Scepticism: A General Outline of Its Contradiction
As animal rationale, each human being is persistently struggling and tussling with the encountered reality. Using her or his reasoning, human being tries not only to understand what (s)he is thinking of, but also to apprehend of what her or his thinking is thinking of her or his thinking itself. That is epistemological landscape in which human being must be inspecting whether knowledge or science they capture is true. In other words, we can capture that there are three entities involved in an act of thinking, namely reasoning in her of his mind, the reality as the object of her or his thinking of, and the correspondence between both of them.
Several thinkers believe that the reality is the exact entity as we can seize by way of either our sense perception or our reasoning. As a result, it indubitably explicates that the correspondence between both of them does not distort the relationship of the two linked metaphysically by the correspondent. But, several thinkers do vice versa. They demonstrate that what we know is not the totally same as what the reality absolutely is. For the later, we regard them as sceptics who hesitate that human being can totally capture the manifestation of reality.
They have a grand presupposition that either the reality is not disclosed or the mind of animal rationale is not capable of grasping the whole entity of the reality they are trying to conceive. As Pyrrho one of the sceptics asserts, “We cannot comprehend the reality as it totally is” becomes the fundament of the postulation of his scepticism. If we affirm his postulation, as a matter of fact we are unavoidably snared in the pitfall of dogmatic idea. How can Pyrrho immediately take a conclusion such an immensely contrary statement to what he really believes? I mean that how we can do inference by “affirming” on the reality that we are really “negating”. That is hugely absurd.
Unluckily, Pyrrho can seriously not state that we cannot know the reality as it is on the grounds that the statement is truly based upon the reality itself. There is an its nail-eating snake in the statement. Arrogantly, by stating that postulation, Pyrrho is being cornered in a cul-de-sac in which he cannot move both forward and backward by reason of having to neglec what he has asserted. If he really had known that the reality he meant included his own statement, absolutely he would have been aware that he should have stated nothing at all.
Another sceptic in sophist era (in Greece in Hellenistic period) was Gorgias. He was an eminent sophist at the time. He understands that there is not any certainty of our knowledge and the knowledge is completely impossible to reach the reality. It is easy enough to diagnose that what he says is annulling what he wants to teach. That our knowledge is completely impossible to attain what the reality discloses presupposes that the statement is not any part of the reality, as if the statement were beyond the reality. How does it come to concluding that the statement is true, while we have negated that there is not any truth we can grasp.
Finally, Gorgias arrives at a grand narration that every person constantly says a wrong thing. This viewpoint has its rival or the opposite that comes from a plural sophist, that is Protagoras. According to him, whatsoever is said by each person is right, contrary to what Gorgias believes, because, Protagoras postulates that each human being is the standard of every single thing, so that for me that this is true is not always the same as you understand that it turns out not “this”, but “that” is true. The former, asserted by Gorgias, sounds a sort of nihilist tone, where the latter, argued by Protagoras, smells like relativist aroma.
Irrespective of what several of the sceptics declare above as I have just probed briefly, what are you thinking of your thinking linked to the reality? Are you a part of the sceptics?[]