Reply to Stroud

Abstract

I claim that my multi-levels response to epistemological how-possible questions is better than a transcendental response. For example, suppose we ask how knowledge of the external world is possible because we suspect that there are insuperable epistemological obstacles to our ever being able to acquire such knowledge. A multi-levels response starts by identifying means of coming to know about the world around us. For example, where P is a proposition about the external world, it might start by pointing out that it is sometimes possible for us to know that P by seeing that P. This is a Level 1 response to the how-possible question, the level of means. Clearly, it isn't enough just to assert that vision is a source of knowledge. It also needs to be shown that the supposed obstacles to our seeing and thereby knowing that P can be dissipated or overcome. This is the obstacle-removing level (Level 2). Finally we might ask what makes it possible to know that P by seeing that P. What we seek at this third level, the level of enabling conditions, are background necessary conditions for knowing by the proposed means. A transcendental approach goes directly for necessary conditions. One version tries to explain how knowledge of the world around us is possible by identifying necessary conditions for our having such knowledge. Another version tries to explain how knowledge of the external world is possible by showing that our knowing things about the world around us is itself a necessary condition for something else whose reality is not in question. Arguments of the first kind are regressive transcendental arguments. Arguments of the second kind are anti-sceptical transcendental arguments. My worry about the former is that identifying what is necessary for knowledge of kind K doesn't explain how such knowledge is possible in the face of all those factors that make it look impossible. The worry about anti-sceptical transcendental arguments is that it is one thing to show that we must have knowledge of kind K and another thing to explain how knowledge of kind K is