Philosophy Skeptic theories
Knowledge is defined as Justified True Belief. A belief can be anything from the belief in my own existence to the belief that I will get good grades in the course. No one can argue what a person believes. But for a belief to be accepted as knowledge, it needs to be justified and be true. Skeptics raised a question as to how can you justify anything being true.
The common answer was: based on our senses, but then who is to say the senses are true? To be clearer, for me to claim that the existence of this term paper is a truism, I will be able to justify it only by saying that you read it, hence the term paper must exist and hence the claim must be true. But, the fact that you read it in its true form is itself a non-justifiable belief. For here we are “assuming” that what we read is in fact what is and our eyesight is not playing tricks on us. The same follows for all other senses. Hallucination, for instance, makes a person believe the person he is imagining is actually there. For him, the belief is justified based purely on his senses, but it is still not true.
The other method of justifying any claim or any “Truth” is by virtue of reason as was supported by the stoics who claimed reason not only meant using logic, but also understanding the processes of nature. This too was criticized by the skeptics as the logical mode of argument was untenable, as it relied on propositions which could not be proved to be true or false without relying on some further propositions. This was the regress argument, or a never ending series. Also, two propositions could not rely on each other as this would create a circular argument. To state an example, we believe in the “truth” that fire is hot. One way is to say I feel hot around fire, hence it must be hot. This is argued against as shown earlier that your skin feelings might be deceiving or not true. The other argument is the logic based argument. In a same question asked by a person on a question answering forum1,
The common answer was: based on our senses, but then who is to say the senses are true? To be clearer, for me to claim that the existence of this term paper is a truism, I will be able to justify it only by saying that you read it, hence the term paper must exist and hence the claim must be true. But, the fact that you read it in its true form is itself a non-justifiable belief. For here we are “assuming” that what we read is in fact what is and our eyesight is not playing tricks on us. The same follows for all other senses. Hallucination, for instance, makes a person believe the person he is imagining is actually there. For him, the belief is justified based purely on his senses, but it is still not true.
The other method of justifying any claim or any “Truth” is by virtue of reason as was supported by the stoics who claimed reason not only meant using logic, but also understanding the processes of nature. This too was criticized by the skeptics as the logical mode of argument was untenable, as it relied on propositions which could not be proved to be true or false without relying on some further propositions. This was the regress argument, or a never ending series. Also, two propositions could not rely on each other as this would create a circular argument. To state an example, we believe in the “truth” that fire is hot. One way is to say I feel hot around fire, hence it must be hot. This is argued against as shown earlier that your skin feelings might be deceiving or not true. The other argument is the logic based argument. In a same question asked by a person on a question answering forum1,