The Modes of Suspension and What They Were For

Pyrrhonist skepticism was never simple doubt for its own sake. Its practitioners developed structured sets of arguments, known as the modes, cataloguing the many ways that appearances conflict, the same object looks different colors in different light, tastes different to a healthy and a sick person, seems differently sized from near and far, so that no single appearance can be trusted over another without an arbitrary and unjustified choice. Faced with equally balanced arguments on every side of a question, the Pyrrhonist practice was to suspend judgment altogether, a state called epoche, neither affirming nor denying the disputed claim, rather than forcing a conclusion the evidence does not actually support. The promised reward for this discipline was ataraxia, an untroubled calm that Pyrrhonists claimed followed naturally and, they said, almost accidentally once the exhausting effort to settle unsettleable disputes was finally given up. Ancient sources distinguish Pyrrhonism sharply from the skepticism of the Academy under Arcesilaus and Carneades, since the Academics were willing to argue that certain knowledge is impossible, which the Pyrrhonist treated as itself an overconfident dogmatic claim, refusing to assert even that much. The systematic version of the school known from later sources, chiefly the surviving works of Sextus Empiricus in the second century CE, is separated from Pyrrho himself by roughly five centuries of transmission and elaboration.