Instead of seeking to either bridge or deny the logical gap, it simply presses empiricism to its most radical conclusion and accepts that, in the last analysis, we simply cannot step out of our experience of the world to see what the world might 'really' look like. Indeed, the very notion that we might be capable of such a superhuman feat is viewed as inherently absurd. It insists only that the 'external world' of realism is still dependent on human experience, and perhaps ventures to add also that the data of human experience are not completely used up in the construction of a real external world. I then went on to represent realism as responding to this argument by denying the second of its premises, which I introduced humanism as accepting. The humanist response to the sceptical argument is not one of complete capitulation, however.
Humanism responds by taking issue, rather, with the first of the argument's premises.
This premise may be taken as an expression of the fundamental principle of intellectualism, which has been the dominant tradition in Western philosophy since its inception. Humanists takes issue with intellectualism by contending that its ruling on what is to count as 'rationally warranted' cannot be realised, and that scepticism depends for its success on the unattainability of the standards that intellectualism sets. As such, the intellectualist criteria are practically useless as a means of enabling us to make the distinction between 'good' and 'bad' beliefs that we need to be able to make if we are to prosecute our lives successfully. And they fail for the simple reason that their adoption necessarily commits us to the sceptical conclusion that no belief is ever rationally warranted, not even our belief in the existence of an independent reality external to ourselves. III Autonomy, as existentialist writers so dramatically declaim, is thrust upon us.