Philosophical skepticism

Philosophical skepticism questions whether knowledge or justified belief is possible, or whether ordinary claims meet the standards needed to justify them.

Cartesian doubt: René Descartes’s method of withholding assent from any belief that can be rationally doubted. Its systematic doubt shows how skepticism can test beliefs by seeking an indubitable foundation.
Fallibilism: The view that knowledge can be genuine even when error remains possible. It rejects the demand for certainty while preserving ordinary claims to knowledge.
Pyrrhonism: An ancient Greek skeptical tradition that recommends suspending judgment to attain tranquility. It presents skepticism as a practice of suspending judgment rather than a doctrine of universal ignorance.
Knowledge: A successful epistemic relation in which a subject knows that a proposition is true. Skepticism asks whether this relation is possible and what conditions it requires.
Problem of induction: The challenge of justifying inductive inferences without relying on assumptions that themselves require induction. It is a lasting skeptical challenge to predictions drawn from past regularities.
Dream argument: An argument that waking experience may be indistinguishable from dreaming, undermining certainty about the external world. It challenges confidence in perception without assuming that experience is wholly deceptive.
Infallibilism: The view that knowledge requires being unable to be mistaken about what is known. It shares skepticism’s demanding standard, though it need not deny that knowledge exists.
Academic skepticism: The ancient skeptical position associated with Plato’s Academy, which denied that certainty is attainable. It contrasts with Pyrrhonism by making a substantive claim about the limits of knowledge.
Epistemic justification: The support or reasons that make a belief rational or epistemically warranted. Skepticism questions whether reasons can adequately support beliefs about the world.
Scientific realism: The view that successful scientific theories describe a mind-independent world, including unobservable entities. Skepticism about evidence and theory choice pressures claims about what science reveals as real.

Linked from 41 pages