Doubting: Contemporary Perspectives on Skepticism PDF
Preview Doubting: Contemporary Perspectives on Skepticism
DOUBTING PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES Editors: tWILFRID SELLARS, University of Pittsburgh KEITH LEHRER, University ofA rizona Board of Consulting Editors: JONATHAN BENNEIT, Syracuse University ALLAN GIBBARD, University of Michigan ROBERT STALNAKER, Massachusetts Institute of Technology ROBERT G. TURNBULL, Ohio State University VOLUME 48 DOUBTING Contemporary Perspectives on Skepticism Edited by MICHAEL D. ROTH Franklin & Marshall College. Lancaster. U.SA. and GLENN ROSS Franklin & Marshall College. Lancaster. U.SA. KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Doubtlng : contemporary perspectives ~n skepticism! edited by Michael D. Roth and Glenn Ross. p. cm. -- (Phi losophical studies series; v. 48) Includes bibliographical references. 1. Skepticism. I. Roth, Michael David, 1936- II. Ross, Glenn, 1953- III. Series. BD201.D68 1989 121' .5--dc20 89-29547 ISBN-J3: 978-94-010-7367-7 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-1942-6 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-1942-6 Published by Kiuwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, The Netherlands. Printed on acid-free paper All Rights Reserved © 1990 by Kiuwer Academic Publishers Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1990 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any fonn or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any infonnation storage and retrieval system, without written pennission from the copyright owner. TABLE OF CONTENTS PREFACE vii MICHAEL D. ROTH AND GLENN ROSS / Introduction PART 1: CONCESSIONS JONATHAN VOGEL / Are There Counterexamples to the Closure Principle? 13 BREDO JOHNSEN / Relevant Alternatives and Demon Scepticism 29 STEVEN LUPER-FOY / Arbitrary Reasons 39 RICHARD FUMERTON / Metaepistemology and Skepticism 57 RICHARD FOLEY / Skepticism and Rationality 69 JONATHAN ADLER / Epistemic Universalizability: From Skepticism to 83 Infallibilism PETER KLEIN / Epistemic Compatibilism and Canonical Beliefs 99 PART 2: DENIALS RICHARD FELDMAN / Klein on Certainty and Canonical Beliefs 121 PAUL MOSER / Two Roads to Skepticism 127 DORIT BAR-ON / Justifying Beliefs: The Dream Hypothesis and Gratuitous 141 Entities JOHN HElL / Doubts About Skepticism 147 STEWART COHEN / Skepticism and Everyday Knowledge Attributions 161 ERNEST SOSA / Knowledge in Context, Skepticism in Doubt: The Virtue of 171 Our Faculties vi TABLE OF CONTENTS FRED I. DRETSKE / The Epistemology of Belief 183 THOMAS TYMOCZKO / Brains Don't Lie: They Don't Even Make 195 Many Mistakes INDEX OF NAMES 215 INDEX OF SUBJECfS 217 PREFACE During the summer of 1986 one of the co-editors was a fellow at the Summer Institute in Epistemology held at the University of Colorado in Boulder. It was there that the idea for this volume was born. It was clear from the discussions taking place at the Institute that works such as Robert Nozick's Philosophical Explanationsi and Barry Stroud's The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism2 were beginning to have an impact and it was also clear that the debate over the issues surrounding skepticism had not gone away nor were they about to go away. Thinking that a new crop might be ready for harvest, the co-editors sent out a letter of inquiry to a long list of potential contributors. The letter elicited an overwhelmingly positive response to our inquiry from philosophers who were either writing something on skepticism at the time or who were willing to write something specifically for our volume. Still others told us that they had recently written something and if we were to consider previously published manuscripts they would permit us to consider their already published work. Out of all this material, the co-editors have put together the present collection. We believe that this anthology is not only suitable for graduate seminars but for advanced undergraduate classes as well. Teaching philosophy to undergraduates in this, the golden age of pre professionalism, is an enterprise open to considerable risks - psychic as well as fi nancial. The cardinal tenet of the pre-professional, that knowledge is definitely not to be sought for its own sake, revitalizes the never-ending complaint that the study of academic philosophy is idle and pointless - devoid of significance for the real problems that real people encounter in the real world. If one happens to be a teacher of philos ophy at a liberal arts college the enterprise can become downright perilous, for it is a distinctive and perhaps definitive property of such institutions that the primary criterion by which members of their faculties are deemed worthy is success in the classroom. Since both of the co-editors of this volume teach philosophy at a liberal arts college it would be fair to say that we are concerned. It is our belief that not every response to the perilous situation outlined briefly above has been laudable. One of the most ubiquitous responses has been the prolifera tion of courses, almost all at the undergraduate level, designed to engage the interests of various student constituencies which would otherwise have little or no enthusiasm for studying the the traditional canon of philosophical issues. While we do not universally condemn such courses, we hold the view that at their worst such courses tend to be superficial and can blatantly pander to the most current and trendy concerns of college students, while at best they create a false impression in the minds of students as to what sort of enterprise philosophy professors and their graduate students are engaged in when they come together to do philosophy. More often than not these courses quickly become the most popular courses in the department's curriculum and those who teach them the most popular instructors. Consequently, what one of our contributors, Ernest Sosa, has labelled "serious philosophy"3 is, apart from a cursory and necessarily condensed treatment in historical survey courses, fast becoming the exclusive preserve of graduate school courses where the students can be expected to have the requisite mixture of mo tivation and sophistication. We fmd this situation not only unfortunate but deplorable. The logical rigor, clarity and overall acumen of Anglo-American philosophy in this century have combined vii viii PREFACE to produce an extraordinary intellectual achievement which needs no apology. Since the exploration of the metaphysical and epistemological themes which have led to this achievement was and continues to be the dominant activity of English-speaking aca demic philosophers, we see no reason for excluding undergraduates from participating in the enterprise, at least to the point of allowing them to gain a clear sense of what the main business of academic philosophy in their own culture is all about. In our view, attaining such a level of understanding with respect to at least some of the important issues which are currently under discussion at the major research universities in the English speaking world should be an essential component of every ambitious under graduate philosophy program. In one sense then it is fair to say that this anthology is an attempt on our part to put our money where our mouths are. It is true that any success this anthology enjoys will come, most likely, from its adoption as a reader in graduate seminars. This is as it should be since the articles in the volume represent, we believe, the best of the current thinking on the famous philosophical problem which serves as the focus of this collec tion. But each of these articles is eminently teachable to undergraduates as well. The individual papers are, without exception, clearly written and while the various writing styles are diverse, they are uniformly lively and non-technical. Moreover, the sub stantive issues which are raised and analyzed in the papers collected here aptly provide the materials from which to construct a clear and compelling motivation for why philosophers have continued to be fascinated as well as frustrated by what may very well be the least tractable of all philosophical problems. Finally, we have the pleasant task of acknowledging our debts: to Mr. Arlstides Fokas and Mr. Eric Rubenstein, who helped with the preparation of this manuscript, and to Professor Keith Lehrer, teacher and friend to both of the co-editors, without whose encouragement and support this project could not have even begun. NOTES lRobert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1981. 2Barry Stroud, The Significance ofP hilosophical Scepticism, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984. 3Emest Sosa, "Serious Philosophy and Freedom of Spirit," The !oumal of Philosophy, 84,1987, p. 707. MICHAEL D. Rom AND GLENN ROSS INTRODUCTION I IT there is a single issue about which undergraduates are skeptical it is skepticism. As soon as it occurs to them that they are being asked to take seriously a doctrine from which it immediately follows that they do not know their own names, or the name of the college they attend, or whether or not they are at present sitting in class listening to a philosophy lecture, their response is immediate and universal Phrases like, "silly," "stupid," "this is all semantics," and "you're playing tricks with our heads," are fairly typical of the comments elicited by an introductory lecture on skepticism. Here is phi losophy exposed as a useless and trivial enterprise, richly deserving of the ridicule heaped on it at the coffee shop.and fraternity party. How should a teacher of philosophy react to a classroom full of students for whom skepticism produces this sort of response? One could respond positively by accepting their reaction as a pedagogical challenge. A good way to begin is to ac knowledge that at the level of common sense, the claims of the skeptic do appear ridiculous. But such an acknowledgement can be easily turned into a counter-<:hallenge in the following way: if the skeptical thesis is so absurd, so laughable as to be dis missed out of hand, then it should tum out that if we consider what particular reasons people like Plato, Descartes and Hume had for taking skepticism seriously, we should discover, without too much difficulty, where they have made their mistake. At the very least, we should fmd out which intuitions seemed acceptable to them which are clearly not acceptable to us. Once students accept this assessment of their situation as a fair one, it is a rela tively easy matter to get them to see that if some particular claim to knowledge has any chance of being true it must be accompanied by some form of justification. One effec tive way to illustrate this is to point out that ordinarily when someone claims to know something it seems always legitimate to raise the question of how she knows it. The intuition that the claimer is then obliged either to come up with some sort of answer or forfeit her claim to know is one whose pull is deeply felt and is usually convincing. But once this is conceded the teacher has not only taken the offensive but has completed one half of a sort of pedagogical pincer movement and is now ready to close the trap. The crucial move involves introducing what is perhaps the most formidable and certainly among the most intuitively plausible of all the principles in the skeptic's arsenal. The principle, which has come to be known as the "Closure Principle" is one which is widely discussed in the papers which follow and it underlies the argument of the book which has stimulated much of the recent literature on skepticism, Barry Stroud's The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism.! The intuition which the Cosure Principle captures can be brought out in the following example. If you know that Wilson is now in Cleveland and you realize that if Wilson is now in Cleveland it follows that she cannot now be in Pittsburgh, then it would appear to follow as well that you know that Wilson is not now in Pittsburgh. Thus, your knowledge remains "closed" under known M. D. Roth and G. Ross (eds.). Doubting. 1-10. @ 1990 KlllWer Academic Publishers. 2 • MICHAEL D. ROTH AND GLENN ROSS logical implication. The persuasiveness of such examples makes it easy for students to accept that the following principle holds generally: For any propositions p and q, if one knows that p and knows that p entails that q, then one knows that q. But now our students have no escape from the skeptic's clutches. It would be quite an effective move to remind them at this point that so far all the skeptic has asked them to accept is that knowledge requires justification and that the Closure Principle is true - neither of which is open to the charge of being silly or stupid. Armed with the reasonableness of these two modest proposals, a further reminder is in order - namely that the consequence of skepticism which elicited the most derisory response was the claim that we don't even know we are sitting here in philosophy class. Whatever we might or might not know, surely we know that - and whoever says we do not is obviously engaged in some form of intellectual legerdemain. But if we do know that we are really in philosophy class, then the Closure Principle requires us to accept that we must know that we are not merely dreaming we are in philosophy class. Clearly, the proposition that we are not merely dreaming we're in the class follows logically from the proposition that we really are there. And if we know we are not dreaming then, of course, it will be a simple matter to satisfy the justification requirement and tell the skeptic how we know that we are not dreaming. After seeing how many of their classmates admit to having had nightmares and having realized, upon awakening, that they thought the dream was really happening, students can be easily persuaded that satisfying the justification condition for knowledge in this case is not only extremely difficult, but may very well be impossible. Of course, this is not the only scenario which generates a skeptical hypothesis. Perhaps the most famous of all such scenarios is the one proposed by Rene Descartes (1596-1650) in his Meditations. In that work Descartes asks us to consider the pos sibility that we are being manipulated by a powerful and hostile "demon" whose intent is to deceive us by producing in us a set of beliefs which do not accurately reflect the real world, i.e., the way things actually are. Our beliefs would then represent a kind of global hallucination and it would not be up to us to decide whether to be so hallucinated. What we believe would be solely at the discretion of the demon. Once again, the twin props of the Closure Principle and the justification requirement support the conclusion that in order to claim knowledge of the world we must show somehow that we are not being deceived by an evil demon. In more recent times, a popular variation on this theme is the suggestion that we are nothing more than brains which are kept functioning in vats full of life-sustaining materials. These envatted brains are stimulated in various ways by, say, a sophisticated computer to produce in the brains the feeling of being in a philosophy class with other human beings discussing skepticism. What makes such a scenario thinkable is the widely held assumption that even if we really do have complete bodies situated in a real physical world, our consciousness of being in philosophy class etc. is nothing more than our brains being stimulated in certain ways. Thus our awareness of being in philosophy class would be exactly the same if we were envatted brains being stimulated in the appropriate ways. The scenario, like the previous one, demands a satisfactory explanation of how we come to know that we are not brains in vats. The usual response to these scenarios is one which is pedagogically gratifying. More often than not a student will raise her hand and ask, with a mixture of frustration and curiosity, "Well, how do we get out of this?"
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