scepticism

Question 1

Explain how a reliabilist responds to the challenge of scepticism

Answer 1

• Sceptics argues that without the stipulation of necessary conditions you cannot have knowledge - every source of knowledge you have within the context of experience can be doubted.
• However reliabilism doesn’t require such stringent conditions, only that our beliefs are formed via a reliable source or process.
• A reliable source/process is one which has a** high truth-falsity ratio** (i.e. one which generates more truths than falsehoods).
• The consistency and coherence of the senses, for instance, would be enough to make the perceived external **world a reliable cause of our perceptions.

Question 2

Explain how Descartes responds to the challenge of scepticism

Answer 2

• Descartes utilised scepticism in his deductive reasoning, by narrowing what he deemed knowledge into only that which cannot be doubted.
• This allowed him to doubt first sensory perception, then all a posteriori knowledge, then all knowledge including a priori, in his so-called ‘three waves of (methodological) doubt’.
• From these conclusions, he gleaned that the existence of his doubt, thus his mind, was infallible knowledge (his cogito argument) and went on to deductively ‘prove’ the existence of God and the external world based on the infallibility of his own conscious existence.

Question 3

Explain how idealism is a response to the challenge of scepticism

Answer 3

• Berkeley’s idealism does not challenge global scepticism (the doubt of a mind-independent external world),
• arguing that because the mind and its content/ideas are all that can be known, they are all that should be believed in.
• Berkeley asks how - if realism is true - we can link up our perception with the objects behind it; it seems we can’t look past the veil of perception.
• In denying the existence of an external reality, Berkeley rejects the source of scepticism - the ‘veil of perception’ which renders such a world unknowable.

Question 4

Explain Locke’s response to scepticism based on the involuntary nature of our experience

Answer 4

• Locke argued that our perceived experience could not be mind-dependent, as the faculty of imagination by which one’s mind conjures things is fundamentally different.
• Experience is involuntary;
• Locke can choose to conjure the image of the sun at will, but when actually looking at it cannot choose not to experience his sensory perception of it.
• The most likely explanation of this involuntariness is that the external world exists and cause our experience of it.

Question 5

Explain Russell’s claim that the existence of the external world is the ‘best hypothesis’

Answer 5

• Bertrand Russell argued that the existence of MIDOs cannot be infallibly proven/disproven, and so we should draw our conclusion via that which constitutes the ‘best hypothesis’.
• He takes the example of a cat, who walks (disappears) behind a sofa, but emerges (reappears) on the other side (and that leaves in the morning full, but reappears later, hungry).
• Either it actually vanished and then materialised again, or it simply walked
• The fact that ‘it walked’ is a far more straightforward and explanatory answer
• as the simplest, thus most likely (Ockham’s razor)
• strongly suggests that it continued to exist when unperceived, mind-independently. This resolves the issue of ‘gappy’ existence.

Question 6

Explain the response to scepticism from the coherence of various kinds of experience

Answer 6

• In sensory experience, sense-data is consistently coherent across the senses.
• Fire is always bright and hot, and when writing on a piece of paper one witnesses the words appearing.
• The most likely reason for such a regular and vivid perception is that the external world exists.
• Cockburn argued that the fact that we can accurately infer and predict our experiences (e.g., the appearance versus sound of a waterfall; different but consistently indicative of each other) suggests that there is some mind-independent object which both senses perceive yet is independent of any particular sense.
• If it could be heard without being seen and seen without being heard, then it seems to follow it exists without being seen or heard, i.e. mind-independently.
• This is an abductive response to external world scepticism.

Question 7

Explain the role/function of philosophical scepticism

Answer 7

• The function of philosophical scepticism, or the methodological application of doubt, within epistemology is generally understood as twofold: To doubt everything (global scepticism or ‘Pyrrhonean’ doubt; establishing the extent of what cannot be known) or to establish its antithesis; that which can be known. A classic example of such scepticism comes with Descartes’ ‘3 waves of doubt’ and his subsequent response (the cogito - that if doubt exists, then so too must the mind. Philosophical scepticism is often contrasted with normal/everyday doubt (which is trivial, commonplace, and easily solved - for example, will I catch my train on time?).