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L ocke's Reply to the Skeptic
Author(s) -
Weinberg Shelley
Publication year - 2013
Publication title -
pacific philosophical quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.914
H-Index - 32
eISSN - 1468-0114
pISSN - 0279-0750
DOI - 10.1111/papq.12005
Subject(s) - skepticism , epistemology , inference , normative , demonstrative , order (exchange) , philosophy , direct and indirect realism , perception , psychology , linguistics , finance , economics
Given his representationalism how can L ocke claim we have sensitive knowledge of the external world? We can see the skeptic as asking two different questions: how we can know the existence of external things, or more specifically how we can know inferentially of the existence of external things. L ocke's account of sensitive knowledge, a form of non‐inferential knowledge, answers the first question. All we can achieve by inference is highly probable judgment. Because L ocke's theory of knowledge includes both first order psychological and second order normative conditions, sensitive knowledge can be non‐inferential and less certain than intuitive and demonstrative knowledge.