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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
Attempts to philosophize about human knowledge lead inevitably to skepticism. So Hume taught and so some influential contemporary philosophers would have us believe. But what are we to make of this fact, assuming that it is one? Should we treat it as bad news about our chances of obtaining knowledge? Or should we rather see its importance as primarily meta-philosophical? That is, should we take the real significance of skepticism's seeming inevitability to lie in what it tells us about the idea of understanding knowledge philosophically?
1 This paper is a revised and expanded version of a talk given at the A.P.A. Western Division meeting, 1991, under the title ‘Knowledge as an Object of Theory.’ I would like to thank my co-symposiasts, Robert Audi and Mark Kaplan, as well as members of the audience, for a stimulating discussion. A much earlier version was presented at a conference on realism at the Forum fiir Philosophie Bad Homburg. A shortened version of that talk is to appear in German in an anthology edited by Wolfgang Kohler. For a full exposition and defense of the ideas sketched here, see my forthcoming book Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Skepticism (Oxford: Blackwell1992).
2 Barry Stroud, ‘Understanding Human Knowledge in General,’ in M. Clay and K. Lehrer, eds., Knowledge and Skepticism (Boulder, CO: Westview Press 1989), 32. Cited below as ‘Understanding.'
3 Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1986), 231. Cited below as View.
4 Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1989), 73f. Cited below as Contingency.
5 Barry Stroud, The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), 168. Cited below as Significance.
6 Significance, 209
7 Significance, 81-2
8 See the introduction to Rorty's Consequences of Pragmatism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1982). See also Contingency, Ch. 1.
9 Bernard Williams, Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry (Harmondsworth: Pelican 1978), 64
10 View, 71, 92
11 But maybe not in its ancient, Pyrrhonian form. See my ‘Skepticism without Theory,’ Review of Metaphysics (1988).
12 As I perhaps did in Groundless Belief(Oxford: Blackwell1977).
13 ‘Understanding,’ 32
14 ‘Understanding,’ 49
15 H.P. Grice and G. Strawson, ‘In Defense of a Dogma,’ Philosophical Review (1956). Grice and Strawson over-estimated the degree of consensus which never extended beyond a narrow range of text-book examples.
16 I am grateful to Simon Blackburn for this way of putting things.
17 Edmund Gettier, ‘Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?’ Analysis (1963)
18 J.L. Austin, ‘Other Minds’ in Philosophical Papers (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1961), 44-84. See esp. 51-7.
19 Formal foundationalism is sometimes thought to contrast with coherentist theories of knowledge justification. However, I am dubious about the traditional contrast between foundationalism and the coherence theory. See Unnatural Doubts, ch. 7.
20 This is what Descartes has in mind when he refers to ‘the order of reasons.’ He writes, ‘I do not follow the order of topics but the order of arguments … [In] orderly reasoning from easier matters to more difficult matters I make what deductions I can, first on one topic, then on another’ (Letter to Mersenne [24 December, 1640], quoted from Anthony Kenny ed., Descartes: Philosophical Letters [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1981], 87).
21 Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty (New York: Harper 1969), ‘1!250. Cited below by OC and paragraph number.
22 OC,53
23 OC, 88
24 OC, 163
25 OC,235
26 OC,341-3
27 OC, 318, emphasis in original. Cf. the metaphor of the river bed at 95-8.
28 I discuss the nature of philosophical reflection, particularly its connection with the setting aside of ‘practical’ considerations in Unnatural Doubts, ch. 5.