Wallach, Marc
(1998)
The unintelligibility of scepticism resurrected.
MPhil thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
Scepticism about the external world is the view that all our everyday and scientific beliefs are epistemically on a par. Scepticism does not deny that we have true beliefs, only that we have any rational justification for accepting them as true. In this thesis I examine the claim that what passes for the doctrine of scepticism is in fact incoherent. My thesis consists of four sections. In the introduction I briefly discuss and reject the naturalist's response to scepticism. In the second section, I introduce the sceptical argument and defend it as a philosophical extension of our ordinary epistemic practices. In the third section, I examine G E Moore's famous anti-sceptical papers, which I eventually reject. The final part of my thesis looks at Wittgenstein's On Certainty (OC), in which he wrestles with the idea of the intelligibility of scepticism. The claim that scepticism, or indeed any philosophical position, is unintelligible is not easy to establish and I do not think Wittgenstein demonstrates that it is so. Nevertheless, I do think he pushes scepticism to a point where it is difficult to see how it could occupy any conceptual space in our intellectual lives.
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