Principia: An International Journal of Epistemology (Jun 1999)
Free Will as a Sceptical Threat to Knowing
Abstract
Sceptics standardly argue that a person lacks knowledge due to an inability to know that some dire possibility is not being actualised in her believing that p. I argue that the usual sceptical inventory of such possibilities should include one's possibly having had some freedom in forming one's belief that p. A sceptic should conclude that wherever there might have been some such freedom, there is no knowledge that p. (This is not to say that sceptics would be correct in that conclusion. It is just to say that the usual sceptical way of thinking should welcome the possibility of some such belief-freedom as much as it routinely welcomes the possibilities of dreaming and of evil demons.)
