The Ancient Sceptic Attitude and Disagreement

Abstract

It is argued that a philosophical “sceptic attitude”, found originally in the Socratic approach and arguably in the Pyrrhonist’s treatment of disagreement, should be taken to be an epistemically positive attitude in the sense that it fosters a serious philosophical examination of what is taken to be true, without entailing the radical scepticism often associated with it. We argue that if the two sides of a disagreement are equivalent (at that moment, given the evidence available), it doesn’t require one to consider the disagreement as undecidable without qualification and so to suspend judgment indefinitely. If this is so, we claim, the Pyrrhonian disagreement-based position will be significantly restricted as a form of scepticism and should instead be seen as promoting an epistemically propitious sceptic attitude.