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    Carmelics

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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Reid's direct theory of perception delivers knowledge of the external world.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    2 perspectives
    Reason for 1 of 2
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    • 1.Reid's appeal to common sense as epistemic bedrock merely relocates the justificatory problem rather than solving it.
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    • 2.Principles accepted as self-evident to 'all mankind' can be culturally variable, undermining their status as universal epistemic foundations.
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    • 3.A theory grounding knowledge in unargued intuitions cannot answer the skeptic without begging the question against them.
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    Reason for 2 of 2
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    • 1.Direct realism entails that perception gives us unmediated access to objects, but perceptual illusions and hallucinations demonstrate that experience can systematically misrepresent the world.
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    • 2.If the same perceptual mechanism produces both veridical and illusory experiences indistinguishably, Reid's direct theory cannot internally differentiate knowledge from error.
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    • 3.A theory that cannot discriminate knowledge from mere true belief without external supplementation fails to deliver knowledge in the philosophically robust sense.
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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
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    • 1.The Way of Ideas' representational theory leads to skepticism about the external world.
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    • 2.Reid's direct theory of perception avoids the pitfalls of the representational theory.
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    • 3.Avoiding those pitfalls allows the theory to ground knowledge of the external world rather than collapsing into skepticism.
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