ABSTRACT
As seen in Chapter 1, meliorative social epistemology inherits the structural problems of epistemic support from traditional internalist epistemology because the basis of epistemic evaluation is restricted to the resources available to the community. This chapter takes up two of the structural problems—epistemic circularity (Sections 1–5) and epistemic regress (Sections 6–7). This is not because tackling them leads to the solution of Cartesian skepticism. Central to the challenge of Cartesian skepticism is not these two problems, but the issue of empirically equivalent alternative hypotheses. However, some presentations of Cartesian skepticism with an emphasis on the reliability of sense perception gives the impression that epistemic circularity is an important issue in Cartesian skepticism. The first five sections of the chapter show that epistemic circularity is a myth, but also that debunking the myth does not solve Cartesian skepticism.
