International Journal for the Study of Skepticism最新文献

In this brief commentary, we offer thoughts on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: A Philosophical Study. We focus on the book’s relevance to the study of cognitive biases, including Kelly’s discussion of naïve realism (in the psychologists’ sense). While we are largely enthusiastic about Kelly’s theorizing, we also provide some pushback against his notion of emergent biases. We hope that psychologists will engage with Kelly’s work and might consider how some philosophical refinements could improve the empirical study of biases.

Ángel Pinillos’ Why We Doubt offers an error theory for at least some versions of global skepticism: skeptical doubts are based on a faulty heuristic. Once this heuristic is replaced by a more apt principle inspired by Bayesian approaches to epistemology, the skeptical doubts are shown not to be motivated. I argue contra Pinillos that skeptical doubts may remain even if we grant the main line of Pinillos’ argument. Skeptical doubts might be generated by disagreement even when we accept Pinillos’ Bayesian inspired principle.

Pinillos’ Why We Doubt presents a powerful critique of such global skeptical assertions as “I don’t know I am not a brain-in-a-vat (biv)” by introducing a cognitive mechanism that is sensitive to error possibilities and a Bayesian rule of rationality that this mechanism is designed to approximate. This multifaceted argument offers a novel counter to global skepticism, contending that our basis for believing such premises is underminable. In this work, we engage with Pinillos’ adoption of Bayesianism, questioning whether the Bayesian principle that he invokes truly does fail to generate the verdict that we don’t we aren’t biv s, contrary to what Pinillos asserts. Furthermore, we argue that Pinillos’ empirical argument is not empirical enough; we need a lot more empirical work if we are going to counter global skepticism and win over neutral bystanders.

According to Thomas Kelly, traditional skeptical arguments can be conceived in terms of bias. The main aim of this paper is not to challenge Kelly’s conclusions, but rather to draw some interesting consequences from them. Specifically, in addition to cases of biased judgments, which draw the ire of the skeptic, there are also cases of biased suspension of judgment. By examining cases of racially biased suspension of judgment and comparing them to cases of skepticism, I argue that we can help to uncover the mechanism that underlies the skeptic’s accusation of bias. In particular, I aim to show that it is the conclusiveness of one’s evidence, rather than the likelihood of the possibility at issue, that matters to the skeptic.

In this article, evidence is briefly presented for three facts that together point to something puzzling. (1) That major continental philosophers of the nineteenth century tended to engage in some detail, as part of a broader preoccupation with ancient Greek thought, with Pyrrhonian scepticism. (2) That major continental philosophers of the twentieth century tended to engage in some depth with their nineteenth-century forebears and maintained their tendency to engage significantly with ancient Greek thought. (3) That twentieth-century continental philosophers demonstrate little to no interest in Pyrrhonian scepticism. This raises the question: why does engagement with Pyrrhonism disappear from continental philosophy? The article discusses two hypotheses that might explain this disappearance.

In a previous article, I developed transcendental arguments to refute several versions of Nick Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis. I called some of these arguments the sim-style argument. In this article, I have four main aims. First, I employ the sim-style argument to remedy a defect in Hilary Putnam’s brain-in-vat argument. Second, I show that the most radical skepticism, which Tim Button called the nightmarish Cartesian skepticism, can be refuted by the sim-style argument or by another transcendental argument I develop here. Third, I compare my approach to radical skepticisms with Donald Davidson’s, as it is often regarded as an exemplar of transcendental arguments. Fourth, I explain how the prominent objections, mainly developed by Barry Stroud, to transcendental arguments can incur two undesirable results: psychologism and Kantian skepticism.

I review the dispute between Ribeiro (2011) and Brown (2021) over whether the radical transformation which a human self would need to undergo in order to be heaven-admissible would be such that it leads to a loss of self. Ribeiro thinks it would; Brown thinks it wouldn’t. My primary intention here is to advance the debate by trying to better understand what’s in dispute between these disputants. From this better understanding of what’s in dispute, we can see what would be needed to substantively advance the debate, and one claim I defend here is that in order to substantively advance this debate, a disputant would need to have a compelling defense of his side’s view on (at least) one of the two main issues that my analysis herein identifies.