Program “I love Psychology” 

Feelings of doubt and indecisiveness. Reasonable Doubt

This is not to say, of course, that doubts have absolutely no use for us, for it is they that force us to act more or less thoughtfully, but there should be a minimum of them in our lives, like salt in food. Doubts are caused by fear of failure, of the negative result that may occur. But a negative result is also a result, and although of course you want to deal only with positive things, you won’t be able to live this life without negative experiences. For the overwhelming majority of people, doubts arise precisely because of the attitude that making mistakes and making mistakes is bad. This is how we are raised from childhood, teaching us not to make mistakes, and therefore to act, giving rise to millions of doubts in our heads. Self-doubt has a direct impact on doubts, of which in this case there are simply a great many, and a person would rather find you a lot of arguments why he cannot do something than just go and do it. What can you say, of course it shouldn’t be like this, we should doubt very rarely, and even then only to think through our actions in detail, and not use doubts as a brake. This is the worst thing when you slow down, and when we doubt, we definitely slow down.

Sextus does not even recognize the truth of the main premise, nor the truth of the conclusion. For the Major to be true, we would need to make sure that every person is truly lethal, which is obviously impossible. The conclusion is then already contained in the major's premise, so its conclusion does not mean any expansion of our knowledge.

The causal reason for Sextus's refusal to criticize. In the third book of this work we find arguments which at some points are reminiscent of Huma. For the Sect, causality is not an objective definition of reality, but only a connection between phenomena, that is, between our content of thought. Cause and effect are a completely heterogeneous reality, which Sextus proves as a temporary category: these two quantities can be neither consistent nor real. If the effect had to precede this cause, it would be absurd.

I’ll tell you, you can doubt all your life, thinking and wondering how it could be, but I recommend that you experiment more, that is, act even when you have doubts. Well, anyway, you cannot be one hundred percent sure of something, this is not a reason not to do anything. A theory will remain just a theory if it is not verified through practice, and therefore there is no need to think too much, you just need to find out. If you belong to the overwhelming majority that I spoke about above, then you need to change your worldview. You must understand that mistakes and failures are as normal as success. There is no need to be afraid of them, there is no need to try to avoid them, if failure overtakes you, then you need to try to learn a lesson from it, through a simple understanding of what happened and why. If you do not give up the attitude that a problem is bad, you will never grow, and you will remain at the level you are at today. Well, what terrible thing could happen in your life if you make a decision that you doubt? If they don’t kill you for this, then nothing, although death is inevitable, it’s only a matter of time.

If, on the contrary, the cause preceded this effect, then the current connection between them will fall. Finally, if they were given at the same time, cause and effect would lose their mutual distinction. Because, in addition, they are correlative concepts, they cannot be understood - one relates to another and so on again and again, so we are dealing with a continuous appeal to infinity.

Sexts suspect that any skeptics are asserting their own threat, because the moment something is asserted, it claims the truth and thereby cancels its own position, which denies the truth. For example, when skeptics argue about the possibility scientific evidence, they do themselves as proof that they deny the values ​​of the scientific - necessity and generality. Sextus knows about this, and in his work “Against the Mathematicians” he directly expresses: But even if he destroys himself, he does not have the possibility of the existence of proofs.

But still, I'm sure that most what you doubt is not at all a threat to your life, and if so, you have nothing to lose. Any position in this life can be won back, you just need to have the courage to do so, and doubts are for cowards. You don’t doubt it if you know that a negative result is not possible? You only doubt if there is a possibility of a negative scenario, and this is what you are afraid of. Or rather, in fact, you are not afraid, in fact, you are interested in finding out for yourself whether your theory works or not, whether you are doing the right thing. But they taught you, they are afraid of this, so that you don’t accidentally grow wings, and you don’t get out of the general herd. Your interests do not lie in doubts, you need to understand this, your interests are in activity and in activity. An idea has come to your mind, it needs to be implemented, thought about if necessary, planned, but implemented.

There are many things that do the same thing to others! Such as fire consumption of wood and destroys itself, and as a laxative, expelling impurities from the body, and expel itself, and also brought evidence against evidence - after eliminating any evidence - also destroys itself!

For example, at the presentation of the first tropic of Aenesis, Hegel writes: The first is the diversity of animal organization. Depending on this diverse organization different ideas and advice on the same issue arises with different living beings. Thus, skeptics conclude that animals have different origins. Hegel's conclusion also follows from the absence of an objective image of the world. However, the same conclusions, according to Heger, are based on finding other different, conflicting ideas about animals and people, represented by other tropes.

If thoughts often come into your head, but you doubt it and just drive them over your head, thinking about how it might be, I feel sorry for you, your life is primitive. A negative result can only negatively affect your self-confidence, but this is not natural either, because if you made a mistake, it is not a tragedy, but you did, you showed that you are a person who can do it if he wants. Therefore, a real person, great and omnipotent, simply has no room in his head for doubts; they take up too much space there. Doubts, like cowardice, should only be a protective factor, like an alarm, but not as a guide to life.

A trivial and apparently contemptuous belief in the objective deceitfulness of finite objects suddenly arises among the assumptions of Hegelian dialectics. The mockery of the realists, with whom the Prussian ideologist does not care, lies entirely on his own head. The tropics of Agripa are a bit more challenging and not as easy to tackle. Hegel does not even try to equate them and perceives them as valuable anti-realist arguments. Agrippa showed that there is no absolutely correct principle, because we can always accept the opposite principle.

As a guide, I advise you to use confidence, courage, determination, self-belief, and the desire to have more. With such baggage, you are unlikely to be scared, but you need to love problems and failures, without them you are like without fuel to move. It is the problem that makes us act more actively, and faith in ourselves allows us to overcome the consequences of our mistakes. Drive doubts out of your head, they are not needed there, because they were artificially placed in you, when you were born, there were no doubts in your head, because they are not needed there. We acquire doubts in the process of upbringing, as part of what seems to be supposed to help us survive, but this is in moderate doses. In large quantities, doubt, like alcohol, is poison for us.

Neither principle is compelling to the reasoning process, so it depends on our choices. In some areas this is true. But both Agrippa and Hegel ignored the privileged position of the principle of dispute. There is no other way to formulate the idea here. This formulation is merely verbal, and the validity of the principle of disagreement is unintentionally accepted.

Hegel admits that his system contains its own negation and that this is precisely what happens. However, in applying negation to his own thoughts, Hegel was very gentle, preferring to deny himself only in words, so he did not have to do so. A speculative idea finds itself in self-denial of its dynamic life, because, being rejected, it “moves.” There is also an unintentional implied objective reality principle of dispute. A speculative idea is subject to its opposite only “immediately,” and not simultaneously.

Maxim Vlasov

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Greetings, dear blog readers!

From this article you will learn how to doubt less and learn to make even the most difficult and life-changing decisions. Including which one to choose, whether to go to work after maternity leave or not, to call a friend whom you offended yesterday or not.

This minimal time shift saved Hegel from understanding the absurdity of his teaching. The principle set aside brought him back to his central thesis. Therefore, classical metaphysics is not at all naive with their “balancing” technique when they make the difference between being and non-being absolute and tireless. The process did not prove its validity of the principle of dispute ad infinitum. The cessation of the principle is not arbitrary, but inevitable. In fact, the authentic form of knowledge does not claim the principle of blocking regression to infinity, but, on the contrary, such regression does not exist, because this principle cannot be denied, because its negation presupposes it, and therefore it is necessary to begin with it the fundamental process of science.

Before moving directly to the techniques that help you make a decision, let's talk about the fact that not all decisions are equally important and, in this regard, they can be approached in different ways.

Fateful, important and routine decisions

All situations in which we need to make a decision can be divided into 3 groups:

1. Fateful decisions.

These are the decisions that will significantly change our lives; the results of this decision seriously affect our future destiny.

This must be realized, although Aristotle emphasizes that everything cannot be proven, otherwise the process will go on to infinity and nothing will become clear. From the point of view of unmatched realism, skepticism looks different. Hegel does not understand skepticism because he interprets it against the backdrop of his dialectical prejudices. The contribution of skeptical objections to philosophical thinking does not lie where Hegel sees it, but in view of the obstacles to such a radical position. Skeptics have already deviated from their search program by developing a sense of skepticism.

For example, the decision to radically change profession, start doing business, move to another country for permanent residence, choose a husband.

Here long-term doubts are justified. Rather, it is justified to think about a decision for a long time, collect information to evaluate options, and discuss it with other people.

2. Important decisions.

An example of situations where it is necessary to make an important decision could be the search new job(choosing an employer), choosing a school for a child, purchasing a car, talking with significant person about your relationship, the decision to go to paid training on a topic that is important to you.

The skeptical position was not about being self-serving, its finality was practical as it had a certain skeptic to ensure inner peace and harmony. The era, abandoning any judgment of the nature of reality, renunciation of truth, was skeptical of itself in order to eliminate the disaster from possible misdeeds or deprivations from innumerable truth. Inner peace comes only when we stop worrying about the truth. The skeptical search loses its original openness for its practical completeness and ceases to be an endless search.

These are decisions, the importance of which is determined by significant monetary or time investments, the expenditure of emotional resources (for example, when you have a not the most pleasant conversation with a loved one), when the relationships with which this decision is associated are of great value.

3. Routine decisions.

This type of decision is related to everyday, passing situations, from what color of a new blouse to buy to what movie or ice cream to choose.

If he had the opportunity to come up with a true vision, that is, to find something true, the skeptic would lose the inner serenity that characterizes him by his search. The truth can be questioned again, and the way to secure it is difficult. Seeking to achieve inner peace is a very unfortunate combination of means and ends that the skeptics have overlooked.

The search for submission to inner happiness ceases to be a search and turns into an untouchable dogma. No major skeptic could escape these pitfalls because it comes to the heart of the skeptical position. In declared indifference to things, indifference also becomes the goal of all skepticism - inner happiness. This did not happen to any of the skeptics because they understood happiness as immediately desirable and did not follow the principle of indifference as the dogmatists did. Beyond this fundamental contradiction, further contradictions arise in parts of the teachings of particular skeptics.

The consequences of these decisions do not change our lives much, but despite this, we can spend a lot of time and effort making them. Hang on to them, waste your energy worrying that you made a mistake by going to this cinema.

Techniques to help you make decisions easily

1. Cartesian questions.

Suitable for taking important and fateful decisions, in which you determine whether this should be in your life or not. It is not suitable when there are several options and you need to choose from them.

Pyrgon, like Hegel, adheres to the contradiction of reality, but this statement does not apply to self-realization. All the skeptical tropics of Aenesidemus and Agrippa are, in the above sense, illustrative examples of the self-destructive thinking of their authors. Einsid's criticisms of science and causation also turn against him. If it is not science, his theses are not scientific.

Objections to the validity of causation are absurd. If he accuses that the cause of his transcendence has lost its identity, then we must remind him of his own thesis of the unidentified thing. Sextus Empiricus denies his phenomenology, arguing that causation is purely subjective and yet assigns it an objective objectivity in the generation of phenomena in the human mind. His elimination of silogist thinking only applies when he applies the principle on which he relies, i.e. the principle of empirical verification of truth.

Ask yourself 4 questions in sequence; it is better to write down the answers. And don’t stop at the first answers that lie on the surface. It will be better if you can find more than 5 answers to each question.

Question 1. What will happen if this happens?

Question 2: What happens if this does NOT happen?

Question 3: What will NOT happen if this happens?

But this is internally contradictory because it itself is not verifiable. Thus, Sextus's criticism of the syllogistic structure of reasoning falls flat. The fascination with skeptical thoughts sometimes takes on such dimensions that even some realists attribute to it some inappropriate historical merit. For example, Giovanni Riehl, who has an undeniable philosophical sense of reality, admires Sextus's separation of the "laxatives" and ascribes a pure role to skepticism in relation to the dogmatic Hellenistic systems, especially Stoicism.

Question 4: What will NOT happen if this does NOT happen?

Here is an example of reasoning when you are faced with the situation of whether to go to work after maternity leave or not

1. What happens if I go back to work after maternity leave?

  • I can be financially independent and buy gifts with my own money
  • I will have an incentive to dress beautifully, put on makeup, and take care of myself
  • I will have less time to spend with my children
  • I'll break out of the house-sandbox-house wheel
  • I will be able to realize myself not only as a mother and wife.

2. What happens if this does NOT happen?

He also didn't understand that conflicting opinions cannot perform any cleansing, that they cannot even perform the task of “laxatives”, which after releasing the unwanted contents will also be expelled. It is the automatic braking that makes it impossible to establish yourself in the microwave of its duration. Skepticism cannot be created at all, it only relies on unfounded rhetoric. You know what you need, but you won't do it.

Who really owns the voice inside of us that says we're not good enough to run a marathon, pursue a career, or process everything that hasn't yet been accomplished, but do we know we need it? Who are you, do you think about this? You can't do this. - Someone in your head sounds like a stuck soundtrack.

  • If I stay at home, I can keep the house clean, play more with my child, and relax more.
  • I will turn into a housewife who only cares about “what to cook” and “where to go for a walk with the child”
  • If I don't go to work, I won't have my money.
  • If I continue to sit at home after, my relatives will consider me a slacker.
  • I will have more time for hobbies and self-development.

3. What will NOT happen if this happens?

Here we have another voice. He explained to me that Doubt was not speaking from my rational Self. That my Doubt was just fear. Doubts try to quench our dreams. We can achieve what we want to achieve if we start, and we are willing to take incremental steps.

Step: Recognize that Doubt is Just a Feeling

What did my faith tell me?


To get rid of something, we must first acknowledge that it exists. It's not fun for guys especially. Let's say the main reason we are not aware of our desires is that we doubt ourselves. Only then can we break this habit.

  • If I go back to work, I won’t be able to monitor changes in my child so closely.
  • In this case, I will not be able to sleep until 9 am and take a quiet hour in the middle of the day.
  • I won’t reproach myself for being dumb and completely forgetting what I knew before.
  • When my child grows up, he will not be ashamed of the fact that his mother is a housewife.
  • I will not listen to my husband’s reproaches that he is the one who supports me

4. What will NOT happen if this does NOT happen?

  • If I stay at home after maternity leave, then I won’t be able to prove to everyone that I’m capable of much.
  • If I'm just a housewife, I won't be able to fully realize myself.
  • If I don't go to work after maternity leave, I'll never know what it's like to be a working mother.
  • My life won't be as fulfilling as I want it to be
  • I will not listen to accusations from my husband that because of work I completely abandoned my home and child.

For making a decision when you need to choose from several options, the technique

2. Selection matrix.

To do this, you draw a table where you write the name of the options in the lines and the selection criteria in the columns. Then you evaluate each option according to each criterion and assign a certain score to it. Then you calculate the sum of points that each option scored and the one that received the most points.

I talked about how to choose your favorite job from several options using this technique at the webinar "Formula for your favorite job". You can download it for free.

Another technique for making a final decision on an important matter is

3. Deadline.

You can choose this or that job for a very long time, decide which car is better to buy, because... There is a lot of information, a lot of contradictory data. To ensure that this process does not drag on for a long time, you can set yourself a deadline for making a decision.

For example, in a month, on such and such a date, I definitely have to choose what brand of car I want to buy.