1: Occam's Razor has already been covered. The concept inherently rests (unless you take William of Ockham's original version, which cannot be applied in the same way) on empirical observations about the world- which are the things under doubt.
2: The argument started on if it is rational to trust the senses, and turned into an argument about the proper rules to decide that question. Such a question cannot be solved empirically. Besides, such a rule cannot justify itself as it is not empirically rooted.
3: I considered this possibility, but wasn't confident enough to claim it because rarely, despite the nature of human concepts, a simplistic explanation actually works. For example, that "a trout is a type of fish" is true as a linguistic statement, no clarification or deeper understanding of the human mind required.
My mind is good at Verbal Comphrehension skills, such as Philosophy and Law. To get into Law at Melbourne, I need to get good marks. Philosophy is a subject at which I get good marks, and fun because of how my brain works, so I do it. I take a genuine interest because I like the intellectual stimulation and I want to be right about the sort of things philosophy covers.
I have naturally read the material here, but am still not sure how to act on two questions.
1: I've been arguing out the question of Foundationalism v.s Coherentism v.s other similiarly basic methods of justifying knowledge (e.g. infinitism, pragmatism). The discussion left off with two problems for Foundationalism.
a: The Evil Demon argument, particularly the problem of memory. When following any piece of reason, an Evil Demon could theoretically fool my reason into thinking that it had reasoned correctly when it hadn't, or fool my memory into thinking I'd reasoned properly before with reasoning I'd never done. Since a Foundationalist either is a weak Foundationalist (and runs into severe problems) or must discard all but self-evident and incorrigible assumptions (of which memory is not one), I'm stuffed.
(Then again, it has been argued, if a Coherentist were decieved by an evil demon they could be decieved into thinking data coheres when it doesn't. Since their belief rests upon the assumption that their beliefs cohere, should they not discard if they can't know if it coheres or not? The seems to cohere formulation has it's own problem)
b: Even if that's discarded, there is still the problem of how Strong Foundationalist beliefs are justified within a Strong Foundationalist system. Strong Foundationalism is neither self-evident nor incorrigible, after all.
I know myself well enough to know I have an unusually strong (even for a non-rationalist) irrational emotive bias in favour of Foundationalism, and even I begin to suspect I've lost the argument (though some people arguing on my side would disagree). Just to confirm, though- have I lost? What should I do now, either way?
2: What to say on the question of skepticism (on which so far I've technically said nothing)? If I remember correctly Elizier has spoken of philosophy as how to act in the world, but I'm arguing with somebody who maintains as an axiom that the purpose of Philosophy is to find truth, whether useful or useless, in whatever area is under discussion.
3: Finally, how do I speak intelligently on the Contextualist v.s Invariantist problem? I can see in basic that it is an empirical problem and therefore not part of abstract philosophy, but that isn't the same thing as having an answer. It would be good to know where to look up enough neuroscience to at least make an intelligent contribution to the discussion.