Skepticism's Role

What is skepticism's place? It was fashionable for a while to dismiss it as confused: this fashion arose from Austin's philosophy. That approach is not so popular now. But is the current state of affairs any fairer to the skeptic?

Stroud questions the ``apparently liberal" idea that skepticism should be treated as a theory amongst many others. The implication is that this is a deceptive way of seeming to acknowledge its force while setting it up to lose:

``[this approach takes skepticism seriously] only to the extent of weighing it in the scales of theoretical plausibility, fully on a par with a series of alleged competitors. And, on that assessment, not surprisingly, philosophical skepticism is felt to be even less worthy of consideration than, say, Ptolemaic astronomy or the account of creation in the book of Genesis." [Review of Unger, 246-247]

But what could the alternative be? A reviewer of Stroud's The Significance of Philosophical Skepticism writes that ``Stroud rejects the claim that skeptical doubts are scientific and that we are free to use science to meet them" [Squires, 559].

In his review of Unger's Ignorance, Stroud argues that the way to go is NOT to do what Unger does, and take the bait of the liberal idea. For then one must argue that, as a theory on all fours with other theories, skepticism is actually plausible. Unger's way of doing that is by a simple, ``if it walks like a duck..." strategy.

``And then, I thought, of all the reasons skepticism might be impossible to refute, one stands out as the simplest: it isn't wrong, it's right. The reason why skeptical arguments are so compelling, always able to rise again to demand our thought, would then be a simple one: These arguments, unlike attempts to refute them, served the truth." [Unger, 2]

Stroud finds this epiphany unconvincing; to him, the strategy behind it is misguided. But this isn't to say that there isn't something to the ``duck" strategy. A comparison is with a debate over whether someone knows something. In the absence of a widely-agreed upon theory of knowledge, it is impossible to sketch a story in which our storytelling non-question-beggingly ensures (by exploiting a sufficient condition on knowledge) that S knows p. But if we were to say, for example, that S believes p, that p is true, that S's belief is safe, that it is secure, that S's belief is inferentially justified by other of his beliefs, that all of S's supporting beliefs are based on expert testimony, etc...there comes a point at which an interlocutor who maintains that S doesn't know that p is in an unattractive position. If it looks, smells, etc. like knowledge, then, protestations aside, it probably is knowledge. What strikes me as bizarre about Eklund's way with ontic vagueness is that it is the equivalent of granting that S has a JTB that p, but arguing that, since JTB isn't always K, we shouldn't conclude that S knows p. But even if JTB doesn't cut ice as a reductive account of knowledge, it is good evidence of knowledge.

I want to use something like the duck strategy in discussing ontic vagueness. The position is like skepticism in that it is questionable whether it is really ``on all fours" with other accounts of vagueness (\knowledge).

Williamson comments on the ``if it walks like a duck" line of thought with regard to ``vagueness in things":

The idea of vagueness in things has attracted some and repelled others. The idea attracts, because it promises to allow a rather direct relation between our vague ordinary words and the facts we use them to describe...The idea repels, because it promises to forbid a complete description of all the facts in precise scientific words. Opposed metaphysical proclivities underlie the ensuing debate. [qtd. Hyde, 297]

Stating the obvious

van Inwagen writes in Material Beings that his metaphysical thesis that there are no chairs is compatible with what the folk, speaking colloquially, say when they say there are chairs.

``This is because the ordinary man does not, in the normal course of events, say things like `There are tables'; rather, he says things like `Some of my tables are antiques.'" (from Tye's review)

Likewise, Vann McGee, an all-purpose defender of classical logic, notes (in conversation) that people never assert tautologies. In fact, he seems to hold something even stronger: ordinary language is compatible with classical logic even though it's the case that speakers are sometimes hesitant to assent to tautologies and even explicitly deny them. A case in point is speakers' hesitancy with LEM and Bivalence when confronted with vague borderline cases.

This is tough. By such lights speakers cannot even set up a prima facie presumption that

1. There are chairs.

or

2. I am neither thin nor not thin. (``She is and she isn't.")

At least with regards to van Inwagen, it certainly does seem fairer to be Lewis-like (PW) in conceding that one's theory ``disagrees extravagantly with commonsense notions of what there is." The dynamic is surely that people rarely say things that they find obvious. But this is not really a license to deny the obvious!

Then again: Tye makes the interesting, surely true, point in his review of van Inwagen that our everyday concepts like chair have no necessary and sufficient conditions of application. Does this mean that every reductive analysis is doomed to fail? This doesn't seem fair to reductive projects.

...``The result is that (2c) is not equivalent to (1). This result is not, I think, suprising: reductive paraphrases, like badly worn tires, tend to develop leaks in new places shortly after their old leaks are patched.

I am not, then, persuaded...where van Inwagen first goes wrong is in supposing, as many have before him, that it is possible to construct a reductive analysis of material object parthood. Our concepts generally do not have necessary and sufficient conditions. I see no reason to believe that this case is any different."