But why?  Question, question, question.  No room for blythly proceeding forward without full consideration.  While the skeptic is dismissed/ignored as too skeptical, they have a point - and still cannot be refuted.  If the "contemporay" attitude (a la Pollock and Cruz) is taken on, there are similarities with a critical attitude.  Except the critical attitude is more focused on power.  Questions are more around whose knowledge overrides others and the critique that it is typically those who are powerful (although possibly 'power' is manifest in different ways).   The skeptical attitude focuses questions on a more 'reasonable'(?) approach?  What reasons do we have for believing this or that to be true?

...But contemporary epistemology tends to take a different attitude toward skepticism.  If we consider a variety of skepticism that confines itself to some limited class of beliefs, it might be possible to answer the skeptic by showing that those beliefs can be securely defended by appeal to other beliefs not among those deemed problematic.  But for any very general kind of skepticism, that is impossible in principle.  Every argument must proceed from some premises, and if the skeptic calls all relevant premises into doubt at the same time then there is no way to reason with him.  The whole enterprise of refuting the skeptic is ill-founded, because he will not allow us anything with which to work. 
The proper treatment of skeptical arguments requires looking at them in a different light.  We come to philosophy with a large stock of beliefs.  Initially, we regard them all as knowledge, but then we discover that they conflict.  One instance of this general phenomenon is represented by skeptical arguments… (Pollock and Cruz 1999: 3)

[Skeptical arguments] are important for what they show about knowledge rather than because they make us doubt that we have knowledge. The task of the contemporary epistemologist is to understand knowledge. For this she need not refute the skeptic – we already know that the skeptic is wrong. Nevertheless, important conclusions about the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification can be gleaned form the investigation of skeptical arguments. This is because such an argument constitutes a reductio ad absurdum of its premises, and its premises consist of things we initially believe about knowledge and justification. Thus in deciding which of those premises is wrong we are learning something new about knowledge and correcting mistaken beliefs with which we begin. In short, the task of the epistemologist is not to show that the skeptic is wrong but to explain why he is wrong (Pollock and Cruz 1999: 10).

Even though all arguments rest on premises, an argument’s premises need not, of course, be question begging in a context of inquiry. So, the skeptical challenge at hand does not oppose argument in general. It opposes only arguments that beg relevant questions in a context of inquiry.
The skeptical challenge does not imply that moderate realism cannot be true or even that it is not true. So, the challenge does not require idealism of any sort. The main skeptical issues concerns not directly the objective truth or falsity of moderate realism but rather the kind of epistemic support available for it… (Moser 1999: 73).

"Postmodernism" as a way of organizing expectations... could be seen as a cautionary and skeptical approach to the ability of the system to address is own deficiencies. (Hohendahl 2000: 54)

Gadamer understands this dialectical character of experience as a “skepticism in action” (Risser 1997)

While I can agree with the last point Pollock and Cruz make - which is similar to that of Moser - the assertion that the skeptic is "wrong" seems a bit much!  This is based on the very thing the skeptic is arguing against, so the skeptic is wrong simply because they dont believe that the skeptic is right...??

Some earlier notes (in refnotes/risser)

• so how much to know/understand? what are the questions I am asking? why am I reading this aspect of philosophy? why am I reading philosophy?
• I guess the key is the question of knowing and understanding – arising from concerns regarding objectivity and truth – if we are going to be sustainable (what ever that might mean) we have to have some understanding… or do we?
• maybe I come to this more because I think that our current emphasis on certainty must be mellowed/ameliorated/diminished/softened – one approach for doing this is by raising the question of understanding and knowledge etc.
• the notion of an historically effected consciousness should be a warning for any who rely on knowledge and research – this is the same as questioning assumptions – but perhaps it makes it more dialogic, more evolutionary – by noting this h.e.c. and pointing to the recursion (what terms used by risser/gadamer/etc.?) involved in interpretation – the interaction between interpreter, interpreted and h.e.c. – makes this a dynamic and evolving thing – knowledge is not static, but a continual dialogue

and some other thoughts much later and after reading bits of Herrnstein Smith (Scandalous Knowledge): the skeptical thing goes much deeper.  It's - excuse the terminology - foundational. :)