Abstract
Skeptical invariantism does not account for the intuitive connections between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning and this constitutes a significant problem for the position because it does not save corresponding epistemic appearances (cf. Hawthorne (2004:131-5)). Moreover, it is an attraction of fallibilist over infallibilist-skeptical views that they can easily account for the epistemic appearances about the connections between knowledge, assertion, and practical reasoning (cf. Williamson (2000:249-255)). Call this argument ‘the argument from the knowledge norm’. I motivate and develop a Humean, pragmatist strategy for a skeptical response to ‘the argument from the knowledge norm’. Afterwards I outline a ‘toy’ version of pragmatic skepticism that can implement the strategy and save our everyday practice of assertion and practical reasoning. To this effect, I distinguish between assertibility conditions and truth conditions for ‘know’ and suggest that while assertibility conditions are pragmatic conditions sensitive to practical exigencies, truth conditions are semantic conditions sensitive only to truth. I briefly respond to three objections and conclude that pragmatic skepticism is resourceful enough to save our everyday practice of (fallibilist) assertion and practical reasoning and, hence, pay some due respect to corresponding epistemic appearances.
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Notes
See Conee (2005:52) and Bonjour (2010:59-60) for a similar stipulation. Dinges (2015:6) is also kind of sympathetic to such a construal of skeptical invariantism. This stipulation of skeptical invariantism is modest because it is permissive enough to allow for non-global forms of skepticism. For instance, a local form of skeptical invariantism could deny only all a posteriori and contingent knowledge but not all a priori and necessary knowledge (cf. Hawthorne (2004:133, n.43)). If that is the case, then we could have a priori knowledge of what knowledge is that local, contingent knowledge does not satisfy (but see Quine (1953), Williamson (2007) and Beebe (2011) for skepticism about a priori knowledge). At any rate, a non-global, local form of skepticism about knowledge would pale compared to Unger’s (1975) global, ‘universal skepticism’ about knowledge (and justification). For other accounts of global skepticism about knowledge, see Fogelin (1994), Klein (2003) and Rinard (forthcoming). In section 4, I distinguish the ‘toy’ skeptical view sketched here from these more extreme forms of skeptical invariantism.
This is the case because, according to infallibilism, knowledge requires epistemic probability 1 of the belief on the given justification and, as we very rarely satisfy such a stringent constraint of epistemic probability, it follows that we rarely have knowledge. Thus, skeptical invariantism is naturally conjoined to infallibilism. See Dodd (2011) for an explication of infallibilism along such probabilistic lines. Relatedly, Davis (2007) talks of ‘complete’ justification and Unger (1975) of ‘absolute’ justification.
For various forms of skeptical invariantism, see Unger (1975), Fogelin (1994), Schaffer (2004), Davis (2007), Frances (2009), Cappelen (2005), Kyriacou (2017, forthcoming), and Rinard (forthcoming).
See Rinard (forthcoming: section 2) for some discussion of the point. Two recent monographs that by and large overlook skeptical invariantism are MacFarlane (2014) and Baumann (2016).
See Quine and Ullian (1978: Ch. 6) for some discussion of theoretical virtues.
See Unger (1975), Williamson (2000), Hawthorne (2004), and Stanley (2005) for the knowledge norm of assertion and practical reasoning. The norm may take various forms (modally weaker or stronger) and I am not here interested in what particular form it should take. Also, it is to be noted that the knowledge norm of assertion and practical reasoning does not suffice to lead to action. If you have agoraphobia and suffer from extreme shyness and introversion, then you can’t go out in the market to buy, say, ice-cream, even if you want ice-cream, fallibly know where to find it and how to get it. This indicates that the knowledge norm can lead to action only if it is supplemented by general conditions of rationality (practical and theoretical). Thanks to an anonymous referee who raised the point.
We may wonder: Isn’t the case that skeptical invariantism is epistemically self-defeating because, by its own lights, we cannot really know its supposed truth? And if the knowledge norm is true, isn’t it the case that skeptical invariantism is non-assertible because we cannot (by its own lights) claim to know that it is true? (cf. Hawthorne (2004:132) for similar worries and Cappelen (2005:31-5) for some discussion).
However, the skeptical invariantist view has an easy way out of these objections. Skeptical invariantism need not be epistemically self-defeating because we can employ an abductive philosophical methodology (cf. Williamson 2007) and suggest that we do not know that skeptical invariantism is true. A presumption to really know that skeptical invariantism is true would, indeed, threaten to make the view self-defeating because it is very unlikely that we can have infallible, deductive justification for the view. More modestly, we can propose that we could in principle find the theory to be only abductively plausible and, therefore, reasonable. According to this view, reasonable belief is possible, in opposition to the more extreme skeptical view that embraces skepticism even about reasonable belief and denies that skeptical invariantism could be shown to be reasonable (cf. Unger (1975), Fogelin (1994), Rinard (forthcoming)). I discuss this aspect of the view in section 4.
See Rinard (forthcoming: section 2) for discussion of such a reductio to skeptical arguments. See also Hannon (2019) for the case that skepticism is impractical and, therefore, implausible. Contrary to Hannon’s (2019) pessimism, this paper optimistically suggests that at least some moderate version of skepticism can be practical and, therefore, could, in principle, be even plausible.
See Unger (1975), Fogelin (1994), Schaffer (2004), Conee (2005), Davis (2007), Bonjour (2010), Dodd (2011), Moon (2012), and to some extent Dinges (2015). Hawthorne (2004:140-1) is also a sympathetic critic. Compare “It is clear enough that a number of the structural constraints on the concept of knowledge are perfectly compatible with skepticism. Indeed, skepticism uses them to its advantage… The costs, meanwhile, are clear enough: The Moorean constraint is obviously violated. Skepticism is also at odds with the intuitive normative connections between knowledge, assertion and practical reasoning we have described. The scoreboard is not obviously terrible. But we should carefully examine alternative approaches” (2004:140-1).
As seen from within the skeptical perspective, everyday (fallibilist) ‘knowledge’ is not really knowledge but something coming close to knowledge, strictly speaking. In what follows, I will not use scare quotes around the word ‘knowledge’ to indicate this difference for reasons of style and simplicity.
See Stroud (1984) and Rinard (forthcoming) for some discussion of the disaster that skepticism threatens to unleash (practically and intellectually).
Hume, for one, seems to have thought that inductive knowledge works and should work along those pragmatic lines. See Hume (1739, Book 1, Part III) and Stroud (1977: Chs IV &V) for discussion.
Compare Unger (1975: 48): “…our language habits might serve us well in practical ways, even while they involve us in saying what is not true.’
The deflationary maneuver does not necessarily deny all knowledge, or that there is a robust knowledge relation. It only denies that there is much knowledge. This is coherent with a moderate form of skeptical invariantism that accepts that there is a robust knowledge relation and some knowledge (e.g., of necessary truths) (cf. Hawthorne (2004:133, n.43)).
Actually, Hawthorne (2004:134) in passing suggests, more or less, the same proposal. He writes ‘Perhaps for an assertion to be proper, it merely has to be as close to knowledge as the context demands’ (2004:134).
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for pressing me on this score.
Blinded reference for reviewing purposes XXX.
Does skeptical pragmatic invariantism accept that ‘know’ is ambiguous? Is not this view about ‘know’ linguistically odd, anyhow, and, therefore, unlikely to obtain? In reply, skeptical invariantism does not suggest that ‘know’ is ambiguous because it sets determinate truth-conditions for ‘know’ (for the ambiguity view of ‘know’, see Satta (2018)). The actual use of ‘know’ can be ambiguous between fallibilist and infallibilist conceptions of knowledge but, as I have argued elsewhere, this is relatively harmless because we have the cognitive competence and the linguistic means to disambiguate the conception of knowledge expressed in a set context. Linguistic means such as modifiers (adverbs and adjectives) can help us effortlessly disambiguate which conception of knowledge is expressed in a conversational context. Unger (1975:59. 84-6) first introduced this idea. For a similar point see Conee (2005:53).
Also, the view is not as linguistically crazy as one might presume at first sight because the linguistic phenomenon of loose use and partial semantic blindness is quite widespread (cf. Burge (1979), Putnam (1975)). We often use words loosely and exhibit at least partial semantic blindness with regard to the accurate and exact meaning of words. We might even do so for practical reasons in full awareness that we are using a word loosely and in discrepancy from its strict meaning (e.g., water, fish, simultaneity etc.). If that is the case, the fallibilist loose use of ‘know’ in everyday life and semantic blindness about the exact infallibilist meaning of ‘know’ should not be considered so bizarre. It is far from being unprecedented, linguistically speaking, and thereby the portrayed picture of ‘know’ is neither bizarre nor crazy.
Dinges (2015:4) proposes that we understand what is to be close enough (via substitutional implicature) to what is said in the following way: “in order to be close enough to knowing that p, one must satisfy all the conditions for knowledge…except the justification condition…for example… S is close enough (for the purposes of the low standards case) to knowing that p iff p, S believes that p and S can rule out all likely alternatives to p” (his emphasis). For a safety-based understanding, see Kyriacou (2017).
The two-level understanding of knowledge cognition is also consonant with dual processing theories of cognition that distinguish between effortless and automatic System 1 processing and effortful and reflective System 2 processing (cf. Kahneman (2011)). Everyday fallibilist assertion and practical reasoning could be processed by System 1 and reflective thinking about ‘know’ (that supposedly suggests the plausibility of infallibilism) could be processed by System 2. Thus, the portrayed dualistic picture of ‘know’ is psychologically realistic and there is no concern about the psychological applicability of the idea.
Compare Frances (2009:150): ‘We engage in the talk anyway, because the truth-value of the literal construal of our words doesn’t really matter…and because it would be a real pain in the ass to stop talking that way.’
As Nozick (1993:112-4) has argued, rationality as reason-responsiveness might have evolved to play an evolutionary adaptive role, but now ‘floats free’ and can be used to inquire into pure mathematics, logic systems, game theory, metaphysics, theoretical physics, and even rationality itself.
See Blome-Tillman (2013), Hawthorne (2004), MacFarlane (2014), and Dinges (2015) for similar worries. Compare Cohen (1999:80)) “The way I see it, what is troubling and unacceptable about skepticism is the claim that all along in our everyday discourse, when we have been claiming to . . . know, we have been speaking falsely.”
This is the dialectical maneuver that Wright (1991) has called ‘the Russelian retreat.’
I would like to thank Kevin Wallbridge, Michael Hannon and Alexander Dinges for helpful comments to previous versions of the paper.
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Kyriacou, C. Assertion and Practical Reasoning, Fallibilism and Pragmatic Skepticism. Acta Anal 35, 543–561 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00414-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-019-00414-z