Skepticism

On November 19th, the Philosophy Department gave a lecture on whether or not Skepticism is good or bad. Me, not being a particularly strong philosopher, was very lost on more than one occasion. However, one thing that I was able to discern was being a skeptic is not going to get you very far in life.

Why might this be true? When one is a skeptic, they are always believing that what they are seeing and what they are doing is false. How can we know we are really here? How can we know that what we're seeing is what really is there? Why isn't what we seem to be seeing just a dream? The lecture discussed that how people often make the assumption that if they were dreaming, they could just pinch themselves, and they would wake up. However, the flaw in this logic is why could they not simply dream that they were getting pinched. In the lecture it was stated that the way one can truly decide whether something is a dream or not is because in dreams, people are unable to give deductive reasoning, and reason through something. So by my presence at the lecture, and processing what was going on, I therefore could not have been dreaming, because that level of thinking cannot be attained in a dream state.

In my classroom, it will be important for me to keep my students engaged. If they ever reach a point where they could even start to consider whether or not they are dreaming, that means they are most likely too close to sleeping, which is not the sort of learning environment I am trying to create. In an ideal world I would like to think that my students could be always engaged enough that they would always be using those critical thinking skills. Seeing as my classroom is not in a perfect environment, I know that this will realistically not be attainable.

When one is a skeptic, they are limiting their own creative powers by ruling out that which seems to be impossible. Since much of scientific creation is based on thinking about things in more abstract philosophys, it would be reasonable to say that a lot less would have been done in science if more skeptics existed in the world. Limiting knowledge is another thing that skeptics believe that I am trying to battle in my classroom. One needs to be creative, and willing to at least listen to new ideas, if one does not want to go as far as accept them. Be a skeptic if you like, but that's what I think.