There are four levels of argument for why we should be skeptics and how skepticism leads to intellectual humility rather than intellectual arrogance. Skepticism, in this sense, does not mean the rejection of knowledge, truth, or rational judgment. It means maintaining an awareness of the limitations under which human beings acquire, interpret, and organize knowledge. We can hold convictions, construct arguments, adopt ethical principles, and act upon our understanding while simultaneously acknowledging the possibility that our understanding remains incomplete or even mistaken.
1. The Limits of Human Senses
Human senses are biologically limited. The human eye perceives only a tiny portion of the electromagnetic spectrum (i.e., 0.0035%), while human hearing generally extends from approximately 20 Hz to 20,000 Hz, with considerable variation between individuals and across age. Our capacities for taste, smell, touch, and other forms of sensory perception are similarly bounded. Other organisms inhabit sensory worlds that are radically different from our own: some animals perceive frequencies beyond the range of human hearing, while others possess forms of sensory perception that human beings simply do not have.
Our observations and experiences are therefore relative to the biological apparatus through which we encounter reality. This does not mean that sensory experience is meaningless or that everything perceived is an illusion. It means that the raw data available to human beings is necessarily selective. We do not encounter reality in its totality; we encounter that portion of reality to which our biological capacities give us access.
From this principle, another limitation follows. The raw data from which we construct our understanding of the world is itself limited in scope. What we observe is real within the conditions under which we observe it, but the fact that something falls outside our perception does not make it nonexistent. Human beings therefore begin their pursuit of knowledge from a position of epistemic limitation.
2. The Limits of Reason
The limitations of human understanding do not disappear once sensory information has been collected. We must still interpret that information, and interpretation introduces another layer of difficulty.
Psychology has documented an extensive range of cognitive biases that influence human judgment, including confirmation bias, anchoring, the bias blind spot, availability bias, and numerous others. We tend to notice information selectively, interpret evidence through existing beliefs, give disproportionate weight to certain forms of information, and construct explanations that appear more coherent to us than they necessarily are.
Logical fallacies create another difficulty. Even individuals who value rationality can unconsciously commit fallacies while arguing, interpreting evidence, or reaching conclusions. Knowing that a particular fallacy exists does not automatically immunize a person against committing it.
A thorough study of cognitive biases and logical fallacies is therefore essential to disciplined reasoning. Even then, however, there is no guarantee that a person will completely escape them. The recognition of fallibility is consequently part of rationality itself. The rational person is not the person who imagines themselves incapable of error, but the person who understands that error remains possible and therefore remains open to correction.
3. The Diversity of Frameworks
There is another level of limitation that becomes visible once we move beyond individual perception and reasoning: the diversity of epistemological frameworks through which human beings attempt to understand reality.
Human beings have developed numerous methodologies for determining what constitutes truth or falsehood, rationality or irrationality, right or wrong, reality or appearance. These include formal logic, Hegelian dialectics, dialectical materialism, dialectical naturalism, negative dialectics, the Socratic method, positivism, rationalism, empiricism, phenomenology, analytical philosophy, pragmatism, conceptual engineering, methodological skepticism, hermeneutics, and various holistic and contemplative practices.
Each framework abstracts reality in a particular manner. Each establishes, explicitly or implicitly, parameters through which certain forms of evidence become significant and others become secondary or irrelevant. The same phenomenon may therefore acquire different meanings when examined through different conceptual frameworks.
The same applies to worldviews. A person may understand reality through an anarchist, Marxist, postmodernist, modernist, romantic, classicist, idealist, materialist, social ecological, environmentalist, capitalist, or some other worldview. Each worldview contains, to varying degrees, its own ontological and epistemological assumptions through which reality is interpreted and its own criteria through which particular claims are justified.
This does not mean that every framework is equally valid. That conclusion would itself require an argument. It means that we should distinguish between having a framework and believing that our framework possesses an absolute and final authority over reality. The former is unavoidable; the latter requires justification.
We cannot reason from nowhere. Every attempt to understand reality begins from some conceptual position, even when that position is implicit. The intellectually humble person therefore asks not merely, “What do I believe?” but also, “What framework has produced this belief, what assumptions does that framework contain, and what would count as a sufficient reason for me to revise it?”
4. The Diversity of Understanding
It is equally important to understand how understanding itself functions.
Consider a simple example. Suppose a fifth-grade student is placed in a university class on quantum physics. Will the student understand the lecture? Probably not. But does this necessarily mean that the student is intellectually dull? Certainly not. The student lacks the conceptual schema required to decode the material.
A schema can be understood as an organized structure of previously acquired knowledge through which new information is interpreted. We do not encounter every new idea as completely blank minds. We interpret new information through what we already know.
This raises another question: how are these schemas constructed?
They are shaped by an enormous range of influences: parents, teachers, friends, social institutions, traditions, cultures, economic circumstances, social position, religious and philosophical traditions, books, films, education, personal experiences, interests, habits, and countless other encounters. Consequently, the schemas through which individuals interpret reality are inevitably diverse.
Two people may therefore encounter the same event and derive radically different understandings from it without either person necessarily being intellectually dishonest. They may possess different bodies of prior knowledge, different experiences, different conceptual categories, and different assumptions about what matters.
This is another reason intellectual humility is necessary. What appears immediately obvious to us may appear incomprehensible to another person because we possess a schema that they do not. Conversely, something that appears obvious to another person may remain invisible to us because we lack the conceptual framework through which they understand it.
Skepticism Between Relativism and Absolutism
This leaves us with an important question: Should we therefore become relativists or absolutists?
Neither position is sufficient.
The relativist risks turning every truth, value, and judgment into something merely relative to a particular individual or framework. If everything is equally relative, then the relativist faces a serious difficulty in establishing rational or ethical grounds from which to condemn oppression, resist domination, defend human dignity, or construct a better social order. If every framework is merely as valid as every other framework, then the grounds for preferring one framework over another become increasingly difficult to establish.
The absolutist faces the opposite problem. The absolutist assumes that their understanding of truth, morality, rationality, beauty, or reality corresponds to an absolute order that has been grasped correctly. The aforementioned limitations of perception, reasoning, frameworks, and understanding are consequently overlooked or treated as problems belonging primarily to other people.
This can produce intellectual arrogance: the assumption that one's own framework has reached the final truth and that disagreement is therefore evidence of ignorance, irrationality, corruption, or evil. At its most extreme, this mindset can provide a justification for imposing one's conception of truth upon others through coercion.
The alternative is skepticism.
Skepticism as Intellectual Humility
Skepticism acknowledges the limitations of perception, reason, frameworks, and individual understanding while still permitting us to hold convictions and act upon them.
A skeptic does not have to reject truth. Rather, the skeptic recognizes that our access to truth is fallible. We can choose an epistemological and ontological framework that appears most reasonable according to the best of our current understanding, develop moral principles within that framework, construct arguments, and act upon our conclusions while maintaining an awareness that our conclusions may require revision.
This produces a peculiar but important position: we can pursue objective truth without claiming absolute possession of it.
There is a distinction between saying, “This proposition is objectively true according to the strongest reasons and evidence presently available to me,” and saying, “I possess an absolutely infallible understanding of reality.” The first permits inquiry, disagreement, evidence, revision, and intellectual development. The second closes the door to all of them.
Skepticism therefore does not require the abandonment of objectivity. It requires humility about our relationship with objectivity.
No human being can reasonably appoint themselves as the final authority on truth. We may have good reasons for believing something to be true, but the existence of good reasons does not transform us into infallible authorities. The same applies to ethics and aesthetics. We may construct powerful arguments concerning what is right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, while acknowledging that our conceptions remain products of fallible human inquiry.
This acknowledgment also weakens the rational basis for imposing our worldview upon others by force. If there remains a possibility that our own understanding is incomplete, then there remains a possibility that another person possesses an argument, experience, framework, or conception of reality that could expose a limitation in our own thinking.
Perhaps we have simply not encountered that argument yet.
Perhaps we have not experienced the reality that would have changed our worldview.
Perhaps we have not read the book, encountered the person, witnessed the event, or acquired the conceptual schema that would have forced us to reconsider what we currently regard as obvious.
This possibility is sufficient to cultivate intellectual humility.
Then What Can We Do? Reject Everything?
Does skepticism therefore require us to reject everything and remain permanently suspended in doubt?
No.
The purpose of skepticism is not paralysis. It is disciplined commitment.
We still need to establish our ontological, epistemological, and moral parameters. We still need to determine what we mean by truth, falsehood, right, wrong, beauty, ugliness, justice, and injustice. We still need frameworks through which we can interpret reality and make decisions. The difference is that we construct and employ these frameworks with an awareness of their limitations rather than treating them as unquestionable absolutes.
We can make objective arguments within a framework that we consider most reasonable according to the best of our understanding. We can defend our conclusions vigorously. We can disagree with others. We can organize collectively around shared principles. We can build institutions, communities, movements, and social arrangements based upon those principles.
But we should distinguish between agreement and authority.
If two people agree upon the parameters through which a particular question is to be evaluated, they can have a meaningful discussion about the evidence and reach conclusions according to those shared parameters. If thirty people share the same framework, they can collectively organize their lives and institutions according to it.
What skepticism denies is the automatic right to impose that framework upon everyone else.
We may believe that we have discovered the most reasonable way of living, but another person may possess reasons that we have yet to encounter. They may have experienced a reality that we have never experienced. They may have developed a conceptual schema that reveals something invisible within our own. They may eventually convince us, or we may eventually convince them.
The possibility of revision is therefore not a weakness of a worldview. It is a condition of intellectual honesty.
Skepticism ultimately asks us to hold our convictions firmly enough to act upon them, but lightly enough to revise them when better reasons emerge. It allows us to pursue truth without pretending to possess it absolutely, to pursue justice without assuming ourselves morally infallible, and to construct a worldview without transforming that worldview into an unquestionable authority.
Intellectual humility begins precisely at the point where we recognize that our understanding of reality is always an understanding from somewhere, through something, and according to some framework.
We cannot escape those conditions.
What we can escape is the arrogance of pretending that we have transcended them.