Honey is sweet

I've been reading The Skeptic Way, as I've mentioned. It's full of interesting arguments, but arguments that I think are ultimately wrong. One of the precepts of Skepticism is the distrust of our very senses. If we can't trust our senses, can we really profess to know the truth? They believed not.

One of their example arguments was about honey. We claim that honey is sweet. But, it is not necessarily sweet to everyone. From Sextus Empiricus's Outlines of Pyrrhonism:

For example, the honey appears to us to be sweet. This we grant, for we sense the sweetness. But whether it is sweet we question insofar as this has to do with the [philosophical] theory, for that theory is not the appearance, but something said about the appearance.

This was interesting to me, since I have experimented with the Indian herb Gymnema Sylvestre, which is a sugar-blocker. If you eat it, you won't taste any sweetness for about an hour. It's a pretty lousy hour. After ingesting the herb, I ate a few sweet things, which were radically transformed. Sugar tasted like sand, and honey was just fairly tasteless glop. So, honey is sweet? It depends.

Still, the Skeptics would say that this proves we can't even say that honey is sweet, since it obviously was not sweet to me. And they would be true that the statement "honey is sweet to all humans all the time" is wrong. But "honey is sweet" is just shorthand for "honey is sweet to almost all people, almost all of the time", which is typical of the sort of hedging we would have to do if we wanted to lend our thoughts some precision. My experiences don't mean that honey isn't sweet, but it serves to define the cases in which honey would not be sweet. Knowledge is gained by the sugar-blocker experiment, not taken away.

This is, I think, the problem of the Skeptics. They are correct in not believing most of what they hear. But instead of approximating the truth, and then refining, they propose to not believe anything. This is far worse, I think. We need to believe things, since knowledge in general helps us lead lives that are benefitted from societies' collective wisdom. We just need to be open to new evidence, and to refine our beliefs when they are proven wrong.