Arata Hamawaki

In his book How to Take Skepticism Seriously, Adam Leite observes that in ordinary life we proceed under the assumption of “epistemic asymmetry”: the principle that we are permitted to draw on knowledge that we wouldn’t have were the counterpossibilities that threaten our knowledge true in order to rule out those very counterpossibilities. Leite argues that epistemic asymmetry allows us to rule out the skeptical possibilities, and further, that it allows us to do so even if we accept the view that the most that sensory experience can provide on its own is knowledge about how things merely appear in sensory experience. While I agree with his observations about our ordinary position, I raise questions concerning the decisiveness of Leite’s appeal to what we accept there in the dialectical engagement with the skeptic. I also raise questions about his attempt to neutralize the skeptical threat posed by the restricted conception of what we immediately perceive. And finally, I briefly explore the question whether there might not be a “truth in skepticism.”

In his early essay, “Must We Mean What We Say”, Cavell argues that the claims of ordinary language philosophers regarding “what we say when” are not empirical generalizations about a given group of speakers but are rather to be understood as measuring the limits of what counts as a coherent act of thinking and speaking. Cavell’s charge against the skeptic about the external world is that he seeks to think and speak beyond these limits. In this paper I compare Cavell’s response to the skeptic to Davidson’s. Both base their responses on a broadly Kantian approach that appeals to the conditions under which thinking or speaking about objects is possible. On this approach the skeptic isn’t giving a false answer to an intelligible question, but rather, the question to which the skeptic is giving an answer is shown to be in some way unintelligible. But while Davidson’s critique of the skeptic is based on the conditions of ascribing meaning to one’s words, and contents to one’s beliefs, Cavell’s critique is based on the failure of the skeptic to mean the words he uses in the way that he needs. This difference expresses an underlying disagreement about the meaning of “meaning”: for Davidson the world comes into view through the meaning of our words and concepts, through the contents of our beliefs; for Cavell, the world comes into view through the agreement in “criteria” that are a condition of applying words and concepts to the world. This difference illuminates what Cavell calls “the truth of skepticism”: the idea that “my relation to the world and to others in general is not one of knowing”.

In this paper, I take up Thompson Clarke’s distinction between “philosophical” and “plain” ways of understanding a question that could be expressed with the words, “how do you know…?” Clarke argues that this distinction has two important implications. First, philosophical skepticism would stand in an “indirect” relation with its “plain” counterparts, so that what the philosopher is examining is not, as it might initially seem, a plain claim to know, but rather what Clarke calls “philosophical common sense.” Second, if philosophical common sense is intelligible then it cannot be defended: philosophical skepticism would be unavoidable. For Clarke philosophical common sense is intelligible, only if our “conceptual human constitution” is of the “standard type,” and our “conceptual human constitution” is of the “standard type” only if the concepts of dreaming and waking do not have a “knowability requirement” built into them. I defend the claim that these concepts have a “knowability requirement” by tracing the “knowability requirement” to the nature of judgment itself: in particular to what I describe as the priority of the first-person point of view in the constitution of states of judgment. If this is right, the only intelligible questions of the form “how do you know…?” are of the plain variety, and any satisfying treatment of skepticism would have to forego a defense of “philosophical common sense.”