PHIL 201THE CHALLENGE OF SKEPTICISM TRANSCRIPTS1:Hello, and welcome to another presentation in Philosophy 201: Philosophy and Contemporary Ideas. I’m Dr. Mark Foreman. We are in the process of talking about knowledge. Epistemology isthe unit that we’re dealing with at this point. In our last presentation, we defined knowledge as “justified, true belief.” What I want to do on the next several presentation is take that definition apart and examine each element of it. I want to talk about beliefs, I want to talk about what we mean by truth, and I want to talk about this idea of justification. However, before we do that, I want to first look at a view that basically says we have no knowledge. That view is called skepticism.S2:What is skepticism? Skepticism is the view that says we should suspend judgment concerning knowledge claims. It basically says that we have no knowledge. There are different varieties—different kinds—of skepticism:- One kind is simply Common Sense Skepticism. This is a healthy kind of skepticism that we all tend to have when we hear stories of things out of the ordinary. When somebody claims, for example, that they saw Elvis, or that the moon landing was a hoax and didn’t really happen, or somebody claims that they’ve seen a ghost. You know, we all kind of sitback—we all kind of get skeptical about that. We wonder if that’s really true. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy sort of skepticism in this sense of the word.- However, what we want to talk about here more is a Philosophical Skepticism. Now, philosophical skepticism surrounds what’s called the skeptical thesis: no one knows anything. And there are different kinds of philosophical skepticism:o One kind is called unmitigated skepticism. Unmitigated skepticism says that the skeptical thesis is true (the thesis that no one know anything) and I know it is true.This is sometimes referred to as absolute skepticism because it’s claiming to knowabsolutely that no one knows anything at all. Or sometimes it’s referred to as global skepticism. Global skeptics deny that we know there is an external world out there, or that there are other minds out there, that we have free will, or whether there are souls or anything like that. They claim that we can’t know anything at all about the world that we experience. It’s universal doubt about everything. This is also sometimes referred to as Pyrrhonic skepticism, named after Pyrrho, who was a Greek philosopher who adopted this idea of skepticism.o Another type of skepticism is called mitigated skepticism. Mitigated skepticism says that the skeptical thesis is true (no one know anything), but it wants to hedge a little bit. It doesn’t want to claim to know that that’s true. He says, “I don’t know that this is true, but I believe that it’s true that no one knows anything.” Now mitigated skepticism sees already a problem that maybe some of you have already seen with the unmitigated skeptic. Which is, if no one knows anything, how do you know that? We’re going to talk a little bit about that when we talk about some of the problems with skepticism in a little while. But mitigated skepticism tries to escape that problem by saying, “I’m not claiming to know that Page 1 of 7PHIL 201no one knows anything; I just believe no one knows anything.” We’ll see if the mitigated skeptic is able to escape that problem as well.o A third type of skepticism is called metaphysical skepticism. The metaphysical skeptic doesn’t want to claim that no one knows anything. He wants to say, “Well,okay, there are some things I can know. But not much. And what I can know aboutthem isn’t much [basically analytical and empirical truths]. But I cannot know other things [any sort of metaphysical truths].” This is sometimes referred to also as local skepticism: I can know some things, but not other things.Let’s look at some examples of philosophers who were skeptics.S3:One example of the global skeptic would be the French philosopher René Descartes—especiallyhis famous “search for certainty.” As a matter of fact, that represents the classical ideal of how the global skeptic thinks. Now, you need to know a little bit about Descartes here. Descartes lived during a time when a lot of things were being questioned. A lot of truths that had been assumed for so many years by people were now open to doubt and questioning. And he began to question, himself. He wondered, could we find something for certain? Is there any way that we can find certain knowledge? And he was driven by this idea of finding knowledge 100% for certain. Now, Descartes wondered how one would do that. He thought the best way to find certain knowledge was to turn the question around and say, “What can I doubt? If I can doubt something, I know that I cannot have certain knowledge about that.”By doubt , here, what Descartes meant was it is possible I could be wrong about this. If it’s possible that I could be wrong about it, that means I can doubt it. And if I can doubt it, then I can’t have certain knowledge of it. So he began to start doubting all of his knowledge. As a matter of fact, he went through kind of a systematic version of doing this (we call this systematicdoubting), where he doubted all of the knowledge that he possibly had.- He started off with the knowledge he gained with his senses—what he could see, what he could hear. And he said, “Is it possible that my senses could be wrong about the information that’s communicated to me? Have I ever had that experience?” Well, we’ve all maybe had that experience at one time or another where our senses were wrong about something—where we thought we saw something, but in fact did not see it at all. One time I remember walking into my shed that I had in back of my house. Looking in the corner, I thought I saw a snake, so I ran out of the shed and came back in with a rake to grab the snake. And it turned out that it wasn’t a snake at all. It was a rope that was curledup in the corner of my shed. And simply because I came out of the bright light into the dark, I thought I saw something that, in fact, wasn’t there. My senses communicated incorrect information to me. That happens once in a while. But wait a second: if it happens once in a while, then I can’t have certain knowledge from my senses. I can doubtwhat my senses tell me. Therefore, Descartes says, I am not going to arrive at any certain