Why We Doubt

Download or read book Why We Doubt written by N. Ángel Pinillos and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2023 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This book is an attempt to investigate an important set of philosophical and practical problems related to skeptical doubt from the perspective of human cognition, an area where there has been quite a bit of progress in the past 50 years. The road will take us to some unexpected places. For example, I will argue that the capacity which draws us to philosophical skepticism serves a human rational function which is to weed out hasty reasoning in our everyday life. The capacity also seems to play a role in creative outside-the-box thinking, conspiratorial thought and even in some mental health illnesses, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Finally, our approach will allow us to develop a philosophical response to the skeptical challenge. A key to this argument will be to show that our inclinations toward skeptical doubt have a certain logic to them which has an identifiable flaw. We exploit this flaw to answer the skeptic. We will get to these points in this introduction and in the book, but we first need to clarify some terminology"--