Skeptical Hypotheses Research Articles

I Talked to a Genius and All I Got was Knowledge

Bryan Frances’s recent argument is for the epistemic position called Live Skepticism. The Live Skepticism Argument (LSA) attempts to establish a restricted set of skeptical conclusions. The LSA’s “skeptical hypotheses” are scientific and philosophical positions that are “live actual possibilities” in an intellectual community. In order to “rule out” live hypotheses, an expert must know them to be false. However, since these are live hypotheses in this expert’s intellectual community—endorsed by others who have parallel levels of knowledge, intelligence, and understanding—this expert is unable to rule them out. Consistent with the LSA is the outcome that people not exposed to these live hypotheses can know what these experts cannot. However, in this paper, I defeat the LSA by developing and defending a counterexample that focuses on the phenomenon of genius testimony. Everyone, including the LSA’s proponent, can and should allow that expertise comes in degrees. While in many cases a person’s intelligence, understanding, and knowledge are parallel to others in the field, there are some who are extraordinary in their intelligence, understanding, and knowledge (geniuses). If an expert meets with a genius, it is possible that the genius provides this individual with beliefs that can rule out a skeptical hypothesis. Therefore, an expert can have knowledge, even if the skeptical hypothesis is live and endorsed by others who have parallel levels of knowledge, intelligence, and understanding. After providing this counterexample, I present three potential objections, and show how people can know global warming exists and that smoking does not give someone cancer. I conclude by defending this counterexample from a likely reply by proponents of the LSA involving luck and knowledge.

Skepticism: The Hard Problem for Indirect Sensitivity Accounts

Keith DeRose’s solution to the skeptical problem is based on his indirect sensitivity account. Sensitivity is not a necessary condition for any kind of knowledge, as direct sensitivity accounts claim, but the insensitivity of our beliefs that the skeptical hypotheses are false explains why we tend to judge that we do not know them. The orthodox objection line against any kind of sensitivity account of knowledge is to present instances of insensitive beliefs that we still judge to constitute knowledge. This objection line offers counter-examples against the claim of direct sensitivity accounts that sensitivity is necessary for any kind of knowledge. These examples raise an easy problem for indirect sensitivity accounts that claim that there is only a tendency to judge that insensitive beliefs do not constitute knowledge, which still applies to our beliefs that the skeptical hypotheses are false. However, a careful analysis reveals that some of our beliefs that the skeptical hypotheses are false are sensitive; nevertheless, we still judge that we do not know them. Therefore, the fact that some of our beliefs that the skeptical hypotheses are false are insensitive cannot explain why we tend to judge that we do not know them. Hence, indirect sensitivity accounts cannot fulfill their purpose of explaining our intuitions about skepticism. This is the hard problem for indirect sensitivity accounts.

Skepticism, A Priori Skepticism, and the Possibility of Error

Epistemologists have differed in their assessments of what it is in virtue of which skeptical hypotheses succeed in raising doubts. It is widely thought that skeptical hypotheses must satisfy some sort of possibility constraint and that only putative knowledge of contingent and a posteriori propositions is vulnerable to skeptical challenge. These putative constraints have been disputed by a number of epistemologists advocating what we may call “the non-standard view.” My main concern in this paper is to challenge this view by identifying a general recipe by means of which its proponents generate skeptical scenarios. I will argue that many of the skeptical arguments that are founded on these scenarios undermine at most second-order knowledge and that to that extent the non-standard view’s rejection of the standard constraints on skeptical hypotheses is problematic. It will be argued that, pace the non-standard view, only in their error-inducing capacities can skeptical hypotheses challenge first-order knowledge. I will also dispute the non-standard view’s claim that its skeptical arguments bring to light a neglected form of radical skepticism, namely, “a priori skepticism.” I conclude by contending that the non-standard view’s account of how skeptical hypotheses can raise legitimate doubt actually rides piggyback on the standard ways of challenging the possibility of knowledge.

Skeptical hypotheses and moral skepticism

Moral skeptics maintain that we do not have moral knowledge. Traditionally they haven't argued via skeptical hypotheses like those provided by perceptual skeptics about the external world, such as Descartes' deceiving demon. But some believe this can be done by appealing to hypotheses like moral nihilism. Moreover, some claim that skeptical hypotheses have special force in the moral case. But I argue that skeptics have failed to specify an adequate skeptical scenario, which reveals a general lesson: such arguments are not a promising avenue for moral skeptics to take. They're ultimately weaker when applied to morality compared to perception.

In Conversation with the Skeptic: Contextualism and the Raising of Standards

I begin by describing the solution to the problem of skepticism propounded by contextualists, which constitutes the background of the rest of the paper. I then address the question of what happens when a skeptic and a non-skeptic are confronted in dialogue to the standards in play for correct knowledge ascription, on the assumption that contextualism about knowledge is right. I argue against Keith DeRose that there are reasons, both intuitive and theoretical, to conclude that the standards will be raised in such a way as to make the skeptic’s denials of knowledge true. Next, I argue, again against DeRose, for the claim that that conclusion has significant theoretical consequences. In particular, I argue that, if the standards do tend to rise, then there is a serious problem for contextualist answers to skepticism. The problem, which is sometimes called the factivity problem, is that the contextualist position is not possible to state properly unless we know in the theoretical context that skeptical hypotheses do not hold.

Effective Sceptical Hypotheses

AbstractThe familiar Cartesian sceptical arguments all involve an explanation of our experiences. An account of the persuasive power of the sceptical arguments should explain why this is so. This supports a diagnosis of the error in Cartesian sceptical arguments according to which they mislead us into regarding our perceptual beliefs as if they were justified as inferences to the best explanation. I argue that they have instead a perceptual justification that does not involve inference to the best explanation and that should not be put in doubt by the sceptical hypotheses.

Evidentialism and skeptical arguments

Cartesian skepticism about epistemic justification (‘skepticism’) is the view that many of our beliefs about the external world—e.g., my current belief that I have hands—aren’t justified. I examine the two most influential arguments for skepticism—the Closure Argument and the Underdetermination Argument—from an evidentialist perspective. For both arguments it’s clear which premise the anti-skeptic must deny. The Closure Argument, I argue, is the better argument in that its key premise is weaker than the Underdetermination Argument’s key premise. Next I examine ways of motivating each argument’s key premise. I argue that attempts to motivate them which appeal to one’s having the same evidence in skeptical scenarios, to skeptical hypotheses’ alleged ability to explain our evidence just as well as real world hypotheses, or to the fact that if skeptical scenarios were true everything would appear just as it does all fail to provide any motivation for the premises or for skepticism. But I close by considering a different argument for the key premises and skepticism that lacks the central defect of these other arguments. Future work on skepticism should focus on this final argument at the expense of the others.

STRONG, THEREFORE SENSITIVE: MISGIVINGS ABOUT DEROSE’S CONTEXTUALISM

Summary According to an uential contextualist solution to skepticism advanced by Keith DeRose, denials of skeptical hypotheses are, in most contexts, strong yet insensitive. # e strength of such denials allows for knowledge of them, thus undermining skepticism, while the insensitivity of such denials explains our intuition that we do not know them. In this paper we argue that, under some well-motivated conditions, a negated skeptical hypothesis is strong only if it is sensitive. We also consider how a natural response on behalf of DeRose appears to be equally available to his primary rival (viz., the sensitivity theorist).

McDowellian Neo-Mooreanism?

In a series of recent articles, Duncan Pritchard argues for a “neo-Moorean” interpretation of John McDowell’s anti-sceptical strategy. Pritchard introduces a distinction between “favouring” and “discriminating” epistemic grounds in order to show that, within the radical sceptical context, an absence of “discriminating” epistemic grounds allowing one to distinguish brain-in-a-vat from non-brain-in-a-vat scenarios does not preclude possessing knowledge of the denials of sceptical hypotheses. I argue that Pritchard’s account fails. First, the distinction between “favouring” and “discriminating” epistemic grounds only works for “mules-disguised-as zebras” examples, but breaks down in the radical sceptical case. Second, McDowellian disjunctivism neutralizes the radical sceptical threat, but does not refute it. Third, the “highest common factor” conception is itself responsible for generating the sceptical problem and once this is undermined by McDowellian disjunctivism, scepticism no longer stands in need of direct refutation. I conclude by showing that one can either be a McDowellian disjunctivist or a neo-Moorean, but not both.

Problems for contrastive closure: resolved and regained

The standard contextualist solution to the skeptical paradox is intended to provide a way to retain epistemic closure while avoiding the excessive modesty of radical skepticism and the immodesty of Moorean dogmatism. However, contextualism’s opponents charge that its solution suffers from epistemic immodesty comparable to Moorean dogmatism. According to the standard contextualist solution, all contexts where an agent knows some ordinary proposition to be true are contexts where she also knows that the skeptical hypotheses are false. It has been hoped that contrastivist theories of knowledge can mirror the contextualist solution while avoiding this epistemic immodesty. I review the main problems for contrastive closure and argue that none of the arguments currently in the literature pose an insurmountable problem for the contrastivist solution. However, I argue that contrastivist theories of knowledge, like their contextualist rivals, are indeed committed to epistemic immodesty.

Introspection and inference

In this paper I develop the idea that, by answering the question whether p, you can answer the question whether you believe that p. In particular, I argue that judging that p is a fallible yet basic guide to whether one believes that p. I go on to defend my view from an important skeptical challenge, according to which my view would make it too easy to reject skeptical hypotheses about our access to our minds. I close by responding to the opposing view on which our beliefs themselves constitute our only source of first-person access to our beliefs.

The Bayesian explanation of transmission failure

Even if our justified beliefs are closed under known entailment, there may still be instances of transmission failure. Transmission failure occurs when P entails Q, but a subject cannot acquire a justified belief that Q by deducing it from P. Paradigm cases of transmission failure involve inferences from mundane beliefs (e.g., that the wall in front of you is red) to the denials of skeptical hypotheses relative to those beliefs (e.g., that the wall in front of you is not white and lit by red lights). According to the Bayesian explanation, transmission failure occurs when (i) the subject’s belief that P is based on E, and (ii) P(Q|E) P(Q). No modifications of the Bayesian explanation are capable of accommodating such cases, so the explanation must be rejected as inadequate. Alternative explanations employing simple subjunctive conditionals are fully capable of capturing all of the paradigm cases, as well as those missed by the Bayesian explanation.

Radical Skepticism, Closure, and Robust Knowledge

The Neo-Moorean response to the radical skeptical challenge boldly maintains that we can know we're not the victims of radical skeptical hypotheses; accordingly, our everyday knowledge that would otherwise be threatened by our inability to rule out such hypotheses stands unthreatened. Given the leverage such an approach has against the sceptic from the very start, the Neo-Moorean line is an especially popular one; as well see, though, it faces several commonly overlooked problems. An initial problem is that this particular brand of anti-sceptical strategy is available only to a theory of knowledge that will compromise itself to especially weak epistemic standards—indeed, standards as weak as our epistemic grounds are for accepting the denials of skeptical hypotheses. And the grounds here are weak. After all, we can't support our claim to know the denials of skeptical hypotheses by appealing to any relevant discriminatory capacities, and nor is it at all clear that we can adduce any independent rational grounds that stand to favour the denial of any given skeptical hypothesis over its skeptical alternative. With this said, the aim here is to investigate whether the Neo-Moorean line could be advanced against the sceptic in a way that wouldn't require wholesale lowering of epistemic standards. Here it will be important to note that Sosa's (2007; 2009) recent virtue- based epistemology distinguishes between higher-grade and lower-grade knowledge, and for this reason, his view seems specially equipped to handle the problem of lowering epistemic standards—a problem that would otherwise seem to leave the Neo-Moorean line too pricey a gambit. Sosa, to put it plainly, could allowably grant us low-grade, animal knowledge of the denials of skeptical hypotheses and at the same time insist that not all knowledge (i.e. reflective knowledge) can be gained so cheaply. Voila! Unfortunately, as we'll see, Sosa's view as well the other two most plausible contender-views for maintaining a Neo-Moorean line—Greco's and Pritchard's—run (for similar reasons) into dead ends. What it turns out that none of these views could do effectively was to reconcile the Neo-Moorean commitment to knowing the denials of skeptical hypotheses with (i) the demand that we don't compromise the epistemic standards for knowing wholesale, and (ii) the thought that not just knowledge, but knowledge grade, gets preserved over closure. This special point about closure (and one rarely discussed) turns out to be especially devastating for what seemed like the most well-equipped strategies for taking up the Neo-Moorean line. Having set the scene as such, my final move in the paper is a positive one: to take up the task of reconciling Neo-Mooreanism with the epistemic standards worry as well as with the problem posed by closure for knowledge grade. The way out, I'll argue, is to take on board a unique variety of robust virtue epistemology according to which knowledge is thought to be situated a certain way within a gradient balance between ability and luck

Silins’s Liberalism

Nico Silins has proposed and defended a form of Liberalism about perception that, he thinks, is a good compromise between the Dogmatism of Jim Pryor and others, and the Conservatism of Roger White, Crispin Wright, and others. In particular, Silins argues that his theory can explain why having justification to believe the negation of skeptical hypotheses is a necessary condition for having justification to believe ordinary propositions, even though (contra the Conservative) the latter is not had in virtue of the former. I argue that Silins's explanation is unsuccessful, and hence that we should prefer either White/Wright-style Conservatism (which can explain this necessary condition) or Pryor-style Dogmatism (which denies that this is a necessary condition).

Liberalism and Conservatism in the Epistemology of Perceptual Belief

Liberals claim that some perceptual experiences give us immediate justification for certain perceptual beliefs. Conservatives claim that the justification that perceptual experiences give us for those perceptual beliefs is mediated by our background beliefs. In his recent paper ‘Basic Justification and the Moorean Response to the Skeptic’, Nico Silins successfully argues for a non-Moorean version of Liberalism. But Silins's defence of non-Moorean Liberalism leaves us with a puzzle: why is it that a necessary condition for our perceptual experiences to justify us in holding certain perceptual beliefs is that we have some independent justification for disbelieving various sceptical hypotheses? I argue that the best answer to this question involves commitment to Crispin Wright's version of Conservatism. In short, Wright's Conservatism is consistent with Silins's Liberalism, and the latter helps to give us grounds for accepting the former.

BonJour on explanation and skepticism

Laurence BonJour, among others, has argued that inference to the best explanation allows us to reject skeptical hypotheses in favor of our common-sense view of the world. BonJour considers several skeptical hypotheses, specifically: (i) our experiences arise by mere chance, uncaused; (ii) the simple hypothesis which states merely that our experiences are caused unveridically; and (iii) an elaborated hypothesis which explains in detail how our unveridical experiences are brought about. A central issue is whether the coherence of one’s experience makes that experience more likely to be veridical. BonJour’s recent treatment of “analog” and “digital” skeptical hypotheses is also discussed. I argue that, although there are important lessons to be learned from BonJour’s writings, his use of inference to the best explanation against skepticism is unsuccessful.

DESCARTES' RESOLUTION OF THE DREAMING DOUBT

After resolving the dreaming doubt at the end of the Sixth Meditation, Descartes concedes to Hobbes that one could apply the criterion for waking experience in a dream and thus be deceived, but he no longer considers this possibility to have skeptical force. I argue that this is a legitimate response by Descartes since 1) the dreaming doubt in the Sixth Meditation is no longer a global skeptical hypothesis as it is in the First, and 2) the level of certainty that sensory experience must meet in the Sixth Meditation is lower than it must meet in the First.

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.

Skepticism Between Excessiveness and Idleness

Abstract: Skepticism seems to have excessive consequences: the impossibility of successful enquiry and differentiated judgment. Yet if skepticism could avoid these consequences, it would seem idle. I offer an account of moderate skepticism that avoids both problems. Moderate skepticism avoids excessiveness because skeptical reflection and ordinary enquiry are immune from one another: a skeptical hypothesis is out of place when raised with in an ordinary enquiry. Conversely, the result of an ordinary enquiry cannot be used to disprove skepticism. This ‘immunity’ can be explained by theories such as contextualism, or sensitive invariantism. Moderate skepticism avoids idleness, because it can eliminate dogmatic elements from our commitments. An analogy is used to illustrate this: Consider someone who is rootless—someone who doesn't have a home. She won't take this conclusion to undermine her judgment that she is flying home for the holidays—even if she is sleeping in the guest bedroom. Similarly, a skeptic won't take the skeptical conclusion to undermine ordinary claims to know. Yet concluding that one is rootless is significant: it can shape one's commitments; for instance it can check one's nationalism. Similarly, accepting the skeptical conclusion is significant; it can undermine dogmatic commitments and ultimately bring about intellectual catharsis.

The Abductivist Reply to Skepticism

Abductivists claim that explanatory considerations (e.g., simplicity, parsimony, explanatory breadth, etc.) favor belief in the external world over skeptical hypotheses involving evil demons and brains in vats. After showing how most versions of abductivism succumb fairly easily to obvious and fatal objections, I explain how rationalist versions of abductivism can avoid these difficulties. I then discuss the most pressing challenges facing abductivist appeals to the a priori and offer suggestions on how to overcome them.