Abstract

Donald Davidson argues that the very nature of belief ensures that, if we have any beliefs at all, most of them must be true. He takes this to show that Cartesian skepticism is fundamentally mistaken. Many commentators, however, find this response to skepticism to be lacking. In this paper, I draw from recent work by Rebecca Kukla and Mark Lance and attempt to give Davidson’s argument a newfound force by applying it to our acts of ostension, of pointing others to features in our shared environment. The sort of ostensive argument that I extract from Davidson remains largely unexplored in skepticism’s vast literature, and I argue that this is the strongest way to read Davidson’s epistemological work, providing a response to some influential objections to his arguments.