Indeed, Moore's common sense approach to the problem is far too limited. It needs further elucidation in order not to appear suspect to the skeptic.
Suppose one were to attempt an evidential form of Mooreanism, such as in the following example (Pritchard 2007):
know E.
If I know E, then my evidence for E. favors E. over the known to be incompatible BIV hypothesis.
My evidence for E. favors E. over the known to be incompatible BIV hypothesis.
This argument surpasses the common sense approach taken by Moore, and thus requires further elucidation. Once you claim that you have evidence in favor of one hypothesis over another, then such simple formulations as expressed above will not do.
Pritchard thus brings in other forms of anti-skepticism in his formulation of a neo-Moorean anti-skeptical approach. In particular he takes in to consideration contextualism. This theory holds that the word "knows" is sensitive to the context in which it is used, as well as the agent it is used by. It thus can be argued that different contexts utilize different epistemic standards that cannot be reduced to one universal epistemic standard. The epistemic standards in one context in which an ascription is made might stand up, but might not necessarily in another context. As Pritchard (2007) writes,
Given the broadly indexical nature of 'knows', however, there is no conflict between these two claims, since the proposition that is being expressed in the one context is not the same proposition that is being expressed in the other, and thus the one can be true while the other is false without contradiction.
Contextualism can thus be considered as a linguistic theory in need of an epistemological basis. The idea, then, behind forging an effective neo-Mooreanism is to deny the first premise of the skeptic's argument without advancing contextualism.
One theory that Pritchard proposes in the two texts being considered here is that knowledge is rooted in non-lucky true belief.
There are various ways of formulating this principle, not all of them plausible, but the basic formulation has it that for a true belief to be safe it must be the case that, across a wide range of near-by possible worlds, where the agent believes the target proposition (on the same basis), that belief continues to be true (Pritchard 2007).
Another is that proposed by John McDowell, which Pritchard (2007) summarizes as follows:
claim in the spirit of epistemic internalism which demands of a knower that she be in a position to know by reflection alone what the reasons which support her knowledge are; and content externalist claim of the disjunctivist sort... which allows that one's reasons can be both empirical and factive - i.e., can be reasons for believing an empirical proposition and entail what it is that they are a reason for.
McDowell argues that one's experience can function as one's reasons. The content of an individual's experiences will often be determined by the conditions of one's environment at the time of having them. This poses a problem to the classic internal/external debate at the root of skepticism in that it is commonly believed that what one has reflective access to cannot extend beyond the "inner" in order to take in factive empirical reasons (Pritchard 2007). McDowell dismisses this notion as false. Such a picture, he offers, invites the skeptical challenge, rather than managing to quell it. Instead, McDowell favors a system that endorses his particular branch of content externalism.
From a pragmatic standpoint, one can easily refute skepticism by following the line of reasoning that Pritchard develops through the recent debates in epistemological inquiry, as outlined above. In order to do so, one must reject the standard readings of Moore in favor of a neo-Mooreanism, as Pritchard develops it. This involves the development of an anti-luck epistemology. Such an epistemological system avoids contextualizing our knowledge while simultaneously attaining closure. What is more, contextualist intuitions must be accommodated...
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