 Then, having apparently established that the strongest defensible transcendental claims concern merely how things must appear to us or what we must believe, the second stage of Stroud’s argument is that in order to bridge the gap that this has opened up, and to get to a conclusion about how things actually are, one must opt either for verificationism or idealism. The former holds that in order to be meaningful, a sentence must say something that we can determine to be true or false. If so, then we cannot be left in the limbo of skeptical doubt behind a veil of appearances wondering where the truth lies. The latter sees no gap between how the world is and how we think things are or merely appear to us. However, aside from the potentially problematic nature of both these positions, an appeal to either verificationism or idealism is also dialectically unsatisfactory, as any such appeal would appear to render the transcendental argument itself redundant—for each on its own is powerful enough to disarm skeptical worries, without the transcendental manoeuvre now being required (cf. Stroud 1968 [2000b: 24–5]). In this way, Stroud has convinced many that the proponent of transcendental arguments faces an unattractive dilemma: either to dispense with verificationism or idealism, but fall short of the anti-skeptical conclusion concerning how things are; or to accept verificationism or idealism, but then make the transcendental argument itself superfluous.