Then, having apparently established that the strongest defensible transcendental claims concern merely how things must appear to us or what we must believe, the second stage of Stroud’s argument is that in order to bridge the gap that this has opened up, and to get to a conclusion about how things actually are, one must opt either for verificationism or idealism. The former holds that in order to be meaningful, a sentence must say something that we can determine to be true or false. If so, then