The Skeptic and the Dogmatist

Abstract

this paper is devoted to articulating and defending a dogmatist account of perceptual justification which enables us to reject the skeptic's arguments that we have no justified perceptual beliefs. I will present the positive case for my account in III, and I will defend it against an important objection in IV. My primary concern will be questions about perceptual justification rather than questions about perceptual knowledge. This is because the connections between justification and knowledge are complicated. I believe that the account of perceptual justification I will be arguing for can be extended to provide an account of perceptual knowledge, as well. But I will not attempt to do that. 6 I will also be concentrating throughout on questions about what propositions we have justification for believing. When we're evaluating the epistemic merit of a belief you hold, we're sometimes concerned with more than just whether it's a belief in some proposition you have justification for. We also take into consideration what sorts of justification, if any, your belief is based on. One may have very good reasons for believing p, but base one's belief in p