Oh, thanks for asking. There’s so much I could say here. The short answer is I don't know. This whole issue has been something which has bothered me for many years. It’s probably one of the deepest and most disturbing of all philosophical problems, at least in epistemology. Every position seems to be completely untenable, including skepticism. The regress argument is the very paradigm of an _aporia_ on my view. And while I’ve never accepted foundationalism, I also never thought that skepticism was a genuinely tenable option. I think that people who claim to be skeptics are usually disingenuous or simply haven’t fully thought the position through. However, it seems that every position faces inescapable difficulties. So, I have no clue. For a long time, I used to go for some kind of coherentist view. But I’ve never really been comfortable with the whole circular structure. That is, how can we ever escape the circle of beliefs/thoughts and make genuine contact with the world outside? Sure, one can make the circle bigger, but does that actually avoid the apparent viciousness of the circularity? It seems that no matter how big one makes the circular structure, the same problem arises. How can a belief support other beliefs if it is ultimately getting its support from those very beliefs that it was itself supposed to be supporting?! At bottom, it seems the situation looks a lot like self-justification. So one gets trapped within the circle, at best having some kind of mere illusion of knowledge.

@@Philosophy_Overdose Thanks for sharing that. I had a similar path, when I fully understood the Meno's Paradox and epistemology, I quickly saw the problem any "truth" seeker is plunged into. I am also working from an Islamic/religious background, I can tell the same problems with JTB, correspondence, runs deep. I think every individual will have to stamp their feet somewhere ultimately. Funny enough, Rorty's interviews that you posted, has helped me understand more all different positions. 👍

@@Philosophy_Overdose perfect answer. Really gives an idea of what philosophy can be: not a discipline who pragmatically gives ultimate answers on topic such as this one, but rather the creation of new questions and new points of view to examine reality

Circular arguments are invalid.

@@TheMahayanist not all of them..

Lol you wish 😊

Isn't this statement in itself an axiom?

@@CaptainBohnenbrot no people came up with it through conjecture and criticism, it works so we keep using it

@@TheSinghisking4ever So we should keep it if it works. That's an axiom.

@@CaptainBohnenbrot The axiom is actually "what works, works"

That is not really the position of Pyrrhonian skepticism. They held you can act on (reasonable) appearances. They just wanted to avoid dogmatism, which crushes questioning and investigation.

All you need to do is read the Transcendental Analytic and Transcendental Idealism to be skeptical about everything. Every belief is based on masses of data (but only a sliver of what is possible to have) and is manipulated by the mind (Pure Reason & the Concepts) such that a belief is arrived at. Everything can be subject to skepticism, most of all judgement.

@@MV-vv7sg I'm curious as to why you say that. Kant specifically describes his philosophy as a remedy to dogmatism on the one hand and skepticism on the other. Were you a skeptic before reading Kant? Do you accept some of Transcendental Idealism but not all of it? What do you make of empiricism?

@@thejimmymeister Very good questions. I apologise in advance of my lack of being concise. Really I meant that a semi-skeptical indirect realist is likely to become a global skeptic after subscribing to (a variation) of Transcendental Idealism. For if they already are doubtful about the nature and truth of their indirect perceptions, to discover that not only all perceptions are of a world of representations (exclusive of the mind-independent reality that is the noumenol world of Things-in-Themselves) that is no longer informed by reality, but also that who’s laws we discover are really set there by the mind and pure reason itself, AND this combined with the quiet generally accepted idea that we all have subjective perceptions and ideologies and cognitions with our own unique banks of data (empirical experiences) which inform these things, then it seems we are all in our own worlds, of our own unique representations. And that because language fails to connect these solitary minds, but instead makes the illusion of us referring to the same sensations and representations and so on (despite our not really thanks to language games personal meanings of words - not in the grammatical sense but the semantic sense words have with our unique experience) and In this way you can doubt the truth and objectivity and necessity of all your sensations. We possess the unfortunate power to realise and comprehend our own imprisonment of unique phenomenal prisons, so are voyeurs of our own being permanent residents in private Plato Cave’s. It’s as if we have the ideas about being there an outside to the cave but not the knowledge or experiences of the Philosophy Kings, if what they climb into is the mind-incomprehensible un-perceivable realty of things-as-they-are-in-themselves. But this is purely a philosophical stance where you peer enviously at the world of Thing-in-Themselves. However in living philosophy or in ‘reality’ (ie every day life, not mind-independent objective reality) you serve your sentence of being limited to the world of representations and instead prescribe to the empirical means of learning about all these mind-dependent representations. So use the pursuit of science to understand these representations. And by doing so, since they are subjective and mind-synthesised (I can quote Kant here if it is needed), you learn about your own sense of cogito sum. To re-position a quote from the British artist Harold Cohen: “That, finally, defines my use of the word “image”. An image is a reference to some aspect of the world which contains within its own structure and in terms of its own structure a reference to the act of cognition which generated it. It must say, not that the world is like this, but that it was recognized to have been like this by the image-maker, who leaves behind this record: not of the world, but of the act [and his sight].” But instead we realise our perceptions and thoughts are like these ‘images’ (representations) which tell us more of the mind which synthesised it from its unique-to-them Pure Reason, rather than what it is imaging. And so to explore the science of the universe and of our logical comprehension is to explore in some sense our own personal variation of the human mind and its reason. This makes very real the lines of Wittgenstein ‘The world is the totality of facts’ & ‘The limits of my language are the limits of my world’ when you consider that both logic and language are the bare bones of the minds operating as a data collective, rule governed synthesis of representations. This sounds very mystical, but as you delve further into truth and knowledge - which I believe are just husks with no Kernels, you start to sound more spiritual. This is coming from someone who is not religious, spiritual or faithful and is wholly ruled by the empiricism of science, the determinism and scientific arguments against free will and someone who studied Physics and Mathematics at A-level. So please don’t missunderstand my crudely articulated thoughts as speculative spiritualism. I hope this is somewhat clear, but if it generated more questions than answers, do you ahead!

@@thejimmymeister I also must plead forgiveness for I really applied my argument that I have just made for perceptions and cognitions to the idea of belief without justification, fo arrive at that original comment. Which I realise now I haven’t really argued for. So I should say I am mistaken to use Transcendental Idealism in a way unlike Kant to argue for arbitrary dogmatic notions. But I feel I am able to make a link, though yet I am unable to articulate this link between our understanding and reason; to beliefs.