4/8/2023 0 Comments Skeptical regress![]() Sure, you could say that the skeptic's axoimatic presupposition of "I'm not sure" counts as 100% certain non-skeptical knowledge, but this is a pretty weak knowledge claim and very little in the way of positive assertions follow from it. Can anyone refute the sceptics claim that all examinations of reasoning entail an infinite regress or vicious circularity in their justification The project. If you're a foundationalist, which most people are to the extent they have any reasonably thought-out epistemological position, then you say that "this chain of justification has to terminate somewhere" and that's it, no justification necessary after that.īut why isn't this move open to the skeptic as well? Couldn't they take their skepticism as foundational just as the foundationalist takes their own axiomatic presuppositions as foundational? One would think that this question has some answer to it, but any answer is itself a knowledge claim Y, about which the further question "does Y actually count as knowledge?" arises, and so on in an infinite regression. We avoid the regress, and as a fringe benefit we get back the external world.8 Is this the only way to treat the regress An alternative strategy might. In turn, we can now deny that relevantly similar Cartesian scenarios motivate us to be skeptical about whether we are skeptical, and so on. We can then sensibly ask, "but does X actually count as knowledge?", which is essentially the whole point of epistemology. be skeptical about whether the external world exists. For example, suppose one makes knowledge claim X. ![]() I think your argument works, but the general form of the argument supports conclusions that the non-skeptic wouldn't like. But inductively proving that the future will be like the past seems promising to unwary. The government report eventually issued in 1996 examined sixty-two of the many cases of alleged ritual abuse that had been reported by police and welfare agencies and concluded that in the cases that could be substantiated the main event was sexual abuse. It is possible that things will be different than how they have been, and we can’t deductively prove something to be true if it’s possibly false. The BFMS was founded in 1993, in the wake of Britain’s 19881991 Satanic panic. ![]() Infinite regression is a problem for epistemology in general, and not just skepticism. We cannot deductively prove that the future will be like the past. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |