Abstract

As a philosophical position skepticism originated in Ancient Greece and the philosopher Pyrrho is commonly cited as the father of this position. Traditionally skepticism is associated with the view that nothing is, or can be, known with certainty and that, thus, knowledge is generally impossible. The present investigation is restricted to one particular kind of skepticism, namely, skepticism about the external world. We examine the logical structure of the skeptical position and we identify its basic assumptions. Our analysis reveals that skepticism is essentially a problem about the justification of our beliefs about the external world. We argue that all skeptical arguments rest on some common intuitions about human knowledge and the mind-world relation. ;The main objective of our project is to demonstrate that transcendental arguments have the power to refute skepticism. Transcendental arguments have been introduced in philosophy by Immanuel Kant. Our investigation is focused on Kant's original argument and A. Grayling's attempt to separate the transcendental refutation of skepticism from Kant's transcendental psychology. ;Our defense of transcendental arguments includes two stages. First, we demonstrate how transcendental arguments justify our beliefs about the external world. Second, we show that transcendental arguments serve this goal better than any traditional theory of justification. Our analysis reveals serious deficiencies in A. Grayling's refutation of skepticism. At the end of our investigation we endorse Kant's transcendental refutation of skepticism. ;We spell out three desiderata for the success of any refutation of skepticism. First, a successful refutation of skepticism will have to demonstrate that we can have justified beliefs about the external world that are likely to be true. Second, a successful refutation of skepticism will have to explain what went wrong in the reasoning of the skeptic. Finally, a successful refutation of skepticism will have to preserve most of our pre-philosophical intuitions about the external world, namely, that there are empirical objects that continue to exist even when we do not perceive them. We argue that transcendental idealism satisfies all three requirements. Thus, we believe that our project brings us closer to a conclusive refutation of skepticism about the external world