Scepticism by Duncan Pritchard

Author:Duncan Pritchard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192564498
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-07-26T00:00:00+00:00

Scepticism and context

A different kind of response to the sceptical problem involves the idea that perhaps there is some sort of context-shift in play in the sceptical reasoning. It can certainly feel as if something of this kind is happening when one first engages with the problem. As we just noted in our discussion of scepticism and commonsense, we don’t usually even consider radical sceptical hypotheses in our day-to-day life. Could it therefore be the case that the radical sceptic is somehow illicitly raising the standards for knowledge, and that this is what is generating the sceptical problem?

Here is one way of putting some flesh on the bones of this idea. Perhaps ‘knows’ is a context-sensitive term. The idea would be that sometimes this term is associated with a very undemanding epistemic standard, and hence is easy to satisfy, while at other times it is associated with a very demanding epistemic standard, and hence is hard (if not impossible) to satisfy. This could explain why our everyday usage of this term involves us ascribing lots of knowledge to each other, as the thought would be that in day-to-day contexts we use ‘knows’ in an undemanding way. Perhaps what happens when we engage with radical scepticism, however, is that we shift from using ‘knows’ in this undemanding way to employing it in its more austere rendering. It would thus be no surprise that we find ourselves no longer widely attributing knowledge, since ‘knows’ now means something far more restrictive than it did previously. Could the radical sceptical problem really turn on a shift of context of this kind?

It is certainly true that some of the words that we use are inherently context-sensitive, in the sense that one needs to know specific information about the situation in which they are used in order to work out what is meant. Perhaps the clearest example of this are indexicals, like ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’. When I say that ‘I am hungry’, I mean that Duncan Pritchard is hungry, but when you make the very same assertion you are making a claim about you and not about me. Understanding statements involving the word ‘I’ thus requires one to know who is speaking. Similarly, in order to understand what is meant by an assertion involving ‘here’ or ‘now’, it will be important to know when and where, respectively, the assertion was made. That expressions involving indexicals have this feature explains why no-one thinks that two people are disagreeing if one person says ‘I am hungry’ and the other person says ‘I am not hungry’. If the same person made both assertions one after the other, then we would be puzzled, since they would seem to be contradicting themselves. But if two people make these assertions then there is no contradiction, since the ‘I’ in each case refers to a different person.

So there is clearly a precedent for there being terms in our language that are context-sensitive in roughly the way that it is being suggested that ‘knows’ might be.

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