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Teachers' Resource Web The Central Problem that Plagues Restoration Comedy Richard Kroll, UCI After Montaigne pointed out in the late sixteenth century that we don't necessarily know as much as we think we do and that the best approach to knowledge was Sextus Empiricus' idea of suspending judgment, Europeans were left to consider how we can have and use any knowledge at all. One answer, preferred by Englishmen, that most practical of people, was to say that we can know things for all practical purposes by using the processes of inference; and thus, we get the rise of early modern empiricism. Admitting, for example, that we can't know what's going on in another person's mind doesn't mean that we can't try to figure it out: there are some probable, though not certain, clues, in what he or she does or in how he or she fails to control body language. The first section of the chart shows that Sextus Empiricus proposed
two kinds of signs: the "indicative" and the "commemorative";
the second and third parts illustrate the Restoration argument that
some kinds of signs were better at referring to what they claimed
to refer to than others. Thus:
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