30.2: Skepticism

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The primary goal of epistemology is to fight back against skepticism. Skepticism is the view that we don’t know anything. Nobody wants skepticism to be true, but it turns out it’s a really difficult view to argue against. Much of what we talked about in our chapters on perception and memory help to motivate skepticism. How can you claim to know anything empirical, a skeptic will argue, if you can’t trust what you see and hear to be real? Top-down processing shows us that beliefs, desires, expectations, schemas and biases can all cause us to experience things incorrectly. Those same features impact what we remember and how we remember it. Understanding these things should cause any rational person to question the veracity of their experiences and memories. With this foot in the door, the skeptic has everything they need. If you might be wrong about some particular perception or memory, then you might be wrong about all of them – including ones you think are fundamental. If you push back, they can always refer you to false-memory syndrome. From there, we find ourselves at the radical skepticism Descartes was concerned about – we might just be dreaming about all of this (what a boring dream).