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TheAncientGeek comments on My Skepticism - Less Wrong Discussion
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The axioms of rationality are required to reason towards positive conclusions about a real world. They are not a minimal set, because sceptics have a smaller set, which can do less.
Most people probably aren't satisfied with the sort of "less" that universal skepticism can do.
Also, some axioms are required to reason, period. Let's say I refuse to take ~(A ∧ ~A) as an axiom. What now? (And don't bring up paraconsistent logic, please--it's silly.)
Rational axioms do less than theistic axioms, and a lot of people arent happy with that "less" either.
Not in terms of reasoning "towards positive conclusions about a real world", they don't.
Most of whom are theists trying to advance an agenda. "Rational" axioms, on the other hand, are required to have an agenda.
From the scepti.cs perspective, rationalists are advancing the agenda that there is a knowable external world.
No. They do less in terms of the soul and things like that, which theists care about, and rationalists don't.
Meanwhile, sceptics don't care about the external world.
So everything comes down, to epistemology, and epistemology comes down to values. Is that problem?
And yet strangely enough, I have yet to see a self-proclaimed "skeptic" die of starvation due to not eating.
EDIT: Actually, now that I think about it, this could very easily be a selection effect. We observe no minds that behave this way, not because such minds can't exist, but because such minds very quickly cease to exist.
They have answers to that objection , just as rationalists have answers to theists' objections.