Explain and illustrate the use of scepticism as a philosophical tool
Scepticism is used as a philosophical tool, it uses the process whereby everything is doubted and questioned so that you can get to the foundations of knowledge and remove all bits of knowledge that have been shown to be false. We need foundational truths to stand on and “Neurath’s boat” explains this.
This analogy compares the search for knowledge to a crew of sailors trying to rebuild their ship in the middle of the open sea. There lack of dry dock causes them to have no secure footing to complete their repairs. Comparatively, we have no foundations on which to base our knowledge. This is why we involve the process of scepticism in philosophy because inevitably we need to get to the base of all knowledge.
The ancient Greek sceptic Pyrrho believed that knowledge was something that was clearly impossible to have. He and his school questioned everything and therefore came ultimately to the conclusion that it was theoretical to say it was possible that even they didn’t know anything. Therefore they claimed that as knowledge is an unobtainable commodity, knowledge does not matter. Since we do not know things as they are, but only as they seem to us, nothing can be called good or bad. Neither sense, perception or reason lead to truth because what we learn is related to the world of appearances. Pyrreans believe that life is simply a set of appearances so therefore we may aswell get along with it as well as you can, for appearance sake.
There are two main types of doubt, reasonable doubt and philosophical doubt. Reasonable doubt applies to practical certainties e.g. when you pour a drink into a glass you assume that the glass is going to be able ...