AAP2010 Abstracts
Use the form below to search abstracts by Author, Institue or Keyword.
| Title | Mr |
| First Name | Weng Hong |
| Surname | Tang |
| Institution | National University of Singapore |
| Title of Paper | Certainty and Obvious Logical Truths |
| Select a Stream | Epistemology |
| Abstract | It is often thought that simple and obvious logical truths are immune from rational doubt. But some philosophers, such as Peter Unger and David Christensen, have argued to the contrary. They are sympathetic to the narrator of Descartes's First Meditation, who worried that a supremely powerful being might have deceived him into thinking that certain logical statements that are in fact false are obviously true. One way to respond to Unger and Christensen is to follow Ruth Barcan Marcus, Robert Stalnaker, and David Lewis, among others, in maintaining that we can't believe the impossible: all logical truths, whether complex or simple and obvious, are immune from doubt, and hence, from rational doubt. But such a response is dialetically weak---it seems too drastic to hold that we believe all logical truths, no matter how complex they might be. In this paper, I explore a more temperate response. We can't, qua believers, doubt the simplest and most obvious of logical truths, but it might still be possible for us to doubt more complex ones. One worry is that this response is unstable: any argument that we can't doubt the obviously impossible might easily become an argument that we can't doubt anything that is impossible. I attempt to deal with the worry. |
