Abstract
For a putative knower S and a proposition P, two types of skepticism can be distinguished, depending on the conclusions they draw: outer skepticism, which concludes that S does not know that P, and inner skepticism, which concludes that S does not know whether P. This paper begins by showing that outer skepticism has undesirable consequences because that S does not know that P presupposes P, and inner skepticism does not have this undesirable consequence since that S does not know whether P does not presuppose P. We indicate that the two types of skepticism aim to different loci of doubts: while outer skepticism doubts whether we can gain an epistemic warrant for the actuality, inner skepticism doubts whether we can gain epistemic identification of the actuality. It is further indicated that responses to skepticism from externalist theories, as well as from fallibilist internalist theories, can only respond to outer skepticism but not to inner skepticism.
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Notes
Section 2 elaborates more on the issue of presupposition.
For a recent discussion on Williams’ distinction of the two inquiries and their epistemological significance, see Wong (2005).
Williams’ original inquiry is “who knows whether P?”, which is used to characterize the information seeking characteristic of knowing.
For example, Lycan (1999, p. 3) clearly endorses this view.
One may suggest that knowing that P does not even entail P, but only pragmatically implicates P. We find this proposal even less plausible. The standard test for implicatures is by that they can be canceled (defeated), as shown by (1a), where the generalized conversational implicature that not all students failed the test is canceled by the following sentence in fact, all students failed the test.
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(1)
a. Some students failed the test. In fact, all students failed the test.
b. John knows that it is raining outside. In fact, it is not raining.
If that S knows that P only implicates that P, we would expect (1b) to be consistent, but it is not (See also Williamson 2000, p. 35 for a similar argument).
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One may question the presupposition account for the following reason. Given that what is presupposed is also entailed, that S knows that P entails that P. In case that P is false, by modus tollens, it follows that it is not the case that S knows that P, and this is a result that the presupposition account does not seem to like. The presupposition account can respond to the objection by the following. Given that the presupposition of that S knows that P is not satisfied, either that S knows that P cannot be felicitously expressed or that S knows that P is truth-valueless, so modus tollens cannot even be applied.
Saying that knowing that P presupposes P does not make asserting that I do not know that P equal to asserting that P and I do not know that P, which leads to Moore’s paradox. Saying that I do not know that P is to presuppose P and assert that I do not know it. It gives rise to infelicity when P is not the case, but nothing paradoxical arises.
The meta-linguistically interpreted not in S does not know that P cancels the presupposition of that S knows that P rather than the presupposition of that S does not know that P.
A standard discourse of the lottery case is as follows: “Consider that John bought a lottery ticket and believes that he will not win the lottery, given that he finds his chance to win to be quite low. Even if it is the case that he will win the lottery, we still find that John does not know that he will win the lottery, given that there is a chance, counterfactually speaking, for him to win.” In this discourse, that John will win the lottery is already presupposed before we attribute that he does not know it.
That S does not know where John is does have a presupposition that John is somewhere. But the presupposition arises from the interrogative rather than from know.
It has long been noticed that subjunctive expressions have interpretations other than counterfactual interpretations, but those interpretations are not the interest of this paper.
One way to express the idea is to think of open possibilities as an agent-dependent notion, and the dependency is on the common ground (beliefs) among agents: what is openly possible, and thus epistemically possible, is what is not excluded from the common ground of a group of agents. See DeRose (1991) for a more detailed discussion. This idea can formally appeal to the notion that, like NP quantifiers (cf. Stanley and Szabo 2000), epistemic modals, as well as other modals, contain implicit domain restrictors in their logical forms which can be filled in by either overt syntactic element or contextual information (cf. Kratzer 1981; von Fintel and Iatridou 2003). We will not go into the details of the issue any further.
The open possibility arising from indicative conditionals is an implicature, for it can be canceled. For example, we can say something like the following: John is unhappy, but if John is happy, he will come to our party. See Gillies (2004) for more details.
Putnam (1981) argues that the skeptical possibility that we are brains in vats is actually impossible. One may like to consider whether he argues that it is not the case that we might be brains in vats or that it is not the case that we might have been brains in vats.
In Nozick (1981), the notion of counterfactual possibilities is used only to illustrate subjunctive conditionals in his analysis of knowledge. He does not endorse any specific possible-world account of subjunctive conditionals.
To see that Nozick (1981) takes skeptical possibilities as counterfactual possibilities, consider the involved subjunctive mood in Nozick (1981): “If it were true that an evil demon was deceiving us, if we were having a particular dream, if we were floating in a tank with our brains stimulated in a specified way, we would still believe we were not.” (Nozick 1981, p. 201).
Lewis (1996) adopts a two step strategy to include counterfactual possibilities into epistemic consideration. His first step is to ‘eliminate’ possibilities, which is a notion that we shall talk about later, and the second step is then to ignore worlds by applying his principles of ignorance. As for skeptical worlds, they are not eliminated, but they can be ignored depending on context. Thus, according to Lewis, elimination is an actuality-independent notion, but ignorance, as well as consideration, is an actuality-dependent notion.
Reflexivity of the accessibility relation is required to satisfy this condition.
As far as we know, Descartes uses indicative mood to express skeptical possibilities in the original Latin version, and the French translation follows.
This issue shall get clearer in Sect. 5.
Fumerton (1995) distinguishes skepticism with respect to knowledge and skepticism with respect to justified or rational beliefs. Limited outer skepticism is better understood as skepticism with respect to the skepticism on knowledge in the sense that the evidence for beliefs cannot ‘guarantee’ or ‘track’ the truth of the believed proposition, rather than his skepticism with respect to justified or rational beliefs.
We find limited outer skepticism is already implicit in Dretske (1970). Of course, it may already appear in even earlier literature, such as the work of Hume. But we would like to leave this historical issue open here.
Whether an inner skeptic can be successful in demonstrating a skeptical possibility to be an open possibility is not our concern in this paper.
The phrase true belief indicates that this is a form of limited outer skepticism.
On this interpretation of (PE-3), it is no longer required that the beliefs under discussion are true beliefs.
A stronger form of epistemic closure is as follows: if S knows that if P, then Q, then if S knows that P, then S knows that Q.
The difference between inner and outer skepticism should not be identified with the difference between metaphysical skepticism and epistemological skepticism. Even though inner skepticism expresses a concern about what the actuality is, it is a concern about our ability to identify it rather than a concern about whether there is an actuality.
Pritchard (2005) remarks that externalist theories, nonetheless, can avoid what he calls veritic luck defined as “For all S, the truth of S’s belief in a contingent proposition, φ, is veritically lucky if, and only if, S’s belief that φ is true in the actual world, but false in most near-by possible worlds in which the belief is formed in the same manner as in the actual world.” (Pritchard 2005, p. 196)
For the relation between reflective luck and the Pyrrhonian challenge to externalism, see Pritchard (2006).
The complaint that skepticism raises the epistemic standard too high can only be based on this presupposed knowledge. Nonetheless, what inner skepticism aims for is non-presupposed knowledge. Thus the complaint cannot be that inner skepticism raises the epistemic standard.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank Xiang-Min Sen and two anonymous reviewers for very helpful comments. Thanks are also due to audiences at the 2007 annual conference of Taiwan Philosophical Association. The first author gratefully acknowledges the support from Taiwan National Science Council under the project number 95-2411-H-194-015-MY2, 97-2628-H-194-063-MY3, and 98-2410-H-031-002-MY3.
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Wang, L., Tai, O. Skeptical Conclusions. Erkenn 72, 177–204 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9198-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-009-9198-2