Abstract

This treatment of scepticism is then shown to have important consequences for a wide range of issues in epistemology. Some of these are the following: that transcendental arguments are unsound because they presuppose a mistaken account of the sense in which we know what we take ourselves to know; that the technical notion of a criterion Wittgenstein employs in the Investigations involves a confusion which results from a failure to appreciate the role of background presuppositions in our epistemic discourse in everyday life; that extreme scepticism--the doctrine that there is no proposition whatever that we are justified in believing--does not entail that we are justified in doubting anything and, partly for this reason, can be coherently maintained; that pragmatic justifications presuppose that there are at least some things that we are epistemically justified in believing and thus that pragmatic justifications by themselves are an inadequate response to scepticism; that the Gettier examples do not justify abandoning the traditional analysis of knowledge in favour of a causal theory; and that the traditional analysis, properly understood, itself entails that there is a causal element in knowledge. The treatment of scepticism proposed also helps to show that traditional foundationalism and the coherence theory of justification are both untenable, and makes possible the development of a foundationalist theory which diverges from traditional foundationalism in ways that avoid the standard objections against that view, in particular, the problem if circularity. ;One of the central aims of this essay is to show that the main traditions in twentieth-century epistemology do not provide a satisfactory refutation of scepticism. This is achieved by developing a theory about the nature of epistemic concepts which shows that scepticism has been misunderstood both by those who defend it and those who dismiss it as absurd. A consequence of the theory proposed is that scepticism is consistent with the truth of epistemic claims in everyday life. Thus one cannot refute it by appealing to the intuition or common sense belief that those claims are true, as epistemologists have commonly supposed