When people first start to get interested in philosophy, something that most do is to try and develop or hone some good critical thinking skills. It’s important to know when you’re being bullshitted. And it’s important to understand what it is to have deductive validity.
A problem that occurs all too often is that people realize the power of skeptical arguments and begin to abuse them by going about deducting everything that they encounter to a state where no knowledge can exist at all, while failing to recognize that even skepticism is a founded concept and a system which indeed does have objective properties. It may be true that we can’t measure the boundaries of the universe, but it simply doesn’t follow that there can be no knowledge or facts.
The problem that I see is that these pseudo-skeptics use strong skeptical arguments in order to assert thier views and negate those of others while resting on a foundation which will necessarily negate even what’s left once they “win” the argument given that the point of view of skepticm is taken further enough along.
Some extreme cases that I’ve seen have held such notions that we can’t even have proof of simple moorean facts. I would hope that any reasonable thinker would admit that he in fact is who he is and that if he’s looking at his hands that he would admit that there are two hands, belonging to him, right in front of him.
The fact is that most skeptical arguments can be properly ignored under most circumstances. The positive thinker, (and I’m not talking about optimism or making lemonade when life gives you lemons) will move right along constructing systems which will continue to blur the vision of most people who advocate this strong skeptcism. Ask any scientist and they will agree.
The skeptics will find themselves unemployed, or incarcerated or hungry or poor while screaming out that none of these things are real, or that none of it is fair because it’s all just a delusion and there can be no foundation for such things. What gets me the most about this is that they often dismiss postive constructivist metaphysics while clinging on to the notion that the “cosmos” are full of chaos. I ask myself what exactly is the distinction here between “acceptable” skeptical or nihilistic metaphysics and that of positivism? On what grounds do we throw out the system builders metaphysics while maintaining a justification for the metaphysics of “chaotic cosmos”.
Anyway, skepicism is dead. If you don’t beleive me, go sit on a train track and try and deduct the train away as it approaches. Tell is that it has no foundation in the cosmos and that you wont be subject to is because you think it’s built from a bunch of delusions about time, space and causation. You’ll see what I’m talking about.