Scepticism Comes Alive

Abstract The nagging voice of the sceptic has always been present in epistemology. Over the last thirty years or so, philosophers have thought of several promising ways to counter the radical sceptic. For instance, facts about the reliability of cognitive processes, principles determining which possibilities must be ruled out in order to have knowledge, and principles regarding the context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions. In this research monograph, Bryan Frances presents a new argument template for generating new kinds of radical scepticism, ones that hold even if all the clever anti-sceptical fixes such as contextualism, relevant alternatives theory, and reliabilism defeat the traditional sceptic. However, the new sceptical conclusions are quite different from traditional scepticism. Although the new sceptic concludes that people don’t know that fire engines are red, that people sometimes have pains in their knees, or even that people believe that fire engines are red or that knees sometimes throb, people admit that they know millions of exotic truths, such as the fact that black holes exist. One can know about the existence of black holes, but not about the colour of one’s shirt or even about what one believes regarding the colour of one’s shirt. The new sceptical arguments proceed in the usual way (here’s a sceptical hypothesis; one can’t neutralize it, one has to be able to neutralize it to know P; so one doesn’t know P), but the sceptical hypotheses plugged into it are “real, live” scientific-philosophical hypotheses often thought to be actually true, such as error theories about belief, colour, pain location, and character traits. Frances investigates the questions, ‘Under what conditions do we need to rule out these error theories in order to know things inconsistent with them?’ and ‘Can we rule them out?’