ABSTRACT
Let us turn now to consider some of the various facets of scepticism. In the scheme I am developing, the word ‘scepticism’ is a tag for the dox-
astic vice of not acquiring true beliefs though they are available to be acquired. Such a usage has all the air of a definition, and I offer it as such. But, where ‘credulity’ and ‘rectitude’ are words with little currency as terms of art, that definition of ‘scepticism’ runs up against the fact that considerable scholarly and philosophical attention has been paid to the phenomena that call for the use of the name. It might, therefore, have been better to choose a less interesting word for the vice opposed to credulity and rectitude. For instance, ‘diffidence’, ‘mistrust’ or ‘over-caution’ would have done. Choices like these would have added to the unfamiliarity of the picture I am giving of Descartes’ epistemology. Granting that on those (relatively few) occasions when it is not a strawman or a mere tag, ‘scepticism’ is shorthand for a manifold of interrelated but fissiparous tendencies, I stick with the word in the interests of connecting both with historical debate and with going concerns in early seventeenth-century philosophy.
