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Sceptical Argument (sceptical + argument)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	100%

Selected Abstracts

THE STRUCTURE OF SCEPTICAL ARGUMENTS

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 218 2005
Duncan Pritchard
It is nowadays taken for granted that the core radical sceptical arguments all pivot upon the principle that the epistemic operator in question is ,closed' under known entailments. Accordingly, the standard anti-sceptical project now involves either denying closure or retaining closure by amending how one understands other elements of the sceptical argument. However, there are epistemic principles available to the sceptic which are logically weaker than closure but achieve the same result. Accordingly the contemporary debate fails to engage with the sceptical problem in its strongest form. [source]

Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 215 2004
Adam Leite
A familiar form of scepticism supposes that knowledge requires infallibility. Although that requirement plays no role in our ordinary epistemic practices, Barry Stroud has argued that this is not a good reason for rejecting a sceptical argument: our ordinary practices do not correctly reflect the requirements for knowledge because the appropriateness-conditions for knowledge attribution are pragmatic. Recent fashion in contextualist semantics for ,knowledge' agrees with this view of our practice, but incorrectly. Ordinary epistemic evaluations are guided by our conception of a person's standing with regard to the reasons that there are for and against the truth of a belief. Thus the objection from our ordinary practices is sound: fallibility is not an epistemological shortcoming, and a convincing sceptical argument must use only requirements which figure in ordinary epistemic practice. [source]

Horwich, Meaning and Kripke's Wittgenstein

THE PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 199 2000
Alexander Miller
Paul Horwich has argued that Kripke's Wittgenstein's ,sceptical challenge' to the notion of meaning and rule-following only gets going if an ,inflationary' conception of truth is presupposed, and he develops a ,use-theoretic' conception of meaning which he claims is immune to Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical attack. I argue that even if we grant Horwich his ,deflationary' conception of truth, that is not enough to undermine Kripke's Wittgenstein's sceptical argument. Moreover, Horwich's own ,use-theoretic' account of meaning actually falls prey to that sceptical challenge. [source]

The Tension in Wittgenstein's Diagnosis of Scepticism

DIALECTICA, Issue 3 2000
Reid Buchanan
I argue that Wittgenstein's rejection of scepticism in On Certainty rests on the view that epistemic concepts such as,doubt,,knowledge',,justification'and so on, cannot be intelligibly applied to the common sense propositions that traditional sceptical arguments appear to undermine. I detect two strands in On Certainty in support of this view. I attempt to show that neither of these strands adequately establishes the thesis, and that they point to a tension in Wittgenstein's treatment of scepticism. I argue that the first strand is dogmatic, but accords with the constraints of Wittgenstein's method, while the second strand avoids the dogmatism of the first at the cost of violating these constraints. [source]

ACADEMIC ARGUMENTS FOR THE INDISCERNIBILITY THESIS

PACIFIC PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY, Issue 4 2005
CASEY PERIN
I claim that these arguments, unlike modern sceptical arguments, are supposed to establish mere counterfactual rather than epistemic possibilities. They purport to show that for any true perceptual impression j, there are a number of alternative causal histories j might have had which would not have resulted in any change in the way in which j represents its object. [source]

Scepticism and its Sources

PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMENOLOGICAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2003
SAMIR OKASHA
A number of recent philosophers, including Michael Williams, Barry Stroud and Donald Davidson, have argued that scepticism about the external world stems from the founda-tionalist assumption that sensory experience supplies the data for our beliefs about the world. In order to assess this thesis, I offer a brief characterisation of the logical form of sceptical arguments. I suggest that sceptical arguments rely on the idea that many of our beliefs about the world are,underdetermined'by the evidence on which they are based. Drawing on this characterisation of scepticism, I argue that Williams, Stroud and Davidson are right to see the foundationalist assumption as essential to the sceptic's argument, but wrong to think that scepticism is inevitable once that assumption is in place. By pursuing an analogy with some recent debates in the philosophy of science, I try to locate the additional assumptions which the sceptic must make, in order to derive her conclusion. [source]