CEPPA Talk – Elizabeth Barnes (University of Virginia)

Title: Ameliorative Skepticism and the Nature of Health

Abstract: In this talk, I’ll give a brief overview of the project I call ‘ameliorative skepticism’. Sally Haslanger has argued that, in doing social ontology, we can sometimes approach the question ‘what is x?’ by asking question ‘what do we want x to be?’. I argue that sometimes the only way to answer this question is to answer it skeptically: that what we want x to be is something it can’t be. But I suggest that there’s a version of skepticism we can bring to questions like this that is substantially weaker than error theory or eliminativism. I use the case of health as an example.