© Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000. Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA METAPHILOSOPHY Vol. 31, No. 3, April 2000 0026–1068
SCEPTICISM: EPISTEMIC AND ONTOLOGICAL ANTHONY RUDD
ABSTRACT: It is widely thought that sceptical arguments, if correct, would show that everyday empirical knowledge-claims are false. Against this, I argue that the very generality of traditional sceptical arguments means that there is no direct incompatibility between everyday empirical claims and sceptical scenarios. Scepticism calls into doubt, not ordinary empirical beliefs, but philosophical attempts to give a deep ontological explanation of such beliefs. G. E. Moore’s attempt to refute scepticism (and idealism) was unsuccessful, because it failed to recognise that philosophical scepticism operates on a different level from that on which we make – or doubt – particular empirical claims. And, as I argue with specific reference to work by Nozick and Fogelin, Moore’s basic confusion is still widely shared in contemporary discussions of scepticism. Keywords: scepticism, G. E. Moore, Robert Nozick, Robert Fogelin.
It is commonly assumed that the aim of philosophical scepticism is to show that we do not know the things we are inclined to assume we do. Supposedly the sceptic not only denies us knowledge of remote or esoteric scientific or historical facts, but also denies that we can know even the most banal of everyday matters. Now, there are various different brands of scepticism, and there are also rather few philosophers today who think of themselves as sceptics. “The sceptic”, as he or she figures in most contemporary epistemology texts, is usually a fiction created, in order to be refuted, by a nonsceptic. This means that it is rather futile to make claims about what scepticism really means, or about what the sceptic wants to deny. What one can do, however, is to consider certain classic sceptical arguments concerning dreams, demons, brains-in-vats, and suchlike, and then ask oneself what, if they are correct, they really would show. I argue here that they give us no good reasons to suppose that we cannot know such simple everyday matters of fact as that there is an apple on the plate. However, I go on to argue that the real challenge and significance of these arguments remain even when this is conceded. What the familiar Cartesian and post-Cartesian sceptical arguments show (assuming their soundness) is that we cannot know the ultimate ontological status or nature of the objects about which we quite properly make knowledge-claims in everyday life. We can know that there © Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
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is an apple on the plate without knowing whether the apple or the plate has an existence independent of its being perceived or, if so, what the nature of that existence is. In other words, what sceptical arguments call into doubt is not our ability to make ordinary knowledge-claims, but the ability of philosophers to justify any ontological interpretations of those claims. I
I want to start by investigating a distinction that Robert Fogelin makes between “Pyrrhonian” scepticism, which he defends, and “Cartesian” scepticism, which he rejects (192–93). According to Fogelin, both types of sceptic attempt to show that our ordinary beliefs are doubtful, but the Cartesian attempts to show this by producing globally disconcerting hypotheses – the demon or the vat – while the Pyrrhonist concentrates on local, particular instances.1 I shall try to show that neither type of scepticism in fact gives us good reason to doubt our everyday knowledge-claims. Fogelin himself is not convinced that the Cartesian “global” hypotheses really are thinkable, and he supposes that they commit Cartesian sceptics to the doctrine that we are separated from the objects of our knowledge by a veil of ideas. This notion is dubious in itself, and one might anyway wonder what a sceptic is doing presupposing any such contentious philosophical doctrines at all. As Fogelin says, “To the Pyrrhonist, the Cartesian-style skeptic is not skeptical enough” (193). In any case, demons and mad scientists are not necessary to establish a universal doubt: It does not take radical – globally dislocating – scenarios to introduce suspension of belief. It is quite sufficient to note – and dwell on – the fact that our empirical claims are made in the face of unchecked, though checkable, defeators. . . . Given any empirical assertion, it is always possible – indeed always easy – to point to some uneliminated (though eliminable) possibility that can defeat this claim. Nothing like brains in vats [is] needed to achieve this purpose. . . . A reliance on examples involving papier-mache will usually be sufficient. (Fogelin 193)
This seems to me to be problematic. First, is it really true that any empirical claim can be questioned by pointing to uneliminated but reasonably everyday possibilities (i.e., not involving brains in vats, evil demons, and the like)? What about “I am eating a tomato”, said between mouthfuls while I am biting into what looks, feels, and tastes like one? The only way that this sort of claim could plausibly be falsified would be by introducing some pretty outré scenario. There just don’t seem to be any unchecked but 1 I find this questionable as a historical thesis; the classical Pyrrhonists may not have come up with anything quite comparable to Descartes’s demon scepticism, but their arguments were nevertheless of considerable generality.
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empirically checkable “defeators” left in such cases. What more could I possibly do to make sure it’s a tomato?2 Perhaps one could defend scepticism at this point by arguing as follows: for any empirical proposition – no matter what – there is a logical possibility that it might be false. Or, one might say, we can never be quite sure of any empirical claim, just because it is a member of a class of beliefs of which we never can be quite certain. To this, one might simply respond that the mere logical possibility of doubt – that the denial of an empirical proposition is never self-contradictory – just serves to define what an empirical proposition is, and cannot by itself show that some such propositions may not in reality be quite certain. Nor can the fact that some empirical claims are genuinely doubtful establish that they all are just by virtue of belonging to the same class as the genuinely doubtful ones. (That some members of a racial group are criminals does not mean that they all are.) But in any case, my point was not that we could never think up a scenario in which “I am eating a tomato” might seem doubtful, but simply that such a scenario would have to be pretty far-fetched; it would not simply be a matter of appealing to one of Fogelin’s reasonably everyday possibilities. A further problem is that the argument to scepticism from the logical possibility of doubt would, of course, only show that we cannot know anything empirical if we assume that knowledge implies certainty. Hence one could refute the sceptic by providing a successful analysis of the concept of knowledge which does not involve certainty as an element. Keith Lehrer takes this line, though he acknowledges that his “refutation” of scepticism does not involve rejecting the sceptic’s substantive claim that there is no empirical certainty. As a result, his disagreement with scepticism as he understands it becomes essentially a terminological one (Lehrer, Chap. 9). In fact, scepticism is not so much refuted as rendered trivial; we accept the sceptic’s thesis that there is no empirical knowledge that is absolutely certain, and we simply define or redefine “knowledge” as requiring only reasonable probability. This leads me to the second main problem I have with Fogelin’s account. Even in cases – unlike the tomato one – where there are further empirical checks that I could make, how important is it that I do not do so? Fogelin notes that we tend to use the concept of knowledge in a fairly relaxed way in ordinary life (so that I can be said to know something if I 2 There is, I suppose, the possibility of a classificatory scepticism being invoked here. Someone might say, “How do you know it is a tomato, and not something created by scientists that has a different genetic structure, but is just indistinguishable by the senses from a real tomato?” I am unimpressed by objections of this sort, because I don’t accept the metaphysical essentialism on which this sort of argument depends. Scientists may want to classify things differently than grocers do, but when I classify what I am eating as a tomato, I am just not concerned with its genetic structure. If the reader is inclined to essentialism about natural kinds, other examples of empirical claims not subject to further defeators can be used. Can I have further doubts that this is a chair when I am sitting on it?
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have reasonable grounds for believing it and no positive ones for disbelieving it), but that we also accept a strict use of the concept, so that if challenged as to whether I really know that there is a cow in the field opposite (and not a papier-mâché replica), I would accept that I don’t really know. To insist on regularly applying such strict standards would be tiresomely pedantic, but not wrong (Fogelin 198–99). (He, therefore, takes it that we normally accept both the certainty model of knowledge and something like Lehrer’s more chastened concept, moving between the two as context demands.) Fogelin thinks this explains why the sceptic can, when speaking in a relaxed, everyday sort of way, make lots of knowledge-claims, while still insisting that strictly speaking, we know (virtually) nothing. This is, I think, a plausible and helpful distinction. But if accepted it would seem, as Lehrer’s similar move did, to reduce the scepticism which Fogelin wants to defend to a triviality. To say, as Fogelin does, that I don’t know whether particular empirical propositions are true or not seems to conflict with common sense, but in fact it doesn’t, because it is only in the “strict sense” that I can be said not to know such propositions, and, according to Fogelin, common sense doesn’t normally use “know” in its “strict sense”. If that is the case, his point should trouble neither common sense nor, therefore, those philosophers who are keen to defend it. To be told that we don’t know propositions like the one about the cow “in the strict sense” is not likely to surprise or worry anyone, once that strict sense has been explained to him or her. Nor does Fogelin’s “sceptical” thesis seem to conflict with other philosophical views. Philosophers as such are not interested in particular empirical claims (“the cow is in the field”) but in general categorical ones (“material objects exist”). They may be interested in the meta-claim that we can know ordinary empirical claims with certainty; but a philosopher driven by the quest for certainty is unlikely to pick statements such as “There is a cow in the field”, made after a casual glance, as paradigms of what cannot be doubted. It is therefore hard to see what interest – either practical or philosophical – Fogelin’s points about the possibility of papiermâché replicas have.3 The dispute about whether that is a real cow or a replica arises on and can be settled on a straightforward empirical level. (We can go up and look at the beast.) A properly philosophical dispute – and therefore one which a philosophical sceptic will be interested in – will have a quite different character. To see this point, it may help to imagine a group of philosophers in the field, all of whom have looked carefully and who therefore agree on the empirical fact that there is a cow there. What they may still disagree with 3 I should say that the inadequacy of his general account of scepticism does little to diminish the considerable interest of the specific arguments which Fogelin advances in Pyrrhonian Reflections against a range of influential positions in contemporary epistemology.
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one another about is the fundamental ontological analysis of that fact. We can suppose that one is a phenomenalist, one a “common-sense” direct realist, one a scientific realist, one a Whiteheadean process philosopher. Let us now suppose that they are joined by a sceptic. If she were to follow Fogelin’s line and ask, “Do you know it isn’t a papier-mâché replica?” the philosophers could simply and correctly say “yes” and get back to their discussion. If the sceptic is to contribute to that, she would have to do so by arguing that all the above mentioned positions are possible, but that there is no rational basis for choosing between them. All five philosophers, despite their disagreements, can all perfectly well agree that it is a cow in the field, that it is not a pig or a sheep or a replica, and there is no reason at all to think that their philosophical views will make any difference to their practical behaviour in respect of the cow – or anything else for that matter. This suggests that Fogelin has misunderstood the point of the “Cartesian” sceptic’s reliance on globally disconcerting hypotheses. These Cartesian arguments, at least if they are carefully formulated, do not take the “veil of ideas” doctrine as a premise. Rather, they operate to present us with undecidable alternatives. Maybe we do just perceive things as they are. But maybe our immediate perceptual experience does mislead us as to the real nature of the world? Or maybe there is no world beyond our experiences? None of these possibilities is asserted; all are kept in play, and the “Cartesian” sceptic’s argument is that we have no good reason for choosing between them; so we are forced to suspend judgement as to which one is correct. But whether the cow is directly perceived by me, represented to me by my ideas, or constructed out of them, makes no practical difference to the ways I will act, or the ways I will talk to anyone (except another philosopher) about the cow. Nor, therefore, will it affect my ability to make the claims to knowledge of it that I would make in those everyday practical or conversational contexts. What Cartesian sceptical arguments motivate, then, is a doubt not about specific empirical facts but about ontological theories which claim to tell us what the deep underlying truth about those facts is. Of course, one can raise doubts about cows in fields; but one can also settle them in straightforward empirical ways. If a properly philosophical sceptic raises doubts about cows (or desks, chairs, tomatoes, etc.), he should be using them only as examples of what Cavell calls “generic objects” (see Cavell 53). In asking, Is that a sheep there? he is not suggesting that it might be a dog or a papier-mâché model, but that the whole course of your experience, in which you make the judgements you do about dogs and sheep and fields, might be, for example, a protracted dream. But these questions (“Is that a dog or a sheep?” and “Is there an external world?”) are simply not on the same level, any more than questions about what happened in a story operate on the same level as the question of whether the story itself was true or fictional. © Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
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II
I have argued that sceptical considerations do not give us reason to doubt the sorts of knowledge-claims made in everyday life. “Pyrrhonian” doubts which appeal to possible empirical “defeators” can be dealt with empirically. Insofar as they are not investigated, they may justify our admitting that there are all sorts of things we don’t know “in a strict sense” – but ordinary knowledge-claims are not usually made in that sense anyway. As for “Cartesian” arguments – their whole point is that we cannot check to see whether the scenarios they mention obtain. But their generality is such that they don’t really engage with particular empirical claims. They may lead me to “bracket”, as Husserl would say, my belief that my perceptual experience gives me access to a world of independently existing objects – which is, of course, not the same as positively denying that it does. But within this bracketed world, about whose ultimate ontological status I suspend judgement, I can still make all the ordinary empirical claims and distinctions that I did before exposure to sceptical arguments. I shall try to bring this point out more clearly by looking at G. E. Moore’s classic argument against scepticism. For this depends on the supposition that there is an incompatibility between scepticism about the external world and such truths as “this is a hand” said by someone holding his hand out for inspection (Moore 1959a, 1959b, 1959c). Moore mentions a number of “truisms”, some being descriptions of his present situation (I am standing up, I am wearing clothes) and others being general truths about the world (e.g., that it has existed for a long time before his birth). His argument is as follows: If scepticism were correct, I could not know these truisms. But I do know them. So scepticism is false. Obviously this argument is valid, and surely I do know things like “I have hands”. (I am setting aside Wittgensteinean scruples about the appropriateness of using the concept of knowledge in respect of something so obvious.) If there is a problem then, it must lie with the first premise of these arguments – that if scepticism were correct, then I couldn’t know Moore’s truisms. One response would be to deploy Fogelin’s distinction between strict and relaxed uses of “know”; in a strict sense, I don’t know that this is a hand, but in a looser sense I do. But since the sceptic is using “know” in a strict sense and Moore is using it in a loose sense, then Moore’s argument fails to engage with its intended target. There is, no doubt, something in this, but as I noted above, we ought to be suspicious of suggestions that we don’t even “strictly speaking” know that, for example, we have hands. I am inclined to think that Moore rather than Fogelin is right about this. However, my argument against Fogelin has already provided the materials for an alternative critique of Moore, one which allows us to accept that, yes, of course we know that we have hands, without supposing that there is any incompatibility between this knowledge and external-world scepticism. © Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
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The classic (“Cartesian”) sceptical arguments are global in their scope. Their whole point is that there is nothing in my experience to tell me that I am not a brain in a vat or a victim of the demon. All the hypotheses that the sceptic advances are empirically equivalent, as are the various realist accounts of the external world to which they are proposed as alternatives. The sceptic will then go on to argue that we are left with no rational basis for choosing between them and we must therefore suspend judgement as to which is correct. But this strategy involves distinguishing between everyday empirical claims and philosophical theories which are constructed to explain what those claims are really (ultimately) about. We can settle ordinary empirical questions (more or less) without raising any philosophical questions at all. For instance, I can tell someone’s hand from his foot or his nose. But this does nothing to address the question as to whether the whole course of experience in which I make such distinctions is a protracted dream, or has been induced by the scientists in charge of the vat. This is the distinction of levels I mentioned above. On one level we make ordinary empirical judgements (The book is on the table) and we have criteria by which we can normally settle whether they are true or false. But there is another level at which we seek to give a philosophical account of those judgements or of the objects of those judgements. And here is where the sceptical arguments bite, for they suggest that there are an indefinite number of empirically equivalent hypotheses which could explain the way things seem, and that there is no rational basis for choosing between them. There may be other problems with this sceptical strategy, but Moore’s attempt to refute scepticism by insisting on the truth of ordinary empirical claims involves a misunderstanding of how the sceptical argument works; it confuses the levels the sceptic distinguishes.4 Oddly enough, this is a point that Moore himself seems to see, at least partly, for he does say that although “I am not at all sceptical as to the truth of such propositions [as his ‘truisms’] . . . I am very sceptical as to what, in certain respects, the correct analysis of such propositions is” (Moore 1959b, 53). But he fails to see that this admission undermines his entire argument. Idealist philosophers don’t deny empirical truths – they just analyse them differently from realists; and sceptics are sceptical precisely about the question as to which of these analyses, if any, is correct. Moore therefore provides the classic instance of the error of supposing that scepticism must be false because it conflicts with ordinary empirical truths. Contra Moore, I can distinguish hands from feet while still suspending judgement about the “external world”.5 4 Whether or not scepticism is still in some sort of conflict with common sense depends on whether “common sense” is committed to a specific philosophical ontology. That is another question – though the notion of “common sense” is so vague that I doubt whether it has any clear answer. 5 A similar critique of Moore is elaborated in Chapter 3 of B. Stroud’s The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism.
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III
I would now like to examine one influential modern critique of scepticism which, although more sophisticated and considerably more technical than Moore’s, still runs into the same basic problem. This is Robert Nozick’s discussion, and I choose it as an illustrative case study, as one example (though an important one) of the continuing “Moorean” approach to scepticism which is widespread in contemporary epistemology. Nozick’s discussion of scepticism (in Nozick, Part 3) starts from the definition of knowledge which he advances as a contribution to the debate on the Gettier problem. According to Nozick, for S to know that p, it is necessary, as well as p being true and S believing it, that the belief tracks the truth. That is, in order to count as knowing p, S must now be in such a state of mind that, were he in a counterfactual situation, he would be able to determine whether or not p was still true. Nozick does not require that S be able to track the truth of p across all possible worlds – only across close ones. In fact, his account is a version of the idea that to know something is to be able to exclude “relevant alternatives.” On this account of knowledge, Nozick concedes that we cannot know that such sceptical possibilities as the brain-in-the-vat one do not obtain. But, he argues, just because I don’t know that I’m not a brain in a vat, it doesn’t follow that I cannot know ordinary empirical facts – for instance, that I am sitting at a keyboard in my room. So far, this seems close to the position I have been outlining, although Nozick takes himself to be making some sort of point against scepticism. (He acknowledges, however, that it does not amount to a refutation. See 197–98.) The way Nozick makes his point, however, reveals a different conception of the nature and force of sceptical arguments from the one I am defending here. According to Nozick, the sceptic first establishes that I don’t know, for instance, that I’m not a brain in a vat on a planet near Alpha Centauri, and concludes that if I don’t know that, then I can’t know that I am typing at my desk. This inference depends on the principle of closure under known logical implication – that if I know p, and know that, if p then q, then I know q. The sceptic, according to Nozick, runs through this reasoning in reverse: I don’t know q (q = “I’m not a brain in a vat”), but since I would know q if I knew p (p = “I’m sitting typing”) then I can’t know p. The supposition is, of course, that the sceptic is trying to undermine ordinary beliefs such as p. And the reasoning that Nozick ascribes to the sceptic is the mirror image of Moore’s. For Moore, of course, argues that since we do know things like p, and know that if p then q, we therefore know q – and so scepticism is false. The puzzle is that Moore seems right to assert that we do know his “truisms”, while the sceptic also seems right to insist that we do not know that his scenarios don’t obtain. But how, if the argument scheme that both appear to use is valid, can we know both? Nozick’s response is to reject the closure principle. I can know p, © Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
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because I only have to exclude relevant alternatives. It isn’t necessary to exclude such outré alternatives as my being a brain in a vat, for they lie in possible worlds far too distant to need to be taken into account. Of course, if he is right here, Nozick has refuted Moore’s argument as well as the sceptics’, since Moore certainly relies on the closure principle. (Nozick doesn’t actually mention Moore, but does insist that my knowing empirical facts does not mean that I know that sceptical scenarios are false.) There have been various responses to this suggestion. Some have complained that the closure principle is far more intuitively plausible than the account of knowledge which leads Nozick to reject it (e.g., BonJour). A different point is made by Edward Craig, who has neatly demonstrated that Nozick begs the question against the sceptic, by assuming that the sceptical scenarios do apply only in distant possible worlds. For the sceptic is, after all, asking how we know the actual world isn’t a sceptical one. Nozick simply assumes that it isn’t. Given the account I have suggested, we can see that Nozick is right to claim both that we can have knowledge of empirical facts and that sceptical arguments are not refutable, despite the conflict that a Moorean would see between these claims. However, Nozick hasn’t broken sharply enough with the Moorean stance – hence the problems that continue to dog his account. If we do make the clean break I am recommending, then we can make both claims without running into the problems that Nozick faces. On the account of scepticism I am suggesting, I can know all manner of ordinary empirical facts, even though I do not know whether or not some sceptical scenario obtains. The valid point struggling to emerge from Nozick’s vague talk of the relative closeness of possible worlds is really a point about a difference of levels of discourse. The claim “There is a table” operates on a different level from the claim “There are (or are not) mind-independent physical objects”. The sceptical scenarios are not meant as remote possibilities within the world of empirical fact; they are possible explanations of why there is such a world experienced at all. If the sceptic’s arguments are correct, the multiplicity of these explanations and the impossibility of deciding between them show that we do not know what is the ultimate ontological status of the world we experience. However, that would not prevent us from describing how things are in that experienced world. We can make true phenomenological claims while continuing to suspend ontological judgement. (A “phenomenological” claim, it is worth emphasising, is not one about sense-data, but just an everyday claim about, for example, a cow in a field – but made without prejudice to the question of whether such claims should ultimately be interpreted in, for instance, a Berkelean, a phenomenalist, or a direct realist fashion.) On this account we can accept that we have knowledge of ordinary empirical facts, if we can exclude relevant alternatives, and that we don’t know that the various sceptical hypotheses are not true. In so doing we are © Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 2000
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not begging the question, since we do not deny that this world could be a “sceptical” one; and we are able to maintain the closure principle. I cannot argue that because I don’t know I’m not a brain in a vat, then I don’t know that I’m sitting typing. But this isn’t because there is anything wrong with the closure principle, but because in this case p does not imply q. I can know, as a matter of phenomenological fact, that I am sitting typing, but it doesn’t follow that I can know that those phenomenological facts are not being generated by the controllers of the vat artificially stimulating my brain. In supposing that the sceptical hypotheses apply in remote possible worlds, Nozick has gone halfway to seeing what is wrong with Moore’s assumptions. But even a remote possible world still seems to be in the same logical space as this one. That is, Nozick still treats the sceptical scenarios as though they were on the same level as ordinary empirical possibilities, the difference between them being one of degree rather than of kind. But this is Moore’s fundamental mistake. My being deceived by the evil demon is not just a more remote possibility than my being in London rather than Bristol; it is a putative explanation of why there is a world of empirical possibilities experienced by me at all. As such, the difference between a sceptical scenario and an ordinary empirical possibility is qualitative, not, as Nozick’s talk of remoteness suggests, quantitative. IV
I want to conclude by suggesting two morals we can draw from the foregoing discussion. First, the assumption that sceptical arguments are directed against the possibility of ordinary empirical knowledge usually has the effect of making the task of the anti-sceptic look easier than it is.6 For if philosophical scepticism really tells me that I cannot know that I am currently sitting typing, then surely it must have gone wrong somewhere, and we ought to be able to find out where! But if it does not directly challenge such everyday assertions, then we may find that it is not as implausible, or as open to refutation, as has often been supposed. Properly understood, therefore, scepticism is a threat to philosophical ontologies rather than to everyday knowledge-claims. But – and this is the second moral – this means that we can get on with epistemology, analyse the concept of knowledge and the various ways it is acquired, and so on, without needing to bother much about scepticism. The very generality of its claims makes it largely irrelevant for such purposes. What it does challenge is the notion that we can establish any philosophical account of the 6 Fogelin’s work, of course, is something of an exception, as he uses the assumption in a defence of scepticism. But, as I have argued above, the defence actually strips scepticism of its best resources and exposes it to damaging criticism.
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way the world really is. It is therefore significant for metaphysics or ontology, rather than for epistemology. Odd as it may seem at first, philosophical scepticism doesn’t have much to do with knowledge at all. Philosophy Group Department of Humanities University of Hertfordshire Wall Hall Campus Aldenham Hertfordshire WD2 8AT United Kingdom
[email protected] References
BonJour, L. (1987). “Nozick, Externalism and Scepticism.” In The Possibility of Knowledge, edited by S. Luper-Foy. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield. Cavell, S. (1979). The Claim of Reason. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Craig, E. (1989). “Nozick and the Sceptics: The Thumbnail Version.” Analysis, 49:4, 161–62. Fogelin, R. (1995). Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lehrer, K. (1990). Theory of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Moore, G. E. (1959a). “Certainty.” In his Philosophical Papers. London: Allen and Unwin. ———. (1959b). “A Defence of Common Sense.” In his Philosophical Papers. London: Allen and Unwin. ———. (1959c). “Proof of an External World.” In his Philosophical Papers. London: Allen and Unwin. Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical Explanations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Stroud, B. (1984). The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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