What is "scepticism"

Usage examples of "scepticism".

The reports of the amnestic effects of protein synthesis inhibitors were first ignored, often on the same sorts of a priori grounds that had led to my initial scepticism, and only after some struggle accepted by these definers of the field.

Because they travelled around, and had many different pupils, in differing circumstances, the sophists became adept at arguing different points of view, and in time this bred a scepticism about their approach.

But the scientific attitude tends, except in the highest minds, to develop a certain dryness, a scepticism about spiritual and imaginative forces, a dulness of the inner apprehension, a hard quality of judgment.

If we reckon the scepticism that Gibbon says characterized his time to have declined in ours, and if even a little of the rampant gullibility he attributes to late classical times is left over in ours, should we not expect something like demons to find a niche in the popular culture of the present?

All these capable people are thus in the position of Wotan, forced to maintain as sacred, and themselves submit to, laws which they privately know to be obsolescent makeshifts, and to affect the deepest veneration for creeds and ideals which they ridicule among themselves with cynical scepticism.

Every statement put forth by the Laboratory interests in defence of the present system of unrestricted and secret vivisection should be regarded with scepticism unless accompanied by absolute proofs.

I did not mind this, as I knew that Wiggy liked to maintain a certain tacit pride in the face of my scepticism, but when she mentioned that Eileen had read the tea leaves and promised her a late marriage I drew the line.

All science asks is to employ the same levels of scepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.

Something in it I felt was like my own sensation when Simson in the midst of his scepticism was struck dumb.

Troilus hoping to find Cressida again in the city, Pandarus entertaining a scepticism which he concealed from his friend.

Another species of mitigated scepticism which may be of advantage to mankind, and which may be the natural result of the Pyrrhonian doubts and scruples, is the limitation of our enquiries to such subjects as are best adapted to the narrow capacity of human understanding.

The great subverter of Pyrrhonism or the excessive principles of scepticism is action, and employment, and the occupations of common life.

There is, indeed, a more mitigated scepticism or academical philosophy, which may be both durable and useful, and which may, in part, be the result of this Pyrrhonism, or excessive scepticism, when its undistinguished doubts are, in some measure, corrected by common sense and reflection.

Atrocious, indeed, must have been the guilt, and strange would have been the scepticism, of those men, if they had obstinately resisted the proofs of a divine agency, which the elements, the whole range of the animal creation, and even the subtle and invisible operations of the human mind, were compelled to obey.

A stunning decline in life expectancy, increasing infant mortality, rampant epidemic disease, subminimal medical standards and ignorance of preventive medicine all work to raise the threshold at which scepticism is triggered in an increasingly desperate population.