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| Paper IPM / Philosophy / 8088 |
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| Abstract: | |
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Although there has been a revival of interest in transcendental arguments in the past few decades, they are no longer regarded as effective means in thwarting the threat of skepticism. It has been claimed that transcendental arguments generally fail to make good on their uniqueness claims, that they tacitly rely on the verification principle, that they show, at best, that the possibility of experience requires the belief in certain propositions without the latter being necessarily true and so on. All these claims have been made against a background of conflicting intuitions about the aim and structure of these arguments. In this paper, I distinguish between validity and epistemic effectiveness of transcendental arguments, and try to put these claims in their proper perspective by delineating the scope and limits of such arguments. Finally, having identified a distinct class of transcendental arguments, I try to present a unified account of their nature, one that incorporates, as much as possible, some of the intuitions expressed about them in the literature.
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