ABSTRACT
Sceptical arguments typically proceed via presentation of some large, purportedly untestable possibility which is somehow supposed to undermine a whole region of what people had fancied to be knowledge. Transmissibility must surely hold in general if valid inference is to be a means of rational persuasion. Iterativity should hold whenever possession of sufficient reason to believe a proposition is a decidable state of affairs - as it had better in general be if the selection of beliefs for which there is sufficient reason, and hence rationality itself, is to be a practicable objective. The burden of the second sceptical argument is that there is indeed no evidence whatever for the existence of other consciousnesses, or of the past, or of the material world. It would be fair to reply that people were never anyway in the market for the sceptic's conclusion.
