forum for week of 26 September: skepticism

Simply put, I believe that when people think about philosophical skepticism they indeed recognize a (possible) truth in it. However, I also believe most people don't care enough about its importance since it normally has little impact on our daily life. For sure you could accept this truth, realize you cannot know anything for sure and thus stop believing in anything, but how would your life then look like? You would have to question everything at every given time, which seems rather impossible. Instead, people would rather accept it as a possibility, yet one not significant enough to actually influence their way of life. It's impractical to let it lead your life.

I'd like to add something to the comment above about Karl Popper's Falsificationism. Popper developed this theory in response to his problem of demarcation; he was looking for a criterion to distinguish general "real" science from "fake" pseudoscience. His theory is a response to confirmationism; a theory which states that we can justify scientific theories and beliefs through observations, thus confirming them. Popper argued that this is impossible, you cannot start making (useful) observations without having some expectations already in place. Instead, he argued, we believe in theories not because they are confirmed but because they are not yet falsified. We can never exclusively conclude that a theory is true, but we can conclude that a theory is false. As long as a theory has not yet been refuted, we are justified in believing it.

This argument too can be challenged. Can we really ever conclusively disprove a theory?

To get back to the point, debating over whether or not there is anything we can really know for sure is for most people not going to lead anywhere. Philosophers have been debating over this issue for a long time and the problem is that we can never really know if any of their theories is true or not, they can never be confirmed because any method to confirm such a theory is in itself subject to skepticism. Many theories will sound plausible but have little value to make life-changing decisions accordingly.