{"id":5738,"date":"2017-02-26T13:40:11","date_gmt":"2017-02-26T13:40:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/02\/26\/is-pyrrhonism-a-doctrine\/"},"modified":"2017-02-26T13:40:11","modified_gmt":"2017-02-26T13:40:11","slug":"is-pyrrhonism-a-doctrine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2017\/02\/26\/is-pyrrhonism-a-doctrine\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Pyrrhonism a Doctrine? Can One Live Without Beliefs?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sextus<\/a>"Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine, but a way of intellectual life, a way of thinking, talking, and acting." (Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way<\/em>, Oxford UP 1996, p. 66) Mates is a careful writer and his meaning is clear: Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine at all<\/em>. It involves no beliefs or teachings or doctrines or dogmas. There is no Skeptic credo<\/em>. The whole point of it is to live without beliefs, belieflessly, adoxastos<\/em>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nice work if you can get it. In these days of bitter controversy and unremitting acrimony, would it not be great to be able to float through life belieflessly?  <\/span><\/p>\n

Before asking whether it is possible to live without beliefs, we should consider why a life without beliefs might be thought to be desirable. But before that we need to understand what the Pyrrhonian skeptic means by 'belief.'<\/span><\/p>\n

What is belief?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

According to Mates, and I follow him on this, belief is "a firmly maintained affirmative attitude toward a proposition purporting to describe some feature of the external world . . . ." (SW, 60)  To illustrate, suppose our skeptic tastes some honey. Speaking with the vulgar, he may say 'This honey is sweet.' But he will think with the learned and intend 'This honey is sweet' as elliptical for 'It seems to me at present that this honey is sweet.' Thus he does not go beyond the sensory appearances, nor does he allow himself to fall into dispute with a cantankerous table mate who, tasting honey from the same jar, claims that the honey is not<\/em> sweet.  There is nothing to dispute because there is no one proposition that the skeptic affirms and his table mate denies.<\/span><\/p>\n

Sticking to the sensory seeming, our skeptic refuses to accept or affirm the proposition that the honey is<\/em> sweet, a proposition that purports to describe a feature of the external world. Of course, he does not reject or deny this proposition ether. He takes no stand on its truth or falsity. He suspends judgment.  He may even take a further step and doubt whether there is any proposition to take a stand on.  He may question whether  the sentence<\/em> 'This honey is sweet,' taken at face value and not as elliptical for the modalized sentence above, expresses any proposition<\/em>.  He would then not be suspending judgment as to the truth-value of a proposition, but suspending judgment on the question whether a declarative sentence<\/em> the constituent words of which possess meaning also possesses a unitary propositional sense or meaning capable of attracting a truth-value. More on this later, perhaps, in a subsequent entry.<\/span><\/p>\n

As for 'external world,' I take it to refer not only to sense objects as they are in themselves, if there are any, but to any and all objects and state of affairs whose nature and existence are independent of us, whether physical or not. On this use of 'external world,' God and Fregean propositions are in the external world.  <\/span><\/p>\n

Given this understanding of 'belief,' why should living without beliefs be thought to be a good thing? <\/span><\/p>\n

The beliefless life as the happy life<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

To put it briefly, the ancient skeptic thinks that belieflessness is the way to happiness. But what is required for happiness? According to the luminaries of late antiquity, ataraxia<\/em> is at the core of happiness or well-being as a necessary component thereof.<\/span><\/p>\n

Ataraxia<\/em> is a concept central to the Skeptics, Stoics, and Epicureans. My concern at the moment is solely with the skeptics, and their main man, Sextus Empiricus.  Ataraxia<\/em> (from Gr. a<\/em> (not) and taraktos<\/em> (disturbed)) refers to unperturbedness, freedom from emotional and intellectual disturbance,  tranquillitas animi<\/em>, tranquillity of soul. Thus Sextus (circa 200 anno domini<\/em>) tells us in his Outlines of Pyrrhonism<\/strong>, Book One, Chapter Six, that  "Scepticism has its arche<\/em>, its inception and cause, in the hope of attaining ataraxia<\/em>, mental tranquillity." (Hallie, p. 35)<\/span><\/p>\n

The skeptic's goal is not truth, but eudaimonia<\/em> (happiness or well-being) by way of ataraxia<\/em> (tranquillity of mind). The central means to ataraxia<\/em> and happiness is the withholding of assent from all contents of assertion or belief, including such mundane contents as that honey is sweet, but especially those that transcend the mundane and give rise to contention and bitter strife. To use some contemporary examples, beliefs about abortion, gun control, capital punishment, wealth redistribution, illegal immigration, foreign policy, the nature and existence of God etc. lead to strife and in extreme cases bloodshed. Given the difficulty and seeming irresolvability of the issues, the skeptic enjoins the withholding of assent for the sake of ataraxia<\/em>. The latter is supposed to supervene upon the practice of epoch\u00e9, the practice of withholding assent.<\/span><\/p>\n

A quick illustration. Suppose a political conservative maintains the thesis T that capital punishment is morally justified in some cases, while his liberal opponent maintains the opposite (the contradictory proposition, ~T): in no case is capital punishment morally justified. The propositions maintained cannot both be true given the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC).  Each side is passionately convinced of the truth of his thesis and each side marshals arguments in support of it.  But the best arguments on either side 'cancel out.' Or so the skeptic claims. Upon careful examination of the arguments for and against T, he finds no compelling reason to take one side over the other.  This puts him in a state of doubt with respect to T and its negation.  He then takes a further step: he suspends judgment about T.  This further step is not logically required because one who has no compelling reason to accept one or the other of a pair of contradictory propositions might decide to accept one or the other for no reason at all, or for prudential reasons. Let's think about this.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is suspension of judgment rationally motivated by lack of demonstrative evidence?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

The following is a non sequitur<\/em>:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

1) There is no compelling reason to accept either T or its negation ~T. Therefore:<\/span><\/p>\n

2) One ought to suspend judgment by withholding assent from both T and ~T.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The inference is invalid, moving as it does from 'is' to 'ought.'  Why must I suspend judgment when I can plump for one or the other of the contradictories? An auxiliary premise, however, will validate the inference:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

0) One must withhold assent from any proposition for which the evidence is not demonstrative\/compelling.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

In the presence of (0), the inference from (1) to (2) goes through.<\/span><\/p>\n

Is the principle of intellectual integrity a belief?<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Call (0) the principle of intellectual integrity.  It seems that this principle is a doxastic commitment of the skeptic. In plain English, it seems that this is a belief<\/em> of his. But then he has beliefs after all, which gives the lie to his claim to live adoxastos<\/em>, belieflessly. Our skeptic obviously needs the principle of intellectual integrity, and I don't think I am dogmatizing if I call it a belief.<\/span><\/p>\n

We agreed with Mates that, for a skeptic, a belief is " "a firmly maintained affirmative attitude toward a proposition purporting to describe some feature of the external world . . . ." (SW, 60)  It seems obvious that (0) is a proposition and that the skeptic has an affirmative attitude toward it. That is,  he accepts or affirms it. He believes it.  You might object that this proposition does not describe anything. But I think it does. It describes an ideal of human behavior.  It describes what a person of intellectual integrity is like. Such a person withholds assent to the non-evident.  He doesn't dogmatize in the manner of the Platonist or the Stoic or the Christian.<\/span><\/p>\n

Our Pyrrhonian skeptic, then, firmly maintains, over time, an affirmative attitude toward a proposition that describes something transcendent of his fleeting sensory states, namely, the person of intellectual integrity, the man who apportions his assent to the evidence and does not irresponsibly affirm beyond the evidence.  With respect to (0), the Pyrrhonian is not merely saying how things seem to him at present.  He is holding before us an ideal of the sage or wise man that is external to our fleeting mental states.<\/span><\/p>\n

After all, a way of life cannot be founded upon a subjective seeming that might be overturned tomorrow by a contrary seeming. The skeptic's commitment to his way of life transcends the moment and what seems to him to be the case in the moment.<\/span><\/p>\n

Interim conclusion<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

Pyrrhonism, while obviously not merely a doctrine, rests on doctrines. Others of these I will discuss later. So it is false to say that Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine.  It is also false that we can live without beliefs. If anyone can, it is the Pyrrhonist. But we have just seen that he needs beliefs too.<\/span><\/p>\n

Since it is not possible to live without beliefs, it cannot be desirable to live without beliefs. One cannot rationally desire the impossible.<\/span> <\/span><\/p>\n

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"Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine, but a way of intellectual life, a way of thinking, talking, and acting." (Benson Mates, The Skeptic Way, Oxford UP 1996, p. 66) Mates is a careful writer and his meaning is clear: Pyrrhonism is not a doctrine at all. It involves no beliefs or teachings or doctrines or dogmas. … Continue reading “Is Pyrrhonism a Doctrine? Can One Live Without Beliefs?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,372],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ancient-skepticism","category-belief"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5738"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5738\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}