This paper argues for a completely universal scepticism, according to which no beliefs at all are justified to the least degree. The argument starts with a version of the Agrippan trilemma, according to which, if we accept that a belief is justified, we must choose between foundationalism, coherentism of a particular sort, and an infinite regress of justified beliefs. Each of these theories is given a careful specification in terms of the relationship of “justifiedness in p depending on justifiedness in (...) q”. It is then argued that no beliefs – not even beliefs about phenomenal experiences – are foundational in the required way. Both coherentism and infinitism are untenable, since, since they face various objections, most significantly the objection that acceptance of either would commit one to allowing that all beliefs were justified. Because the three possible accounts of justificational structure all fail radically, it is concluded that no beliefs are justified. (shrink)

Sceptics have been accused of achieving their sceptical conclusions by an arbitrary (though usually implicit) redefinition of terms like “justified”, so that, while it may be true that no belief is justified in the sceptic’s new sense of the word, all the beliefs we have taken as justified remain so in the ordinary, standard meaning of the term. This paper defends scepticism against this charge. It is pointed out that there are several sorts of case where someone’s belief may be (...) properly termed justified in one “sense”, or from one “point of view”, but from another, equally properly termed unjustified. It is argued that the point of view of the sceptic, or the sense in which he uses the term, is one of the perfectly standard ones, and not some arbitrarily introduced new sense. In addition, an explanation that is not damaging to scepticism is provided of a sceptic’s own continued ascriptions of justifiedness in everyday contexts. (shrink)

In his justifiedly famous paper, “Elusive Knowledge” (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74:4, 1996), David Lewis presents a contextualist account of knowledge, which, like other contextualist accounts, depicts sceptical claims as involving application of a higher standard of knowledge than is applied in everyday ascriptions of knowledge. On Lewis’ account, the sceptic’s denials and the everyday ascriptions are made in different contexts, which allows them both to be true. His account gives detailed specification of how contexts are to be determined. My (...) paper points out that this view is unattractive to the sceptic, since it makes scepticism, even if true, completely disconnected from and irrelevant to the rest of our cognitive discourse. After arguing that the sceptic’s own ascriptions of knowledge (made outside the philosophy seminar room) can be explained in non-contextualist ways, I expound and criticise Lewis’ analysis of knowledge, taking up in particular a central component of his account, the “Rule of Attention”. In the central part of the paper I argue that the reasons given for the inclusion of the rule are all inadequate, and also that there are positive reasons for rejecting it. The final section of the paper argues that the excision of the Rule of Attention removed would leave Lewis’ account subject to serious counter- examples. (shrink)

In this paper, I respond to the paper “The Validation of Induction” by Robert Pargetter and John Bigelow (Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 75:1, 1997), in which the authors propound the thesis that the arguments commonly thought of as good inductive arguments “properly construed, are deductively valid”. I maintain that they have not established this claim, and neither have they established a number of associated but logically independent claims that they make about inductive arguments and inductive inferences.

I discuss and criticise Douglas Gasking’s paper, “The Analytic-Synthetic Controversy” (in the current issue of this journal). Gasking proposes an explanation of our classifying together as “analytic” statements like “Someone is a bachelor if and only if he is an unmarried man”. He proposes that the feature common to the statements that we so classify is that they provide the only “semantic anchor” for a word that does not have, in Quine’s terms, a socially constant stimulus meaning. I argue that, (...) even after modifications are introduced to allow the account to handle certain difficulties, the account falls to some fatal objections. (shrink)