#my take#philosophy
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Skepticism
2021-01-26 · 2 min readWhat is skepticism, is it good, and is there such a thing as too much skepticism?
Is that true? Thats the question almost all of us have thought at least once in your lives. This skepticism about ideas can help us learn more, but at some point we realize that we should just take something as given. Starting with why skepticism is useful, is how it helps us get closer to the "truth". If we wholly accept everything said and done in front of us, that would be naive and lead to many baseless ideas. Through skepticism of other people's ideas, we can test for new viewpoints, and help us realize how some of our deepest beliefs might be wrong. This happens all the time, such as flat vs round earth, slavery, and so many other revolutionary ideas born out of skepticism of the status quo. In this light, questioning our deepest help beliefs is the key to change and progress.On the other hand, we have a different class of skepticism. There are skeptics of reality itself, and whether or not what we see, touch, and smell are real. To this type of skepticism, I would say that it is unproductive. The key to effective skepticism, is that through disproving the idea, humanity could change for the better. If someone proved reality was fake through moral philosophy, then nothing would happen. Everyone would have to go through their day to day lives with nothing being different. Since nothing would actually be achieved, that would render being a skeptic about reality not useful at all, and therefore would be frivolous skepticism.This was a quick brain dump of what an idea I had to differentiate "good" vs "bad" skepticism. I love skepticism about different moral theories (woot for metaethics), but I sometimes feel like some post-modern skeptics questioning reality have no aim. See you next week!Thanks for reading! Liked the story? Click the heart
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