External World Skepticism, Confidence and Psychologism about the Problem of Priors

Abstract

In this paper, I will distinguish two varieties of external world skepticism: belief and confidence skepticism. I will argue that we can defang the intuitive motivations for confidence skepticism (though not a meeker “argument from might,” which got some attention in the twentieth century literature on external world skepticism) by adopting a partially psychologistic answer to the problem of priors. And I will argue that certain recent work in the epistemology of mathematics and logic provides independent support for such psychologism.