The Miserable Skeptic

I touched on it in my previous post, but an accusation commonly thrown at skeptics is that they are ‘closed minded’. When pressed to asking the accuser what this actually means, they typically respond that skeptics have shaped their own world view and will deny anything which runs contrary to it.

It’s important to remember that skepticism is not a ‘world view’; it is a method of evaluating a claim based on the best available evidence. The skeptic (i.e. someone who utilises skepticism) remains agnostic until they have weighed up the pros and cons of a claim and have decided which presents the most compelling evidence. Hardly the actions of a closed mind.

By contrast to the skeptic occupying an informed middle ground, those who ‘have shaped their own world view and will deny anything which runs contrary to it’ can arise on both sides of a claim. They may either agree or disagree with it, because of their world view. They ‘just know’ that something is right or wrong. Unflinching believers tend to be labelled as ‘true believers’, ‘a priori believers’ or, when dealing with claims of the supernatural, ‘woo-woos’. Their polar opposites are the ‘denialists’, otherwise known as ‘a priori skeptics’, ‘hardline disbelievers’ or ‘bullying bastards’. I should point out that a priori essentially means knowledge possessed by an individual, independent of their experience; hence the a priori skeptic just knows something doesn’t exist, whereas the (true) skeptic weighs up the evidence.

Problems can arise when a proponent of a claim accuses the true skeptic of a priori skepticism based upon the speed by which they may reach a decision. They fail to take into consideration that the skeptic may have encountered an identical claim, based upon identical evidence in the past and did the work back then. Therefore this is not hardline disbelief; the skeptic has already covered the issue under discussion and has no need to reinvent the wheel. The door may be shut, but only to what it has seen before. Open it by coming up with something new.