Sceptical Overkill: On Two Recent Arguments Against Scepticism

This paper is a discussion of a recent attempt by Crispin Wright (Wright 1991; page references to this work unless stated) to force at least some varieties of external world scepticism to succumb to a "head-on, rational response", contrary to well-known expressions of pessimism by, for example, Sir Peter Strawson and Barry Stroud. The varieties of scepticism in question are those that involve positing a "purportedly undetectable but cognitively disabling state", such as the state imposed by Descartes' malicious demon, in which a sufferer is unable to tell whether or not his or her experiences are caused by items in his or her perceptible environment, as opposed to some disassociated cause; the argument is completed by noticing that, if such a state were possible, then no-one could have complete confidence that he or she were not in such a state. Wright's project is more ambitious than the simple defeat of such a sceptical argument in debate; he claims, and I agree, that a generalised defeat would itself have to be achieved within three constraints.