Dans la cadre du debat sur la perception du monde exterieur qui oppose le scepticisme et le faillibilisme, l'A. defend une position dogmatique inspiree de l'epistemologie antisceptique de G. E. Moore. Adoptant un modele propositionnel de l'experience, l'A. developpe une approche positive de la justification de la perception.

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The Skeptic and the Dogmatist

This article surveys work in epistemology since the mid-1980s. It focuses on (i) contextualism about knowledge attributions, (ii) modest forms of foundationalism, and (iii) the internalism/externalism debate and its connections to the ethics of belief.

Highlights of Recent Epistemology

othis view strikes many as implausible, 7 it does seem to square with the relevant data. Thus, e.g., in terms of the Bank Case, it’s DeRose’s contention that most of us will find both of the following claims compelling: ~1! when I claim to know that the bank will be open on Saturday in Case A, I am saying something true;~2! I am also saying something true in Case B when I concede that I don’t know that the bank will be open on Saturday. Granted, “I seem to be in no better position to know in Case A than in Case B” ~DeRose 1992, p. 914!. Still, DeRose thinks, one can perfectly consistently maintain both ~1! and~2!: @I#n Bank Case B...when, in the face of my wife’s doubt, I admit that I don’t know that the bank will be open on Saturday, I don’t contradict an earlier claim to know that I might have made before the doubt was raised and before the issue was so important because, in an important sense, I don’t mean the same thing by “know” as I meant in the earlier claim. ~Ibid., p. 921; italics added ! According to DeRose, then, the meaning of “know ~s!” varies with certain features of the context in which it is used in making knowledge attributions. And so too for Cohen; for while there are important differences between the views of Cohen and DeRose ~more on this presently !, both believe that context enters into epistemology in virtue of the contribution it makes to the meanings of key epistemic terms, and thus in virtue of the role it plays in the determination of the conditions to be satisfied by knowledge-attributing sentences. So, according to the contextualist, knowledge attributions are context-sensitive because context affects what knowledge-attributing sentences literally express . While it promises to account for “what we want to say” with regard ~e.g.! to the Bank Case, contextualists make much of the fact that their view provides what is alleged to be a novel and quite plausible resolution of sceptical puzzles~DeRose 1992, 1995; Cohen 1988; Lewis 1979, 1996; Unger 1986 !. Taking his cue from Cohen~1988, pp. 93–94 ! the sceptical argument DeRose ~1995! focuses on is the following: ~SA! P1. I don’t know that I’m not a BIV@that is, a bodiless brain in a vat being electrochemically stimulated to have just those sensory experiences I’m having #. P2. If I don’t know that I’m not a BIV, then I don’t know that I have hands. So, C. I don’t know that I have hands. Of course, unlike the Bank Case, SA isn’t an example of merely pedestrian knowledge attributions. The basic strategy of the contextualist, however, is the same with respect to both sorts of case. In particular, it is the contextualist’s 480 NOÛS

The Context-Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions

There is a fairly widespread – and very influential – hope among philosophers interested in the status of normativity that the solution to our metaethical and more generally metanormative problems will emerge from the philosophy of action. What we need, so the thought goes, is to better understand what action and agency consist in. With this understanding in hand, we will then have all that we need in order to give a philosophical account of reasons for action, or of (practical) normativity altogether.In this paper I argue that this hope is unfounded. Focusing on the work of Rosati, Velleman and Korsgaard, I argue that normativity cannot be grounded in what is constitutive of action. After presenting the objection to this strategy, I then address several – actual and possible – retorts, concluding that these thinkers have not been able to address the worry, and that it does not seem likely that they can.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID2607208_code357518.pdf?abstractid=2607208&mirid=1&type=2

Agency, Shmagency: Why Normativity Won't Come from What is Constitutive of Action

Wittgenstein apparently regarded G. E. Moore's "Proof of an External World" as one of his finest pieces of philosophical work.1 That is an important clue for anyone who wants to understand what Wittgenstein thought a satisfactory treatment of knowledge-scepticism should accomplish.2 I do not believe, though, that many of Moore's moder readers would share Wittgenstein's high regard. The greater part of the essay is devoted to exasperatingly slow ruminations on what it means to describe objects as "external", or "outside our minds" or "presented in space" or "to be met with in space". Nothing particularly consequential emerges. And the actual 'Proof-'which everyone on first reading feels blatantly begs the question-is confined to the last few pages. Here is the essence of it:

(Anti-)Sceptics Simple and Subtle: G.E Moore and John Mcdowell

reason to expect that they should succumb to a uniform treatment. My concern here is with the large but not comprehensive group of sceptical arguments that make play with a purportedly undetectable but cognitively disabling statedreaming, pervasive hallucination, victimisation by the Cartesian demon, Brainin-a-vathood, etc. I believe these arguments do share a best-most challengingform, which I shall delineate below.' I also believe that, so delineated, they can be made to succumb to a head-on, rational response-something of which a substantial amount of distinguished recent commentary has despaired.2 I shall focus on the example of dreaming; but it will be possible to substitute throughout any of the other familiar fantasies without important change.

Scepticism and dreaming: Imploding the demon

It is, as is familiar, difficult to be precise about what is involved in realism. The realist in us wants to hold to a certain sort of very general view about our place in the world, a view that, as I have put it elsewhere, mixes modesty with presumption.' On the one hand, it is supposed, modestly, that how matters stand in the world, what opinions about it are true, is settled independently of whatever germane beliefs are held by actual people.2 On the other, we presume to think that we are capable of amving at the right concepts with which to capture at least a substantial part of the truth, and that our cognitive capacities can and do very often put us in position to know the truth, or at least to believe it with ample justification. The unique attraction of realism is the nice balance of feasibility and dignity that it offers to our quest for knowledge. Greater modesty would mean doubts about the capacity of our cognitive procedures to determine what is true-or even about our capacity to conceptualize the truth-and, so, would be a slide in the direction of skepticism. Greater presumption would mean calling into question, one way or another, the autonomy of truth, and, so, would be a slide in the direction of idealism. To the extent that we are serious about the pursuit of truth, we are unlikely to be attracted by either of these tendencies. We want the mountain to be climbable, but we also want it to be a real mountain, not some sort of reification of aspects of ourselves. It is a remarkable phenomenon that an issue of this degree of abstractness, whose proper formulation is unclear to the point where it is prima facie hazy what shape a relevant debate about it might assume, can so command intellectual curiosity. The conviction that a real issue is being presented is the conviction that metaphysics, in the most traditional sense, is possible: that there are genuine questions about the objectivity of human intellectual endeavor, and about the constitution of reality, which it falls to the traditional philosophical methods of critical reflection

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Realism, Antirealism, Irrealism, Quasi‐Realism. Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture, Delivered in Oxford on June 2, 1987

lackburn’s interesting paper makes three principal claims. First, he argues B that the semantical antirealist ideas explored in Dummett’s and my writings suffer for want of an opponent who is both vulnerable to the arguments developed and interesting. Second, he asserts that Dummett’s overarching ambition, to use (the resolution of) issues in the theory of meaning to illuminate traditional metaphysical controversies concerning realism, is misconceived -both in the assumption that an underlying unity in such controversies is to be expected across different subject matters and in the cardinal role assigned to the philosophy of language. Rather the issues between realists and antirealists vary with the regions of discourse science, mathematics, modality, probability theory, morals, etc. -about which they are in dispute. There is no overriding debate in the philosophy of language, and no talisman is provided thereby for use in the debates which there are, nor “even a set of arguments playing any useful role in their solution.”’ The debates “ . . . are many, although they each require their own geography, for the shoe may pinch in different places, in the theory of morals, of possibility, probability, cause, or mind.”* Third and somewhat surprising in company with the second claim -Blackburn does wish to commend a certain overview of these debates: it is one in which the realist is someone who believes that “ . . . reference to a genuine order of objective facts is necessary to explain some aspect of our practice,”3 and thus stands opposed to a character, Blackburn’s quasi-realist, who holds that all aspects of the discourse in question can be conservatively explained without invocation of the idea of such a “genuine order of objective facts” to which we should think of the assertions within it as owing truth-conditional allegiance. I have some qualified sympathy with Blackburn’s second claim. In the Preface to Realism, Meaning and Truth,4 I counseled caution both about Dummett’s global identification of realism with belief in the appropriateness

Crispin Wright

Papers

Scepticism and dreaming: Imploding the demon

Realism, Antirealism, Irrealism, Quasi‐Realism. Gareth Evans Memorial Lecture, Delivered in Oxford on June 2, 1987

Misconstruals Made Manifest: A Response to Simon Blackburn