Bryan Frances

This is the first book to offer a detailed analysis of the “greatest of all time” (GOAT) concept as it is employed both in and out of sports. For specificity, I focus on baseball primarily, with additional materials on how the GOAT concept applies to philosophy and music. The general principles I uncover apply to many areas. The book’s purpose is to reveal the hidden non-mathematical concepts and principles that lie behind our GOAT judgments—and then to understand the subjectivity, objectivity, psychology, and limits of GOAT lists. The book is half baseball, half philosophy, and written for a general audience.

In epistemology the nagging voice of the sceptic has always been present, whispering that 'You can't know that you have hands, or just about anything else, because for all you know your whole life is a dream.' Philosophers have recently devised ingenious ways to argue against and silence this voice, but Bryan Frances now presents a highly original argument template for generating new kinds of radical scepticism, ones that hold even if all the clever anti-sceptical fixes defeat the traditional sceptic. Sharp, witty, and fun to read, Scepticism Comes Alive will be highly provocative for anyone interested in knowledge and its limits.

Kripke’s puzzle has put pressure on the intuitive idea that one can believe that Superman can fly without believing that Clark Kent can fly. If this idea is wrong then many theories of belief and belief ascription are built from faulty data. I argue that part of the proper analysis of Kripke’s puzzle refutes the closure principles that show up in many important arguments in epistemology, e.g. if S is rational and knows that P and that P entails Q, then if she considers these two beliefs and Q, she is in a position to know that Q.

Saul Kripke’s puzzle about belief demonstrates the lack of soundness of the traditional argument for the Fregean fundamental principle that the sentences ‘S believes that a is F’ and ‘S believes that b is F’ can differ in truth value even if a =b. This principle is a crucial premise in the traditional Fregean argument for the existence of semantically relevant senses, individuative elements of beliefs that are sensitive to our varying conceptions of what the beliefs are about. Joseph Owens has offered a new argument for this fundamental principle, one that is not subject to Kripke’s criticisms. I argue that even though Owens’ argument avoids Kripke’s criticisms, it has other flaws.

The consensus is that a normal person, regarding a normal fair lottery, under ordinary, realistic conditions, can’t know ahead of time that a given ticket is a loser. I disagree, sort of. Suppose you learn that a lottery involves extreme probabilities. You also hear, perhaps via the lottery’s website, that someone who bought just one ticket got the winning number. In response to the acquisition of those two pieces of knowledge, you come to think that either the announcement is false (no one who bought a single ticket won), or it's true but either something superhuman was going on or the lottery was fixed. I say: if your belief is true, then it amounts to knowledge. That is, you can know that the lottery’s outcome won’t be an ordinary case of someone with one ticket winning a fair lottery, with no superhuman assistance.

Many highly educated people think religious belief is irrational or naïve. This chapter shows the opposite: how religious belief can be, and often is, completely reasonable. I will list the main factors that make a great deal of religious belief rational.In the next chapter, however, we will visit the factors that can, and often do, make much religious belief irrational.So, the question of the rationality of religious belief has no simple answer: much of it is as reasonable as you like, but much of it is highly irrational or naïve.

It’s common for scientifically informed people to insist that science goes against theism. To a certain extent this is true: we know that the earth is billions of years old, living species evolved over millions of years, and the world did not flood a few thousand years ago.It’s also true that we have never uncovered any good scientific evidence for anything remotely like an omniscient, omnipotent, morally perfect creator of the universe. None at all.Even so, I think if one pays due attention to the limits of cutting edge science, then the scientific argument against God collapses.

Any theist who has reflected much knows that there are an enormous number of very intelligent, sincere, rational people who reject his or her religious beliefs. Furthermore, this disagreement isn’t going to go away with more investigation: it has been around for centuries and is virtually immune to resolution.This seems to many intellectuals to show that there is something seriously wrong with religious belief: you shouldn’t believe something when there is such intractable controversy about that very belief.In this chapter I partially explain why many philosophers think that this evidence against theism is much less strong than it appears.

In Chap. 4 we saw impressive reasons for thinking that recent advances in physics fail to supply good reason to think that there had to have been some supernatural intelligence that designed the universe.However, for many centuries people have looked to cosmology for evidence of God: something must have created the universe, and only a supremely powerful entity could have pulled it off. Their idea seems to have been bolstered by Big Bang cosmology, which says that the universe came into being about 14 billion years ago.In this chapter I explain why philosophers generally agree that this “Cosmological Argument” for the existence of God is no good.

The notion of the epistemic threat to a belief that P posed by contrary hypotheses, hypotheses entailing not-P is examined. In doing so, it is shown how contextual factors affect the live sceptic’s argument. The three strategies available for constructing anti-sceptical responses to the live scepti’s argument are described. The goal here is twofold: provide a way of classifying possible anti-sceptical solutions, and more hopefully, supply materials useful for constructing an adequate anti-sceptical solution to live scepticism. Finally, the power of the live and classic hypothesis-based sceptical arguments are compared, arguing that the live ones are significantly stronger.

The argument template used to generate new sceptical arguments was presented in chapter 3. In this chapter, the template is used to generate the first live sceptical argument by plugging ‘No one believes anything’, or belief eliminativism, into the template. It is argued that in some close possible worlds, eliminativism is a live hypothesis, and many philosophers and cognitive scientists are mere mortals with respect to it. The obvious objections are addressed, and this live sceptical argument is compared with arguments concerning evidence one does not possess.

The anti-sceptic can try to argue that regardless of the strength of the epistemic factors that suggest live scepticism, positive epistemic factors such as evidence and reliability are sufficiently strong to defeat it head on, so to speak. This is the Defeated Threat strategy, which comes in three varieties. The Safety-Sensitivity solution is an attempt to solve the puzzle by claiming that worlds in which people falsely believe, e.g., that fire engines are red, are too metaphysically distant to sabotage their knowledge. The Extreme Externalism solution says, roughly, that the reliability of people’s beliefs is enough of a factor to neutralize the sceptical hypotheses. The Tenacity solution insists that knowledge is not the kind of state that can easily be unseated; thus, since people once knew that fire engines are red, that knowledge stays with them even after they become mere mortals with regard to colour error theory.

The argument template used to generate the new sceptical arguments is presented. In doing so, what it means for a hypothesis to be “live”, what it means for someone to be a “mere mortal” with regard to a live hypothesis, what it means to be able to “rule out” a hypothesis are explained. The key premises of the argument: the Modesty Principle, the Live Hypothesis Principle, and the Mere Mortal Premiss are formulated. Roughly put, if one is a mere mortal with regard to a live hypothesis H, then in order for one to know something P obviously inconsistent with H, one needs to be able to rule out or neutralize H. But since one is a mere mortal, one can’t neutralize H; so one does not know P.

It is argued that most of the counterintuitive elements of traditional sceptical theories do not apply to the live sceptical theories, and that the live sceptic’s argument is identical in form to arguments we rely on without hesitation. The live sceptic is not denying anyone of the warrant they think they have; neither are they denying its quality. The knowledge denied by the live sceptic is frequently ruled out in uncontroversial circumstances. This is important to the live sceptic’s case because it might be objected that it’s nearly impossible not to know one’s own beliefs, pain locations, or sock colours when the beliefs are formed in maximally veridical ways.

It isn’t clear what scepticism really is. Perhaps it’s the thesis that certain knowledge attributions are false. Then again, it might be that even though knowledge attributions are true pretty much when common sense says they’re true, the facts that make them true are impoverished compared to what anyone thought. For instance, if it turned out that all true beliefs had only piddling amounts of warrant and knowledge is mere true belief, then although knowledge attributions would be true, the sceptic would still win. These matters are explored and it is argued that even if live scepticism is false, since her central thesis ‘The overall warrant possessed by the beliefs targeted by the live skeptical hypotheses is anemic compared to that had by our other beliefs that amount to knowledge and aren’t targeted by any live skeptical hypotheses’ may still be true, she may still win the battle with the critic of live skepticism.