Frank Furedi on an old idea that’s more important than ever

Although society upholds the freedom of speech there are powerful forces that encourage people to conform to the received wisdom. Those who question consensus are frequently told “you can’t say that”. Such individuals are frequently indicted as sceptics, such as Euro-sceptics and Global warming sceptics. “Scepticism and doubt,” writes Dana Villa, are “routinely singled out as the corrupting evils of our time.” The attempt to police the voicing of doubt is an indirect recognition of the importance of the idea of scepticism in the 21st century.

As a philosophical standpoint scepticism has been around since the ancient Greeks. Questioning claims about knowledge and truth is crucially important if we are to avoid the mutation of what we learned into a dogma. When Socrates stated that “all I know is that I know nothing” he emphasised the pivotal role that questioning and doubt played in philosophical reflection. The aim of Socrates was to point out that one’s ignorance is the point of departure for a rigorous search for the truth. The defining attitude of the sceptic is the suspension of judgement. A sceptic is someone who has not decided or is not in a position to decide.

The act of suspending judgement need not mean a commitment not to judge. It can mean the postponement of judgement while the sceptic continues to inquire into the problem. Unlike doubt, which involves a negative judgement, scepticism represents a form of prejudgement. It is opposed to dogma and the attitude of unquestioned certainty. In some cases, of course, the suspension of judgement can be an act of evasion. But the suspension of judgement also can be a prelude to a commitment to explore further in pursuit of clarity and truth.

Although there are numerous variants of scepticism, as a philosophical orientation it represents a challenge to the all-too human proclivity for embracing dogma. For the Ancient Greeks, scepticism was not about not believing or denying a particular proposition. The genuine sceptic rarely claims to know that a particular proposition is wrong and therefore could not counsel disbelief. No, to the Ancient Greeks, scepticism meant inquiry. Scepticism is motivated by a complex range of motives, but it is underpinned by a belief that the truth is difficult to discover.

Scepticism, like any good idea, must not be pursued dogmatically. Scepticism need not give up on the idea knowledge. Scientific research can make important discoveries without insisting that it has discovered The Truth. A sceptical sensibility accepts the results of such research as probable while being open to the possibility that it might have to be modified and even rejected. This potential for developing knowledge without claiming certainty is crucially important in today’s distinctly uncertain world. This is important for the development of science – and it is essential for the flourishing of a democratic public life. There can be no freedom of thought without the right to be sceptical. Which is why the demonisation of the sceptic today does not simply reflect a tendency towards polemical excess – it is also an attack on human inquiry itself.

Precisely because society is continually confronted with the ossification of its insights and the power of taken-for-granted truths it needs sceptics to encourage intellectual life to question its assumptions and yield to new experience. Contemporary society is no less drawn towards constructing dogma than previous ones. Indeed the tendency to morally condemn scepticism inadvertently signals the importance this philosophical view for the present era. Yet we have no choice but to live with our doubts. The antidote to our obsessive addiction to certainty is a regular dose of scepticism.

Further reading
The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, Richard Popkin (Oxford University Press, 2003)

Frank Furedi is professor of sociology at the University of Kent and the author of Wasted: Why Education Isn’t Educating (Continuum)

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