Abstract
A prominent contemporary anti-skeptical strategy, most famously articulated by Keith DeRose, aims to cage the skeptic′s doubts by contextualizing subjunctive conditional accounts of knowledge through a conversational rule of sensitivity. This strategy, I argue, courts charges of circularity by selectively invoking heavy counterfactual machinery. The reason: such invocation threatens to utilize a metric for modal comparison that is implicitly informed by judgments of epistemic sameness. This gives us reason to fear that said modal metric is selectively cherry-picked in advance to support the very anti-skeptical conclusion for which the contextualist longs.
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Notes
DeRose assures me in correspondence, by the way, that this is essentially the view that he continues to hold. Although he does occasionally employ a ‘double-safety’ locution to accommodate the demand that knowledge be subject to upset by nearby worlds in which p is true but the subject disbelieves it (as well as by worlds in which the subject believes p even though p is false), he regards this to be ‘a new name’ for what he takes to be ‘the same old picture.’
Obviously, another reason I focus on CCC (and its accompanying anti-skeptical argument) is that it has become effectively impossible anymore to talk about contextualism as a generic position. The oft-cited reason is branding. Unlike skepticism, which, for present purposes, can be viewed as the position that worldly knowledge is unattainable because various bizarre scenarios (involving malign genies and the like) cannot be effectively countered, contextualism now comes in so many fragrances and flavors that one must step very lightly in any attempt to articulate a generic contextualist position. One chief branding distinction is that between attributor and subject contextualism, as we decide whose context is to determine the fortunes of knowledge claims (DeRose 1999, 190-191). Another is that between conversational and non-conversational contextualism, as we decide which features of context properly count as determinative (Williams 2004, 193). A third is the distinction between varying accounts of distance, as it were, as we decide the nature of the changes that are ushered in by distinct epistemic contexts. It is thus that we are confronted by ‘contextualists’ as different as Keith DeRose and Michael Williams (DeRose 1995; Williams 2001). While the former insists that it is the conversational circumstances of attributors of knowledge that render various possibilities relevant or irrelevant by raising or lowering standards of knowledge along a single scale of severity, the latter maintains that it is the speaker′s background information and practical interests that determine her standards of knowledge (and, in cases of radical skeptical challenge, whether or not an ordinary ‘knowledge relation’ is even in play at all). In light of such diversity, it can be quite misleading to speak of ‘contextualism’ as a generic position.
To render our comparisons concrete and telling, I herein restrict ‘radical skeptical scenarios’ to ‘brain-in-vat’ scenarios, thus taking the Cartesian malign genie to be the non-magical mad scientist of recent philosophical vintage, maliciously poking his victim′s brain, envatted mere moments before.
It may seem that it is merely a general, rather than exceptionless, feature of BIV worlds that they sabotage truth-tracking in a way that IA worlds do not. For we certainly seem to be able to imagine BIV worlds in which such sabotage may not seem to occur. Suppose, for instance, that our malevolent brain-scientist sets things up so that the envatted victim′s perceptual experiences regarding his immediate environment are generally correct, despite their not being caused in the way we ordinarily take them to be caused (e.g., by sensory surveillance, as opposed to direct neural stimulation). In such cases, when the victim, e.g., believes that an apple is before him, an apple really is before him. It is merely the case that he doesn′t actually ‘see’ it with his eyes. Even though I have no problems acknowledging odd exceptions to general rules, I am unconvinced that the above-described sort of case really does constitute an exception. For in such examples there still remains a large class of beliefs with regard to which our truth-tracking abilities remain undermined: our second-order beliefs concerning the source of our ‘sensory’ experiences.
Here I am obviously importing the test case examples (e.g., amputating accidents and envatted brains) that DeRose himself employs.
This possible world tradition traces, of course, to Stalnaker and Lewis, both of whom investigate possible worlds′ similarity in the course of examining counterfactual conditionals as tools with which we might logically characterize the features of actuality (Stalnaker 1970; Lewis 1973a, 1973b). For both authors, conditionals of the form, ‘If A were true, then B would be true’ apply in the actual world only when B accompanies A in most similar non-actual worlds in which A obtains. That is to say, such conditionals are true when less departure from actuality is required to make their antecedents true in conjunction with their consequents than is required to render their antecedents true alone. Beyond this, details vary, as Stalnaker and Lewis offer competing formalisms with which to characterize those worlds differing minimally from our own. Stalnaker targets this class through a selection function designed to pick out that world in which A obtains and approximates actuality as closely as A′s truth allows (Stalnaker 1970). Lewis proposes an ordering metric on which any two non-actual worlds must either be equidistant from actuality or else line up in progressive serial order with respect to it. He then stipulates that ‘if A were true, then B would be true’ applies if and only if either no worlds accommodate A, or else some world accommodating both A and B is closer to actuality than is any world accommodating A but not B (Lewis 1973a, 1973b, 1986). Various differences follow from these differences, in turn. Lewis jettisons both Stalnaker′s uniqueness and limit assumptions, which collectively dictate that exactly one world is metaphysically closest to actuality. Thus, Lewis′s worlds may tie for similarity, but not Stalnaker′s. For Stalnaker, each world has one and only one most similar neighbor. Beneath these differences, however, the thematic similarities between Lewis′s and Stalnaker′s accounts prevail, at least insofar as our present concerns go. In particular, both authors effectively treat possible worlds′ comparative similarity as intuitively familiar, and so provide little method for judging inter-world distance other than simple reflection upon the relevant counterfactual conditionals themselves.
When we talk of ‘miracles’ in this context, we must careful for reasons that Lewis himself notes. Why? Because, strictly speaking, such ‘miracles’ are not miracles from the standpoint of the worlds in which they actually occur. As Lewis writes,
‘When I say that a miracle takes place at w, I mean that there is a violation of the laws of nature. But note that the violated laws are not laws of the same world where they are violated. That is impossible; whatever else a law may be, it is at least an exceptionless regularity. I am using “miracle” to ex-press a relation between different worlds. A miracle at w1, relative to w0, is a violation at w1of the laws of w0, which are at best the almost-laws of w1. The laws of w1 itself, if such there be, do not enter into it.‘ (Lewis 1979, pp. 466–467).
See Krasner and Heller (1994) for a number of clever counterexamples to Lewis′s principles.
Bauman (2005, 233) offers a comparative analysis in similar terms, as well as an alternative circularity objection, but by way of a different route and somewhat broader brush strokes than those I employ here.
Here it is obviously important that BIV worlds (as opposed to Cartesian demon worlds, for instance) are completely non-magical in character.
One possible, but ultimately misconceived, response that CCC anti-skeptical strategists might offer at this point is the following: the sort of circularity that I obsess on simply isn′t one that they need be concerned to avoid. Indeed, they might maintain that I have made their argument for contextualism for them. For isn′t their point that different inquiries about knowledge vary as a function of which counterpossibilities are considered germane, and isn′t this point itself reflected in the characterization of belief-forming method that one has in mind when one poses a question about knowledge? That is, why can′t contextualists concede the circularity I argue for, but then simply dismiss it as harmless? This potential move, despite its boldness, misses the point. The circularity for which I argue is not harmless as long as contextualists take seriously their implicit claim to have independent and objective modal similarity criteria at hand. I suppose that they might simply opt to reject this implicit claim. If they do this, however, it is incumbent upon them to provide a supplemental argument for an additional thesis: contextualism also governs our modal similarity attributions, and moreover, governs it in a way that causes it to parallel our knowledge attributions perfectly. This is an argument that they do not provide.
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Wilburn, R. Possible Worlds of Doubt. Acta Anal 25, 259–277 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0058-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0058-0