Skepticism: philosophical foundations and contemporary perspectives

Skepticism

Against Skepticism

One of the key problems in the history of epistemological inquiry is that of skepticism. There are some moderate skeptics who have argued that knowledge is theoretically possible. There are some skeptics, however, who are more radical in their views. They feel that the attainment of true knowledge is not possible. Indeed, the deep truth that that the skeptic brings out is the fact that it is quite difficult to determine from whence knowledge comes. I believe that one finds the answer to this in Reid, who came to the conclusion that there was no real way of knowing how one attains knowledge - whether it derives from purely internal processes, the external world, or some combination thereof.

Against Skepticism

One of the key problems in the history of epistemological inquiry is that of skepticism. The philosophical argument behind skepticism is that one does not have knowledge at a given moment. There are some moderate skeptics who have argued that knowledge is theoretically possible. Some even believe that this was Socrates's view. To be precise, Socrates seems to have felt that if people continue to ask questions, then over time they will develop a form of knowledge. At the moment, however, most people who are not enlightened philosophically do not have this knowledge.

There are some skeptics, however, who are more radical in their views. They feel that the attainment of true knowledge is not possible. One famous example of such a school was the Academicians in Ancient Greece, after the time of Carneades.

There is, however, a third skeptical approach to the problems. That would be to neither accept nor reject the possibility of attaining knowledge.

We can further distinguish between two different types of skeptics: global and local. This distinction can be made regarding whether the skeptic directs their skepticism towards everything in general or specific ideas, respectively. Global skeptics feel that there is no way to absolutely know whether anything is true or false. It is hard to defend such an argument, however, as it requires that absolutely nothing be known - with the exception of the knowledge that nothing can be known, which seems to be a contradiction. Those who identify themselves as global skeptics may attempt to get around this problem by stating that they are "reasonably certain" that their total skepticism is true, while simultaneously refusing to assert that skepticism itself can be "known" to be true. For these individuals, even an argument advanced in favor of skepticism is not necessarily true. While skepticism can thus be upheld in arguing that skepticism itself is subject to skepticism, it also concedes to the fact that skepticism can never be proven or confirmed as a doctrine. Of course, this does not bother a true Pyrrhonian global skeptic, as he will argue that, from a subjective standpoint, he does not know anything and thus cannot make assertions about the true possibilities of knowledge.

Local skeptics, on the other hand, feel that individuals may have knowledge about specific areas. This, of course, is the less radical form of skepticism. Local skeptics tend to be skeptical about certain forms of knowledge, but remain undoubtful about others. In different fields of inquiry, different forms of skepticism may emerge. A person may believe in the existence of the external world, for instance, while remaining skeptical about the existence of certain phenomena in that world.

Those who identify as anti-skeptics typically argue that if an individual does not know anything, then there is no way of knowing that one knows nothing. Thus, that person may indeed know something after all. Such an argument, however, only succeeds when you have an absolute denial of the possibility of knowledge.

Thomas Reid formulated one famous anti-skeptic position. Reid started out by considering the possibility that the skeptic may be right - that perception, through which philosophers have traditionally assumed we use to attain knowledge, is unreliable. At the same time, one must concede that perception is merely one of many cognitive processes. Therefore, if perception is not reliable, then all of one's other cognitive processes must also be unreliable. Since all of one's faculties derive from the same source, Reid reasoned, then all of them must be fallible if one of them is. This also means, however, that the faculty of reasoning, which everyone - including the skeptic - uses in formulating arguments, must also be unreliable. Thus, whenever one reasons, one is bound to make a lot of mistakes. Whenever we dare to make an argument, then, we can never really trust the veracity of what we are arguing. This would have to apply to the skeptic's arguments in favor of skepticism, as well. So even if the skeptic happens to be right, then we should not pay attention to what he is arguing, because the processes he uses to arrive there are inherently flawed. If the skeptic is wrong, then of course skepticism should also be ignored. Thus, it is not necessary to take skepticism seriously, either way.

In formulating an argument against skepticism, it is worthwhile to also take into consideration the famous argument made by G.E. Moore. Moore in many ways elaborated and expounded upon Reid's philosophy through a very simple formulation. Moore's response to the skeptic involved a common "everyday" type of proposition: the idea that the philosopher had two hands. Such a claim must be intuitive. As such, it is inconsistent with the typical skeptic argument that we might be nothing more than headless brains in vats. If the philosopher is aware that he has two hands, then he cannot be a headless brain in a vat. This second claim is also intuitive. From these two claims, Moore deduced that he knows he is not a headless brain in a vat.

While, at the outset, Moore's claim seems to be infallible, a number of objections have arisen in recent years to dash Moore's conclusions. According to Pritchard (2005), chief among these is the dialectical impropriety objection, which may be summarized as follows:

don't know that I'm not a headless brain in a vat.

If I know that I have two hands, then I know that I'm not a headless brain in a vat.

I don't know that I have two hands.

This clearly elucidates what a typical skepticist response might be to Moore's famous postulation. Furthermore, just as Moore's initial formulation was intuitive, so are the first two premises in the skepticist response above. Thus, while the Moorean concludes that he feels secure in his anti-skeptical bias because he has intuitively derived his conclusion from everyday propositions, the skeptic replies that we have no way of truly attaining this everyday knowledge.

A second objection to the Moorean postulation, according to Pritchard (2002), is the impasse objection. This is a critical response that has it that the skeptic response elucidated above has just has much force as Moore's argument, in that both are equally derived from intuition. Thus, Moore's postulation represents little more than a draw with regards to the skeptic argument.

The third objection to Moore, as raised by Wittgenstein, is the conversational impropriety objection. This has it that the way Moore formulates his argument is inappropriate in a conversational manner, in that we do not typically say, "I know that x" when we are asserting our knowledge of something; rather, we just state x itself.

Furthermore, Moore's proposition, when examined closely, contains no supporting epistemology. It contains no proper means for showing us, through empirical means, how we might come to know that we are not just headless brains in vats; thus, it fails to answer the skeptic's chief concern. Connected to this is the inherent simplicity of Moore's argument. Surely, skepticism cannot be so easy to refute with a three-line refutation and no supporting theoretical argument. This shows us that Moore's argument does not bother to diagnose the problem that skepticism poses. It is thus too simplistic in its assertion.

As Pritchard's inquiry continues, however, it soon becomes apparent that chief among the problems with the Moorean formulation is the fact that it does not engage with that aspect of skepticism that targets the evidential basis of knowledge. Such a formulation extends back to the ancient Pyrrohnian skeptical writings, and states that one's knowledge has to be supported by evidence, and the evidential support favors what is believed over alternatives that are known to be incompatible. As Pritchard writes elsewhere,

So construed, the problem seems entirely uncontentious, since it is hard to see how one's evidence could be genuinely supporting evidence if it did not perform this 'favouring' function. The trouble is, however, that once one feeds skeptical hypotheses into this principle then one immediately generates the skeptical problem. This is because if you know that, for example, you have two hands, and you also know that having hands is inconsistent with being a BIV, then it follows, via underdetermination, that your evidence for believing that you have hands must favour your belief that you have hands over the alternative hypothesis that you are a BIV. Ex-hypothesi, however, this is impossible, and thus you are unable to know that you have two hands (and much else besides) (Pritchard 2007).

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 in this scheme. This is accomplished through the integration of a context-sensitivity mechanism inherent in the proprietary conditions for "explicit knowledge self-ascriptions" (Pritchard 2007).

Such a pragmatic approach to the problems posed by skepticism effectively demarcates classical Mooreanism from neo-Mooreanism through an explanation of why Moore's argument was both deeply flawed and partly true.