thwarting, the more dangerous security is.
I agree with you on a priori scepsis being relevant only in the politics of knowledge and not in its initial possibility. I also agree with your perspective that science is a form of art, and the lack of this perspective today is the cause of our inability for control over what emerges from science as powerful. I also agree that understanding this higher perspective on science will set mankind free for its future, and that while this time is not yet upon is, it is coming.
Good. There are probably still few who dare to and are able to think like this, but apparently it’s not a complete rarity anymore, if there are a couple of us on this board alone. This is promising.