buylotrogold

The brain-in-a-vat thread has gone on long enough to annoy some people.  I suspect that some are just annoyed at being asked to defend their beliefs, particularly in cases where it's really hard to do so, and some are annoyed by theoretical questions that are not directly tied to concrete, practical concerns.  That's the anti-intellectual sort of annoyance. But there may be some who are sincerely puzzled as to why philosophical skepticism is an important topic in epistemology, given that it does not seem at all plausible.  Shouldn't we concentrate our attention on the epistemological theories that seem most likely to be true?  This is a genuinely philosophical motivation for dismissing skeptical theories. The answer for these, philosophical people, is the following.  Skepticism is important because of the arguments that exist for it.  These arguments have an interesting feature: They start from general epistemological principles that are widely-accepted and at least prima facie seem obviously true.  You probably would accept any of these principles, in a context where it wasn't being used to defend skepticism.  Yet these principles lead to the conclusion