Anti-skeptical Argument Research Articles

Libertarianizm, sceptycyzm jusnaturalistyczny i argument z uzasadnionego użycia siły

The article analyses the argument from the justified use of force, put forward against jusnaturalist skepticism by Stephan Kinsella. This argument is intended to show that skepticism about natural rights has become entangled in a performative contradiction, because in order to prove that no natural rights exist, it must assume the existence of such rights. The defeat of jusnaturalist skepticism, in turn, is to prove apagogically the existence of natural rights, including the libertarian private property rights. The article shows, using Hohfeld’s analysis method, that the anti-skeptical argument from the justified use of force does not achieve its goals.

Radical psychotic doubt and epistemology

ABSTRACT Wouter Kusters argues that madness has much to offer philosophy, as does philosophy to madness. In this paper, I support both claims by drawing on a mad phenomenon which I label Radical Psychotic Doubt, or RPD. First, although skepticism is a minority position in epistemology, it has been claimed that anti-skeptical arguments remain unsatisfying. I argue that this complaint can be clarified and strengthened by showing that anti-skeptical arguments are irrelevant to RPD sufferers. Second, there’s a debate about whether so-called hinge commitments are beliefs or not. I argue that RPD can be used to strengthen the case that they are. Moreover, if hinges are beliefs, some madpeople are more epistemically rational than some sane philosophers. Third, drawing on my own mad experiences, I challenge evidentialism by presenting a better candidate for a truly forced choice about what to believe than William James’ traditional religious example. I further show that in certain psychiatric contexts, evidentialism has more radical implications than Jamesian pragmatism, which comes out as more conservative. Finally, I discuss how philosophical theories like pragmatism and Pyrrhonism can provide inspiration for new and much – needed coping strategies for RPD sufferers.

Revisiting Moore’s Anti-Skeptical Argument in “Proof of an External World”

Abstract This paper argues that we should reject G. E. Moore’s anti-skeptical argument as it is presented in “Proof of an External World.” However, the reason I offer is different from traditional objections. A proper understanding of Moore’s “proof” requires paying attention to an important distinction between two forms of skepticism. I call these Ontological Skepticism and Epistemic Skepticism. The former is skepticism about the ontological status of fundamental reality, while the latter is skepticism about our empirical knowledge. Philosophers often assume that Moore’s response to “external world skepticism” deals exclusively with the former, not the latter. But this is a mistake. I shall argue that Moore’s anti-skeptical argument targets an ontological form of skepticism. Thus, the conclusion is an ontological claim about fundamental reality, while the premises are epistemic claims. If this is correct, then the conclusion outstrips the scope of its premises and proves too much.

Strategia antysceptycka eksternalizmu semantycznego

This paper discusses various answers to the problem of skepticism offered by some advocates of semantic externalism: Putnam’s argument against the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis and its reconstructions presented by Brueckner and Warfield. I argue that all these responses fall short of being successful. Brueckner’s disjunctive argument needs to be supplemented by a disquotational principle that assumes a specific interpretation of the other premises (the vat-English interpretation is excluded). Warfield’s argument rests on the principle of privileged access to the content of one’s own mental states. This additional premise is highly controversial given the externalist theory of meaning. I discuss two kinds of argument against combining semantic externalism with privileged self-knowledge: the reductio argument and the “slow-switching” arguments. The last part of the paper critically examines McKinsey’s attempt to construct a successful anti-skeptical argument.

Why Disagreement-Based Skepticism cannot Escape the Challenge of Self-Defeat

AbstractGlobal meta-philosophical skepticism based upon disagreement faces the problem of self-defeat since it undercuts its motivating conciliatory principle. However, the skeptic may easily escape this threat by adopting extensive meta-philosophical skepticism, i.e. the view that most of our philosophical beliefs are unjustified, except our beliefs in epistemically fundamental principles. As I will argue in this paper, this kind of skepticism still poses a radical challenge to philosophy as a cognitive discipline. Moreover, non-global skepticism that is still extensive undermines itself as well. The deeper reason for this is that this more modest kind of skepticism can only be motivated by the assumption that disagreement with philosophical peers is abundant and that we can identify peers only by relying on track-record arguments. But then one can argue for extensive meta-philosophical skepticism only if one presupposes that those philosophical beliefs that form the basis of track-record evaluations are justified. Here, the threat of self-defeat looms again. I will proceed by first defending the premises of this new anti-skeptical argument against standard objections from the literature. Second, I will show in more detail where the epistemic inconsistency arises in the argument for extensive meta-philosophical skepticism.

Error theory: How we came to be bamboozled by our own words?

The conversational contextualist is frequently faced with objections which aim to show that her anti-skeptical argument founded on an ?error theory? portrays a picture of the actual linguistic practice which is unsustainable. In this article, the author strives to ascertain what is the validity and argumentative power of these objections. The first part of the text illustrates the key points on which the contextualist solution of the sceptical problem is assessed as appealing, while the second part cites multiple reasons to doubt its credibility, given that it incorporates an ?error theory?. Given the reconstruction of objections to the ?error theory?, some of which we do not yet have an answer to, the author closes with the insight that there is sufficient grounds to conclude that the appeal of the conversational contextualist approach to problems of knowledge is, to a large extent, and on multiple grounds, reduced.

PERSPECTIVAL EXTERNALISM IS THE ANTIDOTE FOR RADICAL SKEPTICISM

ABSTRACTHilary Putnam (1981) provides an anti-skeptical argument motivated by semantic externalism. He argues that our best theorizing about what it takes to experience, think, and so on, entails that the world is much as we take it to be. This fact eliminates the possibility of radical skeptical scenarios, where from our perspective everything seems as it does in the actual case, but we are widely and systematically mistaken. I think that this approach is generally correct, and that it is the most promising strategy for undermining radical skepticism. There are, however, well-discussed difficulties with Putnam's way of pursuing this strategy (see especially Anthony Brueckner 1986). I argue that in order to avoid these objections we will have to be more radical externalists than Putnam proposed; in particular, we will have to beperspectival externalists. According to perspectival externalism, a subject's reliable relations to her environment play a crucial role in determining not only the contents of her mental events, but also what it is like for her to grasp those contents. While semantic externalism is widely accepted in epistemology, perspectival externalism is not. I argue that perspectival externalism is independently more plausible than mere semantic externalism, and that such an account can enable us to better pursue Putnam's anti-skeptical strategy.

Why warrant transmits across epistemological disjunctivist Moorean-style arguments

Epistemological disjunctivists (such as Duncan Pritchard and John McDowell) make appeal to Moorean-style anti-skeptical arguments. It is often held that one problem with using Moorean-style arguments in the context of a response to skepticism is that such arguments are subject to a kind of epistemic circularity. The specific kind of epistemic failure involved has come to be known as a failure of warrant transmission. It would likely pose a problem for the anti-skeptical ambitions of the epistemological disjunctivist if his version of the Moorean-style argument failed to transmit warrant; but no epistemological disjunctivist has offered an argument to show that this is not so. In this paper, I fill the gap by arguing that warrant transmits across epistemological disjunctivist Moorean-style arguments.

In Defense of Love Internalism

In recent defenses of moral responsibility skepticism, which is the view that no human agents are morally responsible for their actions or character, a number of theorists have argued against Peter Strawson’s (and others’) claim that “the sort of love which two adults can sometimes be said to feel reciprocally, for each other” would be undermined if we were not morally responsible agents. Among them, Derk Pereboom (Living without free will. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2001, Ideas y Valores 141:5–25, 2009) and Tamler Sommers (Philos Q 57(28):321–342, 2007, Relative justice: cultural diversity, free will, and moral responsibility. Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2012) most forcefully argue against this conception of love. However, in this paper, I plan to defend the claim that there is an essential connection between love and moral responsibility, a thesis I will call love internalism. To begin, I will specify the content and scope of love internalism, and consider ways in which other theorists have attempted to motivate it. I will then consider the various arguments that Pereboom and Sommers advance against love internalism. These arguments, it seems to me, offer us powerful reasons to reject several of the ways in which philosophers have tried to connect moral responsibility to love. Consequently, in light of these criticisms, I will further precisify the content of love internalism. And as we will see, love internalism (as I argue for it) is immune to Pereboom’s and Sommers’ criticisms. Moreover, when its content is sufficiently clarified, love internalism can serve as a plausible premise in an anti-skeptical argument. I thus conclude by arguing that this suitably reformulated statement of love internalism offers a significant challenge to moral responsibility skepticism of the sort Pereboom and Sommers endorse.

Perceptual Anti-Individualism and Skepticism

In “Perceptual Entitlement, Reliabilism, and Scepticism,” Frank Barel explores some important and under-discussed questions regarding the relation between Tyler Burge’s views on perceptual entitlement, on the one hand, and the problem of skepticism, on the other. In this note, I would like to comment on a couple of aspects of Barel’s article. First, I have my own take, different from Barel’s, on the question of whether we can sketch an a priori anti-skeptical argument proceeding from perceptual anti-individualism. Second, I discuss the question whether Barel’s “Rationalistic” anti-skeptical argument is successful.

Qué tiene de nuevo el argumento antiescéptico de D. Davidson

Some time ago I presented a paper on “The anti-skeptical argument of Donald Davidson and its radical innovations”. More recently I read a few articles that raised some objections to the argument which I think are not correct. In this article I analyze these objections as a way to rework the innovations that I tried to highlight in the previous article. The anti-skeptical argument of Davidson has two successive arguments, viz. an argument for the veridical nature of belief and an argument that relies on semantic externalism. A first objection was that the appeal to the principle of charity in the context of a response to the skeptic is to assume the point in question. A second objection is that relying on externalism in an anti-skeptical argument is a crude petitio principii, as externalism implies the existence of external objects. However, I will claim that considering the problem as a whole the externalist assumption is not a fallacious one but an assumption derived by necessity from within the very frame of Cartesian reflection. The third objection I wish to consider has to do with whether this method of identifying causes gives us an objective world or just a subjective one. I think that these objects identified in the speakers’ triangulation are the objects of the public world. Key words: externalism, anti-skepticism, objectivity.

Moorean responses to skepticism: a defense

Few philosophers believe that G. E. Moore’s notorious proof of an external world can give us justification to believe that skepticism about perceptual beliefs is false. The most prominent explanation of what is wrong with Moore’s proof—as well as some structurally similar anti-skeptical arguments—centers on conservatism: roughly, the view that someone can acquire a justified belief that p on the basis of E only if he has p-independent justification to believe that all of the skeptical hypotheses that undermine the support lent by E to p are false. In this paper I argue that conservatism does not make trouble for Moore’s proof. I do this by setting up a dilemma concerning the notion of “justification to believe” that figures in conservatism. On one understanding of justification to believe, conservatism is subject to obvious counterexamples. On another understanding of justification to believe, conservatism is consistent with Moore’s “proof” conferring justification upon its conclusion. Since these two understandings exhaust the logical space, the conservative indictment of Mooreanism fails.

Kant's Concepts of Justification

Epistemologists surveying the literature on “Kant’s epistemology” often feel at sea. Even bracketing differences in terminology and emphasis, Kant’s writing about knowledge can seem foreign to the contemporary discussion in a way that, for instance, Hume’s or Reid’s does not. Those working in Kant’s epistemology, on the other hand, dissect with great care his arguments about space and time as the forms of intuition, the deductions of the categories, the structure of the antinomies, the prohibition on knowledge of things-inthemselves, and so forth. But none of these topics bears any obvious relation to what goes on in much contemporary epistemology. The main exception, perhaps, is the literature on the Refutation of Idealism: there we find an attempt on the part of commentators to articulate Kant’s anti-skeptical argument in a way that contemporary epistemologists will appreciate. Typically, however, the conclusion is that Kant’s argument is a miserable failure when judged by contemporary standards or successful only insofar as it is bound up with Kant’s other views and thus of less interest to the general philosophical public. In this paper I want to discuss a neglected portion of Kant’s epistemology that, by contrast, does connect directly to topics of great interest in contemporary thinking about knowledge, and does not rely on any peculiarly Kantian doctrines. I will also suggest, however, that understanding this portion of the critical philosophy can be very useful for those interested in the finer details of Kantian exotica. The portion of Kant’s epistemology that I have in mind is his theory of justification, where by “justification” I mean the evaluative concept that specifies conditions under which a propositional attitude is rationally acceptable with a moderate-to-high degree of confidence. Kant employs bothepistemic

The Aristotelian Prescription

From a number of quarters have come attempts to answer some form of skepticism—about knowledge of the external world, freedom of the will, or moral reasons—by showing it to be performatively self-defeating. Examples of this strategy are subject to a number of criticisms, in particular the criticism that they fail to shift the burden of proof from the anti-skeptical position, and so fail to establish the epistemic entitlement they seek. To these approaches I contrast one way of understanding Kant‟s core anti-skeptical arguments in the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant‟s goal is the more modest one of showing the applicability of the concepts of substance and cause to experience, against those who might call such application incoherent, or a category mistake. I explain why this goal makes Kant‟s approach more promising than those of neoKantian practitioners of otherwise structurally-similar strategies. In his book Insight, Bernard Lonergan purports to demonstrate that certain forms of skepticism are self-defeating. He calls the strategy exemplified by his arguments the “Aristotelian prescription” for dealing with skepticism, after Aristotle‟s discussion, in Book Γ of his Metaphysics, of the impossibility of maintaining that the principle of non-contradiction is false. According to this strategy, if some form of skepticism is performatively self-defeating, the prescription for dealing with it lies in “getting the skeptic to talk”: in articulating his skepticism the skeptic refutes himself. 1 The trick, of course, is showing that the target skepticism really is self-defeating. In this paper I contrast two approaches to filling the Aristotelian prescription. Practitioners of the first approach include Lonergan, C.I. Lewis, Joseph Boyle, Germain Grisez,

Problems For Semantic Externalism and A Priori Refutations of Skeptical Arguments

Summary A familiar sort of argument for skepticism about the external world appeals to the evidential similarity between what is presumed to be the normal case and the case where one is a brain in a vat (or BIV). An argument from Putnam (1981, ch. 1) has been taken by many to provide an a priori refutation of this sort of skeptical argument. The question I propose to address in this paper is whether Putnam's argument affords us an a priori refutation of skeptical arguments that appeal to the claim that one does not know that one is not a BIV. I will develop a negative answer to this question along two related fronts. Along the first front I defend against new criticisms the common position that the externalism on which Putnam's argument is based entails skepticism about the meanings of sentences in our language and the contents of our thoughts. I do not take this to be a refutation of externalism or externalist arguments; rather, I see this as a motivation to locate the difficulty with arguments for externalism. But if externalism is abandoned, of course, the anti-skeptical argument it has widely been taken to support must be abandoned along with it. I will argue, however, that this is not a significant loss, because along a second front I will argue that externalism cannot be given a priori justification; it is therefore ill-suited to ground an a priori refutation of BIV skepticism anyway.

Internal Realism, Metaphysical Realism, and Brains in a Vat*

The paper explores the relationship between skepticism on the one hand and the metaphysical realist and the internal realist conceptions of truth on the other. After a brief description of the metaphysical realist and the internal realist positions, it is argued that the former but not the latter is committed to an important sort of skepticism, namely, that we might be wrong about practically everything at the same time. First an abstract argument is presented to this effect, then the issue is further clarified through an analysis of Hilary Putnam's anti-skeptical argument about brains in a vat. The analysis shows that the argument can be rejected only from the metaphysical realist standpoint. Since the argument is conclusive from the internal realist point of view, internal realism, in contrast with metaphysical realism, is safe from skepticism.

Knowing the World and Knowing Our Minds

In Reason, Truth and History Hilary Putnam (1981) offered an argument purporting to show that Brain-in-a-Vat (hereafter BIV) skepticism can be refuted on the assumption that central features of the causal theory of reference are correct. Many philosophers have discussed Putnam's proposal, defending both the pro and con sides of the debate.' The debate continues in the current literature with Putnamians such as Tymoczko and Dell'Utri offering ever more intricate defenses of the anti-skeptical position and critics such as David and Brueckner rebutting these defenses. As things now stand, Putnam's critics are carrying the debate. Philosophers, I claim, have come to a (perhaps loose) consensus that although the BIV hypothesis is false, it is not provably false: the Putnamian anti-skeptical project is a failure. Unless a major improvement is forthcoming from the Putnamian camp, anti-skeptical arguments like that of Putnam will remain in disfavor. In this paper, with an eye on some of the recent literature concerning first person knowledge of mental content, I will provide the needed improvement.

Neither Mentioning 'Brains in a Vat' nor Mentioning Brains in a Vat Will Prove that We Are Not Brains in a Vat

In chapter I of Reason, Truth, and History Hilary Putnam has presented an anti-skeptical argument purporting to prove that we are not brains in a vat. How exactly Putnam's argument goes is somewhat controversial. A number of competing reconstructions have been proposed. They suffer from a defect which they share with what seems to be Putnam's own version of the argument. In this paper I wish to examine a very simple and rather natural reconstruction of the argument which is a failure like its colleagues but for somewhat different reasons. Here it is:

Transcendental Arguments II

Kant was concerned to refute Cartesian skepticism by showing that the existence of objects located in space is a condition for the possibility of self-conscious experience. There is widespread disagreement among Kant scholars about how Kant intended this refutation to proceed and even about which parts of the Critique of Pure Reason embody the crux of the Kantian anti-skeptical strategy. In this paper, I will examine what I take to be the most promising kind of reconstruction of Kant's anti-skeptical strategy-promising because of its potential anti-skeptical force and not because of its fidelity to Kant's intentions. This paper, then, is an examination of an antiCartesian epistemological position and not a piece of Kant scholarship. According to the position in question, it follows from the fact that one is the subject of self-conscious experience that there are outer objects-physical objects located in space. Therefore, according to this position, a Cartesian skeptic cannot consistently maintain that he is self-conscious yet deny that one can know whether or not there exist any outer objects. The distinguishing feature of the kind of reconstruction of Kant which I discuss is its construal of what is involved in self-consciousness. Since the key premise of the reconstruction's anti-skeptical argument is that one is selfconscious, the intended construal of self-consciousness is obviously crucial. On the construal in question, one has knowledge about temporally diverse experiences simply in virtue of being self-conscious. I call this the wide construal of self-consciousness, to be contrasted with the narrow construal, on which it is not held that selfconsciousness involves knowledge of experiences which exist at different times. On such a construal, one might hold only that if one is self-conscious, then one has the ability to know of a current experience that it belongs to oneself (one can self-ascribe a current experience, in Strawson's phrase). Different writers have different views about the nature of the knowledge concerning temporally diverse experiences which is supposedly entailed by self-consciousness.

An Anti-Skeptical Argument at the Deduction

An Anti-Skeptical Argument at the Deduction