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But what if it were possible to show that all claims to knowledge, be they propositional or practical, were wrong and had to be wrong, i.e. that nobody ever has, and nobody ever can, know anything? Some people would say, dismissively, that only a philosopher would think of that! But before you ridicule the messenger, you do need to see why this has been claimed, not least because this teaches us a lot about us as thinkers and investigators, as well as about the subject matter itself. So one of the things we will be examining is the challenge of universal scepticism (sometimes spelt “skepticism”.)

Consider, for example, a famous example from the French philosopher Rene Descartes (1596 -1650). (Note: the adjectival form of his surname is “Cartesian” – hence Cartesian scepticism). Descartes invites us to imagine that, contrary to orthodox religious opinion, the universe is overseen by a totally malignant demon, whose overriding aim is to cause us to be constantly deceived in our perceptions and our thinking. Nothing is as it appears to be. Can you disprove the existence of such a being? But if you cannot rule it out, you have to admit that is at least a possibility. But if it is a possibility, can we be certain of anything? This is an important question for Descartes and not, as the more cynical critics (sceptics about scepticism!) might say, an amusing but idle philosophical speculation. Why? Because Descartes believed knowledge, to be truly such, must rest on solid foundations, i.e. on certainties (The edifice of knowledge can only be as strong as its weakest foundations). But if everything is possibly wrong, there are no certainties, and therefore nothing truly deserves to be called knowledge.

As we shall see, there are many other arguments for scepticism, as well as many attempts to rebut them.

TASK 4: How would you attempt to rebut Cartesian scepticism? And do you agree with the Cartesian view that genuine knowledge must rest on foundations which are certain? In your own primary field of advanced study, can you identify foundations of certainty on which knowledge in your field ultimately rests? (These are difficult and contentious issues to which we will return.)

7. Truth and (Propositional) Knowledge.

The examples of contrasts we gave right at the beginning illustrate that the mere fact that an opinion, or a guess, is true, is not enough to make it knowledge. And, although there are many areas of disagreement about knowledge, there is at least an agreement that, in the case of propositional knowledge, being in possession of the truth is not enough to constitute knowledge, but being in possession of the truth is a necessary condition for you having (propositional) knowledge. To put it in schematic shorthand, where ‘X’ represents any person you like, and ‘P’ represents any proposition you like; then the following pattern holds:

(1)  X knows that P

entails:

              (2)It is true that P

and:      

              (3) X believes (opines, considers) that P

But the entailment does not hold in the reverse direction, i.e. it is not what is called a co-entailment or mutual entailment. That is to say, while (1) entails both (2) and (3); (2) an本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。