What We Can Learn from the Skeptical Puzzle

Abstract

There is reason to think that a familiar and frequently used epistemic closure principle is false. Given this, the relevant instance of that principle should be removed from a familiar skeptical argument, and replaced with an instance of a more plausible epistemic closure principle. Once this has been done, however, we see that even if the resulting skeptical argument is unsound, we need deny neither closure nor the claim that we know the things we ordinarily take ourselves to know. Nothing that the skeptic can do, at least with an argument that makes use of an epistemic closure principle, can ever force us to relinquish closure or the utterly vast stretches of knowledge that we ordinarily take ourselves to have.