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September 08, 2006
New paper online: "Escape from the Humean Predicament"
This is a fairly polished draft of my writing sample. Here is the abstract:
In this paper, I outline a new strategy for answering skepticism, inspired by the words of Quine. It begins with the assumption that if skeptics have the right to make scientific assumptions for the sake of reductio ad absurdum, then anti-skeptics also have the right to make further free use of science in order to block the reductio. I illustrate how this strategy may be applied to three related skeptical conclusions: Quine's own underdetermination thesis, Humean inductive skepticism, and anti-foundationalism. Underdetermination is undermined by an appeal to scientific practice to see that it relies on a crude and unrealistic hypothetico-deductivist conception of confirmation. The classical Humean problem of induction can be resolved by appeal to a material theory of induction which recognizes diverse methods of confirmation practiced by scientists in different domains of fact. Finally, by appealing appealing to psychological evidence regarding perception and concept-formation, I show how the regress of inductive justification can be terminated in perceptual foundations.
Posted by Ben at September 8, 2006 06:50 PM