Transcendental arguments and Stroud’s dilemma

In this article I will talk about Barry Stroud's critique of transcendental arguments, which he understands as anti-sceptical reasoning, coined by Kant in "Critique of Pure Reason".In the widespread reading, partially established by Stroud himself, we start from some important ways of thinking and experiencing the world and proceed to the conclusion, which, ideally, reflect necessary conditions of our thinking and experiencing the world in certain way.Thus we try to defend these conditions from the doubts of a sceptic.Stroud poses a famous trilemma for a TA proponent: we try to find some truth about the world, independent from a mind-option, which is impossible due to the restricted domain of TA; we can try to 'bridge the gap' between premises and a conclusion of TA by accepting transcendental idealism.The second option is 'a verification principle'.Transcendental idealism is controversial, verification principle makes TA redundant.The third option is 'modest TA': we refuse to make conclusions about the world as it really is.Without denying that TA may face some serious problems, I will try to prove that Stroud's critique is based on interpretative inaccuracies and methodological inconsistency.I will try to show that by highlighting Stroud's conflation of two kinds of TA which he himself presents: 'E-formulation' and 'doxastic formulation'.More importantly, I will criticize his understanding of the doctrine of transcendental idealism.In my opinion, Stroud faces a dilemma: either he bases his critique on an accurate interpretation of Kant-and in this case this critique may vanish, or-he refuses to tie TA to Kant's conceptual framework.In the last part I will outline another problem with TA, formulated more broadly, then Stroud's trilemma-'the relevance problem'