Hume’s Moderate Skepticism Essay Example

capacity to be answered in a way that would provide some belief, some knowledge as a result. The most important point, the main objective here is –or at least should be –for knowledge to be attainable. Thus, a good questioner is someone who asks the good question, with the intention of producing something at the end and with the realization that there is no first principle of which the rest can be deduced.

Hume’s suggestion at this point is to begin with clear and self-evident principles, to move forward cautiously and to check the conclusions frequently and carefully examine their consequences. That is a methodological reasoning, and a quite logical one for it does not deny the reliability of anything that appears on its way, and if there is a clear principle to begin with, it may lead to something in the end that is quite convincing. On the other hand, what extreme skeptics does generally is to try and develop arguments which cannot be – and more importantly which never have the intention to be – useful to mankind.

That’s why I think what Hume finds most problematic about extreme skepticism is its attitude towards inquiry. He asserts that if the skeptics’ principles were to be accepted then all life would cease to exist. Nonetheless, for we, and also the skeptics, are still alive – and not by chance or force, by “willing” to stay alive – then there is no reason to go on with such argumentation, or we should accept the defeat and impossibility right away and die.

For that is not the case, Hume believes that the skeptical

principles of such thinkers would vanish when confronted by real things that our beliefs and emotions are addressed to. That shows how he sees the extreme skeptics’ way of questioning: useless and insincere. What Hume believes to be a useful kind is a mitigated skepticism, that is a kind of skepticism but modified a little by common sense and reflection. What Hume calls a mitigated skepticism necessitates the admission of the features of the nature of human understanding, being more careful and open to antagonists, being less prejudiced and dogmatic.

With such an attitude and the awareness of the limitations of possible human knowledge, argumentations would be more fruitful and realistic. We all know that generally the way a person – if they never thought through their ways of interpreting things – considers reality, sensation and such things is wrong and lacking, and a good questioner should be going after such mistakes. That is to say, a good questioner should come to think of the real nature of sensation and our relations with objects; the way we see and perceive the objects and how our minds work on the outside world.

There are things which we can be sure of –that I will mention shortly–, and also there are things; even though we can never be sure about the reality of the thing, that does not necessitate denying the existence of it altogether. Nonetheless, this does not necessarily mean that anything we think we know is wrong and untrustworthy, we can never be sure of nothing for even sensation is misleading in some sense. This view, other than Hume’s skepticism concerning how philosophy

should be done, is more related to what is called “moderate skepticism”.

Here what Hume means is, with the realization of the limits of human acknowledgement and cognitive capabilities, what should humans go for should be things that they can comprehend with such limitations they have. Here what he asserts is that the only grounds to be sought for knowledge are quantity and number for they do not have presuppositions about the world, dependent on experiential reasoning – we know Hume believes that the only thing one can look for an answer to questions of facts is experience – and rests only on the relations of ideas.

The inquiry should be run considering these limitations and thus, going on only through the way on which all the cognitive content is clear and sharp. At the end of the 3rd part of the 12th section of “Enquiry concerning human understanding”, Hume says that if any book –anything we come across–, does not contain any abstract reasoning about quantity and number, or any experiential reasoning about matters of fact and existence, then its worth is zero, it is all about sophistry and illusion.

That is his extent of skepticism. Nothing is reliable in a universe –in the sense of “a totality” – where the qualities mentioned above are not the constituents. Hume believes in a set of occurrences, whereas extreme skeptics deny any possibility of knowledge altogether. That is the way Hume finds a mitigated skepticism more effective than an extreme one. With this set of occurrences, mathematics, numbers and quantity it is possible to reach and therefore to seek knowledge.