Stempticism And Skepticism

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Skepticism is a questioning attitude towards knowledge, facts, or opinions/beliefs stated as facts. Two areas of knowledge in which this can be true for a skeptic are in history and the human sciences.
History is the study of past events and consists of facts that always remain true. For example, something in the past that will never change and will always remain true is that slavery was abolished in 1865. We know this because it is something we have obtained through education and has been passed down from generation to generation and will never change. When it comes to history, we run into many problems. One of the major problems with history is that we obtain the knowledge through first hand accounts. A skeptic could say that it is hard to know the truth if our knowledge of the past is first filtered through the eyes of those who witnessed it and then through the eyes of the historian who wrote about it. A skeptic may side with Lytton Strachey’s paradoxical observation that “Ignorance is the first requisite of the historian, ignorance which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits”. This observation means that through ignorance and biases, a historian chooses what he/she would like to include and what not to include. A skeptic would say that this would impact the way that we obtain historical information and what is true because there are facts being omitted.
Another reason that a skeptic may question the accuracy of an historical fact is because the writing of history is influenced by the era which it is written. For example, we do not know how future historians will look back and see the invasion of Iraq in 2003. As time passes, we are always adding new information. This means that what has gone before will be rea...

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...e as humans it is so easy for us to connect emotionally with other people. Lastly, there are biases toward human sciences because they are swayed by emotion and reason, and emotion can change our perception of things. Since we frequently explain human behavior in terms of meaning and purpose we may never be able to reduce the human sciences to the natural sciences.
Because we did not live in the time of the history, we learn in school or the human sciences that are studied that it is very easy for people to question the facts of where this information came from or how accurate this information is. A skeptic will always question facts or knowledge no matter how much information is given. We will always need skeptics to prevent us from always accepting a fact without wanting to understand it more and ask questions. So is skepticism and curiosity always a bad thing?

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