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Essays on Skepticism
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Essays on Skepticism

Anthony Brueckner

Abstract

This book is a collection of important work on the problem of scepticism, by someone who has provided perhaps the leading contemporary investigation of this problem. The guiding questions of this volume are: Can we have knowledge of the external world of things outside our minds? Can we have knowledge of the internal world of our own contentful mental states? The work divides into four sections: I. Transcendental Arguments against Scepticism, II. Semantic Answers to Scepticism, III. Self-knowledge, and IV. Scepticism and Epistemic Closure.

Keywords: internal world, transcendental arguments, semantic answers, self-knowledge, epistemic closure, scepticism

Bibliographic Information

Print publication date: 2010 Print ISBN-13: 9780199585861
Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: January 2011 DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199585861.001.0001

Authors

Affiliations are at time of print publication.

Anthony Brueckner, Author
University of California, Santa Barbara

Contents

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Front Matter

Title Pages

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

I TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS AGAINST SKEPTICISM

1 Transcendental Arguments I

2 Transcendental Arguments II

3 The Anti‐Skeptical Epistemology of the Refutation of Idealism

4 Modest Transcendental Arguments

5 Transcendental Arguments from Content Externalism

6 Stroud's “Transcendental Arguments” Reconsidered

II SEMANTIC ANSWERS TO SKEPTICISM

PART A ON PUTNAM

7 Brains in a Vat

8 Semantic Answers To Skepticism

9 Trees, Computer Program Features, and Skeptical Hypotheses

10 Cartesian Skepticism, Content Externalism, and Self‐Knowledge

11 Terms of Envatment1 (with Jon Altschul)

PART B: ON DAVIDSON

12 Charity and Skepticism

13 The Omniscient Interpreter Rides Again

PART C: ON McDOWELL

14 Singular Thought and Cartesian Philosophy

III SELF‐KNOWLEDGE

PART A: CONTENT EXTERNALISM AND SELF‐KNOWLEDGE

15 Scepticism about Knowledge of Content

16 Knowledge of Content and Knowledge of the World

17 Externalism and Memory

PART B: THE McKINSEY PROBLEM

18 What an Anti‐Individualist Knows A Priori

19 The Characteristic Thesis of Anti‐Individualism

20 Brewer on the McKinsey Problem

21 Wright On The McKinsey Problem

22 Externalism and Privileged Access Are Consistent

23 The Resiliency of the McKinsey Problem

IV SKEPTICISM AND EPISTEMIC CLOSURE

24 Epistemic Universalizability Principles

25 Why Nozick is a Sceptic

26 Skepticism and Epistemic Closure

27 Unfair to Nozick

28 Problems with the Wright Route to Skepticism

29 The Structure of the Skeptical Argument

30 Klein on Closure and Skepticism

31 The Elusive Virtues of Contextualism

32 Strategies for Refuting Closure for Knowledge

33 Knowledge, Evidence, and Skepticism According to Williamson

34 Fallibilism, Underdetermination, and Skepticism

35 Some Comfort for the Closure Skeptic

36 ∼K∼SK

End Matter

Bibliography

Index