Skepticism Can Person Skeptical, Limits? Is Doubt?

Skepticism

Can person skeptical, limits? Is doubt? Does a person obligation ethical moral reasoning examining beliefs. Are beliefs possessed challenged shown false? How skeptic respond claim a belief doubted? Identify specific belief present response skeptic.

Philosophical skepticism: Its limits

Some philosophers have asserted that it is impossible to know anything and adopt a position of radical skepticism. "Philosophical skepticism attempts to render doubtful every member of a class of propositions that we think falls within our ken" (Klein 2011). An example of philosophical skepticism is manifested in Descartes' Meditations in which the philosopher begins by doubting everything. How does he know, Descartes asks, that the world is not a dream? It is widely accepted that persons may be subject to delusions and cannot accurately perceive reality, but what is to assure us this is not true of the entire world? "Visual experience is in fact notoriously unreliable about certain matters. When I see the mountains in the distance, I have a visual experience as of something purple. But closer inspections reveal that the mountains are really some mottled collection of brown and gray and green -- anything but purple" (Grosen n.d.). Also, I might be color blind and unable to perceive the green of the mountains accurately, as they really are. My thoughts and personal 'truth' cannot be denied, even though their status as testimony to objective reality may be in doubt.

However, eventually Descartes concludes that even if his senses may play him false at times, there must be a person engaged in the act of doubting who has a real, substantive existence, and thus he is a 'real' person, and all is not an illusion. 'I think therefore I am,' associates the existence of a thinking mind with reality, versus the body, which may be influenced by tiredness, sleep, drugs, mental incapacity, and other aspects of the material world that cloud one's judgment. From his own existence, Descartes deduces that there is a God, given that an imperfect being such as himself is still able to conceive of perfection in his or her thinking mind.

Although the mind-body dualism proposed by Descartes has been questioned, there is some truth to his proposition that certain subjective perceptions cannot be proven or disproven. The mountains look very different to the eyes of a human vs. The eye of a bee or a dog, so what is 'reality?' Whose reality is 'truth?' Later philosophers took even more radically skeptical approach, stating that it was impossible to make any generalization about the world for all time. According to David Hume: "Hume supposed, the most obvious point is a negative one: causal reasoning can never be justified rationally. In order to learn, we must suppose that our past experiences bear some relevance to present and future cases. But although we do indeed believe that the future will be like the past, the truth of that belief is not self-evident. In fact, it is always possible for nature to change, so inferences from past to future are never rationally certain" including so-called scientific laws (Kemerling 2011). While it may be true up to now that when I drop a pencil it falls to the ground, I can only hazard a guess based upon past experiences and scientific theories. Yes, it has always been true until now, but it was also true for many years that my mother was taller than me and that my grocery store only stocked two flavors of M&Ms. These postulates are no longer true. Experience does not promise consistency in the future, although we must to some extent behave as this is the case.