What is "skeptical"

Usage examples of "skeptical".

It was common in the early days of antisepsis for a skeptical surgeon to half-heartedly try the lengthy, exasperating techniques on one or two patients, find that the patients still became infected, and generalize from this experience to conclude the system was worthless.

Both Varantus and the Martian ambassador looked skeptical, but Brassen nodded.

Through the course of this strange yet inspiring evening I had gone from being a skeptical litigator carefully studying a hotshot lawyer-turned yogi to a believer whose eyes had been opened for the first time in many years.

It would be best to speak of the matter to no one, she decided-not even to Melia who, no doubt, would be as skeptical as Mr.

In this, it seems to me, we should agree with these skeptical anti-realists and knowledge microscopists of today: their instinct, which repels them from modern reality, is unrefuted - what do their retrograde bypaths concern us!

Being also skeptical, his skepticism sometimes overcolours his imagination.

The self-anointed pastor of the First Resurrectionist Maritime Assembly for God was skeptical.

Her first reactions to his growing interest in her company had been suspicion and disbelief, but as time went on without any slackening of his regard, nor lessening of his unfailing courtesy and respect toward Seriema, even her skeptical mind had begun to wonder, and finally to hope, while her love-starved imagination raced far ahead.

Does he care to say what is unpersuasive about the evidence adduced by so many historians and participants, from the hawkish Bundy and Haldeman to the more skeptical Clark Clifford?

The march of science, which had been stopped by the local fogs of Todos Santos some fifty years, had not disturbed the simple Aesculapius of the province with heterodox theories: he still purged and bled like Sangrado, and met the priest at the deathbed of his victims with a pious satisfaction that had no trace of skeptical contention.

Children wincing in the sun, women in sun hats, men shading their eyes from the glare as if the past possessed some quality of light we no longer experience, a Sunday dazzle that caused people in their churchgoing clothes to tighten their faces and stand at an angle to the future, somewhat averted it seemed, wearing fixed and finedrawn smiles, skeptical of something in the nature of the box camera.

I would hope, in the confident, fantastic, and disintegrationist mode of Robertson and Dover Wilson, but in a skeptical and conservative way.

Hephaistion would not consider his proposal, and even Eumenes was skeptical, until Casey put together a hasty, toy-sized prototype to demonstrate the idea.

He was also skeptical about the Army leadership, which he considered to be too old-fashioned, wedded to heavy forces, and too slow to change.

Perhaps Gamow was skeptical of his own equation, since he never sought experiments to look for the background radiation.