Dear all, Next week, Dr. Genia Schönbaumsfeld (Southampton) will give a talk entitled "Dretske’s Verbal Hocus-Pocus: Radical Scepticism and the Closure Principle". An abstract is included below.
The meeting will be held at 5:15pm on Tuesday, 28 January, in the *Boys Smith Room* (found in the Fisher Building), St. John's College. For more information, including details about our fees, and our 2013-2014 programme, please visit our website at http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc. We look forward to seeing many of you there. Best, Kyle Mitchell and Shyane Siriwardena ABSTRACT: It is a commonly accepted assumption in contemporary epistemology that we need to find a solution to ‘closure-based’ sceptical arguments, and, hence, to the ‘scepticism or closure’ dilemma. In the present paper I argue that this is misguided, since despite near-unanimity to the contrary in the current literature, the closure principle does not, in fact, do any sceptical work. Rather, the decisive, scepticism-friendly moves are made *before* the closure principle is even brought into play. If we cannot avoid the sceptical conclusion, this is not due to closure’s holding it in place, but because certain scepticism-entailing assumptions about perceptual experience have simply been taken for granted. Once the real villain of the piece is exposed, it will become clear that the closure principle has been cast in the role of scapegoat in this debate. So, even though my arguments are primarily aimed at Dretske, their moral has general application and should pave the way for a more pellucid approach to the problem of radical scepticism. -- Kyle Mitchell and Shyane Siriwardena Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc
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