SHORT SUMMARY ON SKEPTICISM KEVIN FRANCIS THIRD YEAR PHILOSOPHY

The main skeptical conclusion is that knowledge is impossible.No one does know because no one can know.there are many types of skeptics.there are some who respond to every assertion with the question how do you know while some others have higher evidential standards than most people in believing knowledge is true.however these types of skepticism do not not present an interesting philosophical position.the most interesting form of skepticism depends upon on an argument. There are many types of distinct skeptical arguments.the first distinction is between local and global skeptical arguments.local skepticism maintains that even if knowledge is possible elsewhere ,it is for special reason not available in this or that selected area.Main areas of this type of skepticism are ethics,religion and the future.A local skepticism tends to spread very quickly and become a general (global) skepticism.Global skeptical arguments are generally more convincing and effective than the local ones. Some skeptical arguments attack the notion of knowledge directly but leave other related notions,crucially,that of justified belief,untouched.they aregue that you must be certain,but that one can never really be certain and hence one can never really know.we can still argue that some beliefs are more justified than other.this type of skepticism does not affect the justification part of out argument.A stronger for of skepticism however would threaten both notion of knowledge and claim that any defect present in the notion of knowledge is also present in that of justified belief.eg-thoughour belief sun will rise tomorrow is true and justified,we can never be certain. We can also distinguish arguments which,although they attempt to deprive us of knowledge and justified belief still allow that we understand the proposition whose truth we are no longer allowed to know to those which claim that the reason we do know their truth is because we do not understand them.Eg-a contrast between those skeptics who believe although we understand the proopostion that God exists,we have no evidence to prove it to those who believe that the proposition God is incomprehensible to us and hence we can neither know it to be true or justified in believing it. They are three main skeptical arguments Brain in vat argument The skeptics claim that how do we not know that we are not a brain,suspened in a vat full of liquid in a laboratory and wired to a computer which is feeding us our current experiences under the control of something ingenious scientist.For if we were such a brain, nothing in your experience could possibly reveal that we were,for our experience is identical with that of something which is not a brain in a

vat.Since we only have our own experience to appeal to,and the experience is same in either situation, nothing can reveal to you which is the actual one. The principle of this argument can formalized as follows PCK: *Kap and Ka(pq)+Kaq. The principle asserts that if a knows that p and p implies q, a also knows that q; we also know it to be true if any proposition we know to be the consequence of a proposition we know. The argument from error We have made mistakes even in areas where we felt most confident.The skeptics argue that nothing we can point to in our current our current position tells us that this situation is not one in which we are mistaken.since we clearly did not know then,how can we claim to know now we know.This argument relies on the epistemological version of the principle of universalizability familiar in ethical theory.A judgement that an action is morally good is universalizable in the sense that by making such a judgement one commits oneself to holding that any relevantly similar action occurs,one must either call it goodot take back ones judgement that the first one was good.The principle of universalizability tells that in the absence of any relevant difference we must make the same judgement again.There may be some properties which are evidence transcendent.one example of such a property would be goodness,we cannot say one action is good and another is not unless we can pick out a further relevant difference. The argument from error exposes the consequences of such an approach for epistemology.For eg- if we claim that it would rain yesterday but that it turns out we were wrong and it did not rain.At the time of our claim the fact that it was not going to rain was evidence transcendent,as all claims about the future must be.And this means if we claim today that it would rain in the afternoon,we must continue to assert that I knew yesterday it would rain.if on the other hand we abandon my claim to have known yesterday,we cannot make the claim to know today.For the only claim that would justify such a difference in claim is one which is not available to us,facts about the afternoons weather are evidence transcendent in the morning.Hence our acceptance we did not know yesterday,prevents us from claiming knowledge today.If we claim that we did not know yesterday but we know today,the skeptics would argue that we could not be justified in making such a claim as there was no difference between two days we could tell at that time.If we once wrongly claim to know that p,then we can never claim to know that p,unless we can show relevant difference between the two cases. The justification of argument from experience We normally suppose that our experience is a reliable guide to the nature of those parts of those world which we are not observing and on favorable cases it gives us knowledge.Thus we can know what is our bottom drawer or what we will eat for breakfast from some form of inductive inference.when we put a diary in a drawer we can only know that the diary will be in the drawer after 5 mins unless are experience makes that proposition probable.But we only have reason to believe that our experience makes the proposition probable if we have reasons to believe that events which we have not observed are similar to events which we have observed are similar.But that belief is not necessarily or analytically true; no contradiction is implied by supposing it false.And we cannot suppose that experience alone given me reason to believe that the unobserved will resemble the observed since appeal to experience

begs the question asked: it argues not to but from the crucial belief that our experience is a reliable guide or that the unobserved will resemble the observed.Hence we have no reasons to believe that out experience is a reliable guide and hence have no reason for any belief about events beyond my experience and so cannot have knowledge about them.Our genereal belief that experience is a reliable guide cannot be justified since all promising justifications assume what is at issue by supposing that our experience is a reliable guide. Criticism of skepticism We could say that the sceptic implicitly claims to know his conclusion that knowledge is impossible or that he claims that his premises justify his belief that that justified belief is impossible.The formere suggestion seems quite effective, but the latter is quite effective as what is the point of arguing that justified belief is impossible,for if the sceptics are right,there could be no reason for your conclusion.These defenses again the sceptics attempt to avoid detailed examination of the argument and focus merely instead on the conclusion.They do this in either two ways.either they dispute the right of sceptics right to assert conclusion, or to assert it as a conclusion; or they suggest directly that the conclusion cannot be true, and hence they are excused from considering any suggested reason for believing it.Instances of the latter could be derived from the claim that to understand this or any proposition is to know under which conditions it is true and under which it is false.If the sceptics conclusion were true we could not have such knowledge;so the conclusion is true, we would not be able to understand it.It is impossible for us to understand the conclusion, then without realizing that it is false.This argument if successful, would turn the argument against a global skepticism about understanding into an argument against a weaker but still global skepticism about knowledge.Since we do not know what the sceptics are saying, we must have the sort of knowledge required for that understanding.Dancy believe these arguments are not strong as the sceptics should insist that they provide no justification whatever for an unwillingness to consider his/her arguments seriously for what they are.To take the weakest case; even if the sceptics were unwise enough to admit that any assertion involves a claim to knowledge and that he is asserting his conclusion that knowledge is impossible, he can still maintain his position.He takes himself to having true premises and valid inference to a true conclusion; the premises might include proposition in the past that he has made mistakes.He may admit that in using that proposition as a premise he is implicitly claiming it to be true.But he insisits that it follows from it and others of the same kind that knowledge is impossible.Either it is a proof by reducito ad absurdum, in which we assume something to be true to prove it false,or it is a way of exposing a paradox within the concept of knowledge as the sceptics can surely insist that if a central concept such as that of knowledge can be used to take us validly from true premises to false or impossible conclusion, something is wrong with the concept itself. One common argument against the first two arguments of the sceptics is that since it admits that as far as we are concerned there could be no difference between the hypothesis that we are sitting and reading that the hypothesis that you are a brain in a vat fed the experience of sitting and reading.The sceptics insists that there is a difference between the two hypothesis,but it is evidence transcending that is you cant tell.One response to this would be to say that although there is a difference between the two hypothesis, it is not one which could make any difference to us and hence we can be exempted from paying any attention to it.A stronger position would be to say that there is no difference to matter.the first response is a a realists positon.A realist believes that they are evidence transcending truths, truths whose obtaining lies beyond our power of recognition.The stronger move would be called

anti-realist, It denies the existence of evidence transcending truths and holds that difference which we in principle incapable of recognizing does not exist.The realists and the sceptics think of the world as one which we have a tentative grasp at best.There are many facts about our remote past and the remote future which we shall have no means of recognizing or veriftying.The anti realist does not believe in the existence of this further real world which lies beyond the world that we know and which may come apart from our world in ways which of course we could not recognize if they occurred.For them, our world ie the recognizable world is the only world. So for the anti realist the enterprise of epistemology is easier; since the objects of knowledge is brought closer to us; and there is no gap between evidence and truth since there can be no evidence transendant properties.The skeptical argument against justified belief will require a move which the anti realist disallow.They all require us to make sense of the realist thought that it is always possible that unknown to us the world differs radically from the way it appears ti us.But the anti realist rejects this as impossible.The trouble is that the implausibility of the truth of skepticism is about as great as that of the truth of anti realism.Eg- whatever we may think of the future, we think of the past as having been in its time as determinate as present now is.But we suppose that there are many propositions about the past whose truth is evidence transcending for us, despite our lack of grip on these truths, we do take there to be a be a transcendent fact of the matter at stake,one that lies now beyond all possibilities of being recognized by us. It has sometimes been suggested that epistemology could survive the loss on the concept of knowledge, as all important epistemological questions can equally be profitably be rephrases using the concept of justified belief.Thus instead of asking what will happen in the future, we ask in which if any circumstances our belief about the future our justified.The difficulty with this suggestion is that most of the skeptical arguments seem to be directed as much against the notion of justified belief as against that of knowledge.