The Logical Atheist

When it comes to seeing objects, we can think about it two ways.  1. We perceive what are called sense-data, that is, perceptions, and then infer things "out there" from mental images "in here." 2. We perceive objects "out there," full stop. No. 1 runs afoul of Occam's Razor as well as the way we experience seeing things. No one in their everyday life thinks they perceive perceptions. They know they perceive things. Children begin to do this almost immediately. That later on we learn that perception (like everything else) has a specific nature involving light, eyes, brains, etc. changes nothing whatsoever. Why would anyone expect a process to have no nature? That would make no sense. Only an impossible god would see without a way to see. No. 1 also introduces serious problems, which have long been pointed out. If all we perceive directly is something inside our heads, how do we know that this stuff corresponds to anything "out there"? Or how ...

I think [Arthur] Fine's [postrealism] view (which I take to be in the same spirit as Wittgenstein's) is both deeply right and deeply wrong. To my mind, both thinkers rightly reject reflectionism [the view that the mind reflects reality] in favour of what I've been calling the "rail-less" view [according to which logic is imposed neither by reality on mind nor vice versa], but wrongly think that in doing this they are committed to rejecting metaphysical realism in favour of postrealism. It is quite right to say that we cannot describe extra-linguistic reality from a standpoint outside language. But why can't we describe extra-linguistic reality from within language? There is all the difference in the world between saying (rightly) that we can never conceive-of-reality apart from language, and saying (wrongly) that we can never conceive of reality-apart-from language. --Roderick Long, Wittgenstein, Austrian Economics, and the Logic of Action  

Much philosophical and theological confusion reigns because people unwittingly engage concept-theft. It consists of using a concept to which one is not epistemologically "entitled" because the speaker denies its logical foundation. Thus the user has "stolen" it." For example, if you were to deny the legitimacy of the concept parent-- say, you believed new human beings came into existence way other than commonly thought--you would not be entitled to use the concept orphan  since orphan  logically depends on the concept (biological)  parent . Our concepts, constructed as they are from our identification of things in the world, exist (or ought to exist) in nonarbitrary, often hierarchical relationships with other concepts. The higher the level of abstraction (for example,  animal ), the more a concept subsumes other, lower level concepts ( dog , cat , etc.). A little thought shows this to be true. The term stolen concept  was coined by the philosophical novelist A...

We know, with the same certainty with which we believe any  mathematical proposition, how the letters A and B are pronounced, what the colour of human blood is called, that other human beings have blood and call it "blood". That is to say, the questions  that we raise and our doubts  depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those things turn. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted. But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest content with assumption. If I want the door to turn the hinges must stay put. My life  consists in being content to accept many things. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty  340-44       

Objective certainty is not tied exclusively to conclusive reasons or self-evidence. It may be grounded in the absence of intelligible doubts .... Grounds for doubt are not as easy to come by as skeptics think. Fairy-tale imaginings (e.g. brains-in-vats) don't count. --Michael Williams, Lecture, "Wittgenstein on Knowledge & Certainty"  (video)

One cannot make experiments if there are not some things that one does not doubt. But that does not mean that one takes certain presuppositions on trust. When I write a letter and post it, I take it for granted that it will arrive--I expect this. If I make an experiment I do not doubt the existence of the apparatus before my eyes. I have plenty of doubt, but not  that . If I do a calculation I believe, without any doubts, that the figures on the paper aren't switching of their own accord, and I also trust my memory the whole time, and trust it without any reservation. The certainty here is the same as that of my never having been on the moon. --Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty  337

If, as the skeptical atheists hold, skepticism is the insistence that evidence should precede belief (that's actually evidentialism, but we'll let that go), then what are we to say about the person who declares: "I doubt that doubt is justified in such and such a case." Show me some evidence"? Is that a person a meta-skeptic?