Scepticism and the senses

European Journal of Philosophy 17 (4):559-570 (2009)
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Abstract

Abstract: This paper is an attempt to identify and to suggest reasons to reject those assumptions about the nature and scope of perceptual knowledge that appear to make an unacceptable scepticism the only strictly defensible answer to the philosophical problem of knowledge of the world in general. The suggestion is that our knowing things about the world around us by perception can be satisfactorily explained only if we can be understood to sometimes perceive that such-and-such is so, where what we perceive to be so is the very state of the world that we thereby know to be so. This is not proposed as a better answer to the philosophical problem, but as a way of seeing how that problem as traditionally understood could not really present a threat to anyone who can think about the world at all.

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Author's Profile

Barry Stroud
Last affiliation: University of California, Berkeley

Citations of this work

Epistemological Disjunctivism and the Internalist Challenge.Kegan Shaw - 2019 - American Philosophical Quarterly 56 (4):385-396.
McDowellian Neo-Mooreanism?Genia Schönbaumsfeld - 2013 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (3):202-217.
Recent Work on Skepticism in Epistemology.Chris Ranalli - 2023 - American Philosophical Quarterly 60 (3):257-273.

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References found in this work

The philosophical writings of Descartes.René Descartes - 1984 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
The skeptic and the dogmatist.James Pryor - 2000 - Noûs 34 (4):517–549.
Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits.Bertrand Russell - 1948 - London and New York: Routledge.
Descartes: the project of pure enquiry.Bernard Williams (ed.) - 1978 - Hassocks: Harvester Press.
Second philosophy: a naturalistic method.Penelope Maddy - 2007 - New York: Oxford University Press.

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