What’s new in the anti-skeptical argument of D. Davidson?

Abstract

Some time ago I presented a paper on “The anti-skeptical argument of Donald Davidson and its radical innovations”. More recently I read a few articles that raised some objections to the argument which I think are not correct. In this article I analyze these objections as a way to rework the innovations that I tried to highlight in the previous article. The anti-skeptical argument of Davidson has two successive arguments, viz. an argument for the veridical nature of belief and an argument that relies on semantic externalism. A first objection was that the appeal to the principle of charity in the context of a response to the skeptic is to assume the point in question. A second objection is that relying on externalism in an anti-skeptical argument is a crude petitio principii, as externalism implies the existence of external objects. However, I will claim that considering the problem as a whole the externalist assumption is not a fallacious one but an assumption derived by necessity from within the very frame of Cartesian reflection. The third objection I wish to consider has to do with whether this method of identifying causes gives us an objective world or just a subjective one. I think that these objects identified in the speakers’ triangulation are the objects of the public world.

Key words: externalism, anti-skepticism, objectivity.