No CrossRef data available.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
One way of developing a sceptical position is to take some hypothesis (H) which entails the sceptical thesis (T) that nothing is known, and argue that since H is not known to be false, T cannot be known to be false either. That is, since His not known to be false, it is not known that anything is known. One may then argue convincingly that no one knows anything at all (T) on the grounds that it is not known that anything is known is virtually equivalent to nothing is known (sc. that knowing is virtually equivalent to knowing that one knows). Take, for example, the Cartesian sceptical hypothesis that there is an evil demon systematically deceiving everyone all of the time about everything. Instead of arguing that the hypothesis is true and that there actually is such a creature, it is much more plausible to suggest that no one knows for certain that there is not, so that in this sense it is possible that there is. What follows is not that no one knows anything, but that it is not known that anything is known.
1 Hintikka, Vide J. Knowledge and Belief (Ithaca, Cornell U. P., 1962) p.111Google Scholar
2 Unger, P. “A Defense of Skepticism”, in Philosophical Review, Vol.80 (1971) pp.198-219CrossRefGoogle Scholar
3 Ibid. pp.212-213
4 Ibid. p.216
5 K. Lehrer, “Why Not Scepticism?”, in Philosophical Studies (1971) pp. 283–298.
6 Ibid. p.292
7 Ibid. p.292
8 Ibid. p.297
To send this article to your Kindle, first ensure no-reply@cambridge.org is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about sending to your Kindle. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save this article to your Dropbox account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Dropbox account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save this article to your Google Drive account, please select one or more formats and confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you used this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your Google Drive account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.