Thursday, October 15, 2026

My personal step outside both Academic Skepticism and Pyrrhonism

First, it is NOT that of Doug Bates, who thinks Pyrrho himself was a Buddhist in drag.

And, to the degree Pyrrhonism believed in an epoche, like modern phenomenology, no, I don't believe in that. 

And, I don't think the younger, Pyrrhonist Hume did either, and certainly not the older one.

Rather, I think his version of Pyrrhonism was based on rejecting probabilistic reasoning as untenable. Per his bon mot in later life, when questioned about how he could go to sleep every night, not knowing if the sun would rise in the morrow or not, he said, he simply went to bed.

Elsewhere, contra legends about Pyrrho's behavior, Hume gives every occasion that giving assent to regular, customary natural occurrences is fine. And, he did not "suspend judgment" on human custom, let alone reject it as if he were a good Cynic.

(Stoicism gets the matter of the epoche wrong, by not accepting that everything is sense impressions — albeit sense impressions encoded by a regularly evolved set of perceptual organs into a regularly evolved brain.)

Back to more modern times.

Hume would have rejected the Pyrrhonist emphasis on apatheia. 

My stance is in some ways related to Benson Mates. Suspension of judgment does not lead to ataxaria. That said, is it even possible to suspend judgment? Per other Pyrrhonists rejecting the tales of Pyrrho not following convention about repeating natural world matters, the master himself didn't suspend judgment on whether or not an oxcart was actually coming at him. 

Rather, going back to Hume, I think this could be seen as a subset of the passions. 

I'm not really sure what to call it, as of course, Academic Skepticism had the Sgt. Schultz approach to knowledge, period, and Pyrrhonism said, well, we can't even know that much.

Descartes has been associated with probabilistic skepticism, but I hate to use the term Cartesian skepticism, because, he wasn't really all that. First and foremost, his was a methodological skepticism that laid the foundation for modern science in some ways; he was not a philosophical skeptic.

Wiki has a short piece about probabilism. Based on it and tidbits at Stanford, I could call myself a Carneadic skeptic, I guess. That said, Carneades rejected the idea of actual probabilities.

Because I reject the precision of Bayesian probabilism (as well as rejecting Bayes' backstory of coming up with his equation to try to refute Hume — take that, Richard Carrier!), I would have to tie this with Stanford's article on imprecise probabilities. 

 

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