Skeptical Conditions

Teaching Skeptical Inquiry

A new political season is upon us, and surely it will provide plenty of new examples for me to use during my first week of class. For more than two decades, I have spent at least the first week of my introductory biology course discussing human population growth, its underlying causes, and its environmental ramifications. I always begin with the website www.census.gov/main/www/popclock.html (al...

Constraints on Skeptical Hypotheses

In this article I examine the constraints that skeptical hypotheses must satisfy in order to be used to raise significant skeptical challenges. I argue that skeptical hypotheses do not have to be logically, metaphysically or epistemically possible. They only need to depict scenarios that are subjectively indistinguishable from the actual world and must provide some indication of how subjects ca...

Skeptical appeal

Radical skepticism is the view that we know nothing, or at least next to nothing. Nearly no one actually believes that skepticism is true. Yet it has re­ mained a serious topic of discussion for millennia and it looms large in popular culture. What explains its persistent and widespread appeal? How does the skep­ tic get us to doubt what we ordinarily take ourselves to know? I present evidence ...

ASSOCIATION for SKEPTICAL ENQUIRY

A skeptical biochemist

Social history, especially of bioethics, is bound to be problematic unless it is predicated upon a clear analysis of the substantive ethical issues. At issue in the 1960s was whether research standards should be subjective guidelines, enforced by the researcher's conscience, externally enforced objective rules, or intersubjective standards enforced by review committees (IRBs). In a series of pa...