Externalism and skepticism

The Externalist Challenge

Volumn , Issue , 2004, Pages 53-64

  Greco, John ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 73649106655     PISSN: None     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book    
DOI: 10.1515/9783110915273     Document Type: Chapter

References (28)

1. The typical knower, one might think, does not typically have any second-order beliefs about the sources of her beliefs. (Here we must distinguish between currently having a (perhaps unconscious) second-order belief, and being disposed to form a second-order belief in response to a relevant query.)
2. For example, see Laurence BonJour, The Structure of Empirical Knowledge (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985); and Richard Fumerton, Metaepistemology and Skepticism (Lanham, MD: Row-man and Littlefield, 1995).
3. See for example Keith DeRose, "How Can We Know that We're Not Brains in Vats?" The Southern Journal of Philosophy XXXVIII (2000) Supplement: 121-48; and Brian McLaughlin, "Skepticism, Ex-ternalism, and Self-Knowledge," The Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Vol. LXXIV, (2000): 93-118. See also DeRose's introduction to Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader, Keith DeRose and Ted Warfield, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). A number of philosophers have argued that content ex-ternalism shows certain standard skeptical scenarios to be impossible; for example, any scenario entailing that no external things exists. But as McLaughlin notes, it is widely acknowledged (even among these philosophers) that skeptical arguments can be reconstructed so that they invoke no such scenarios. As examples, McLaughlin cites Ted Warfield, "A Priori Knowledge of the World: Knowing the World by Knowing our Minds," Philosophical Studies (1998), reprinted in DeRose and Warfield; and Collin McGinn, Mental Content (Oxford: Blackwell Press, 1992).
4. I defend these theses at length in "Agent Reliabilism," Philosophical Perspectives, 13, Epistemology, James Tomberlin, ed. (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Press, 1999); and in Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
5. Let me forestall an objection from the start. In various places McDowell claims that he is not trying to "answer" or "refute" the skeptic, and so one might think that his position is not supposed to respond to skepticism at all. But what McDowell means in such passages is that he is not trying to answer the skeptic on his (i.e. the skeptic's) own terms. Rather, McDowell's strategy is to identify assumptions in the skeptical reasoning that we need not accept, or might even have reason to reject. See for example "Knowledge and the Internal," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1995), p. 888, note 19. As far as I can see, this is the only sane strategy for responding to skepticism that one could adopt. Since the skeptical arguments are typically valid, it is impossible that one might answer the argument on its own terms-not if this means rejecting the skeptical conclusion without challenging a skeptical assumption. And notice that this is not a comment on the strength of the skeptic's arguments-it is rather a simple point about the nature of logical validity.
6. See Wilfred Sellars, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind," in Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge, 1963).
7. Mind and World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), pp. 9-10.
8. Mind and World, p. 23.
9. "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge," Proceedings of the British Academy 68 (1982), p. 472.
10. "Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space," in P. Pettit and J. McDowell, ed., Subject, Thought and Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp 145-6.
11. "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge," p. 479.
12. "Knowledge and the Internal," p. 886.
13. "Knowledge and the Internal," p. 890. See also "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge," pp. 475-6.
14. "Knowledge and the Internal," p. 890. See also "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge," pp. 475-6.
15. "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge," p. 474. See also "Knowledge and the Internal," pp. 890-1.
16. "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge," p. 474. See also "Knowledge and the Internal," pp. 890-1.
17. "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge," p. 479.
18. The problem is worse for McDowell, in fact. This is because McDowell's account of positive epistemic status is inconsistent with reliabilism, and therefore McDowell cannot respond to Hume. In other words, it is not just that McDowell must add something to respond to Hume-rather, what must be added is inconsistent with McDowell's account of the epistemically normative. Although this is a problem for McDowell's account of the epistemically normative, however, it is not a problem for content external-ism in general. That is, content externalism need not be wedded to McDowell's additional views about epistemic normativity, which include his Sellarsian, anti-reliabilist commitments.
19. Enquiries concerning Human Understanding and concerning the Principles of Morals, third edition, L. A. Selby-Bigge, ed., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), pp. 152-153.
20. The present point does not depend on the claim that there could be worlds with no regularity at all. It is sufficient that the world need not be as regular as it is, and so induction need not be reliable enough to generate positive epistemic status and knowledge.
21. This comes out clearly in McDowell's rejection of "full blown externalism," a defining characteristic of which is that it makes reliability an external constraint on knowledge. Cf. "Knowledge and the Internal," pp. 881-4.
22. It would be remiss to ignore McDowell's explicit response to Hume's skeptical reasoning. In the passage that follows, McDowell is considering how his response to the Argument from Illusion can be extended to Hume's skepticism about induction. Now my fourth Sellarsian idea can be put like this: there cannot be a predicament in which one is receiving testimony from one's senses but has not yet taken any inductive steps. To stay with the experience of color, whose simplicity presumably makes it maximally favorable to the contrary view: color experience's being testimony of the senses depends on the subject's already knowing a great deal about, for instance, the effect of different sorts of illumination on color appearances. . . . This makes for an easy extension to inductive skepticism of the epistemological move I have been recommending. . . . Nothing could be immediately present to one's senses unless one already had knowledge that goes beyond what is immediately present to the senses. So the supposed predicament of the inductive skeptic is a fiction. ("Knowledge and the Internal," p. 891) This line of argument can be reconstructed as follows.
23. "there cannot be a predicament in which one is receiving testimony from one's senses but has not yet taken any inductive steps." In other words, there could not be contentful observations unless one also has inductive knowledge, or knowledge about what is unobserved.
24. But there is contentful observation (The skeptic grants that much when he tries to set up the problem). Therefore,
25. There is inductive knowledge: the predicament in which one has contentful observation but no inductive knowledge is a fiction. (1,2) The problem with the above line of reasoning is this: even if it is exactly right, it does nothing to show where Hume's argument is wrong. And since it does not, it does nothing to show how McDowell's account (contra Hume) makes inductive knowledge possible.
26. Even internalists should accept Ra. Internalists distance themselves from reliabilism by rejecting something like Rb and Rc.
27. Why does rejecting Rc give Hume all he needs? Because there is a necessary relation between inductive evidence and belief only if something like RIP is part of that evidence. But if we need to know RIP as part of our evidence, then premise (1) of (HI) is true and Hume's reasoning goes through.
28. I would like to thank Bill Brewer, Bill Jaworski, Duncan Pritchard, Richard Schantz and Ernest Sosa for their comments on earlier drafts.