Stroud’s Modest Transcendental Argument

Abstract

Jonathan Ellis

Barry Stroud is well known as a critic of philosophers who purport to answer, or otherwise deflate, the threat of skepticism of the external world.  He is most famous in this regard for his seminal paper on transcendental arguments, in which he argues that the prospects of defeating the skeptic with such arguments typically depend upon an implausible form of verification principle.  There he mostly focuses upon Strawson and Shoemaker.  But since then, Stroud has addressed strategies taken against skepticism as varied as those proposed by Kant, Moore, Austin, Carnap, Quine, Cavell, Davidson, and Sosa, in each case meticulously articulating precisely why the strategy could not ultimately succeed.  It is not surprising, then, that Stroud has come to be thought of as the quintessential skeptic.  Epistemologists will be surprised to learn, then, that in several recent papers Stroud now argues that we face no threat of skepticism after all.  If he who has been so carefully critical of enterprises that purport to answer, or otherwise deflate, the threat of skepticism has something now to say as to why we face no such threat at all, it is a proposal that comes with good pedigree and perhaps even a presumption in its favor.

In this paper, I discuss the prospects of Stroud’s new approach to skepticism.  In the end, I remain unconvinced by his argument, I regret to say.  I believe that it relies on an unmotivated and questionable assumption concerning what is required to raise a skeptical threat.  My primary goal in the paper is to explain why I think this.  However, I also believe that there is a particular element of Stroud’s strategy that may bear considerable promise.  In the final section, I underscore this element and attempt to outline a different way of developing it to anti-skeptical ends.