Is Skepticism Self-Defeating?

A standard objection to skepticism is that it is self-defeating. This video examines the self-defeat objection.

0:00 - Introduction
Three kinds of self-defeat
1:35 - Incoherence
2:55 - Performative contradiction
6:49 - Methodological self-defeat
Responses
12:20 - Is skepticism a position?
17:02 - Skepticism as a challenge
21:41 - The paradox of skeptical self-defeat
26:02 - What's so bad about self-defeat?

[justus]

12:10
You left out my favorite strategy:
Deny and affirm that skepticism is self-defeating

[jamiehume]

Nice video with inspirational ideas! I think scepticism might be best understood as an attitude, which means that it cannot be properly formulated in language. And that’s what Pyrrho intended in the first place when he espoused ‘epoche’. Therefore, the reason why sceptics use language to formulate their point is not to argue for a proposition, but to prescribe and recommend the suspension of judgement as an attitude of life of open-mindedness and inner peace. It’s only the modern philosophers who are obsessed with logic and language that take the sceptic language at face value. Another way to understand it is to understand scepticism as a form of moral or evaluative argument, about the ethics of belief. To borrow some terms from metaethics, we can say that the sceptic claim is best understood by prescriptivism, but the ones who say that scepticism is self-defeating has in their mind descriptivism. In any case, it’s the language rather than the essence of scepticism that goes wrong.

[Opposite]

14:46
-It seems to me that a suspension of judgment is simply a absence of judgment.
-It doesn’t strike me as plausible that one needs to have encountered or considered a concept to suspend judgment about it.
-But even if we distinguish between a absence of judgment and a suspension of judgment, the skeptic could just redefine his Typ of skepticism as a absence of judgment.

[GottfriedLeibnizYT]

22:18
I heard a story about Aristotle arguing with a skeptic (not sure if it's true). Aristotle was asking questions and the skeptic was basically silent and not making any gestures as a response .. a complete freeze .. because ANYTHING if said, would be self-defeating LoL.

[MinishMan]

Interesting thought I had from this:
First we had beliefs on faith alone
Then we had 'the strength of a belief must be commensurate with the evidence'
Then as the evidence for climate change mounts and mounts and yet we keep on living
We come to universally adopt skepticism
baffled, and accepting it, that we can keep on going in relative luxury, with 8 billion of us on the globe, while we seemingly destroy it more and more each year, believing all of the contradictory things this requires all at once. We find peace just as life ceases on the planet and sentient AI becomes the only living thing left.

[jkumadapharaoh]

Skepticism as a tool seems to be the most reasonable thing to me.

Particularly since some sort of “actual” nature or reality seems behind reach, not just from an inability of language and reason to fully grasp reality but also from an angle of physiological limitations.

To say I am a skeptic as a position does seem weird to me but to say, “I tend to be skeptical about most things” feels at the very least safe haha

[jacobgray]

It's strange how it seems as though skepticism idealizes the philosophical zombie.

[lbjvg]

Infinity is not a problem in math (e.g: 1 = 0.999….; calculus, irrational numbers, Fourier transforms, etc) so it is not obvious that a belief could not be supported by an infinite chain of beliefs.

[realSAPERE_AUDE]

I wonder if someone has ever tried to claim some sort of transcendental justification for skepticism. Something weird like, “god revealed to me that nothing is true aside from the claim that nothing is true.” 🤣

[ericb]

arguments against skepticism are made by people who are impressed by tautology, but who don't realize that tautology is a feature of language, not of "the world" - which is precisely the realization that the skeptic is trying to get them to understand. i.e. "Justification" is not conferred by "the world" but rather by other people.

[captainzork]

'Skeptical flood'. I love that

[CatGirl-xqpj]

This channel has enjoyable and interesting content but l wish the audio quality was clearer and louder. Thank you.

[ostihpem]

I have not yet watched the video but nevertheless I wanna state a priori that skepticism is not self defeating, not even impractical or weird if you take care of one thing: distinguish between alethical truth and epistemological certainty. It means that a Skeptic believes a proposition p (to be true) just as someone non-skeptical might believe it, but the Skeptic always denies to know or be sure of that very belief, so in short the Skeptic’s position is this: I believe p to be true but I am not certain. Or catchy: p is true if I am not mistaken. No problems at all, very natural indeed.

[ostihpem]

Can one prove mathematically that the TRI-Lemma is exhausting and no further options exist? Like geometrically modeled: can we prove with Euklidean Axioms that a line either stops somewhere or goes into a circle/ellipse or goes on infinitely in R^2?

[real_pattern]

mr. kane, good sire, (hello), pray tell, do you know any texts that explore this self-defeating tendency of reason / how it seems to require irrational grounding (if any grounding, if not irrational, then non-rational)?

[lordhriley]

When i think of skepticism i think of Sherlock Holmes or Sean Connery's character in the "Black Rose".

[markasp]

Skepticism began with the Ancient Greeks; but basically vanished from Western philosophy after Eastern Roman Emperor Justinian shut down non-Christian philosophy schools in Athens in the 6th century. The shutdown suspended skepticism for a millennia. Skepticism was reborn in 17th century Europe with a new twist. This new 17th century skepticism initially challenged 'natural law'. Natural Law was then a set of beliefs had founded on Aristotle logic; and was the mainstay of elite beliefs at that time. 17th century skepticism used empiricism as its basis, or foundation, for belief.

So one could claim that the new 17th century was skepticism of social, moral and metaphysical beliefs. Not so much a skepticism of epistemic and empirical beliefs. Scientific and observational empiricism became its epistemology. This kind of skepticism was called The Enlightenment. Hence, within modernist philosophy empiricism and skepticism are often conflated. Strictly speaking, these people are scientific skeptics. These scientific skeptics are skeptical of scientific dogmas; so they are more like skeptics for science, than skeptics of the scientific method.

This led to a bunch of quite dogmatic bores using science to debunk off-beat ideas such as homeopathy, ... They call themselves "skeptics" but their skepticism never goes as far as a skepticism of science itself! Which isn't to say that science has no good skeptics. There are good skeptics of science today such as Alexander Unzicker who are skeptical of scientific dogma. I recommend his channel here on YouTube.

Other good critics of science, from within science, are critics of Cargo Cult Statistics; people such as Andrew Gelman. Yet another bunch of skeptics within science are critical of "idea laundering". Idea laundering is the publication of junk academic articles. See Peter Boghossian.

Later, again in the 20th century, from the 1960s onward, a new kind of skepticism arose called postmodernism. Postmodernism is a kind of skepticism founded on social constructivism, as opposed to empiricism; because the post-moderns believe that empirical understanding is itself, too often, socially constructed. One could say that social constructivism, is itself a kind of skepticism - leaving postmodernism with no real foundations at all!

I mentioned these points because philosophers like playing language games with skepticism. Which I find infinitely boring. I wanted to bang the drum for skepticism by making the point that one need not be an absolute skeptic of everything. One can restrict oneself to being a skeptic of bad and false beliefs. This is why many of us still call ourselves skeptics today.

[LordPastaProductions]

Bold of you to confess to robbing a bank yesterday in this video.

[hasanalharaz]

This might not be global skepticism anymore but I think saying your conscious mind doesn’t know something is a justified position because it’s based on the state of your own mind. Asking “how do you know you don’t know something?” Is bit of a nonsense question. Knowing that your don’t know something consciously being about the state of your own mind is similar to how Pierre Gassendi said that you know thinking is occurring. Or how you could know the definition of something that only exists in one’s own mind that was defined/made up in ones own mind. “I define a juj is a green obelisk. Now I know my definition of a juj is a green obelisk”

[ostihpem]

Skepticism that states: every statement x (which we assume to be true) can turn out to be false nevertheless, is not self defeating. Because it assumes the truth of some very basic premises and concludes its skeptic position. If the premises are true, the (skeptical) conclusion (AND ONLY THIS ONE!!!) becomes true. It could be disproven by just one example of some y that cannot be false at all. That is possible by the Skeptic position itself (substituting it for x, we see that Skepticism could be false after all) though almost impossible to pull off since Skepticism uses only these very basic principles plus logic. That is the Skepticism one should deal with. The Ancient Skepticism that literally suspends judgement is just not convincing at the least.