Challenging Knowledge

Abstract Starting-point epistemology (SPE) is a new position that, coupled with agent-centered rationality, is the key to resolving philosophical scepticism. SPE acknowledges that metacognitively sophisticated agents know that they know things and know (something) about the methods by which this happens. Agent-centered rationality implies that a metacognitively sophisticated agent should only desert a knowledge claim because of a challenge they recognize to be fatal to that claim. Scepticism is metacognitive pathology: except in those rare cases when an individual is cognitively damaged, sceptical arguments should fail. This book studies the various ways the cognitively healthy can protect themselves from prematurely distrusting what they take themselves to know. A sceptical position results from an agent’s failure to correctly monitor their own processes of knowledge-gathering. Example: An agent’s claim to know p can be challenged by presenting scenarios to that agent in which ¬p. These scenarios are characterized as cases that are logically compatible with the evidence had by that agent. But logical possibility isn’t coextensive with epistemic possibility. The former allows cases that no agent should regard as challenging their knowledge claims and excludes cases that every agent should be concerned with. Giving in to logically possible scenarios illustrates an agent’s failure to stand their ground when inappropriately challenged: for example, yielding their knowledge claims in cases where they know the scenarios being presented are too remote to take seriously. It’s shown in this book how the arguments for Cartesian and Pyrrhonian scepticism turn on failures to appropriately evaluate one’s knowledge-gathering methods.