This guy persistently misrepresents skepticism. No radical skeptic as he conceives them could live long, since apparently they don’t believe in eating or breathing…
Radical skepticism is not the rejection of belief, it is the rejection of certainty. I believe many, many things that I am not certain of. I am willing to live without absolute certainty.
In my head and heart there are things I choose to feel certain about, even though I know that such certainty is mere faith. I have no defense or argument to justify my certainty that my wife loves me. I don’t care about empirical justification for that.
People who sneer at skeptics, I am guessing, want to be honored and respected for feeling certain about things that are not, in fact, certain. Meanwhile the power of skepticism is that it encourages me (and everyone) to let the questioning continue.
If you care about philosophy at all, then you should accept that the questioning must continue. The end of doubt is also the end of philosophy.
>Radical skepticism is not the rejection of belief, it is the rejection of certainty.
Are you sure that's true of radical skepticism? The classic example is Decartes, who doubted the reality of his own senses, of the world, and even entertained doubt of his own existence. Radical as the modifier does seem to be about extreme form.
Rejection of certainty seems much closer to a restatement of an already present status quo with respect to folk belief.
If radical means root, or pure, then I am referring to the original skepticism of Pyhrro and Sextus Empiricus.
If radical means crazy and ridiculous, then I don’t think there are any of those kind of skeptics. Not really. Because you can’t live without beliefs.
You CAN live without a commitment to certainty.
Sure and if skeptic is understood according to its Greek root skepsis aka "inquirer" then it's basically all of Greek philosophy. What matters is which combination of context and colloquial usage seems most pertinent in this context. The notion introduced in the post goes like this:
>Skepticus: Do you have a full psychological analysis of each of these concepts along with the truth conditions for their correct application? No? Well, I guess they are just made-up armchair fantasies invented by empirically-resistant philosophers.
I get that you think there's a more reasonable notion of skeptic that trades on a notion of true scotsman.. sorry, true skeptic, according to your preferred choice of emphasis, but I think the notion of "radical" skepticism as meaning the variety that emerged in what we call modern philosophy, from Descartes and Berkely counts as a fair characterization of a mainstream version of the idea.