Skepticism and foundations / Gilbert Harman -- How should we respond to scepticism with regard to the senses / Michael Ayers -- Scepticism and justification / Anthony Grayling -- Is knowledge easy--or impossible? Externalism as the only alternative to skepticism / James Van Cleve -- Three attempts to refute skepticism and why they fail / Richard Foley -- How a pyrrhonian skeptic might respond to academic skepticism / Peter Klein -- Skepticism, fallibility and circularity / Keith Lehrer -- Skepticism : (...) what perception teaches / Fred Dretske -- Elusive knowledge / David Lewis -- Two diagnoses of skepticism / Robert Fogelin -- Responding to the sceptic : therapeutic versus theoretical diagnosis / Marie McGinn -- Neither contextualism nor skepticism / Ernest Sosa -- Indiscernability skepticism / Steven Luper -- Brains in vats / Hilary Putnam -- Trees, computer program features, and skeptical hypotheses / Anthony Brueckner -- Metaskepticism : meditations in ethno-epistemology / Shaun Nichols, Stephen Stich and Jonathan M. Weinberg -- Scepticism and the social construction of science and technology : the case of the boundary layer / David Bloor. (shrink)

An argument whose conclusion C is essential evidence for one of its premises can provide its target audience with justification for believing C. This is possible because we can enhance our justification for believing a proposition C by integrating it into an explanatory network of beliefs for which C itself provides essential evidence. I argue for this in light of relevant features of doxastic circularity, epistemic circularity, and explanatory inferences. Finally, I confirm my argument with an example and respond to (...) objections. (shrink)

This should be fairly close to the text of this paper as it appears in The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38 (2000), Spindel Conference Supplement: 121-148.