Could We Be Brains in a Vat?

Canadian Journal of Philosophy 14 (1):115--23 (1984)
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Abstract

The course of my experience is quite consistent with the hypothesis that it is being produced by a mad scientist who is feeding into my sensory receptors entirely delusive stimuli. Indeed, I could at this very moment be nothing more than a brain floating in a vat of nutrients, my nerve ends linked up to some infernal apparatus by means of which my unknown deceiver induces in me utterly erroneous beliefs about the world.So begins a familiar line of thought which dramatizes an equally familiar sceptical problem about the relation between our experiences and the world. However, Hilary Putnam has recently offered a marvellously ambitious argument which is intended to kill stone-dead the philosophical fantasy that we might be deluded brains in a vat.

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Citations of this work

The existence of personites.Matti Eklund - 2020 - Philosophical Studies 177 (7):2051-2071.
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Epistemological solipsism as a route to external world skepticism.Grace Helton - 2021 - Philosophical Perspectives 35 (1):229-250.
Putnam’s Brain-Teaser.David Davies - 1995 - Canadian Journal of Philosophy 25 (2):203--27.

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