cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/3172656

Couple of days ago I saw a post about on atheist community about a quote saying atheist can’t base their morals on anything.

I commented that if religion didn’t accept some premises like god, they wouldn’t either. Some said I am wrong and downvoted me. So I decided to post here about to what extent can I be skeptical about premises, to see where I am mistaken (or commenters).

Before that post, for a while I had an idea that even the analytical truth/necessary truth (whatever you name it) like “a is equal to a” are premises which can not be proven (since they are the basics of our logic, which will we be in use to prove claims) even though they seem us to be true by intuition. They just have to be accepted to be able to further think about other things.

So my question is since we can question the correctness of basics of our logic and cant find an answer, we can not justify or learn anything. Also, there lays the problem of do we really understand the same thing from the same concepts, and does language limit us?

If I am mistaken, which is highly probable, please correct me and don’t judge. I am not much of a philosophy reader.

I would really appreciate it if you could share some resources (video, article, book, anything…) about limits of our understanding, logic, language and related topics.

Thanks in advance…

  • Takapapatapaka@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    1 year ago

    @Arxir@lemmy.world 's answer is a very good and complete one !

    On a side note, I would add that this is a problem that kinda divides philosophers (and people more generally). From my own experience, it is very common to discredit skepticism as a useless philosophy/reflexion, maybe because it seems to be pointless to a lot of people. But it has been used through the whole history of philosophy :

    • In Ancient Greece, there were different Schools of Skepticism, as explained in other answers
    • It was quite common during Renaissance, typically with Montaigne, or Descartes (though he was using a skeptic method to assert the existence of knowledge)
    • To me, skepticism is one of the influences that led to the emergence of philosophies like phenomenology, as they try to describe our experiences as subjects without asserting facts about an external world.
    • As i studied logic and epistemology, i discovered that skepticism has influences in those fields. For exemple, the epoche, the suspension of judgment used by skeptics, is used in modern epistemology, with theories such as Equal Weight View. They also talk a lot about limitations of language, formal logic being some slight kind of remedy to it.

    So in the end, while i feel like skepticism has a really bad reputation, i also find very common to accept the idea that every truth/belief/knowledge/reflexion needs unprovable premises, which seems to me like a skeptic root. It is not often the main subject, but i frequently find signs of it around me.

    • SmoothSurfer@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      1 year ago

      I really don’t understand why skepticism take this much discredit. It just asks question, it just does what we do to reach knowledge. Isn’t the whole point of philosophy is asking questions and trying to find answer.

      Thanks for your reply