Abstract

The resurgent interest in skepticism over the past fifteen years is due largely to perceived breakthroughs by Robert Nozick and Stanley Cavell, who each question skeptical assumptions thought to have gone unquestioned since Descartes. I argue that Austin and Wittgenstein each questioned the same assumptions over forty years ago, that they did so in a more complete and convincing manner, and that their approaches to skepticism, properly understood, are as sophisticated and compelling as any yet produced. ;In Philosophical Explanations, Nozick questions the assumption that to accept the possibility of skeptical hypotheses is to reject the possibility of knowledge of the external world. He claims that this implication holds only if the closure principle holds, and argues that the closure principle fails. I maintain that the skeptic's reasoning doesn't depend on the closure principle, that it depends instead on a stronger "infallibility" principle, and that Nozick's arguments against the closure principle are, in any case, unacceptably weak. I then explicate and defend strong arguments in both Austin and Wittgenstein against the skeptic's use of the infallibility principle. ;In The Claim of Reason, Cavell shows how the skeptic attempts to cast doubt on the whole of our knowledge by casting doubt on a "best case" claim to knowledge--a claim which we cannot place in doubt without thereby placing in doubt every other claim to knowledge. He then questions the assumption that there can be best case claims, providing a "schema" for showing that what the skeptic takes as a best case claim is not, grammatically, a claim at all. I argue that Austin and Wittgenstein anticipate Cavell in asserting the incoherence of the notion of a best case claim, and that jointly they provide a framework within which Cavell's schema can be brought to fruition