introphil_lecture_slides_IntroPhil2-week2-slides

Brains-in-Vats

and ‘Everyday’ Knowledge

So even if we don’t know that we’re not brains-in-vats, so what?

But if you were a brain-in-a-vat, then you wouldn’t have hands (since brains-in-vats are handless by definition). So how do you know that you have hands?(And if you don’t know this, what do you know?)

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Epistemic Vertigo

It is certainly part of the human condition that we are fallible creatures. But perhaps, once we reflect on the matter (and thus reflectively ‘ascend’), we realise that there is more than just fallibility at issue here. Maybe we simply don’t know as much as we typically suppose.

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Part Three Conclusions

•Radical scepticism is the view that we know very little, if anything, about the world around us.

•Radical scepticism makes use of sceptical hypotheses, which are scenarios indistinguishable from ordinary life but where we are radically in error.

•It seems that if we cannot rule-out these hypotheses, then much of what we think we know is under threat.

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Further Reading

I explore these issues about the nature and extent of knowledge in my introductory textbook,

What is This Thing Called Knowledge? (Routledge).

See especially parts 1 & 3.

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Thank You For Listening!

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