No True Skeptic...

A popular skeptical atheist celebrity often cites Carl Sagan's maxim that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence." I think that's right. But our skeptical atheist goes on to show that he's far from a true skeptic. (No true skeptic....) So this person offers this example: if someone tells him that he owns a dog, he's willing to believe this ordinary claim because the skeptic knows that people and dogs exist; he knows that people own dogs; and so on. The purported dog owner might show his interlocutor a dog collar and some doggie treats, which our skeptic is willing to accept as evidence. That's fine, of course. But it shouldn't be fine for a true skeptic. A true skeptic would challenge every piece of evidence for the person's owning a dog. Why? Maybe the person is a liar. Maybe the person is a hologram. Maybe the skeptic is hallucinating. Maybe the skeptic is just a brain in a vat. As W. S. Gilbert has a character sing in H.M.S. Pinafore, "Things are seldom what they seem/skim milk masquerades as cream."

Wouldn't a true skeptic's doubts be endless? Why stop at some arbitrary point?

To repeat what I've said before, in philosophy skepticism is not merely contextual doubt about a particular claim. It's the position that knowledge generally or in a particular domain is impossible. The principled requirement for evidence is best described not as skepticism but evidentialism.

In that connection, I reminder readers that the coiner of the label agnosticism, Thomas Henry Huxley, Darwin's champion, did not mean by the label just that he didn't know if God existed but that he was largely convinced that no one could know. It's important to understand that the Gnostics, from which Huxley derived his label, claimed to know the supernatural, and he wanted a label to distinguish his position from theirs. He wrote:

[Theists and atheists] were quite sure they had attained a certain "gnosis," [knowledge regarding spiritual mysteries] -- had, more or less successfully, solved the problem of existence; while I was quite sure I had not, and had a pretty strong conviction that the problem was insoluble. [Emphasis added.]

Of course words are always "on the move," as linguist John McWhorter reminds us. There is no platonic realm of definitions. Still...