Skeptical Problems, Semantical Solutions

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Skeptics have often challenged our standard beliefs about the world by constructing alternative descriptions of how the world might be. The alternative description the skeptic offers is intended to have two essential features. First, the kind of world that would fit the skeptic's description would be very different from the kind of world we believe ourselves to inhabit. Second, a world fitting the skeptic's description would appear to its inhabitants just as our world appears to us. The skeptic challenges us to give reasons for holding on to our standard beliefs rather than taking our world to be one that fits the alternative description. Many strategies have been employed in defense against this sort of skeptical attack. In this century, a number of philosophers have looked to linguistic considerations to defend our standard beliefs. This tradition includes verificationist attempts to show that the alternative description offered by the skeptic is not, after all, incompatible with our standard description, but actually equivalent to it. It also includes quite a different strand of semantical antiskepticism which encompasses paradigm case arguments as well as certain arguments put forward by contemporary philosophers such as Donald Davidson (1984), Paul Horwich (1982), and, perhaps most famously, Hilary Putnam (1981). This second type of argument seeks to use semantical considerations to show that the skeptic's alternative description of the world is not the true one. It is this latter anti-skeptical strategy that I would like to examine here. I will begin by discussing two sorts of objections, one more technical and the other more intuitive, that have been brought against the method of dismissing a skeptic's hypothesis about the (extralinguistic) world by linguistic means. This discussion will center on Putnam's semantical refutation of an updated brain-in-vat version of Descartes' evil genius hypothesis. Put-