Doubts don't happen in a vacuum. You need good reasons for doubting, just as you need good reasons for knowledge claims.
According to whom? You seem to be insisting on arbitrary rules that few skeptics would agree to.
You keep saying the skeptic “need only abstain from committing to any position,” as if doubt were a kind of weightless intellectual free-float. That is not how actual doubting works.
You're operating on an excluded middle, since the options for any knowledge claim are either a)commit to its truth b)commit to its falsity or b)suspend a decision
To raise the very objection you are raising, you are already relying on a stack of commitments:
- that your words keep their meanings from one sentence to the next,
- that basic logical moves like “if P then Q” are in order,
- that your memory of what I said two comments ago is roughly reliable,
- that there is another mind here for you to address,
- that there is a public space (this thread) in which claims can be compared.
I'm relying on no such commitments, since all I am doing is playing a game. At most, I've accepted modus ponens as a legitimate form of inference and am asking you to force me to accept your position. I am the tortoise in our little game.
You do not defend any of that, you simply use it. That is exactly what “hinge” means. You can call it “abstaining from commitments” if you like, but your actual performance gives the game away: your doubting is parasitic on an unargued practical background. Pointing that out is not begging the question against the skeptic; it is describing the conditions that make the skeptical performance intelligible in the first place.
I don't require any of it, because I am not defending a position.
On the “linguistic turn” point, you have it backwards. Looking at the grammar of “know,” “doubt,” “truth,” and “justified” does not remove the possibility of knowledge, it removes the fantasy that we could talk about “real truth” in total abstraction from our actual practices. When you insist that truth must be something beyond “consensus agreement,” you are already trading on a whole network of meanings you never stop to justify. Again, that is the hinge structure.
Again, in defending a position I will adopt commitments but my issue isn't with the need for such commitments in ordinary practice but the fact that language is used as an excuse to take them off the table. If we can't question them and give some sort of justification, then anything that flows from them is automatically suspect because we have undefended premises. The turn to linguistics has effectively removed truth from the table because the consensus "hinges" render everything that stands on them suspect since no attempt to justify such things has been made.
And no, truth is not “off the table” in a Wittgensteinian picture. We still distinguish true from false, better supported from worse, reliable routes from unreliable ones. What drops out is the idea of a God’s-eye guarantee that floats free of any human form of life. If that is your standard for “real truth,” then of course nothing will meet it, including your own skeptical theses.
Consensus beliefs are not true, and agreeing not to ask certain questions doesn't render those questions moot.
So there are really two options here:
- Either you admit that your own skeptical stance leans on unargued background certainties and you join the hinge conversation about what they are and how they function,
- Or you keep claiming to “abstain from commitments” while in practice relying on exactly the kind of hinges you deny, which is less a philosophical position and more an act.
There's no "unargued background" to my skeptical posturing, there is only a deferral of commitment until "forced" to accept something. So far, everyone who has come to me with boasts about knowledge has inevitably proven to be speaking out of ignorance. So until someone can provide me a more solid foundation for knowledge than faith, I will remain a skeptical fideist at heart.
I've made my point. I'm moving on.
Which is exactly why the skeptic need not worry about infinities, because all we have to do is have enough questions to outlast those who claim to have knowledge.
