Todd Suomela's personal annotations on this page
Tsuomela bookmarked
on 2009-09-08
Much of epistemology has arisen either in defense of or in opposition to various forms of skepticism. Indeed, one could classify various theories of knowledge by their responses to skepticism. For example, rationalists could be viewed as skeptical about the possibility of empirical knowledge while not being skeptical with regard to a priori knowledge and empiricists could be seen as skeptical about the possibility of a priori knowledge but not so with regard to empirical knowledge. In addition, many traditional problems, for example the problem of other minds or the problem of our knowledge of God's existence, can be seen as restricted forms of skepticism which hold that we cannot have knowledge of any propositions in some particular domain thought to be within our ken.
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Even before examining the various general forms of skepticism, it is
crucial that we distinguish between philosophical skepticism and
ordinary incredulity because doing so will help to explain why
philosophical skepticism is so intriguing. -
The point here is that in this case, and in all ordinary
cases of incredulity, the grounds for the doubt can, in principle, be
removed. As Wittgenstein would say, doubt occurs within the context of
things undoubted. If something is doubted, something else must be held
fast because doubt presupposes that there are means of removing the
doubt.[2]
We doubt that the bird is a robin because,
at least in part, we think we know how robins typically fly and what
their typical coloration is. That is, we think our general picture of
the world is right — or right enough — so that it does
provide us with both the grounds for doubt and the means for
potentially removing the doubt. Thus, ordinary incredulity, say about
some feature of the world, occurs against a background of sequestered
beliefs about the world. We are not doubting that we have any knowledge
of the world. Far from it, we are presupposing that we do know some
things about the world. To quote Wittgenstein, “A doubt without an end
is not even a doubt” (Wittgenstein 1969, ¶ 625). -
In contrast, philosophical skepticism attempts to render doubtful
every member of a class of propositions that we think falls
within our ken. One member of the class is not pitted against another.
The grounds for either withholding assent to the claim that we can have
such knowledge or denying that we can have such knowledge are such that
there is no possible way to either answer them or neutralize them by
appealing to another member of the class. Thus, philosophic doubt or
philosophical skepticism, as opposed to ordinary incredulity, does not,
in principle, come to an end. Or so the philosophic skeptic will
claim! -
Let us use “EI-type” propositions to refer to epistemically
interesting types of propositions. Such types of propositions
contain tokens some of which are generally thought to be known given
what we ordinarily take knowledge to be. Thus, it would not be
epistemically interesting if we did not know exactly what the rainfall
will be on March 3 ten years from now. That kind of thing (a fine
grained distant future state) is not generally thought to be known
given what we ordinarily take knowledge to be. But it would be
epistemically interesting if we cannot know anything about the future,
or anything about the contents of someone else's mind, or anything
about the past, or anything at all about the “external world.” We think
we know many propositions about those types of things. -
- Assent that we can have knowledge of EI-type propositions.
- Assent that we cannot have knowledge of EI-type propositions.
- Withhold assent to both that we can and that we cannot have
knowledge of EI-type propositions.
consider the (meta) proposition concerning the scope of our
knowledge, namely: We can have knowledge of EI-type
propositions. Given that there are just three stances we can have
toward any proposition when considering whether to assent to it, we
can:
Let us call someone with the attitude depicted in (i) an
“Epistemist.”[4]
Such a person assents to the claim that we
can have knowledge of EI-type propositions.
This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 30 Mar 2008, by Doug Noon.
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doubt occurs within the context of
things undoubted
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Todd Suomela
Much of epistemology has arisen either in defense of or in opposition to various forms of skepticism. Indeed, one could classify various theories of knowledge by their responses to skepticism. For example, rationalists could be viewed as skeptical about the possibility of empirical knowledge while not being skeptical with regard to a priori knowledge and empiricists could be seen as skeptical about the possibility of a priori knowledge but not so with regard to empirical knowledge. In addition, many traditional problems, for example the problem of other minds or the problem of our knowledge of God's existence, can be seen as restricted forms of skepticism which hold that we cannot have knowledge of any propositions in some particular domain thought to be within our ken.
-
Even before examining the various general forms of skepticism, it is
crucial that we distinguish between philosophical skepticism and
ordinary incredulity because doing so will help to explain why
philosophical skepticism is so intriguing. -
The point here is that in this case, and in all ordinary
cases of incredulity, the grounds for the doubt can, in principle, be
removed. As Wittgenstein would say, doubt occurs within the context of
things undoubted. If something is doubted, something else must be held
fast because doubt presupposes that there are means of removing the
doubt.[2]
We doubt that the bird is a robin because,
at least in part, we think we know how robins typically fly and what
their typical coloration is. That is, we think our general picture of
the world is right — or right enough — so that it does
provide us with both the grounds for doubt and the means for
potentially removing the doubt. Thus, ordinary incredulity, say about
some feature of the world, occurs against a background of sequestered
beliefs about the world. We are not doubting that we have any knowledge
of the world. Far from it, we are presupposing that we do know some
things about the world. To quote Wittgenstein, “A doubt without an end
is not even a doubt” (Wittgenstein 1969, ¶ 625). - 3 more annotations...
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jeff morrisonAwesome
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