The founder of Skepticism was a Greek man named Socrates. It was Socrates who first asked his people, the Athenians, to question their beliefs. He asked them to check if their beliefs still held philosophical water when they challenged these beliefs. It was asked that they question in a way that wouldn’t allow them to justify their beliefs with assumptions or hypotheticals such as, “It makes sense,” or “How could I be wrong, that is impossible.”
Socrates developed a little thing called the Socratic Method, and this was something that was so revolutionary that it changed the face of scientific investigation forever. But this was all basically a watered down version of the real thing, it was a good start, a great start in fact for an ancient Greek guy who happened to be hideously ugly. But in the end it left too many questions unanswered.
I’m actually quite sure Socrates either had an inkling of Radical Skepticism or held the belief in secret, but he never really exposed it. He probably did this either because he liked to think he had knowledge, felt civilians wouldn’t be able to cope with these revelations, as they were having so much trouble with the watered down version.
Skepticism is a doctrine that questions the nature of individual existence, which is a good thing to do. Radical Skepticism, on the other hand, is a doctrine that questions not only the general nature of existence but also the nature of perception and the nature of rationalism.
Skepticism is a bit of a cop out, it starts off with, “We will make no assumptions.” And then as you continue on a bit you hear skepticism say things like this, “I think therefore I am,” “well if you ignore some stuff that seems obvious and just makes sense…”
You see skepticism and Radical skepticism start out the same way, “You can only know a concept to be truth when you don’t need assumption to come to conclusions and it is impossible for the concept to be otherwise.” But the split comes when we consider whether Descartes’ first Theory is actually viable or not.
Socrates and the Skeptics would have you know that Descartes can be known, but the Melbourne Circle and the Radical Skeptics would beg to differ. Though it may seem obvious that just the having of though proves that there is a physical context for that thought, it cannot be known.
For us to know things we need three ingredients, existence, perception and rationalism. But to know these things, we need to find them without assumption. We need to assume the nature of our rationalism, our perception and existence before we can start, and this is a big problem for those of us who worship knowledge and more specifically wisdom.
The thing is that we are forced to assume things, we are forced to assume the nature of our own rationalism, perception existence. It is because we cannot escape assumption that we must understand that knowledge and truth are absolutely unattainable. We have to assume Descartes first theory, and then we have to build all other knowledge upon pure assumption.
All we have are assumptions. But a lot of people are much like me, and don’t like to call them that, the word hypothetical has such a sympathetic ring to it.
Hyanthes