Underdetermination Skepticism and Skeptical Dogmatism

International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 5 (3):218-251 (2015)
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Abstract

The Mundane World Hypothesis (mwh) says that we have material bodies, we have brains located inside our bodies, we have sense organs which process visual information, the direct cause of our perceptual judgments is typically macroscopic material objects, and we live in a material world. Skeptics using underdetermination arguments arguemwhhas no more epistemic merit than some skeptical competitor, e.g., that we are in the Matrix. Since such competitor hypotheses are equipollent, we are not justified in believingmwh. This paper takes the underdetermination skeptic’s premises to a more radical conclusion: skeptical dogmatism, which is the view thatmwhis probably false based on the idea that there are many equipollent competitors tomwh.

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Mark Walker
New Mexico State University

Citations of this work

Motivating (Underdetermination) Scepticism.Guido Tana - 2024 - Acta Analytica 39 (2):243-272.
Reasoning One’s Way Back into Skepticism.Mark Satta - 2023 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 13 (3):202-224.
Occam’s Razor, Dogmatism, Skepticism, and Skeptical Dogmatism.Mark Walker - 2016 - International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 6 (1):1-29.

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References found in this work

Philosophical explanations.Robert Nozick - 1981 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Epistemology and cognition.Alvin I. Goldman - 1986 - Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Reason, Truth and History.Hilary Putnam - 1981 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
Theory of knowledge.Roderick M. Chisholm - 1966 - Englewood Cliffs, N.J.,: Prentice-Hall.
Epistemic Luck.Duncan Pritchard - 2005 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.

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