Saturday, July 6, 2024

Rationalistic Skepticism

Everything is either true or false and it is logically impossible for this to be any other way.  Not everything is knowable, however, although something is knowable about everything--everything is governed by logical axioms and other necessities about what does and does not follow, so at least this much can be known.  Total skepticism is illegitimate because logical axioms, which would still have to be true even if they were false [1], and one's own existence [2] are absolutely certain when approached without assumptions, as are certain other things, though they are very precise truths, such as that one feels cold and perceives snow instead of knowing that there is a snowy environment outside of one's consciousness.

A great many things are still not knowable, even if they seem to be true.  Whether the uncaused cause loves me or murder is immoral are among these.  I cannot prove them because they do not follow by logical necessity from anything that is inherently true, like axioms, and it would not matter if these were things pertaining to direct sensory experiences; besides the basic existence of some sort of external world, which is far more difficult to discover than many think [3], nothing but the subjective experience of perceptions is confirmed by the senses.  Some people talk as if in not knowing something is true despite it being logically possible means they know it is false, or at least are justified in believing it is false short of absolute proof.  They might still call themselves skeptics!

Being uncertain, for legitimate or irrational reasons, if there is an external world is not the same as believing it does not exist.  A skeptic of the deep state, moreover, would not believe that there is no deep state, but that there is no way to know.  A skeptic of God's existence would not be an atheist, but an agnostic, though it is the concepts and their relationship to logical necessities rather than the words that matter.  A skeptic of morality or extraterrestrial life has to believe that they do not or cannot know if moral obligation or life outside of Earth exists.  If they believe that no alien life forms of any kind exist, then they are not a skeptic.  If they believe there is no such thing as morality, they are a moral nihilist and not a moral skeptic.

It can be objectively true that something is unknowable for a given being and thus skepticism is the only valid position for them on that point, but being skeptical about knowing if something is true is not the same as holding that it is false, and if it is ultimately true after all, its veracity is not nullified by the asinine irrationalism of the fallacious kind of "skeptic."  Knowledge cannot be had, in addition to the inherent prerequisite of inherent logical truths and at least one consciousness in existence to know them, without two things: something being true and the logical necessity which requires its truth also being knowable.  The second listed requirement for knowledge is utterly unattainable for humans in many matters.




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