Abstract

Attempts to philosophize about human knowledge lead inevitably to skepticism. So Hume taught and so some influential contemporary philosophers would have us believe. But what are we to make of this fact, assuming that it is one? Should we treat it as bad news about our chances of obtaining knowledge? Or should we rather see its importance as primarily meta-philosophical? That is, should we take the real significance of skepticism's seeming inevitability to lie in what it tells us about the idea of understanding knowledge philosophically?