The Space of Reasons 2007-11-06

Shopping for Apples and Appendixes

This is the final installment of my ongoing series of posts on Reid's shop argument. In my previous post, I noted that the sceptic’s attempt to refute step (1) of the Shop Argument fails. However, the sceptic can also attempt to undermine the Shop Argument by refuting step (2); that is, the sceptic may argue that the fact that two faculties come from the same shop does not imply that they are equally trustworthy. In fact, it is quite easy to construct a counterexample to step (2) of the Shop Argument. For instance, the Apple computer company manufactures both ipods and desktop computers. Now I am a big fan of the Apple ipod and would gladly class it among the ten greatest 21st century inventions. However, I also believe that the Apple desktop operating system remains the most non-user friendly ...

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