Abstract
Ernest Sosa has proposed at least three responses to the dream argument for skepticism in his writings in the past decade. The first and the main purpose of this paper is to critically examine the three Sosaian responses, as well as a Wittgensteinian response Sosa would endorse, by investigating whether they can refute the six different versions of the dream argument found in a passage in the Zhuangzi. The second purpose of this paper is exactly to offer an exposition of the passage in the Zhuangzi so as to show that there were already sophisticated versions of the dream argument in ancient China. The main results of the critical examination are as follows. For four of the six versions of the dream argument found in the Zhuangzi, each of them can be refuted by either the Wittgensteinian response or one of the three Sosaian responses. With respect to the remaining two versions of the dream argument, one of them can be refuted partially by two of Sosa’s responses. First, that version of the dream argument can be refuted by one of Sosa’s responses, provided the imagination model of dreaming is adopted. Second, it can also be refuted by another of Sosa’s responses without assuming the imagination model of dreaming, though both the view that there is unsafe knowledge and a certain externalist reliabilism need to be adopted. However, another of the two remaining versions of the dream argument cannot be refuted by any of the Sosaian responses, nor the Wittgensteinian response. This shows that the three Sosaian responses and the Wittgensteinian response cannot refute significantly many different versions of the dream argument. Sosa’s responses, including the Wittgensteinian response, therefore are not in general successful in the refutation of he dream argument for skepticism.
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Notes
Personal communication after Sosa gave the commentator’s comments on an earlier draft of this paper presented at the APA Pacific Division Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, on 3 April 2015.
It is very likely that the Zhuangzi is not the product of a single author, but that a number of authors contributed to it during its process of composition. For the sake of convenience, in this paper I use the name “Zhuangzi” to refer to the authors of the Zhuangzi. I am justified in doing so, because we shall only consider two passages from the same chapter of the Zhuangzi, and thus it is very probable that they were written by the same person.
The reason the butterfly passage is not discussed here is that it mainly concerns the notion of transformation, or the idea of the possibility of transformation between Zhuangzi and any other thing such as a butterfly, even though it might be able to be interpreted in a way bearing some rather minimal relation with skepticism.
James Legge’s translation of the Zhuangzi is used here, because, at least with respect to this passage and a couple of sentences quoted later, I am of the opinion that Legge’s translation is better than many other more recent and popular translations.
The Chinese original does not say “this life”, but only “this”. But I think Legge is correct to interpret “this” as referring to “this life”, or life as a whole, comprising of all the instances of my experience and all my beliefs, regardless of time.
This is from Sosa’s commentator’s comments on the earlier draft of this paper at the occasion mentioned in footnote 1.
Recently, Pritchard gives this modal account of luck:
If an event is lucky, then it is an event that occurs in the actual world but which does not occur in a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world (Pritchard 2015: 128).
Following Carter and Peterson (forthcoming), with a slight alteration as indicated, this gives rise to the most updated version of Pritchard’s safety condition:
S’s belief is safe if and only if in [a wide class of the nearest possible worlds where the relevant conditions for that event are the same as in the actual world] in which S continues to form her belief about the target proposition in the same way as in the actual world, the belief continues to be true.
See, for example, Bogardus (2014), and the discussion later in this paper.
Stephen Hetherington (1999, 2001) also holds that the fake barns case involves knowledge, and that the relevant instance of belief is very failable. Since failability implies unsafety, his theory basically treats the relevant belief in the fake barn case as an unsafe belief. Moreover, Hetherington also thinks that the reason some other people have the intuition of ignorance for the fake barn case is that they have mistakenly thought being very failable, or being unsafe, implies the lack of knowledge. Actually, Hetherington (1999, 2001) may be seen as having already been arguing for the possibility of unsafe knowledge well before, say, Neta and Rohrbaugh (2004) and Comesaña (2005).
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Acknowledgments
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the APA Pacific Division Annual Meeting at Vancouver, Canada, on 3 April 2015. I would like to thank Ernest Sosa, who was the commentator, for his invaluable comments and criticisms. A revised version was presented at the “Taipei – Hong Kong Intercity Workshop in Philosophy” at Soochow University, Taiwan, on 25 September 2015. I would like to thank the audience, especially Chienkuo Mi and Shane Ryan, at the two occasions for their comments and criticisms. This paper was also supported by a Direct Grant (4051028) from the Chinese University of Hong Kong.
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Cheung, L.K.C. Three Sosaian Responses and a Wittgensteinian Response to the Dream Argument in the Zhuangzi . Philosophia 44, 721–743 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9732-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-016-9732-9