 There are numerous testimonies to the effect that the Academics regarded argument on both sides of the question as a method of inquiry, and argued as they did the better to discover the truth, i.e., to further skeptical ends in the original acceptance of the term (cf. Cicero, Acad. 2.7. 60, 76; N.D.1.11; Plutarch, Stoic. Repugnan. 1037C). But opposing arguments to each other can be also be used to lend support to skepticism in the sense of a skeptical position by calling the possibility of knowledge into question and commending the suspension of judgment. And sometimes the Academics are said to have created such oppositions with this end in view, i.e., it seems, to support a skeptical position to which they were committed (Cicero Acad. 1.46). And a set of arguments directly to the–in our sense–skeptical conclusions that nothing can be known and that one should suspend judgment occupied a place of central importance in the Academy’s practice of argument. The Academics seemed to their opponents to be attached to the skeptical conclusions of these arguments. And this seems to have been true of at least some Academics. Nonetheless these arguments seem at least at first and in the hands of some New Academics to have been put forward in a dialectical spirit.