ABSTRACT
The professional response has been to refuse to enter the cage-to avoid falling into the trap of trying to justify knowledge, and instead, to seek to describe knowledge. The word "skepticism" just means "doubt". Cartesian skepticism is a form of inductive skepticism: it is skepticism about the inference from certain evidence to certain beliefs, arising from the fact that this inference is not deductively valid. Skepticism is just the application of everyday standards of knowledge ascription and of everyday justificatory practices, beyond the bounds to which those standards and practices are normally applied. Externalists point out that the way Descartes and philosophers since him tend to think about knowledge make it over-intellectual. Contextualism may driven by an urge to rehabilitate infallibilism. Testimony is mediated by experience, but it is a very special kind of experience, and thus plausibly deserves its own third category as a source of knowledge.
