I do realize it happens all the time. Words are borrowed from technical disciplines and given new meanings for everyday usage. Fine. It isn’t always a problem, and it also goes the other way. Technical disciplines borrow terms from ordinary usage, and assign them specific new meanings.
For example, “homophobia” originally meant an irrational fear or hatred of man (thus, homo). It was borrowed during the turbulent 60s and reformulated, such that the ending “phobia” did not refer to the root “homo” per se, but to the root as an abbreviation of “homosexual”. Since there needs to be a word to describe an irrational fear or hatred of homosexuals or homosexuality, I have no problem with the rebirth and refinement of this one. We need this word so that we can identify what bigots are bigotted about.
But using skepticism to mean incredulity is decidedly not necessary. We already have a perfectly cromulent word that means incredulity: it’s “incredulity”. When people say “I’m skeptical” but mean “I’m incredulous”, it sucks because they’re two distinct concepts, and you have to take time out to figure out which they mean. They might not care, but you as a thinking person do, and so the discussion begins to unravel while you attempt to determine what the illiterate crank is trying to say. And as often as not, your questioning is taken by him or her to be dodging.
Of all the fucking ironies!
This is a Pitting of Dopers who merely pretend. The majority of Dopers who claim to be skeptics probably know what they’re saying, so this rant isn’t directed at them. It’s directed solely toward the ones who proudly puff out their chests and demand evidence because they are “skeptics”.
No, dammit! If evidence that you find satisfactory will convince you of something, then you are not skeptical about it. You are merely incredulous. You’re just doubtful of it. Like Wittgenstein said, doubt functions in a context of certainty. For a thing to be doubtful, some other thing must be certain. Doubt presupposes its own resolution by evidence or argument. If there were anything I could say to you or anything I could show you that would convince you that I’m right, then all you did was doubt my side while having confidence in your own. That’s incredulity.
To be skeptical, you must be doubtful about any and all possible evidence or argument. There can’t be a proposition within the set of propositions that you will accept over the others. To be a skeptic, you must hold either [1] that X cannot possibly be true no matter what argument or evidence I supply (Academic Skepticism), or [2] that it cannot even be known whether X is true — i.e., you won’t take a side either way (Pyrrhonian Skepticism).
I think that at a place of this calibre, and in the interest of fighting ignorance, it is important that we get this right. Skepticism is a noble philosphy, and in fact, every philosophical principle can be stated in terms of its skeptical interpretation. So don’t claim to be scientific if you evaluate the truth of something based on how well it confirms your theory. Don’t claim to be rational if you reject the conclusion of an argument you cannot show to be unsound. And don’t claim to be skeptical if you’re going to demand evidence that I’m right.
:mad: […incredulous glare…]
(Oh. And here’s a reference for those interested in a more in-depth examination of skepticism without having to wade through the history of it all.)
Clever. In Greek, the philosophy appropriated it from the vernacular around 300 BC: “skepsis” (examination, reflection, consideration). But in English, the vernacular appropriated it from the philosophy, and by either modern definition doesn’t really coincide with the Greek vernacular term.