Often, the mantle of "skepticism" allows one to feel that the world is all knowable.

[Bonobo]

But as scary as that may be, it is not.

Throughout history, time and time again, anything that was thought co contradict the commonly accepted paradigm has been characterized as "crazy".

The fact is that people tend to unthinkingly create a framework that defines the limits of what they can conceive of.

It is not until the unconscious and unexamined preconceptions have been done away with that great leaps, breakthroughs and new ideas can be explored.

Does this mean that no one visited the moon and that it was just a movie set? Of course not. But lumping everything that defies consensus reality into truly brainless word, "Truther" or "CT" is a lazy substitute for independent thought.

Humans are low-level animals with senses able to detect an extremely narrow band of EM waves that we interpret as light and which our brains configures into images that we call reality. But the universe is much much more than that and in order to truly appreciate that, you must first realize how narrow your world really is.

The Japanese have the story of the frog in the well. The frog never ventures out and believes that the well is the entire universe.

http://www.taiwandc.org/folk-fro.htm

[olddots]

1. Thank you

makes sense to me.

[Warpy]

2. Wrong.

Skepticism means you ask questions, lots of questions, questions about everything.

Questions are exciting. Questions are what lead us in all sorts of directions to explore.

Answers, however, are rather dull. Not quite as dull as "god did it," but removing the mystery from anything tends to bring the adventure to an end.

You're going to have to find a true believer to find someone who thinks the universe is all knowable. He has no questions of anything or anybody. "God did it" shuts down all inquiry and all adventure.

[Bonobo]

4. Correct, what I described is not true skepticism.

That is why I described it as the "mantle of skepticism".

A TRUE skeptic would question their preconceived ideas as rigorously as they do other ideas.

[TalkingDog]

14. Kudos for the concise object lesson. Note to those who consider themselves to be critical thinkers:

Reading comprehension is vital.

I've noticed literature out of the UK that describes this notion as : New Skepticism. Closely allied with the New Atheism.

Their main weapons seem to consist of nay-saying and debunking, rather than a truly critical examination of said event, idea, research, etc. To them, the final indignity seems to be the admission that they don't (or can't) know something. Whereas "old school" (or, as I like to call it, classical) skepticism would readily admit the same.

[SidDithers]

3. Skepticism. You don't understand it...nt

Sid

[Bonobo]

5. Yeah, Sidney, I do, nt

[SidDithers]

7. Yeah, Sidney, I don't...

fixed that for you.

Sid

[Bonobo]

9. Shit, Sid...

You're as humorous as a runny sore.

[HiPointDem]

6. Often, the mantle of conformity allows one to feel that the world is all knowable.

[Bonobo]

8. Yeah, I guess that's true. nt

[MrSlayer]

10. Agreed.

The entire point of the Alex Joneses of the world is to make any and everyone that questions authority or "official lines" look like lunatics.

Just buying what you're sold sight unseen makes you a sucker. Especially from people that have been proven liars time and again.

Well said.

[Electric Monk]

11. ++

The entire point of the Alex Joneses of the world is to make any and everyone that questions authority or "official lines" look like lunatics.

Just like the "no plane hit the Pentagon" BS was designed to distract from who created "The Base" in Afghanistan in the first place. One theory is loony so all must be?

[tkmorris]

12. The Allegory of the Cave reimagined

You are correct of course in pinpointing the limitations of human senses, however I think you underestimate our ability to imagine those aspects of the universe as it is that we cannot directly perceive.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

13. Most people who say "you can't know everything" seem to mean "you can't know anything".

There are a great many things which one *can* be pretty damn certain of, and most conspiracy theories fall under that heading.

Yes, there are many, many things I don't know, but whether or not 9/11 was an inside job is not one of them.

[dmallind]

15. I think the more important question is how

Whether everything is knowable is as yet....unknowable. But we do have an almost insurmountably good inductive case for evaluating how things can become known.

The method that works far better than any other - in fact the only method that has been shown to work at all - involves empirial evidence, observation, hypothesis, testing and re-evaluation. Rinse and repeat. Not just in the hard sciences but in all areas of what we do know. We don't need to be able to see ultraviolet to know it's there, but we also didn't find out it was there because of some mystical gnosis or woo-merchant flummery.

Skepticism, like any other intellectual approach, has its limits. If I were to be rigidly skeptical about whether my bed exists every night or whether clothes are still socially acceptable every day, I'd achieve even less than I already do.