Scepticism Comes Alive by Bryan Frances

Author:Bryan Frances [Frances, Bryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 0199282137

end p.100

But wait: can't you rule out by introspection alone the hypothesis that your current Rutherfordium conception is muddled? Your teachers say that they taught all these silly things about Rutherfordium, but you don't remember any of them. You consider your current Rutherfordium 'attitudes', and find no traces of the confusion they passed on to their students. You conclude that you must not have been listening in class when the confusion was being spread, or you were absent those days, or perhaps your conception started out muddled but somehow got straightened out soon afterwards. No amount of interrogation now can show that your current conception is muddled. A philosophy student who has a muddled conception of supervenience may insist that her conception is fine, which shows that just because someone judges that their conception isn't muddled doesn't mean that they're right. But that's a case of someone not knowing she has a coherent conception because she doesn't have such a conception. In the Rutherfordium case we are looking for a situation in which someone doesn't know she has a coherent conception even though she does have a coherent conception and believes that she has such a conception.

I'm not sure about this case. I think the eliminativist sceptic is advocating the strongest of the new sceptical arguments, so it isn't surprising that it's tougher to find supporting arguments for it. The Rutherfordium story does establish that you can at time T know that at T you believe that P, while later on, even though you correctly believe that at T you believed that P, you don't at that later time know that at T you believed that P (even though you aren't demented, haven't forgotten anything, etc.). That's a nice result, but not what we need for a one-off case that can act as a precedent for the live sceptic's arguments. The eliminativist sceptic wants to argue that a live hypothesis can take away your present knowledge that you presently believe that P. So we're trying to find a relatively uncontroversial one-off case in which you first know that you believe that P, but then, due to misleading developments, your present true belief that you presently believe that P no longer counts as knowledge, because you can't rule out the live hypothesis that you don't presently believe that P.

Consider another example, one that comes closer to doing the trick. Someone convinces our scuba-diver Sam that one doesn't believe something unless one is positive that it's true. There is no such thing as believing something a little bit or half way or even 95 per cent; you either believe it 100 per cent, or nothing; there is no

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.