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Perception and Skepticism
Edited by Susanna Schellenberg (Rutgers - New Brunswick)
Assistant editor: Zhiguo Huang (Rutgers - New Brunswick)
About this topic
| Summary | The literature on perception and skepticism can be helpfully organized around two skeptical arguments: closure arguments and underdetermination arguments. Where H = I have hands and ~BIV = I am not a handless brain in a vat, one familiar closure argument proceeds as follows: (1) If I am justified in believing H, then I am justified in believing ~BIV. (2) But I am not justified in believing ~BIV. (3) So, I am not justified in believing H. The popular response is to reject (2). According to liberal Mooreans, (2) is false because one’s perceptual experience gives one immediate justification for H and thus mediate justification for ~BIV (by closure). According to conservatives, we lack immediate perceptual justification for H. Non-skeptical conservatives reject (2) by arguing that our justification for H partly consists in some antecedent justification for ~BIV. According to some non-skeptical conservatives, the antecedent justification is an a priori entitlement. According to others, the justification is inferential—say, an abductive argument from the patterning of our perceptual experience to the probable truth of our perceptual beliefs. While liberal Mooreanism and conservatism are often taken to be the only ways to deny (2), the liberal rationalism of Silins (2008) affords a subtle compromise. Some other important work in the literature on perception and skepticism responds to the following underdetermination argument: (A) I have the same perceptual evidence whether ~BIV or BIV is true. (B) So, my evidence does not favor believing ~BIV over BIV. (C) But if (B) is true, then I am not justified in believing H. (D) So, I am not justified in believing H. Epistemological disjunctivists reject (A). Although epistemological disjunctivism has gained adherents in recent years, it is not a majority view. Most epistemologists reject either (C) or the inference from (A) to (B). Some externalists reject (C) by denying that justification supervenes on evidence and holding that non-evidential factors justify our belief in H. Some conservatives reject the move from (A) to (B) by insisting that there is a non-skeptical alternative to BIV that better explains one’s perceptual evidence. |
| Key works | The locus classicus of liberal Mooreanism is Moore 1939. Landmarks of contemporary liberal Mooreanism include Pryor 2000 and Pryor 2004. Classic illustrations of entitlement-based conservatism include Wright 2002 and Wright 2004. Vogel 1990 is a major conservative who appeals to abduction. Iconic works by epistemological disjunctivists include McDowell 1988, McDowell 2008, and Pritchard 2012; key critics include Comesaña 2007 and Conee 2007. |
| Introductions | Fumerton 1985, Pryor 2000, and Huemer 2001 serve as great introductions to skeptical issues in the epistemology of perception. BonJour 2007 and Siegel & Silins 2015 provide introductory discussions of skeptical problems in connection with other issues in the epistemology of perception. Millar 2017 offers an overview of the literature on epistemological disjunctivism and skepticism. Brueckner 1994 clarifies the relationship between the closure and underdetermination arguments. |
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Related
Siblings
- Discriminability (115)
- Dogmatism about Perception (123)
- Epistemic and Non-epistemic Perception (64)
- Naive and Direct Realism (517)
- Perceptual Evidence (186)
- Perceptual Justification (577)
- Perception and Knowledge, Misc (479)
- Sense-Datum Theories (445)
- Speckled Hen Problem (29)
- The Given (223)
Contents
277 found
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| 1 — 50 / 277 |
- Descartes's Method of Doubt.Leslie Allan - manuscriptEnlightenment philosopher, René Descartes, set out to establish what could be known with certainty, untainted by a deceiving demon. With his method of doubt, he rejected all previous beliefs, allowing only those that survived rigorous scrutiny. In this essay, Leslie Allan examines whether Descartes's program of skeptical enquiry was successful in laying a firm foundation for our manifold beliefs. He subjects Descartes's conclusions to Descartes's own uncompromising methodology to determine whether Descartes escaped from a self-imposed radical skepticism.
- Falsehood: An Analysis of Illusion's Singularity.Marc Burock - manuscriptIt is a common tactic, going back to the beginnings of religion and philosophy, to presume that we are enveloped in a world of untruth and illusion, thereby fueling our movement toward truth. In more modern times, Descartes demonstrates this process clearly with his Meditations. This work extends the Cartesian skeptical position by challenging the concept of illusion itself, asking those who have ever called something ‘an illusion’ to question the meaning of these assertions. This broader skepticism partially annihilates itself (...)
- Las paradojas escépticas.Santiago Echeverri - forthcoming - In Juan Carlos Villacrés & Estefanía C. Apolo (eds.), Introducción a la Filosofía Analítica. Universidad Central del Ecuador, Fundación Filosófica.In everyday life, we often understand skepticism as a position that one may set aside because of its absurdity or incoherence. In Greek philosophy, skepticism was rather an inquiring attitude that led to the suspension of judgment and, as a result, the freedom from distress. In Modern philosophy, many philosophers viewed skepticism as a phase of thought that had to be overcome before laying firm foundations for the sciences. These pictures differ from the outlook that dominates current analytic epistemology, where (...)
- Philosophy as Symptom & Disavowal.Joseph D. Osel - forthcoming - Social Science Research Network__Res Publica (2011).Remove from this listExport citation
Bookmark - Are There Heavyweight Perceptual Reasons?Chris Ranalli - forthcoming - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism:1-26.Genia Schönbaumsfeld has recently argued for the view that our ordinary perceptual reasons provide support for heavyweight metaphysical and epistemological views, such as that there is a mind-independent physical world. Call this the Heavyweight Reasons Thesis. In this paper, I argue that we should reject the Heavyweight Reasons Thesis. I also argue that the rejection of the Heavyweight Reasons Thesis is compatible with the Factive Perceptual Reasons Thesis, the thesis that our perceptual reasons for our ordinary beliefs can be factive, (...)
- Veridicalism and Scepticism.Yuval Avnur - 2024 - Philosophical Quarterly 74 (2):393-407.According to veridicalism, your beliefs about the existence of ordinary objects are typically true, and can constitute knowledge, even if you are in some global sceptical scenario. Even if you are a victim of Descartes’ demon, you can still know that there are tables, for example. Accordingly, even if you don’t know whether you are in some such scenario, you still know that there are tables. This refutes the standard sceptical argument. But does it solve the sceptical problem posed by (...)
- Abduction, Skepticism, and Indirect Realism.J. Adam Carter - 2024 - Philosophical Studies:1-18.Moore and Russell thought that perceptual knowledge of the external world is based on abductive inference from information about our experience. Sosa maintains that this ‘indirect realist’ strategy has no prospects of working. Vogel disagrees and thinks it can and does work perfectly well, and his reasoning (and variations on that reasoning) seem initially promising, moreso than other approaches. My aim, however, will be to adjudicate this dispute in favor of Sosa’s pessimistic answer, and in doing so, to better uncover (...)
- Epistemological Disjunctivism and the Conditionality Problem for Externalism.Santiago Echeverri - 2024 - Episteme 21 (2):387-407.Epistemological disjunctivism (ED) has been thought to solve the conditionality problem for epistemic externalism. This problem arises from externalists’ characterization of our epistemic standings as conditional on the obtaining of worldly facts which we lack any reflective access to. ED is meant to avoid the conditionality problem by explicating subjects’ perceptual knowledge in paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge via their possession of perceptual reasons that are both factive and reflectively accessible. I argue that ED’s account of reflectively accessible factive perceptual (...)
- Perceptual justification and the demands of effective agency.Griffin Klemick - 2024 - Synthese 203 (34):1-20.Pragmatist responses to skepticism about empirical justification have mostly been underwhelming, either presupposing implausible theses like relativism or anti-realism, or else showing our basic empirical beliefs to be merely psychologically inevitable rather than rationally warranted. In this paper I defend a better one: a modified version of an argument by Wilfrid Sellars that we are pragmatically warranted in accepting that our perceptual beliefs are likely to be true, since their likely truth is necessary for the satisfaction of our goal of (...)
- Defending Phenomenal Explanationism: Responses to Fumerton, Huemer, McAllister, Piazza, Steup, and Zhang.Kevin McCain & Luca Moretti - 2024 - Asian Journal of Philosophy 3:article number 80.
- Physicists Don't Yet Understand Color Qualities (2nd edition).Brent Allsop - 2023 - Journal of Neuralphilosophy 2 (1).You can demonstrate a subjective quality like redness is different from red light. If you add a device that converts a red signal into a green one, between the retina and the optic nerve, the strawberry will seem green. It’s not about light hitting the retina, it’s about how the signal is processed. In this case, the greenness must be a quality of our conscious knowledge of the strawberry, not of the red light landing on the retina. If you use (...)
- Debunking Interface Theory: Why Hoffman's Skepticism (Really) is Self-Defeating.Jeffrey N. Bagwell - 2023 - Synthese 201 (25):1-23.Cognitive scientist Donald Hoffman and others have recently advanced an evolutionary debunking argument aimed at our perceptual beliefs in ordinary objects, based on the Interface Theory of Perception. In contrast with most recent criticisms of Interface Theory, which have targeted its characterizations of perception and veridicality, I raise a broad dialectical problem for Hoffman’s debunking argument. I show that the argument is self-defeating, and that responding to this problem by appealing to Universal Darwinism leads to a fatal dilemma for the (...)
- Hinge commitments as arational beliefs.Aliosha Barranco Lopez - 2023 - Synthese 201 (3):109 (2023).Hinge epistemology is a family of views that offers a novel approach to avoiding skeptical conclusions about the possibility of a posteriori justification of our empirical beliefs. They claim that at the basis of our empirical beliefs lie certain commitments whose rational status is not determined by our evidence. These are called hinge commitments. Prominent hinge epistemologists have claimed that hinge commitments are either rational or arational but yet not beliefs. I argue that such views are subject to decisive objections. (...)
- Why Philosophy Makes No Progress.Eric Dietrich - 2023 - Global Philosophy 33 (2):1-14.This paper offers an explanation for why some parts of philosophy have made no progress. Philosophy has made no progress because it cannot make progress. And it cannot because of the nature of the phenomena philosophy is tasked with explaining—all of it involves consciousness. Here, it will not be argued directly that consciousness is intractable. Rather, it will be shown that a specific version of the problem of consciousness is unsolvable. This version is the Problem of the Subjective and Objective. (...)
- Moderatism and Truth.Santiago Echeverri - 2023 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 53 (3):271-287.According to MODERATISM, perceptual justification requires that one independently takes for granted propositional hinges like <There is an external world>, <I am not a brain in a vat (BIV)>, and so on. This view faces the truth problem: to offer an account of truth for hinges that is not threatened by skepticism. Annalisa Coliva has tried to solve the truth problem by combining the claim that external world propositions have a substantive truth property like correspondence with the claim that hinges (...)
- A‐Rational Epistemological Disjunctivism.Santiago Echeverri - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 106 (3):692-719.According to epistemological disjunctivism (ED), in paradigmatic cases of perceptual knowledge, a subject, S, has perceptual knowledge that p in virtue of being in possession of reasons for her belief that p which are both factive and reflectively accessible to S. It has been argued that ED is better placed than both knowledge internalism and knowledge externalism to undercut underdetermination-based skepticism. I identify several principles that must be true if ED is to be uniquely placed to attain this goal. After (...)
- Christos Kyriacou and Kevin Wallbridge's Skeptical Invariantism Reconsidered. [REVIEW]Santiago Echeverri - 2023 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 13 (1):61-78.This is a critical notice of Christos Kyriacou and Kevin Wallbridge (eds.), Skeptical Invariantism Reconsidered. New York and London: Routledge, 2021. Pp. x + 324. ISBN 978-0-367-37018-3. It discusses in some detail contributions by Nevin Climenhaga, Christos Kyriacou, Michael Hannon, Kevin Wallbridge, Annalisa Coliva, and Genia Schönbaumsfeld.
- Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition by Michael Bergmann. [REVIEW]Charles Goldhaber - 2023 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.Michael Bergmann's Radical Skepticism and Epistemic Intuition develops a response to radical skepticism inspired by commonsense philosophers, such as Reid and Moore. Bergmann argues against radical skepticism on the grounds of its conflicting with strongly-held "epistemic intuitions" about the "epistemic value or goodness” of our particular perceptual, recollective, introspective and a priori beliefs. I press concerns about whether Bergmann's "intuitionist particularist" response can diagnose the source of skepticism, and argue that his methodology turns out to itself be strikingly skeptical.
- Does Hallie See a White Cup on a Desk? A Phenomenological Account of Hallucination Indiscriminability.Hicham Jakha - 2023 - Roczniki Filozoficzne 71 (3):183-203.In this paper, I argue for phenomenology, Husserlian phenomenology to be precise, as providing a solid paradigm on how to determine and assess hallucination. To be more explicit, in the context of my deliberations, I analyze Susanna Schellenberg’s arguments for “phenomenal” evidence and “factive” evidence, as regards her evidential theory of perception. To pinpoint the inadequacies raised in her account of (the hallucinating) Hallie and (the veridically perceiving) Percy sharing any kind of evidence, I propose Edmund Husserl’s epistemic fulfillment as (...)
- Why We Doubt: A Cognitive Account of Our Skeptical Inclinations.N. Ángel Pinillos - 2023 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.This book, the first of its kind, puts forward a novel, unified cognitive account of skeptical doubt. Historically, most philosophers have tried to tackle this difficult topic by directly arguing that skeptical doubt is false. But N. Ángel Pinillos does something different. He begins by trying to uncover the hidden mental rule which, for better or worse, motivates our skeptical inclinations. He then gives an account of the broader cognitive purpose of having and applying this rule. Based on these ideas, (...)
- Hacia una interpretación conectada de la experiencia en la filosofía de David Hume.Sofía Calvente - 2022 - Tópicos 43:47-75.En este trabajo nos proponemos hacer un aporte para esclarecer el sentido y la función de la experiencia en el marco de la teoría del conocimiento de Hume. Para ello examinaremos dos interpretaciones que pueden reconstruirse en la literatura secundaria: la que la entiende como impresiones simples de sensación y la que la concibe como patrones de percepciones conectadas. Consideramos que la primera perspectiva no es adecuada para comprender el rol epistémico de la experiencia, lo que nos inclina hacia la (...)
- Can Global Anti-Realism Withstand the Enactivist Challenge?Christian Coseru - 2022 - Analysis 82 (1):131-142.This paper argues that some defenses of global antirealism that critique both epistemic foundationalism and ontological priority foundationalism (e.g., Westerhoff 2020) turn on a false dilemma that ignores non-representational approaches to consciousness and cognition. Arguments against the existence of an external world and against introspective certainty, typically draw on a range of empirical findings (mainly about the brain-based mechanisms that realize cognition) and that are said to lend support to irrealism. Theories that incorporate these findings, such as the interface theory (...)
- Evolutionary Explanations of Our Reliability.Sinan Dogramaci - 2022 - Oxford Studies in Metaethics 17 (1):197-224.It can easily look like evolution is in a better position to explain the reliability of our perceptual beliefs than the reliability of our moral beliefs. This paper takes a closer look at the issue and argues that there’s no reason—no reason which armchair philosophers could uncover—to think evolution can better explain perceptual reliability than moral reliability. It also offers a diagnosis of why it seemed otherwise. The diagnosis concerns our need to use the truth predicate as a generalizing logical (...)
- Eliminativism and Evolutionary Debunking.Jeffrey N. Bagwell - 2021 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 8:496-522.Eliminativists sometimes invoke evolutionary debunking arguments against ordinary object beliefs, either to help them establish object skepticism or to soften the appeal of commonsense ontology. I argue that object debunkers face a self-defeat problem: their conclusion undermines the scientific support for one of their premises, because evolutionary biology depends on our object beliefs. Using work on reductionism and multiple realizability from the philosophy of science, I argue that it will not suffice for an eliminativist debunker to simply appeal to some (...)
- The Myth of Stochastic Infallibilism.Adam Michael Bricker - 2021 - Episteme 18 (4):523-538.There is a widespread attitude in epistemology that, if you know on the basis of perception, then you couldn't have been wrong as a matter of chance. Despite the apparent intuitive plausibility of this attitude, which I'll refer to here as “stochastic infallibilism”, it fundamentally misunderstands the way that human perceptual systems actually work. Perhaps the most important lesson of signal detection theory (SDT) is that our percepts are inherently subject to random error, and here I'll highlight some key empirical (...)
- Dynamic Introspection.Michael Cohen - 2021 - Dissertation, Stanford University
- Perception as a Multi-Stage Process: A Reidian Account.Marina Folescu - 2021 - Journal of Scottish Philosophy 19 (1):57-74.The starting point of this paper is Thomas Reid's anti-skepticism: our knowledge of the external world is justified. The justificatory process, in his view, starts with and relies upon one of the main faculties of the human mind: perception. Reid's theory of perception has been thoroughly studied, but there are some missing links in the explanatory chain offered by the secondary literature. In particular, I will argue that we do not have a complete picture of the mechanism of perception of (...)
- Entitlement, epistemic risk and scepticism.Luca Moretti - 2021 - Episteme 18 (4):576-586.Crispin Wright maintains that the architecture of perceptual justification is such that we can acquire justification for our perceptual beliefs only if we have antecedent justification for ruling out any sceptical alternative. Wright contends that this principle doesn’t elicit scepticism, for we are non-evidentially entitled to accept the negation of any sceptical alternative. Sebastiano Moruzzi has challenged Wright’s contention by arguing that since our non-evidential entitlements don’t remove the epistemic risk of our perceptual beliefs, they don’t actually enable us to (...)
- “Merleau-Ponty on Hallucination and Perceptual Faith”.Peter Antich - 2020 - Études Phénoménologiques - Phenomenological Studies 4:49-66.According to a familiar line of thinking, hallucination reveals that what we take to be direct experiences of the world are in fact mere appearances: appearances which give only mediate and unreliable testimony to reality. If we wish to secure knowledge of the world, we must transition to a different register, that of reason and judgment. In this classical analysis, non-normal perception functions to show the deficit of normal perception. Merleau-Ponty offers a strikingly different account of hallucination. Far from inciting (...)Remove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- “The Crisis of (Not) Touching”.Rachel Aumiller - 2020 - Women in Philosophy. Blog of the Apa.
- Perceptual entitlement and skepticism.Anthony Brueckner & Jon Altschul - 2020 - In Peter Graham & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (eds.), Epistemic Entitlement. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
- Opaque Updates.Michael Cohen - 2020 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 50 (3):447-470.If updating with E has the same result across all epistemically possible worlds, then the agent has no uncertainty as to the behavior of the update, and we may call it a transparent update. If an agent is uncertain about the behavior of an update, we may call it opaque. In order to model the uncertainty an agent has about the result of an update, the same update must behave differently across different possible worlds. In this paper, I study opaque (...)
- The problem of perception and the no-miracles principle.Michael Cohen - 2020 - Synthese 198 (11):11065-11080.The problem of perception is the problem of explaining how perceptual knowledge is possible. The skeptic has a simple solution: it is not possible. I analyze the weaknesses of one type of skeptical reasoning by making explicit a dynamic epistemic principle from dynamic epistemic logic that is implicitly used in debating the problem, with the aim of offering a novel diagnosis to this skeptical argument. I argue that prominent modest foundationalist responses to perceptual skepticism can be understood as rejecting the (...)
- Use Your Illusion: Spatial Functionalism, Vision Science, and the Case Against Global Skepticism.E. J. Green & Gabriel Oak Rabin - 2020 - Analytic Philosophy 61 (4):345-378.
- Knowledge for Nothing.Patrick Greenough - 2020 - In Peter Graham & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (eds.), Epistemic Entitlement. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.Let Entitlement Epistemology be the theory of knowledge which says that entitlement—a special kind of unearned warrant to accept or believe—can help us successfully address a range of sceptical arguments. Prominent versions of this theory urge that epistemology should not be concerned with knowledge (and similar externalist states) but rather with justification, warrant, and entitlement (at least insofar as these are conceived of as internalist states). Knowledge does not come first, half-way, or even last in epistemological theorising—rather, it ought to (...)
- Knowledge for nothing.Patrick Greenough - 2020 - In Peter Graham & Nikolaj Jang Lee Linding Pedersen (eds.), Epistemic Entitlement. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.No categoriesRemove from this listExport citation Bookmark
- Mary Shepherd's Essays on the perception of an external universe.Mary Shepherd - 2020 - New York: Oxford University Press.This is the first modern edition of the works of Lady Mary Shepherd, one of the most important women philosophers of the early modern period. Shepherd has been widely neglected in the history of philosophy, but her work engaged with the dominant philosophers of the time - among them Hume, Berkeley, and Reid. In particular, her 1827 volume Essays on the Perception of an External Universe outlines a theory of causation, perception, and knowledge which Shepherd presents as an alternative to (...)
- The stimulus-to-perception connection: a simulation study in the epistemology of perception.Paul D. Thorn - 2020 - Synthese 199 (1-2):551-578.The present paper introduces a simple framework for modeling the relationship between environmental states, perceptual states, and action. The framework represents situations where an agent’s perceptual state forms the basis for choosing an action, and what action the agent performs determines the agent’s payoff, as a function of the environmental conditions in which the action is performed. The framework is used as the basis for a simulation study of the sorts of correspondence between perceptual and environmental states that are important (...)
- Perceptual Justification and the Cartesian Theater.David James Barnett - 2019 - In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Volume 6. Oxford University Press. pp. 1-34.According to a traditional Cartesian epistemology of perception, perception does not provide one with direct knowledge of the external world. Instead, your immediate perceptual evidence is limited to facts about your own visual experience, from which conclusions about the external world must be inferred. Cartesianism faces well-known skeptical challenges. But this chapter argues that any anti-Cartesian view strong enough to avoid these challenges must license a way of updating one’s beliefs in response to anticipated experiences that seems diachronically irrational. To (...)(collection) View on Amazon.comRemove from this list Direct download (2 more)Export citation Bookmark 3 citations
- (1 other version)Perceptual Justification and the Cartesian Theater.David James Barnett - 2019 - In Tamar Szabo Gendler & John Hawthorne (eds.), Oxford Studies in Epistemology, Volume 6. Oxford University Press. pp. 1–34.
- Neural phase: a new problem for the modal account of epistemic luck.Adam Michael Bricker - 2019 - Synthese (8):1-18.One of the most widely recognised intuitions about knowledge is that knowing precludes believing truly as a matter of luck. On Pritchard’s highly influential modal account of epistemic luck, luckily true beliefs are, roughly, those for which there are many close possible worlds in which the same belief formed in the same way is false. My aim is to introduce a new challenge to this account. Starting from the observation—as documented by a number of recent EEG studies—that our capacity to (...)
- Locating Consciousness: Why Experience Can't Be Objectified.T. W. Clark - 2019 - Journal of Consciousness Studies 26 (11-12):60-85.The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities, but science doesn't find sensory experience in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in the world is a function of our necessarily representational relation to reality as knowers: we won't discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms. Qualia -- arguably a type of representational content -- will therefore (...)
- Perceptual Errors in Late Medieval Philosophy.Juhana Toivanen & José Filipe Silva - 2019 - In Brian Glenney, José Filipe Silva, Jana Rosker, Susan Blake, Stephen H. Phillips, Katerina Ierodiakonou, Anna Marmodoro, Lukas Licka, Han Thomas Adriaenssen, Chris Meyns, Janet Levin, James Van Cleve, Deborah Boyle, Michael Madary, Josefa Toribio, Gabriele Ferretti, Clare Batty & Mark Paterson (eds.), The Senses and the History of Philosophy. New York, USA: Routledge. pp. 106-130.Perception of the external world is an essential part of the animal (including human) life, both as a source of knowledge and as a way to survive. Medieval authors accepted this view, and despite general concerns about the reliability of the senses in the acquisition of certain and objective knowledge, they thought that for the most part our perceptual system gets things right when it comes to the perceptual features of things—but not always. Our article focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century (...)
- Epistemology without concepts?: Penelope Maddy: What do philosophers do? Skepticism and the practice of philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017, xi+248pp, $29.95 HB. [REVIEW]Santiago Echeverri - 2018 - Metascience 27 (1):117-121.Review of Penelope Maddy, What Do Philosophers Do? Skepticism and the Practice of Philosophy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017, 248 pp.).
- Skepticism about Other Minds.Anil Gomes - 2018 - In Diego E. Machuca & Baron Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.In this paper I distinguish two ways of raising a sceptical problem of others' minds: via a problem concerning the possibility of error or via a problem concerning sources of knowledge. I give some reason to think that the second problem raises a more interesting problem in accounting for our knowledge of others’ minds and consider proposed solutions to the problem.
- The Bayesian Account of the Defect in Moorean Reasoning.Byeong D. Lee - 2018 - Logique Et Analyse 241:43-55.Many Bayesians such as White and Silins have argued that Moorean reasoning is defective because it is a case where probabilistic support fails to transmit across the relevant entailment. In this paper, I argue against their claim. On the Bayesian argument, a skeptical hypothesis is that you are a brain in a vat that appears to have hands. To disclose the defect in Moorean reasoning, the Bayesian argument is supposed to show that its appearing to you as if you have (...)
- Mark Eli Kalderon, "Sympathy in Perception". [REVIEW]Catherine Legg & Jack Alan Reynolds - 2018 - Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2018 (0809).Mark Eli Kalderon's book boldly positions itself as a work in speculative metaphysics. Its point of departure is the familiar distinction between presentational and representational philosophies of perception. Kalderon notes that the latter has been more popular of late, as it is more amenable to "an account" explicating causal or counterfactual conditions on perception; but he wishes to rehabilitate the former, at least in part. One widely perceived disadvantage of presentationalism has been the way that understanding perception merely as registering (...)
- Epistemological Disjunctivism and the Random Demon Hypothesis.Thomas Lockhart - 2018 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 8 (1):1-30._ Source: _Page Count 30 According to epistemological disjunctivism I can claim to know facts about the world around me on the basis of my perceptual experience. My possession of such knowledge is incompatible with a number of familiar skeptical scenarios. So a paradigmatic epistemological disjunctivist perceptual experience should allow me to rule out such incompatible skeptical scenarios. In this paper, I consider skeptical scenarios which both cast doubt on my conviction that I can trust my purported perceptual experiences and (...)
- Skepticism and Perceptual Justification, edited by Dylan Dodd and Elia Zardini. [REVIEW]Ted Poston - 2018 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 8 (3):250-255.
- Disjunctivism and Scepticism.Duncan Pritchard & Chris Ranalli - 2018 - In Diego E. Machuca & Baron Reed (eds.), Skepticism: From Antiquity to the Present. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.An overview of the import of disjunctivism to the problem of radical scepticism is offered. In particular, the disjunctivist account of perceptual experience is set out, along with the manner in which it intersects with related positions such as naïve realism and intentionalism, and it is shown how this account can be used to a motivate an anti-sceptical proposal. In addition, a variety of disjunctivism known as epistemological disjunctivism is described, and it is explained how this proposal offers a further (...)
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