ABSTRACT
This book examines the epistemic status of our belief in the natural world. The aim is to evaluate our basic view of the natural world; for example, that familiar objects such as rocks, trees and chairs exist in the natural world where we also reside, and we interact with these objects. 1 I am going to examine whether our basic view of the natural world withstands the challenge of Cartesian skepticism. The point of dispute is not occasional errors, but the possibility of a wholesale misconception of reality. The Cartesian skeptic questions our basic view of the natural world by introducing radical alternative scenarios, e.g. that all objects of our sense perception are illusions created by a supernatural being, or that they are entities in the virtual world to which we do not belong. So, to put our basic view of the natural world in negative terms, the objects of our sense perception are not illusions created by a supernatural being, not entities in the virtual world to which we do not belong, etc. I call it “the natural world hypothesis”.
