ABSTRACT
One reason that the alignment of skepticism and deconstruction is made is that skepticism describes people relationship to the provisional objects of their knowledge as one of deep uncertainty, which sounds like what the deconstructionist means when he speaks of textual 'indeterminacy'. But there are significant differences between skeptical doubt and deconstructionist indeterminacy. The deconstructive rejection of the principle of non-contradiction and the 'performative' nature of deconstructive practice may suggest that deconstruction is a skeptical methodology of literary analysis. Certainly some of the consequences of deconstruction, by which it seems impossible to be secure in the received meaning of a text, or by which the difference between literature and criticism has been blurred, may seem like methodological skepticism, but deconstruction alone is not responsible for this state of critical affairs. In this case, the task of epistemology becomes one of outlining the criteria on which our capacity for judgment, and hence our knowledge, rests.
