Abstract
Under one interpretation, Pyrrhonian skeptics advocate universal suspension of judgment. This gives rise to an ancient and influential objection, which I will call “Hume’s objection.” Hume’s objection, in a nutshell, is the following: life requires action, and action requires belief. But, given that the Pyrrhonian advocates universal suspension of judgment, and thus universal absence of belief, the Pyrrhonian is condemned to inaction, and therefore to suicide. In principle, two answers are available to the Pyrrhonian: he can deny that action requires belief, or he can reject the interpretation of his position according to which it advocates universal suspension of judgment. Both interpretations have been resourcefully advanced as historically correct. In this paper, however, I am not interested in the (anachronistically stated) historical question: how did the Pyrrhonians answer Hume’s objection? Rather, I am interested in the philosophical question: are any of the answers available to the Pyrrhonian theoretically satisfying? I am particularly interested in whether some contemporary developments in the semantics of knowledge attribution (such as contextualism and contrastivism) can help make any of those answers more plausible. My answer, I’m afraid, is “No.”
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Notes
- 1.
He could also deny that life requires action or that suspension of judgment with respect to a proposition requires lack of belief in that proposition. Insofar as I can understand what these alternatives would amount to, I take them to be terminological variants of the answers in the text.
- 2.
Epistemic justification is to be distinguished from practical, or prudential, or moral, or even other kinds of justification one might have for belief. In what follows, justification is assumed to be epistemic unless explicitly said otherwise.
- 3.
Harman (1973).
- 4.
Jeffrey (1983).
- 5.
- 6.
“Credence” is Lewis’s term for point-valued degrees of confidence.
- 7.
The following three axioms are a usual base for the probability calculus: (i) For any proposition p, 0 ≤ C(p) ≤ 1; (ii) For any tautology p, C(p) = 1; and (iii) For any mutually exclusive propositions p and q, C(p∧q) = C(p)+C(q). Another usual component of Bayesianism is that credences should be updated by “conditionalizing” on the new evidence acquired—where a function C* is the result of conditionalizing on e from a previous function C iff, for any p, \(C^\ast(p)=\dfrac{C(p \wedge e)}{C(e)} \)
- 8.
The terminology of “thick confidence,” as well as the example, is from Sturgeon (2008).
- 9.
Of course, in believing and disbelieving (or in assigning degree of confidence 1 or 0) I am also committed to the truth of the proposition and its negation, respectively. There is no analog of this commitment in the case of suspension of judgment.
- 10.
In one sense, the definition in terms of suspension of judgment is stronger than the one in terms of lack of knowledge: under the assumption that knowledge entails justified belief, that the only justified attitude with respect to proposition p for subject S is suspension of judgment entails that S doesn’t know that p, but the entailment in the other direction doesn’t hold. However, a skeptic need not accept that knowledge entails true belief (in fact, if his skepticism is general enough, he will also suspend judgment with respect to that proposition), and so commitment to skepticism in the sense adopted here doesn’t by itself entail commitment to skepticism in the lack-of-knowledge sense.
- 11.
If p 2 just is p 1, then the Pyrrhonian will presumable once again invoke the mode of hypothesis and suspend judgment accordingly.
- 12.
David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, XII.
- 13.
Example: my not boarding that taxi may well be rationalized by, inter alia, my assigning a degree of confidence of 0.5 to the proposition that it will be involved in a fatal accident.
- 14.
For more on problems with thick confidence, see White (2010).
- 15.
- 16.
- 17.
The fact that belief is non-voluntary (to the extent that it is a fact) cannot ground a relevant difference. At most, the unvoluntariness of belief gives us an exculpation, not a justification, for holding it.
- 18.
“Invariantism” because it holds that the semantic contribution of “knows” to a knowledge attribution is not contextually variant, “insensitive” because that invariant contribution is independent of the practical interests of the subject of the attribution. I will not be concerned here with sensitive invariantism.
- 19.
See Gettier (1963). Which degree of justification is invariantly attributed by a knowledge attribution is a matter for epistemology to decide, not semantics, according to this traditional picture.
- 20.
See Conee and Feldman (1985).
- 21.
Quine’s reply to Morton White, in Hahn and Schilpp (1986, p. 665).
- 22.
Christine Korsgaard might be making this point in Korsgaard (1986).
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Acknowledgments
Versions of this paper were presented at the NYU La Pietra conference on Skepticism: Ancient, Modern, Contemporary, Florence, Italy, and at the International Conference on Ancient Pyrrhonism and its Influence on Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, Buenos Aires, Argentina. Thanks to the audiences and especially to Jim Pryor and Adam Leite, my commentators at La Pietra. Many thanks also to Manuel Comesaña, Diego Machuca, Steven Nadler, and Carolina Sartorio for their comments and suggestions.
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Comesaña, J. (2012). Can Contemporary Semantics Help the Pyrrhonian Get a Life?. In: Machuca, D. (eds) Pyrrhonism in Ancient, Modern, and Contemporary Philosophy. The New Synthese Historical Library, vol 70. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1991-0_12
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