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Skepticism Disarmed

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

L.S. Carrier*
Affiliation:
University of Miami

Extract

If skepticism is once again fashionable, then much of the credit must go to Peter Unger who gives a sustained defense of an ultra-pyrrhonian position in his book, Ignorance: A case for Skepticism. Starting with a version of the traditional argument that we know nothing about the external world, Unger plunges deeper into skeptical waters by next arguing that there is at most hardly anything which we know to be so; and he scarcely pauses before proceeding to defend the stronger conclusion of ‘universal ignorance,’ the thesis that nobody ever knows anything to be the case. I view Unger's thesis and the arguments that led him to it as a challenge to be overcome, not by an appeal to dogmatism - which Unger sees as the only alternative to skepticism - but by recourse to hard-biting arguments of the sort in which Unger himself puts his faith. In what follows I shall attempt to restate Unger's three main skeptical arguments with a view to showing that their bite is not nearly so hard as he imagines.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1983

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References

1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1975); page numbers in the text refer to this work.

2 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1963), 67ff.