The next philosophical school of thought to emerge as influential in the history of philosophy are the Sceptics. Their doctrine is simple and straightforward: a philosophical Sceptic says that we know nothing, and we cannot know anything, because knowledge is impossible. And as a result, we should withhold judgement from anything and everything. Commit to nothing, assent to nothing, endorse nothing. And because of this, feel nothing. There are some interesting therapeutic ideas that follow from this philosophy, but this will be an unusual chapter because I do not have much to say on behalf of the Sceptics and quite a bit to say against them. Their philosophy, whilst influential in its own time and important as a stepping-stone in the historical development of philosophy, does not offer much of benefit to us nowadays, in my opinion. Most of what is good and useful in their work is included in other schools, such as Stoicism. And most of what is bad and harmful in their work could be really bad and really harmful, especially for philosophy.
Scepticism is the denial of knowledge and the denial of knowledge is too easy. Anyone can ask ‘why?’ or ‘how do you know for sure?’ Anyone can play that critical game and because of that it can too easily become only a game. But philosophy is not a game; it is a serious business. Philosophy is our attempt to get true beliefs about what really matters. Nothing is more important than that. It is more than a matter of life and death: it is a matter of living and dying well. It is not something to be taken lightly.
Anything that has a tendency to push philosophy towards being nothing but a game that clever people play drags philosophy and philosophers away from its true purpose. It is a corrupting force and a source of infection: the best remedy is to fight the infection or else cut away what is beyond saving.
If you were to study the Sceptics you would find them to be serious philosophers and not mere game-players. But the difficulty lies with our ability to take scepticism seriously, to stop it being too easy and becoming frivolous. This is scepticism with a small ‘s’, to indicate that it is the wider philosophical theory and not only the Sceptic school of thought. If I thought it were possible to provide a positive introduction to Scepticism without letting it slide too easily into scepticism, then I would give the Sceptics more weight in this book. But I am pessimistic (and sceptical) about that possibility. I think we are already too vulnerable to the idea that philosophy is nothing but a critical game – I think that is the prevailing view of the discipline – and I don’t want to reinforce or endorse that corrupted view. If you let scepticism rule your philosophical view then you will tend to become someone who offers endless pedantic arguments to trivial ends. It is better to be ruled by a different philosophical view and use scepticism only as a tool.
And so why include the Sceptics at all? They take their place in the history of philosophy (and in this book) for two reasons: firstly, because they tell us what happened to Plato’s Academic legacy; and secondly, scepticism acts as a foil or opponent to other (more helpful) schools of thought, in particular for the school that is the subject of the next chapter: Stoicism. It’s helpful to understand much of philosophy as a response to scepticism, and it’s particularly helpful to understand Stoicism as a response to Scepticism. And so to get to Stoicism, and to any further in the history of philosophy, it’s helpful to go via the Sceptics.
Plato’s Academic Legacy
That the Sceptics emerged from Plato’s philosophical legacy is an interesting and, to my ear, discordantly flat note in the history of philosophy. Socrates (Plato’s teacher) showed some sceptical tendencies, of course, claiming only to know that he did not know, but this didn’t seem to be the end of his philosophical work but only its (ironical) beginning. He started by showing how little we know, breaking-down our false ideas of things, with the aim of getting us on the path to know more and better. Plato took up his teacher’s aim and developed an elaborate system of metaphysics and epistemology (a theory of knowledge). As a rule, when we guess at the chronology of the Platonic dialogues, we tend to say that the ‘earlier’ dialogues, more true to Socrates’ teaching, are the more sceptical dialogues, whereas the ‘later’ dialogues, more true Plato’s own thought, are less sceptical and more assertive. Plato the student is less sceptical than Socrates the teacher; Plato seems to move away from Socratic scepticism towards the construction of his own ‘Platonism’. It is odd, then, that this knowledge-building trajectory is reversed after Plato’s death. And yet that is what seems to happen.
By the time of a few generations after Plato’s death, the Greek philosophical world is ruled by some distinct schools of thought, amongst which are the Cynics, the Cyrenaics, the Epicureans, and (eventually) the Stoics, and you’ll also find the heirs to the Aristotelian school, who come to be called the ‘Peripatetics’, and the heirs to Plato’s Academy: the Academic Sceptics.
Aristotle’s followers – called the ‘Peripatetics’ because of Aristotle’s habit of walking around (peripatos) whilst he was teaching – seem to have remained true to the spirit and content of Aristotle’s philosophy. Plato’s Academics do not. They seem to abandon a lot of Plato’s philosophical theories and adopt Scepticism instead. It’s not clear why this is.
It might be that we do not get such a comprehensive picture of Plato’s mature metaphysical views as we think, perhaps only seeing his ‘earlier’ and ‘middle’ thought in the dialogues and not much of the ‘later’ thought, which might have launched the Academy on the trajectory that it did following his death. Or it might be that we only see his public-facing thought and not what was going on behind the closed doors of his school. Most of what we know about Plato’s thought, from Plato himself, we get from his dialogues, but we also know that Plato didn’t write his dialogues with the intention of offering an explicit and comprehensive overview of his philosophy. The dialogues are invitations to study philosophy and to ask the right questions in the right way – they are multi-layered teaching materials – but they are not clear treatises that outline a theory in explicit terms. They are not textbooks or reference works. They are provocations, demonstrations, sometimes satires. They are public-facing works, intended to serve a purpose appropriate to that task. Because of this it seems reasonable to imagine that he kept a fair bit back for the private discussion of his school.
Sometimes when you read Aristotle’s version of Plato you can get a sense of this, since Aristotle’s version doesn’t always resemble what we see represented in Plato’s dialogues. (Remember that Aristotle was a later student of Plato so would have been a part of the Academy’s in-house discussions.) In Aristotle’s recollection of Plato’s thought, there is a lot of talk of two principles: one of unity or ‘the One’ (which Plato identifies with the Form of the Good) and another of division or plurality. It’s all very mathematical and a little bit mystical, and highly reminiscent of Pre-Socratic Pythagoreanism. According to this view, all things come into being from the interaction of these two principles – ‘unity’ and ‘division’, the ‘monad’ and the ‘dyad’, the ‘bringing together’ and the ‘pushing apart’ – and all understanding reduces to them. Quite an important point, you would think. Certainly important enough for Aristotle to lead with this in his description of Plato’s metaphysics. But there is barely any unfiltered mention of these principles in Plato’s dialogues.
Perhaps Plato reserved these important ideas only for his most able students and didn’t allow them to be released to the unschooled public who would be in no position to understand them properly. Let them first study geometry. But as much as these elements of high Platonism might be hidden from the public, there is little to suggest they are sceptical arguments. Quite the opposite, in fact. So there’s little reason to think that Plato was a sceptic. The most we could say is that they leave Plato’s students with the task of working out these confusing and possibly incoherent ideas. Perhaps that road leads to Academic Scepticism, in the end.
Alternatively, it might be a more prosaic matter of choosing the right heirs. When Aristotle was forced to flee Athens (due to the anti-Macedonian sentiment that followed the death of Alexander the Great, who, we remember, was Aristotle’s student and patron), he passed his school on to his friend and student Theophrastus. This seems to have been a wise choice – as we would expect from a philosopher who thinks that virtue is ‘a state of character concerned with choice’. Theophrastus continues Aristotle’s work faithfully, eventually leaving the school in the capable hands of Strato, who also preserves and continues the Aristotelian legacy. By these wise choices, the Peripatetic school flourishes and remains constant.
By contrast, Plato does not seem to make such a wise choice, bequeathing his school to his nephew, Speusippus, who oversees the Academy for the eight years following Plato’s death. Speusippus does not make a good impression, in no way emulating Plato’s example or philosophy. He charged fees for his teaching, for one thing, which is something Plato did not do, and he was said to be a slave to pleasure and ruled by his emotions, once getting so angry that he threw a puppy into a well! He added to this heinous crime against puppies by an even greater crime against Platonism: he rejected the Theory of Forms and denied the Form of the Good its place at the top of Plato’s metaphysical hierarchy. These amendments are amended but not lost in the next leader of the Academy, Xenocrates, who at least seems to have been of better character and more true to Plato’s philosophical ideal: for example, when Alexander the Great offered him some money, Xenocrates returned it and pointed out that Alexander needed it more since he had more mouths to feed. Xenocrates oversees the Academy for twenty-five years, eventually passing it on to Polemo, and by the accounts of Polemo’s character it’s clear that all philosophy of this time is undergoing some Cynic influence. Polemo hands the school to his young lover Crates of Athens (not the same Crates as Crates the Cynic), who in turn hands the school on to Arcesilaus. Arcesilaus was said to be a man of very expensive habits and a second sort of Aristippus (the pleasure-loving Cyrenaic). By all accounts he drank himself to death, admittedly at the respectable (for a hedonist) age of seventy-five.
Arcesilaus is the origin of Academic Scepticism. He is the one who turns Plato’s Academy away from the shattered remnants of ‘Platonism’ towards a new approach. By now we are nearly one-hundred years distant from Plato’s direct influence. The Academy has been through many changes, subject to many different influences. Aristotelianism remained relatively constant in this time; Platonism did not. I leave it to your judgement whether you think this says anything significant about the two philosophical approaches.
Two Philosophical Approaches
We’ve already seen the virtues of these two approaches – Platonism and Aristotelianism – in their respective chapters in this book, and they certainly each have a lot in their favour, but it’s also important to recognise their respective vices and vulnerabilities. Plato wants to take us up to the highest understanding exemplified in mathematical understanding; Aristotle wants to keep our feet firmly on the ground. Both approaches have consequences, good and bad.
Aristotle’s ‘look first, think after’ or ‘matter-over-mind’ approach is constantly bringing us back down to earth, holding theory accountable to our observations of the physical world. And the thing about the physical world is: it doesn’t change all that much. This allows Aristotle’s approach to remain relatively constant in its slow and incremental progression towards scientific understanding. But it also runs the risk of becoming shallow, superficial, and reductive, and it leaves you very much in danger of getting locked into observational biases. We see this with the Aristotelian ‘geocentric’ view that ‘observes’ the Earth to be at the centre of the universe. This view was born from Aristotle’s metaphysical theory about the ‘heavy’ elements falling as far as they can in the void, which means falling to the middle, meaning the heavy earth beneath our feet must be at the middle of the void. And this theory is confirmed by observation, as we stand on solid ground and watch the fiery stars move around us. It seems as if we are still and they are moving. It takes a long time and a lot of counter-evidence to break out of this observational bias, but we were entrenched in this view for nearly 2,000 years. If you don’t want to wait that long for science to catch up, it helps to have the option of a higher philosophical perspective that questions what we see.
We know that there were philosophers of the time who believed that the stars were fixed and the Earth rotated on its axis, and we know this mainly because the Aristotelians wrote so dismissively of them. It’s possible to see this view in Plato too, although it is a bit cryptic in his Timaeus.The point is not so much who had the right answer and for what reasons; the point is that seeing the true meaning of something is often a matter of finding the right perspective. The 20th century philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe recalls a conversation she had with Wittgenstein, where he asked her why she thought people thought for so long that the sun went around the Earth. She responded that it was probably because it looked as if the sun went around the Earth. To which he replied: ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as if the Earth turned on its axis?’
Perhaps geocentricism is a relatively innocent mistake and not one that’s going to impact your day-to-day life, but not all observational mistakes are innocent. For instance, Aristotle ‘observed’ that women were inferior to men, noting that they could not do and so didn’t achieve all that much in his Greek society, at least when compared to men. But if you let this observation determine what opportunities your society allows to women, such as literacy and education, you will soon end up locked in a vicious cycle. It takes a higher perspective to recognise this for what it is: not observations but shadows projected onto the wall in a dark cave of ignorance. These are chains that need to be broken.
Plato’s ‘mind-over-matter’ approach, by contrast, wants to take us away from what we observe and up to the higher understanding found in the intelligible world. From that higher perspective – investigating the idea of human beings and not our observations of them – Plato recognises the truth of the idea of gender equality as well as the role that social convention plays in generating gender inequalities.In simple terms, he notes that society tends to burden women with childcare responsibilities and this prevents them from taking up roles in his Greek society that would lead to more renown. To move society towards a more equal and meritocratic ideal, Plato says that the state should provide childcare, thus freeing women to live as they choose and to achieve no less than men. (Full disclosure: what Plato actually argues for – possibly ironically – is the dissolution of the nuclear family and for all children to be raised by the state, with procreation itself being governed by a kind of managed lottery. But the extremity of this dystopian solution doesn’t diminish the accuracy of the analysis of the problem.) Plato’s investigations of the idea of a perfectly just society exposes the injustice of gender inequality in a way that Aristotle’s observations do not.
Moving away from our observations of the physical world and towards an investigation of our ideas allows you to ask important questions, freeing you from social conventions and even from your own biased perspective, and from there you can make an attempt at gaining a higher understanding. But once you untether understanding from the observable world in that way, you let it fly free. Who then gets to decide what that higher understanding is or ought to be? And what holds it to account?
If you are wise, like Socrates, then you will cautiously find your way out of the dark cave of ignorance and make some progress towards the light of the world as only a cultivated intellect can understand it. But it takes a disciplined humility to stop yourself running away with yourself: you must hold yourself to account, constantly putting your thoughts to the test, endlessly committed to living the examined life. That’s why it’s so important for Socrates to have conversations, because sincere conversations put you to the test and hold you to account. They expose your shortfalls; they often show you things that you did not expect.
If you are not wise but instead are stupid and arrogant, then you will not hold yourself to account, and so you will populate the intelligible world with your own mystical theories and speculations and, believing them to be true, convince others to do the same. You end up in a world of your own making; you see what you want to see, whether or not it’s really true. Aristotle’s matter-over-mind approach of prioritising observation over theory – an approach we see reflected in modern science – is less vulnerable to this problem. But Plato’s mind-over-matter approach is perpetually vulnerable to corruption via mysticism or arrogance. It remains constant only by becoming dogmatic, since there is nothing holding it to account beyond its own account. And dogmatic philosophy is not really philosophy at all; because, as we all know, that a famous philosopher said it is no reason to take it as true. If it is true then there will be reasons that make it true, and you can find those reasons; you don’t have to take anyone’s word for it.
Once you free philosophy from the conventions of society or any other common sense observations, nothing holds it to account beyond philosophical wisdom. And philosophical wisdom is often a matter of being willing to reflect on your own thoughts, put them to the test, and be glad to discover when you are wrong. That is the kind of wisdom that Socrates had but that Plato’s immediate heirs did not. It seems as if they were led astray by an inflated sense of their own importance, as ‘leaders’ of the most famous philosophical school, convinced, because of this, that they knew better than anyone else. They lost all humility, and with that all intellectual humility. They didn’t have conversations, like Socrates, but gave lectures, and thought enough of themselves to charge fees for doing so. Anyone who would look to call themselves a philosopher should know better.
We should return to the wisdom of Socrates. And where does Socrates’ philosophical wisdom start? We begin by realising that we do not know as much as we think.
Scepticism with a small ‘s’
By the time Arcesilaus takes over the Academy and turns it towards its sceptical direction, the philosophical schools of thought were becoming well established and clearly defined. They each had their theories and doctrines and recommended ways of living. They each thought they had the answer to the question of how to live well as a human being. They each thought they were wise.
What would Socrates say to this? Perhaps he would question them and put their thoughts to the test. Perhaps he would want to show them that they were not as wise as they liked to think and that they didn’t have all the answers. The wise philosopher knows that they don’t have all the answers, and that’s why they must keep asking questions. Socrates is wiser than all the others precisely because he knows that he does not know, whereas they all think they know what they do not.
You could see Arcesilaus’ scepticism as a return to the spirit of Socrates’ questioning approach. (Certainly this is how Cicero, a later Roman Academic Sceptic, sees it.) But Arcesilaus moves Socrates’ ironic scepticism on one step further. Socrates says he knows only that he doesn’t know; Arcesilaus says he doesn’t even know that much.
Socrates uses scepticism as a tool. His incessant doubting and questioning is a way for him to clear the decks of ignorance, which is a necessary step on any route to learning, since few people are willing or able to learn when they think they already know all there is to know. The first lesson is to learn that you don’t know as much as you think. For Socrates, scepticism is the first step on a journey towards greater understanding. But for Arcesilaus, scepticism is the destination of that journey. As far as Arcesilaus and the Academic Sceptics are concerned, philosophy teaches us only that we don’t know, and cannot know, a single thing. They say that there is no such thing as knowledge.
There are, of course, arguments for this claim. Those arguments constitute the flesh-and-bones of the Sceptic school of thought. But before we get to those arguments, it’s worth reflecting on the role that they are playing in the context of Greek philosophy at that time, and therefore the purpose that they are meant to serve.
Because scepticism of this more expansive sort is an import to Greece. It does not come from Socrates. It comes from the East, most likely from Hindu, Jain, Buddhist or Hindu/Jain/Buddhist-influenced sources, via Pyrrho. Pyrrho was a Greek philosopher who travelled with Alexander the Great’s expedition to India. There he encountered what are described in ancient sources as ‘Gymnosophists’ and ‘Magi’. From these he learned that there was no such thing as justice or right or wrong, and that nothing is true, but everything is the product of human perceptions and opinions. These ideas will be recognisably familiar to anyone familiar with Eastern philosophy and religion.
‘Gymnosophist’ just means something like ‘naked wise man’ and would have been used by Westerners to refer to any ascetic philosopher of the East. When Pyrrho returns to Greece, he imitates these Eastern philosophers, but to my mind the ‘Pyrrhonism’ that results remains only an imitation that leaves something behind, lost in translation. I speak as an outsider and fully aware of the diversity of opinion within Eastern schools of thought, but my sense is that scepticism, in many forms of Eastern philosophy and religion, is intended to be therapeutic. It is a tool. It is a way to get to a destination, but it is not a destination in itself. It is not necessarily meant to be taken literally.
Scepticism, taken literally, is obviously self-refuting. Someone says that ‘there is no truth’. If what they say is false then they are mistaken to think that it’s true. That much is obvious. But if what they are saying really is true, then there can be no truth, so proving that they must be mistaken in what they think: you cannot think truly when there are no truths to think. And so either way they are mistaken to take scepticism as true. And because of that they ought to reject it as a mistake and an example of faulty thinking.
Scepticism is different from nihilism, of course. If nihilism says ‘there is no truth’, scepticism only needs to say ‘there is no knowledge of the truth’, and there is an important difference there. There could be truth beyond our reach. If you ask me how many stars there are in the universe, at this moment in time, and whether this is an odd or an even number, I can rightly reply: ‘I don’t know, and there’s no earthly way of knowing.’ But it doesn’t follow from this that there is no answer. There will, presumably, be a definite fact of the matter about that question. But understanding that fact to be definitely, finally, and completely beyond my reach, I might rightly consider it a waste of time and a show of stupidity to reach for it.
But this doesn’t help the problem of self-refutation. To say ‘there is no truth’ invites the response: is that true? Likewise, to say ‘there is no truth that I can know’ invites the response: how do you know? The result is the same in either case. If there is no truth that you can know, then if you know this to be true, you are mistaken, because nothing can be known, and if you don’t know this to be true, then you are mistaken if you think that it is. Once again, either way you are mistaken.
In Greek terms, this is a classic paradox, like the liar’s paradox: ‘Everything I say is a lie, even this.’ When someone says this, either they are lying or they are telling the truth. If they are lying, because they always lie, then they are telling the truth in this case, meaning not everything they say is a lie, making their statement false; and if they are telling the truth in this case, then not everything they say is a lie, making their statement false. So either way their statement is false. The structure of this kind of paradox remains the same regardless of the content: Either it’s true or it’s false; if it’s true then it’s false, and if it’s false then it’s false; so, either way, it’s false. It’s always false and cannot possibly be true. And so if scepticism is anything like these kinds of paradoxes then it cannot possibly be true, it must be false, and why should we pay any attention to something we know to be false? What reason would we have to choose it over all the many other false things? Who would ever want to be guided in their life by something false?
You can say, with Socrates, ‘I know that I don’t know something’, without necessarily falling into contradiction or paradox. But you can’t say ‘I know that I don’t know anything’ without refuting yourself. You fall into contradiction with yourself, asserting what you deny whilst denying what you assert.
Socrates’ scepticism is a tool for the improvement of human rationality; in essence it’s a way of exposing false and faulty beliefs, principally by identifying contradictory beliefs. It looks to find contradictions in order to resolve them, because contradictions can never be true: a contradiction in thought is a sure sign that you have misunderstood something. Socratic scepticism is a foundational tool in Greek thought, and from there to all of Western philosophy, but it rules out the possibility of wholesale scepticism on the basis that scepticism of that more expansive form is contradictory and refutes itself.
Eastern mystical scepticism, by subtle contrast, is an invitation to revel in contradictions as a way to transcend human rationality. It is this form of scepticism that Pyrrho brings back to Greece from his travels in India. But Pyrrho and the Greeks do not seem to use scepticism in the same way as their Eastern mystics; I think they only imitate it. The Greek Sceptics take scepticism to be the conclusion of a rational argument; the product of reason, not the product of transcending it. This is neither Socrates’ scepticism nor the scepticism of the ‘Gymnosophists and Magi’, but something new.
And it is Pyrrho’s scepticism that makes its way, via Arcesilaus, into Academic Scepticism. This is scepticism understood not only as a therapeutic tool but as a true statement of the real state of things. It is scepticism taken literally. And because of that, it is in immediate danger of refuting itself.
Scepticism with a big ‘S’
In their defence, many Academic Sceptics (big ‘S’) do not fall into this self-refuting trap. They would say that they cannot refute themselves because their refusal to assent to any philosophical doctrine includes even their own; they claim that they have no doctrine to assert. They cannot be saying anything false, because they are not saying anything at all: they are only ever rejecting what other people say. They endlessly say ‘you are wrong’ whilst never once saying ‘I am right’.
This is not as incoherent as it sounds. Imagine you are sceptical about ghosts and other such supernatural things. Now someone comes to you and says that a house is haunted, and surely it is more likely to be a ghost than a demon. But you, being a sceptic, deny this and say it is no more likely to be a ghost than it is a demon. In saying this, you’re not saying it’s more likely to be a demon; and neither do you have to say that, if it’s neither a ghost nor a demon, it must therefore be a witch! As a sceptic you can just say there is nothing in the house at all. Having taken the ghost away, you don’t have to put anything in its place.
The Sceptics are like this with philosophy. They say that Aristotle is no more correct than Plato; Plato is no more correct than Epicurus; Epicurus is no more correct than Diogenes; Diogenes is no more correct than Socrates; Socrates is no more correct than Aristotle; etc., etc. This is the case because they are all wrong, in their own ways. Like our haunted house, it’s no more a ghost than a demon or a witch or a werewolf or a vampire. The philosophical haunted house is empty of true philosophies. But this doesn’t mean we have to put something in its place.
Arcesilaus shows this kind of attitude with his habit of pointing out, to every point made, the philosophers who would disagree with it. Imagine we were talking about Epicurus’s view that pleasure is valuable, rightly to be pursued, and the only indicator of the good: to this Arcesilaus would reply something like ‘I think Antisthenes [the Cynic] would disagree’. And if we were talking about something more akin to Antisthenes’ or Socrates’ view of pleasure, that it is only good when it is right, he would say ‘I think Epicurus would disagree’. He is always able to play philosophers against each other, showing that they cannot all be right and that there is always a counterargument to every argument. And this makes a rhetorical point, of course, that philosophers, the wisest of all human beings, don’t seem to be able to agree about anything; and if the wisest of human beings can’t agree, then what hope do the rest of us have?
The Sceptics are often found arguing on the basis of the diversity of opinions that can be seen in human beings. Some people like this, others that; some believe this, others that. There is no universal agreement on anything. From this they infer that there is no truth to anything. But whilst this is a weakly rhetorical point, the inference manifestly doesn’t follow. Some people still believe that the Earth is flat and that the Holocaust didn’t happen. Most people disagree with them. Does it follow from this lack of universal agreement that there is no truth about these things? Of course not. We simply say that some people are wrong and others are right. We use reason to show this and make it clear.
Besides which, this argument can be refuted by agreeing with it, reducing it to absurdity. Imagine there were, by chance, an item of knowledge held in common by all living things: an item of knowledge on which there is universal agreement. Would the Sceptics accept this as something really known? Of course not. So why cite disagreement as something that confirms Scepticism, when agreement wouldn’t refute it? The truth is that agreement or disagreement, universal or not, makes no difference to the truth. Just because a load of people think it or don’t think it, that doesn’t make it any more or less true or false. That much ought to be clear to any philosopher.
Again, though, in the way that the Sceptics deploy it, it probably isn’t as lousy an argument as it sounds. It depends what you think they’re trying to say with it. If you think they are taking a lack of universal agreement as a proof of the impossibility of truth, then that is a lousy argument. But if you take it only as a question, intended to undermine our confidence in what we too-often take to be obvious, then it’s not so bad. The Sceptics are just turning their opponents’ strength against them, like a good wrestler. Non-Sceptics typically think that evidence counts in favour of the truth: the more evidence there is for something, the more likely it is that that something is true. The Sceptics point out that if this were true, and if evidence gave us a reliable way to get to the truth, then we would expect there to be more agreement, because the evidence is there for all to see. Whereas if evidence does not give us a reliable way of getting the truth, then we would expect there to be less agreement. And we see less agreement. So, based on this evidence, it stands to reason that evidence is not a reliable way of getting the truth. The non-Sceptic is the one who wanted to use evidence to ground knowledge and so to follow the evidence where it leads; the Sceptic is just showing that the evidence, properly considered, might not lead them to more knowledge, but less. The Sceptic is just turning their opponent’s view against them, allowing them to refute themselves. But in turning against their opponent’s view, the Sceptic doesn’t assert their own.
Many of the Sceptic’s arguments show the signs of this ‘turning against’ attitude, using the tools and methods of their opponents, showing that they fail on their own terms. Obviously a Sceptic would not base any knowledge on anything as unreliable as evidence or universal agreement. But they will offer arguments on the basis of these things if it serves their purposes of knocking down a rival school’s theory. Showing that a theory fails on its own terms is not the same as showing that it fails according to your own terms. And if you claim to have no ‘terms’ of your own, then this is the only method of argument available to you.
It seems to me that many of these Sceptical arguments began only as rhetorical devices, formed in the back-and-forth of philosophical discussion, intended only as a negative or counter-point to another school’s philosophical argument. It’s only later that these arguments took on a life of their own as ways to positively assert the self-contradictory statement that ‘there is no true knowledge’. You can say ‘what you say is not true’ and ‘what you say is not true’ and ‘what you say is not true’ many many times before you ever have to fall into the contradiction of saying ‘there is no true knowledge’. If you take the Sceptics at their word, they are only ever saying ‘what you say is not true’ and never saying ‘there is no true knowledge’; in this way they think they avoid self-contradiction.
This is a more charitable interpretation of the Sceptic’s arguments. Like the Eastern philosophers, the Sceptics see scepticism as a therapeutic tool. You use reason to show that reason is unreliable, in that way learning to throw it away. In that oft-repeated philosophical simile, the Sceptics use reason like a ladder that you use to climb out of a pit but leave behind once you have used it.
The question is whether this charitable interpretation can extend across all that the Sceptic school of thought comes to stand for. The question is whether they hold to scepticism only being a tool, or not; a way of denying other theories without ever asserting their own, or not. The suspicion is that they do not, since they are often found asserting and defending various kinds of arguments for their position. And these are rational arguments, many of which can be seen to depend on the standards of reason that they claim do not really exist. They offer a positive rational analysis that shows that positive rational analyses cannot ever be true. And if they are doing this, then they are falling into self-contradiction; the image is not of climbing a ladder and discarding it but of cutting off the branch on which they sit.
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