Suspending judgment › Living by Appearances

The practical objection is immediate: if assent is suspended, what guides action? Sextus distinguishes a criterion for deciding truth or existence from a criterion of action. Appearances supply practical guidance even while their philosophical interpretation remains under examination (I.21–22).

He describes a fourfold observance of everyday life. Natural capacities enable perception and thought. Necessary feelings lead a hungry person toward food and a thirsty one toward drink. Laws and customs provide inherited practices. Instruction in arts supplies learned activity. He describes these guides without giving them the status of dogmatic conclusions about reality (I.23–24).

The learned arts matter because his practical life is not reduced to reflexes. A person can engage in a skill and follow its instruction. In the project illustration, the analogous move would be to use an available procedure while continuing to examine the disputed explanation of failure. The comparison has a limit: if the team adopts provisional beliefs, that commitment still differs from withholding assent. We should not assume that such a team thereby lives Sextus' complete skeptical practice.

Following custom also creates an ethical problem. What happens when a community's practice is harmful? Sextus' account explains how action is possible without first establishing a philosophical theory. It does not automatically supply a defense of every custom or a developed principle for reforming unjust institutions. A critic can accept that suspension permits activity while still demanding an account of responsible resistance. Activity alone is not enough to establish that the activity is good.