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Articles

Sceptical Hypotheses and Transcendental Arguments

Jonathan Barfield presents a way to beat the sceptics.

What if the world doesn’t really exist? Perhaps what I think is the real world is actually an illusion, or a computer simulation? Maybe I am really a brain in a vat of liquid goo, connected up by an evil scientist to electrodes producing nerve impulses that pump a simulation of a real world directly into my brain (cf. The Matrix)? Or what if nothing exists outside my mind? Perhaps the only thing that exists is my mind? Is anything I think about the world actually true?

Such deep questions and worries about what we can know about the world are called sceptical hypotheses. A sceptical hypothesis challenges our everyday assumptions about what is real and how we can know it, pushing us to accept the possibility that we might not know anything, or at least that we don’t have very much justification for some of the things that we usually assume we know.

One way of trying to overcome a sceptical hypothesis is to construct a theory of knowledge which sets out the criteria that have to be met in order for me to know something. I can then test any given claim to see if meets the standards I have set myself.

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