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Analysis Advance Access published online on September 24, 2009
Analysis, doi:10.1093/analys/anp130
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

Has Gemes refuted global scepticism?

A.C. Genova

University of Kansas 3078 Wescoe Hall Lawrence, Kansas 66045, USA acg@ku.edu

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Ken Gemes (2009) presents a purported refutation of global scepticism whose lucidity is only exceeded by its brevity. He argues that the ‘widely accepted view’ of the matter is wrong in thinking that the sceptical hypothesis (SH), if true, entails that ‘... all our experienced-based beliefs could be false’. He attributes this view of the SH to Descartes and provides the following counter-example: on the basis of one's sensory experience one could believe the claims

(1) I have a hand.

and
(2) It is not the case that I have a hand with a wart on it.

He correctly contends that it is logically impossible that both (1) and (2) can be false. Their simultaneous negations are jointly inconsistent. If (1) is false (no hand), then (2) must be true (no proposition attributing a property to a hand can be true); while if (2) is false (I do . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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