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Summary Putnam's brain-in-vat argument is an attempted transcendental argument against the sceptical hypothesis that we are brains in vats (BIVs). A simple construction of the argument runs as follows: My word "brain" refers to brains; A BIV's word "brain" does not refer to brains; So I am not a BIV. An alternative reconstruction ends with the (perhaps weaker) conclusion that my sentence "I am not a BIV" is true. On either reconstruction, however, the argument seeks to use semantic means to refute some kind of radical, global, scepticism.
Key works Chapter 1 of Putnam 1981 contains the fullest statement of Putnam's argument, and helps to set the dialectical context of Putnam's interest in the BIV scenario. Putnam then clarified the argument in response to criticisms, particularly his 1992 reply to Anderson, and his 1994 reply to Wright. Here, Putnam makes clear that the argument involved only two premises (disquotation and some kind of causally constrained theory of reference), thereby favouring the first of the reconstructions suggested above. (The second reconstruction seems better suited to Davidson's 1986 anti-sceptical argument, which is closely connected with Putnam's.) Wright 1992 is one of the fullest and strongest defences of Putnam's argument; however, Wright ends by suggesting that Putnam has failed to refute certain ineffable sceptical concerns (similar worries were voiced by Nagel and van Inwagen). Button 2013 devotes several chapters to the BIV argument, seeking to defend it in its own terms, address Wright's ineffable concerns, and assess the overall limits of BIV-style argumentation. Brueckner & Ebbs 2012 collects a three-decade exchange which begins with Putnam's BIV argument and connects with the wider question of how scepticism and content externalism should interact. Goldberg 2015 offers new essays on the BIV argument
Introductions Putnam 1981 (ch. 1). Wright 1992. Button 2013 (chs. 12-16).
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  1. Veridicalism and Scepticism.Yuval Avnur - forthcoming - Philosophical Quarterly.
    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 (...)
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  2. Center Indifference and Skepticism.David Builes - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Many philosophers have been attracted to a restricted version of the principle of indifference in the case of self-locating belief. Roughly speaking, this principle states that, within any given possible world, one should be indifferent between different hypotheses concerning who one is within that possible world, so long as those hypotheses are compatible with one’s evidence. My first goal is to defend a more precise version of this principle. After responding to several existing criticisms of such a principle, I argue (...)
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  3. Moderatism and Truth.Santiago Echeverri - forthcoming - Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
    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 (...)
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  4. World brains, giant brains and brains in vats.Charlie Gere - forthcoming - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences.
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  5. Putnam on Brains in Vats.Sanford Goldberg (ed.) - forthcoming - Cambridge University Press.
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  6. Précis of The Illusion of Doubt.Genia Schönbaumsfeld - forthcoming - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism:1-6.
    The Illusion of Doubt shows that radical scepticism is an illusion generated by a Cartesian picture of our evidential situation—the view that my epistemic grounds in both the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ cases must be the same. It is this picture which issues both a standing invitation to radical scepticism and ensures that there is no way of getting out of it while agreeing to the sceptic’s terms. The sceptical problem cannot, therefore, be answered ‘directly’. Rather, the assumptions that give (...)
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  7. Underdetermination and closure: Thoughts on two sceptical arguments.Martin Smith - forthcoming - In Matthew Jope & Duncan Pritchard (eds.), New Perspectives on Epistemic Closure. Routledge.
    In this paper, I offer reasons for thinking that two prominent sceptical arguments in the literature – the underdetermination-based sceptical argument and the closure-based sceptical argument – are less philosophically interesting than is commonly supposed. The underdetermination-based argument begs the question against a non-sceptic and can be dismissed with little fanfare. The closure-based argument, though perhaps not question-begging per se, does rest upon contentious assumptions that a non-sceptic is under no pressure to accept.
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  8. O disjuntivismo ecológico e o argumento causal.Eros Moreira de Carvalho - 2023 - Trans/Form/Ação (46):147-174.
    In this paper, I argue that the ecological approach to perception provides resources to overcome the causal argument against disjunctivism. According to the causal argument, since the brain states that proximally cause the perceptual experience and the corresponding hallucinatory one can be of the same type, there would be no good reason to reject that the perceptual experience and the corresponding hallucinatory experience have fundamentally the same nature. Disjunctivism concerning the nature of the experience would then be false. I identify (...)
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  9. 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.
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  10. Précis on Knowing and Checking: an Epistemological Investigation.Guido Melchior - 2023 - Acta Analytica 38 (1):1-13.
    In this Précis, I provide an overview of my Monograph Knowing and Checking: An Epistemological Investigation (Melchior 2019), which is subject to a book symposium organized by the University of Maribor. This volume in Acta Analytica contains contributions by Peter Baumann, Kelly Becker, Marian David, Nenad Miščević, Robert Weston Siscoe, and Danilo Šuster along with my replies.
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  11. 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, (...)
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  12. Ein Plädoyer wider die Annahme einer fundamentalen Unterscheidung von Genese und Geltung in der Erkenntnistheorie.Markus Seidel - 2023 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 77 (4):454-483.
    Many epistemologists believe that the distinction between the genesis and the validity of a belief is a fundamental presupposition of adequate epistemological reflection. In this article it will be argued that the arguments for this majority conviction are not convincing. As an alternative it is suggested that the distin- ction between epistemic and non-epistemic procedures should be regarded as fundamental for epistemology.
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  13. Sensitivity, Safety, and Brains in Vats.Haicheng Zhao - 2023 - Topoi 42 (1):83-89.
    Both sensitivity and safety theorists concur that their accounts should be relativized to the same method that one employs in the actual world. However, properly individuating methods has proven to be a tricky matter. In this regard, Nozick (Philosophical Explanations, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1981) proposes a Same-Experience-Same-Method Principle: if the experiences associated with two method tokens are the same, they are of the same type of method. This principle, however, has been widely rejected by recent safety and sensitivity theorists. (...)
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  14. The insignificance of philosophical skepticism.Jonathan Dixon - 2022 - Synthese 200 (485):1-22.
    The Cartesian arguments for external world skepticism are usually considered to be significant for at least two reasons: they seem to present genuine paradoxes and that providing an adequate response to these arguments would reveal something epistemically important about knowledge, justification, and/or our epistemic position to the world. Using only premises and reasoning the skeptic accepts, I will show that the most common Cartesian argument for external world skepticism leads to a previously unrecognized self-undermining dilemma: it either leads to a (...)
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  15. Two New Doubts about Simulation Arguments.Micah Summers & Marcus Arvan - 2022 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 100 (3):496-508.
    Various theorists contend that we may live in a computer simulation. David Chalmers in turn argues that the simulation hypothesis is a metaphysical hypothesis about the nature of our reality, rather than a sceptical scenario. We use recent work on consciousness to motivate new doubts about both sets of arguments. First, we argue that if either panpsychism or panqualityism is true, then the only way to live in a simulation may be as brains-in-vats, in which case it is unlikely that (...)
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  16. Lunacy and Scepticism: Notes on the Logic of Doubt Concerning the Existence of an External World.Sebastian Sunday Grève - 2022 - Topoi 41 (5):1023-1031.
    This article develops a logical (or semantic) response to scepticism about the existence of an external world. Specifically, it is argued that any doubt about the existence of an external world can be proved to be false, but whatever appears to be doubt about the existence of an external world that _cannot_ be proved to be false is nonsense, insofar as it must rely on the assertion of something that is logically impossible. The article further suggests that both G. E. (...)
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  17. On the Alleged Instability of Externalist Anti-skepticism.Matthew Jope - 2021 - Journal of Philosophy 118 (1):43-50.
    A certain brand of skeptical argument appeals to the thought that our inability to subjectively discriminate between competing hypotheses means that we are unwarranted in believing in either. Externalists respond by pointing out that such arguments depend on an internalist conception of warrant that we would do well to reject. This strategy has been criticised by Crispin Wright who argues that if we pursue the implications of externalism sufficiently far we find that it is ultimately unstable or incoherent. I first (...)
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  18. Closure, deduction and hinge commitments.Xiaoxing Zhang - 2021 - Synthese 198 (Suppl 15):3533-3551.
    Duncan Pritchard recently proposed a Wittgensteinian solution to closure-based skepticism. According to Wittgenstein, all epistemic systems assume certain truths. The notions that we are not disembodied brains, that the Earth has existed for a long time and that one’s name is such-and-such all function as “hinge commitments.” Pritchard views a hinge commitment as a positive propositional attitude that is not a belief. Because closure principles concern only knowledge-apt beliefs, they do not apply to hinge commitments. Thus, from the fact that (...)
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  19. Why Boltzmann Brains Are Bad.Sean M. Carroll - 2020 - In Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science. Routledge. pp. 7-20.
    Some modern cosmological models predict the appearance of Boltzmann Brains: observers who randomly fluctuate out of a thermal bath rather than naturally evolving from a low-entropy Big Bang. A theory in which most observers are of the Boltzmann Brain type is generally thought to be unacceptable, although opinions differ. I argue that such theories are indeed unacceptable: the real problem is with fluctuations into observers who are locally identical to ordinary observers, and their existence cannot be swept under the rug (...)
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  20. We Can't Know.Markus Lammenranta - 2020 - In Steven Cowan (ed.), Problems in Epistemology and Metaphysics : An Introduction to Contemporary Debates. London: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 38-51.
    The paper defends Cartesian skepticism by an argument relying on internalism and infallibilism. It argues that this sort of skepticism gives the best explanation of our intuitions and ordinary epistemic practices.
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  21. Idealism and illusions.Robert Smithson - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 29 (1):137-151.
    According to the idealist, facts about phenomenal experience determine facts about the physical world. Any such view must account for illusions: cases where there is a discrepancy between the physical world and our experiences of it. In this paper, I critique some recent idealist treatments of illusions before presenting my own preferred account. I then argue that, initial impressions notwithstanding, it is actually the realist who has difficulties properly accounting for illusions.
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  22. The Brain in a Vat, edited by Sanford C. Goldberg.Cameron Boult - 2019 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 9 (1):75-82.
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  23. There are Actual Brains in Vats Now.Adam Michael Bricker - 2019 - Logos and Episteme 10 (2):135-145.
    There are brains in vats (BIVs) in the actual world. These “cerebral organoids” are roughly comparable to the brains of three-month-old foetuses, and conscious cerebral organoids seem only a matter of time. Philosophical interest in conscious cerebral organoids has thus far been limited to bioethics, and the purpose of this paper is to discuss cerebral organoids in an epistemological context. In doing so, I will argue that it is now clear that there are close possible worlds in which we are (...)
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  24. My Ordinary Anti-Sceptical Beliefs Are Not Insensitive.Changsheng Lai - 2019 - Frontiers of Philosophy in China 14 (3):469-489.
    An orthodox sceptical hypothesis claims that one’s belief that “I am not a brain-in-a-vat (BIV)” (or any other ordinary anti-sceptical belief) is insensitive. A form of sensitivity-based scepticism, can thus be constructed by combining this orthodox hypothesis with the sensitivity principle and the closure principle. Unlike traditional solutions to the sensitivity-based sceptical problem, this paper will propose a new solution—one which does not reject either closure or sensitivity. Instead, I argue that sceptics’ assumption that one’s ordinary anti-sceptical beliefs are insensitive (...)
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  25. What to believe about your belief that you're in the good case.Alex Worsnip - 2019 - Oxford Studies in Epistemology 6:206-233.
    Going about our daily lives in an orderly manner requires us, once we are aware of them, to dismiss many metaphysical possibilities. We take it for granted that we are not brains in vats, or living in the Matrix, or in an extended dream. Call these things that we take for granted “anti-skeptical assumptions”. What should a reflective agent who believes these things think of these beliefs? For various reasons, it can seem that we do not have evidence for such (...)
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  26. Structuralism as a Response to Skepticism.David J. Chalmers - 2018 - Journal of Philosophy 115 (12):625-660.
    Cartesian arguments for global skepticism about the external world start from the premise that we cannot know that we are not in a Cartesian scenario such as an evil-demon scenario, and infer that because most of our empirical beliefs are false in such a scenario, these beliefs do not constitute knowledge. Veridicalist responses to global skepticism respond that arguments fail because in Cartesian scenarios, many or most of our empirical beliefs are true. Some veridicalist responses have been motivated using verificationism, (...)
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  27. Reassessing the Case Against Evidential Externalism.Giada Fratantonio & Aidan McGlynn - 2018 - In Veli Mitova (ed.), The Factive Turn in Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This paper reassesses the case against Evidential Externalism, the thesis that one's evidence fails to supervene on one's non-factive mental states, focusing on two objections to Externalism due by Nicholas Silins: the armchair access argument and the supervenience argument. It also examines Silins's attempt to undermine the force of one major source of motivation for Externalism, namely that the rival Internalist picture of evidence is implicated in some central arguments for scepticism. While Silins concludes that the case against Evidential Externalism (...)
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  28. The New Evil Demon and the Devil in the Details.Mikkel Gerken - 2018 - In Veli Mitova (ed.), The Factive Turn in Epistemology. Cambridge University Press. pp. 102-122.
    I will argue that cases of massive deception, such as New Evil Demon cases, as well as one-off cases of local deception present challenges to views according to which epistemic reasons, epistemic warrant, epistemic rationality or epistemic norms are factive. In doing so, I will argue is that proponents of a factive turn in epistemology should observe important distinctions between what are often simply referred to as ‘bad cases.’ Recognizing epistemologically significant differences between deception cases raises serious challenges for those (...)
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  29. Duncan Pritchard’s Epistemic Angst.John Greco - 2018 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 8 (1):51-61.
    _ Source: _Volume 8, Issue 1, pp 51 - 61 _Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of our Believing_. By Duncan Pritchard. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2016. Pp. xv + 239. ISBN 978-0-691-16723-7.
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  30. I—How Both You and the Brain in a Vat Can Know Whether or Not You Are Envatted.Ofra Magidor - 2018 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 92 (1):151-181.
    Epistemic externalism offers one of the most prominent responses to the sceptical challenge. Externalism has commonly been interpreted as postulating a crucial asymmetry between the actual-world agent and their brain-in-a-vat counterpart: while the actual agent is in a position to know she is not envatted, her biv counterpart is not in a position to know that she is envatted, or in other words, only the former is in a position to know whether or not she is envatted. In this paper, (...)
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  31. ‘This Is the Bad Case’: What Brains in Vats Can Know.Aidan McGlynn - 2018 - Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 92 (1):183-205.
    The orthodox position in epistemology, for both externalists and internalists, is that a subject in a ‘bad case’—a sceptical scenario—is so epistemically badly off that they cannot know how badly off they are. Ofra Magidor contends that externalists should break ranks on this question, and that doing so is liberating when it comes time to confront a number of central issues in epistemology, including scepticism and the new evil demon problem for process reliabilism. In this reply, I will question whether (...)
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  32. “The Brain in Vat” at the Intersection. [REVIEW]Danilo Šuster - 2018 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 18 (1):205-217.
    Goldberg 2016 is a collection of papers dedicated to Putnam’s (1981) brain in a vat (‘BIV’) scenario. The collection divides into three parts, though the issues are inter-connected. Putnam uses conceptual tools from philosophy of language in order to establish theses in epistemology and metaphysics. Putnam’s BIV is considered a contemporary version of Descartes’s skeptical argument of the Evil Genius, but I argue that deception (the possibility of having massively false belief) is not essential, externalism does all the anti-skeptical work. (...)
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  33. Ignorance and Knowledge: the viability of externalist neo-Mooreanism as a resonse to radical scepticism.John Asquith - 2017 - Dissertation, King's College London
    Here, I shall be examining the viability of a Moorean response to the Argument from Ignorance; i.e., one that tries to rebut the argument by denying its first premise that we cannot have knowledge that we are not BIVs. After first explicating the Argument from Ignorance in detail, I then go on to try and motivate this approach by critically examining two alternative approaches to dealing with radical scepticism: closure-denial, and attributer contextualism. Finding them wanting, I then turn to a (...)
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  34. How to Undercut Radical Skepticism.Santiago Echeverri - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (5):1299-1321.
    Radical skepticism relies on the hypothesis that one could be completely cut off from the external world. In this paper, I argue that this hypothesis can be rationally motivated by means of a conceivability argument. Subsequently, I submit that this conceivability argument does not furnish a good reason to believe that one could be completely cut off from the external world. To this end, I show that we cannot adequately conceive scenarios that verify the radical skeptical hypothesis. Attempts to do (...)
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  35. Disjuntivismo epistemológico e ceticismo radical.Breno Ricardo Guimarães Santos - 2017 - Veritas – Revista de Filosofia da Pucrs 62 (3):624-656.
    Epistemological disjunctivism is a philosophical theory that has received special attention in the recent years. Particularly because it has been seen by many as a way of renewing discussions that range from the nature of justification of our daily beliefs to the possibility of unveiling the structure of the problem of radical skepticism and of responding to it. Duncan Pritchard is one of the authors who have offered a particular view of disjunctivism and ways of conceiving of disjunctivist treatments to (...)
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  36. Perspectival Externalism Is the Antidote to Radical Skepticism.Lisa Miracchi - 2017 - Episteme 14 (3):363-379.
    ABSTRACTHilary Putnam provides an anti-skeptical argument motivated by semantic externalism. He argues that our best theorizing about what it takes to experience, think, and so on, entails that the world is much as we take it to be. This fact eliminates the possibility of radical skeptical scenarios, where from our perspective everything seems as it does in the actual case, but we are widely and systematically mistaken. I think that this approach is generally correct, and that it is the most (...)
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  37. Transcendental Arguments, Conceivability, and Global Vs. Local Skepticism.Moti Mizrahi - 2017 - Philosophia 45 (2):735-749.
    In this paper, I argue that, if transcendental arguments are to proceed from premises that are acceptable to the skeptic, the Transcendental Premise, according to which “X is a metaphysically necessary condition for the possibility of Y,” must be grounded in considerations of conceivability and possibility. More explicitly, the Transcendental Premise is based on what Szabó Gendler and Hawthorne call the “conceivability-possibility move.” This “inconceivability-impossibility” move, however, is a problematic argumentative move when advancing transcendental arguments for the following reasons. First, (...)
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  38. Brains in vats and model theory.Tim Button - 2016 - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), The Brain in a Vat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 131-154.
    Hilary Putnam’s BIV argument first occurred to him when ‘thinking about a theorem in modern logic, the “Skolem–Löwenheim Theorem”’ (Putnam 1981: 7). One of my aims in this paper is to explore the connection between the argument and the Theorem. But I also want to draw some further connections. In particular, I think that Putnam’s BIV argument provides us with an impressively versatile template for dealing with sceptical challenges. Indeed, this template allows us to unify some of Putnam’s most enduring (...)
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  39. An Argument for External World Skepticism from the Appearance/Reality Distinction.Moti Mizrahi - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (4):368-383.
    In this paper, I argue that arguments from skeptical hypotheses for external world skepticism derive their support from a skeptical argument from the distinction between appearance and reality. This skeptical argument from the appearance/reality distinction gives the external world skeptic her conclusion without appealing to skeptical hypotheses and without assuming that knowledge is closed under known entailments. If this is correct, then this skeptical argument from the appearance/reality distinction poses a new skeptical challenge that cannot be resolved by denying skeptical (...)
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  40. Putnam on Brains-in-Vats and Radical Skepticism.Duncan Pritchard & Chris Ranalli - 2016 - In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), The Brain in a Vat. Cambridge University Press.
  41. Dreams in a Vat.Danilo Suster - 2016 - European Journal of Analytic Philosophy 12 (2):89-105.
    Putnam’s semantic argument against the BIV hypothesis and Sosa’s argument against dream skepticism based on the imagination model of dreaming share some important structural features. In both cases the skeptical option is supposed to be excluded because preconditions of its intelligibility are not fulfilled (affirmation and belief in the dream scenario, thought and reference in the BIV scenario). Putnam’s reasoning is usually interpreted differently, as a classic case of deception, but this feature is not essential. I propose to interpret BIV’s (...)
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  42. What it Means to Live in a Virtual World Generated by Our Brain.Jan Westerhoff - 2016 - Erkenntnis 81 (3):507-528.
    Recent discussions in cognitive science and the philosophy of mind have defended a theory according to which we live in a virtual world akin to a computer simulation, generated by our brain. It is argued that our brain creates a model world from a variety of stimuli; this model is perceived as if it was external and perception-independent, even though it is neither of the two. The view of the mind, brain, and world, entailed by this theory has some peculiar (...)
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  43. How you know you are not a brain in a vat.Alexander Jackson - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (10):2799-2822.
    A sensible epistemologist may not see how she could know that she is not a brain in a vat ; but she doesn’t panic. She sticks with her empirical beliefs, and as that requires, believes that she is not a BIV. (She does not inferentially base her belief that she is not a BIV on her empirical knowledge—she rejects that ‘Moorean’ response to skepticism.) Drawing on the psychological literature on metacognition, I describe a mechanism that’s plausibly responsible for a sensible (...)
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  44. The (Un)Holy Grail of Epistemology.Paweł J. Zięba - 2015 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 22 (1):21-33.
    As formulated by Duncan Pritchard and John McDowell, epistemological disjunctivism is the claim that perceptual experience can provide the subject with epistemic justification that is reflectively accessible and externally grounded at the same time. Pritchard calls this thesis ‘the holy grail of epistemology’, since it reconciles two traditionally rival theories of justification, namely epistemic internalism and epistemic externalism. The main objection against epistemological disjunctivism thus understood is that it does not do justice to the well-known internalist intuitions expressed in The (...)
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  45. The Limits of Realism, by Tim Button. 264 + xi p., Oxford University Press, Oxford 2013. [REVIEW]Nathan Wildman - 2014 - Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 68 (3):433-37.
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  46. The Limits of Realism.Tim Button - 2013 - Oxford: Oxford University Press UK.
    Tim Button explores the relationship between words and world; between semantics and scepticism. -/- A certain kind of philosopher – the external realist – worries that appearances might be radically deceptive. For example, she allows that we might all be brains in vats, stimulated by an infernal machine. But anyone who entertains the possibility of radical deception must also entertain a further worry: that all of our thoughts are totally contentless. That worry is just incoherent. -/- We cannot, then, be (...)
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  47. Challenging Closure: Is It A Way To Answer The Skeptic?Fred Dretske - 2013 - The Harvard Review of Philosophy 19:61-68.
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  48. Sceptical Scenarios Are Not Error-Possibilities.Tim Kraft - 2013 - Erkenntnis 78 (1):59-72.
    On a common view of scenario-based sceptical arguments sceptical scenarios are error-possibilities, i.e. their point is to introduce the possibility of having only false beliefs. However, global error is impossible for purely logical/conceptual reasons: Even if one’s beliefs are consistent, the negations of one’s beliefs need not be consistent as well. My paper deals with the question of what the consequences of this result are. Two attempts at repairing scenario-based sceptical arguments within the framework of understanding sceptical scenarios as error-possibilities (...)
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  49. Could a Brain in a Vat Self‐Refer?Rory Madden - 2013 - European Journal of Philosophy 21 (1):74-93.
    : Radical sceptical possibilities challenge the anti-realist view that truth consists in ideal rational acceptability. Putnam, as part of his defence of an anti-realist view, subjected the case of the brain in a vat to a semantic externalist treatment, which aimed to maintain the desired connection between truth and ideal rational acceptability. It is argued here that self-consciousness poses special problems for this externalist strategy. It is shown how, on a standard model of first-person reference, Putnam's brain in a vat (...)
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  50. New Terms of Envatment.Samuel Montplaisir - 2013 - Ithaque 12:77-87.
    The argument against skepticism relying on content externalism, which was made famous by Hilary Putnam, has been considered inconclusive by many philosophers. However, some believe that this argument has precluded the possibility of skeptical hypotheses. These hypotheses typically are fictional scenarios where a deceptive power makes your experiences indistinguishable from those you would have if you were not in such a scenario, making most of your justified belief false. Some philosophers, such as Anthony Brueckner and Jon Altschul, have taken this (...)
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