# Give Skepticism a Try

Philosophy has a weird relationships with skepticism. On one hand, skepticism is a legitimate philosophical view with [no good arguments against](https://wonderandaporia.substack.com/p/self-defeat-doesnt-matter).

On the other hand, it’s usually treated as an obviously wrong view. An absurdity which, nevertheless has to be entertained. Skeptic arguments and conclusions are almost never directly engaged with. Instead, they are treated as bogeymans that would somehow destroy all reason and, quite ironically, as justifications for dogmas.

Consider how Descartes arrived to a theistic conclusion. Whatever the observations, it’s always possible that those are just illusions imposed by evil demon. Which means that no observations can be fully justified. Unless... there is a God that prevents evil demon from his misdeeds.

Now, as I’ve already mentioned in [another post](https://apeinthecoat102771.substack.com/p/no-god-can-help-you), the addition of God doesn’t actually help with the issue. Shame on Descartes for not figuring it out himself! But this isn’t the only mistake here and Descartes is far from only famous philosopher who fell for it.

Emanuel Kant came to the conclusion that there is no way to justify the existence of space and time with observations, as space and time are prerequisites for any observations in the first place. Therefore, they have to be justifiable “à priori” in a matter, suspiciously resembling cyclical reasoning:

Unless “à priori” justifications are true, space and time are not justifiable. But space and time has to be justifiable[^xub4p3xun0q]. Therefore “à priori” justifications has to be true.

Both Kant and Descartes argued for a bottom line that they’d wishfully assumed. That skepticism is ultimately false. And therefore, whatever required for this assumption to be true has to also be true:

Unless X is true, we have no way to defy skepticism. And we *really want to* defy skepticism. Therefore X has to be true.

[![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xTx0!,w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2139464-35cd-4d5a-a195-84c143002479_576x713.gif)](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!xTx0!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fb2139464-35cd-4d5a-a195-84c143002479_576x713.gif)

Now let’s not dunk on the poor giants whose shoulders we are standing on. They made silly mistakes, true, but someone had to, so that we knew better. The lesson here is to actually know better and ~~make new, more fascinating mistakes~~ arrive to the right answer instead.

We can even see how this kind of reasoning makes some sense with the ultimate goal of adding philosophy up to normality. It seems *normal* that our knowledge is justified. It intuitively makes sense. While skepticism is *weird*. If we can’t be certain in anything, including our reasoning techniques, how comes we can know anything whatsoever? How can we build technology that works? How can we distinguish truth from falsehood at all?

And so most philosophers are really into certainty. It’s deeply entangled with the view that philosophy (or at the least some part of it) is a separate magisterium that lies beyond the empiricism of sciences, providing a certain foundation for it and all our knowledge. Where science deals with probabilistic knowledge and uncertainties, philosophy is the domain of synthetic/fundamental/pure reason/necessary truths.

Indeed, in my salad days, I was thinking among the similar lines. However, as with many such common wisdoms, it’s enough to [just start questioning them](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/qmqLxvtsPzZ2s6mpY/a-priori) from the height of our modern knowledge, to see the cracks:

> If the brain has an amazing “a priori truth factory” that *works* to produce accurate beliefs, it makes you wonder why a thirsty hunter-gatherer can't use the “a priori truth factory” to locate drinkable water. It makes you wonder why eyes evolved in the first place, if there are ways to produce accurate beliefs without looking at things.

When pushed to grapple with the question of how all this certain knowledge providing justification for itself and all our other knowledge is supposed to work, many philosophers would vaguely gesture towards mathematics and say: “Like this!”

This is ironic for multiple reasons.

First of all, most people, philosophers included, do not really understand why math works the way it does and what exactly it means. So invoking math as an example is not an attempt to answer a question while pointing at a direct gear level model, instead, it’s an attempt to hide one confusion into a yet other one.

Secondly, math is an extremely rigorous reasoning about precise matters, while philosophy is a vague reasoning about poorly defined matters. It’s, of course, very flattering for philosophy to claim the status of being math-like. But actually expecting to get the benefits of rigor, without putting any of the work required for it is quite naive.

Thirdly, math is merely a [truth preserving mechanism](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3FoMuCLqZggTxoC3S/logical-pinpointing), a study of which conclusions follow from which premises for a certain definition of “follow”. It’s generalized conditional knowledge, not fundamentally free from the uncertainty but merely outsourcing it to the moment of applicability. As a result math can’t actually prove anything about real world with perfect confidence. A mathematical model may be making confident statements conditionally on all the axioms being satisfied, but whether or not the reality satisfy these axioms is an empirical question.

[Neither math can justify itself](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del%27s_incompleteness_theorems). There is a deep uncertainty in it’s core, which makes it much more similar to empirical knowledge, than we could’ve initially though. So even if philosophy was as rigorous as math, it couldn’t be a certain foundation for all our knowledge.

So maybe, just maybe, we can for once try a different approach. To try and add skepticism to normality instead of constantly dismissing it. After all, science is the normality to which we would like philosophy to be adding to. And science seems to be doing pretty well even though it’s based on merely probabilistic knowledge.

Engineers building rockets do not sweat about Cartesian Demon and yet the rockets seem to works fine. If something is good enough for building rockets maybe it’s good enough for our reasoning in general?

So give skepticism a try. You may be surprised how much everything will make sense afterwards.

[^xub4p3xun0q]: There is an extra level of irony here that, among other things, Kant has “à priori” figured out that space and time are absolute, which we now know not to be the case.