«Phenomenological positivism»as a reply to skepticism: a reappraisalof Merleau-Ponty’s anti-skeptical strategy

Abstract

In this article we will attempt a critical reconstruction of Merleau-Ponty’s argument against skeptical doubts about our perceptual experience, in a dialogue with previous approaches to the problem within the existing literature, and with the purpose of pointing out that the phenomenologist’s anti-skeptical argumental strategies do not need to be considered as presupposing a previous rejection of metaphysical realism and as, correlatively, based on an alternative ontology. To do this, we will appeal to an analogy with Merleau-Ponty’s critique of skeptical relativism concerning the «laws of thought»: if psychologistic doubts about our possible «confinement» in limited evidences, proper to our psychic constitution, are excluded, this is simply because, in order to articulate the skeptical tenet itself, we need to be considered capable of acknowledging as such those evidences which, however, cannot be evidences for us. The positive fact of the existence of a form of  experience such as ours, according to Merleau-Ponty, becomes in this way the insurmountable basis of any epistemological evaluation.