  Just as the rise in interest in transcendental arguments within twentieth-century philosophy can largely be traced back to the work of Strawson, so too the subsequent disillusionment can largely be traced back to the work of one person, namely Barry Stroud in his influential 1968 article (Stroud 1968). In that paper, Stroud focused on the nature of the transcendental claim that the truth of some proposition S is a necessary condition for the possibility of language, but then argued that ‘the sceptic can always very plausibly insist that it is enough to make language possible if we believe that S is true, or that it looks for all the world as if it is, but that S needn’t actually be true’ (Stroud 1968 [2000b: 24]). Moreover, the general problem this raises is that if such a response by the skeptic is plausible in the case of language, perhaps it is also plausible in the case of other starting-points too? Thus, for example, when it comes to skepticism about the existence of the external world or other minds, maybe no argument can be constructed to show there must actually be such a world or minds as a condition for inner experience or the having of thoughts, but just that we must believe them to exist, or that they must seem to us to do so—which hardly looks like enough to quash skeptical doubts on these matters.