The Problem of Conflicting Sense-Impressions in Pyrrhonian Scepticism.

 

 

Consider the following case of conflicting perceptions: honey tastes sweet to some and bitter to others. Many philosophers in antiquity thought that this type of case created epistemological and metaphysical problems, and consequently they proposed different strategies to deal with it. Although it clearly underlies much ancient epistemological and metaphysical discussion, the problem of conflicting perceptions has received surprisingly little attention in the literature. A handful of articles have dealt with the general structure of the problem (e.g. Burnyeat, 1979; Fine, 1996), and even fewer papers have analysed the implications that conflicting perceptions have for ancient Pyrrhonism (an exception is Harte and Lane, 1999).

 

In this new project I analyse the general structure of the problem: why did some philosophers think that conflicts of perceptions are problematic? Strikingly, this fundamental question has been overlooked by modern scholars. Based on both philosophical considerations and textual analysis, I argue that the phenomenon of conflicting perceptions was thought to be problematic because it does not fit well with these philosophers’ pre-theoretical assumptions about the nature of the world and the way we have access to it. As the examination of some passages in the works of the Sextus Empiricus will show (esp. PH I 12, 26, 29, 210-211), Sextus’ narrative implies that all men share the same pre-theoretical assumptions. This will also allow me to show that the different ways in which ancient philosophers propose to solve the problem of conflicting perceptions depend on which of those assumptions they decide to drop or qualify.