Truth and Skepticism: On the Limits of a Philosophical Refutation of Skepticism

Diogenes 33 (132):95-106 (1985)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

What is truth? This famous question does not express merely the anguish—or the detachment—of the person who, at the moment of choosing, hesitates between deciding for one or the other of the contradictory theses being presented. At a second level, the question no longer concerns merely the content but the very conditions for the decision: in what name, by virtue of what criterion do we say that a given assertion is true while its contrary is false? We could limit ourselves to recognizing in this second phase a particular species of philosophical questioning, which proceeds reflexively from the constituted to the constituent, from the given of the experience to the conditions for the possibility of the experience in general. But in the question about truth, a prejudicial difficulty inevitably arises which is proper to this question and makes it incomparable to any other. How can I be assured of the truth of my assertions about truth without presupposing at the same time a theory for that truth which I am in tact in the process of seeking? In other words, any question about truth moves in a circle since, by demanding a true answer, just like every question it implies that the questioner already knows what is truth at the very moment when he is asking what it is.

Other Versions

No versions found

Links

PhilArchive

    This entry is not archived by us. If you are the author and have permission from the publisher, we recommend that you archive it. Many publishers automatically grant permission to authors to archive pre-prints. By uploading a copy of your work, you will enable us to better index it, making it easier to find.

    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 101,810

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Truth, Assumption, and the Subject.Hulya Fatma Guney - 2002 - Dissertation, Duquesne University
Anselm on truth.Thomas Williams & Sandra Visser - 2004 - In Brian Leftow (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Anselm. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. pp. 204-221.
Recognizing "truth" in Chinese philosophy.Lajos Brons - 2016 - Logos and Episteme 7 (3):273-286.
Conférence de Ljubljana.Alain Badiou - forthcoming - Filozofski Vestnik.
What is Quine's view of truth?Donald Davidson - 1994 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 37 (4):437 – 440.
Epistemological Implications of Relativism.J. Adam Carter - 2017 - In Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa (ed.), The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Contextualism. New York: Routledge. pp. 292-301.
Weiss and the Problem of Togetherness.George Schrader - 1956 - Review of Metaphysics 10 (2):227 - 243.

Analytics

Added to PP
2010-08-10

Downloads
155 (#149,797)

6 months
14 (#242,709)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references