In “Blind Skepticism versus a Rhetoric of Assent” (College English 61:4) Wayne Booth offers a narrow assessment of a broad problem, the problem of skepticism. As Booth concisely puts it:
If we’ve encountered unlimited solid refutations of “truths” we once embraced, we fall into the camp of the many utter skeptics among the great thinkers: “I must doubt every belief unless I have hard evidence for it—and there may be no hard evidence for anything.”
The alternative to doubting everything is seen to promote forms of dogmatism where ideas are fixed by appeals to authority. The assault on this sort of dogmatism is strong, particularly in the realm of the rhetoric of science, where Feyerabend argued long ago that science has no coherent “method” for arriving at its “truths.” Booth’s “rhetoric of assent,” offered as an alternative to both dogmatism and skepticism, has been a subject of debate and elucidation for decades now. Underneath it lies an even older debate over how we can “know” anything about the external world at all.
Booth does not engage that issue. Avrum Stroll’s Surfaces does. Reading it, I was interested in his discussion of G.E. Moore and the problem of “direct realism.” Moore’s famous argument against skepticism goes something like this: pointing to his hand in a lecture hall, Moore uttered “I know this is a hand.” Was this a dogmatic expression of belief? I think not. Stroll frames his inquiry around this passage from Moore’s “A Defense of Common Sense”: