Unger's Defense of Skepticism: New Wine in Old Bottles

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 12 (3):453 - 465 (1982)
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Abstract

Peter Unger has recently attempted to defend skepticism by means of a novel and ingenious theory about certain general features of our language. According to his theory, skepticism is a logical consequence of the fact that certain epistemic terms, including ‘certain’ and ‘know,’ belong to a much wider class of absolute terms whose strict meaning is such that they have little or no positive application to things in the world. The purpose of this paper is to enquire whether Unger's theory of absolute terms provides a stronger basis for skepticism than do other, more familiar, approaches. I shall argue that the theory cannot be regarded as an explication of the ordinary meaning of the terms in question; that the ordinary meaning of these terms can be understood by means of an alternative, if less exciting, model; and that the logic of our language does not commit us to skepticism.

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Shane Andre
California State University, Long Beach

Citations of this work

Unger's Argument from Absolute Terms.Gregory Stoutenburg - 2017 - Philosophical Papers 46 (3):443-461.

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References found in this work

Contrastive statements.Fred I. Dretske - 1972 - Philosophical Review 81 (4):411-437.
Knowledge and belief.Norman Malcolm - 1952 - Mind 61 (242):178-189.
Knowledge and Perception.H. A. Prichard - 1950 - Philosophy 25 (95):358-360.
Russell's doubts about induction.Paul Edwards - 1949 - Mind 58 (230):141-163.

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