The Logical Atheist

Atheist call-in show hosts like to glibly dismiss some theistic callers as guilty of using the  argumentum ad populum ; that's the claim that a proposition must be true because lots of people believe it to be true. This is considered an informal fallacy  and a fallacy of relevance rather than a formal, or logical, fallacy. But is it really a fallacy? It depends, as we'll see. I'll say right at the top that no less a thinker than Aristotle held that our knowledge is and should be chock full of endoxa , which is Greek for reputable beliefs that almost all people hold without having personally confirmed them. Oops, by dropping Aristotle's name, did I just commit the fallacy of the argument from authority  ( argumentum ab auctoritate ) ? We'll see. When I said above that "it depends," part of what I meant is that it depends on how we phrase the alleged fallacy. "That most everyone believes X is true proves that X is true" is clearly fallacious. But h...

I have no problem with someone who says he is "skeptical" of some proposition or theory. In everyday talk, that just means the person has doubts about a claim. It may not mean that he doubts  it, just that he has doubts about it, which seems different. The first seems to imply a rejection or a near-rejection of the claim; the second seems softer. "I doubt it" differs from "I have doubts about it." Be that as it may, I am dubious about using the term skepticism to mean mere doubt. Making doubt into a ism  is an entirely different ballgame. An ism  suggests a doctrine, and a doctrine based on doubt strikes me as strange. (For the same reason, the term  atheism  is weird because no doctrine flows merely from not believing in God.) In philosophy skepticism is the position that knowledge in general or knowledge of a particular kind is impossible . It does not mean a particular doubt about something. One cannot doubt everything, as Wittgenstein pointed out. Thi...