Threat Of Skepticism Research Articles

Introspective disputes deflated: the case for phenomenal variation

Sceptics vis-a-vis introspection often base their scepticism on ‘phenomenological disputes’, ‘introspective disagreement’, or ‘introspective disputes’ (ID) (see Kriegel in Phenomenol Cogn Sci 6(1):115–136, 2007; Bayne and Spener in Philos Issues 20(1):1–22, 2010; Schwitzgebel in Perplexities of consciousness, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2011): introspectors massively diverge in their opinions about experiences, and there seems to be no method to resolve these issues. Sceptics take this to show that introspection lacks any epistemic merit. Here, I provide a list of paradigmatic examples, distill necessary and sufficient conditions for IDs, present the sceptical argument encouraged by IDs, and review the two main strategies (resolution and containment) to reject such a scepticism. However, both types of strategies are unsatisfactory. In order to save introspection from the looming sceptical threat, I advocate a deflationary strategy, based on either an ‘Argument from Perceptual Kinship’ or an ‘Argument from Ownership’. In the end, there cannot be any genuine IDs, for nothing can fulfil the reasonable conditions for IDs. What looks like IDs may instead be indicators of phenomenal variation. Debates that look like IDs may then arise even if introspection were a perfect method to know one’s mind. Thus, scepticism vis-a-vis introspection based on IDs rests on shaky grounds.

Meta-Incommensurability between Theories of Meaning: Chemical Evidence

Attempting to compare scientific theories requires a philosophical model of meaning. Yet different scientific theories have at times—particularly in early chemistry—pre-supposed disparate theories of meaning. When two theories of meaning are incommensurable, we must say that the scientific theories that rely upon them are meta-incommensurable. Meta-incommensurability is a more profound sceptical threat to science since, unlike first-order incommensurability, it implies complete incomparability.

Skeptical Theism, Moral Skepticism, and Divine Commands

Over the last twenty-five years skeptical theism has become one of the leading contemporary responses to the atheological argument from evil. However, more recently, some critics of skeptical theism have argued that the skeptical theists are in fact unwittingly committed to a malignant form of moral skepticism. Several skeptical theists have responded to this critique by appealing to divine commands as a bulwark against the alleged threat of moral skepticism. In this paper we argue that the skeptical theists’ appeal to divine commands fails to rescue their position from the threat of a worrisome form of moral skepticism.

A Silent Melody: John Henry Newman’s Fifteenth Oxford University Sermon as an Expression of Personal Struggle

Although Newman’s Fifteenth Oxford University Sermon is often considered a precursor to An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (1845), the following essay views this Sermon as an expression of Newman’s personal struggle from 1839 to 1845: in the midst of confusion, he pondered; against the threat of liberal skepticism, he defended truth; in the face of doubt, he reaffirmed his relationship with God.

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.

(Re)encountering Individuality: Schlegel's Romantic Imperative as a Response to Nihilism

According to Friedrich Schlegel: “The Romantic imperative demands [that] all nature and science should become art [and] art should become nature and science”; “[P]oetry and philosophy should be made unified”, and “life and society [should be made] poetic”. The aim of this paper is to explain why Schlegel believes that this is an imperative that constrains philosophy and ordinary life. I argue that the answer to this question requires that we regard the Romantic imperative as a response to the skeptical worry that was introduced by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi as nihilism. The aspect of nihilism that I discuss concerns the worry that we are incapable of experiencing individuals qua individuals. According to Schlegel, this skeptical threat requires a reorientation in thought and philosophical method, one that must be modeled on the aesthetic orientation towards the world. More precisely, the experience of individuals qua individuals, which is called into question by the nihilist, depends on the special normative structure of the creative and critical attitude towards art and beauty that Schlegel called Romantic Poesie. Kant failed to address nihilism because he failed to recognize that the normative structure that he himself ascribed to the judgment of taste is required also for experiencing individuals as individuals, and for being properly responsive to persons.

The Forgotten Foundations of Hart and Sacks

The set of teaching materials known as The Legal Process continue to exert tremendous influence over mainstream public-law scholarship. Developed by Harvard Law Professors Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks in the late 1950s, those materials formed the cornerstone of the legal education of generations of lawyers, judges, and legal scholars. In part for that reason, the methods of legal interpretation and institutional analysis they articulated arguably still constitute the reigning paradigm of scholarship in the areas of statutory interpretation, federal courts, and administrative law.Despite their pervasive influence, however, the philosophical and jurisprudential foundations of The Legal Process are poorly understood. The standard historical account of the text denies any such foundations exist, characterizing it instead as an effort by its editors to respond to the skeptical threat of Legal Realism by advancing an “instrumentalist” or “neutral” theory of law that denied the need for, or value of, any deeper philosophical justification. Though originally offered as a critique of the approach embodied in the teaching materials, that account has been accepted even by those working within the Legal Process framework.That acceptance is surprising and troubling, because the standard historical account is deeply mistaken. In the first chapter of The Legal Process, the editors consciously advance controversial positions on the nature of morality, law, and legal knowledge. And if one looks carefully at those positions and the sources the editors rely on in staking them out, one can see that they were trying to construct a model of legal practice and scholarship based on the metaphysical and epistemological doctrines of one strand of philosophical pragmatism. Understanding such philosophical commitments not only enables us to better explain how Hart and Sacks took themselves to be responding to Legal Realism, but also forces us to consider how more recent efforts to ground legal practice fare in comparison.

The Surrealism of the Habitual: From Poetic Language to the Prose of Life

This article argues that the later philosophy of Wittgenstein has significant affinities with surrealist approaches to the ordinary. It links the question of ordinary language first to the dilemmas of poetic speech after Mallarmé, then to a current of thought on everyday life that emerges in France in the wake of surrealism (Lefebvre, Blanchot, Certeau). Finally, a reading of prose texts by Breton and Aragon brings together these two lines of argument, demonstrating that surrealism appeals to ordinary language and everyday life as a remedy against the threat of scepticism. Surrealist manipulations of language are less a departure from the real than an attempt both to restore and to renew the human relation with the world. Obscured by its very familiarity, the everyday comes into view as what Cavell calls the ‘surrealism of the habitual’.

On the Necessity of Beauty

In the Critique of Judgment Kant argues that we may assume a certain ‘common inner sense’ on pain of skepticism. I present an interpretation of this argument, which holds that its skeptical threat involves the threat of a regress for judgment, that it argues for a principle underlying both empirical cognition and judgments of beauty, and that no ‘everything is beautiful problem’ results. This principle is essentially ‘epistemologically normative’ rather than moral, although in the end the moral raises its head. Kant's account is important not only for his aesthetic theory but for his theory of empirical cognition.

Quantum probabilities and the conjunction principle

A recent argument by Hawthorne and Lasonen-Aarnio purports to show that we can uphold the principle that competently forming conjunctions is a knowledge-preserving operation only at the cost of a rampant skepticism about the future. A key premise of their argument is that, in light of quantum-mechanical considerations, future contingents never quite have chance 1 of being true. We argue, by drawing attention to the order of magnitude of the relevant quantum probabilities, that the skeptical threat of Hawthorne and Lasonen-Aarnio’s argument is illusory.

Sosa on scepticism

In my remarks, I discuss Sosa's attempt to deal with the sceptical threat posed by dreaming. Sosa explores two replies to the problem of dreaming scepticism. First, he argues that, on the imagination model of dreaming, dreaming does not threaten the safety of our beliefs. Second, he argues that knowledge does not require safety, but a weaker condition which is not threatened by dreaming skepticism. I raise questions about both elements of his reply.

SCEPTICISM AND THE IMAGINATION MODEL OF DREAMING

As a solution to dream scepticism, Ernest Sosa has argued that when we dream, we do not believe the contents of our dreams, but rather imagine them. Thus dreams do not cause false beliefs; so my beliefs cannot be false as a result of being caused by dreams. I argue that even assuming that Sosa is correct about the nature of dream experience, belief in wakefulness on these grounds is epistemically irresponsible. The proper upshot of the imagination model is to recharacterize the way we think about dream scepticism: the sceptical threat is not that we have false beliefs. So even though dreams do not involve false beliefs, they still pose a sceptical threat, which I elaborate.

ACKNOWLEDGING A HIDDEN GOD: A THEOLOGICAL CRITIQUE OF STANLEY CAVELL ON SCEPTICISM

In his early work, the philosopher Stanley Cavell offers a sustained engagement with the threat of epistemological scepticism, shaped by the intuition that although (as the late Wittgenstein shows) ordinary language use is the practice within which alone meaning is possible (and which can thus not be further analysed or rationalised), it is also a basic human inclination to wish to escape the limitations of the ‘ordinary’. This, for Cavell, is the root of scepticism. Scepticism, on this view, thus appears not primarily as an epistemological but as an (injurious) moral stance, which cannot be refuted but must be continually confronted and overcome. Vis‐à‐vis scepticism, ‘acknowledgement’ is the practice‐based recognition of the world and other people in their continuing elusiveness, which ineluctably involves risk, but just so is the only way of knowing that is appropriate to and honours the (finite) human condition. One problematic aspect of this (very fertile) approach is that Cavell's secular viewpoint makes it difficult for him to say both why the desire for a ‘beyond’ arises in the first place, and why its expression as denial is morally wrong (rather than merely misguided). His approach thus invites a theological ‘supplementation’ which grounds the human condition in an original and real relation to God that is meant to draw the believer, through Christ, into the divine life itself. Such a reinterpretation both elucidates the concepts of scepticism and acknowledgement, and makes these concepts available for a theological outlook that is able to accommodate Cavell's profound insights into ‘the human’.

KANT'S TRANSCENDENTAL STRATEGY

The interpretation of transcendental arguments remains a contentious issue for contemporary epistemology. It is usually agreed that they originated in Kant's theoretical philosophy and were intended to have some kind of anti-sceptical efficacy. I argue that the sceptic with whom Kant was concerned has been consistently misidentified. The actual sceptic was Hume, questioning whether the faculty of reason can justify any of our judgements whatsoever. His challenge is a sceptical argument regarding rule-following which engenders a vicious regress. Once this sceptical threat is properly identified, the prospects of transcendental arguments must be re-evaluated.

The modality principle and work-relativity of modality

Davies argues that the ontology of artworks as performances offers a principled way of explaining work-relativity of modality. Object oriented contextualist ontologies of art (Levinson) cannot adequately address the problem of work-relativity of modal properties because they understand looseness in what counts as the same context as a view that slight differences in the work-constitutive features of provenance are work-relative. I argue that it is more in the spirit of contextualism to understand looseness as context-dependent. This points to the general problem—the context of appreciation is not robust enough to ground modal intuitions about objective entities. In general, when epistemology dictates ontology there is always a threat of anti-realism, scepticism and relativism. Davies also appeals to the modality principle—an entity’s essential properties are all and only its constitutive properties. Davies understands essentiality in a traditional way: a property P is an essential property of an object o iff o could not exist and lack P. Kit Fine has recently made a convincing case for the view that the notion of essence is not to be understood in modal terms. I explore some of the implications of this view for Davies’ modal argument for the performance theory.

Berkeley au siecle des lumieres. Immaterialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siecle (review)

Reviewed by: Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècle Todd Ryan Sébastien Charles . Berkeley au siècle des Lumières: Immatérialisme et scepticisme au XVIIIe siècle. Preface by Geneviève Brykman . Paris: Vrin, 2003. Pp. 368. Paper, € 28,00. The reception accorded to Berkeley's immaterialism by eighteenth-century philosophers constitutes one of the great puzzles of early modern philosophy. How is it possible that Berkeley, whose announced purpose in both the Principles and Three Dialogues was to refute "Skeptics and Atheists," should quickly come to be seen as the foremost champion of Pyrrhonian skepticism, and indeed of atheistic solipsism? To be sure the caricature of philosophical opponents for polemical purposes is hardly limited to Berkeley. Yet from the [End Page 495] modern point of view Berkeley, the "good Bishop" who tirelessly insisted on the consonance of immaterialism with common sense, as well as the indispensable role of God as cause of our ideas of sense, seems a rather unlikely candidate for the near universal hostility—one might even say vilification—that was to be his lot. Forty years ago Harry M. Bracken attempted to unravel this paradox in his classic study The Early Reception of Berkeley's Immaterialism. Through a careful and philosophically informed examination of early accounts of Berkeley's immaterialism, Bracken argued that the distorted image of Berkeley that was to become the common currency of Enlightenment thinkers had its origin in the earliest accounts of Berkeley's work, most notably a pair of reviews in the Jesuit journal Mémoires de Trévoux, and a vituperative attack on "the atheism of the Immaterialists" by Father Tournemine. According to Bracken, the image of Berkeley as a radical disciple of Malebranche who pushed the Oratorian's philosophy to its logical conclusion by denying the existence of matter was promoted by the Jesuits as part of their theological and political struggle against Cartesianism. It was also in these early reviews that Berkeley's name was first associated with the legendary "egoist" philosopher who in addition to denying the existence of material substance, further claimed that his was the only created spirit in existence. Sébastien Charles's impressive new study extends Bracken's work by carefully documenting the dissemination of this distorted image of Berkeley throughout the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Europe. Charles's book is a comprehensive and impressively erudite survey of the use (and misuse) of Berkeley in the writings of the philosophes, as well as later thinkers, including the Idéologues and members of the Berlin Academy. Sadly, though perhaps not unexpectedly, the texts that Charles surveys afford little critical insight to interpreters of Berkeley. The misreadings of Berkeley are so egregious and so pervasive that the philosophy of the Principles and Three Dialogues is generally disfigured beyond recognition. Indeed, even to speak of a "misreading" of Berkeley is somewhat misleading, since many of those who took up the task of refuting immaterialism seem not to have read him at all. However, Charles's aim is much less to shed interpretive light on Berkeley's philosophy than to rectify the long-standing image of the eighteenth century as an era of unbridled epistemological optimism. Emphasizing the confrontations with radical skepticism to be found in the writings of thinkers as diverse as Rousseau and Diderot, La Mettrie and Destutt de Tracy, Charles argues that far from ignoring the threat of radical skepticism, materialists and dualists, deists and Christians made common cause in their struggle against what they took to be Berkeley's alleged "egoism." Indeed, for Charles, "the question of solipsism was the central problem for the metaphysics of the Enlightenment." The ubiquity of references to Berkeley among these thinkers certainly argues in favor of Charles's thesis. Yet the attempt to survey such a large number of authors frequently necessitates an abbreviated treatment that renders difficult the task of assessing the relative importance of the confrontation with radical skepticism in any individual thinker's system. Further, the very weakness and formulaic character of the attempted refutations might reasonably raise suspicions as to whether the threat of solipsism was taken as seriously as Charles maintains...

Foundationalism and the Metaphysics of Practical Reasons

This paper argues that much contemporary thought about reasons is saddled with a questionable assumption. The assumption is that reasons owe their normative force to their metaphysical nature; or in other words, that practical is a metaphysical kind. This assumption is traced to an implicit foundationalism in views of reasons, which is itself a response to the threat of a form of skepticism: some reason must be able to stop a regress of reasons, on pain of there being no reasons for action at all. However, foundationalism about reasons, with its implicit commitment to reasons as a metaphysical kind, is not the only way to halt the skeptical threat. A contextualist alternative is sketched and some reasons are offered to prefer it. Much ink has been spilled in the last thirty years or so debating the nature and source of our reasons to act—our reasons. A slow revolt against once-hegemonic instrumental theories has sparked new creativity among Humeans, Kantians, Aristotelians, and others. Virtually all of these views, however, share a common assumption, or perhaps better, a common picture of the form an answer must take. In this picture, our reasons to act are grounded in some kind of thing, which by its very nature provides us those reasons. More specifically, it is commonly assumed that there is some metaphysical kind appropriately labeled pract ical reasons—the debate, then, is a battle over which kind this is, and what its properties are. Do our reasons spring from contingent, subjective desire, or from the Form of the Good? Are they found in normatively loaded value, or ordinary natural fact? Is the source of our reasons subjective or objective? Agent-relative or agentneutral? Necessary or contingent? On this picture, thought begins with metaphysics. Auslegung, Vol. 27, No. 1

John McDowell on Experience: Open to the Sceptic?

The aim of this paper is to show that John McDowell’s approach to perception in terms of “openness”remains problematically vulnerable to the threat of scepticism. The leading thought of the openness view is that objects, events and others in the world, and no substitute, just are what is disclosed in perceptual experience. An account which aims to defend this thought must show, therefore, that the content of perceptual experience does not “all short” of its objects. We shall describe how McDowell defends the openness view with reference to the disjunctive analysis of appearances (sections II and III); argue that his defence includes features which are both inconsistent with and unnecessary for the openness view (section IV); and show how those features call into question the success of McDowell’s route of response to sceptical arguments (section V). Finally, we sketch an alternative approach to openness and conclude that the explosive effect of letting loose the conception of experience advanced by the openness view has yet to be felt in the English‐speaking world (section VI).

The epistemic virtues of consistency

The lottery paradox has been discussed widely. The standard solution to the lottery paradox is that a ticket holder is justified in believing each ticket will lose but the ticket holder is also justified in believing not all of the tickets will lose. If the standard solution is true, then we get the paradoxical result that it is possible for a person to have a justified set of beliefs that she knows is inconsistent. In this paper, I argue that the best solution to the paradox is that a ticket holder is not justified in believing any of the tickets are losers. My solution avoids the paradoxical result of the standard solution. The solution I defend has been hastily rejected by other philosophers because it appears to lead to skepticism. I defend my solution from the threat of skepticism and give two arguments in favor of my conclusion that the ticket holder in the original lottery case is not justified in believing that his ticket will lose.

Practical Skepticism and the Reasons for Action

At least since Descartes's Meditations philosophers in the West have been concerned to defend the rationality of our beliefs from the threat of epistemological skepticism. The idea that there might be nothing which we know, or more radically, which we have even the slightest reason to believe, is one that many philosophers have thought to be deserving of serious attention. It seems somewhat odd, therefore, that there has not been similar attention given to what one might call practical skepticism. Is it not also possible that there is nothing which we have even the slightest reason to do? Of course, there is a sense in which epistemological skepticism might be thought to be the more basic problem. If there is nothing which we have any reason to believe, then it will follow that there is nothing which we have any reason to do. If some proposition is a reason that we have for doing something it must at least be the case that we have some reason to believe that proposition. But is practical skepticism merely a species of epistemological skepticism? I doubt it.