Why do skeptical hypotheses undermine certainty?
Answer Skeptical Hypothesis seek to get rid of any “false certainty” which is “unwarranted” by some lack of justification. The most famous would be Descartes’ “evil deceiver” who potentially seeks to trick us. The problem is, if your criteria is “empirical justification”, by supposing an evil deceiver, one has given up the very means of detecting deception. If this is the case, the all we can know is that we have sense impressions. That they correspond to reality is utterly beyond our ability to grasp – even though it’s what we “seem” to experience daily. But of course, dare such a believer to “cause” the “sense data of stepping in front of a bus” and they’ll tell you you’re crazy. The real world exists. And just because one can posit a logical problem which is seemingly very difficult if not impossible to utterly and completely refute, that those not thereby mean that to such a logical proposition we MUST give complete logical assent. Does that help. Peace, -J.M.J.
