Copyright © 1999 Ron Tower
This is intended to be a brief, practical handbook for skeptics of the pyrrhonist type. Pyrrhonism was founded by the ancient Greek skeptic Pyrrho of Elis. It was a school of philosophy that was intended to provide a practical way of life as opposed to just a theoretical or academic pursuit. The most famous written expression of Pyrrhonism is Outlines of Pyrrhonism by Sextus Empiricus. This handbook can be viewed as an attempt to provide a similar outline in the language of the late twentieth century.
At some point in my life I began to notice that there were many different ways of viewing the world from the one that I had been raised in. There were different religions than mine, different philosophies, cultures, ways of life, obsessions than mine. This unsettled me and set me on a search. What was the one true way? I went through many different attempts to find that one true way. But always these attempts at certainty were eroded away by the awareness of other ways. Also, there were disturbing indications that my search for certainty might be unfounded. Is certainty really possible? I encountered various arguments, from diversity, relativity, assumption, vicious circle, and infinite regress, that called certainty into question. This situation left me in distress. Finally, I don't know exactly why, I just gave up for a moment. I just suspended judgement on absolutes and certainties and relied on everyday practices and practicalities. Unexpectedly, this gave me a kind of peace. I still had this itch for certainty, but in time it died down. I decided that suspending judgement on these absolutes might be the best way for me. I decided to just suspend judgement and rely on practical criteria.
One way of categorizing philosophies is according to how they approach the issue of the one true way, certainty, real knowledge, absolute truth. Dogmatists believe they have found this truth. Nihilists believe there is no such truth. And skeptics suspend judgement and turn to practical criteria. Dogmatists are like skeptics in the sense that they are skeptical of something, namely, views that contradict their dogma. For example, extreme rationalists may think of themselves as skeptics because they are skeptical of religious claims or fringe science, but they are not skeptics in the pyrrhonist sense. They are just counter-dogmatists. Nihilists seem like skeptics because they deny absolute truth, but they are absolutely sure that it is true that there is no absolute truth. Thus they contradict themselves. Pyrrhonist skeptics try to avoid these contradictions by just suspending judgement on the issue of absolute truth. They do no know how to find absolute truth, so they just abandon that approach and move on to practical issues.
Skeptical arguments can be general, applied to all truth claims, or specific to one particular issue. One set of general skeptical arguments was first formulated by Agrippa, an ancient Greek skeptic. Updating the terminology a little, they are the arguments from diversity, relativity, assumption, vicious circle, and infinite regress. Suppose I want to determine whether a particular claim is true. First I may notice that there are a diversity of other contradictory claims. How can I know this is the correct claim? Also, this claim may be true relative to the claimant's social position, culture, physical condition, perspective, or other factors, but it might not be true for people in other relative positions. To address this situation, I may look for a criterion to use in proving the claim. But this criterion itself needs proof. To assume it is just an assumption. But if I need to prove it, I need other criteria. But these in turn need proof leading either to a vicious circle or to an infinite regress. Based on these skeptical arguments I do not conclude that there is no truth. I just turn away from this particular game. There does not seem to be any way to win it. Something may come up in the future. Who knows? But for now I will just suspend judgement and move on to practical issues.
Sextus Empiricus enumerated several rules of life or practical criteria that the skeptic can use once he or she decides to suspend judgement on absolutes. He listed such things as laws and customs, the guidance of nature, and the practice of the various practical arts. By the guidance of nature he meant our senses and our everyday reasoning abilities. By practical arts he meant such practices as farming, building, medicine, business, and many others. Updating the terminology a little, this handbook uses language, experience, and desire as the practical criteria. It seems that language, experience, and desire are the basics that we start from in everyday life and that it is very difficult to imagine going beyond them. Other aspects of life seem to be just configurations of these basics. And it seems that we can go very far with these criteria without the need for an absolute justification because we make no absolute claims about them. We just say that we find them useful. If we did try to give them an absolute warrant, we would immediately come up against the skeptical arguments.
Even though we as skeptics suspend judgement on absolute truth, we still need a way of talking about truth issues. Sextus Empiricus elaborated various skeptical formulas. These were ways of talking when confronted with truth claims or asked to make a statement about truth. These included phrases like "perhaps or perhaps not", "I determine nothing", "I suspend judgement", "maybe or maybe not". These are ways of talking when dealing with dogmatic statements about absolute truth. But the word "truth" can be used in various ways. It can be used in everyday conversation to express agreement: "Ain't that the truth!" It can be used to ask about experiences: "Isn't it true that you saw Mister Jones enter the store at 8 AM on April 9th?" It would not be particularly useful to say, "I determine nothing" when you did see Mister Jones and you are just reporting your own personal experience. Also, it may be awkward to preface every assertion with "it appears" or "it seems to me". Pyrrhonism was criticized as impractical by people who confused the two issues of statements of dogma and reports about personal experience. The skeptic will suspend judgement on dogma and use "perhaps" or "maybe" or "I suspend jugdgment" or simply "I don't know" about such things, but for practical discussions, the skeptic can be very comfortable saying, "That is true" when reporting experiences or expressing agreement.
It can be convenient to refer to the practical criteria, language, experience, and desire, using the acronym LED. This can then be elaborated into a practical set of tools and terms to use for problem solving while suspending judgement on absolute truth, certainty, grand narratives, or other things that seem to be beyond our knowledge. Here is some jargon that may be useful.
LED. A philosophy, religion, path, conceptual tool, and method of self improvement and problem solving. An acronym standing for language, experience, and desire. Language includes natural and artificial languages and texts. It also includes nonverbal languages and texts such as dance, body language, images, movies, etc. Experience includes passive observation as well as action, inner as well as outer experience, emotions, feelings, intimations, the whole vast realm of human experience. Desire includes the whole realm of wants, needs, likes, dislikes, goals, motives, etc. LED implies that we are limited to language, experience, and desire and also that there is no one, true configuration of language, experience, and desire. Finding the one, true configuration would be just another configuration, ad infinitum.
Configuration. A particular pattern of language, experience, and desire. Life seems to be just a series of such configurations. Also, religions, cultures, societies, histories, situations, worlds, etc. seem to be such configurations.
L work. Exploration, study, and just enjoyment of the whole realm of languages and texts, looking at their diversities and similarities, relationships, etc. in order to understand how language is used, what the possibilities are, and different ways of expressing things, to find coherent theories, to stimulate the imagination, and to just enjoy the play of language, of stories and songs, of patterns and structures. Performance, creation, reading, writing, conversation, inner dialog, mining unspoken assumptions and programming.
LE work. Testing texts against experience. Finding texts to describe or express experience. Finding texts that predict experience or provide reliable maps. Correcting harmful inner commentary through experience testing. Exploring and mapping out new experiences.
E work. Developing simple mindfulness and awareness. Letting go of descriptions and desires and just experiencing the flow. Following your breath, walking, etc. without comment or desire. Enjoying the moment.
ED work. Goal directed action. Following a plan. Executing a program. Following the steps. Getting things done.
LD work. Finding ways to express the whole complexity of desire. Developing a useful nomenclature.
D work. Understanding your desires. Finding the contradictions and inconsistencies. Untangling the knot. Deciding which desires to keep or add and which to give up. Learning to desire things within your control. Values clarification. Goals clarification. Selecting higher desires and giving up lower desires. Simplifying your desires. Elaborating your desires. Refining your desires. Moderating your desires.
LED work. Putting all the other elements together. Finding a coherence of language, experience, and desire that will work for you and bring you a reasonable degree of happiness and satisfaction. Also, more narrowly, finding a configuration for a particular situation that meets requirements. Problem solving. If you are not happy or something is not working, change the experience to conform to desire, change the desire, or change how you view the problem, or some combination of these.
The term skeptic is often used today as a self-designation for a group of people who are fighting what they view as superstition, irrationality, and pseudo-science. They provide a useful service in investigating various fringe claims, but some of them also seem to be putting forward science as some sort of absolute truth and trying to limit experience to just the sort of sense experience that can be shared in public. It could be that science as a practice may choose to limits its domain to only those types of experiences, but we human beings have many experiences beyond that. There is more experience than science can pin down. It may be vague and hard to quantify, but it is still experience. From a pyrrhonist point of view, science is a useful tool for the social production of texts that have been well tested against experience and that can be used to predict future experience and to design technological artifacts, but we would have to suspend judgement on whether science is the only truth. Science is a particular set of configurations of language, experience, and desire. It is a set of social practices and texts. It may be the best tool we have for solving certain kinds of problems and should be used for that purpose, but it cannot replace religion as the source of authoritative truth.
It is common practice to appeal to some authority, whether a religious prophet, a charismatic leader, some privileged text, or science, as the final source of truth, to be accepted without question. But this begs the question of how we know that authority is an authority. By what criteria do we decide? This immediately leads into skeptical arguments. It may be practical to accept some person or some text as a useful source of suggestions, practices, or information, beyond what we know ourselves, but there is a serious problem in giving unquestioned acceptance to an authority just because they have been in some way put into that position. It can also be a practical danger as shown by suicide cults and world wars.
Postmodernism can be defined as skepticism about grand narratives or metanarratives. It also emphasizes diversity and relativity. It could be seen as skepticism using linguistic tools. Postmodernism does not necessarily have the same goals of providing a practical philosophy of life that pyrrhonist skepticism does, but it does share many of the same concerns and approaches. Postmodernism could be seen as providing a set of tools and arguments that skeptics can use out past the linguistic turn. On the other hand, PoMo can become a sort of dogmatism, so the skeptic must be a little wary.
Pragmatism can be defined as an emphasis on using practical consequences for making judgements about texts or programs. This fits in very easily with skepticism's practical criteria approach. Also, pragmatism has emphasized pluralism and diversity. This fits in well. Skepticism will just part company when pragmatists try to say that they have the correct definition of truth in opposition to the correspondence or coherence theorists. For the skeptic, truth is first and foremost a word. It can be useful to use the word in a pragmatic, correspondence, or coherence sense depending on circumstances and goals. Pragmatists have also criticized skepticism, but this has been in the "Pyrrho falling into a ditch" vein of criticism that falls away once you understand the distinction between suspending judgement on absolutes and living everyday life using practical criteria.
Pyrrhonism has been accused (like postmodernism) of implying political conservatism. This was because Sextus Empiricus suggested following the laws and customs of your country given the difficulties in coming up with an absolute standard of morality or social organization. The issue though is what "country" we are talking about. Replace "country" with "culture" or "subculture" and things open up quite a bit. You could be a member of a conservative or liberal subculture. The problem comes when we get to subcultures that require absolute submission to some dogma, such as dialectical materialism. Political movements that depend on their members towing some doctrinal line will be naturally suspicious of skeptics. But a skeptic can have their own personal reasons for wanting to promote freedom, justice, and democracy or for protecting the privileges of landlords or corporations depending on their personal history and desires. Skepticism itself does not lead to one place or the other, except that it does lead away from political subcultures that depend on dogma as opposed to just common desires.
Skepticism sees the basis of morality in desire and social membership and human experience. I try to be fair because I want to be fair, because I want to be treated fairly, because fairness is needed for my society to function, and because human history has shown that a lack of fairness leads ultimately to rebellion and disorder which I also would like to avoid. I can also choose to use terms like "good", "bad", and "right" in these contexts. Where I run into a problem as a skeptic is moral absolutes. Even though I strongly desire justice, I cannot see how to provide an absolute warrant for justice. It is just something that we humans usually want to have. It becomes more murky when we get into sexual morality. If I have entered into some social contract called heterosexual marriage that involves monogamy, I feel some obligation to live up to my contract. Also, I am motivated by love for my partner. On the other hand, I can imagine other arrangements that could also work well and other ideas about gender and sexual interaction that could be desirable and safe and stable. So I had best keep an open mind.
Skepticism has trouble with religious dogmatism, appeals to authority, exclusivism, and intolerance, but it does not necessarily have a problem with religious experience, rituals, stories, practices that accept the limits of language, experience, and desire. The problem with religion is dogma. Religious texts can be understood as art, rule books, meditation manuals, and expressions of religious experience without claiming to be the one and only truth. Religions are, as best we can tell, human creations. They are human subcultures that a skeptic may choose to belong to. But the skeptic will be chased away by dogmatism and authoritarianism. A skeptic may have certain mystical experiences, but he or she cannot tell if this indicates a transcendent being. It may be possible that a prophet has experienced God, but a skeptic cannot know without experiencing God for themselves and comparing notes. Even then the experience is likely to be highly ambiguous. Just accepting the prophet's statement on authority will not work.
Skepticism has little problem with science as the social production of texts that are well tested against publicly accessible sense experience and that are useful for tentatively predicting future publicly accessible sense experience. Science is the main source of knowledge in this sense. The problem comes in when science presumes to provide the authoritative truth about the real world. Then we fall into skeptical arguments. As long as it stays in the area of practical criteria, we love it. There also may be some benefit in expanding science into some more ambiguous areas of experience beyond publicly accessible sense experience, paranormal experiences, near death experiences, etc., as long as we don't get too carried away.
A skeptic may choose to be a humanist in the sense of wanting to promote humanist themes such as freedom, justice, democracy, tolerance, science, artistic expression, and an emphasis on the human as opposed to a supernatural that is beyond human experience. A problem comes in though in that many humanists consider some form of scientific materialism or scientific naturalism to be a required doctrine of humanism. A skeptic would tend to suspend judgement on these metaphysical doctrines while making use of science as a social practice giving useful results rather than as the only source of truth. So it may be useful for skeptics who would like to move in the humanist camp to define themselves as skeptical humanists, that is, people who like the humanistic values while suspending judgement on scientific materialism as a dogma and instead using the practical criteria approach.
It is definitely not necessary to join a broad life style group to be a skeptic. Still there may be some benefits to joining a group that promotes and supports a particular philosophy of life. Pyrrhonist societies could be formed to teach and promote pyrrhonist skepticism and to provide a social group through gatherings for lectures, discussions, mutual aid, child education, life cycle ceremonies, and seasonal celebrations. On the other hand it may be more practical to get such social interaction on the liberal fringes of some religious group or in a humanist or ethical culture group. Then again, some skeptics may not feel the need for much social support beyond simple citizenship, family and friends, and membership in special purpose groups such as political parties, issue groups, or recreational clubs.