forum for week of 26 September: skepticism

It seems to me that most people cave in when presented with philosophical "globally" skeptic scenarios because we have an intuitive grasp over how Karl Popper argues we should treat unfalsifiable hypotheses. It is rather obvious that Descartes' Demon, for instance, is unfalsifiable, because it undermines the entire process of attaining knowledge by suggesting that our thoughts themselves may be manipulations of some malignant architect. We tend to accept the potential validity of such fantasies because we recognize firstly that they are difficult if not impossible to argue against, and secondly that the unfalsifiable nature of such hypotheses means that they should not be considered with nearly the same weight as a hypothesis verifiable through the scientific process. Karl Popper claims (as a previous poster notes) that an unfalsifiable belief is essentially dogmatic. In short, people do not argue with global skepticism with the same rigor afforded to other philosophical topics because it doesn't allow for much of an argument, and that the acceptance or not of such a broad, overarching, dogmatic belief has negligible consequences for our everyday lives. As an analogy, consider how many people are bothered by the idea of Bertrand Russell's teapot. Few of us would argue that we could disprove the notion that there is a celestial teapot in orbit around the sun, but few of us think that it would result in a drastic change in our everyday lives if it were to be true.