Abstract

My broadest concern is over the question of whether or not naturalistic epistemology is fully adequate, or comprehensive, qua knowledge theory, vis-a-vis alternative accounts of epistemology as a discipline which is primarily concerned to address the challenge of traditional external world skepticism. Consequently, I develop and critique two lines of antiskeptical criticism which, if sound, would each serve to validate naturalistic epistemology in this regard. ;The first of these maintains that skeptical argument turns upon equivocation. It alleges that the skeptic redefines "knowledge" in accordance with arbitrarily high standards of his own fabrication, and then draws misplaced conclusions for the possibility of knowledge as this relation is ordinarily understood. This critique of skepticism is, I argue, unconvincing. It errs in treating skepticism as a philosophical artifact, rather than as a discovery about knowledge. Thus, the skeptic does not get his negative result by simply changing the subject. ;The second line of antiskeptical criticism which I then consider is, in contrast, more promising. What this account questions is the skeptic's ability to meaningfully assert his challenge from the position of epistemological solipsism which he purports to assume. From this position, I argue, discriminations of differing intentional content of a sort required to significantly distinguish between alternative skeptical counterpossibilities cannot be drawn, and without such discriminations the skeptic is unable to raise genuinely competing skeptical alternatives for consideration, and thereby pose the question of how we could ever know which one of them obtains. ;Such semantic antirealism, I then argue, is only ameliorated by a complimentary positive reconstrual of semantic factuality in immanent, naturalistic terms. It is only through such a reconstrual that the notion of semantic "normativity" can be rendered intelligible . Attempts to pose the skeptical challenge are consequently self-defeating