Pyrrhonism

Sextus describes Pyrrhonian skepticism's relationship with other ancient philosophers in his opening of Outlines of Pyrrhonism:

When people search for something, the likely outcome is that either they find it or, not finding it, they accept that it cannot be found, or they continue to search. So also in the case of what is sought in philosophy, I think, some people have claimed to have found the truth, others have asserted that it cannot be apprehended, and others are still searching. Those who think that they have found it are the Dogmatists, properly so called -- for example, the followers of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics, and certain others. The followers of Clitomachus and Carneades, as well as other Academics, have asserted that it cannot be apprehended. The skeptikoi continues to search.

The admission of learned ignorance of Pyrrhoism is not the end of the journey, but rather a first step in honest inquiries of the truth. It is a dishonest peace of mind if it was not continually challenged and nourished by the search for truth.

There are two primary goals of classical skepticism: truth and peace of mind. True knowledge is the theoretical end of skepticism, and peace of mind is the practical end. Some Pyrrhoneans prefer failure (continued skepticism) to success (dogmaticism) in their inquiries, at least when peace of mind followed the confession of ignorance. Others admitted to a willingness to assent to a good argument when they saw one. Nescio is of the second type and Nesciam is of the first type.

Sextus also claims a third goal of skepticism: to cure dogmatists of their rashness and self-conceit. Skeptics seek this end because the skeptic is "a lover of his kind".

There has been the misconception that Pyrrho was an academic skeptic - doubting that knowledge can exist at all. This is incorrect. There are several branches of skepticism, Pyrrhonism being one of them. In Pyrrhonisim it is believed that absolute and universal knowledge can and does exist. The fact that two philosophers disagree about its nature does not mean that it is not knowable.

Please read the the description of Pyrrhonism by Sextus again:

... some people have claimed to have found the truth, others have asserted that it cannot be apprehended, and others are still searching.

This is a key point. The academic skeptic is of the second group, the Pyrrhonian skeptic is of the last group.

Sextus then goes on to give the names of the various schools of philosophy and their position on knowledge.

Those who think that they have found it are the Dogmatists, properly so called -- for example, the followers of Aristotle and Epicurus, the Stoics, and certain others. The followers of Clitomachus and Carneades, as well as other Academics, have asserted that it cannot be apprehended. The skeptikoi continues to search.

If one was to compare skepticism with with religious faith, the Dogmatists would be those with undeniable faith in a diety. Granted, each group has a different deity or truth sought for, but faith remains the same. Great debates have been waged over who is right.

The Academics would be atheists - no truth is knowable, no higher power exists. With as with atheists, there are a number of proofs (though these much more interesting) about the non-existence of the subject at hand.

The followers of Pyrrhonism are a different sort of skeptic than the academics and could best be described as agnostics when it comes to the matter of knowledge. Knowledge does exist, and certain knowledge too. Just because others can't make up their mind about what that knowledge is, or which one is correct does not mean it does not exist. Admitting that one doesn't know is not the end of the search, but rather the start.

The admission of lack of knowledge is not a 'cannot be known' but rather 'I do not know now'. The pursuit of truth does not and cannot end with 'it is impossible to know'.

Contextual Note: This node is mainly comprised of the body of a paper I wrote for a graduate course on skepticism at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Its primary focus is a discussion of whether or not Pyrrhonism is a practical philosophy, and specifically how Myles Burnyeat's (a respected modern scholar of skepticism) investigation of that question is laid out. I have reformatted the text to remove parenthetical references, and made it slightly more readable in node format.

If you wish to cite this piece in a formal paper and want to give me credit, feel free to send me a /msg.

Introduction

"The argument that the Pyrrhonist cannot live his skepticism is not a modern invention", writes Alan Bailey, author of Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrhonian Scepticism. "This type of argument goes back at least as far Aristotle", and it was the principle criticism levied against the ancient Pyrrhonists by "the dogmatic philosophers" according to the account of Diogenes Laertius. This position "that the Sceptics do away with life itself, in that they reject all that life consists in...[persists] after nearly five centuries of intense philosophical controversy." Myles Burnyeat, in Can the Skeptic Live His Skepticism, focuses on David Hume's rendition of this tenacious challenge to Pyrrhonism: "a Pyrrhonian cannot expect, that his philosophy will have any constant influence on the mind: or if it had, that its influence would be beneficial to society. On the other hand, he must acknowledge, if he will acknowledge anything, that all human life must perish, were his principles universally and steadily to prevail."

Burnyeat's interpretation of the skeptic's position is based on the depiction of the Pyrrhonism which Sextus laid out in Outlines of Skepticism. Burnyeat is sympathetic to the claim that the Pyrrhonist can lead his life while remaining true to his skepticism. However, his final analysis is that "Hume and the ancient critics were right" in judging Pyrrhonism as an unworkable sort of life for man. I argue that Burnyeat's conclusion that the skeptic's "supposed life without belief is not...a possible life" deserves at the least a more in-depth explanation than that which Burnyeat gives it. I am especially interested in the reference to the passage in Wittgenstein|Wittgenstein's] Philosophical Investigations that he cites in his footnotes as "instructive" in understand why the skeptic's life is supposedly impossibly. Burnyeat's case rests on the assertion that the skeptic cannot consistently say, "it appears that p is true, but I do not believe that p". However, according to his interpretation, the skeptic needs to be able to say something like this if he is going to defend his claim that he makes no epistemic statements about the world, but instead only ppearance-statements. I wish to investigate how one could in fact make such a claim rationally, and whether the sort of self-detachment which Wittgenstein seemingly dismisses could in fact be possible for the skeptic. Burnyeat's assertion that this is simply not attainable needs some defense, I think, if it is to be the reason why we should condemn the skeptical project as being infeasible.

Before coming to that passage, however, I want to look at Burnyeat lays out the skeptic's system of thought. His view is that Pyrrhonism represents "the only serious attempt in Western thought to carry skepticism to its furthest limits and to live by the result." With this statement in mind, the first part of this examination is a look at the account of skepticism which Burnyeat gives. In the second part, I turn my attention to the reasons for which he finds skepticism to be a nonviable system, and attempt to sketch out a possible interpretation of the skeptic's life which could be compatible with making statements such as, "It seems to me that my ego believes this, but it isn't true", which I take to be equivalent to "p, but I do not believe that p". I suggest that this interpretation, based on an attempt to make plausible the state of affairs Wittgenstein describes in which one takes notice of oneself as others do, could provide the groundwork for an argument proving the possibility of a practical life lived as a skeptic.

Burnyeat's Presentation of Sextus' Skepticism

Burnyeat begins by noting a common mistake in contemporary discussions of skepticism: the view that the skeptic's target is knowledge, rather than belief. "There are few interesting problems got at [by questioning the adequacy of the grounds on which we ordinarily claim to know about the external world] which are not problems for reasonable belief as well as for knowledge...the more serious the inadequacy exposed for a knowledge claim, the less reasonable it becomes to base belief on such grounds." He points out that "it takes rather special circumstances" to assent to a belief about something in the face of "a clear realization that it is unfounded." Hume, Burnyeat points out, realized this; his claim "is a double one: first, that what the skeptic invalidates when his arguments are successful...'is nothing less than reason and belief'; second, that what makes it impossible to sustain a radical skepticism in the ordinary business of life is that 'mankind...must act and reason and believe'." This focus on belief, however, is precisely what Sextus addresses; it is "out of [a] continuing resignation of belief", according to the Outlines, "that the skeptic proposes to make a way of life." Since Sextus does claim to make life with no belief possible, Burnyeat reasons, Hume cannot get away with assuming without argument that it is impossible to live thusly.

Hume, it seems, is basing his argument that skepticism is not successful on the dogmatic assertion that we simply cannot give up our reasons and beliefs -- the "contention that our nature constrains us to make inferences and hold beliefs which cannot be rationally defended against skeptical objections." If skepticism were successful, the argument continues, our reasons for holding beliefs and making inferences would be invalidated, and were that the case, we would abandon them. However, since we do not give up our beliefs and inferences ("he has particularly in mind the propensity for belief in external bodies and for causal inference", according to Burnyeat), skepticism is not successful.

The problem with this argument is with the initial assertion that we cannot live without reason and belief. Sextus states that the skeptic "can, should, and does" give up his reasons and beliefs, and offers a defense in the form of the Pyrrhonism, whereas Hume does not. Burnyeat's interest is therefore in "what the life without belief is really meant to be." He begins, "as the skeptic himself begins, with the arguments." Sextus' portrayal of skepticism is as a "highly developed practice or argument, formalized according to a number of modes or patterns of arguments", that supposedly end in epoche, or the suspension of judgment and belief. The essence of Sextus' arguments is the "capacity for bringing into opposition, in any way whatever, things that appear and things that are thought, so that, owing to the equal strength of the opposed items and rival claims, we come first to suspend judgment and after that to ataraxia (tranquility), freedom from disturbance". The skeptic will supposedly come to see over a period of time that for any given matter, he cannot discern what is actually true, because "things appear differently to different people according to one or another of a variety of circumstances" -- circumstances which Sextus presents as the Ten Modes of Aenesidemus. Aware that "conflicting appearances cannot be equally true, equally real", the skeptic is forced to suspend judgment, as he can neither accept all of the appearances before him (because they conflict), nor satisfactorily choose one over the other (as he has no criterion by which to make such a decision). Upon doing so, he is surprised to find himself at peace -- in giving up his struggle to choose one appearance over the other, he has brought himself to a state of contentment.

Interestingly, there seems to be an assumption of dualism here: there is subjective appearance, and there is objective truth. Although the skeptic argues that we cannot formulate a satisfactory intellectual criterion of truth by which to tell the two apart, if we could, we would presumably find that one experience was true, and one was not. As Burnyeat points out in Idealism and Greek Philosophy: What Descartes Saw and Berkeley Missed, however, this is not "an explicitly philosophical thesis" made by the skeptic. This temptation to read the Pyrrhonism as possessing the sort of hyperbolic doubt common to a skeptical philosopher living in a post-Cartesian world must be resisted; there is no reason to believe that the Pyrrhonist has the doubt of "all things" that Descartes claims they possessed in the first Meditation. The lack of a subjective/objective split in Pyrrhonist doubt would mean that there is no evidence supporting "an epistemic reading of the skeptic's appearance-statements." Such a limitation on the scope of Pyrrhonist doubt becomes important in Burnyeat's discussion of assent, and we shall examine it more thoroughly when we arrive there.

As mentioned above, the end result of epoche is supposed to be ataraxia, which is "among other things a matter of not worrying about truth and falsity any more." If epoche is "suspending belief about real existence as contrasted with appearance", a notion critically important to the skeptical argument, "that will amount to suspending all belief, since belief is the accepting of something as true." The expansion of epoche into a suspension of all belief has its roots in the Greek definition of dogma: "dogma originally means simply 'belief' -- as assent to something non-evident, that is, to something not given in appearance." Given that the skeptic is rejecting all dogmatic statements, all statements that concern belief are also to be considered unreasonable, especially since all belief concerns real existence rather mere appearance.

If the skeptic is ignorant of the "real nature" of things, however, we are left with an important question: how can he live his life? When belief is connected to real existence, he is seemingly deprived of a criterion for action as well as one for truth. This question, says Burnyeat, can be traced back to Aenesidemus, who preceded Sextus by two hundred years or so. Aenesidemus was concerned with the establishment of a skeptical system as well, and he "set out to classify the various modes or ways in which things give rise to belief or persuasion", and then subsequently tried to show that "each of these modes produces conflicting beliefs of equal persuasiveness, and is therefore not to be relied upon to put us in touch with the truth."

Parallel to his work on the ten modes was his polemic against the the Academic (or more specifically, Carneades') three-level scheme for the conduct of life. The Academic's criterion rested on the notion of to pithanon -- that which is persuasive, or convincing. Carneades' second criterion was that an impression not only be pithane (convincing), but that it not be "reversed by any of the associated impressions]." The problem with such a criterion, Burnyeat notes, is that it was fallible, as it "allowed that in some instances we would be persuaded of something which was actually false."

Aenesidemus' own position was that "one should not take anything to be true, and he had arguments to show that, in fact, nothing is true." He defended the model of Pyrrho, and attempted to disprove "the idea that a philosophy based on suspending belief would make Pyrrho behave without foresight." Appearance plays an important role in the Pyrrhonist's life, both as Aenesidemus and Sextus depict it. Although, as Sextus writes, "...we shall not be able to decide between our own appearances, and those of other animals", "...the way to live without belief, without softening the skeptical epoche, is by keeping to appearances." Burnyeat thus underscores a point he has raised previously: most skeptical systems fall short of the complete renouncement of all belief that Sextus as espouses, instead focusing their skepticism on knowledge (or merely some sorts of belief), rather than belief itself. In making the criterion for the skeptical life appearance, however, Sextus purports to remove belief from Pyrrhonism while still presenting it as a way to live. "It is a pleasing thought that not only does Sextus anticipate Hume's objection, but also...it was done in part precisely to meet that objection more effectively" than had been done before.

So what is this life by appearances supposed to be? Sextus outlines a "fourfold scheme" by which he will live, designed to allow him to be active "under four main heads":

1. The guidance of nature - "...the skeptic is guided by the natural human capacity for percipience and thought, he uses his senses and exercises his mental faculties..."
2. The constraint of bodily drives - "...hunger leads him to food, thirst to drink, and Sextus agrees with Hume that you cannot dispel by argument attitudes the causal origin of which has nothing to do with reason and belief...."
3. The tradition of laws and customs - "...the skeptic keeps the rules and observes in the conduct of life the pieties of his society..."; "...not attitudes, but practices...are what the skeptic accepts..."
4. Instruction in the arts - "...he practices an art or profession, in Sextus' own case, medicine, so that he has something to do..."

It is worth nothing that Sextus' code exemplifies the limitation on Pyrrhonian doubt (that is, that Pyrrhonian doubt is not the sort of hyperbolic Cartesian doubt that it might seem to be) that was discussed earlier. The fact that the Pyrrhonist practices an "art or profession" indicates that the skeptic believes that one can do something; there is surely an implicit acceptance of the existence of an objective world here. It is not a belief in that world, as Burnyeat points out, but rather an indication that explicitly questioning whether anything existed, even the skeptic himself, did not occur to the ancient Greeks. Unlike Descartes, the Pyrrhonian skeptic does not extend his doubt so far as to question whether or not he can act at all, which would indeed be a paralyzing degree of doubt. His motivation for "something to do" is founded in an world-view in which his will can be fulfilled.

Burnyeat also questions just what the skeptic is "contrasting when he sets appearance against real existence." If he is only interested in sense-appearance, his mental life will be restricted, as he will presumably be unable to address philosophical propositions in a skeptical manner. A closer investigation of Sextus' definition of "skepticism as a capacity for bringing into opposition things that appear and things that are thought", however, reveals that "he does not always or even usually mean sensibles alone when he speaks of what appears." Sextus is likely referring to the "impression of the thing that appears" when he speaks of "what appears"; since there are impressions in his lexicon which could not possibly be sense impressions, such as the impression that not all impressions are true, his talk of appearances cannot be limited only to what is sensible. Because the skeptic has in mind non-sensory impressions when he speaks of appearances, he must be careful to relegate "skeptic formulae such as 'I determine nothing' and 'No more this than that'" to the status of being 'mere records of appearance'". How he is supposed to do this poses a considerable problem for the skeptic, and it is at the center of Burnyeat's criticism of Pyrrhonism.

Sextus speaks of things appearing both as objects of sense and as objects of thought, "and sometimes he goes so far as to speak of things appearing to reason or thought." Burnyeat notes that the same language and approach to dealing with how something appears to the senses is equally useful for reporting on non-sensory subjects. The skeptic is not restricted from forming conceptions -- for example, defining a man as a "featherless two-footed animal with broad nails and a capacity for political science" -- so long as he only bases such conceptions on "things that appear closely to reason itself", and as long as he does not commit himself to a claim about the reality of the things he conceives of. An important thing to note here is that the skeptic "divides questions into questions about how something appears and how it really and truly is, and both types of question may be asked about anything whatever." He does not, according to Burnyeat, "divide the world into appearances and realities so that one could ask of this or that whether it belongs to the category of appearance or the category of reality." By speaking of things appearing to both thought and to sense in the same way, the Pyrrhonist widens the scope of his skepticism.

What is the way that something appears to the skeptic? It is an impression he has, and as such is azetetos, or "not subject to inquiry." Moreover, when a thing appears in a certain light to him such that it might seem especially believable, it no more inclines him to actually believe that it is as it appears than would the fact of its so appearing to someone else. This conception of be affected by an appearance in the same way that he would be affected by another person's having it is an important one to bear in mind -- as Burnyeat continues, "...[this] withdrawal from truth and real existence becomes, in a certain sense, a detachment from oneself." Tied into this notion of supposed detachment is "the difficult concept of assent and the will", crucial to understanding "skepticism as a philosophy of life."

If the skeptic is going to claim to live without beliefs and act on mere appearance, there must be a distinction between him basing his actions on what appears and his believing that what appears is actually true. That distinction, according to Burnyeat, is the distinction between belief and mere assent. "Assent", he writes, "is a wider notion that belief." His epoche is taken to be a withholding of assent to anything that is not evident, but "there are things he assents to: ta phainomena", or anything that does appear. Sextus clarifies assent is to be understood as "assent to something insofar as it appears, or to the state/impression which its appearing to us, but the expression of this assent is propositional: e.g., 'Honey appears sweet'." But how does this sort of assent come to be?

The picture Burnyeat portrays is as follows: "things that appear lead us to assent abolutetos, without our willing it, in accordance with the impression they affect us with...when the skeptic assents, it is because he experiences two kinds of constraint." The first brand of constraint is to what Burnyeat terms kata phantasian katenagkasmena pate, or states of affairs with which the skeptic is "forcibly affected in accordance with an to assent...." When we taste honey and assent to the propositional statement, "honey appears sweet", we do so "because we are sweetened perceptually". This rather thorny notion of being affected perceptually seems to mean that "we have a perceptual experience featuring the character of sweetness", and that in assenting to it, we are merely acknowledging this active compulsion to assent coming from what is happening to us. "The impression is just the way something appears to one, and assent to it is just acknowledging that this is indeed how the thing appears to one at the moment."

Bailey notes an interesting point: Burnyeat's position that truth is an objective thing, "a matter of correspondence with external reality." The effect that this seemingly implicit dualist conception of the world is significant. 'The fact that statements about appearance do not say anything about how things stand objectively would have led the Greeks to conclude that ]such] statements are incapable of being either true or false...from this viewpoint, then, the Pyrrhonist is in a position to accept a great many claims about appearances without giving way to belief." Being able to assent in this way also means that he can do what appears best to him -- live by appearance -- without "needing to ascribe to...any beliefs whatsoever." The importance of the Pyrrhonist's not explicitly dividing his world into subjective/objective terms is that by doing so he does not have to make any claim about objective truth by means of his subjective experience. For the Greek skeptic, assenting to an impression, where an impression is understood to be a strictly subjective experience, does not necessarily have anything to do with truth or falsity, although our temptation as post-Cartesian thinkers might be to say that it would.

This conception of assent is not to be limited to objects of the sensory world. When the skeptic makes a philosophical statement, such as "I determine nothing", there is a pathos, a passivity, something the skeptic is affected with, attached to his statements. "As [Sextus] explains, when the skeptic says, 'I determine nothing', what he is saying should be taken to mean, 'I am now affected...in such a way as to not affirm or deny dogmatically any of the matters under inquiry'." The question arises, however: what is the affecting agent in the skeptic's mind, some thing parallel to the impressor in sensory impressions? According to Burnyeat, is his the skeptic's own arguments, presumably where he is engaged in the revelation of equally strong views in opposition with each other, that acts as the pathos, "just as much as a sense impression is forced upon him by an encounter with some sensible object and then forcibly engages his assent."

The result of bringing these skeptical arguments to bear on his life, according to Burnyeat, is that the skeptic brings himself into a sort of stalemate, the condition he terms ataraxia. But the skeptic claims that he is not brought into total lethargy, as Hume would assert he must be, precisely because he has access to his fourfold schema. "Of course [he] will have his preconceptions, the result of being brought up in certain forms of life, and these will prompt him to act in one way or the other. But the point is that he does not identify with the values involved. He notes that they have left him with inclinations to pursue some things and avoid others, but he does not believe there is any reason to prefer the things he pursues over those that he avoids."

It seems at first blush that the fact that the skeptic acts based on anything at all -- even "inclinations" -- serve as reasons for the pursuit of some things. Is not his reason that very inclination? Were the skeptic to truly hold the conviction that neither option in any given choice was really better, would he not be without inclination backing up his choice of one? Burnyeat argues that the skeptic's inclinations are not in the same class as voluntary choice -- moreover, the involuntary choice he does have is something like rather like tossing a coin, where "[the skeptic] adheres to the conventions of whatever society he lives in without himself believing in them or having any personal attachment to their values."

Of course, it is one thing for Sextus to claim that the skeptic can respond to all choices without deciding or believing anything, but quite another for him to show that he actually does so. Burnyeat attempts to offer an account of ataraxia by which the skeptic could do so. He offers two examples: the first is from Epictetus, who posed the problem of deciding whether the number of the stars was even or odd. According to Burnyeat's reading of skepticism, the sort of "helpless inability to mind either way" evoked by pondering such a question is how the skeptic feels "about everything." The second example is an elucidation of this sort of detachment: if, say, a tyrant were to tell the skeptic that his family would be slain if he failed to commit some unspeakable deed, the mature skeptic would "be undisturbed not because [his] will has subjugated the tendency to believe and to be emotionally disturbed, but because [he has] been rendered unable to find any reason to think anything is true rather than false or good rather than bad." He acts, but "the point is that he does not identify with the values involved."

II. Burnyeat's Analysis of Skepticism

With this conception of skepticism established, Burnyeat turns his attention to deciding "whether it is a possible life for man." The major objection he finds to the account given by skeptic is that some of his statements of appearance, such as "all things appear relative" or "some things appear good, others evil", are actually beliefs, appearances only in the epistemic sense. There are two ways to interpret this objection: as an objection to how Burnyeat has read Sextus, or as an objection to Sextus' text.

Let us examine the former first: "the skeptic's assent to experience, as Sextus describes it, is not the assertion of the existence of certain impressions or experience, but the expression of a non-dogmatic belief about what is the case in the world." In other words, the skeptic doesn't suspend all belief, just dogmatic belief, specifically "epistemic beliefs." Burnyeat responds that there is a distinction in Sextus' text between two kinds of dogma: "broad" dogma, "meaning to accept something or not contradict it", and "narrow" dogma, "assent to one of the non-evident things investigated by the sciences". The Pyrrhonist has no objection to the broad definition of dogma, for he indeed does assent to "states with which he is forcibly affected in accordance with an impression", but he certainly does not assent to "anything that is non-evident." Two questions must be explored: does the assent that he does give "signify approval of an epistemic reading for appearance-statements generally?" Moreover, "does [Sextus'] account of dogma in the narrower sense restrict his disapproval to what we have provisionally called dogmatic belief?"

To the first question we return to the point we have made before about the temptation to read Sextus anachronisticly. The idea that the statement "I am warmed/chilled" is dogma in the broad sense, certainly, but it does not signify an epistemic claim, but rather a recounting of the skeptic's experience. The confusion stems from the Cartesian idea that a claim to being "warmed/chilled" means either that the skeptic feels warmed/chilled subjectively or that an objective process is taking place. The actual terminology Sextus uses can be traced back to its root