Wolfgang Schwarz

What Good is Refuting Skepticism?

I'm always worried when a philosopher claims that it's a virtue of his theory that it rules out certain kinds of scepticism, or when a philosopher criticizes another philosopher (say, a contextualist) for not doing so.

I suppose it would be a good thing if newspapers always told the truth. But what would you say if I offered you a theory on which it is ruled out a priori that something false could be written in a newspaper? That wouldn't be a point in favour of my theory. For it seems intuitively obvious that something false could be written in a newspaper. A theory isn't good just because it entails something which, if true, would be good.

Similarly, if a theory offers me an a priori guarantee that given our evidence, inductive inferences must be truth-conducive (as perhaps Peacocke wants?), I regard that as a serious drawback ot the theory: it seems intuitively obvious to me that people in suitable counter-inductive worlds could have exactly the same evidence. Whatever 'guarantee' we have, they have it as well. So the 'guarantee' is not worth its name. Likewise for those externalist theories that say I couldn't possibly turn out to be a brain in a vat. It's good if I'm not, but I don't want a philosophical theory to tell me so.