Critical Common-Sensism and Rational Self-Control

Abstract

Whenever philosophers have proclaimed the necessity of meeting sceptical challenges in order to provide secure foundations for our knowledge or acquiesced in scepticism because those challenges cannot be met, some of their contemporaries have objected that the weight placed upon these sceptical challenges is unwarranted. Since the suggestion that all might be a dream does not shake any of my everyday certainties, it is complained, it has no more relevance to philosophy than it does to my attempts to organize my domestic life. The thought experiment of the first Meditation produces no real doubt; the doubts considered by Pyrrhonists and Cartesians are 'unnatural' or 'unreasonable'. I know that I am awake, that I can see my hand, that fire burns, that murder is wrong: and since sceptical challenges to these beliefs do not shake my confidence in them, it is reasonable to rely upon them in developing an adequate understanding of how I am able to investigate my surroundings. Merely pointing out that we cannot doubt such things, or that we find it 'unreasonable' to doubt them cuts little philosophical ice. The underlying issue concerns whether our failure to doubt such propositions is legitimate; it may rest upon a psychological compulsion which hides from us the illegitimacy of our methods of inquiry. Describing such doubts as 'unreasonable' rejects this possibility but is merely a rhetorical flourish unless we can explain why relying upon such beliefs is legitimate. We must decide whether appeal to such 'common-sense' certainties embodies a response to fundamental epistemological issues or is simply an attempt to ignore them.