Standard methods of inferring knowledge about the world are based off premises that I don’t know the justifications for. Any justification (or a link to an article or book with one) for why these premises are true or should be assumed to be true would be appreciated.
Here are the premises:
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“One has knowledge of one’s own percepts.” Percepts are often given epistemic privileges, meaning that they need no justification to be known, but I see no justification for giving them epistemic privileges. It seems like the dark side of epistemology to me.
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“One’s reasoning is trustworthy.” If one’s reasoning is untrustworthy, then one’s evaluation of the trustworthiness of one’s reasoning can’t be trusted, so I don’t see how one could determine if one’s reasoning is correct. Why should one even consider one’s reasoning is correct to begin with? It seems like privileging the hypothesis, as there are many different ways one’s mind could work, and presumably only a very small proportion of possible minds would be remotely valid reasoners.
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“One’s memories are true.” Though one’s memories of how the world works gives a consistent explanation of why one is perceiving one’s current percepts, a perhaps simpler explanation is that the percepts one are currently experiencing are the only percepts one has ever experienced, and one’s memories are false. This hypothesis is still simple, as one only needs to have a very small number of memories, as one can only think of a small number of memories at any one time, and the memory of having other memories could be false as well.
At first I just made it up, feeling that it was appropriate name due to the many parallels with moral nihilism, then I googled it, and description that came up roughly matched what I was talking about, so I just went on using it after that. I'm guessing everyone goes roughly through that process. Normally I add a little disclaimer about not being sure that if it is the correct term, but I didn't this time.
I didn't know the term "philosophical skepticism", thanks for giving me the correct one. In philosophy I feel there is generally problem where the process of figuring out the names that other people who separately came up with your concept before you did use to describe the concept you want ends up involving more work and reading than just re-doing everything...and at the end of the day others who read your text (as if anyone is reading that closely!) won't understand what you meant unless they too go back and read the citations. So I think it's often better to just throw aside the clutter and start fresh for everything, doing your best with plain English, and it's okay if you redundantly rederive things (many strongly disagree with me here).
I feel that the definition of "Epistemic nihilism" is self evident as long as one knows the words "epistemic" and "nihilism". The term "Skepticism" implies the view that one is asking "how do you know", whereas nihilism implies that one is claiming that there is no fundamental justification of the chosen principles. If indeed I'm describing the same thing, I kinda think "epistemic nihilism" is a more descriptive term from a "plain english" perspective overall.
(Also, re: everyone - I haven't actually seen that term used in the wild by people who are not me unless explicitly googling it. Maybe your impression results from reading my comments somewhere else?)
'Global skepticism' is really the correct one. 'Philosophical skepticism' is just a broad term for the doubting of normative justifications or knowledge.
I doubt it very much. But some of the comments gave me the impression that it is in literature somewhere.