Assertion: skeptic | /r/HasAspect | belief
Facets:
value: in order to settle
type: PURPOSE
value: along these lines
type: OTHER
value: in other words
type: OTHER
value: exactly
type: DEGREE
value: in a very famous
type: LOCATION
Source sentences:
text: Sextus turns to the question of whether the skeptic has any beliefs in a very famous—and much debated—passage, PH I 13 (in Annas and Barnes’ translation):
text: Rather, Perin and Fine argue, the skeptic has exactly the belief you would expect, given that he says things like ‘honey seems sweet to me’: the belief that things appear thus-and-so to him (in this instance, the belief that honey appears sweet to him).
text: In other words, in order to settle back into intellectual tranquillity, the Skeptic must have some belief along these lines: no enquiry will ever produce an answer.
text: The question of how to interpret this little paragraph, and thus settle the question of whether the Skeptic has any beliefs, is the question that much contemporary scholarship concerning Sextus has focussed on (see for instance the papers collected in Burnyeat and Frede 1997; with Fine 2000; Barnes 2007; Perin 2010b), yet there does not seem to be a consensus.
text: It is important to see that Barnes and Burnyeat do not arrive at this position by interpreting I 13 alone; rather they have an argument that the Skeptic can’t have any beliefs, and they interpret I 13 in the light of that.
text: How does Sextus’ treatment of the criterion contribute to the debate between scholars over the question of whether the Skeptic has any beliefs?
text: But note that if it turns out that the Skeptic can have beliefs, and that the belief that no enquiry will ever produce an answer is one of the beliefs available to the skeptic, then we might be able to answer Burnyeat’s objection (for more on this see below, 3.6).
text: How can the Skeptic respond to the charge that he cannot lead a recognisably human life unless he has beliefs?
text: The skeptic does indeed have beliefs: Burnyeat was wrong to say that acknowledging that things appear to you thus-and-so is not a way of holding something to be true, and Barnes was wrong to try to dodge the commitments the skeptic incurs when he utters sentences such as ‘honey seems sweet to me’, by talking of avowals.
text: Verdict: the Skeptic does have beliefs.
text: And quite apart from the apparent unavailability of this particular belief to the Skeptic, there is also the general worry that the Skeptic has no beliefs whatsoever (thus precluding him from believing that no enquiry will ever produce an answer).
text: The answer is that both Jonathan Barnes and Myles Burnyeat have used Sextus’ discussion of the criterion as a means of securing the conclusion that the Skeptic has no beliefs at all.
text: This opens up the possibility that the Skeptic can in fact have the belief that Myles Burnyeat says is necessary for the Skeptic to attain tranquillity (see above, 3.3).