Why Reasons Skepticism is Not Self-Defeating

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 373-375, 1994

In "The Self-Defeating Character of Skepticism" I argue that traditional global epistemological skepticism is incoherent because it mistakenly assumes that we can question our knowledge of the external world without undermining our self-knowledge. The rationale behind my argument is the idea that, since we are substantial agents who exist and act "in the world" among other material beings, the view that our knowledge of our own existence and nature is or can be exclusively subjective is misguided. In a critical response to my essay, Anthony Brueckner claims that my reasoning fails to discredit the idea that one can adopt both "the Cartesian conception of self-knowledge as involving an inference to the existence of a mental substance" and "the Cartesian skeptical view concerning knowledge of the external world. Brueckner believes that my argument is of the "transcendental" variety, and I suspect he also believes that any reasoning of that kind is fatally flawed. In this discussion I explain why my argument escapes Brueckner's objection.

2000

Cambridge University Press eBooks, 2000

Re-examining Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason by asking, What (if anything) do Kant’s premises, analyses and arguments in fact justify?, reveals that in several regards, Kant justified other, more important epistemological conclusions than he claimed, and that he did so independently of his Transcendental Idealism (Westphal 2004, 2006). Centrally important here is that Kant in fact provides two parallel, sound proofs of mental content externalism. These are proofs of this thesis: We human beings could not think of ourselves as persisting through apparent changes in what we (apparently) experience – nor could we think of the apparent spatio-temporal world of objects, events and people – unless in fact we are conscious of the actual spatio-temporal world and have at least some rudimentary knowledge of it. Such proofs turn, not on general facts about (or features of) the world, but on appreciating various fundamental regards in which our finite human cognizance depends upon the world we inhabit. The ‘transcendental’ character of these analyses concerns identifying and appreciating various fundamental features of our finite form of human mindedness, and basic constraints upon, and prospects of, cognitive justification within the non-formal domain of human empirical knowledge. Such analyses and proofs have been developed in various ways, using distinctive strategies, not only by Kant, but also by Hegel, C. I. Lewis, Heidegger, Wittgenstein and F. L. Will. These I return to below (§5, end); here I am concerned with the methodological reflections required to understand, assess and appreciate such transcendental proofs, and why so few analytic epistemologists – foremost amongst them: sceptics – have found them persuasive or illuminating.

1975

1992

An important source of doubt about our knowledge of the "external world" is the thought that all of our sensory experience could be delusive without our realizing it. Such wholesale questioning of the deliverances of all forms of perception seems to leave no resources for successfully justifying our belief in the existence of an objective world beyond our subjective experiences. I argue that there is there is a fatal flaw in the very expression of philosophical doubt about the "external world." Therefore, no such justification is necessary. The feature of skepticism which I believe renders it vulnerable is the assumption that each of us has a right to be certain of his own existence as a subject of conscious experience even in the face of comprehensive doubt about our empirical beliefs.

Ergo, 2023

The aim of this paper is to shake up the consensus view on transcendental arguments (TAs) that the ambitious “world-directed” kind fails and that only moderate, “belief-directed” transcendental arguments have a claim to validity. This consensus is based on Barry Stroud’s famous substitution objection: For any transcendental claim ‘p is an enabling condition for X’ we can readily substitute ‘the belief that p’ for ‘p’. I depart from the observation that the force of Stroud’s objection depends on it being applicable to any world-directed TA whatsoever. This requires a much more substantive justification than is commonly supposed. I rehabilitate world-directed TAs by posing a dialectical dilemma for the Stroudian skeptic: a certain moderate TA is required to uphold the skeptical challenge, but this TA brings with it the commitment to a distinction which restricts the scope of the challenge, namely to ‘empirical’ instead of ‘transcendental’ beliefs about the world. The positive result is a new way of understanding what world-directed transcendental arguments are: a way of showing us which of our beliefs about the world are true because they are, in the sense of Wittgenstein’s meter-measure analogy, constitutive of our very standard for objectivity.

The Philosophical Review, 2012

Epistemologists and philosophers of mind both ask questions about belief. Epistemologists ask normative questions about belief—which beliefs ought we have? Philosophers of mind ask metaphysical questions about belief—what are beliefs, and what does it take to have them? While these issues might seem independent of one another, there is potential for an interesting sort of conflict-the epistemologist might think we ought to have beliefs that, according to the philosopher of mind, it is impossible to have. In this paper, I argue that this conflict does arise, and that it creates problems for traditional skeptical views in epistemology. In particular, I will argue that on certain popular views about the nature of belief, it is impossible to adopt the near-global agnosticism recommended by the skeptical epistemologist. On other plausible views, it is only possible in special circumstances, and this limitation undermines skeptical epistemological claims. The only views about the nature of belief on which there are no metaphysical hurdles to adopting the agnosticism recommended by the skeptic are views that face powerful objections—objections that are completely independent of anti-skeptical epistemological considerations.

Jessica Wilson has recently offered a more sophisticated version of the self-defeat objection to Cartesian scepticism. She argues that the assertion of Cartesian scepticism results in an unstable vicious regress. The way out of the regress is to not engage with the Cartesian sceptic at all, to stop the regress before it starts, at the warranted assertion that the external world exists. We offer three reasons why this objection fails: first, the sceptic need not accept Wilson’s characterization of the sceptical thesis and thus need not start her regress; second, even if she did commit to the regress, it would not undermine scepticism in the way Wilson envisages; and third, the appeal to mental state scepticism which is necessary to generate the second and subsequent steps in the regress is not justified.