forum for week of 2 October

There will never be a way to refute as skeptic like Argle. His argumentation is certainly a reasonable one, but one that puts humanity or human knowledge in utter despair. A way to confront such a skeptic would only be through a compromise. We can accept that all of our knowledge even our perceptual experiences and beliefs are a mere illusion, to such a degree that our reality is artificially created by a mad scientist or a demon. No matter what the cause of our reality is, we do have to accept it. We have to accept that our perceptional evidences are not to be trusted. But within this, our reality, the rules of the skeptic do not have to apply. We simply neglect any skeptical hypothesis and we will find out, as humanity did since millions of years, that knowledge certainly can be attained, and the most reliable way to do so is through perception. Within our reality, a reality we share with other human beings through experiences of shared perceptual evidences and interactions that lead to such, we are fairly comfortable in trusting our sense data and our perception although we are aware that it can misguide our beliefs sometimes. Through shared experiences we are able to avoid or limit such false beliefs by accepting a common ground for attaining knowledge, and this common ground is perception. Reality is what the majority of human beings perceive it to be. And therefore we are justified in trusting our perception (with the usual reserve).