Abstract
Duncan Pritchard recently proposed a Wittgensteinian solution to closure-based skepticism. According to Wittgenstein, all epistemic systems assume certain truths. The notions that we are not disembodied brains, that the Earth has existed for a long time and that one’s name is such-and-such all function as “hinge commitments.” Pritchard views a hinge commitment as a positive propositional attitude that is not a belief. Because closure principles concern only knowledge-apt beliefs, they do not apply to hinge commitments. Thus, from the fact that a subject knows that he is sitting in a room, and the fact that the subject’s sitting in a room entails his bodily existence, it does not follow that the subject also knows that he is not an envatted brain. This paper rejects Pritchard’s non-belief reading of hinge commitments. I start by showing that the non-belief reading fails to solve the skeptical paradox because the reasons that Pritchard uses to support the non-belief reading do not exempt hinge propositions from closure principles. I then proceed to argue that the non-belief reading is false as it claims that hinge commitments, unlike ordinary beliefs, are rationally unresponsive—with the help of a scenario in which a subject’s experience is internally chaotic, we can safely conclude that the hinge commitment that one is not systematically mistaken about the world is equally responsive to one’s evidential situations.
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06 April 2023
A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04132-3
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Jean-Baptiste Rauzy, Grégoire Lefftz, Guillaume Dechauffour and J. Adam Carter. I am grateful to three anonymous referees from Synthese for comments on earlier versions of this paper.
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Zhang, X. Closure, deduction and hinge commitments. Synthese 198 (Suppl 15), 3533–3551 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1679-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1679-x