 The problem that Stroud has highlighted may be briefly illustrated by returning to the exemplars of transcendental arguments that we considered in Section 1. Thus, when it comes to Kant’s Refutation of Idealism, it can be said that the most that Kant really establishes is that we have experience as of things outside us in space, while all that Strawson’s objectivity argument shows is that we must apply the is/seems distinction to our experience, and so believe that things exist without us experiencing them, but that this doesn’t do enough to show that this distinction is really a valid one (cf. Wilkerson 1976: 57, Brueckner 1989). Likewise, against Putnam it is argued that the skeptic can challenge his externalist theory of reference, where on a more internalist view, you could then think about being in a vat even if you were in one, as the meaning of ‘vat’ no longer depends on your relations to the world; or, if Putnam insists on his externalism, it could be claimed that this is already a position that rules out skepticism because it assumes that the mind and world are linked in important ways, making it unnecessary to make appeal to the specific transcendental argument that Putnam rests upon it (cf. McCulloch 1999). Similarly, against Davidson it can be argued that thought would be possible, even if the ‘others’ with which one ‘triangulated’ were nothing but robots or automata; or again, if this is ruled out by appeal to some form of semantic externalism, this then renders the transcendental argument redundant. In all these cases, therefore, it may appear that Stroudian objections can be used to damaging effect.