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The paradigm response to skepticism

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Abstract

This paper introduces and defends the paradigm response to external world skepticism. To understand it, consider an analogy. One of the hallmarks of being a bird is an ability to fly. A penguin lacks this hallmark and thus fails to be a paradigm bird. Likewise, there are various hallmarks of knowledge. Some of your external world beliefs lack some of these hallmarks, and thus fail to be paradigm cases of knowledge. Just as the inability of penguins to fly doesn’t prevent them from being birds, likewise the lack of these hallmarks doesn’t prevent your beliefs from being knowledge. It just prevents them from being paradigm cases thereof.

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Notes

  1. It’s worth contrasting my view with a response with a similar name—the “paradigm case argument” originating in the 1940s and associated with Norman Malcolm. Malcolm used ideas about the way we learn terms to support the claim that our external world beliefs are paradigms of knowledge (Malcolm, 1942). My view, by contrast, denies that these beliefs are paradigms of knowledge. In spirit, my view is closer (though not equivalent) to views on which there are higher and lower forms of knowledge, with our external world beliefs counting as knowledge of a lower sort. Such views arguably stretch back to Plato (2004). I apply the view of knowledge I discuss here to the threshold problem in my (Immerman, Forthcoming). Thanks to several anonymous referees for suggesting I discuss these points.

  2. See e.g. (Becker, 2007, p. 2; Brueckner, 2008; Cohen, 1988, p. 94; Cohen, 2000, p. 100; Cohen, 2001, p. 94; DeRose 1995; Gerken, 2012, p. 386; Lammenranta, 2008, p. 11; Pritchard, 2001, pp. 87–88; Pritchard 2002; Sosa, 2009, pp. 53–54; Wright, 1991, p. 89).

  3. One example I have in mind here is the KK principle. Some skeptical arguments seem to implicitly rely on the KK principle (see e.g. Stroud, 1984), which opens the possibility that I could apply this paper’s anti-skeptical strategy to address them. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting I discuss this.

  4. One classic example of someone who characterized certain properties in this way is Ross (1930); a more recent example is Audi (1993).

  5. One classic example of someone who characterized certain epistemic properties in this way is Roderick Chisholm (see e.g. Chisholm, 1957; Chisholm, 1966); some more recent examples include e.g. (Craig, 1990, p. 14; Gerken, 2011; Gerken, 2015; Hannon 2015; Hannon, 2019, pp. 110–113; Hannon, Forthcoming, p. 27; Pinillos, Forthcoming, Pinillos, 2016).

  6. One classic example of someone who characterized certain epistemic properties in this way is John Pollock (see e.g. Pollock, 1967, 1974; some more recent examples include e.g. Cohen, 2004, p. 484; Pinillos, Forthcoming).

  7. For examples of discussion of this or closely related arguments, (see e.g. Atkins & Nance, 2014, p. 36; Axtell, 2008, p. 561; Becker, 2007, pp. 69–70; Black, 2002, p. 148; Black, 2008, p. 11; Byrne, 2004, p. 303; Campbell et al. 2010, p. 11; Cleve, 2008, p. 288; Conee & Feldman 2004, p. 279; DeRose, 1999, Feldman 2001, p. 63; Gascoigne, 2002, p. 10; Janvid 2013, Kraft, 2013, p. 66; Leite, 2004, p. 336; Leite, 2010, p. 40; McGinn, 2003, p. 151; Murphy, 2013, p. 273; Pritchard 2002, pp. 217–218; Schaffer, 2004, p. 139; Sosa, 1999, p. 143; Stanley, 2005, p. 27; Steup, 2013; Turri, Forthcoming; Unger, 1975, p. 8; Vahid, 2013, pp. 243–244; Wang, 2014, p. 1130).

  8. Examples of people who take this path include (Audi, 1985; Dretske, 1970, 2005; Nozick, 1981).

  9. Experimental philosophy arguably seems to support my view; for discussion, (see e.g. Beebe & Monaghan, 2018, Kraft & Wiegmann, 2018, Turri, 2015. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting I add a note to this effect and for the citations.

  10. For some more quotes in a similar vein, see (Dretske, 2005, p. 17).

  11. See e.g. (Hawthorne, 2004, p. 34; Williamson, 2000, p. 117). Note that Hawthorne and Williamson are both aware of counterexamples to the principle as stated; Hawthorne notes some explicitly (Hawthorne, 2004, pp. 34–35) while Williamson includes the hedge “in general” in his phrasing of the principle.

  12. For some other examples of common counterexamples to this sort of closure principle, see e.g. (David & Warfield, 2008; Kvanvig, 2006, pp. 261–221; Lasonen-Aarnio, 2008).

  13. For similar formulations, see e.g. (Byrne, 2004, p. 321; Klein, 2004, p. 166; Stanley, 2005, p. 27; Steup, 2005, p. 2; Steup 2013; Wang, 2014, p. 1130).

  14. See e.g. (Heylen, 2016, p. 64; Rosenkranz, 2007, p. 90).

  15. A similar sort of point is raised in Heylen (2016). Note that this sort of example also works against position-to-know closure principles where “position to know” is understood as meaning that you would know q if you competently deduced it from p. For a related view, see e.g. (McHugh, 2010). Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting I discuss this.

  16. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this question.

  17. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this question.

  18. This is an extremely common path, often called the “Moorean” path thanks to its association with G.E. Moore; see (Moore, 1939).

  19. For one of the founding discussions regarding the relationship between sensitivity and knowledge, see (Nozick, 1981).

  20. See e.g. (Becker & Black 2012, p. 1; Cross, 2010, p. 40; Ichikawa 2017, p. 60; Kvanvig, 2012, p. 107).

  21. See e.g. (Ichikawa, 2017, p. 61; Kripke 2011; Pritchard, 2012, pp. 175–176; Sosa, 1999, pp. 145–146; Vogel, 2012, p. 134).

  22. There is some controversy here, in part stemming from Hilary Putnam’s idea that if you were a brain in a vat, the content of your beliefs would be very different (Putnam, 1992). The standard move in response is to modify the skeptical hypothesis to add in that you have recently been envatted. For some related discussion, see e.g. (Baumann, 2019; Roush, 2010). Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting I add these two additional citations.

  23. For example, in the the subsection devoted to the second premise, I argued that closure under known entailment is a hallmark of knowledge. So if you reject the second premise, it follows that you think our external world knowledge is violating this hallmark.

  24. Thanks to an anonymous referee for flagging this concern.

  25. I gave a number of examples in my second footnote on page 1.

  26. For instance, it is arguably right to lie in Kant’s case where a crazy murderer shows up at your door and asks for the location of your friend (Kant, 1996).

  27. What pragmatic explanation should we offer? The details will, of course, depend on which premise of the skeptical argument one wishes to challenge, on exactly how one understands the notion of a tight connection, and on one’s preferred views about pragmatics. But for the sake of illustration, it might be helpful to have a concrete example of how such a pragmatic explanation might go.

    One option is to invoke Grice’s maxim of quantity (Grice, 1989). That maxim enjoins us to provide an appropriate amount of information. That is, we should provide neither too little information nor too much. Abominable conjunctions seem to fail this maxim; they are not sufficiently informative. In particular, they provide us with a case in which something has a property but lacks a hallmark of this property. It would be better if they added information explaining why the hallmark was absent.

    Indeed, this explanation might help explain another phenomena: first-personal abominable conjunctions often sound even worse than third-personal in the case of knowledge closure. For example: “I know I have hands but not that I’m not a handless brain in a vat” sounds worse than its third-person variant “he knows he has hands but not that he’s not a handless brain in a vat”. Here’s the explanation: it’s even less clear how this first sentence could be true. Perhaps he has never heard of brains in vats. But obviously I have heard about brains in vats; I’m talking about them right now. Thus an explanation seems especially pressing. (Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting I discuss this first-personal case).

    We can also see this point in the opposite direction: if it’s very easy to guess at an explanation for knowledge closure failure, then “abominable conjunctions” won’t sound abominable at all. An example: “I knew that there were 111 people attending the conference, but not that the attendees could split evenly into groups of 37.”

  28. What are some of these other tasks? One is to settle various questions I have left open, for instance (i) what understanding of “tight link” to use (ii) what semantic theory of hallmarks and paradigms to endorse, and (iii) what additional arguments for external world skepticism to apply the paradigm response to (the underdetermination argument jumps to mind). Another is to explore new questions the paradigm response invites. For example are there any paradigm cases of knowledge at all? Or does every case of knowledge fail to be a paradigm case, for some reason or another? Thanks to several anonymous referees for raising some of these questions.

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Acknowledgements

This paper is part of a larger project which I’ve talked about with a number of people over the years; thanks to all of you for discussions, including Nevin Climenhaga, Josh DiPaolo, Caleb Perl, and Jeff Tolly, among others. Thanks to several anonymous referees for some helpful comments and to Reviewer Two and Jared Henderson who together convinced me to remove a couple of less useful subsections.

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Immerman, D. The paradigm response to skepticism. Synthese 200, 258 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03727-6

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