  With respect to the charge of general skepticism little has been said. van Inwagen (1996) claims that his defensive stories are not – unlike general skeptical hypotheses – improbable relative to what we know. Note that this is different from being improbable relative to our empirical evidence, which skeptical hypotheses are not.  Certainly general skeptical hypotheses are not “real possibilities” in van Inwagen's sense, which he insists on calling “epistemic possibilities,”; they are not plausible alternatives that would cause ordinary folk to falter in judgment. More will be said about this as the problem recurs in Section 6.