Skepticism Between Absurdity and Idleness
Skepticism is the view that we do not know anything about the world. This view seems absurd: It seems to deny that our enquiries are ever successful. Skepticism could avoid absurdity if it were shown to be compatible with successful enquiry. But then it would seem idle: a superfluous afterthought to our otherwise respectable enquiries.
In my doctoral dissertation I defend a form of skepticism that avoids both absurdity and idleness. I hold that the strongest skeptical argument rests on a challenge to our higher-order knowledge. Such a challenge has been underestimated in contemporary discussion, because it seemed to depend on the controversial principle that knowing entails knowing that one knows. I argue that, despite the falsity of this principle, there are norms of first-personal authority that require us to ‘descend’ from a failure of higher-order knowledge to a failure of first-order knowledge. On my proposal, skepticism is reached through suspension of belief: Because we lack higher-order knowledge, we are required to suspend our first-order beliefs. When we suspend our beliefs, we thereby lose any first-order knowledge we might have had, since knowledge requires belief.
How can skepticism avoid being absurd? The moderate skeptic can select among several semantic theories of knowledge-attributing sentences, such as contextualism, which allow for the truth of the skeptical conclusion in the context of philosophical reflection and the truth of our knowledge claims in ordinary and scientific enquiry.
This might make it look as if moderate skepticism must be idle. I use an analogy to explain why it need not be: Just as someone who concludes that she is rootless—that she lacks a ‘home’—could, in a different context, truly claim that she is flying home for the holidays or that she has a home phone number, so a moderate skeptic can, in ordinary contexts, truly claim to know. And just as concluding that one is rootless will lead one to reassess one’s commitments, accepting the skeptical conclusion will move one to eliminate dogmatic elements from one’s commitments and will ultimately bring about a form of intellectual catharsis.
Essays that are part of this research project include: