involve advancing some degree of doubt regarding claims that are
elsewhere taken for granted. Varieties of skepticism can be
distinguished in two main ways, depending upon the focus and the
extent of the doubt.
As regards the former, skeptical views typically have an
epistemological form, in that they are focused on the epistemic status
of certain beliefs. For example, one common variety of skepticism
concerns our beliefs about the past and argues that such beliefs lack
positive epistemic status – that they are not justified, or are not
rational, or cannot constitute knowledge (and perhaps even all three).
Where skepticism does not have this epistemological focus, then it
tends to be of an ontological form in that it is directed at beliefs
about the existence of some supposedly problematic entity, such as the
self or God. Here the target of the skepticism is not so much one's
putative knowledge of these entities (though it may be that as well),
but rather the claim that they exist at all.
As regards the latter, one can differentiate between skeptical views
that are either local or radical. Local varieties of skepticism will
only concern beliefs about a certain specific subject matter, such as
beliefs in abstract objects or the conclusions of inductive arguments.
Since ontological varieties of skepticism tend to be concerned with
the existence of particular sorts of entities, they are usually
(though not always) of this local form. In contrast, radical forms of
skepticism afflict most of our beliefs and thus pose, at least
potentially, the most pressing philosophical challenge.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the locus for discussion of skepticism has
tended to be radical epistemological varieties of skepticism, and this
is certainly a trend that has continued into contemporary debate. In
historical discussion, for example, the two most influential forms of
skepticism have, arguably, been the radical epistemological skepticism
of the classical Pyrrhonian skeptics and the Cartesian form of radical
epistemological skepticism that Descartes considers in his
Meditations. The former consists of a variety of skeptical techniques
that counter any grounds that are offered for belief with grounds for
doubt (or at least non-belief) that are at least as persuasive. Since
no belief is more reasonable than its denial, the Pyrrhonian skeptics
concluded that one ought to be skeptical about most (if not all) of
one's beliefs. Cartesian skepticism reaches a similar conclusion,
though this time by highlighting through the use of skeptical
hypotheses that we cannot be certain of any (or at least hardly any)
of our beliefs and thus must retreat to skepticism. Roughly, a
skeptical hypothesis is an error-possibility that is incompatible with
the knowledge that we ascribe to ourselves but which is also
subjectively indistinguishable from normal circumstances (or, at
least, what we take normal circumstances to be), such as that we might
be currently experiencing a very vivid dream. Since such scenarios are
subjectively indistinguishable from normal circumstances, the
Cartesian skeptical move is to say that we cannot know that they are
false and that this threatens the certainty of our beliefs.
What is common to both of these historical approaches, and which lives
on in the contemporary discussion of skepticism, is the primary
conception of skepticism as resting on an entirely intuitive and
pre-theoretical understanding of our epistemic concepts. In this sense
it has the form of a paradox – a series of wholly plausible and
intuitive claims that, collectively, lead to an intellectually
devastating conclusion. Recent discussion of skepticism also treats
the problem as having this paradoxical form, though the epistemic
focus of the discussion is now not so much the lack of grounds for
belief which counter the skeptic's grounds against belief, or the lack
of certainty, but rather the lack of knowledge. Contemporary
discussions of skepticism have thus tended to make the radical
epistemological claim that we fail to know (hardly) anything.
1. The Skeptical Paradox in Contemporary Debate
Contemporary discussion of the problem of the radical skepticism has
tended to focus on a formulation of that problem in terms of a paradox
consisting of the joint incompatibility of three claims, each of which
appears, on the surface of things and taken individually, to be
perfectly in order. Roughly, they are as follows.
First, that we are unable to know that any one of a number of
skeptical hypotheses are false, where a skeptical hypothesis is
understood as a scenario that is subjectively indistinguishable from
what one takes normal circumstances to be but which, if true, would
undermine most of the knowledge that one ascribes to oneself. A
standard example of a skeptical hypothesis is the so-called
'brain-in-a-vat' (BIV) hypothesis that one is being 'fed' one's
experiences by computers. If this were true, then most of what one
believes about the world would be false (or, at the very least, true
in a different way from how one would expect), and thus one would lack
knowledge. Moreover, this scenario is characterised such that there
would be no perceptible difference between being a BIV and having the
non-BIV experiences one currently takes oneself to be experiencing and
thus, plausibly, it does not seem to be a scenario that we could ever
know to be false. We thus get our first 'intuitive' element of the
skeptical paradox:
I. I am unable to know the denials of skeptical hypotheses.
The second 'intuitive' claim about knowledge that the skeptic employs
is the following:
II. If I do not know the denials of skeptical hypotheses, then I do
not know very much.
What motivates this claim is the compelling thought that unless one
can rule-out the kind of error-possibilities at issue in skeptical
hypotheses by knowing them to be false, then this suffices to
undermine most (if not all) of the knowledge that one traditionally
ascribes to oneself. After all, if I were a BIV, then I wouldn't be
sitting here now. Hence, if, for all I know, I could be a BIV, surely
it must follow that I do not know that I am sitting here now (and much
more besides)?
Finally, there is the third element of the skeptical paradox that
creates the required overall philosophical tension. This is the highly
plausible claim that we do know a great deal of what we think we know:
III. A lot of what I believe, I know.
Of course, there may be lots of abstract and technical kinds of
knowledge which I think I have but actually lack, but the point of
this intuition is that many of the 'ordinary' propositions that I
believe (such as that I am sitting here now) do seem to be the kinds
of propositions that I could not plausibly be wrong about in a
wholesale fashion. With these three claims in place, however, the
puzzle becomes obvious. For if I cannot know the denials of skeptical
hypotheses, and if this lack of knowledge entails that I lack
knowledge of most of what I believe, it follows that I must lack
knowledge of most of what I believe. Hence, one cannot accept all of
these three claims; one of them must go.
The skeptic offers a very simple way out of this puzzle, which is to
deny, on the basis of I and II, that we ever have knowledge of the
kind of ordinary propositions at issue in III. That is, the skeptic
argues as follows:
(S1) I am unable to know the denials of skeptical hypotheses.
(S2) If I do not know the denials of skeptical hypotheses, then I do
not know very much.
Hence:
(SC) I do not know very much.
For example, a skeptical argument which employed the BIV skeptical
hypothesis might well run as follows:
(S1*) I am unable to know that I am not a BIV.
(S2*) If I do not know that I am not a BIV, then I do not know very much.
Hence:
(SC*) I do not know very much,
Clearly, however, this radical skeptical suggestion regarding how we
should respond to these three incompatible claims is less of a
proposal than a reductio of epistemological theorising. This
conclusion is, after all, intellectually devastating, consigning our
cognitive activities to, at best, a kind of bad faith. We would thus
be wise to look closely at the anti-skeptical alternatives before we
accept this (paradoxical) response to the skeptical paradox.
If we are to evade skepticism, we are thus going to have to motivate
one (or more) of the following three claims. First, that, despite
appearances, we do (or at least can) know the denials of radical
skeptical hypotheses after all. Second, that, despite appearances, it
does not follow from the fact that we lack knowledge of the denials of
radical skeptical hypotheses that we thereby lack knowledge of
ordinary propositions as well. Third, that, despite appearances, these
three claims are consistent after all.
2. Relevant Alternatives, Infallibilism, and Closure
Of the three anti-skeptical strategies just listed, the second looks,
prima facie, to be the most promising. After all, this does seem to be
the weakest element of the skeptical argument since, although it is at
first pass intuitive, on reflection it is far from immediately obvious
that our knowledge of everyday propositions should be dependent upon
anti-skeptical knowledge in this fashion. One response to the problem
of skepticism has thus been to deny this premise in the skeptical
argument by arguing that one can perfectly well know everyday
propositions whilst failing to know the denials of anti-skeptical
hypotheses such as the BIV hypothesis.
One motivation for this line of argument has been to argue that
skeptical error-possibilities are just not relevant to everyday
knowledge in the way that everyday error-possibilities are. After all,
we do not ordinarily demand that agents should rule out skeptical
error-possibilities before we ascribe them knowledge. This relevant
alternatives (RA) line of argument, which has its roots in work by J.
L. Austin (1961), has been developed by Fred Dretske (1970). As
Dretske is aware, however, simply denying (S2) of the skeptical
argument on these grounds is not enough, rather one needs to also
engage with the epistemological theses that underlie this premise and
offer a fully-fledged account of what this notion of epistemological
relevance involves.
One epistemological thesis that is often thought to provide support
for (S2) is that of infallibilism. This is the thesis that, roughly,
for an agent to know a proposition that agent must be able to
eliminate all error-possibilities associated with that proposition.
Provided that one is willing to make the plausible move of construing
'eliminate' here in terms of the ability to know the negation of then
one straightforwardly gets the requisite link between infallibilism
and (S2) since the skeptical hypothesis in question (whichever
skeptical hypothesis it is) will clearly be an error possibility which
must be known to be false if the agent is to have knowledge of the
ordinary proposition at issue. Accordingly, an inability to know the
denial of the skeptical hypothesis will suffice to ensure that the
agent lacks knowledge of the ordinary proposition, just as (S2) says.
In effect, infallibilism is the opposing thesis to the RA line because
it counts every alternative as being relevant.
Although infallibilism may seem to be an obviously false
epistemological thesis, a persuasive case can be made in its defence.
In particular, Peter Unger (1971; 1975) has been a prominent defender
of a version of infallibilism (although in more recent work, such as
Unger (1984; 1986) he has moved towards a thesis which is more in line
with contextualism, a view which we will be considering below). In
these early works Unger argued that 'knowledge' is an "absolute term"
like 'flat' or 'empty'. According to Unger, what is interesting about
absolute terms is that they are never really satisfied, although we
often talk as if they are. So, for example, nothing is ever really
flat or really empty because, respectively, no surface is ever
completely free of friction and no container could ever be a vacuum.
Accordingly, even though we may loosely talk of Holland's 'flat' roads
or John's 'empty' fridge, reflection indicates to us that such
assertions are, in fact, false (Holland's roads have some bumps on
them, however small, and John's fridge, whilst empty of food, is
'full' of air, not to mention refrigerator parts). Similarly, Unger's
point is that what the skeptic is responding to in her arguments is
the fact that, strictly speaking, nothing is every really known
because to be really known the agent would have to rule out every
possibility of error and this is an impossible hurdle to clear (at
least for a non-omniscient being). So although we might talk of
knowing lots of things, reflection indicates to us, as it does with
our use of 'flat' and 'empty', that our claims to know are all, in
fact, false.
We will return to consider infallibilism again below. In the meantime,
however, we can set this thesis to one side because there is a
(logically) weaker thesis that would also suffice to support (S2).
Accordingly, so long as we are able to deny the weaker thesis then we
can get a rejection of infallibilism by default. This weaker thesis is
the principle that knowledge is 'closed' under known entailment, or
the 'closure' principle for short. Roughly, this principle states that
if an agent knows a proposition (such as that she is currently
seated), and knows that this proposition entails a second proposition
(such as that she is not a BIV), then she also knows the second
proposition. In general, this can be roughly expressed as follows:
Closure Principle for Knowledge
If an agent knows P, and knows that P entails Q, then that agent knows Q.
Whereas infallibilism supports (S2) by demanding that an agent should
be able to know the denials of all error-possibilities, closure merely
demands that the agent knows the denials of those error-possibilities
that are known to be logical consequences of what one knows. For
example, if one knows the ordinary proposition that one is currently
seated, and one further knows that if one is seated then one is not a
BIV, then one must also know that one is not a BIV. Conversely, if one
does not know that one is not a BIV then, given that one knows the
entailment in question (which ought to be uncontroversial), one
thereby lacks knowledge of the ordinary proposition in question, just
as (S2) says. And note that, unlike (S2), the plausibility of closure
is not merely prima facie. After all, we reason in conformity with
closure all the time in cases where we gain knowledge of previously
unknown propositions via knowledge of other propositions and the
relevant entailment. Indeed, closure is in this respect far more
compelling than infallibilism, since what credibility the latter
thesis has is gained by philosophical argument rather than by prima
facie reflection on our actual epistemic practice. The theoretical
burden imposed upon anyone who advocates the denial of (S2) is thus
very strong, since it requires a principled rejection of the intuitive
principle of closure.
The standard proposal put forward to support the denial of closure has
been some variation of the original RA model advanced by Dretske
(1970; 1971; 1981). Essentially, the idea is to claim that knowledge
only transfers across known entailments where the entailments in
question are 'relevant'. Thus, knowledge that one is sitting down may
transfer across a known entailment to the relevant proposition that
one is not standing up, but it won't transfer across a known
entailment to the irrelevant proposition that one is not a BIV.
Accordingly, the link between ordinary knowledge and anti-skeptical
knowledge required by the skeptic is severed and ordinary knowledge is
secured. Dretske himself puts the point as follows:
The general point may be put this way: there are certain
presuppositions associated with a statement. These presuppositions,
although their truth is entailed by the truth of the statement, are
not part of what is operated on when we operate on the statement with
one of our epistemic operators. The epistemic operators do not
penetrate to these presuppositions. (Dretske 1970, 1014)
In effect, what Dretske is arguing here is that in everyday contexts
an agent's acquisition of knowledge of the propositions at issue in
that context presupposes the falsity of certain irrelevant
error-possibilities. That they are taken for granted is, for Dretske,
entirely legitimate (that is, he rejects infallibilism). Nevertheless,
the negations of these error-possibilities are often entailed by what
is known in that context and thus, if closure held, it would follow
that an agent could come to have knowledge of what is presupposed in
her knowledge simply by knowing the relevant entailment. It is this
that Dretske objects to, arguing that one's epistemic position
regarding the antecedent proposition will not transfer to the
consequent proposition where the consequent proposition has performed
this 'presuppositional' role.
An example will help clarify matters. Consider the following two
propositions (adapted from ones adduced by Dretske (1970)):
(P) The animals in the pen are zebras.
(Q) The animals in the pen are not mules cleverly disguised to look like zebras.
Dretske argues that in normal circumstances one can come to know (P)
without making any special checks to ensure that the irrelevant
error-possibility at issue in (Q) is false. Instead, all the agent
needs to do is have evidence that eliminates relevant
error-possibilities (such as, for example, evidence to support her
belief that it is the zebra enclosure and not the ape enclosure that
she is looking at). This is fortunate, because if we demand that the
agent must rule-out the kind of error-possibility at issue in (Q) (and
thus, one might reasonably assume, know (Q)) before she can know (P),
then we will end up setting the requirement for knowledge at a very
high level. Indeed, it will be highly unlikely that your average agent
would be able to know a proposition like (P) if this demand is made,
because the average agent would not be able to tell a zebra apart from
a cleverly disguised mule. Nevertheless, Dretske acknowledges that the
agent's knowledge of (P) presupposes that the error-possibility at
issue in (Q) is false. Here is the crux, however. If we allow closure
to stand, then it will follow from the agent's knowledge of (P), and
her knowledge of the entailment from (P) to (Q), that she thereby
knows (Q) also, even though we have already granted that the agent in
question is not in a position to be able to know such a thing. Dretske
puts the point as follows:
If you are tempted to say [that the agent does know (Q) ...], think
for a moment about the reasons that you have, what evidence you can
produce in favour of this claim. The evidence you had for thinking
them zebras has been effectively neutralised, since it does not count
toward their not being mules cleverly disguised. Have you checked with
the zoo authorities? Did you examine the animals closely enough to
detect such a fraud? (Dretske 1970, 1016)
Dretske thus concludes that we should instead allow that an agent
might be able to know (P) whilst failing to know (Q), and thus, given
that the entailment is known, that closure fails.
This is certainly a very compelling argument, and it does at the very
least offer a prima facie case against closure. The job is not quite
done, however, because we also need to be given an account of
knowledge which will flesh-out this account of relevance. After all,
we have strong intuitions that our epistemic concepts do license
closure. It is to this end that Dretske (1971) went on to develop his
'modal' account of knowledge, an account which was adapted and
supplemented by Robert Nozick (1981).
What Dretske needs is a theory of knowledge which, whilst being
plausible, can also explain how we can know everyday propositions
whilst failing to know the denials of skeptical hypotheses, even in
cases where we know that the everyday proposition in question entails
the relevant denial of the skeptical hypothesis. Given these arduous
demands, his proposal is, to say the least, ingenious. In essence,
what Dretske does is to adduce a modal condition on knowledge, what I
will call 'Dretskean Sensitivity', that can be roughly expressed as
follows:
Dretskean Sensitivity
If P were not true, then the agent would not believe P.
The basic idea behind Dretskean Sensitivity is that for a belief to
count as knowledge it must at least 'track' the truth in the sense
that, not only is it true but, had what is believed been false, the
agent would not have believed it. With this condition in play, Dretske
can get the result he wants.
Suppose the actual world is pretty much as I take it to be. It follows
that my belief that I am currently in my office and my belief that I
am not a BIV are both true. Now consider whether the former belief
counts as an instance of knowledge. On this account it does (at least
pending any further conditions that one wants to add to Dretskean
Sensitivity), because in the nearest possible world in which I am not
in my office – the world in which, for example, I am in the corridor
outside my office – I no longer believe that I am. My belief thus
'tracks' the truth adequately to be a candidate for knowledge. In
contrast, consider my belief that I am not a BIV. The problem with
this belief is that in the nearest possible world in which this belief
is false (that is, the BIV-world), I continue to have a belief that I
am not a BIV because in this world I am the victim of a widespread
deception. Accordingly, this belief fails to meet necessary condition
for knowledge set out in Dretskean Sensitivity and thus is not even in
the running to be an instance of knowledge.
Dretske can thus use Dretskean Sensitivity to explain why closure
fails by showing how knowledge needs to be understood relative to a
certain relevant range of possible worlds which is variable depending
upon the proposition at issue. As a result, one can know one
proposition relative to one set of possible worlds, know the
entailment to a second proposition, and yet fail to know the second
proposition relative to a different set of possible worlds. More
specifically, one can have knowledge of everyday propositions relative
to one set of possible worlds that is 'near-to' the actual world, know
that it entails the denial of a skeptical hypothesis, and yet lack
knowledge of the denial of the skeptical hypothesis because knowledge
is here relative to the 'far-off' possible worlds that are quite
unlike the actual world. The notion of 'relevance' at issue in the
basic RA account is thus cashed-out in explicitly modal terms.
Moreover, since a number of logical principles fail in modal contexts
because of this sort of variability, it should not come as much of a
surprise to find that closure meets a similar fate. Dretske is thus in
a position to offer a plausible account of knowledge that can
accommodate all of the claims that we saw him wanting to make earlier.
This conception of knowledge, along with the later more elaborate
version advanced by Nozick (1981), has been extremely influential. It
is worth noting, however, that it is an epistemologically revisionist
anti-skeptical proposal because it results in the denial of the highly
plausible principle of closure. With this in mind, there is a prima
facie tension involved in adopting such a proposal, despite the
compelling defence of this position that Dretske, Nozick and others
have offered. After all, the idea that we must know the known
consequences of what we know is extremely strong and the rejection of
this claim cannot be taken lightly. As Keith DeRose (1995, §5), has
pointed out, dropping closure means allowing what he calls "abominable
conjunctions", such as that one knows that one has two hands but one
does not know that one is not a BIV. That closure should hold has been
one of the main motivations for alternative interpretations of the
core RA anti-skeptical thesis that do not result in the rejection of
closure, as we will see in a moment.
Besides this line of criticism against the Dretske-Nozick account, a
number of other claims have been made. I will focus here on those
avenues of critique that are directed at the view presented as an
anti-skeptical proposal, rather than as an analysis (albeit perhaps
only a partial one) of knowledge. Edward Craig (1989; 1990), for
instance, has argued that the Dretske-Nozick proposal is either
impotent at meeting skeptical arguments or unnecessary. After all, the
strategy only works on the assumption that skeptical possible worlds
are indeed far-off worlds, and Craig argues that if we are entitled to
that supposition then we have no need of an anti-skeptical strategy.
Conversely, if we are not entitled to that supposition, then the modal
analysis of knowledge offered by Dretske and Nozick leaves us in an
impasse with the skeptic which is no better than we were in before.
That is, all that the Dretskean approach will have achieved is to show
us that, provided the world is in fact pretty much as we take it to
be, then skepticism is false and this still leaves the issue of
whether the world is in fact pretty much as we take it to be
unresolved.
Craig's objection is surely wrong, however, because the skeptical
argument purported to show that knowledge was impossible, and the
Dretske-Nozick account at least refutes this claim by showing that
knowledge is possible; that we can have knowledge provided that
certain conditions obtain. What is true, however, is that there is
nothing in the Dretske-Nozick line which demands that the agent should
be able to become reflectively aware that we have met these conditions
if we are to have knowledge, and this 'externalist' element of the
view may well be problematic. For if this is the case then the
existential force of skepticism – that we could indeed, for all we can
tell, be a victim of a skeptical hypothesis – is just as powerful as
ever. The worry here is that there is always going to be something
intellectually unsatisfactory about an anti-skeptical proposal that is
run along epistemologically externalist lines. We will consider the
role of epistemological externalism and internalism in the skeptical
debate in more detail below, since it raises issues which impact upon
all anti-skeptical proposals, regardless of whether they retain
closure.
The large body of critical appraisal of the Dretskean proposal falls,
however, on the rejection of the closure principle, closure. There are
two ways in which this critique is often run. Either critics argue
directly for the retention of closure and thereby against the
Dretskean line by default, or else they try to offer an alternative
construal of the motivation for the Dretskean line that retains
closure. Peter Klein (1981; 1995) is a good representative of the
former position, arguing that, contra Dretske, we can indeed come to
know (/be justified in believing) that the animal in the pen is not a
cleverly disguised mule on the basis of our knowledge (/justified true
belief) that it is a zebra and our knowledge of the entailment.
Central to Klein's view is a commitment to epistemological
internalism, whose role in the skeptical debate will be discussed
below, and a certain view about the structure of reasons that we do
not have the space to go into here. The most interesting attacks on
the Dretskean approach to closure do not come from this quarter,
however, but from those who claim to be motivated by similar
epistemological concerns as those which motivate Dretske himself.
After all, that one who endorses a radically different conception of
the epistemological landscape should not find the Dretskean proposal
plausible is not nearly so intriguing as dissent from those who
sign-up to many of the key Dretskean claims. In particular, it is
interesting to note that two of the main rival views to the Dretskean
line are wrought out of the same basic RA claims.
Consider again the core RA thought. This is was that certain
error-possibilities are irrelevant to the determination of knowledge,
and thus that one can have knowledge merely by eliminating the salient
error-possibilities. With this characterisation of the core RA thesis
in mind, the natural question to ask is why the core RA thought should
be spelt-out along Dretskean lines. After all, the Dretskean line does
take far-off skeptical possible worlds to be relevant to the
determination of knowledge (albeit only knowledge of anti-skeptical
propositions), whereas the basic RA idea was surely that such far-off
worlds were manifestly irrelevant to the determination of knowledge
(any knowledge). There thus seems to be an ambiguity in the RA thesis.
Either we take it as meaning that relevance is determined by the
nearest not-P world (no matter how far-out that might be), and thus
end up with the thesis that Dretske and Nozick propose, or else we
construe it as simply demanding that only near-by possible worlds are
relevant worlds. This is no mere technical dispute either, since a
great deal hangs upon which alternative we adopt.
After all, if we adopt the latter reading of the core RA thesis then
we are left with the thought that knowledge possession only requires
tracking the truth in near-by possible worlds and on this construal
the motivation for denying closure fades. For not only will an agent's
belief in an everyday proposition typically track the truth in near-by
possible worlds, so will her belief that she is not a BIV (since she
is, by hypothesis, not a BIV in any near-by world). Admittedly, this
belief will not track the truth in the nearest possible world in which
she is a BIV, but since this possible world is far-off, this fact
alone should not suffice on this construal of the RA thesis to
undermine her knowledge. An entirely different reading of the core RA
thesis thus seems to license the denial of the first premise of the
skeptical argument, (S1) – that we are unable to know the denials of
skeptical hypotheses – rather than the denial of closure and thus the
rejection of the second premise, (S2). Moreover, that this reading of
the RA thesis does not result in the failure of closure means that it
does possess some considerable dialectical advantage over the
Dretske-Nozick thesis.
We will consider how such an approach to skepticism might function in
more detail below. First, however, we will look at a different reading
of the core RA thesis that also does not result in the denial of
closure. Where this line differs from the one just canvassed is that
it does not straightforwardly allow that one can know the denials of
skeptical hypotheses either. Instead, it argues that the standards for
relevance are variable such that, although one knows everyday
propositions and thus the denials of skeptical hypotheses relative to
a low standard of relevance, one lacks knowledge of these everyday
propositions and thus of the denials of skeptical hypotheses at high
standards of relevance. In this way, the hope is that this thesis can
explain both our skeptical and anti-skeptical intuitions (and our
attachment to closure), whilst nevertheless denying the universal
correctness of the skeptical argument. This anti-skeptical thesis is
contextualism, and since the version that we will be considering
regards the mechanisms that alter these standards of relevance to be
conversational mechanisms, we will call it semantic contextualism.
3. Semantic Contextualism
Semantic contextualism – as put forward by such figures as Stewart
Cohen (1987; 1988; 1991; 1999; 2000), DeRose (1995) and David Lewis
(1996) – is without doubt the most dominant form of anti-skeptical
theory in the current literature. In essence, this view maintains that
skeptical arguments only seem to work because they exploit the way in
which the correct employment of our epistemic concepts (such as
knowledge) can be influenced by features of the conversational
context. More specifically, semantic contextualists argue that the
standards for knowledge possession fluctuate depending on what is at
issue in that conversational context. Accordingly, they are in a
position to allow that both skepticism and anti-skepticism could, in a
restricted sense, be true. In skeptical conversational contexts where
the standards are high, the skeptical conclusion that we know very
little will be true. In contrast, in non-skeptical conversational
contexts where the standards will be relatively low, we are in a
position to know much of what we think we know, albeit only to this
low epistemic standard.
In what follows, I will primarily focus my explication of the semantic
contextualist thesis by looking at DeRose's version since this is the
most developed (and, arguably, the most influential) characterisation
of the thesis which incorporates most of the main features of the
other two accounts. Later on, however, I'll mention some of the key
differences between these three versions of the semantic contextualist
view. Moreover, in §4, I will be looking at a different type of
contextualist theory that is advanced by Michael Williams (1991) –
what I call inferential contextualism – which does not conform to the
basic semantic contextualist template.
Before we look at the DeRose version of the semantic contextualist
thesis, however, it is worthwhile first being clear about the
following supposed features of the 'phenomenology' of our engagement
with skepticism since semantic contextualism can most naturally be
viewed as a response, and to some extent as an accommodation, of these
features:
I. Ascriptions of knowledge to subjects in conversational contexts in
which skeptical error-
possibilities have been raised seems improper.
II. In conversational contexts in which no skeptical
error-possibilities are in play it seems perfectly appropriate to
ascribe knowledge to subjects.
III. All that may change when one moves from a non-skeptical
conversational context to a skeptical context are mere conversational
factors.
The first two features represent what Williams (1991, chapter one)
refers to as our 'biperspectivalism', our intuition that skepticism is
compelling under the conditions of philosophical reflection but never
able to impact on everyday life where it is all but ignored. The third
feature creates the tension because it highlights our sense that one
of these judgements must be wrong. That is, since conversational topic
has no obvious bearing on the epistemic status of a subject's beliefs,
that it ought to be universally true (that is, whatever the
conversational context) that the subject either does or does not know
the propositions in question. So either our knowledge ascriptions in
everyday contexts are right (and thus the skeptic is wrong), in which
case we shouldn't take skepticism so seriously in conversational
contexts in which skepticism is at issue; or else the skeptic is
right, and thus our everyday practice of ascribing knowledge is under
threat. Semantic contextualism opposes this thought with the
suggestion that what is actually occurring is not a contradiction but
a responsiveness, on the part of the attributor of knowledge, to a
fluctuation in the epistemic standards (and with them the subject's
possession of knowledge) caused by a change in the conversational
context. In effect, and contra the third claim listed above, semantic
contextualism holds that mere changes in the conversational context
can have an effect on the epistemic status of one's beliefs so that it
can be true both that one has knowledge in everyday contexts whilst
lacking it in skeptical conversational contexts.
Accordingly, we find DeRose (1995) arguing that the basic
contextualist strategy pivots upon the acceptability, and appropriate
use, of the following contextualist thesis:
Suppose a speaker A (for "attributor") says, "S knows that P", of a
subject S's true belief that P. According to contextualist theories of
knowledge attributions, how strong an epistemic position S must be in
with respect to P for A's assertion to be true can vary according to
features of A's conversational context. (DeRose 1995, 4)
Here we get the essentials of the semantic contextualist view. In
particular, we get (i) the claim that the strength of epistemic
position that an agent needs to be in if she is to have knowledge can
fluctuate from context to context (which makes the thesis
contextualist); and (ii) the claim that what is at issue in the
determination of contexts in this respect is the conversational
context (which makes the contextualist thesis semantic). The
interesting question now is how the details of how this account is to
function are to be spelt-out.
The first thing that DeRose tries to capture is the intuition that as
one moves from one conversational context to another one's epistemic
situation (one's total informational state for instance) could remain
exactly the same. DeRose accommodates this intuition in conjunction
with the contextualist picture by arguing, as the above quotation
indicates, that although one's "epistemic position" is constant at any
one time, the epistemic position that one needs to be in so as to
count as possessing knowledge can be variable. Strength of "epistemic
position" is characterised by DeRose as follows:
[...] being in a strong epistemic position with respect to P is to
have a belief as to whether P is true match the fact of the matter as
to whether P is true, not only in the actual world, but also at the
worlds sufficiently close to the actual world. That is, one's belief
should not only be true, but also should be non-accidentally true,
where this requires one's belief as to whether P is true to match the
fact of the matter at nearby worlds. The further away one gets from
the actual world, while still having it be the case that one's belief
matches the fact at worlds that far away and closer, the stronger a
position one is in with respect to P. (DeRose 1995, 34)
In order to see this, imagine that Lars believes that his car is
outside on the basis of a certain fixed informational state (which
involves, perhaps, his memory of the car being there a few hours ago,
his grounds for believing that no-one would steal it, and so forth).
Now imagine an (almost) exact counterpart of Lars – Lars* – who is in
exactly the same cognitive state except that he has the extra piece of
information that the car was there a minute ago (perhaps he looked).
Clearly, Lars* will be in a slightly better epistemic position with
respect to his belief that his car is outside than Lars. Although they
will, in general, track the truth across the same set of possible
worlds, Lars* will track the truth in a few extra possible worlds,
such as the possible worlds in which his car was stolen ten minutes
ago.
DeRose then goes on to describe the mechanism which changes the
conversational context (and thereby alters the epistemic standards at
play) in terms of the thesis of Dretskean Sensitivity that we saw
above. Recall that for an agent to have a belief in P that is
sensitive in this way, the agent must not only have a true belief in P
in the actual world, but also not believe P in the nearest possible
world (or worlds) in which P is false. DeRose's thought is that in any
particular conversational context there is a certain set of
propositions that are explicitly at issue and that the agent must, at
the very least, be sensitive to all these 'explicit' propositions if
she is to know them. Moreover, the most demanding of these
propositions – the proposition which has a negation that occupies the
furthest-out possible world – will set the standard for that
conversational context since this not-P world will determine the
extent of possible worlds that one's beliefs must be able to track if
one is to be truly said to know a proposition in that context. Knowing
a proposition thus involves being in an epistemic position sufficient
to track the truth across the range of possible worlds determined by
the most demanding proposition explicit to that context. Crucially,
however (and I will be expanding upon this detail in a moment), this
point also applies to propositions which are implicit to a
conversational context (that is, propositions which one believes but
which are not explicit to that conversational context). In order to
know such a proposition – even if one's belief in that proposition is
not sensitive – one need only be in a sufficient epistemic position to
meet the standards of that context. (The importance of this point will
soon become apparent).
DeRose then characterises the mechanism that brings about an upward
shift in epistemic standards as follows:
When it is asserted that some subject S knows (or does not know) some
proposition P, the standards for knowledge (the standards for how good
an epistemic position one must be in to count as knowing) tend to be
raised, if need be, to such a level as to require S's belief in that
particular P to be sensitive for it to count as knowledge. (DeRose
1995, 36)
That is, what changes a conversational context is when a new
proposition is made explicit to that context which is more demanding
than any of the propositions currently explicit in that context. This
will thus increase the range of possible worlds at issue in the
determination of knowledge, and thereby increase the strength of
epistemic position required in order to be truly said to know.
What motivates this claim is the fact that, as Lewis (1979) famously
argued, when it comes to 'context-sensitive' terms like 'flat' or
'knowledge', the conversational 'score' tends to change depending upon
the assertions of that context. We may all agree that the table in
front of us is 'flat' in an everyday context, but, ceteris paribus, if
someone enters the room and denies that it is flat we do not thereby
disagree with her. Instead, we take it that she means 'flat' in some
more demanding sense and so raise the standards for 'flatness' so as
to make her assertion true (this is what Lewis (1996, 559) calls a
"rule of accommodation"). That is, we take it that the new participant
of our conversational context means flat in some more restricted sense
so that the barely perceptible bumps on the table before us are
sufficient to make the claim "This table is flat" false. DeRose
considers the Lewis line to have captured something intuitive about
the pragmatics of how we use our 'context-sensitive' terms and,
moreover, believes that epistemic terms such as 'knowledge' behave in
a similar way.
An example will help clarify matters here. Imagine an agent in a
quotidian context in which only everyday propositions, such as whether
or not one is currently having dinner with one's brother (P), or
whether or not the garden gate has been closed (Q), are at issue.
Sensitivity to these everyday propositions will only require the
consideration of nearby possible worlds and thus the strength of
epistemic position demanded will be very weak. Let us say, plausibly,
that the possible world in which one is not having dinner with one's
brother is 'further-out' than the possible world in which the garden
gate is not closed. This proposition will thus determine the range of
possible worlds at issue in the determination of knowledge in that
conversational context. Let us further suppose that the agent in
question does have a sensitive belief in this proposition. The issue
of what other propositions the subject knows will now be decided by
whether the agent's belief in those propositions will track the truth
across the range of possible worlds determined by not-P. If, for
instance, the agent's belief that the garden gate is closed matches
the truth as to whether Q in all of the possible worlds within that
range, then she will know Q. Equally, however, if the subject's belief
in a proposition which is implicit to that conversational context
tracks the truth across this range of possible worlds then that
proposition will be known also, even if the agent's belief in that
proposition is not sensitive.
Consider, for instance, the agent's belief that she is not a BIV, a
proposition which, as we saw above, one cannot be sensitive to because
in the nearest BIV-world one still believes that one is not a BIV. On
the contextualist model, however, if one is in a conversational
context in which such a proposition is not explicit, then one can know
this proposition just so long as one has a belief as to whether this
proposition is true which matches the facts as to whether it is true
within the range of possible worlds at issue. And, clearly, this
demand will be trivially satisfied in the above scenario where the
subject has a sensitive belief in the ordinary proposition, P. After
all, insofar as one has such a sensitive belief in P, then it must be
the case that the BIV skeptical world is, modally speaking, far-out,
for if it weren't, then this would affect the sensitivity of the
subject's beliefs in ordinary propositions like P. Accordingly, on
this view, all the subject needs in this context is a stubborn belief
that she is not a BIV in order to be truly said to know this
proposition in this conversational context. The contextualist can thus
capture the second element of the 'phenomenology' of our engagement
with skepticism that we noted above – that, in quotidian
conversational contexts, we are perfectly willing to ascribe knowledge
of everyday propositions and also feel that we must know the denials
of skeptical hypotheses as well.
One might wonder why I use the word 'feel' here. Well, the reason is
that, on the contextualist account, if one were to explicitly mention
these anti-skeptical propositions (as one would if one were to
verbally ascribe knowledge of them to oneself), then one would thereby
make that proposition explicit to the conversational context and so
change the epistemic standards needed for knowledge accordingly. In
order to have knowledge that one is not a BIV within the new
conversational context, one's belief that one is not a BIV must now
exhibit sensitivity (which, as we saw above, is impossible), and the
possible worlds relevant to the determination of that sensitivity will
be relevant to one's knowledge of even everyday propositions.
Accordingly, one will now lack knowledge both of the denial of the
skeptical hypothesis (because one's belief in this respect is not
sensitive), and of the everyday propositions (since even though one's
beliefs in these propositions are sensitive, one can never be in an
epistemic position that would support knowledge of them which would be
strong enough to track the truth in far-off BIV-worlds). The
contextualist thus claims to have captured the other two aspects of
the 'phenomenology' of our engagement with skepticism – that we are
completely unwilling to ascribe knowledge in skeptical conversational
contexts, and that this is even so when the only thing that may have
changed from the non-skeptical conversational context in which we were
willing to ascribe knowledge is the course of the conversation.
Moreover, the contextualist has done this without either conceding the
universal truth of skepticism (since skepticism is false in everyday
contexts), or denying closure (since there is no single context in
which one both knows an everyday proposition whilst lacking knowledge
of the denial of a skeptical hypothesis). Accordingly, DeRose claims
to have 'solved' the skeptical paradox in an entirely intuitive
manner.
The semantic contextualist proposals made by Lewis, Cohen and others
run along similar lines to the DeRose thesis. The key difference
between DeRose and Lewis is that Lewis cashes-out his thesis in terms
of a series of rules which determine when we may and may not properly
ignore a certain error-possibility rather than in terms of a general
modal account of knowledge. The key difference between Cohen's
position and that advanced by Lewis and DeRose is that it is centred
upon the concept of justification rather than knowledge and
incorporates a certain view about the structure of reasons (Cohen
1999; 2000). That the DeRose view differs in these ways from the views
presented by Lewis and Cohen may work in its favour. As Timothy
Williamson (2001) has pointed out, DeRose's more straightforward
position may be insulated from the kind of ad hoc charges regarding
Lewis' employment of numerous rules governing when an
error-possibility is properly ignored, (as put forward, for example,
by Williams (2001)). Moreover, the stress on justification in Cohen's
account can make it unappealing to those who find such a notion
problematic, at least insofar as it is understood as playing an
essential role in knowledge acquisition. There are thus prima facie
grounds for thinking that if any semantic contextualist theory will
work, then it will be one run along the lines presented by DeRose.
In any case, the most interesting objections against semantic
externalism do not rest upon specific elements of the particular
versions of this position, but rather strike against the general
approach. Perhaps the most obvious concern facing semantic
contextualism is that its claim that the epistemic status of an
agent's beliefs can be variable in response to mere conversational
factors is highly contentious. For instance, contra Cohen's (1991)
contextualist characterisation of his RA position, Dretske writes:
Knowledge is relative, yes, but relative to the extra-evidential
circumstances of the knower and those who, like the knower, have the
same stake in what is true in the matter in question. Knowledge is
context sensitive, according to this view, but it is not indexical. If
two people disagree about what is known, they have a genuine
disagreement. They can't both be right. (Dretske 1991, 191)
That is, Dretske rejects outright the thought that the truth-value of
a knowledge claim can be dependent upon anything other than what the
concrete features of the situation are. I won't undertake a detailed
discussion of this line of attack against semantic contextualism here,
however, since the semantic contextualist proposal is clearly meant to
be understood as a revisionistic proposal in this respect. Indeed,
this is to be expected given that, as we have already seen, any
plausible anti-skeptical proposal will have to deny some claim that is
otherwise thought to be intuitive (Dretske himself denies closure, for
example). To query this element of the thesis alone is thus not to
give it a run for its money (although, if one can couple this line of
critique with other concerns then it can carry some dialectical
weight).
The other more general lines of criticism against semantic
contextualism fall into three main camps. First, there is the
allegation that semantic contextualism leaves us no better off than we
were before. Second, there is the worry about how the contextualist is
to explain our knowledge (albeit only in quotidian contexts) of the
denials of skeptical hypotheses. After all, as we noted above, we do
have a strong intuition that we can never know such propositions in
any context (recall that this intuition was one of the motivating
factors behind the Dretskean theory). Third, there is the claim that
semantic contextualism is guilty of over-kill in its approach to
skepticism in that it essentially incorporates a claim which would
suffice to undermine radical skepticism by itself (i. e., regardless
of whether it is combined with a general contextualist thesis).
Accordingly, on this view, contextualism is both unnecessary and
ill-motivated.
The worry that motivates the first concern is that what semantic
contextualism does concede to the skeptic is the 'hierarchical'
structure of her doubts. That is, on the semantic contextualist view
the skeptic is indeed working at a high epistemic standard, one that
is more demanding than our everyday standards. The problem with
conceding this much to the skeptic is that it appears to legitimate
the concern that the skeptic's standards are the right standards, and
thus that, although we are content to ascribe everyday knowledge in
quotidian contexts, we ought not to ascribe such knowledge because,
strictly speaking, we lack knowledge relative to the proper skeptical
standards that should be employed (see Pritchard 2001a for a
development of this problem). This line of thought should be familiar
as the general infallibilist line that we saw Unger arguing for in §2
and one might think that one could dismiss it on the same grounds that
were canvassed there. Matters are not quite so simple, however.
Indeed, it is interesting that in more recent works Unger (1984; 1986)
has toned down his commitment to infallibilism in favour of a
different conception of the skeptical debate which argues that there
is nothing to tell between the contextualist reading of our epistemic
concepts and what he calls 'invariantism', which would license
infallibilist conclusions. Unger's point here is that all
contextualism can achieve is, at best, a kind of impasse with the
skeptic such that we know that one of these views must be right but
where we are unable to definitively determine which. Is it that the
standards are high and only seem variable because we are content to
talk loosely in everyday contexts (in which case the infallibilist,
and thus the skeptic, is right), or is it that our epistemic concepts
are genuinely variable and thus that we do have knowledge relative to
low everyday epistemic standards (in which case the contextualist is
right and the skeptic is wrong)? The skeptical thought that arises
here is that if we are unable to offer sufficient reasons for
preferring the latter scenario over the former then contextualism does
not put us in a better situation than we were in before.
The second worry – that contextualism is unable to explain how we can
have knowledge of the denials of skeptical hypotheses – is
particularly striking because if this claim holds then semantic
contextualism does not even supply us with an impasse with the
skeptic. Instead, the position would simply be incoherent. The thought
here is that since our, presumably empirical, knowledge in this
respect cannot be coherently thought of as being the result of an
empirical investigation, hence we cannot make sense of it at all.
Perhaps the bravest response to this line of attack in the recent
literature can be found in the suggestion made by both Cohen (1999;
2000) and DeRose (2000) that it might be possible to understand an
agent's knowledge of the denials of skeptical hypotheses along a
priori lines. Cohen motivates this thought relative to what he terms
the "a priori rationality" of denying skeptical error-possibilities
(e.g. Cohen 2000, 104), whilst DeRose employs Putnamian reflections on
semantic externalism as a means of showing how we might have a priori
knowledge of empirical truths.
Even if these lines of argument could be made palatable, however, a
further line of attack (the third worry listed above) would instantly
emerge. For if we can indeed make sense of our putative knowledge of
the denials of skeptical hypotheses then what could the motivation for
an epistemologically revisionist thesis like contextualism possibly
be? After all, the epistemological revisionism incorporated in
contextualism only seemed necessary because our knowledge of these
propositions seemed so insecure. If we can have knowledge of these
propositions, however, then why not simply motivate one's
anti-skepticism by straightforwardly denying the first premise of the
skeptical argument, (S1), rather than by going contextualist? We will
return to consider this kind of anti-skeptical proposal – known as the
'Neo-Moorean' view – in more detail in §5.
4. "Hinge" Propositions and Inferential Contextualism
Before we look at this neo-Moorean approach to radical skepticism,
however, it is worthwhile to first consider two lines of argument
which, at least superficially, might appear to be analogue approaches
to that of the Dretskean and semantic contextualist line. Where these
anti-skeptical approaches differ, in the first instance at least, from
those just canvassed, is that they primarily take their stimulus not
from the RA debate but from Wittgenstein's last notebooks (published
as On Certainty) which were on the topic of knowledge and skepticism.
Both of these accounts focus upon the Wittgensteinian notion of a
"hinge proposition", though they each use the notion in a different
way. The first camp, which includes such figures as Peter Strawson
(1985), Crispin Wright (1985; 1991; 2000), Hilary Putnam (1992) and
Avrum Stroll (1994) might be considered to be offering the purest
hinge proposition thesis because for them the notion is the primary
unit upon which their anti-skepticism rests. In contrast, the
conception of this notion employed by Williams (1991) is developed
along explicitly contextualist lines. Interestingly, however, the type
of contextualism that emerges is not of a semantic variety. I will
consider each of these views in turn. First, however, we need to look
a little at what Wittgenstein had in mind in his employment of this
notion.
Wittgenstein describes hinge propositions as follows:
[...] the questions that we raise and our doubts depend upon the fact
that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like
hinges on which those turn.
That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific
investigations that certain things are in deed not doubted.
But it isn't that the situation is like this: We just can't
investigate everything, and for that reason we are forced to rest
content with assumption. If I want the door to turn, the hinges must
stay put. (Wittgenstein 1969 §§341-3)
As this quotation indicates, what is odd about these propositions is
that, unlike other seemingly empirical propositions, our belief in
them does not seem to either stand in need of evidential buttress or,
for that matter, be legitimately prone to coherent doubt. And this
property is not explained merely by the fact that these propositions
are "in deed not doubted", since the situation is rather that we do
not doubt them because, in some sense, we ought not to doubt them.
Even despite their lack of sufficient evidential support, their
immunity to coherent doubt is part of "the logic of our scientific
investigations."
In proposing this notion Wittgenstein was explicitly challenging the
conventional epistemological wisdom that a belief is only legitimately
held if it is sufficiently evidentially grounded (otherwise it is open
to legitimate doubt), and that no belief in an empirical proposition
is beyond coherent doubt should the grounds for that belief be found
wanting. In particular, Wittgenstein's remarks here were primarily
targeted at G. E. Moore's (1925; 1939) famous "common-sense" response
to the skeptic. In effect, what Moore did was reverse the skeptical
train of reasoning by arguing, on the basis of his conviction that the
skeptical conclusion must be false, that he did know the denial of the
relevant skeptical hypothesis after all. In general, the Moorean
response to the skeptic is to respond to the skeptic's modus ponens
argument with the corresponding modus tollens.
Wittgenstein claimed that where Moore went wrong was in treating a
hinge proposition as if it were just a normal empirical proposition.
In particular, he focussed upon Moore's use of the everyday
proposition 'I have two hands' in this respect, arguing that this is,
in normal circumstances, a hinge proposition and thus that the
certainty that we attach to it is not due to any evidence that we
might have for its favour but rather reflects the fact that in those
circumstances it is what 'stands fast' in our assessment of other
propositions. Nothing is more certain that this proposition in
ordinary circumstances, and thus no other belief could be coherently
regarded as providing support for it or be coherently thought to
undermine it. As Wittgenstein puts the matter at one point:
My having two hands is, in normal circumstances, as certain as
anything that I could produce in evidence for it.
That is why I am not in a position to take the sight of my hand as
evidence for it. (Wittgenstein 1969 §250)
Given that this is so, however, Moore cannot use the certainty he has
for this proposition in order to derive support for his belief in the
denials of skeptical hypotheses since, strictly speaking, his belief
in this proposition is not grounded at all. Indeed, Wittgenstein goes
further to argue that, insofar as Moore regards this proposition as
being grounded by the evidence he has for it, then the circumstances
are no longer 'normal' in the relevant respects and thus the
proposition is no longer a hinge proposition. And in these conditions,
it would be ridiculous to try to buttress one's belief in the denials
of skeptical hypotheses with the support that one has for this
proposition (Wittgenstein (1969, §20) compares it to basing one's
belief in the existence of the external world on the grounds one has
for thinking that there are other planets).
Wittgenstein is not endorsing radical skepticism by attacking Moore in
this way, for the general anti-skeptical line that emerges is that
where the skeptic, like Moore, goes wrong is in considering certain
basic propositions as being coherently open to doubt. In doing so, or
so the argument runs, she fails to pay due attention to the pivotal
role that certain, apparently ordinary, propositions can play in our
systems of beliefs and thus to the manner in which even everyday
propositions can be held with conviction without thereby standing in
need of a corresponding degree of evidential buttress.
So construed, the hinge proposition line is largely a diagnosis of why
we are so tempted by skeptical arguments rather than a refutation of
the skeptical argument. Indeed, in the hands of Strawson (1985),
Putnam (1992), and Stroll (1994) this is what the hinge proposition
line is largely designed to do. So construed, however, it is difficult
to see what comfort it offers. After all, it is far from clear that it
results in the denial of any of the intuitions that we saw at issue in
our formulation of the skeptical argument in §1. In particular, this
diagnostic thesis neither results in the denial of closure nor in a
contextualist thesis. Moreover, the standard hinge proposition line
explicitly allows that hinge propositions are not known, strictly
speaking, since they fall outside of the ambit of epistemic evaluation
(being instead the nodes around which epistemic evaluation takes
place). The anti-skeptical import of the basic hinge proposition line
is thus moot.
In the hands of Wright (1985; 1991; 2000) and Williams (1991),
however, one finds a much stronger version of this approach. I will
focus on each in turn. In effect, Wright argues that doubting hinge
propositions does not merely reflect a misunderstanding of the
epistemological landscape, rather it also leads to intellectual
self-subversion. The most sophisticated of these arguments can be
found in Wright (1991), where he attempts to show that dreaming
skepticism must be unsound because it leads to a more radical form of
doubt which undermines the very presuppositions that the skeptic needs
to employ in order to get her dreaming skepticism off the ground.
Thus, dreaming skepticism is necessarily intellectually
self-subverting and thus it can be disregarded with impunity. What
this line adds to the previous approaches is a principled epistemic
ground for discounting the skeptic's doubt. In particular, since it is
epistemically irrational to doubt the hinge propositions in question,
the implication of the argument that Wright offers is that we can
indeed know the denials of skeptical hypotheses on the basis of our
knowledge of everyday propositions even though our belief in the
former is not evidentially grounded. As Wright (1991, 107-8) puts the
point, "the impossibility of earning a warrant that one is not now
dreaming does not imply that no such warrant is ever possessed."
Although Wright does succeed in at least showing how the diagnosis of
radical skepticism that the hinge proposition line offers might lead
to a refutation of the skeptical argument, a number of problems with
his approach remain. One worry concerns the examples of hinge
propositions that he uses. Whereas Wittgenstein seemed to have
everyday propositions in mind in his use of this notion (and 'I have
two hands' in particular), Wright's argument only works if one takes
the denials of skeptical hypotheses as hinge propositions, a move that
receives only ambiguous support in the text. A more serious worry
concerns how, exactly, we are to cash-out this idea that the warrant
which underpins our putative knowledge of the denials of hinge
propositions can be "unearned" in the fashion that Wright envisages
(see Pritchard 2001c). After all, the idea that we could have
knowledge of these propositions purely because we have knowledge of
everyday propositions does seem to be question begging. Again, then,
the worry about closure in the context of the skeptical debate is
brought to the fore. The intuition that closure holds leads us to
think that an anti-skeptical theory must incorporate the claim that we
can know the denials of skeptical hypotheses, even though such
knowledge bears few, if any, of the usual hallmarks of empirical
knowledge. This tension can only be resolved by either denying closure
or allowing that we can know the denials of skeptical hypotheses, but
each of these moves raises tensions of its own.
Wright responds to this latter worry in more recent work. Drawing upon
remarks made by Martin Davies (1998), Wright (2000) argues that we
need to distinguish between the principle of closure and what he terms
the principle of "transmission". In essence, his way around this
concern about closure is to maintain that whilst knowledge does indeed
transfer across known entailments as closure demands, it does not
transmit, where transmission requires something more demanding. In
particular, transmission demands that the "cogency" of the argument be
preserved, which is its aptitude to produce rational conviction. Here
is Wright:
A cogent argument is one whereby someone could be moved to rational
conviction of the truth of its conclusion. (Wright 2000, 140)
So Wright's thought is that if one does know the everyday propositions
then, trivially, one must know the denials of skeptical hypotheses
that are known to be entailed by those propositions. Nevertheless,
that closure holds in these cases does not mean that any argument that
attempts to establish anti-skeptical knowledge on this basis will be
apt to convince a third party. After all, notes Wright, the argument
is question begging in the relevant respect since it is only by taking
for granted the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses (that is, by
taking the relevant hinge propositions for granted) that the agent is
able to have knowledge of the everyday propositions in the first
place. This is a compelling move to make since it diagnoses the
arguments against closure by characterising them in terms of how what
is lacking from the conclusion is not knowledge but something just as
valuable, a conclusion that is apt to convince. It also explains the
failure of the Moorean approach, for where Moore goes wrong is not in
lacking the knowledge that he claims to have, but rather in attempting
to secure any conviction on the part of his audience by offering his
argument. Indeed, this is a very Wittgensteinian claim to make since
Wittgenstein himself argues that:
Moore's mistake lies in this – countering the assertion that one
cannot know that, by saying "I do know it". (Wittgenstein 1969, §521,
my italics)
As this quotation implies, the problem with Moore's argument is
precisely not the falsity of the conclusion (which would be to
validate either radical skepticism or the denial of closure), but
rather concerns the manner in which he proposes it and the ends that
it is designed to serve.
Still, compelling though this approach is, we are still in need of an
account of knowledge which can explain how it is that we can know such
propositions as the denials of skeptical hypotheses, something which
Wright himself does not offer (see Pritchard 2002a for more on this
point). For this contribution to the anti-skeptical debate we must
look elsewhere. I will consider such an account in a moment, for one
could view the neo-Moorean strategy as presenting the required
analysis. First, however, I will briefly mention another influential
reading of the hinge proposition thesis, due to Williams (1991).
As might be expected, what identifies Williams' inferential thesis as
a contextualist account is that it incorporates the claim that one
should understand knowledge relative to a context of some description.
Like the semantic contextualist view put forward by DeRose et al,
Williams argues that certain error-possibilities are only
epistemically relevant, and thus potentially knowledge defeating, in
certain contexts. Moreover, Williams is also keen to retain the
closure principle. He does so on contextualist grounds, arguing that
provided one keeps to the one context then closure will hold. As with
the semantic contextualist position, then, apparent failures of
closure are simply due to equivocations between different contexts.
The Williams line thus shares a central core of claims with the
semantic contextualist view. Nevertheless, their disagreements are
significant. The two main areas of disparity between the two theories
are as follows. First, Williams does not individuate contexts along a
'conversational' axis, but rather in terms of the inferential
structure of that context (hence the name, inferential contextualism).
Second (and as we will see this point is closely related to the
inferential thesis), Williams does not allow a context-independent
hierarchy of contexts. That is, unlike the semantic contextualists,
Williams does not, for example, regard the skeptical context as being
a more epistemically demanding context. Rather, it is just a context
which employs a different epistemic structure.
Indeed, on Williams' view, contextualism just is the thesis that there
is no such hierarchy of epistemic contexts – instead, each context is,
epistemically speaking, autonomous. To think otherwise is, he thinks,
to fall victim to the doctrine of "epistemological realism" – the view
that the objects of epistemological inquiry have an inherent, and thus
context-independent, structure. In contrast, the inferential
contextualism that he advances is defined as the denial of this
thesis. It holds that:
[...] the epistemic status of a given proposition is liable to shift
with situational, disciplinary and other contextually variable
factors: it is to hold that, independently of such influences, a
proposition has no epistemic status whatsoever. (Williams 1991, 119)
And Williams is quite clear that this last phrase "has no epistemic
status whatsoever" is meant to indicate that there is no
context-independent means by which we can evaluate the standards
wrought in different contexts. He describes his view as a
"deflationary" theory of knowledge, in that it holds that there need
be nothing that ties all instances of knowledge together other than
the fact that they are instances of knowledge. He writes:
A deflationary account of "know" may show how the word is embedded in
a teachable and useful linguistic practice, without supposing that
"being known to be true" denotes a property that groups propositions
into a theoretically significant kind. We can have an account of the
use and utility of "know" without supposing that there is such a thing
as human knowledge. (Williams 1991, 113)
It is as a consequence of such a view that the very validity of the
epistemological enterprise, at least as it is commonly understood, is
called into question:
If we give up the idea of pervasive, underlying epistemological
constraints; if we start to see the plurality of constraints that
inform the various special disciplines, never mind ordinary,
unsystematic factual discourse, as genuinely irreducible; if we become
suspicious of the idea that "our powers and faculties" can be
evaluated independently of everything having to do with the world and
our place in it: then we lose our grip on the idea of "human
knowledge" as an object of theory. (Williams 1991, 106)
And to say that "human knowledge" is not a suitable object of theory
is itself to say that the epistemological project cannot be
systematically conceived. On Williams' view there is no
epistemological analysis to be conducted outside of contextual
parameters and, accordingly, there are no context-independent
standards either as the semantic contextualist model would suggest.
It is as a consequence of this stance that Williams is forced to
concede that the skeptic is perfectly correct in her assessment of our
knowledge, but only because she is operating within an epistemic
context that utilises a standard which defeats our everyday knowledge.
That is, the skeptic's conclusions are correct, but, by being confined
to a specific epistemic context, they lack the hegemony that she
requires in order to cause the intended epistemic harm. It does not
follow from the truth of skepticism that we lack the everyday
knowledge that we attribute to ourselves, or even that such knowledge
is inferior to the knowledge that the skeptic has in mind (which
would, in line with the semantic contextualist view, presuppose a
hierarchy). That is:
The skeptic takes himself to have discovered, under the conditions of
philosophical reflection, that knowledge of the world is impossible.
But in fact, the most he has discovered is that knowledge of the world
is impossible under the conditions of philosophical reflection.
(Williams 1991, 130)
So whereas the 'hierarchical' camp of semantic contextualists tend to
individuate contexts in terms of a context-transcendent criterion of
rigour, Williams' schema allows no such ordering of contexts. For him,
a context is individuated purely in terms of the epistemic structure
it endorses – in terms of the inferential relations that obtain
between the types of beliefs that that context is interested in. And
since no context employs universal standards, this contextual
epistemic structure is also identified in terms of what it takes for
granted – which propositions it regards as being immune from doubt in
terms of that context. Williams calls the defining assumptions of a
context of inquiry its "methodological necessities", and this notion
is explicitly meant to capture the chief insights behind the
Wittgensteinian notion of a hinge proposition. When we do history, for
example, we take the general veracity of historical documentation for
granted, as well as the denials of certain skeptical scenarios such as
that the world came into existence five minutes ago replete with the
traces of a distant ancestry (the so-called 'Russellian Hypothesis').
To doubt such methodological necessities (/hinge propositions) is not,
he argues, to conduct our historical investigations in a more exacting
fashion, but rather to engage in a different sort of investigation
altogether, one that is guided by traditional epistemological
concerns.
The methodological necessities of the traditional epistemological
project which, Williams claims, spawns the skeptical threat, are meant
to involve a commitment to this false doctrine of epistemological
realism. This leads, he argues, to an antiquated foundationalism, one
manifestation of which is the traditional epistemologist's concern
with the problem of the external world. This problem is meant to
reflect the inadequacy of beliefs of one type – concerning immediate
experience – at serving the purpose of epistemically supporting
beliefs of another type – concerning material objects in the external
world. With the problem so characterised, Williams maintains that it
should come as no surprise to find that it is without a solution
(there are no beliefs concerning immediate experience that are able to
act as epistemic guarantors for beliefs concerning objects in the
material world). But, he contends, this need not result in a general
external world skepticism because this conception of the inferential
ordering needed for warranted beliefs about 'external' objects is far
from obligatory. In terms of another type of inquiry, such as
psychological investigations of perception for example, we may
legitimately begin with beliefs about material objects and draw
inferences about immediate experience. And since no context has any
epistemological ascendancy over any other, the project of justifying
psychological beliefs with reference to external world beliefs is just
as valid as any epistemological theory which demanded that the
inferential relations should point in the opposite direction.
Williams' inferentialist contextualist view is thus both more radical
and more demanding than its semantic counterpart. On the one hand, it
is more radical because Williams does not concede to the skeptic that
her skepticism functions at a higher epistemic standard. Instead, he
argues that such skepticism merely reflects a different, and faulty,
conception of the epistemological landscape. Williams' view therefore
evades one strand of criticism that we saw levelled at the semantic
contextualist account above. On the other hand, it is more demanding
because, for related reasons, Williams does not believe that mere
changes in the conversational context can suffice to bring about a
different epistemic context. Instead, there must be an actual
difference in the inferential structure that is employed, and thus,
given his contextualism, a difference in what is being taken for
granted relative to what. Nevertheless, inferential contextualism may
well carry with it even more troubling problems of its own, not least
the worry that this approach is allied to a general quietistic
philosophical approach. Critical appraisal of this theory has been
limited, however, since this variant of the contextualist thesis has
tended to be obscured by its semantic counterpart (though see Putnam
1998). As the dust settles on the current wave of discussion of the
semantic contextualist proposal, one would expect this distinctive
thesis to gain a greater degree of attention.
5. Neo-Moorean Responses to Skepticism
Back, then, to Wright, or, more specifically, to what was absent in
Wright's account, viz., an analysis of knowledge that could account
for the conclusions that he presents. In essence, what Wright is
offering is a neo-Moorean response to skepticism in that he allows,
with Moore, that if we do know everyday propositions then we must know
the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses that are known to be
entailed by them. Where Wright differs from Moore is in not allowing
that one can coherently argue to this conclusion in any way that could
secure rational conviction. Like Moore, however, Wright fails to
supplement this account with an analysis of knowledge that would
support it. In so doing, Wright is failing to properly engage with
other proponents of the debate regarding radical skepticism – such as
Dretske, Nozick and DeRose – who do supplement their anti-skeptical
account with an analysis of knowledge (albeit, perhaps, only a partial
one) that backs-up their theory. Although Wright does not offer such
an account, however, there are analyses of knowledge in the literature
that might provide support for his view, and it is to these analyses
that we now turn.
Recall that the Dretskean line made Dretskean Sensitivity an essential
component of knowledge, where this demanded that an agent should have
a belief which is not only true, but which 'tracks' the truth of the
proposition in question in the nearest possible world in which that
proposition is false, no matter how 'far-off', modally speaking, that
world is. It was this element of the thesis that secured the skeptic's
first premise, (S1), because no-one's belief in the denial of a
radical skeptical hypothesis could track the truth in this sense.
Similarly, DeRose also made Dretskean Sensitivity relevant to
knowledge, albeit only as regards those propositions that were at
issue in that context. Accordingly, in skeptical conversational
contexts where skeptical hypotheses were at issue agents lacked
knowledge of these propositions. What both of these anti-skeptical
approaches have in common is thus that they allow that, at least in
some contexts, we can lack knowledge of the denials of 'far-off'
skeptical error-possibilities (and thus that the first premise of the
skeptical argument, (S1), is true, at least in some contexts).
In contrast to these lines of thought, Ernest Sosa (1999; 2000) has
argued that we should instead regard what he terms "safety" as being
central to knowledge rather than sensitivity. In essence, he
characterises this notion as follows (Sosa 1999, 142):
Safety
In all near-by possible worlds, if an agent believes P, then P is true.
Similar proposals have also been put forward by Mark Sainsbury (1997),
Williamson (2000a; 2000b, chapter 8), and Duncan Pritchard (2002c; cf.
Pritchard 2001a; 2001b; 2002a). The anti-skeptical advantage that this
kind of proposal offers over both the Dretskean line and either of the
contextualist views that we have discussed is that it allows one to
endorse a version of the Moorean proposal which neither issues in the
denial of closure nor results in contextualism.
Take the former point first. What prompted the denial of closure was
the fact that, if we take sensitivity as a necessary condition on
knowledge, then we must allow that a subject can know everyday
propositions whilst being unable to know all the known consequences of
those everyday propositions – i.e., the denials of skeptical
hypotheses. In contrast, on this view we can allow both that agents
have knowledge of everyday propositions and that they can know the
denials of radical skeptical hypotheses. Suppose, for example, that
the agent does have a safe belief in an everyday proposition. Not only
is this belief true in the actual world, but, across the range of
near-by possible worlds where she believes this proposition, it is
true there as well. Insofar as this belief really is safe, however,
then there will not be any skeptical possible worlds in the realm of
near-by possible worlds which determine that safety (henceforth, the
"realm of safety"). For if there were such worlds present in the realm
of safety, then this would suffice to undermine the agent's knowledge
of the everyday proposition since there would then be a near-by
possible world in which the agent still believes the everyday
proposition but where this proposition is false (because the skeptical
hypothesis is true). But since skeptical possible worlds are now
excluded from the realm of safety, it follows that the agent must also
have a safe belief that she is not a BIV (or, indeed, the victim of
any skeptical hypothesis). The reason for this is that there will be
no possible world within the realm of safety in which this proposition
is false, and thus, in every world in the realm of safety in which she
believes this proposition (which, I take it, is all of them), her
belief is true. Accordingly, skepticism is evaded and closure, as
least as it functions in skeptical and anti-skeptical reasoning, is
retained.
Moreover, the adoption of safety as a necessary condition on knowledge
is also able to speak to the core relevant alternatives thought that
we saw in §2. As expressed there, the thought was that I should be
able to have knowledge without having to consider far-fetched, and
therefore irrelevant, error-possibilities. This was supposed to be the
intuition that Dretske was trying to accommodate with his modal
account of knowledge, but, as we saw, he in fact ended up with a
slightly different view which did make far-fetched error-possibilities
relevant to knowledge, albeit only knowledge of the denials of
skeptical hypotheses (note that it was this element of the view that
resulted in the denial of closure). In contrast, a modal
interpretation of the RA approach that is much closer to this core
intuition is that knowledge (any knowledge) is only dependent upon
one's ability to track the truth in the relevant range of near-by
possible worlds, not also in worlds far away. Accordingly, if the
skeptical possibility is indeed far-fetched then it ought to be unable
to influence my knowledge of everyday propositions or, for that
matter, my knowledge of the denials of skeptical hypotheses. Safety
captures this intuition by allowing agents to have knowledge in both
cases provided skeptical possible worlds do not feature in the realm
of safety. Dretskean Sensitivity, in contrast, violates this intuition
by making knowledge dependent not just on the relevant circumstances
in near-by worlds but also on the circumstances that obtain in far-off
worlds (such as skeptical worlds) where the target proposition is
false.
Furthermore, since the realm of safety does not vary in response to
mere conversational factors, it follows that this is not a semantic
contextualist thesis. If the agent does indeed know everyday
propositions then, in line with the central Moorean contention, she
will also know the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses, and this
will be so no matter what conversational context the agent is in. We
thus have a Moorean variety of anti-skepticism which, whilst keeping
to the RA spirit of both the Dretskean and the semantic contextualist
proposals, lacks the epistemological revisionism of either.
This is a compelling account of how a neo-Moorean proposal might run,
and it certainly does seem to present one very plausible way of
reading the core RA thesis. It is not quite as novel as it may at
first seem, however, since one can trace the beginnings of such view
in Gail C. Stine's critical appraisal of the Dretskean thesis back in
1976. She noted that so long as one sticks to the core RA conception
of relevance then the proper conclusion to be extracted is precisely
that we shouldn't concede a lack of knowledge of the denials of
radical skeptical hypotheses, and thus reject closure. Instead, the
conclusion we should draw is that, since such skeptical
error-possibilities are indeed modally far-off, and thus irrelevant,
it follows that we do know their denials after all (insofar as we know
anything much) and thus that closure remains intact. Stine thus
reaches a similar conclusion to Sosa's, though without employing the
technical modal machinery that Sosa adduces. It is interesting to
note, however, that Stine recognised problems with this proposal that
Sosa does not mention. In particular, she saw that the difficulty
facing this brand of RA thesis is to explain how it can be that
closure holds and thus that we do know the denials of anti-skeptical
hypotheses after all, a problem that we also saw facing the semantic
contextualist account above. As Stine herself admits, such a
conclusion does indeed "sound odd". In defence of her position she
argues that this 'oddness' is not due to what is said being false,
however (as the Dretske-Nozick line would suggest), but rather
concerns the kind of false conversational implicatures that such a
claim to know generate.
Although Stine does not develop this move, it is clearly a manœuvre
that has a lot of mileage in it since it confronts head-on the worries
about the lack of diagnostic appeal of the neo-Moorean approach. After
all, one of the advantages of both the Dretskean and the semantic
contextualist line is that they can explain the intuitive appeal of
radical skepticism without succumbing to it. The neo-Moorean approach,
in contrast, seems to make it a mystery as to why we were ever taken
in by this fallacious line of reasoning in the first place. Thus, if
it could be shown that the skeptic plays on pragmatic features of our
language-games with epistemic terms in order to make her arguments
superficially plausible, then we could supplement the neo-Moorean
theory with a powerful diagnostic account which explains the
phenomenology of our engagement with radical skepticism.
Just such an account is offered in Pritchard (2002c; cf. Pritchard
2001b; 2002a). Pritchard claims that we can strengthen Sosa's account
of knowledge whilst keeping true to the basic intuition that drives
that notion (he offers an account of knowledge based on the notion of
"super-safety"). Moreover, he goes on to show that the kind of
mechanisms employed by the semantic contextualist account could just
as well be regarded as mechanisms which govern the appropriate
assertion of knowledge claims rather than as mechanisms which
influence the truth-conditions of what is claimed. For example, the
thought is that in skeptical conversational contexts it is the
standards for correct assertion of knowledge claims that is raised
(rather than the standards for knowledge), and that this fact explains
why it is that we are reluctant to ascribe knowledge in skeptical
contexts even though we are happy to ascribe such knowledge in
quotidian contexts. Accordingly, the idea is that semantic
contextualism, construed as a thesis about the fluctuating propriety
conditions of knowledge claims, could actually be put into the service
of the neo-Moorean view to offer the required diagnostic account.
Indeed, elsewhere Pritchard (2001b) argues that a similar view can be
extracted from some of Wittgenstein's remarks on "hinge" propositions,
so this view may well represent the beginnings of a thesis which
integrates the two branches of recent work as regards skepticism.
Moreover, Pritchard (2002a) also argues that Wright's distinction
between transmission and closure can be recast in terms of a
distinction between the transference of knowledge across known
entailments simpliciter (closure), and the transference of knowledge
across known entailments where the knowledge retains a certain quality
that makes it apt for proper assertion. Wright's intuition about
transmission is thus captured within this development of the
neo-Moorean model by making use of the pragmatic features of our
employment of epistemic terms.
This neo-Moorean approach is so recent that detailed critical
assessment of it has not yet appeared. Nevertheless, we can note one
possible avenue of discussion here, which is the possibly contentious
use that the diagnostic element of this theory makes of the
pragmatic/semantic distinction. If this element of the theory could be
called into question then this would suffice to scupper the diagnostic
component of the theory and thus drastically reduce its plausibility
as an anti-skeptical thesis.
6. Epistemological Externalism and the New Skeptics
Before concluding, it is worthwhile to briefly dwell upon those
influential figures in the recent epistemological debate who, in
contrast to the current mood of optimism that can be found in
epistemological discussion of the problem of radical skepticism, are
deeply suspicious that any intellectually satisfactory solution could
ever be given to this problem. The roots of this movement in the
contemporary literature can be traced back to the work of three main
figures – Unger (1971; 1975), Barry Stroud (1984; 1989) and Thomas
Nagel (1986). We saw Unger's infallibilist defence of skepticism
earlier on, so here I will summarise Stroud's and Nagel's
contribution, and highlight one way in which this variety of
'meta-skepticism' currently informs the skeptical debate, particularly
as it figures in more recent work by Stroud (1994; 1996) and Richard
Fumerton (1990; 1995).
For both Nagel and Stroud, the thought seems to be that there is
something in our philosophical quest for objectivity that inexorably
leads us to skeptical conclusions. Nagel argues, for instance, that
objectivity involves attaining a completely impartial view of reality,
one that is not tainted by any particular perspective. We must, he
argues, "get outside of ourselves", and thereby achieve the impossible
task of being able to "view the world from nowhere from within it"
(Nagel 1986, 76). We realise that the initial appearances present to a
viewpoint can be unreliable guides to reality and therefore seek to
modify our 'subjective' view with a more 'objective' perspective that
is tempered by reason and reflection. As Nagel points out, however,
the trouble with this approach is that
[...] if initial appearances are not in themselves reliable guides to
reality, [then] why should the products of detached reflection be any
different? Why aren't they [...] equally doubtful [...]? [...] The
same ideas that make the pursuit of objectivity seem necessary for
knowledge make both objectivity and knowledge seem, on reflection,
unattainable. (Nagel 1986, 76)
We can reconstruct the argument here as follows. We recognise that our
initial unmodified 'subjective' experience of the world is unreliable
and therefore should be adapted along 'objective' lines by eliminating
the 'subjective' element. For instance, initial appearances tell us,
falsely, that straight sticks suddenly become 'bent' when placed in
water. Accordingly, we modify our initial 'subjective' view with the
testimony of 'objective' scientific investigation which tells us that
the stick in fact stays straight, it is just the light that is
bending. However, and here is the crux of the matter as far as Nagel
is concerned, why do we regard this modified view as being any more
reliable than the completely 'subjective' perspective that it
replaces? After all, we cannot eliminate every trace of 'subjectivity'
and thus the problematic component of our conception of reality that
engendered the pursuit of objectivity in the first place remains.
Consequently, we are both aware of the need for objectivity whilst
also recognising that such objectivity is impossible. As a result,
according to Nagel, we are condemned to the following pessimistic
evaluation of our epistemic capacities:
The search for objective knowledge, because of its commitment to a
realist picture, is inescapably subject to skepticism and cannot
refute it but must proceed under its shadow. [...] Skepticism [...] is
a problem only because of the realist claims of objectivity. (Nagel
1986, 71)
That is, the problem of skepticism
[...] has no solution, but to recognise that is to come as near as we
can to living in the light of truth. (Nagel 1986, 231)
Moreover, since these 'realist' truths concerning objectivity are
meant to be inherent in our epistemic concepts, so it is held that
this pessimism falls naturally out of any reflective analysis of our
epistemic concepts.
Stroud makes similar claims. He writes:
The sceptical philosopher's conception of our position and of his
question for an understanding of it [...] is a quest for an objective
or detached understanding and explanation of the position we are
objectively in. What is seen to be true from a detached 'external'
standpoint might not correspond to what we take to be the truth about
our position when we consider it 'internally', from within the
practical contexts which give our words their social point.
Philosophical scepticism says the two do not correspond; we never know
anything about the world around us, although we say or imply that we
do hundreds of times a day.
I think we do have a conception of things being a certain way quite
independently of their being known or believed or said to be that way
by anyone. I think that the source of the philosophical problem of the
external world lies somewhere within just such a conception of an
objective world or in our desire, expressed in terms of that
conception, to gain a certain kind of understanding of our relation to
the world. But in trying to describe that conception I think I have
relied on nothing but platitudes we would all accept – not about
specific ways we all now believe the world to be, but just the general
idea of what an objective world or an objective state of affairs would
be. If those platitudes about objectivity do indeed express the
conception of the world and our relation to it that the sceptical
philosopher relies on, and if I am right in thinking that scepticism
can be avoided only if that conception is rejected, it will seem that
in order to avoid scepticism we must deny platitudes we all accept.
(Stroud 1984, 81-2)
And note that if responding to skepticism involves denying "platitudes
that we would all accept", then it follows that any adequate response
to the problem of radical skepticism is bound to be intellectually
unsatisfactory.
One might wonder, however, exactly how such epistemological pessimism
is to impact on the kind of anti-skeptical proposals that we have
considered in previous sections. After all, nearly all of them results
in the denial of some key claim that the skeptic makes, and does so on
motivated grounds. In what sense, then, must we accept that these
proposals, whatever the details, are all going to be intellectually
unsatisfactory?
In more recent discussion, one begins to see the emergence of a more
definitive pessimistic line, however, which may well be able to give a
more compelling expression to this worry. In general, although the
point is not always put in these terms, the complaint is that these
recent anti-skeptical approaches offer us, at best, an
epistemologically externalist response to skepticism when what we
wanted was one that functioned within an epistemologically internalist
framework.
Simplifying somewhat, we can take epistemological internalism to
consist in the claim that there is some substantive necessary
condition for knowledge which depends upon facts that the agent is in
a position to know by reflection alone. That is, the internalist
insists that meeting an appropriate 'internal' epistemic condition is
necessary for knowledge possession. Externalists, in contrast, demure
from this claim and therefore allow that agents might know merely by
meeting 'external' epistemic conditions. So, for example, externalists
tend to allow that small children or unreflective subjects (such as
the now notorious, and possibly non-existent, "chicken-sexer") can
have knowledge even though they fail to meet an internal epistemic
condition. Internalists, in contrast, set the standards for knowledge
higher and thus exclude these agents from possessing knowledge (for
more on this distinction, see the essays collected in Kornblith
(2001)).
It is notable that all of the main anti-skeptical accounts that we
have discussed so far have tended to side with externalism. For both
Dretske and Nozick, for example, the sensitivity condition is a
condition that merely needs to be met by the agent for that agent to
be a potential knower – it is not further demanded that the agent
should have the relevant reflective access to the facts which
determine that sensitivity. Similar remarks apply to the semantic
contextualist account, with both DeRose and Lewis endorsing
externalist views (though Cohen might be an exception in this
respect). Finally, the neo-Moorean accounts offered by Sosa et al are
all described in terms of an externalist epistemology. On closer
reflection, it is unsurprising that externalism should be so widely
endorsed in this way, though the reasons in each case are different.
The Dretskeans need to be externalists because it is far more
problematic to deny closure if knowledge is given an internalist
construal. If the denial of closure were not contentious enough, to
argue that one could have the kind of 'reflective' knowledge at issue
in the internalist account of both the antecedent and the entailment
and yet lack it of the consequent just seems plain absurd.
Since both the neo-Mooreans and the contextualists retain closure, it
follows that they need not be troubled by this particular motivation
for externalism. The driving force behind their adoption of
externalism is, in contrast, the fact that they allow (albeit, in the
contextualist case, relative to certain contexts) that an agent can
have knowledge of the denials of radical skeptical hypotheses. The
problem is that this seems to be precisely the sort of knowledge that
cannot be possessed under the internalist rubric because skeptical
scenarios are, ex hypothesi, phenomenologically indistinguishable from
everyday life. Accordingly, it is plausible to suppose that agents are
unable to have the required reflective access to the relevant facts
that determine the epistemic status of their beliefs when it comes to
these propositions.
Despite the current popularity of externalist accounts of knowledge,
however, one might be less sanguine about the prospects for an
externalist response to the problem of radical skepticism. After all,
the skeptical puzzle seems to be one that strikes against the prima
facie attraction of an externalist account of knowledge. As we saw
Craig in effect arguing in §2, if we cannot tell the difference
between being in the world that we think we are in now and a skeptical
possible world such as the BIV-world, then of what comfort is it to be
told that, provided we are in the world we think we are, we know a
great deal? Instead, it would seem that we want some sort of
subjective assurance as regards our knowledge that externalist
anti-skeptical accounts are not in a position to provide.
It is this line of thinking that ultimately motivates recent work by
Stroud (1994; 1996) and Fumerton (1990; 1995). For example, Fumerton
makes the following point:
It is tempting to think that externalist analyses of knowledge [...]
simply remove one level of the traditional problems of skepticism.
When one reads the well-known externalists one is surely inclined to
wonder why they are so sanguine about their supposition that our
commonplace beliefs are, for the most part, [...] knowledge. [...]
Perception, memory, and induction may be reliable processes (in
Goldman's sense) and thus given his metaepistemological position we
may [... have knowledge of] the beliefs they produce but, the sceptic
can argue, we have no reason to believe that these process are
reliable and thus even if we accept reliabilism, we have no reason to
think that the beliefs they produce [constitute knowledge]. (Fumerton
1990, 63)
In effect, the complaint that Fumerton is giving expression to here is
that externalism allows that there are certain conditions on knowledge
that we are unable to reflectively determine have obtained. Indeed,
Fumerton is more explicit about the focus of his objection when he
goes on to write that
[...] the main problem with externalist accounts, it seems to me, just
is the fact that such accounts [...] develop concepts of knowledge
that are irrelevant. [...] The philosopher doesn't just want true
beliefs, or even reliably produced beliefs, or beliefs caused by the
facts that make them true. The philosopher wants to have the relevant
features of the world directly before consciousness. (Fumerton 1990,
64)
Presumably, to argue that externalist accounts of knowledge are
problematic because they fail to demand that the relevant facts should
be "directly before consciousness" is simply to complain that such
theories make the satisfaction of non-reflectively accessible external
epistemic conditions central to knowledge possession.
Fumerton is not the only one to put forward objections to externalism
that run along these lines, though he is perhaps the most explicit
about what the complaint that he is giving voice to amounts to. For
example, a similar argument against externalism seems to be implicit
in the following passages from Stroud:
[...] suppose there are truths about the world and the human condition
which link human perceptual states and cognitive mechanisms with
further states of knowledge and reasonable belief, and which imply
that human beings acquire their beliefs about the physical world
through the operation of belief-forming mechanisms which are on the
whole reliable in the sense of giving them mostly true beliefs. [...]
If there are truths of this kind [...] that fact alone obviously will
do us no good as theorists who want to understand human knowledge in
this philosophical way. At the very least we must believe some such
truths; their merely being true would not be enough to give us any
illumination or satisfaction. But our merely happening to believe them
would not be enough either. We seek understanding of certain aspects
of the human condition, so we seek more than just a set of beliefs
about it; we want to know or have good reasons for thinking that what
we believe about it is true. (Stroud 1994, 297)
It is difficult to understand Stroud's objection here if it is not to
be construed along similar lines to that found in the passages from
Fumerton cited above. Stroud's thought seems to be that it is not
enough merely to meet the external epistemic conditions that give us
knowledge, rather we should also have the special kind of internal
access to those conditions that the internalist demands (and perhaps
even more than that).
A new debate is thus emerging in the literature which is to some
extent orthogonal to the key discussions that we have considered so
far since it questions the very presuppositions of those discussions.
Future work on the skeptical puzzle will thus enjoin participants to
not only meet the skeptical argument in a motivated fashion, but also
respond to this meta-epistemological challenge.
7. References and Further Reading
* Austin, J. L. (1961). 'Other Minds', reprinted in his
Philosophical Papers, (eds.) J. O. Urmson & G. J. Warnock, 44-84,
Clarendon Press, Oxford, England.
* Cohen, S. (1987). 'Knowledge, Context, and Social Standards',
Synthese 73, 3-26.
* Cohen, S. (1988). 'How to be a Fallibilist', Philosophical
Perspectives 2, 91-123.
* Cohen, S. (1991). 'Skepticism, Relevance, and Relativity',
Dretske and his Critics, (ed.) B. McLaughlin, 17-37, Basil Blackwell,
Oxford, England.
* Cohen, S. (1999). 'Contextualism, Skepticism, and the Structure
of Reasons', Philosophical Perspectives 13, 57-90.
* Cohen, S. (2000). 'Contextualism and Skepticism', Philosophical
Issues 10, 94-107.
* Craig, E. (1989). 'Nozick and the Sceptic: The Thumbnail
Version', Analysis 49, 161-2.
* Craig, E. (1990). Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in
Conceptual Synthesis, Clarendon Press, Oxford, England.
* Davies, M. (1998). 'Externalism, Architecturalism, and Epistemic
Warrant', Knowing Our Own Minds: Essays on Self-Knowledge, (eds.) C.
J. G. Wright, B. C. Smith & C. Macdonald, Oxford University Press,
Oxford, England.
* DeRose, K. (1995). 'Solving the Skeptical Problem',
Philosophical Review 104, 1-52.
* DeRose, K. (2000). 'How Can We Know that We're Not Brains in
Vats?', The Southern Journal of Philosophy 38, 121-48.
* Dretske, F. (1970). 'Epistemic Operators', Journal of Philosophy
67, 1007-23.
* Dretske, F. (1971). 'Conclusive Reasons', Australasian Journal
of Philosophy 49, 1-22.
* Dretske, F. (1981). 'The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge',
Philosophical Studies 40, 363-78.
* Dretske, F. (1991). 'Knowledge: Sanford and Cohen', Dretske and
his Critics, (ed.) B. McLaughlin, 185-96, Basil Blackwell, Oxford,
England.
* Fumerton, R. (1990). 'Metaepistemology and Skepticism',
Doubting: Contemporary Perspectives on Skepticism, (eds.) M. D. Roth &
G. Ross, 57-68, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Holland.
* Fumerton, R. (1995). Metaepistemology and Skepticism, Rowman &
Littlefield, Lanham, Maryland.
* Klein, P. (1981). Certainty, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis.
* Klein, P. (1995). 'Skepticism and Closure: Why the Evil Genius
Argument Fails', Philosophical Topics 23, 213-36.
* Kornblith, H. (2001). Epistemology: Internalism and Externalism,
(ed.) Basil Blackwell, Oxford, England.
* Lewis, D. (1979). 'Scorekeeping in a Language Game', Journal of
Philosophical Logic 8, 339-59.
* Lewis, D. (1996). 'Elusive Knowledge', Australasian Journal of
Philosophy 74, 549-67.
* Moore, G. E. (1925). 'A Defence of Common Sense', Contemporary
British Philosophy (2nd series), (ed.) J. H. Muirhead, Allen and
Unwin, London, England; reprinted in his Philosophical Papers, Allen &
Unwin, London, England (1959).
* Moore, G. E. (1939). 'Proof of an External World', Proceedings
of the British Academy 25; reprinted in his Philosophical Papers,
Allen & Unwin, London, England (1959).
* Nagel, T. (1986). The View from Nowhere, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, England.
* Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical Explanations, Oxford University
Press, Oxford, England.
* Pritchard, D. H. (2001a). 'Contextualism, Scepticism, and the
Problem of Epistemic Descent', Dialectica 55, 327-49.
* Pritchard, D. H. (2001b). 'Radical Scepticism, Epistemological
Externalism, and "Hinge" Propositions', Wittgenstein-Studien, 81-105.
* Pritchard, D. H. (2001c). 'Scepticism and Dreaming', Philosophia
28, 373-90.
* Pritchard, D. H. (2002a). 'McKinsey Paradoxes, Radical
Scepticism, and the Transmission of Knowledge across Known
Entailments', Synthese 130, 1-24.
* Pritchard, D. H. (2002b). 'Radical Scepticism, Epistemological
Externalism, and Closure', forthcoming in Theoria 69.
* Pritchard, D. H. (2002c). 'Resurrecting the Moorean Response to
Scepticism', forthcoming in International Journal of Philosophical
Studies 10.
* Putnam, H. (1992). Renewing Philosophy, Harvard University
Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts.
* Putnam, H. (1998). 'Skepticism', Philosophie in Synthetischer
Absicht (Synthesis in Mind), (ed.) M. Stamm, 239-68, Klett-Cotta,
Stuttguard, Germany.
* Sainsbury, R. M. (1997). 'Easy Possibilities', Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 57, 907-19.
* Sosa, E. (1999). 'How to Defeat Opposition to Moore',
Philosophical Perspectives 13, 141-54.
* Sosa, E. (2000). 'Skepticism and Contextualism', Philosophical
Issues 10, 1-18.
* Stine, G. C. (1976). 'Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and
Deductive Closure', Philosophical Studies 29, 249-61.
* Strawson, P. F. (1985). Skepticism and Naturalism: Some
Varieties, Methuen, London.
* Stroll, A. (1994). Moore and Wittgenstein on Certainty, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, England.
* Stroud, B. (1984). The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism,
Oxford University Press, Oxford, England.
* Stroud, B. (1989). 'Understanding Human Knowledge in General',
Knowledge and Scepticism, (eds.) M. Clay & K. Lehrer, Westview,
Boulder, Colorado.
* Stroud, B. (1994). 'Scepticism, 'Externalism', and the Goal of
Epistemology', Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society (supplementary
vol.) 68, 290-307.
* Stroud, B. (1996). 'Epistemological Reflection on Knowledge of
the External World', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56,
345-58.
* Unger, P. (1971). 'A Defence of Skepticism', Philosophical
Review 80, 198-219.
* Unger, P. (1975). Ignorance – A Case for Scepticism, Clarendon
Press, Oxford, England.
* Unger, P. (1984). Philosophical Relativity, Basil Blackwell,
Oxford, England.
* Unger, P. (1986). 'The Cone Model of Knowledge', Philosophical
Topics 14, 125-78.
* Williams, M. (1991). Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism
and the Basis of Scepticism, Basil Blackwell, Oxford, England.
* Williams, M. (2001). 'Contextualism, Externalism and Epistemic
Standards', Philosophical Studies 103, 1-23.
* Williamson, T. (2000a). 'Scepticism and Evidence', Philosophy
and Phenomenological Research 60, 613-28.
* Williamson, T. (2000b). Knowledge and Its Limits, Oxford
University Press, Oxford, England.
* Williamson, T. (2001). 'Comments on Michael Williams'
'Contextualism, Externalism and Epistemic Standards'', Philosophical
Studies 103, 24-33.
* Wittgenstein, L. (1969). On Certainty, (eds.) G. E. M. Anscombe
& G. H. von Wright, (tr.) D. Paul & G. E. M. Anscombe, Basil
Blackwell, Oxford.
* Wright, C. (1985). 'Facts and Certainty', Proceedings of the
British Academy 71, 429-72.
* Wright, C. (1991). 'Scepticism and Dreaming: Imploding the
Demon', Mind 397, 87-115.
* Wright, C. (2000). 'Cogency and Question-Begging: Some
Reflections on McKinsey's Paradox and Putnam's Proof', Philosophical
Issues 10, 140-63.
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