Abstract

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. In several recent papers, however, Stroud argues that we in fact face no threat of skepticism after all. In the first part of this chapter, I assess the prospects of Stroud's antiskeptical argument. In the end, I believe that it relies on an unmotivated and questionable assumption concerning what is required to raise a skeptical threat. Stroud's general antiskeptical strategy, however, of which his particular argument is only an instance, bears considerable promise, I claim. In the second part of the chapter, I discuss this strategy and then offer a different way of implementing it, which I argue is more successful. I conclude that standard arguments for skepticism ultimately depend upon a methodological premise that the skeptic has little reason to accept.