Date: Sat, 23 Jan 1999 10:39:24 -0500 (EST) From: Ruth Groff <rgroff-AT-yorku.ca> Subject: Re: BHA: Skeptical about skepticism An even briefer brief note: Tobin wrote: >Just a brief note. Gary wrote: > >>The answer is, I think, that scepticism >>amounts to a denial of the existence of reality, but the brutality of the >>life of the working class prevents the development of such an ideology. > >In his book *Cosmopolis* (which came out around 1990), Stephen Toulmin makes >a rather interesting argument that there are two varieties of skepticism. >... One type of skepticism, now perhaps dominant in Euroamerican culture, is >Cartesian skepticism: basically, a refusal to believe anything unless it can be >proven absolutely. This matches the skepticism to which Gary refers. I don't think that this is exactly right, and the way it is not right ends up being important. Look: skepticism -- the kind of skepticism that is a *denial* of the possibility of knowledge -- may indeed "amount," in some sense, to a denial of the existence of reality, but it ought not be conflated with such a denial. One could perfectly well insist that there *IS* a reality, that reality does indeed *exist*, but that we cannot in any meaningful sense *know* anything about it, other than that it exists. The problem with equating what we might call "ontological skepticism" and "epistemological skepticism" is that it then appears as though one's ontological commitments resolve one's epistemological quandaries. Specifically, in the case of what are in my view common mis-readings of RTS, it may come to seem as though ontological realism (1) authorizes judgmental rationality (i.e., solves the problem of skepticism expressed as relativism [and here I mean regular old relativism relativism, not Bhaskar's neologistic use of `epistemologcial relativism']); and/or (2) implies positivism and/or absolutism about knowledge. Neither of these positions in fact *follow* from ontological realism, although they may indeed *coincide* with ontological realism. Just as, inversely, skepticism about knowledge does not *imply* skepticism about being, though they may coincide in a particular version of skepticism (viz., one in which knowledge is disallowed because there is thought to be nothing to know). R. --- from list bhaskar-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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