The debate over skepticism concerns propositional knowledge.
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First published Sat Dec 8, 2001; substantive revision Thu Dec 5, 2019

Philosophical skepticism is interesting because there are intriguing arguments for it despite its initial implausibility. Many contemporary epistemological positions can be fruitfully presented as responding to some aspect of those arguments. For example, questions regarding principles of epistemic closure and transmission are closely related to the discussion of what we will call Cartesian Skepticism, as are views according to which we are entitled to dismiss skeptical hypotheses even though we do not have evidence against them. The traditional issue of the structure of knowledge and justification, engendering Foundationalism, Coherentism, and Infinitism, can be seen as resulting from one main argument for what we will call Pyrrhonian Skepticism. In what follows we present these two forms of skepticism and assess the main arguments for them.

1. Knowledge, Justification and Skepticism

2. Two Basic Forms of Philosophical Skepticism

3. The Argument for Cartesian Skepticism Employing the Closure Principle

3.1 Consideration of CP1

3.2 Consideration of CP2

4. Contextualism

5. Pyrrhonian Skepticism

5.1 Rejecting Premise 2: Foundationalism

5.2 Rejecting Premise 5: Infinitism

5.3 Rejecting Premise 3: Coherentism

5.4 Rejecting Premise 7: Positism

5.5 Rejecting More than One Premise

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1. Knowledge, Justification and Skepticism

Philosophically interesting forms of skepticism claim that we do not know propositions which we ordinarily think we do know. We should distinguish such skepticism from the ordinary kind, the claim that we do not know propositions which we would gladly grant not to know. Thus, it is a form of ordinary skepticism to say that we do not know that there are an even number of stars in the Milky Way, but it is a form of philosophical skepticism to say that we do not know that the sun will come out tomorrow. Even though our interest is in philosophical skepticism, we can start our inquiry by thinking about ordinary skepticism.

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