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Carinthium comments on Skepticism about Probability - Less Wrong Discussion
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Any account which assumes we do live our lives, or proscribes ways to do so, is not sceptical at all.
Besides, your argument is circular as you assume the world's existence. It also involves argument ad populorum, appealing to popular belief rather than evidence. Showing that humans are incapable of believing X does not refute X.
I cheerfully plead guilty on all charges.
I am not a skeptic. I am unbothered by any logical circularity in my belief in objective reality. I see no reason to worry about a belief I am incapable of believing.
Honestly, I can't quite picture what it would be like to worry about such things, let alone believe them. If the universe doesn't exist, there's nothing you can do about it, so why waste energy thinking about the possibility?
Circular arguments have no correlation with reality except by chance- you may as well make something up and believe it. It would make about as much sense.
It is correct that if skepticism is correct then there is nothing we can do. Logically speaking, since probability doesn't exist there is a probability of 100%.
I don't believe this is true. A circular argument is at least internally consistent, and that prunes away a lot of ways to be inconsistent with reality.
This assumes the falsity of skepticism to begin with. Even then, it is possible for a circular argument to be internally inconsistent.
For skepticism to be correct you would need to show that it's possible to be skeptic.
It's certainly possible to pretend to be skeptic but pretending to be skeptic doesn't make you any more of a skeptic than pretending to be a duck makes you a duck.
Not so. There is no logical connection between the feasibility of a human believing something and its truth. Something can be true and impossible to believe simultaneously.
I think that's the category that Wittenstein summarizes as "things you can't talk about".
But we are talking about scepticism. It's an exception to the Wittgensteinian rule.
I can also talk about weuisfdyhkj. It's a label. In itself not more meaningful than the label you use. You think that you know what the label means but if your brain can't simulate a reality behind the label it has no meaning. According to Wittgenstein we should therefore not speak about it.
I think I know my answer to this- I've realised my definition of "rational" subtly differs from LessWrong's. When you see mine, you'll see this wasn't my fault.
A set of rules is rational, I would argue, if that set of rules by it's very nature must correlate with reality- if one applies those rules to the evidence, they must reveal what is true. Even if skepticism is false, then it is a mere coincidence that our assumptions the world is not an illusion, our memories are accurate etc happened to be correct as we had no rational rule that would show us that they were. We do not even have a role that we must rationally consider it probable.
One of the rules of such rationality is that pragmatism is explicitly ruled out. Pragmatic considerations have no necessary correlation with what is actually true, therefore they should not be considered in determining what is true. The consideration of whether human beings are or are not capable of believing something is a pragmatic consideration.
You claim that skepticism is incoherent. Firstly, this is circular as you assume things to get to this conclusion. Second, even if you take those assumptions humans are capable of understanding the concept of "I don't know". Applying this concept to absolutely everything is effectively what skepticism is.
But you are not applying it to everything. You have a strong belief in a platonic ideal of rationality on which you base your concept.
Take the buddhists who actually don't attach themselves to mental concepts. They have sayings such as: "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him".
You are not willing that you don't know what skepticism happens to be because you have attachement to it. This is exactly what Wittengsteins sentence is about. We shouldn't talk about those concepts.
The buddhists also don't take in a rational sense about it. They meditate and have a bunch of koans but they are mystics. You just don't get to be a platonic idealist and no mystic and have skepticism be valid.