Ronald Wilburn

Epistemic Contextualism is generally treated as a semantic thesis that may or may not have epistemological consequences. It is sometimes taken to concern only knowledge claims. Still, at other times it is taken to regard the knowledge relation itself. Call the former view Semantic EC, the latter view Substantive EC, and the idea that the plausibility of Semantic EC presupposes that of Substantive EC, the “Presupposition Thesis.” Numerous authors argue against the Presupposition Thesis on the grounds that an understanding of the nature of knowledge is no more required to understand the meaning of knowledge assertions than an understanding of the self, for instance, is needed to understand the meaning of sentences containing “I.” These authors then offer additional arguments for the same conclusion, using further comparisons between “know” and other indexicals, as well as between “know” and quantifiers, gradable and modal adjectives. Herein, I defend the Presupposition Thesis by arguing against these authors’ claims that Semantic EC is plausible without the supposition of Substantive EC.

Epistemic contextualism is the thesis that the standards that must be met by a knowledge claimant vary with contexts of utterance. Thus construed, EC may concern only knowledge claims, or else the knowledge relation itself. Herein, my concern is with “Substantive EC.” Let’s call the claim that the sorts of linguistic evidence commonly cited in support of Semantic EC also imply or support Substantive EC the “Implication Thesis”. IP is a view about which some epistemologists have equivocated. Keith DeRose is a case in point. Herein I argue that IP is false, and that it is false for interesting reasons. To this end, I consider two other terms which DeRose investigates, “free will” and “potency” in his efforts to demonstrate the alleged inability of distinctly philosophical or skeptical doubts to infect ordinary epistemic discourse. I describe how and why these two examples speak against, rather than for, DeRose’s recommendation of Substantive EC.

Quine's attitude toward external world skepticism remains, to this day, less than completely clear. As one might except, Quine seems to dismiss such concerns in most of his work as beneath refutation. But, occasionally Quine seems to adopt an alternative stance, a stance from which he aims to address the issue, not simply ignore it. This is particularly true of Quine's brief but pithy “Response to Stroud,” wherein he seeks to defend the adequacy of epistemology naturalized qua knowledge theory against Stroud's complaint that epistemology, so reconstituted, ignores perfectly intelligible reason for skeptical disquiet. Herein, I expand upon an interpretive suggestion of Dirk Koppelberg's upon which the skeptic's challenge is undermined by the incoherence of the notion of “transcendent” objectivity required for its formulation. After some motivational remarks I try to reconstruct a Quinean antiskeptical critique making use of Koppelberg's strategic suggestion. In then argue that this argument is fatally compromised by tensions internal to Quine's own system, tensions arising from the essential nature of Quine's realism. I close with some morals and conclusions.

In “Why is There Anything at All?” Peter van Inwagen argues that even though it was never necessary that concrete beings existed, it was always maximally probable – just short of necessity – that they did . I argue that van Inwagen’s argument fails, albeit for an interesting reason which has remained so far unnoticed in the literature: there is a critical ten- sion between two of its premises, both essential to its soundness, concerning the nature of comprehensively specified possible worlds. I summarize van Inwagen’s argument, develop this objection, and then describe more problems which invariably accrue when we try to ascribe probability values to possible worlds

Semantic Indeterminacy and Scientific Realism are perhaps the two most ubiquitous and influential doctrines of the Quinean corpus. My concern is to argue against neither in isolation, but against their joint compatibility. Scientific Realism, I argue, when understood as Quine's realistic attitude toward the posits of physical theory, is essentially intentional in character. Thus, Realism requires Intentionality. In Section 1, I provide some necessary exegesis. In Section 2, I attempt to show how this Realism/Intentionality connection arises, surprisingly, within Quine's own mature work to create a tension in his views which he does not himself resolve. In Section 3, I examine the source of the Realism/Intentionality connection more deeply, and respond to possible Quinean objections to my account. In Section 4, I consider the consequences of the connection for various debates in recent analytic philosophy.

In this paper, I argue for the following claims. Contextualist strategies to tame or localize epistemic skepticism are hopeless if contextualist factors are construed internalistically. However, because efforts to contextualize externalism via subjunctive conditional analysis court circularity, it is only on an internalistic interpretation that contextualist strategies can even be motivated. While these claims do not give us an argument for skepticism, they do give us an argument that contextualism, as such, is not likely to provide us with an argument against skepticism

A prominent contemporary anti-skeptical strategy, most famously articulated by Keith DeRose, aims to cage the skeptic′s doubts by contextualizing subjunctive conditional accounts of knowledge through a conversational rule of sensitivity. This strategy, I argue, courts charges of circularity by selectively invoking heavy counterfactual machinery. The reason: such invocation threatens to utilize a metric for modal comparison that is implicitly informed by judgments of epistemic sameness. This gives us reason to fear that said modal metric is selectively cherry-picked in advance to support the very anti-skeptical conclusion for which the contextualist longs.

In this paper, I articulate a form of moral realism that I take to be of special promise. I hope to show, not only that this realist position satisfies cognitivist, objectivist and success constraints, but also that this position is particularly commended by a number of recent apologetic strategies that have been more commonly deployed in the defense of other non-moral varieties of realism. To this extent, I aim to show that moral realism, far from being a desperate or quixotic position, is a perfectly natural extension of analytic philosophy’s efforts to reform itself in spirit of post-positivistic recovery

In a number of recent papers, Davidson cultivates a new-found interest in skepticism.. Starting from a naturalistic "attitude and method," he purports to show that the skeptic's doubts are vacuous because the skeptic "does not understand his own doubts." His argument for this invokes a theory of cognitive content on which the traditional Cartesian picture of inference from inner to outer domains is allegedly turned on its head. On Davidson's alternative account, propositional thought is only made possible by a prior understanding of "objective truth," where this notion is itself only given content by the presupposition of communicative exchange between speakers disparately located in a common spatio-temporal setting. What allegedly emerges is a comprehensive system within which the preconditions of meaningfulness effectively double as the preconditions of knowledge, providing an account of knowledge within which the skeptic has no room to maneuver. My concern in this paper is both with the semantic aspects of this account and with the epistemological consequences that Davidson sees as following from them. The story he tells, I argue, fails to prevent an alternative form of skepticism from arising from within his own naturalistic account of the nature and acquisition of knowledge. This is because a central contention of the account he provides is not only capricious, but implicitly at odds with his long-held views on the anomalousness of the mental.

For naturalistic and non-intuitionistic moral realists, moral knowledge is more problematic than ordinary and scientific factual knowledge. For without special faculties of moral discernment, how could we ever detect moral facts and properties? Physical facts and properties may be accessible to perceptual recognition. But how could moral facts and properties ever be similarly accessible? To address this challenge, we need a meta-ethical account that does two things. First, it must explain how the discernment of moralfacts and properties ultimately consists only of the detection of appropriate physical items. Second, it must explain why, despite this fact, moral perception seems so very puzzling. In this paper I endeavor to provide such an account. It is largely because of the relational nature of moral properties, and thecorresponding externalistically determined normative content of moral property terms, I argue, that our epistemic access to moral knowledge appears mysterious. The metaphysics of moral factuality does a lot to explain the seeming elusiveness of moral knowledge, and in ways that are surprisingly mundane

Michael Williams has argued that radical “external world” skepticism, far from being an interesting philosophical discovery about knowledge, is actually a philosophical artifact, a by-product of “Epistemological Realism,” the view that there are objective epistemological relations able to group distinct kinds of “knowledge” (e.g., “experiential” vs. “external worldly”) into a context-invariant evidential order. I argue against this thesis. It is the skeptic’s conception of the world’s objectivity, not his conception of knowledge’s objectivity as a singular unified context-invariant structure, I maintain, that ultimately underlies the skeptic’s result. And where Epistemological Realism does enter the picture, it enters mainly as a consequence of Metaphysical Realism itself. Maintaining that the metaphysical realism at issue here is a natural, indeed platitudinous, doctrine, I argue that skepticism is better viewed as a philosophical discovery about knowledge than as an artifact of contentious philosophical dogma

Over the last several decades, Richard Rorty has developed a compelling metaphilosophical theory on the history of analytic philosophy. On this telling, analytic philosophy was atavistic from the outset, a forlorn attempt to reinstate scheme/content distinctions. Rather than asking whether our claims "correspond" to some nonhuman, eternal way the world is, we should ask about their pragmatic utility. On Rorty's account, analytic philosophy terminates in pragmatism. In this paper, I argue against this assessment of the fate of our tradition. More specifically, I argue against Rorty's indictment of the notion of correspondence truth. My aim is to show that correspondence truth, in providing an indispensable background for the intelligibility of pragmatism, is not the needless dogma that Rorty takes it to be. Rorty's pragmatism, I thus argue, fails to be a freestanding doctrine.

In a number of papers, Keith DeRose articulates his reasons for thinking that we cannot plausibly explain the mechanics of knowledge attribution in terms of varying conditions of warranted assertability . His reasoning is largely comparative: “know,” he argues, proves a poor candidate for such a diagnosis when compared to other terms to which such warranted assertabilility maneuvers clearly apply. More specifically, DeRose aims, through to use of such comparative case studies, to identify several general principles through which we might determine when WAMs are called for. In what follows, I take issue with one of these principles and argue that DeRose’s efforts to deploy the others to pro-contextualist ends are misguided. I conclude by examining DeRose’s specific objection to Unger’s skeptical invariantism, and identify a problematic feature of his recurrent appeals to linguistic intuition. The payoff of this is an enhanced appreciation of the factors on which the contextualist/invariantist dispute should be seen to turn.

Philosophers generally assume that “contextual” factors blunt the force of “external world” skepticism. I argue herein that this is not the case. On the contrary, properly invoked contextual considerations support, rather than undermine, the skeptic's agenda. This is because the contexts of assessment against which we rightfully judge that knowledge is or is not available ultimately consist in little more than our own presuppositions concerning the objectivity of the items at issue. What this implies, given the mind-independence of the external world, is the aptness of apodictic epistemic standards, and skepticism itself in the process

Philosophers generally assume that “contextual” factors blunt the force of “external world” skepticism. I argue herein that this is not the case. On the contrary, properly invoked contextual considerations support, rather than undermine, the skeptic's agenda. This is because the contexts of assessment against which we rightfully judge that knowledge is or is not available ultimately consist in little more than our own presuppositions concerning the objectivity of the items at issue. What this implies, given the mind-independence of the external world, is the aptness of apodictic epistemic standards, and skepticism itself in the process.