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Skeptical Rearmament

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2020

Bredo C. Johnsen
Bredo C. Johnsen*
Affiliation:
University of Houston, Central Campus/Houston, TX77004
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Extract

In ‘Skeptism Oisarmed,’ L.S. Carrier asserts the following:

… any reasonable person would accept premise (1) only on the ground that both p and q are propositions for which we can get the requisite evidence.

Premise (1), actually a premise schema attributed to Peter Unger, is the following:

If A both knows p and knows that p entails q, then A can come to know that q.

I suggest, contrary to Carrier's assertion, that many reasonable people, including many philosophers, would regard (1) as a necessary truth knowable a priori, and would be quite happy to accept its universal quantification, with no implied restriction to propositions for which we can get any evidence at all.

How is such a dispute about what reasonable people would do to be resolved? I suggest that, at the very least, Carrier owes us an explanation of the grounds on which he would reject particular instances of the schema, e.g.,

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , September 1985 , pp. 507 - 509
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1985

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References

1 Carrier, L.S. ‘Skepticism Disarmed,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 13 (1983) 107–14.CrossRefGoogle Scholar