The Role of Doubt in the Skeptical Attack on Knowledge
INTRODUCTION
Certain truth has no man seen nor will there ever be a man who knows (from immediate experienced about the gods and about everything of which I speak: fro even if he should fully succeed in saying what is true, even so he himself does not know it, but in all things, there is Opinion What has been the major concern in the discipline of philosophy (especially metaphysics and epistemology) is the certainty of the reality that befall man, that is the knowledge of the truth and of existence in man's world; God, man, and nature. Philosophies over the ages have been on the brink of discovering the means by which our knowledge is acquired, the extent of its validity and the standards or criteria by which we can judge the reliability of our knowledge claims. In our claim, we look for satisfaction of what reality is given, given that certain realities can be known.
Portrait of John Locke, by Sir Godfrey Kneller. Oi...
Law was an ardent disciple of John Locke.
From left to right: Plato, Aristotle, Thomas Aquin...In such satisfaction we see that there is inadequacy in what we claim to know as the truth or reality. Hence, this is the point at which we actually need to sieve the matter and to claim what is ours as pertaining to knowledge. The inadequacy and unsatisfactory answers is where our knowledge becomes skeptical if really there can be any adequacy what so ever in our knowledge claim. The question becomes what is the basis of all knowledge-claims and upon which standards
are they to be judged. If so much of what had been taken as certain has proved to uncertain or false or doubtful, then how can we ever be certain. What this short essay seeks to unravel is the extent to which our doubtful skill nature could prove our knowledge claim.