I'm not sure how many of the early moderns thought that. Hume certainly didn't, since he thought no such foundation was possible and yet still wrote o...
Perhaps the description 'evil' is misplaced then. Try instead, 'deceiving demon'. He certainly does deceive, since he fools everyone into thinking tha...
Right, ordinarily. I have some difficulty with this. In a way, there isn't a need for all sorts of things that we insist on doing. There is no need to...
Now I see what you mean by this. Thanks for the clarification. But this is less clear. I thought you said that the evil demon explanation and the Real...
There are some difficulties in what you said, or perhaps just difficulties in my understanding it. You say that 'when you are talking about meaning, y...
I see your point. The evil demon hypothesis is one which is empirically indistinguishable from the Realist hypothesis. I agree with you on that, since...
It seems to me that he is meaningfully different and that you recognize this. The Realist postulates that these two experienced cars are numerically t...
You have to say what the faculty is. And the difficulty is, the faculties typically accepted as possessed by humans by Realists don't fit the bill. Se...
Suppose I do that. Suppose I specify apriori that I want to figure out whether there exists anything which is black, rectangular, has a motherboard an...
But I did discuss this argument with gurugeorge, over many posts. My basic point has been that the argument is circular, since it assumes, without any...
I am not defending Idealism as true. I am happy to concede that there is no more a reliable source for Idealism than we seem to have found for Realism...
You agree with me that nobody who doesn't already accept that Realism is true would accept your argument about cameras. So someone who has no belief a...
I agree that its not the most common use these days, even in academic philosophy. Though if you gloss the Pyrrhonian school as having 'given up' and a...
First, it isn't my 'view'. It isn't even how I use the word 'scepticism' most of the time. The definition to which you are referring is the one which ...
I don't understand what you mean when you say that the whole thing is 'artificial'. All of us have a clear idea of what it is for something to exist, ...
I think we have reached an impasse. From where you see it, my characterization of the issue is just an odd way of talking which creates problems. For ...
Is this strictly relevant? We began looking for a reliable source for the belief that things exist unperceived. You suggest instinct and I replied by ...
Are my instincts a reliable guide to reality? It doesn't seem so. When I look at the stick immersed in water my instincts urge me to believe that it i...
Hold your hand up and look at it. You are perceiving something at that moment. There are certain qualitative features or properties of which you are a...
A good reason to believe it would be any means of reliably establishing it to be true. Sense perception and inference I discussed because these are ou...
, you say that I have been redefining words so as to create a mystery. From my perspective, it is you that is obfuscating things with words. Your insi...
Alright, so you define 'doubt' as the questioning of truth based on reasons. Then you conclude that its incoherent to doubt something without reasons....
, this all seems largely misconceived. I grant that that is how we normally answer 'why?' questions. Why can I only doubt on the basis of some other t...
, you disagree with my account of how people come to believe that Realism is true. You say that it just isn't convincing. For my part, I find the idea...
Sorry for the double post, but perhaps I should add to the above that most people have never even noticed that Realism is something which they believe...
I don't suppose that every single child in the history of the earth is surprised by peek-a-boo, no. But, as I said, many Realists put forward, as a re...
Some philosophers, I believe following Bertrand Russell, have defended Realism by saying that it is an instinctive believe 'built in' to all of us and...
The inference you suggest would be just the kind of things which is needed, but what makes Realism a better explanation of experience than the evil de...
, interesting post. The difficulty with the above argument was that, as I stressed to Marchesk, the sceptical problem I was alluding to consists in th...
Let me distinguish two different conceptions of reason, and I say you have supplied neither of them in favour of Realism. Reliability Humans have two ...
You would need to ask an Idealist how he knows that there are other minds, and why he cares about a rain forest which only exists when people perceive...
I see your point. They are a matter of degree, but the challenges posed by sceptical writings have typically been absolute. So the thought is that we ...
I'm not sure about this. In the sense of 'Skepticism' as 'doubt' then sure, it is a matter of degree. But that's not the only meaning of 'Skepticism' ...
, Hi, nice to meet you. I think the ontological proof is valid. I don't know about sound, but valid certainly. 2 is false. You say 2 follows from 'the...
Many of the issues discussed by philosophers aren't about things which drive capitalist society. Philosophers aren't much concerned with human resourc...
Marchesk, I thought that you were maintaining that no inference was needed? In any case, I am not sure that the argument you suggest is subtle enough ...
Marchesk Thanks again, This reply which you have given is a common and understandable one, but I think it makes some subtle confusions which once made...
Wayfarer, I haven't read The Last Word, but I just did a quick google. It looks like it contains critiques of both Naturalism and Relativism, and that...
Thanks for thoughtful replies T Clark, I take it that you aren't so interested in Scepticism in any of the forms that I described in my OP? You draw a...
Hello, I'm PossibleAaran. I was a member of PhilosophyForums two years ago. The site got new management around the time that I left. I went back to th...
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