Scepticism by a Thousand Cuts

International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (1):44-52 (2016)
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Abstract

_ Source: _Page Count 9 Global sceptical arguments seek to undermine vast swathes of our putative knowledge by deploying hypotheses that posit massive deception or error. Local sceptical arguments seek to undermine just a small region of putative knowledge, using hypotheses that posit deception or error of a more mundane kind. Those epistemologists who have devised anti-sceptical strategies have tended to have global sceptical arguments firmly in their sights. I argue here that local sceptical arguments, while less dramatic, ultimately pose just as serious a challenge to our epistemic self-image and that some prominent anti-sceptical strategies are very poorly placed to meet it

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Martin Smith
University of Edinburgh

References found in this work

Reason, truth, and history.Hilary Putnam - 1981 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
On Certainty (ed. Anscombe and von Wright).Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1969 - San Francisco: Harper Torchbooks. Edited by G. E. M. Anscombe, G. H. von Wright & Mel Bochner.
Reason, Truth and History.Hilary Putnam - 1981 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Epistemic operators.Fred I. Dretske - 1970 - Journal of Philosophy 67 (24):1007-1023.
Epistemological disjunctivism.Duncan Pritchard - 2012 - Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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