The attraction of radical skepticism is easy to understand. You have held beliefs with confidence that later turned out to be wrong — and crucially, you did not know they were wrong at the time. The error was invisible from inside it. Smart people, reasoning carefully from similar starting points, arrive at conclusions opposite to yours. If that is possible, it can seem like any current belief might be similarly compromised: held with the same unearned certainty, wrong in ways you cannot yet see.

That worry is serious and should not be dissolved too quickly. But it is worth being precise about what it actually is. The anxiety is not really about being wrong on the margin — about some local belief turning out to be mistaken and needing revision. That happens constantly and is not especially threatening. The worry is about being wrong in a deeper, more paralyzing sense: that the whole orientation might be off, that the foundations themselves might be rotten.

But try to actually suspend the foundations. Not as a thought experiment — as a real operating stance. There are some commitments you cannot give up without giving up thought itself: that contradictions cannot both be true, that the past bears on the present, that some arguments are better than others. These are not beliefs that survived scrutiny. They are the standards scrutiny depends on. You cannot argue that reason is untrustworthy without relying on reason in the argument. You cannot say your past corrections were mistaken without assuming that mistake and correction still mean something stable. You cannot worry that your past updates were false corrections without presupposing that “false” and “correction” mean something stable. Total suspension does not achieve a neutral vantage point. It dissolves the equipment needed to occupy any vantage point at all.

What the worry genuinely licenses is something more modest: hold your conclusions loosely, take seriously the possibility that you are the one who is wrong, remain open to revision when you encounter better reasoning. The disagreement of intelligent people shows the difficulty is real; it does not show the process is broken.

And there is a further point. Your current beliefs are not the raw, untested things they were when you first held them. They have been carried through argument, exposed to smarter people, survived your own past revisions — or they have been replaced by beliefs that did. That history is not a guarantee, but it is not nothing either. A belief that has come through repeated contact with counterevidence and still holds is not in the same position as one you have never examined. The anxiety treats all current beliefs as equally fragile, equally blind. But some of them have already been stress-tested. The ones that remain deserve a degree of trust — not certainty, but the working confidence of something that has held up so far.

Being wrong on the margin — which will happen — is not the same as the foundations giving way.