How do you know the world around you isn't just an elaborate dream,
or the creation of an evil neuroscientist? If all you have to go on
are various lights, sounds, smells, tastes and tickles, how can you
know what the world is really like, or even whether there is a
world beyond your own mind? Questions like these - familiar from
science fiction and dorm room debates - lie at the core of
venerable philosophical arguments for radical skepticism: the stark
contention that we in fact know nothing at all about the world,
that we have no more reason to believe any claim - that there are
trees, that we have hands - than we have to disbelieve it. Like
non-philosophers in their sober moments, philosophers, too, find
this skeptical conclusion preposterous, but they're faced with
those famous arguments: the Dream Argument, the Argument from
Illusion, the Infinite Regress of Justification, the more recent
Closure Argument. If these can't be met, they raise a serious
challenge not just to philosophers, but to anyone responsible
enough to expect her beliefs to square with her evidence. What Do
Philosophers Do? takes up the skeptical arguments from this
everyday point of view, and ultimately concludes that they don't
undermine our ordinary beliefs or our ordinary ways of finding out
about the world. In the process, Maddy examines and evaluates a
range of philosophical methods - common sense, scientific
naturalism, ordinary language, conceptual analysis, therapeutic
approaches - as employed by such philosophers as Thomas Reid, G. E.
Moore, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and J. L. Austin. The result is a
revealing portrait of what philosophers do, and perhaps a quiet
suggestion for what they should do, for what they do best.
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