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Out-Gunning Skepticism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

L. S. Carrier*
Affiliation:
University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL33124, U.S.A.

Extract

Bredo C. Johnsen1 misconceives my strictures concerning acceptance of the following principle (where ‘p’ stands for any empirical proposition):

(1) If A both knows that p and knows that p entails q, then A can come to know that q.

Johnsen seems unaware that my criticism was intended to apply only after (1) is made to appear in its most plausible light; that is, only after its consequent is interpreted as: ’It is logically possible for A to know that q.’ Without this interpretation (1) might be dismissed simply on the grounds that A suffers from some physical or psychological disability that prevents him from drawing inferences from what he knows.

Properly interpreted, (1) remains acceptable as long as the propositions substituted for p and q are such that it is at least logically possible for A to get evidence enough to make them known. Agreement on this point is itself enough to render Johnsen's own examples irrelevant. For instance, even though it may be physically impossible for A to get adequate evidence that in the constellation Andromeda there is a planet intermediate in size between Venus and Earth, the foregoing is still a fit substitution instance for q; but since such a q does not suffice to falsify the consequent of (1), it does nothing to generate any skeptical argument, either.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1987

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References

1 Johnsen, Bredo C.Skeptical Rearmament,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 15 (1985) 507–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar

2 This was my intended claim in ‘Skepticism Disarmed,’ Canadian Journal of Philosophy 13 (1983) 109.