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THE PROBLEM OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD:

A Fallibilist Vindication of Our Claim to Knowledge

Darryl Jung Depar trnent 0 f Ph il osophy MeGill University, Montreal September 1989

A Thes i5 submitted to the Faeul ty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulf i lIment of the requ i rements for the degree of Ma s ter 0 fArts .

(c) Darryl Jung, 1989.

( Abstract

The celebrated 'veil-of-ideas' argument is a skeptical argument

that moves from a certain episternological doctrine about perception to a

general negative conclusion concerning our thoughts about external

mater iai objects. Indeed, the argument concludes not only that lie do

not knoli, but that neither could lie know nor even reasonably believe,

any of the thoughts that 'Me rnay possibly entertain concerning external

mater ial objects. The epistemological doctrine about perception

referred to in the argument has been in fashion since Descartes and

states that the nature of perceptual knowledge in general is

inferential.

( In this thesis, we will attempt to de~use this argument by calling

into question the epistemological doctrine upon which it relies. This

method of defusmg the argument appeals to sorne of the reasoning to be

found in the writings of J .L. Austin and, more recently, John McDowell.

The folloliing is a rough outllne of hOIi we liill proceed. First, we will

briefly look at the skeptical argument in question. Second, lie w i U

examine the mainstay of the epistemological doctr ine, the Argument from

Illusion, and argue that without the appeal to a certain view about the

nature of appearance, this argument 1s ineffect ive. Third, lie will

adduce reasons for rejecting this vieli of appearance and put forliard an

alternative. This alternative requires us to construe knowledge in

fallibilist rather than infallibilist terrns. Thus, finally, lie will

1 examine the fallibilist and infallibilist conceptions of knowledge.

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RESUME

l L'ëlrgument sceptique celebre que l'on appel argument de la "voile

des idees" part d'une doctrine epistemologique a l'egard de la

perception pour arriver a une conclusion generale qui est negative quant

a la nature de nos pensees concernant les objets materiels exterieurs.

En effet, l'argument estime non seulement que nous ne savons pas, mais

auss i que nous ne pourrions jamais savoir ni meme croire

raisonnab.Lement -- aucune des pensees que nous aurions la possibilite

d'entretenir concernant les objets materiels. La doctr ine

epistemoloqique au sujet de la perception dont l'argument fait lTlention a

ete a la mc~e depuis Descartes. Elle declare que la nature de la

connaissance perceptuelle est en general inferentielle.

Au cours de cette these on va tenter de desamorcer cet argument en

mettant en question la doctrine epistemologique sur laquelle il depend.

Cette method de desamorcer l'argument fait appel aux ralsonnements que

l'on trouve dans les ecrits de J.L. Austin et, plus recamment, dans

celles de John McDowell. Ce qui suit indique, dans ses lignes

generales, notre rnaniere de proceder. En premier, nous allons exposer

brievement l'argument sceptique en question. Deuxiement, nous allons

examiner le soutien principal de la doctrine epistemologique, appellee

"l'Argument a partir de l'Illusion", et nous allons montrer que, s'il

n'aie pas recours a une vue particuliere de la nature de l'apparence,

cet argument devlent inefficace. Ensuite, nous allons alleguer des

raisons pour rejeter cette vue de l'apparence et en proposer une

al ternati ve . Cette alternative nous permet d'analyser la connaissance

en termes de faillibilite plustot qu'en termes de l'infaillibilite.

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Enfin, donc, nous allons examiner les conceptions dites faillibiliste et

infaillibiliste de la connaissance.

Table of Contents

l Introduction • • • • • • • • •

II Background: Veil-of-Perception Skeptical Arguments

III A Sample Argument . . . . " . . . . . . . . . . . IV

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VI

VII

The Argument from Illusion: Two Vie';{S of Appearance

Arguments for the Received View of Appearance • • . • (a) The Argument from Phenomenology . . . . . . (b) Argument from Evidence . . . . . . • . . • . (c) The Argument from Methodological Solipsism •

Modern Accounts of Mind and the Constraint of Methodological Solipsism . . . • . .. (a) Logical Behaviorism ....• (b) Functionalism ...... . (c) Materialist Identity Theory

The External COnEtitution of Intentional Mental states

VIII Fallibilist versus Infallibilist Conceptions of Knowledge

IX Conclusion.

Bibliography . . . . . . . .

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l Introduction

Successful skeptical arguments usually move from plausible

characterizations of our epistemological situation and generally assumed

features of the concept of knowledge to the conclusion that we cannot

have kno~ledge about entire domains of discourse. The celebrated 'veil-

of-ideas' skeptical argument is one paradigm example. It moves from a

certain epistemological doctrine about ho~ we must apprehend facts about

exter~l material objects to such a general negative conclusion.

Indeed, the argument concludes not only that ~e do not know but that,

perhaps more damningly, neither could we know nor even reasonably

believe, any of the thoughts that we may possibly entertain concerning

external material obJects. The epistemological doctrine referrcd to in

the argument has been in fashion since Descartes and may be put as

follows:

we never come to know facts about material objects by slmply looking at themi perceptual knowledge must sornehow be inferential.

In this thesis, we will atternpt to defuse this argument by calling

into question the episternological doctrine upon which it relies. This

rnethod of defusing the argument appeals to sorne of the reasoning to be

found in the writings of J.L. Austin and, more recently, John McDowell.

The following is a rough outline of how we will proceed. First, we will

briefly look at the skeptical argument in questlon. Second, we will

examine the mainstay of the epistemological doctrine, the Argument from

Illusion, and argue that without the appeal to a certain view about the

nature of appearance, this argument is ineffective. Third, we will

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adduce reasons for rejecting this viev of appearance and put forvard an

alternative. This alternative requires us to construe knovledge in

fallibilist rather than infallibilist terms. Thus, finally, we will

examine the fallibilist and infallibilist conceptions of knowledge.

The scope of the discussion contained hereir. viII be limited to

skepticism about external material objects -- the so-called 'problem of

the external vorld'. Very little viII be said about skepticisms about

other domalns of discourse, such as skepticism about other mlnds or

sKepticlsm about the past, ThlS scope, moreover, vill be limlted to the

particular sKep~iclsm about external material objects that 1S arrived at

by the above referred to argument. Similar positions that are arrived

at by other rreans, such as by considering the Gartesian 'dream

hypothesis', viII only be touchDd upon in a tangential way vithin the

discussion of the infallibilist and fallibilist conceptions of

knowledge.

By attempting to defuse the skeptical argument in the vay that ve

do, we hope to throw sorne light on the problem of the external world as

it has been traditionally construed. This .... ill involve us in an

examination of the normative epistemological concepts of evidence,

warrantability, and knovledge.

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II Background: Veil-of-Perception Skeptical Arguments

In this section, we will characterize both the kind of skepticisrn

vith vhich ve will be concerned and the kind of argument to which such

skepticisrn a",peals. Let us begin by explaining what we will mean by

"domain of dlscourse". In our use of this expression, we vi11 mean

roughly the r.et of all statements/facts 'whose indi viduals fall under

sorne intuitively-deflned klnd and whose relations are the characteristic

relations in which such individuals stand. In this respect, we will

take material object discourse ta consist of the statements/facts whose

individuals are medium-sized physical objects, such as tables and

chairs, and whose relations are medium-sized physical obJect relations,

such as x is left of y, x is on top of y, and x is flat. Likewise, we

will take other mlnds discourse to consist of the statements/facts vhose

individuals are other minds and whose relations are psychological ones.

Theoretlcal object discourse will be taken to cons ist of the

statements/facts whose individuals are the "unobservable" entities

postulated vithin scientific theories, such as electrons and e/m-fields,

and whose relations are the ones in which such entities stand, such as x

has charge q, x has rnass m, and the patent lal between x and y 1s v.

Sensation discourse will consist of the statements/facts whose

individuals are sensa, such as colour patches and sounds, and whose

relations are phenomenal, such as x i5 blue and x 1s highel-pitched than

y. A broad domain of discaurse that 1s often referred to 1s discourse

about the past. In our discussion, this will consist of whatever

statements/facts that may be indexed ta the pasto

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It may be objected that the implicit first-order construal of the

above mentioned staternents/facts and, indeed, the neat categorization of

these statements/facts that lS presupposed by our explanatlon of domain

of discourse, are both crude and problematic. Although we fully

acknowledge this, we claim that they will help us in a heuristic way to

be more precise and coherent in OUl later discussions. It should be

noted that, in these discusslons, we will often use ~he expressions

"domain", "discourse", and "domain of discourse" interchangeably.

We are now ln a posit1on to c~arlfy what we mean by skeptlclsm. We

take skepticism to be the epistemological position whose central claim

is that, for sorne speclfied domaln of discourse, ne1ther do we know, nor

" can we know, nor can we even reasonably believe any of the statements

,

belonging to that domain of digcourse. "Skepticism" in this sense is

really elliptical and should be understood as "skepticism about ... ",

where the ellips1s 1S fllled in b:1 sorne appropnate description of the

domain of discourse under consideration. Our formulation of skepticism

has several advantages. One can be ~keptical in our sense about one

domain while remaining unskeptical/dogrnatic about others. For instance,

sorneone May be skeptical about theoretical-obJect discourse while taking

himself/herself to have knowledge over material-object discouIse. Our

formulation also avoids the incoherence 1nto which other formulations

have fallen. For instance, there is the unrestrieted formulation

advanced by Academie skepticlsm which assercs that knowledge aC0ut

anything is impossible: this formulation runs into trouble whenever .. someone inquires whether or hov, assuming its assertion 1s correct, the

assertion itself can be known. By restricting the scope of the

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skeptic's position to particular domains of discoUIse, our formulation

does not render his/her position a self-stultifying one.

As we said earlier, ve will be concerne.' vith a particular kind of

skepticism about rnaterial object discourse. More precisely, ve viII be

concerned vith that skepticism about material object discourse which is

arrived at via a certain form of argunent vhich has been prominent since

Descartes -- in keeping vith the terrr,inology of Jonathan Bennett, the

arguments that rnanifest this forrn will be referred to as veil-of-

perception arguments.

This form of argument has had wide application. Not only l~s it

been employed to arrive at skepticisrn about material object discourse,

but aiso to arrive at skepticism about other rninds discourse, skepticism

about theoretical object diGcourse, and skep~icjsm about discourse about

the pasto What it attempts to show in each of these cases is a two-fold

claim. First, we can only arrive at knowledge of statements belonging

to the particular discourse by infezring them from statements belonging

to sorne other, better understood or, in a sense to be explained, "more

easily apprehended" discourse. J .L. Austin in his Sense and Sensibilia

calls this view 'the empiricist doctrine'. As he puts it for the case

of material object discourse,

~ never see or otherwise perce ive , or directly perce ive rnaterial objects, impressions, sensations, percepts, etc.(l)

anyhow ve never but only sense

Thus, 'Me can only arrive at knowledge of material object statements by

inferring them from sensation statements. In deference to Austin, we

will also refer to this view as the empiricist doctrine. Second, for

1. Austin, J.L. Sense and Sensibilia. OUP, p.2.

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the case at hand, we lack the resources to legi timately make the

required inferenc~s. In other words, we are denied the right to make

the tra:~1tion from statements belonging to the better understood

discourse to statements belonging to less weIl understood one. For

instance, it is argued t;'l.ëit we cannat legitimately move from staternents

about our sensations to staternents about external mdterial objects; from

statements about external material objects ta statements about

theoretical entitiesi from statements about the overt behavior and

behavioral dispositions of other bodies to statements about other minds;

from statements about our present apparent memories, records, and traces

to statements about the pasto So, according to this form ~f argument,

since for the case at hand, we carulot make the transition from the

former discourse to the latt.:r and since the only ronte to knowledge

about the latter is through such transition, there is no pos5ibility of

acquiring knowledge about the latter discourse at aIl. Although there

are individual considerations in each case where this form of argument

is app11ed, the 'form' 1s essentially the sarne. We can easily

characterize this form as consisting of the following four distinct

steps.

The first step corresponds to the first clairn made above the

empiricist doctrine -- and consists in arguing that the char acter of our

knowledge about the domain of discourse under consideration 15 and must

be Inferential: we may only know the statements belonging to that domain

by inferring them from other statements that we somehow already know,

where these latter belong to sorne other domain. There 15 no sense in

which we could say that the former statements could be directly

apprehended: they may only be known through the latter statements which

serve as evidence for tnem. This point has been expressed in various

ways. For instance, it has been maintained that our only "access" to

facts about physical objects is through facts about our sensations; we

must infer facts about theoretical entities from facts about their

alleged effects; facts about another's mind are revealed to us only via

facts about his!her body's overt physical condition, actual behavior and

behavioral dispositions; facts about the past are only known through

facts about apparent memories, records, and traces, aIl of which are

indexed to the present. In each of these cases, it is claimed that our

knowledge about facts belonging to one domain is dependent upon our

prior ~nowledge of facts belonging to another domain and, moreover, that

because of the nature of our sensory and cognitive capacities, this

epistemological condition could not be otherwise. For the sake of

convenience, in the future we will refer to the domain (and its

associative facts, statements, and objects) that lies on the evidence

side of the required Inferences as the e-domain (as e-facts, e-

statements, and e-objects) and, likewise, to the domain (and its

associative facts, statements, and objects) that lies on the conclusion

side as the c-domain (as c-facts, c-statements, and c-objects).

The second step consists in showing that the relation between e-

facts/e-statements and c-facts/c-statements is not deductive. This is

not difficult to do. No set of stat:':':i·ents about our sense-exper ience,

however extensive, logically entails statements about external rnaterial

objects. statements abvut theoretical objects are not formally

deducible from any set of statements about their alleged effects.

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statements about a person's thoughts and feelings do not loglcally

follow from statements about his/her bodily behavior and behavioral

dispositions. And staternents about the present, although they may

constitute strong evidence for staternents about the past, in no way

demonstrate them. The lack of a deductive relation in each case between

the respective e-statements and c-statements is easily illustrated by

noting that no formaI contradiction i5 involved when one accepts the e-

staternents while denying the associative c-statements. It is not

difficult to see why this is the case. Bath the e-staternents and the c-

staternents are expressed with concepts that belong ta the respective

domains of discourse. In this sense, the two sets of staternents are

expressed in two distinct languages, L(e) and L(c). Without appropriate

staternents which are framed wi th vocabulary from each, the fai lure of a

deductive relation rnay be seen to amount to no more than trivial

syntactic considerations. Nonetheless, these considerations play a

crucial role in the logic of this second step and, as we will see, in

the logic of the third step as weIl.

The third step consists in showing that the inferential relations

between e-statements and c-staternents are not inductive either (by

induction here, we mean induction byenurneration). Inductive inference,

assuming that is legitimate to begin with, carries us from facts that we

have apprehended to others we have not. For instance, from our

knowledge that tnis, this, this, and that swan are white, we may

infer via induction that other swans are white. But note that, in this

case, what 1s inferred can be apprehended without the aid of induction

in the sense that for any swan for which we have not had the opportunity

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to see that it is white, we could "in principle" do 50.

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In other words,

induction does not in this sense carry us from facts that we can in sorne

direct way apprehend to others that we cannot. Let us elaborate on this

point. From the first step above, we accept that we can only come to

know facts about objects belonging to c-discourse via sorne kind of

Inference from facts about objects belonging to the respective e­

discourse, which we can somehow apprehend. In this context, we say that

these c-objects are not "directly observable" and that singular facts

involving the se objects cannot be "directly apprehended". What

induction as explained above permits us to do is to legitirnately infer

singular statements about objects that we have not observed from

singular statements about objects that we have observed. So we may rely

upon this type of Inference as a substitute for the direct observations

which for sorne practical reason we are unable to make; the singular

statements that may be inductively

apprehendable without such Inference.

inferred are in principle

According to the first step,

however, singular statements about c-objects cannot be in principle non-

inferentially apprehended.

As with the deductive

the distinct languages,

Thus, they cannot be inductively interred.

case, the difficulty here can be traced to

L(e) and L(c), involved in framing the

statenents belonging to the different discourses. To make a legitimate

inductive Inference from one discourse to the other, we wou Id require

staternent3 that are framed with terms from both languages, but these

statements themselves could not be inductively known, since one could

never verify whether or not even a singular case Is correct.

The fourth and last step consists in arguing that since the

reguired lnferences cannot be justified either

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deductively or

Inducti vely, they cannot be just ified at all. We are not enti tled to

make what seems to be the elementary move of inferring from statements

about sensations to statements about physical objects; and assurning that

we had sufficient warrant to accept statements about physical objects,

we should still not be entitled to make the transition from these to

statements about theoretical entities or to statements about other

minds. Since our only route to knowledge about whatever c-discourse is

via inference from sorne e-discourse, we cannat have knowledge about such

c~iscourse at aIl. Although we have presented these steps by only

referring to the concept of knowledge, the same reasoning can be run

through mutatis mutandis by referring instead to the concept of

reasonable belief.

The problem presented in aIl of the se cases is that of finding a

Ylay to pass beyond Ylhat is taken to be the evidence. What we take to be

the eVidence, the set of e-facts, and the respective conclusion, the set

of c-facts, varies from case to case, but in each case, it 1s argued

that there is a logical gap between both and, because of the nature of

the two sorts of facts, this gap cannot be inferentially bridged.

Epistemologists who are not inclined to skepticisrn have taken this

form of argument seriously and have devoted much effort ta show that it

is defective. Towards this end, four main types of approach have

emerged and each consists in denying one of the steps outlined above.

These will be explained as follows.

First, there is naive realism. The naive realist denies the first

of the above steps. He claims that knowledge of statements about c-

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objects is not necessarily inferential. We can non-inferentially

apprehend such statements because the c-objects are -- in a sense to be

explained by his/her account -- directly observable. Thus, s/he

maintains that we can observe external material abjects and, a~i a

result, come to kn01ll facts about them in a non-inferential way( 2') i

sometimes, we can even b€ in the position to observe theoretical

entities like electrons or radio stars(3); in favourable circurnstances,

we can know facts about the minds of others without reasoning from their

bodies's overt behavior(4). The attItude of the naive realist is that

for each of these cases, we have the sensory and cognitive capacity

cornrnensurate ta the task of apprehending the facts wi thout appeal ta

inference so that we may corne to know such facts in a way that 1s

unaffected by the skeptics argument. l t should be noted that one may

take up the naive realist' s attitude toward any of the potential c-

discourses 1Ilithout also being cornrnitted to apply it to the others.

Second, there is reàuctionlsm. The reductionist accepts the first

of the above steps but denies the seconj. Although s/he and the naive

realist dif~er drastically ln degree of sympathy to cornrnon sense, they

profess methods of meeting the above form of argument that are some1llhat

similar.

They both try to close the gap which the skeptic relies on keeping open. But 1Ilhereas the naive realist does so by

2. See J.L. Austin: "other Minds" in Aristotelian Society, sup. vol. XX, 1946.

3. See H. Putnam: "What Theories Are Philosophical Papers, vol.l, aJPi 1. Intervening, CUP.

4. See Austin, 1946.

Not", "Craig's Theorem" in Hacking: Representing and

bringing the evidence up to the conclusion, the reductionist's policy 1s to bring the conclusion dovn to the level of the evidence. (5)

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The reductionist br ings the conclusion down to the evidence by claiming

that the objects referred to and the relations predicated on the 50-

called conclusion side of the required Inference, the c-objects and c-

relations, are really just logical constructions out of the abjects

referred to and the relations predicated on the evidence slde, the e-

objects and the e-relations. As a result, c-facts/c-statements reduce

ta e-facts/e-statements. Thus, the reductionist holas that facts about

external mater ial objects reduce to facts about our sensat ions (6) ;

statements about theoretical entities are really abbreviative

descriptions about their alleged effects(7); in the same way, s/he holds

that statements which appear ta be about other minds are shorthand ror

statements about their behaviar and that statements which appear to be

about the past are trdnslatable ta statements about our apparent

memories, records, and traces. Since in each case, the c-fltatements are

"brought dO\ffi ta the level of" the e-statements, the y are easily

formally deducible from them.

The kind of reduction between discourses that the reductionist is

proposing 1s modelled after the kind of reduction that philosophers of

science claim occurs between certain theories in mathematics and

science. Classical eXdmples include the reduction of number the ory to

5. Ayer, A.J. THe Problem of Knovledge. Penguin. 1956. p. 79.

6. This position W"dS put forward by the phenomenal1sts.

7. This pasi tion was put forward by the logical positivists.

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set theory and the reduction of classical thermal dynarnics to

statistical mechanics. In both cases, the objects and relations

belonging to the upper-tier the ory are logically constructed out of the

objects and relations of the lo~er-tier theory. Note again that one may

take up the reductionist attitude to~ard any of the potential c­

discourses ~ithout beins committed to applying it to the others.

Third, there is ~bductionism(8). The abductionist accepts the

first t~o of the above steps but denies the third. Unlike the naive

realist and the reductionist, the abductionist accepts the existence the

logical gap between e-statements and c-statements. That is, the

abductionlst malntains that the e-discourse and c-discourse constitute

two logically dIstinct classes of statements ~hat the reductionist

denies -- and that statements belonging to the c-discourse may only be

known by inferring them from statements belonging to the e-discourse-­

what the na ive realist denies. In denying the third step, the

abductionist is clalrning that there is a Iegitimate vay of inductively

inferring the c-statements from the e-statements. This inductive

Inference, however, is not the

1nference that is examined by the

induction by enumerdtiün type of

skeptic in the third of the above

steps. It 1s an abduct i ve inference in the parlance of t~entieth

century philosophy, it is aiso kno~ by the descriptions "inference to

the best explanation" and "HD (hypothetical-deductive) inference".

Thus, the abductivist m3intains that external material objects, though

not directly observable as the naive realist insists, may be known via

abduction as the causes of our sensations~ in the same ~ay that the

8. The term for this analysis cornes from Aristotle.

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existence of theoretlcal entltles may be Inferred as the causes of thelr

effectsi from the overvhelrning evidence of our apparent mernories, and

records, we may know facts about the past, just as from the overwhelming

evidence that 15 const1tuted by another's actual behavior and behavioral

dispositions, ve may know facts about his/her mlnd. The type of

inference by which aIl of this is accomplished has been thoroughly

analysed in the philosophy of science by Hernpel, Popper, and others, and

consists of two distinct parts. First, in an effort ta explain facts

belonging to sorne particular àiscourse, an e-dlscourse, we postulate tvo

sorts of statement: theoreticaJ hypotheses and correspondence rules.

The former are framed completely vith concepts belonglng ta another

discourse, the c-discourse, and the latter are framed with concepts

belonging ta both. Moreover, bath sorts of sc« h;ments are framed in

such a vay as ta permit formaI deduction of e-statements from them.

Second, by following certain criteria, we carry out such formal

deduction vith the aim of explaining the above mentianed e-facts. If

the e-statements VhlCh ve arrive at in the process match (are faithful

to, are made true by) these e-facts, then theses facts are taken to be

tentativelyexplained. After a sufflcient number of formaI deductions

and corresponding 5uccessful matches between the e-statements that are

deduced and the e-tacts that obtaln (vith no rnlsmatches that cannat be

accounted for), two things may be said. One, vith the help of the

correspondence rules, the facts that belong to the c-discourse fully and

certainlyexplain the facts that belong to the e-discourse(9). Tvo, in

9. According ta HempeI, the deductive relation borne betveen the tvo sets of facts is Just what explanation vhen spelled out--consists in.

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virtue of such successful explanation, our initial theoretical

hypotheses are corroborated/confirmed and, as a result, we have come to

a position of knowing them(lO). Although no abductionist wouid maintain

that this "hypothetical-deductive" process always corresponds to the

actual aetiology of how come to know c-statements, such as statements

about external material objects, s/he will malntain that reference to

such a process is to be included in the "rational reconstruction" -- to

use carnap's phrase -- of our knowledge.

Fourth, and fi na lly, there i5 eliminationism. There are really two

kinds of eliminationist. Both accept the first three of the above steps

but draw dlfferent conclusions from the reasoning of the fourth. Unlike

the naive realist, the reductionist, and the abductionist, the first

kind of elimlnationist does not try to abolish or bridge the logical gap

between e-statements and c-statements, for s/he admits that there is no

legitlma~e way of inferrlng the latter from the former. Thus, knowledge

over the particular c-domain is impossible as the skeptic maintains.

But this ellmlnatlonist does not -- as the skeptlc does -- stop here.

S/he further concludes that since we cannot have the desired knowledge,

all of our usual normative epistemological concepts which are related to

this issue have a vacuous extension. These include among others

concepts like warranted assertibility, justification, rational

acceptability, reasonable belief, and knowledge itself. Since a11 of

these are empty, none of them could be use fuI to us al~, therefore, each

should he "eliminated" from our talk. This conclusion obviously demands

10. Of course not all philosophers of science would agree. Popper, for instance, does not think that we ever have confirmation. ~qe can only arrive at falsification.

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that we shift the focus of epistemology. Rather than concentrating our

.. attention on normative episternology, we should only consider descriptive

epistemology -- that is, the study of the actual process of how in fact

we come to acquire che beljefs we do. Quine argues this thesis in his

"Epistemology Nattralized" (11) • He claims that normative epistemology

has failed in two ways. On what he calls the doctrinal side of the

matter, it has failed to justify our acceptance of c-type statements on

the basis of our acceptance of e-type statements he maintains that

Hume showed us thlS failure. On what he calls the conceptual slde of

the matter, normative epistemology has failed to provide the conceptual

reduction -- something Quine thinks \Me all desire -.- of all of our c-

type telms (e.g. physical object terms) to our e-type terms (e.g.

sensation telms). Quine argues thlS point by appealing to the generally

accepted vie\M that although carnap's effort in his Der logishe Aufbau

der Welt (1928) represents normatlve episternology's rnost serlOUS attempt

to provide such a reduction, this effort fell far short of the original

goal. Quine conc:ludes his paper by urging that \Me forget about trying

to "rationally reconstruct" .... hat we take ourselves to kno\M and settle

for studying "psychology" -- that is, descriptive epistemology.

The second kind of eliminationist argues a strict form of

scientific realisrn whose central thesis is that the only real concepts

are those tha~ can he logically construçted out of the primitive

concepts of "flnished science". All of the other concepts that \Me may

appeal to in our use of language are "folk" concepts: accorcting to

11. Quine, W. V.O. "Epistemology Naturalized" in Ontologlcal Relativity and Other Essays. Columbia University Press, 1969.

,

l

18

his/her account of language, these concepts are inadequate, if not

illegitimate, semantic items because they do not accurately match up

with any of the objective features of the world. As paradigm examples

of such folk concepts, this eliminationist often cites secondary quality

concepts like red which do not pick out any easily specifiable set of

scientiflcally respectable features to be found in the "world-in-i tself"

and theoretically Incoherent concepts like phlogiston and simultaneity.

No~, this type of eliminationist malntains that all of our normative

epistemological concepts, like knowledge and reasonable beltef, are also

in this sense folk concepts. They cannot be satisfactorily

reconstructed from the stock of primitives of finlshed science.

Although .... e cannot adequately explain how the eliminationist argues this

thesis here, we can say that it hinges on considerations about the

external constitution of our mental statps(12). Like the first type of

eliminationist, this one recommends that we drop normative (folk)

epistemology and concentrate our attention on descriptive epistemology.

In stead of examining what the conditions are under which we are

rational/justified in believing that P, for sorne P belonging to a c-

discourse, we as epistemologists are enjoined to examine what the

conditions are under which we do in fact believe that P (this

eliminationist may have a 6ifferent characterization of descriptive

epistemology if s/he takes belief, like many eliminationists do, to be

one of the ltems to be eliminated). So, to SUffi up eliminationism (both

kinds), we can say that whereas the skeptic concludes from his/her

12. See H. Putnam: "Why Philosophical Papers, vol. 3, CUPi Cognltlve Science, MIT, 1985.

Reason can 't Be Natura11 zed " in S, Stich: From Folk Psychology to

19

reasoning that we cannot have knowledge about ••• , the eliminationist

concludes that it rnakes no sense to speak about knowledge at aIl.

Although we have only given a rough outline, these four approaches

against the skeptic's form of argument m-lyappear to be promising. But

as rnay be expected, they aIl have serious short-comings and we should

rnake at least sorne cUIsory rernarks about these.

Fi!st, consider the na ive realist's approach. What i5

characteristic about this approach 1s its inclination to common sense.

This inclinatlOn is rnanifested in two ways: there 1S a reluctance to

revise what we first take the scope of our knowledge to be and there is

also a reluctance to revise the characterization of the concepts we use

to frame the statements that fall under this assumed scope. It is easy

to criticize the means by which the naive realist justifies thi5

reluctance. Generally, the naive realist dogmatically rnaintains in

spite of the reasoning of the above mentioned first step -- that the c-

facts under consideration can be apprehended by us in a non-inferentlal

way without really providing an account of how this is actually

possible. In fact, s/he often ernbellishes the point by saying that

these facts can be known by "direct acqualOtance" or by "observatlOn" ,

or that they "are given to us ln perception", but these expressions

obviously do not help to exp~icate what is required to be explicated.

They only serve to obscure the want of such explication. In thls

respect, the naive realist is similar to the intultionist who claims

that Wp can know moral or rnathematical truths by simply "intu1ting"

thern. And like the intuitionist, s/he offers a solution to the problem

of accounting for how we can come to know which is explar~torlly otiose.

(

(

(

1

20

While the naive realist's approach is inclined tovard common sense,

the reductionist's approach is clearlyaverse to it. But there is a

problem associated vith this aversion. Our initial response to his/her

approach is one of puzzlement. Most of us vould say that the claim that

vhen ve believe ourselves ta be speaking about the minds of others, Ve

are really speaking about their bodily behavior must be false. Most of

us would dlso consider the claim that aIl apparent references to the

past are actually references to the ~resent ta be outrigh~ unacceptable.

To this initial response, the reductiol'ist retorts that s/he also does

not find his/her claims to be intuitively correct, but that s/he is

convinced by the skeptic's argument that unless the statements belonging

to the c-discourse at issue are construed in the vay s/he prescribes, ve

cannot maintain our claim to knovledge over that discourse. Even if

this response vere acceptable, there would still remain another

difficulty vith the reductionist's approach. As ve just mentioned, the

most serious efforts to carry out the programme articulated by the

reductionist's approach were conducted this century by carnap and others

who belonged to the Vienna Circle. In Our Knowledge of the External

World and elsevhere, Bertrand Russell outlined this programme vith

respect to external material object discourse. According ta this

outline, external material object language vas to be reconstructed out

of a "logically perfect" sensation language. By this, Russell meant a

formaI language of type/set theory augmented vith a collection of

sensation terms. carnap in his Der logishe Aufbau der Welt (1928) came

nearest to filling

achievement fell

in the

far short

detai~s of Russell's outline. But his

of the Russellian goal of providing a

AR __ ;;::;;:;:_""":;,,..;:g;;uee •

21

suitable reconstruction from a logically perfect language. By 1936 when

his "Testability and Meaning" was 'Written, carnap -- as well as others-

- had despaired of arriving at such a reconstruction. The members of

the Vienna circle soon became their own best critics and reductionism as

an approach to solving the problems of episternology vas abandoned. ~he

philosophical significance of this recent intellectuaJ history should be

clear. If the reductionist's approach is to be taken seriously, the

reductionist must show how s/he can do better than these earlier

reductionists did. SA far, no reductionlst has managed to do just this.

The abductionist's approach i5 valuable to the extent that it

insists that there i5 a mode of inference other than deduction and

induction by enurneration that we may and do use to legitimate our claim

to knowledge. It presents an alternative description of how evidence

and conclusion rnay he related 50 that we rnay warrantably accept the

latter on the basis of the former. There are, however, sev~ral problems

with the approach(13). Consider Sir Peter Strawson's appeal to

abduction in an effort t.o undermine mater laI object skeptlcism.

Perhaps the best skepticisrn-rebutting argtunent in favour of the existence of body is the quasi-scientific argument ..• that the existence of a world of physical abjects having more or less the properties which current science attributes ta them provides the best available explanation of the phenornena of experience(14).

Let us try ta spell out what Strawson intends by this statement. To

begin, the "phenornena of experience" obviously refers to a set of facts

13. Much of the following 1s borrowed from Crispin Wright, "Facts and certainty", pp. 21-23.

14. Strawson, Sir Peter. Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varleties. Methuen, 1985, p.20.

i

\ n

belonging to the e-discourse about sensations. strawson expresses the

belief that they require explanation and, since he is appealing to

abduction, we may take it that such explanation must consist in

postulating a set of theoretical hypotheses --which cor.stitute f,Olllt:! c-

discourse from which we rnay formally deduce this set of e-facts.

Although we did not say so in our description of abduction abovè,

generally when sorne set of facts requires explanation, the set includes

more than just singular facts. It includes regularities that are

expressible in terms of general statements. Now, in the case at hand,

the set of e-facts supposedly includes regularities about sensatiorL~ and

these have the following form: wheneve:c C (where C stands for so:ne set

of conditions), we enjoy such and such types of sensations (the

implication here may not be representable in first order terms).

By "the existence of the external world of physical objects " . .. ,

we should take strawson to be meaning a set of statements belonging to

the c-discourse about physical objects -- that is, the set consisting of

the theoretical hypotheses from which we hope to be able to formally

deduce, with the help of sorne correspondence rules, the e-facts that

require explanation. As we said above, if the hypotheses are such that

they do in fact enable us to carry out a sufficient number of such

deductions --vlz, deductions of e-statements that match the e-facts--

then these hypotheses are said to be corroborated or, even better,

confirmed and ve as a result of carrying out such deductions come to a

position of knoving them.

This much should be clear. However, we run into difficulty when we

actually try to frame -- as ve prlma facie expect that we can -- the

...

•

23

general statements that supposedly express regularities in our

experience in only phenomenal terrns. Michael Williams has this to say:

It is aU very vell ... to call attention to the con15tancy of the appearance of the mountains, or the coherence of the appearances presented by [the] fire. But suppose ~e stick ta yelloVl-orange sense-data (of the k ind VIe may suppose fires to produce under normal conditions). May be ~e have noticed that the occurrence of such sense-data has been correlated vith certain striped sense-data (those produced by the wallpaper on the wall next to the fireplace). But if the conditions of illumination change, if VIe visita friend's house and look into his fire, if VIe close our eyes for a moment Vlhile dozing in front of the fire, if VIe have the room redecorated - in short, if any one of countless, ordinary events takes place -- the generalization linking the occurrence of yellowy-orange flickering sense-data ta the occurrence of striped sense-data will be disconfirrned

If ve are not alloVled ta impose any [external J restrictions on the conditions of perception, but are limit:ed instead to the resources of a purely experiential language, ve ~ill never be able to formulate any inductively confirmable generalizations about the course of exper ience (15).

In other vords, the regularities in our experience cannot he fully

explicated in phenomenal terms. The description represented by the 'CI

in the above conditlonal must specify circumstances like one's spatial

location, physical condition, environmental conditions, etc, aIl of

vhich require appeal ta physicalist terminology. Let us examine another

example to further illustrate the point.

We are in a room wi th a drum and notice that every time VIe str ike

it Vlith a drum stick, ve hear a particular sound. In this situation, VIe

may first think it is pOSSible ta express a simple generalization in

purely phenomenal terms: whenever VIe enjoy drum visual sense-data and

the corresponding visual, tactile, and kinesthetic sense-data of

15. Williams, Michael. Groundless Belief. BlackVlell, 1975, pp. 140-1.

--------

( 24

striking the drurn with the stick, we also enjoy the characteristic

auditory drum sense-data -- provided that certain "background"

conditions are satisfied. Note however that to rnake thls conditional

expliclt by speclfylng the background conditions, we would have to say

that our particular sense modalities and cognitive capacities were

pro~rly functioning, that standard perceptual and environrnental

conditions prevailed (e.g. we have standard ambient air pressure,

temperature, and lighting), that we were at a particular location, tha-c

the drum and drurn stick remained there, etc. Clearly, in doing so, we

wou Id have to appeal to physjcalist terminology, for without such

appeal, we would inevitably flnd a counter-instance to the condltional.

-{ In this respect, the theoretlcal hypotheses -- the c-statements

about external material abjects hypothesized to explain the e-facts

about sensations cannot be supported by the e-facts about our

sensations, or at least not in the way our analysis said they were to be

supported. These hypotheses do not explain the e--facts themselves, in

the sense of formally enta il mg them with the help of sorne

correspondence rules, and sa these e-facts cannot count as evidence for

them. The hypotheses rather explain the regularities in our experience

whose expression must be couched in c-concepts (physical terms) as weIl

as e-concepts (sensation terms). Since this expression presupposes the

correctness of the c-discourse from the beginning, these regularities

also cannot count as evidence for the hypotheses in the way the pure e-

facts would so coùnt if the y were explained by them. So, by the

abductionist's own standarâs, the hypotheses are beyond evidence

alto~ether. His/her approach fails to provide a mode of Inference which

------------------

QS, il 1 14

25

will br idge the logical gap, at 1east for this instance of external

material object discourse, whose bridging it adroits is condition for

knowledge (16) .

We shall say little about the eliminationist's approach. Many have

argued that it is self-stultifying on the grounds that, if it were

correct, there would be no sense in saying that one should accept it

above any other position since its claim is that normative

epistemological expressions are to be eliminated. other problematic

consequences follow from the approach. For Instance, Hllary Putnarn

argues that jf we eliminate our normative epistemological notions, then

we must elirninate the notion of truth as weIl -- other than as a device

for 'semantic ascent'. The reason is because both the realist's and

anti-realist's notions of truth involve reference to normative

epistemological terms . The anti-realist's notion has always been

explicated in terms of rationality or justIfication; e.g. Putnarn

explicates truth in terms of ideal rational acceptability and Dummett

explicates the notion simply in terms of justificati0n. With respect ta

the realist's notion, Putnam says the following:

Ta reject the notions of justification and right assertibility while keeping a metaphysical realist notion ot truth would, on the other hand, not only be peculiar (what ground could there be for regarding truth, in the 'correspondence' sense, as clearer than rlght assertibility?), but incoherenti for the notions the naturalistic metaphYSlcian uses ta explain truth and reference, for example the notIon of causality (explanation), and the notion of the approprlate type of causal chain depend on the notions which presuppose the

16. Although we have on1y considered the case of materlal object discourse, similar comments have been made about the other discoursesi e.g. for an examinatlon of the theory-1adenness of phYSlcal abject statements, see N.R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery, CUP, 195e.

26

notion of reasonableness(17).

In the future, we will take for granted the legitimacy of normative

epistemological notions and we will consider the concept of knowledge to

be a paradigm instance of such normative notions.

Let us sllI1UlBrize what we have said 50 far and then explain hO\rl we

will proceed hereafter. We started by indicating that we are concerned

with skepticism about material object discourse that is arrived at by a

general form of argwnent. This form may he applied to arrive at

skepticism about other discourses as weIl, such as discourse about

theoretical abjects, discourse about other minds, and discourse about

the pasto Next, we examined in a cursory vay the four steps that

characterize this general form of argument. Ta repeat, the first step

consists in arguing that our knowledge about the particular discourse at

issue must he inferential :'1 nature; the second step consists in arguing

that the requlred inference cannot be deductive; the third step consists

in arguing that neither can it he inductive; the fourth step conslsts in

arguing that, given steps one to three, we cannot have knowledge at all

about the discourse at issue. After looking at these steps, we looked

at four tradltlonal app~oaches to criticizlng the general form of

argument, each of which more or le5s respectively conflicts with one of

the four steps. Finally, \rie briefly mentioned sorne of four approaches's

short-comings.

In the next section, sect~on III, we will offer a typical example

of a piece of reasoning that moves from the premise that perceptual

17. Putnam, Hilary. "Why Reasan can' t Be Naturalized" in Reallsm and Reason, Philosophical Papers. val.3, CUP, 1983, pp. 245-246.

27

judgements about material object discourse are inferential in nature-­

the conclusion of the first step, the empiricists's doctrine -- to the

conclusion that neither can we know or even reasonably believe any of

such judgements. In other words, we will offer a piece of reasoning

that realizes the above explained steps two to four as applied to

material object discourse. In section IV, we will discuss the principal

argument that has been advanced to show that perceptual judgements about

material object discourse are in fact inferential in nature -- viz, the

Argument from Illusion. This argument reallzes the above explawed

first step. We will claim here that the Argument from Illusion is

inconclusive unless it appeals to a certain view of appearance -- what

we call the received view -- and, furthermore, we will advance a

competing view of appearance -- what we call the preferred view. This

view wlll let us characterize our perceptual knowledge of material

object discourse as -- in a way to be explained -- non-inferential. It

may be apparent that, in pursuing the matter in this way, we wlll be

following the na ive reallst approach of undermining the skeptic's

argument.

offer a

Unllke most instances of this approach, however, we hope to

somewhat substantlal explanation of how we can acqulre such

knowledge about material obJect discourse in a non-inferential manner.

This explanation will involve reference to fallibilist and infallibilist

conceptions of knowledge, which are discussed in section VIII. The

preferred view of appearance that we explicate ln section IV hlnges on

the correctness of the fallibilist conception. In section V, we examine

some of the reasons for upholding the received view and defuse sorne of

them. One of these reasons appeals to a methodological solipsist

( 28

account of the mind and 50, in sections VI and VII, we will look at the

inadequacyof this account. Lastly, in section VIII, we will examine

both the fallibilist and infallibilist conceptions of knowledge and we

will argue that the fallibilist conception provides a more accurate

characterization of the actual nature of knowledge.

(

1 .

-, ~ .. ...,.. , . - ..... ~ ~

29

III A Sample Skeptical Argument

ln his Henr iet te Hertz lecture "Facts and Certainty", Cr ispin

Wright presents an a~gument which moves from the conclusion of the above

explained step one for the case of rnaterial object discourse -- the

empiricist doctrine -- to the general skeptlcal conclusion of the above

explained step four. That is, the argument concludes that neither do we

know, nor could we know, nor could we even reasonably believe, any of

the tltoughts we may possibly entertain concerning mater ial objects.

Wright himself takes the empirlcist doctrine to be true from the

beginning. Tt will help us if we re-state it. Again, as Austin puts it

in his Sense and Sensibilia:

we never see or otherwise perceive, or anyhow we never directly perce ive rnaterial objects, but only sense­impressions, sensations, percepts, etc.(18)

We may use a more recent idiom and put it thus:

we never come to know facts about material objects by simply looking at themi perceptual knowledge must somehow be inferential.

Although we will not argue for the claim here, Wright's argument is just

one of a genre of skeptical arguments that realize the above explained

steps two to four -- that is, that move from the empiricist doctrine,

that we never come to know facts about material objects by simply

looking, to the paradoxical conclusion that we never come to know such

facts at aU.

We will summarize Wright's presentation of the argument in the

following. It will be noted that its structure does not neatly match up

18. J.L. Austin. Sense and Sensibilia, OUP, p.2.

" ;, " ,t

30

wi th the structure of the above outl 1ned steps two to four. The

elements of these steps can, however, he dist111ed out of his

presentation.

Wr ight begin5 by ask ing what k 1nd of argument could be used to

prove the existence of the external world and, then, considers the

argument offered by G.E. Moore in his "Proof of an External World" (19).

Moore argued in an apparently straightforward manner that because he

knows he has a hand, especially when he sees it while holding it in

front of himself in normal conditions, he knows that there is an

external world, since a hand is a material object ~xi~ting in space and

time. Wright first tries to rigorize this argument. He takes it that

Moore 's putative knowledge claim about his having a hand does not

express something that lS immediately known to him but rather is the

pronuct of an inference from sorne description of the phenomenal

experience he has. It lS at this pOInt that the ernpiricist doctrine

plays its part in Wright's reasoning towards skepticism. The more

robust version of the Moorean proof that Wright in the end arrives at

may be represented by the following three propositions:

1: = sorne proposition describing ln appropriate detail Moore's total field of experience for sorne time before and during the period when he feels he i5 holding up h1s hand. (20)

II : l have a hand.

III: There is an external world.(2l)

19. Moore, G.E. "Proof of an External World" in Proceedings of the British Acaderny, vol. XXV, 1939.

20. Wright, Crispin. "Facts and Certainty" , p.8.

21. Wright, p.7.

31

The proof may strike one as plausible. But this plausibility, Wright

suggests, stems from assimilating its inferential structure to that

exhibited by the following inference:

Five hours ago Jones sWùllowed twenty Deadly Nightshade Berries;

Jones has absorbed into his system a fatal quantity of belladonnai

Jones will shortly die.

However, on closer inspection according ta Wright, an inference that

mirrors the inferentlal structure of the proof more accurately is the

following:

Jones has just written an 'X' on that piece of paperi

Jones has just votedi

An election i5 taking place.

In both of these examples, the first line, according ta Wright, provides

"gooo but defeasible evidence for the second line, and the second line

entails the third line". The difference between the two, however, is

that in the second example though not in the first, the evidential

support provided by the first line for the second depends on whether or

not we already accept the third line, for:

In a situatior. in which people wrote crosses on paper in many other contexts besides elections, the knowledge that Jones had just done S~ might have no tendency whatever to support the belief that he had just voted.(22)

For instance, if our society were such that it held electoral drills in

the way that we actually hold fire drills, the sight of Jones marking an

'X' on a piece of paper behind something like a polling booth would not

22. Wright, p.9.

1--------1

( 32

provide any varrant for a conclusion that Jones vas participating in a

real election rather than a mere drill. Such varrant vould only be

provided by reasons for believing that an actual election vas under vay.

And note that be ca use of the nature of the inferential connections

involved, these reasons vould have to be independent of our knovledge of

Jones's action.

Wright claims that the proof for the existence of the external

world as represented by propositions l, II, and III bears the same

inferentlal relations as the voting example. Our phenomenal experience

provides evidential support for particular propositions about material

objects only on the precondition that ve are justified in accepting that

( there is an external vorld. And just as in the voting example, such

justification must be provided independently of our phenomenal

experience. But, according to Wright, there is a crucial difference

betveen l, II, and III and the voting example. Whereas in the latter

independent justiflcation is available, in the former the only means for

justification of our belief in the external ~orld vould seem to be

through knowleàge of particular propositions about it. What follows

from these considerations, Wright claims, is that our belief in the

existence of an external world and our belief in particular propositions

about it are not only beyond our present knowledge but, as he puts it,

are "beyond evidence altogether".

Although Wright presents his reasoning for material-object-

skepticism indirectly through his rigorization of Moore's prcof, ve may

1 capture its sallent points as follovs. AlI of our evidence for there

being an external vorld is supplled through particular propositions

about it.

33

AlI of our evidence for these propositions is provided by our

phenomenal experience, but only on the condition that we have sorne

independent justification for there being an external world. So,

insofar as such justification is not forthcorning, we cannot even have

reasonable justification for beliefs about rnaterial objects.

wright's argument toward skepticisrn is open to several objections.

But as we said in section II, we shall concentrate on its presupposition

that perceptual knowledge about rnaterial obJects is in general

inferential -- that is, the conclusion of the above explained Step one,

the empiricist doctrine. In so doing, we hope to show that the

progression from step one to step two is illegitimate. If we succeed,

this will enable us to criticize the whole genre of skeptical arguments

that likewise depend on the legitirnacy of this progression in virtue of

their appeal to the empiricist doctrine.

l

34

IV The Argument from Illusion: 'l'wo Views of Appearance

The presupposition that the above argument relies upon -- the

empiriclst doctrine -- can be re-stated as follows:

we never corne to know facts about material objects by sirnply looking; perceptual knowledge must somehow be inferential.

Thus Wright notes quite correctly in his lecture that if this doctrine

is rejected, we rnay hûld that propositions of type II like '1 have a

hand' (c-discourse propositions) may be directly apprehended through,

for instance, our ability to see, ... i.thout having to inter them from sorne

epistemically more favored basis (e-discourse proposttions). In short,

this rejection prevents the argument from reaching its skeptical

conclusion. What we shall de in what follows 1s to examine what

plausible grounds we might adduce for just this rejection.

In this regard, we should ask what has been the rnainstay of the

empiricist doctrine. That is, wha~ reasoning has been offered to

realize the above explained first step for the case of material object

discourse? As has been mentioned, the proponents of the doctrine have

usually put forward the Argument from Illusion(23). There have been

several distinct presentations of this argument. Ch. 1 of A.J. Ayer's

The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge gives one classic presentation

which specifically appeals to bizarre experiences like mirages and

double vision. Thompson Clarke gives another presentation, often cited,

whose merit lies in the fact that it makes no appeal whatsoever to

23. Sep. Price, Ayer, Austin.

1

..

" ..

35

bizarre experiences(24). AlI of these presentations, however, have a

general form which John McDowell tr ies to capture in his "Cr i ter ia,

Defeasibility, and Knowledge". He writes;

On any question about the world independent of oneself to which one can ascertain the answer by, say, looking, the vay things look can be deceptive: it can look to one exactly as if things were a certain way when they are not. . .. It follows that any capacity to tell by looking how things are in the world independent of oneself can at bes: be fallible . ... Something else follows as weIl: since there can be deceptive cases experientially indistinguishable from non­deceptive cases, one's experiential intake - what one embraces within the scope of one's consciousness - must be the same in both kinds of case. In a deceptive case, one's experiential intake must ex hypothesi fall short of the fact itself, in the sense of being consistent with there being no such tact. So that must be true in the non-deceptive case too. One's capacity is a capacity to tell by looking: that is, on the basis of experiential intake. And even when this capacity does yield knowledge, we have to conceive the basis as a highest common factor of what 15 available to experience in the deceptive and non-deceptive cases alike, and as something that is at best a defeasible ground for knowledge .... (25)

The structure of this reasoning may be made more apparent by the

following reformulation and elaboration of what McDowell is saying.

(i) We start off with the intuition that we come to knowat least

sorne facts about the world -- at least simple material object facts--

through our ability to see or, more generally, to perceive. For

example, we may come to know that there is a tomato sitting on the table

by simply seeing that there is.

(ii) It is then brought to our attention that for every case of

24. T. Clarke gave this presentation in his lectures at UC at Berkeley.

25. Mc Dowe 11 , John. "Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge." in The Proceedings Of The British Academy, Vol. LXVIII, 1982, p.471.

ver1dlcal apprehenslon, there exist innlwerable deceptive counterparts,

wherein each of the counterpdrt cases, it 15 assumed that we have an

experience phenomenologically indistinguishable with whatever is

experienced in the veridical case. As exarnples of deceptive

counterparts associated with the our paradigrn veridical case of seeing

that there is a tomato on the table, it <:ould be that there is a wax

tomato on the table, that we are SUffeI"ing an optical illusion or a

hallucination, or that we are experiencing' a dream.

(iii ) We are then persuaded that in each case of putative

perception, what i5 really given to us in experience, or -- as Russell

would put it -- what we are immediately acquainted with, is what is

phenornenologically common to both the veridical case and its associated 'If "

deceptive counterparts. Althoul:}h McDo ... ell does not say 50, empiricists

like Ayer and Price argue that ... e therefore see the same thing in aIl of

such cases and that, as a result, we never directly see material

objects. Items ... hich they call 'sense-data' are the real objects of

experience. Nevertheless, McDo ... ell does not need to make this claim in

order to arrive at the sarne conclusion. According ta hirn, we only need

to acknowledge that since in aIl of such cases we have the same

appearance -- what we are given in experience -- this appearance must

provide no more epistemic warrant for arrivin9 at a pet:ceptual judgement

about the external world in the veridical case than it would provide in

any of the deceptlve counterparts. No... s inee 'I1e rnay arr ive at an

incorrect perceptual judgeroent as a result of an appearance when we are

faced ... ith one of the deceptive counterpart cases, such an appearance

serves as at best a 'defeasible ground', even when had in veridical

j

~ ,>' 1

37

cases. This is because supposedly, at the time of arriving at a

perceptual judgement on the basis of 'looking', aIl that we have to rely

on is what is phenornenologically given in experience and, by the

argument, this does not tell us whether we are in a veridical case or

note In McDowell's words:

In a deceptive case, what is embraced within the scope of experience is an appearance that such and such is the case, falling short of the fact: a mere appearance. So what is experienced in a non-deceptive case is a mere appearance too."(26)

(iv) We are expected to cop~lude from this that we cannot come to

know facts about the world by simply looking, contrary to what we

originally thought in (i). In the Ayer/Price presentation of the

argument, this conclusion follows in virtue of their claim that we just

never do 'directly' see material objects, but only sense-data. Since we

must move from the latter to the former inferentially if we are to know

about them, it follows that the process involves more than simply

looking. In the more general presentation of the ar~nnent, as McDowell

tries to explicate it, the conclusion follows from this consideration.

In any perceptual situation where we have the appearance that P, for

sorne state of affairs P, and on that bas.ls make the perceptual judgement

that P, we cannot as a result be said to know that P. For the epistemic

warrant offered by the appearance is at best a defeasi~le ground and

knowledge, at least when understood in the traditional infallibilist

terms, requires a non-defeasible ground(27). 80 to arrive at knowledge

that P in such a situation, we must do more, such as determine that we

26. McDowell, p.472.

27. This topic will be pursued in the last section of the paper.

38

are not in a deceptive case. In this respect, we cannot corne to know

that P by slmply looking or at least by simply looking at that

particular moment(28).

With this last result, the Argument from Illusion has supposedly

demonstrated the empiricist doctrine the conclusion of the above

explained step one for the case of material object discourse. But, as

the argument stands, it is inconclusive. There is a way of construing

the data upon which it relies to save the intuition with which we

started. For example, with respect to the veridical/deceptive pair of

cases involving the real tomato and a wax equivalent, why can't we say

that, whereas in the veridical case one sees that the real tomato is

sitting on the table and therefore knows that it is, in the deceptive

case one falsely takes it that one sees the real tomato when it is

actually a bogus wax copy?

What is at issue here is a certain view about appearance. The

view, which we shall caU the received view, asserts that an appearance

provldes the same epistemic warrant for a perceptual judgement

i.rrespective of whether it gives rise to a veridical or deceptive case

28. Charles Travis illustrates this consideration in his The Uses of Sense, p.114: "Odile looks through her window and [thinks shel sees a st.ag on the lawn. Does she knov that there is a stag on the lawn? One miqht reason as follows. Suppose there vere a cleverly arrangen stuffed or mechanical stag, placed to lure poachers. If so, nothing now available to or detectable by Odile would allow her to tell that it was SOi to distinguish that situation from one in which there is a stag on the lawn. So for aIl she knows or can tell, there might not be a stag on the lawn. So she d0es not know that there is one."

Barry Stroud also discusses this - what he calls a simple and obvious fact about knowledge - in his The Signiticance of Philosophical Sceptic1sm, pp.23-31. e.g.:"As soon as we see that a certain p0ssibility 15 Incompntible with our knowing such-and-such, ... we immediately recognize that lt is a possibility that must be known not to obtain if we arE' to know the such-and-such in question." p. 27.

39

of perception. That this is involved in McDowell's presentation i5

clear from the passage quoted above . What the above

counter-interpretation of the data does is simply deny the received

view. That is, although we rnay have the sa me appearance in both the

veridical and deceptive cases, the appearance provides different

epistemic warrant in each case for the resulting perceptual judgement

that chere is a tomato on the table. McDowell himself points out the

argument's inconclusiveness:

But suppose we say -- not at aIl unnaturally -- that an appearance that such-and-such is the case can be either a mere appearance OI the fact that such-and-such is the case making itself perceptually manifest to someone. As before, the object of experience in the deceptive cases is a mere appearance. But we are not to accept that in the non­deceptive cases too the object of experience is a mere appearance, and hence something that falls short of the fact itself. On the contrary, we are ta insist that the appearance that is presented to one ln those cases is a matter of the fa ct itself being disclosed ta the experiencer. So appearances are no longer conceived as in general intervening between the experiencing subject and the world. (29)

Much more needs to be said here. The claim that an "appearance

that such-and-such i5 the case" might be "the fact that such-and-such 15

the case making itself perceptually manifest" is probably to be

understood as saying that in veridical cases, we simply see, observe, or

otherwise perce ive nothing other than the fact itself. Although this

claim seems correct, it too adrnits of various interpretations. Let us

suggest the following if-then formulation. If a subject S whose sensory

and cognitive apparatus is in proper working order (i.e. a normal

observer) perceptually interacts with sorne state of affairs P under

29. McDowell, p.472.

{ 40

standard conditions (proper lighting, standard ambient air pressure and

temperature, etc.) in such a way that, as a result, S judges that P,

then we may say that S sees that P and, consequently, that S has non-

inferentially come to know that P. Moreover, such knowledge obtains

notvithstanding the possibility that for aIl that may be gjven to S in

experience as a result of the perceptual interaction, s/he does not have

enough informatlon to be able to rule out the possiblli ty that s/he may

be in a deceptive case. In other words, S may not be in a position to

confirm that the antecedent holds, but if it does hold, s/he 'sees

correctly' .

By contrast, when McDo ... ell says that ,:ln "appearance that such-and-

such is the case" can be a mere appearance, we should understand him as

saying that in a deceptive case ve may take it that such-and-such is the

case but thlS 1S a misperceptlon on our part. With respect ta how we

explicated 'seeing' above, we may put thlS last statement in more

precise terms. A subJect S has a mere appearance that P in a deceptive

case because, although ""hat is phenomenologically given in experience is

the sarne as it would be ln a veridical case, sorne of the above referred

to conditions necessary for 'seeing correctly' are not satisfied (not-p,

sens ory apparatus i3 not properly working, etc.).

Various things follow from this interpretation of McDowell. First,

with the denial of the received view ol appearance, this interpretation

shows hov we may arrive at knowledge of the world non-inferentially by

simply looking, as opposed to vP~t is said by the conclusion of the

Argument from Illusion. For this reason, we will sometimes refer to

this interpretation as th~ preferred vie... of appearance. Second, the

41

interpretation requires us, if we take it seriously, to construe the

concept of kno~ledge in fallibilist terms. We do not arrive at

knowledge that P by logically inferring P from sorne privlleged

incorrigible basis. In short, .f ~e kno~ that P as a result of

perceiving, for aIl that we rnay be able to tell when doing so, ~e may be

wrong! This challenges the vie~ of knowledge as being infallible. We

~ill come to this below.

A question we should address before proceeding any further is how

exactly the received view undercuts this interpretation --the preferred

vie~. Recall that the received view asserts that an appearance provides

the same epistemic warrant for a perceptual judgement made on its basis

irrespect ive of whether it be in veridical or deceptive cases.

Applying this to the veridical/deceptive pair of cases involving the

real tomato and the wax equivalent, ~e wou Id conclude that the

indiscernibility of their respective appearances logically entails the

equivalence of epistemic warrant for the perceptual judgement that there

is a tomato on the table. Since the warrant in the deceptive case must

be such that we cannot simply say that we know that there 1S a tomato on

the table from just looking, the same mt~t apply ta the verldical case

as ~ell. Thus, generalizing from this paradigm example, ~e cannot ever

correctly claim to know on the baS1S of just looking.

The question we must now ask 1s just ~hat sustains the received

vie~ of appearance . In the next section, we will examine three

arguments that have traditionally been appealed to to support this view.

Before we do, however, let us summarize what has been said 50 far. To

begin ~ith, there exists a genre of skeptical arguments that move from

42

the premise that we cannot come to know facts about the world--

material object facts by simply looking to the conclusion that we

cannot come to know facts about the world at aIl. Wright's argument was

presented as an instance of this genre. This premise, the empiricist

doctrine, is itself the conclusion of another argument -the Argument

fram Illusion. But this argument must make appeal ta a certain view of

appearance - what we have referred to as the received view. And without

this view, we can interpret the data upon which the Argument from

Illusion relies in a way that denies the empiricist doctrine.

43

V Arguments for the Recelved Vlew of Appea~ance

(a) The Argument from Phenomenology

One very old argument for the received view as old as the

'Argument from Illusion' itself takes the experiential

indiscernibility between veridical and deceptive apoearances very

seriously. In his Foundations, A. J. Ayer expounds this argument by

considering the appearances of crooked and straight sticks. There 1s,

he says,

no intrinsic difference in kind between those of our perceptions that are veridical in their presentation of material things and those that a~e delusive. When l look at a straight stick, which is refracted in vater and so appears crooked, my experience is qualitativeJy the same as if l were looking at a stick that really was crooked .... [If, however,l when our perceptions are delusive, we were always perceiving something of a different kind from what we perceived when they were veridical, we should expect our experience to be qualiLatively different in the two cases. We should expect ta be able to tell from the intrinsic character of a perception whether i t was a perception of a sense-datum or of a material thing. But this is not possible .... (30)

H. H. Priee provides an analogous piece of reasoning in his Perception.

In chapter two of his book, he argues thus.

The abnormal crooked [appearanceJ of a straight stick standing in vater i5 qualitatively indistinguishable from a normal [appearance] of a crooked stick. [But] is it not incredible that two entities so similar in all these qualities should really be 50 utterly different: that one should be a real constituent of a material object, wholly independent of the observer's mind and organism, while the other is merely the fleeting product of his cerebral

30. Ayer, A.J. The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge. MacMillan, 1940, pp.5-9.

, \

44

processes?(31)

The form of argument put forward by Ayer and Price for the received

view would seem to be insufficlcent. What their form of argument in

effect does is to assert, without appeal to independent support, that

what exclusively individuates an experience is its phenomenological

features. But the failure, for example, in the case of sense-data to

arrive at sat1sfactory identity conditions specif1ed in terms of such

features should certainly suggest that the received view is something

that ought nat ta be accepted, as least as lt stands. It should be

upheld by reasoning from a neutral starting point, and, in the absence

of such reasoning, the view may be safely rejected, and our preferred

view which individuates appearance in terms of difference in epistemic

warrant may be adopted.

McDowell captures this response to the first argum0nt by the

follow1ng statement:

The [preferred view of appearancel can allow what is given in experience in the two sorts of case [veridical and deceptivel to be the same in so far as it is an appearance that things are thus and so; that leaves it open that whereas in one kind of case what 1S given to experience is a mere appearance, in the other it is the fact itself made manifest.(32)

(b) Argument from Evidence

This argument stems from an intuition about evidence.(33)

31. Price, H.H. Perception. Methuen. 1932. p.31.

32. McDowell, p. 475.

33. McDowell, pp. 475-476.

According to our preferred view of appearance, we can supposedly

identify in any given case of putative perception that P the

accompanying appearance that P as either one that warrants us in saying

that we know that P or one that does not, where such identification

depends upon the circumstances surroundlng the case. The proponents

advancing this argument for the received view take the preferred view to

mean that in the veridical case, the appearance that P is a strong item

of eVldence for P, in virtue of its warrant. They likewise take it

mean that, in the deceptive case, the appearance that P i5 also an item

of evidence for P, although It must individuated froro the its

counterpart in the veridical case because of lts difference ln warrant.

Now, according to these proponents, we have the intuition that an

item of evidence for P, for whatever P, is something that we can tell we

have independently of our knowledge that P. Clearly, this intuition is

responslble for our taking evidence to assume an eplstemically

privileged status over its inferential descendants(34).

From what has just been said, the proponents maintain, the

34. Various phenomenalist aceounts, like that of Priee, have fed on this intuition. Aecording to these aceounts, evidence is what has been called a 'pre-eoneeptual given'. By this, it is understood as something that is given to one's consciousness with no part of its nature being eomposed or pre-eonditioned by any higher-grade coneeptual framewark, innate or aequired, that we may embraee taeitly or explicitly. Moreover, every intrinsic feature about such an item is supposed to be directly present ta view, where the qualifier 'directly' implies that the awareness af any of these features is not reaehed by inference, abstraction, or any other intelleetual process. There obviously must be sorne such 'presence te awareness' that are direct in this sense, or so it is claimed, otherwise we should have to cope with an infinite regress - that is, all of our a posteriori reasonings would be ultimately groundless.

See Priee, PerceptIon eh. 1, especially pp. 3-6.

-

l

46

intuition would appear ta directly support the received view of

appearance and, thus, clash with the preferred view. To explain how, we

turn again ta the stock example. In the circumstance of it appearing to

us that there 1s a tomato sitting on the table, the preferred view would

conceive of the same appearance as providing different epistemic warrant

for the perceptual judgement that there is a tomato on the table,

depending on whether we are in a veridical or deceptive perceptual

situation. That is, if we are in a veridical situation (the above

referred to conditlons are satlsfied) then we see that there is a tomato

sitting on the table and, as a result, know that there is. If, on the

other hand, we are in a decept1ve situat10n (sorne of the appropriate

conditions are not satisfiedl, then we do not see that there lS a tomato

on the table and, unless we have sorne other means by which to do so, we

do not know that there is. Since the appearance provides different

epistemic warrant in each of the two cases, it may be said to constitute

different items of evidence for the judgement that there is a tomato on

the table. But the crucial thing is that at the moment of putatively

perceiving that there is a tomato on the table, we cannot identify

whether we are in a veridical ~r deceptive situation. So we cannot

identify which item of evidence we have. Such identifications depend on

the truth or falsity of tne perceptual judgement that there is a tomato

on the table. At this point, the conflict between the preferred view

and the intuition about evidence is apparent: the intuition asserts that

an item of evidence is something we should be able to tell we ha ~

independently of our knowledge of a judgement made on its bAsis.

In response to the proponents, we should say that their argument

1~"""',"'''''_'''j ... t4i_''''''\!IIfoII~'''~_~_ .. ~......-_ . ~"'.'''''''''_-'''T'''''''~~~ ____________ _

,

..

li

47

for the received view misses the point of the preferred view's construal

of appearance. According to this construal, the appearance that P when

had in the veridical case is not an item of evidence for P in the sense

that from it we somehow infer that P and that, moreover, it is in virtue

of such an inference that we come to know that P. This is precisely the

thesis we rejected when we introduced the preferred view. As we said

earlier, such a thesis leads to the general skeptical conclusion that we

can never come to know such P at all. In this respect, by not

identifying appearances with items of evidence in the way the proponents

suggest, we stop thEir argument from reaching the conclusion that the

preferred view clashes with the alleged intuition about evidence.

(b) The Argument from Methodological Solipsism

This argument for the received view stems from the accounts of mlnd

predominant in modern philosophy.(35)

Let us first consider the traditional Gartesian account. Although

many philosophers presently reject this account, most are still in its

sway. The account may be characterized as representing facts about the

mental as ccnstltuting an autonomous realm completely transparent to the

mind's introspection. This realm is conceived as autonomous in the

sense that its states of affairs are arranged as they are indep~ndently

of external circumstances. Although the Cartesian account says much

more about the nature of the mind (e.g. that its essence is to think and

35. This argument is suggested in J. McDowell 's paper "Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space" in Subject, Thought, and Context. OUP. 1986.

t i ~ "

1

L

1 ....

48

that 1t 1s composed of an immaterial substance), these features are the

ones that are relevant ta the upholding of the received view.

We can see how they do 50 by considering how they rule out our

preferred view of appearance. According to this view, in any given case

of putatively perceiving that P for sorne state of affairs P with which

we may perceptually interact, the appearance that P is either one that

warrants us to sayon its basis that we know that P or one that does

not, depending upon the circumstances surrounding the case. From the

point of view of the mental, it should be observed that this viey

commits us to regarding whether we have the first or second disjunct as

stating a non-trivial fact about our mental states. That is, in the

veridical case, we may be ascribed the mental state of it appearing to

us that P and, in virtue of this state, the mental states of seeing that

P and knowing that P. On the other hand, in the deceptlve case we may

be ascribed the mental state of it appearing to us that P, but such a

mental state wou Id be a different state from the one ascribed in the

veridical case in respect of the different epistemic warrant that each

offers.

Now, it should also be observed that this non-trivial fact about us

is one whose constitution is not. independent of external circurnstances.

As 'le described the preferred view above, it depends on whether certain

conditions are satisfied. For instance, on whether the perceptual

interaction occurs under 'normal' circurnstances, etc. Moreover, such a

fact is not one which 1s transparent ta introspection, for at the moment

of putatively perceiving that P, we cannot tell which disjunct 1s the

case. But according to the cartesian account, there should be no facts

49

abol:.t us which are not accessible to introspection. Any putative

difference between the disjuncts characterized above, therefore, could

not he construed as a difference between two ways in which we might be.

Such a difference, if real at aIl, would have to be located outside the

autonomous realm of the ~ntal.

The Cartesian account of mind supports the received view of

appearance in a second way. Specifically, more recent accounts of mind

have inherited from their cartesian archetype the features that support

the view. The accounts which go by the names of 'behaviorism',

'materialism', and 'functionalism' are paradigm examples. Although none

of these conceive the facts about the mental as incorrigibly accessible

to introspection -- however they might conceive of introspection -- they

each conceive of these tacts as composing an autonomous realm arrélnged

as it is independently of external circumstances. This constraint on

the concE:ption of the mental which they all embrace -- which in keeping

with the current terminology we will refer to as the methodological

solipsism constraint -- is sufficient to eliminate our preferred view of

appeàrance. As we said

instance of perception, the

above, the view implies that in a putative

fact of lihether we are in a veridical

situation or a deceptive one is a non-trivial fa ct about us whose

cOI~titution is dependent on external circurnstances.

To explicate these last considerations more explicitly and fully,

we need to digress into a more general discussion about the natures of

these accounts of mind.

50

VI Modern Accounts of Mind and th€. Constraint of Methodological

Solipsism

It may be objected that we have spoken too loosely about the

autonomous realm whose states of affairs are arlanged as they are

independently of external circumstances. In discussing the various

accollnts of mind -- behaviorism, functionalism, anf.. nlaterialism -- we

will distinguish those states of affairs which consti tute the autonomous

realm and those which con5titute external circumstances. It may be

apparent already, however, that the way that the y are dlstinguished is

contingent upon which account of mind i5 considered.

Before we discuss these accounts, we should review the general

taxonomy that twentieth century philosophy of mind, for better or vorse,

has come to adopt. ThIS taxonomy is quite different and rather more

sophisticated than the one implicit in Descartes, and subsequently made

explicit by Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Whereas in the earliE'r taxonomy,

mental phenomena as disparate as pain~, beliefs, concepts, and thoughts

are assimilated to percepts(36), or what Descartes called ideas, in the

twentieth century taxonomy such phenomena are grouped into separa te

mental kinds(37).

We spoke earlier about facts about the mind. Under the modern

taxonomy, statements of such facts are taken to specify the properties

36. Burge, Tyler. "cartesian Error and the Objectivity of Perception" in SubJect, Thought, and Context, ed. Pettit and McDowell, OUP, 1986, p. 118.

37. For more details about the following, see Colin McGinn's The Character of Hind, ch. 1.

q (Ch W4; .... ,"4 •

51

\Ile may have or the relations \Ile may stand in to other particulars.

These particulars include, among other things, sensations, material

objects, other minds, and propositions. Depending on the length of time

\Ile stand in such relations, they are accord ingly referred to as mental

states, events, or processes (causal sequencE~S of mental events). In

our discussion, though, .... e will use the expression 'mental state' to

refer ta any of these specifie types.

The modern taxonomy of mind divldes mental states roughly into

two sorts: the intentional and the non- intent ionai (38). This i5 an

important distinction ~hich neither Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, nor Hume

drew. As typical instances of the first sort, .... e have: (1) Sam belleves

that cannes is ~est of Nicej (2) Joanne thinks that the South of France

is too hot; (3) Henri desires to have a condominIum in Monaco; and (4)

Genevieve fears that she .... ill loose her har;dbag whi le on vacation.

Mental states such as these are often called 'prOpo51tional attitude3'.

The reason is that a person in this type of mental state is t110ught to

st.and in relatlon to a certain state of affairs, possible state of

affairs, or Even a proposition (whatever such cl thlng might be). The

grammatical structure of a sentence that ascribes an intentional mental

state usually bears this relation out. When the ascribing sentence has

a sentential sub-clause follo~lng the relative pronoun "that" as in (l),

(2), and (4) above, the attitude is signified by the vords preceding the

"that" and the (possible) state of aHairs is sigmfied by the sub-

clause, often referred to as the 'that-clause' or 'content-clause'.

38. There is an 'in between' sort exemplified by 'Jane praises the leaders of her union'. "He \IIi11 not deal ~ith this sort here.

,------------------------

52

This first sort of mental state is called 'intentional' because its

instances involve an aboutness feature in an intrinsic Vlay. That is,

they someho ... make reference to something else, namely, Vlhatever

(possible) state of affairs is specified by the that-clause. 1:n making

such reference ta a state of affairs, say a state of affairs P, theyare

also said ta represent P or contain ... hat has been called a 'content

representational of P'. Sorne intentional mental states, like belief,

ale a]so related to truth or falsi ty depenëing on whether or not the

(possible) state of affairs referred ta obtains.

As typlcal instances of the second sort of mental state, VIe have:

(1) Guillaume is in palni (2) Jean feels an itch on his left elbowi and

(3) Bridget is tired. The ë1bsence of any aboutness quality in these

instances is \oIhat makes them non-intentional. Pains, tickles, feels and

the like do not parlicipate HI any semant.1C relatlOnsi they bear no

truth value.

At this point, VIe should remind oursel ves that the mental phenomena

that interest us from the vie1Npoint of our earlier d iscuss ion ale

appearances. As \ole have construed them, they are intentlOnal mental

states. Having the appearance that P requires us to stand ln a relation

-- the relation of 'i t appears ta us that ... ' -- to the putatively

perce i ved fact that P. We may of course cons~ ue an appearance as a

non-lntentlonal mental state by o'lly refe:Lr ing to i ts phenomemological

features, bllt such a construal lb not to our purpose. In our discussion

above, we always made reference to appearances as fully fledged

Intentlonal mental states.

One peculiar but important feature of content-clauses should be

1

l'

l j

1 l ~ 1 1 i 1 , l

1 j

" 53

pointed out -- explicit reference will be made to it later. Sometimes

expressions of notions in content-clauses are not intersubsti tutable

with extensionally equivalent expressions in such a way as ta preserve

the truth value of the ascr ibing sentence that contains the content-

clause. For instance, i t may be the case that sand is by and large,

save impurities, Si02 (Silicon-DlOxide) and that Sam believes that the

beach at cannes has more sand than the beach at Nice, 'Nithout Sam

believing that the one beach has more 8i02 than the other. This 'Nell-

knovm phenomena perta ining to belief content-clauses in partlcular and

content-clauses in general Y/as tirst observed by Frege (39). Accordlng

to Burge, one of the factors that accounts for the phenomena is the

significant contribution that the expression of notions like 5and llIakes

in the characterizat ion of the mental state that is ascr ibed by the

sentence ln \olhich such an expression figures(40). In other 'Nords, the

reason why sand and S102 are not intersubsti tutable ln the report of

Sam's belief concerning the relative amounts of sand at cannes and Nice

is that the corresponding belief Y/ith 'Si02' substituted for 'sand'

would characterize a different mental state from the one characterized

by the first belief. Expressions in content-clauses that behave in a

manner like 'sand' in the above illustration are said ta be 'obI ique

expressions' or are sald to have 'oblique occurrence' within the content

clauses.

Now, by contrast, expressions in conter -clauses that are

39. Frege, G. "On Sense and Reference" in Philosophical Wlitings of Gottlob Frege. ed. P. Geach. Ba.,il Blackwell, 1952.

40. Burge, Tyler. "Individualism and the Mental" in Hidwest Studies in Philosophy, (iv) 1979, p.76.

L

54

intersubstitutable with extensionally equivalent expressions in such a

way as ta preserve the truth value of the ascribing sentence that

contains the content-clause are said ta be 'non-oblique' or are said to

have 'non-oblique occurrence'. In this respect, a sentence ascribing an

intentional mental state may contain non-oblique occurrences of sand

within its respective content-clause. We may say that Sam believes of

that stuff, the stuff that is plentiful on the beach at cannes, calI it

'sand' or 'Si02' or whatèver extensionally equivalent expression you

like, that there is more of it at Gannes than at Nice. Sam may never

have heard of 8102. But this does not matter because the belief that is

ascribed to Sam here 1S dlfferent in kind from the similar sounding one

ascrlbed ln the paragraph above. For in this case, the particular

notions like sand or Si02 serve only to isolate the object or stuff

towards which hlS belief may applYi they make no contribution to the

characterlzatlon of the mental state that is attributed by the ascribing

sentence. This distinction may be made clearer by the following

cons iderat ion. 'ii,'<> may understand the sentence "Sam be lieves that the

beach at Gannes has more sand than the beach at Nice" as ascribing a

particular mental state to Sam. But as it stands, the sentence is

reallyambiguous, for we may interpret it in one of two ways, each of

which ascribe~ a different mental state to Sam. If one takes the ward

'sand' as an obliquely occurring expression, then the notion of sand

participates in characterizing the ascribed mental state in a way that

the notio~ of S102 does not. Its occurrence signaIs how the stuff

towards wl"ach his belief applies is represented to him and this

representation is intr insic to the belief i tself. On the other hand, if

55

one takes the word 'sand' as a non-obliquely occurring expression, then

the notion of sand serves only to pick out uniquely, in one of several

equally effective ways, the stuff or object towards which he is related

in virtue of his belief(41).

With these taxonomical basics, we can start reviewing the various

accounts of mind. Since we are only interested in considering how each

of the various accounts of mind satisfies the constraint of

rnethodological solipsism, we shall attempt ta provide only a rough

characterization of each and shall avoid giving much attention to subtle

details, including the respectIve shortcomings. Afterwards, we will

comment on how they all do in fact realize the methodological solipsism

constraint and then suggest why they do.

(a) Logical Behaviorisrn

This century's first serious effort ta supplant the traditional

cartesian account was logical behaviorism. The central claim of thlS

rnovement is that ascriptions of mental states may be defined away in

terms of purely non-mental behavioral vocabulary. In this sense,

logical behaviorism is not 50 much an account of what mental states are

as it is an account of how to understand the vocabulary used withln

ascriptions of these states. According to logical behaviorism,

ascriptions of emotlons, sensations, beliefs, and desires are not

41. Intentional mental states whose content-clauses contain only non-oblique expressions have sometimes been termed de re (concerning the object); likewise, intentional mental states whose content-clauses contain oblique expressions have sometimes been termed de dicto (concerning the saying). The distinction between the two, however, is quite complicated and will not be made use of here.

56

ascriptions of 'inner' mental states per se, but are an abbreviative way

of ascribing behaviaral dispositions. In its rnost unqualified form,

logical behaviorism asserts that any sentence about a mental state i5

wholely translatable into a grammatically complicated sentence about a

particular behavioral disposition.

What is meant by 'behavioral disposition' here may be gathered from

the following. Someone has a particular behavioral disposition just in

case if s/he were stimulated in a particular way (specified in terms of

surface pressures and irritations), s/he would tend to dlsplaya

partieular behaviour (speeified in ter ms of body movements). Th us , to

say of someone that s/he wants to spend a week in Cannes is just to say,

an a first approximation, something like that if s/he were given the

( opportunity to go ta Cannes, s/he would do so. This way of analysing

mental a~cr l pli ons i5 analogous to the way aser iptlons of physical

dispositlonal propertles, like being ductile, are analysed by many

philosophers of sc ience . According to these philosophers, to ascribe

the property of ductility to an aluminum wire is not to say that it

enjoys sorne structural property; it is just ta say that if a tensile

force were longltudinally applied to the wlre, it would stretch.

So according ta logical behaviorism, a similar analysis applies to

ascriptions of mental states like 'wanting to spend a week in Cannes'.

The analysis, however, is usually mucn richer in the sense that whereas

in the ductllity case just one If-then clause is employed to express the

dispositIon, a mental state usually requires several, perhaps an open-,. 1 ended set of, if-then clauses to express fully the corresponding

behavioral disposition. Thus to say Martine wants to spend a week in

aL •

57

cannes 1s reaIIy more than just to say that if she vere given the

opportunity, she vou là go there -- ve oversimplifieè the translat10n

above. It is aiso to say that if she vere asked vhere she vanted to go,

she vould say 'Cannes', that if she vere offered plane fares to either

cannes or Edinburgh, she vould choose the fare to Cannes, etc. The

propûnents of logical behaviorism usually do not claim that aIl of the

relevant if-then clauses expressing a behavioral disposition

correspondlng ta an ascription of a given mental state can be fully

listed. But they aIl ma1ntain that the meaning of such an ascript10n 1S

to be specified in terms of such a list of if-then clauses.

(b) Functionalism

Logical behaviorism ]ost its appeal in the early 1960'5 because of

its several shortcomlngs(42). Saon after, a nev account of mlnd dubbed

'funct1onalism' emerged(43). This account lS very much an intellectual

descendant of logical behavior1sm. Its central claim is that mental

states are ta be defined in terms of their causal or 'functional' raIes

vithin the mental life of the person enjoying such states. More

precisely, a given mental state is specified in terms of the set of

causal r~lations it bears to the environrnental effects on the body

42. These may be summatized as follows: (1) The programme failed to prov1de the meaning equivalences for

mental ascriptions in purely behavioral terms. (2) It never found a sati~;factory vay ta deal vith pretense, acting,

lying, etc. (3) It never found a vay of providing a rich enough notion of

causation that seemed to be required for psychological explanation.

43. Putnam, H. "Minds and Machines" in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, CUP.

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(input), bodily behaviour (output), and other mental states similarly

characterized(44). These causal relations are expected to be worded

ultirnately in terrns of surface pressures, body movemer.ts, and machine

states (behaviorism-curn-computer science), with no reference made to

mental notions.

The similarity between functionalism and behaviorism lies in their

aim of providing a 'relational' characterizati'jn of mental states. That

ls, they each attempt to define mental states in terrns of the relations

they bear to other things (e.g. environmental input, behavioral output),

No appeal is made to the specifie composition of the subjects that bear

these states. One important difference between the two accounts is

the explanatory superiority that functionalism exhibits over

behavlorism. It has at its disposaI a network of causally interrelated

functional states to which it may appeal in order to explain the

presence of a given mental state. In particular, this feature allows

the history of the mental life of an individual to be taken into account

in such an explanation since it may make reference to previous mental

states entertained by the individual as well as to the current

environrnental stimulus.

(c) Materialist Identity Theory

The materialist identity theory arose in the late 1950's during the

decline of 10gical behaviorism. Indeed, its appearance was large1y

responsible for the quickness of the decline. The theory's central

44. With this form of specification, mental states are assimilated ta the states referred to in finite-state machine descriptions of digital computers.

59

cl,aim is that each fact about the mental is numerically identical vi th

some fact, specified in physical terms, about the brain and/or the

central nervous system. The identi ty theory acknovledges that ve cannat

yet. specify the supposed identi ties but this inabil i ty is only a matter

of our present ignorance. It expects that eventually neurophysiology

will vork them out in a satisfactory vay.

The materialist identity theory cornes in tvo varieties differing

bath in strength and plausibility: the type identity theory and the

token identity theory. The type identity theory is the stronger and, as

a .cesult, less plausible of the tv/o. It claims that mental properties

or types, such as being angry or belleving that the beach at Cannes has

plenty of sand, can be identified with physical properties or types,

such as being in a certain neurophysiological configuration. This

variety has difficulty with the possibility that creatures vith widely

differing physical constitutions may be ascribed the same mental states.

Clearly, if a human, a dog, a fish, or even a silicon-based martian can

be in pain, it is not in virtue of sharing a conunon state described in

the physical and biolagical sciences. The alternativ<:! of Identifying

such mental states vith an open ended d1sjunct1ve description of the

var10us physical states of the different creatures does not seem to

provjde a satisfactory solution. For this reason and others, the type

identity the ory has lost much of its appeal.

The token 1dentity variety, hovever, 15 still attractive and, in

fact, has become more popular vith thE emergence of functionalism. The

pair are often considered to be complementary and thought to provide a

complete account of the mental -- functionalism is taken as providing

i il "

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\

...

the required type-type identities. This variety of materialist identity

the ory makes the claim that mental particulars, such as specifie

instances of being angry, are numerically identical wi th

physical/biological particulars, such as a particular instance of a

neurophysiological arrangement. Since no type-type identities are

involved, mental types and physical types may cross-classify without

impugnlng the credibility of the account.

It easy to see how each of these three accounts satisfies the

methodological solipsism constraint. Remember the constraint asserts

that the facts about the mental are to be conceived as composing an

autonomous realm arranged as i t is independently of external

clrcumstances. In the first place, each account respectively delineates

a clean boundary around the possible facts about the mental which

supposedly compose the autonomous real~ by respectively identifying such

facts with various types of states of affairs each of which is contained

within the physical space of the body. Specifically, the logical

behaviorlst identifies the facts about the mental with dispositional

states of affairs specified in terms of surface pressures and bodily

movements. The functlonalist does much the sarne, save that his

dispositional states of affairs are more significantly causally

interrelated. The materiallst identity theorist identifies facts about

the mental \Vith neurophysiological states of affairs. Th us , all of

these accounts construe the facts about the mental as states of affairs

that are arranged as they are independently of how things might be

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61

outside the bounds of one's bodily surfaces(45)(46). The external

circumstances referred to above rnay there fore be taken to be, as a first

approximation, those states of affairs that lie outsidp. such surfaces.

We should ask ~hy the methodological solipsisrn constraint ls so

satisfied by aIl of these accounts of mind. In other words, ~hy do aIl

of these accounts construe mental states 50 narro~ly as to be completely

constituted by states of af(airs that reside on and beneath our bodily

surfaces with no part played by our surrounding environment? One reason

suggested by sevp.ral phllosophers including Putnam, McDo~ell, and

Woodfield is that by construing mental states in this narro~ ~ay, we

can hope to articulate psychological la~s that link such states ta

behaviour. In McDowell' s words,

It seems scarcely more than common sense that a science of the way organisrns relate to their environment should look for states of the organisms ~hose intr insic nature can be described independently of the environment: this woul~ allo~ explanations of the presence of such states in terms of the environment's impact, and explanations of interventions in the envlronment in terms or the causal Influence of such states, ta flt into the kind of explanation whose enormous power [has made) the ~orld intelligible ... "(47).

So, it is hard to see ho~ states of an organism whose individuation

depends on ho.., things are beyond its/hls/her bodily surfaces cou Id

"facilitate the statement of psychological laws" that connect behaviour

45. More precisely, we rnean beyonà a smaU distance from our bodily surface,,> in arder to speak of surface pressures in a valld way.

46. This of course does not deny that external c j rcumstances causally interact wIth and, as a result, affect states or affairs that are confined wi thin our bodIes.

47. McDowell, John. "Singular Thought dnd the Extent of Inner Space" in SUbject, Thought, and Context. ed. M::Dowell and Pettit. OUP. 1986. pp. 152-3.

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with the environrnent(48). In this respect, insofar as philosophy has

assumed that our ordinary mental states -- like belief, desire, and fear

-- are the explanatorily relevant internal states that will figure in

the statement of these laws, it has always had to construe them in a way

that satisfies the methodological solipsism constraint, or to put it in

another way, it has always taken the methodological solipsism constralnt

to articulate a correct conception of mental states.

We rnay now finish what we had to say about the argument from

rnethodological solipsism that we speke of above. There, we claimed that

the cartesian account of mind represented facts about the mental as

composing an autonomous realm which was completely transparent to

introspection and that, as a result, this account of mind implied that

an appearance provides the same epistemic warrant for a perceptual

judgernent made on its basis irrespect ive of whether it forros part of a

veridlcal or a deceptive experience -- in other words, the received view

of appearance. Now, since the three modern accounts of mind reptesent

facts about the mental in a similar way -- that is, as also compesing an

autonomous realm as according to the rnethodologlcal solipsism constraint

-- they similarly imply the received view. Moreover, insofar as the

received Vlew is crucially appealed ta by the Argument from Illusion,

these accounts of mind support the conclusion of that argument, narnely,

the empiricist doctrine t 1t we cannat corne ta know facts about the

world by simply looking.

48. Putnarn, H. "The Meaning of Meaning" in Philosophical Papers, vol. 2, p.221.

------------~----~-

... 63

Now, to the extent that the empiricist doctrine plays an important

role in leading to the paradoxical conclusions arrived at by the

skeptic, we might question the validity of the methodological solipsism

eonstraint. We may think prima facie, however, that in so doing we are

aiso calling into question McDowell's reasoning given above for

speeifieally employing only those internaI states that can be described

independently of the environment to faeilitate the statement of

psyehological laws that Iink behaviour to the environment. This wculd

be wrong. Insofar as the aim is to articulate just sueh psychologicai

Iaws, we should probably aim to employ such internaI states. What we

can calI into question, on the other hand, is the philosophical

a~sL~ption that our ordinary mental states, like beliefs and desires,

are proper items ta fulfill the role of these internaI states. If they

are not proper items, beeause they cannot be de3crir~d independently of

the enVirOnI.1ent, then it would follo'W that the methodological sollpsism

eonstraint provides an incorrect conception of mental states.

In the n~xt section, we will argue, using results of Putnam and

Burge, that our ordinary mental states are not to he employed ta

facilitate the statement of psychological Iaws that explain behaviour

because, as these results indicate, they cannot be described

independently of the environment. As sueh, the methodological solipslsm

eonstraint yields an incorrect conception of these mental states and

from this we may conclude that it cannot he used to support the received

view of appearance in the way the argument from rnethodolGyical solipsisrn

suggested.

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64

VII The External Constitution of Intentional Mental states

Putnam' s "The

"Individualism and

Meaning of

the Mental" (1979)

'Meaning 1" (1975) and Burge' s

both address the issue of whether

or not our ordinary mental states can be legitimately seen as

constituted by states of affairs that are confined wlthin our bodily

surfaces. From its discussion of meanjng, Putnam's paper allows us to

conclude that our ordinary intentional mental states, insofar as they

involve obliquely occurring natural kind terms, depend

states of affairs that reslde beyond our bodily surfaces.

this result, Burge in his paper arrives at a similar

on physical

Motivated by

result that

intentlonal m~ntal states, insofar as they involve obllquely occurrlng

expressions whose meaning we may only understand incompletely, depend on

social-linguistlc states of affairs outslde our bodily surfaces. In

what follows, thelr arguments for these conclUSlons wlll be explained in

a sûmewhat surnr'drized form. Putnam's considerations will be given

first.

Putnam's discussion centers upon a science-fictiû~ thought­

experiment. He invites us to conceive that somewhere in our galaxy

there 1s a planet which he calls 'Twin-Earth'. Twin-Earth is very

simllar ta our Earth. Indeed, except for

Twin-Earth is identical in detail to Earth.

two principle differences,

This similarity carries aIl

the way through to the social-linguistic communlties of the planet.

Sorne of us on Earth even have dopplegangers on Twin-Earth who speak a

language very slmilar to English, Twin-&lglish. By 'doppleganger', we

mean here 50meone whose states of affairs residing beneath his/her

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65

bodily surfaces are identical, as descrioed in phenornenological,

behavioral, neurophysiological, or functional terms, '':'0 those of the

Earthian counterpart.

One of the principle dHferences between Earth anj '!\Iin-Earth is

that, whereas on I~rth there i5 a species of marsupial called 'koala',

on '!\Iin-Earth there is a spec1es of animal which is also called 'koala'

by those who speak '!\Iln-English and which from our vantage pOInt looks,

sounds, and behaves llke our species of koala(49). The '!\vin-Earth

koala, however, 15 actually a completely different type of mamrnal and

this is determined by the usual criteria b10log1cal taxonomists employ:

anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, genetics, etc. So what '!\vw-

Earthians calI 'koala' is not koala. Koalas are what taxonom1sts

identIfyas such according ta their criteria(50). The fact that '!\vin'·

Earthian koalas (we WIll refer to them as 'twoalas') bear superficial

similarity to our koalas and are called 'koalas' is irrelevant.

A second difference between the two planets lS that their

respective biologists have more or less correctly classified, bu~ in

different ways, the animaIs the y each calI 'koala'. They have

determined each species's evolutionary pedIgree, which are distinct.

Now, although such identifIcations are known by sorne of the populations

on Earth and '!\vin-Earth, most are not famillar with them. Sorne of those

on Earth who are not 50 familiar are the individuals who have

49. Putnam's discussion actually makes reference to water, not KOdla. Because water by now has lost its appeal, we make reference ta the koala. Such reference will not affect the validi ty of our presentatIon of Putnam's ~rgument.

50. Putnam spends a lot of time arguing thlS point. of the argument, we will just accept it.

For the sake

66

doppelgangers.

We are to suppose that there is a person, Eve, who is an Earthian

and speaks English. She has a TVin-Earthian doppelganger -- we shall

calI her Teve -- who speaks Twin-English. Neither knows how the animal

they each calI 'koala' has been blologlcally classified. Because they

are doppelganger pairs, when one utters a sentence, the other utters the

sallie (same form). Suppose now that each utt~rs in a sincere way the

sentence "koalas are beautiful pets". According to the normal criter ia

for belief ascriptlon, we may take it that each has expressed something

that they actually believe. But from what has been said, in uttering

the same sentence they have expressed different things. 'Koala' on

Eve's lips refers to koalas and rneans koala, wherees 'koala' on Teve's

lips refers to twoalas and means twoala. The two ter~; are not even co-

exlenSlve. Llkewise, we may take them to be expressing different

beliefs. Eve belleves that koalas are beautiful petE whereas Teve

believes that twoalas are beautiful pets. This same conclusion holds

for any other beliefs or, even more generally, any other intentional

mental states, that they may entertain whose content-cla <....J involve the

term 1 koala' .

hl this point in the thought-experiment, we are su~~osed to realize

that we have arrlved at a coherent description of two people who may be

identically described in phenomenological, behavioral,

neurophysiological, and functional terms (more speclficall/, whose

states of affairs residing beneath the bodily surfaces have such

identical descrlptions) and yet who enjoy different ordil~ry mental

states. The differences, moreover, are a rcsult of differences in

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67

each's respective physical environment.

Because of the brevity of our presentation, the argument underlying

the thought-experiment might strike one as sophistical. In an effort to

strengthen it, let us examine one of its key features. The conclusion

of the argument, that the intentional mental states we rnay entertain

depend on the constitution of our physical environment, relies crucially

upon the claim that the inhabitants of the two planets express dlfferent

notions and, as a result, refer to different extensions ~hen uttering

sincerely the term 'koala'.(5l) We ~ill attempt to support thlS claim

in a roundabout way by looking at sorne of the consequences of its

denial.

I~t us suppose, then, that Eve and Teve express the same notion

~hen uttering 'koala'. Since Eve is an inhabitant of our planet and is

a generally competent speaker of English, we may suppose that 'koala' as

sincerely uttered by her must apply to koala and refer to koalas.

Likewise, we may suppose that she has many intentlonal mental states

whose contents involve this notion. For instance, she believes that

koalas are wonderful pets; she has one herself. Now because of our

supposition, Teve who is Ev2'S Twin-Earth doppelganger, will also refer

to koalas when uttering the term 'koala'. She will also share the same

intentional mental states whose contents involve thlS notlon.

As Burge notes, t~o difficulties follow from the situation as we

51. This claim i5 one of the principal inslghts Putnam offers in his 1975 paper. He takes it as revealing what Wiggins calls the extension-involving nature of natural kind terms.

68

have described it(52). First, we are hard pressed ta explain how Teve

cou Id have beliefs and intentional mental states in general that involve

the notion of koala. Teve has never had any contact vith koalas or vith

any one else who has. There are no koalas on Twin-Earth. Sa, unlike

Eve, Teve does not have any of the normal means of acquiring the notion.

MOreover, when uttering 'koala', Teve obviously intends ta refer to the

natural kind of animal under wh;\ch her pet falls, and not to some

simllar-Iooking, but structurally different, animal inhabiting a planet

vhich lies beyond her ken. The supposition implies, therefore, that

Teve has a notion that she has mysteriously acquired vhich serves none

of her ordinary purposes of communication.

Second, a peculiar asymmetry is entailed by the situation as ve

have descrlbed it. Insofar as Teve enjoys beliefs involving the notion

of koala, many of these viII he false. Beliefs vith contents like 'this

1s a koala', 'koalas lnhabit this planet' l'koalas can be observed in

the nearby zoo', and 'biologists on this planet knowall ,about koalas'

vill all be false. If this is the case, ve must ask what is distinct

about Eve's circumstances vhich accounts for the resulting disparity

vith respect ta truth value: why are many more of her beliefs whose

contents involve the notion of kO'ila true? Aside from the vay we

described the situation, there seems to be no reason to count more of

ENe's than Teve'~ beliefs as having one truth value over another.

80th of these inexplicable difficulties disappear if we accept the

{ crucial claim upon vhich Putnam's argument relies: the Inhabitants of

52. See Burge, Tyler. "other Bodies" in Thought and Object. ed. Woodfield. DUP. 1982. pp. 109-110.

69

the two planets express different notions and refer to different

extensions when uttering 'koala'. This claim in retrospect would seem

to be the correct view. Teve has just acquired a notion by normal means

that is superficially like Eve's but which upon closer inspection is

quite different. Com~ring what the biologists on the t'dO planets have

to say about kCBlas confirms this difference. Sa does the fact that

both Eve and Teve point to different animaIs as paradigm examples of the

term 'koala'.

In "Individualismand the Mental", Burge arrives at a similar

result about the external constitution of our mental states. His

result, however, differs from Putnam's in an essential way. Whereas

Putnam's result asserts that our intentional mental states depend on our

physical environment, Burge's asserts that they depend on our social-

linguistic environment.

Like Putnam, Burge arrives at his result via consideration of a

thought-experiment. In his presentation of the thought-experiment, he

articulates three distinct steps. First, we are to suppose that:

A gi ven person has a large nurnber of attltudes commonly attributed with content clauses containing 'arthritis' in oblique occurrence. For example, he thinks (correctly) that he has had arthritis for years, that his arthritis in his wrists and fingers 1S more painful than his arthritis in his ankles, that it is better ta have arthritis than cancer of the li ver , that stiffening joints 15 a symptom of arthritis, that certain sorts of aches are characteristic of arthritis, that there are various kinds of arthritis, and 50 forth. In short, he has a wide range of SUCh attitudes. In addition to these unsuTprising aU! bxles, he thinks falsely that he has developed arthriti5 in the thjgh.

Generally competent in E'ngl1sh" rallOnal and intelligent, the patient reports to his doctor his fear that hls arthr i t i5 has no", lodgec1 in lus thlgh. The doctor replies by telling him that this cannot be 50, since arthrltis 15 speclflcally an inflammation of joints. Any dictlonary could have told him the same. The patient ls surprised, but

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relinquishes his view and goes on to ask what rnight be wrong vith his thigh.(53)

Second, we are to entertain a particular counterfactual supposition

involving the patient. We are to imagine the patient as running through

very much the sarne history as he does in the actual case up to the

moment that he tells his doctor about his fear that arthritis has lodged

ln his thlgh. Specifically, he runs through exactly the sarne history as

specified in phenornenological, behavioral, neurophysiological, and

functional terms. He enjoys the same non-intentional phenomenal

experience. He has the same 'ra ... feels' such as pains, visual percepts,

auditory experiences, and so forth. He i5 given the same environrnental

input and he displays the same bodily output, behaviour istically

described in terms of surface pressures and stimulations and b0dy

movements. He in turn acquires the same behavioral dispositions. This

sameneS5 in acquisition extends to his behaviaral interaction with

lingulstic expressions. In particular, he acquires the behavioral

disposition ta assent ta the statement that 'arthritis can occur in the

thigh' as he does in the actual case. His body moves thraugh the same

physiological states. He enjays the same sequences of internaI

functianai states that may rnediate his sensory input and behavioral

output.

The difference between the counterfactual and the actuai situations

lies in the respective social-linguistic environments. In the

counterfactual situation, the terrn 'arthritis' as used by the rnedicai

profession and lay community does not mean arthritis. Its application

53. Burge, "Individualism and the Mental", p.77.

71

does cover instances of arthritts, but it also covers aU other

instances of rheumatoid ailments. As a result, when the patient

explains to his doctor his fear that arthritis has lodged in his thigh,

he makes correct ~~e of the term. This difference, along with anything

that follows from it, are the only differences betveen the acttJal and

counterfact~BI situations.

Third, and finally, we are to acknowledge one of the necessary

consequences of this supposed difference. In Burge's vords,

In the counterfactual sitlEtion, the patient lacks some-­probatlyall -- of the attltudes commonly attributed with conter,t-clauses containinq 'arthr i tis' in oblique occurrence. He lacks the occurrent thoughts or beliefs that he has arthritis in the thigh, that he has had arthritis for years, that stlffening joints and various sorts of aches are symptoms of arthritis, t];.~t his father had arthritls, and so on.(54)

In other words, the patient in the counterfactual situation does

not enjoy any intentional mental states whose content involves an

oblique occurrence of the notion arthritis. He does not have this

notion wit.h which to frame such content. For 'arthritis' as expressed

on his lips does not apply to arthritis. It is not even co-extensive

vi th arthr i tis. Although its extemsion contains aU of the instances

that the extension of arthrltis contains, it contains others as weIl.

The patlent's current rheumatold alIment in his thigh 15 a case in

point. And as ve have descrlbed the counterfactual situatl no other

term as used by the patient applies to arthritis. Therefore, insofar as

intentional mental states are indlviàuated by their respective contents,

and Insofar as these content5 are indiv1duated by their respective

54. Burge, "Individual1sm èlnd the Mental", p.78.

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notions, sorne of the intentional mental states that the patient enjoys

in the counterfactual situation are different from their counterparts

which he enjoys in the actual situation.

At this point, we have arrived at the desired result. Since the

mental states which the patient may enjoy may vary while maintaining the

same 5tates of affairs that reside on and beneath his bodily surfaces,

where these are described in phenomenological, behavioral,

neurophysiological, and functional terms, such mental states must depend

on matters lying outside his bodily surfaces. Moreover, these matters

are constituted by his social-linguistic context.

It should be noted here that Burge's argument is supposed to be

completely general in its application. It does not hinge on any special

features of the expression 'arthritis'. The sarne argument cou Id be used

for artifact ter ms , natural kind words, colour adjectives, social role

terms, or action verbs. For instance, if we employed any of the terms

'sofa', 'brisket', 'clavichord' , 'contract', or 'red' in a pair of

suitably described actual and counterfactual situations, we would come

to the sarne conclusion about the external constitution of our mental

states. In this sense, the conclusion of Burge's arguwent ls more

comprehensive than Putnam's similar sounding one. Whereas Putnam's

conclusion applies only to mental states whose content-clauses involve

natural kind terrns, Burge's conclusion applies ta these as weIl as ta

others, since his thought-experiment does not exploit any naturalness of

the kind 'arthritis'.

In fact the classification particularly natural: the disorders, and drawinq the a matter of cutting nature

effected hy 'arthritis' ls not term ls used for a farnily of boundaries as we do seerns no more at its oyo articulations than

including other rheumatoid complaints (including sorne outside the joints) would be.(55)

73

Besides, as Burge himself claims, the thought-experiment can be run

through by uslng words like 'sofa', 'brisket', etc. which "lack even the

low-grade natural-kind status of 'arthritis'."(56) In this respect,

what make5 Putnam'5 conclU5ion le55 comprehensive i5 its reliance upon

the claim argued above concerning the extension-involving nature of

natura l k lnd terms: when expressed by an earthian, the term 'koala'

applies to whatever is structurally similar to the first instances which

the linguistic community dubbed 'koala'.

In any case, both Putnam's and Burge's conclusions assert that we

cannot say in general that our ordinary intentional mental states are

solely constituted by states of affairs that reside on or beneath our

bodlly surfaces. Wi th regard to the discnssion at the end of the last

section, it follows that our ordinary intentional mental states could

not be the proper items for fulfllllng the role of the explanatorily

relevant internal states which will supposedly he employed to facilitate

the staternent of psychological laws that relate one's behaviour to the

environment. It also follows that the methodological solipslsm

constraint provides an incorrect conception of our ordinary mental

states. This last result has two significant consequences. First,

insofar as the traditional accounts of mind -- ~= we have explicated

them -- are committed to this constraint, their treatments are severely

inadequate. They are all structured in such a vay that systematically

55. Pettit, P. and McDowell, J. Subject, Thought, and contexte OUP. p.e.

56. Pettit and MCDowell, p.S.

74

precludes them from successfully characterizing intentional mental

phenornena . Second, and more relevant, one of the above mentioned

arguments for the received view of appearance, the argument from

rnethodological solipsism, may be safely rejected as a result of its

specifie appeal ta the methodological solipism constraint.

In the next section, we will discuss the infallibilist and

fallibilist conceptions of knowledge. Before we do, however, let us

summarize what has been said sa far. To begin with, there exists a

genre of skeptical arguments that move from the premise that we cannot

come to know facts about the world specifically, material abject

facts -- by simply looking to the conclusion that we cannot come ta know

such facts about the world at aIl. Wright's argument was presented as

an instance of this genre. This premise, the empiricist doctrine, i5

Itself the conclusion of another argument the Argument from

Illusion. But this argument must make appeal ta a certain view of

appearance - what we have referred ta as the received view. And without

this view, we can interpret the data upon which the Argument from

Illusion relies in a way that denies the empiricist doctrine. In an

effort ta do sa, we have examined sorne of the considered reasons for

accepting the received view: t~le argument from phenomenology, the

argument from evidence, and the argument from methodological solipsism.

We take these ta be defU!'sed by this point.

75

VIII Fallibilist versus Infallibilist Conceptions of Knowledge

Without the received view of appearance, the Argument from Illusion

which makes appeal to it is inconclusive. This inconclusiveness allows

us to construe the data upon which the argument relies in a way that

denies the empiricist doctrine; that is, it allows us to construe the

data in terms of our preferred view of appearance. To repeat, this view

asserts that the epistemic warrant that an appearance provides for a

perceptual judgement that P made on its basis deyends on whether we are

in a veridical or a deceptive perceptual situation. That is, if we are

in a veridical situation (certain conditions are satisfied), then we see

that P and, as a result, come to know that P. If, on the other hand, we

are in a deceptive situation (sorne of those conditions are not

satisfied), then we do not see that P and, unless we have some other

rneans by which to do so (e.g. we may read about it), we do not corne to

know that P. As vas mentioned in section IV, the conception of

knowledge referred to in this formulation must be understood in

fallibilist terms. It was further suggested there that, by contrast,

the conception of knowledge which the Argument from IIIU5ion makes use

of and, more generally, the conception of knowledge that the skeptic

makes use of in his attempts ~o demonstrate that we cannot have

knowledge of certain sorts of facts, is to be understood infallibly.

In an effort to explicate these claims, we will discuss these two

conceptions of knowledge, the fallibilist and the Infailibillst, in this

section. First, we will try to get clear about what tnese two

conceptions are. Then, we will examine sorr~ arguments for which of the

1 .. 76

two conceptions provides a more accurate description of the nature of

knowledge.

Before doing any of this, however, sorne prel1minary remarks will be

made about sorne of the assumptions we are making in the discussion.

F1rst, we will often not be talking directly about knowledge per se, but

about knowledge ascriptions, or the application of the concept of

knowledge, etc. One reason for this 'semantic ascent' -- to use Quine's

term -- is that it permits stating generalizations which could not be

stated otherwise(57). A stronger reason is that much of the discussion

about knowledge will make reference to linguistic considerations.

Second, it may be apparent that in using the terms 'concept' and

'conception' as we have been, a certain distinction has been presumed to

exist between the two. We take this distinction to be explained,

roughly, as follows. The 'conception' of a term may be taken, as a

first approximation, to be the set of Statements that an individual

speaker (or group of speakers) holds, at any given time, to be true of

the term. A conception 15 thus indexed to a speaker and a time, or

period of time. This explanation is only a first approximation because

obviously not aU of the statements that a speaker holds to be true of a

term are equally relevant to his or her conception of the term. A more

refined explanation, therefore, would say that a 'conception' of a term

-- indexed to a speaker/time -- is the set of statements that a speaker

holds at a given time to be 'analytically' true of the term. Another

way to put this is to say that it is the (fuzzy) set of statements that

are closely connected to the term in the speakcr's 'field of force' (to

51. Quine, W.V.O. Philosophy of Logic. Harvard. 1986. p. 10.

.' 77

use Quine's suggestive phrase) at that time(58). By contrast, the

'concept' of a term is a public item to be identified with the 'meaning'

or the 'intension' of the terme It is not indexed to speakers or tirnes.

Altho~gh there are many theories which attempt to explicate what

concepts actually are, our discussion will rernain neutral with respect

to what they have to say and will appeal only to the their uncontentious

features.

We may illustrate the concept/conception distinction by two

examples. First:, consider putnam's Twin-Earth thought-experiment. As

it was described above, both Eve and Teve have the same conception of

'koala'. Being doppelgangers, each holds the S,ïme statements ta be true

of the terme Each uses the same criteria to identify instances of the

term (e.g. small, fury, bear-like, tree-dwe3ling mammal). Yet, as we

argued, the respective concepts involved are distinct. 'Koala' as

uttered by Eve applies to koalas, vhereas the same term uttered by Teve

app1ies to a different kind of animal, i.e. twoalas. In this respect,

we implicitly made use of the concept/conception distinction in

discussion of the thought-experiment.

Similarly, we made use of the distinction in the Burgean thought-

experiment. We described the pat:ient in both actual and counterfactual

situations as holding the same statements true of 'arthritis' and,

therefore, as having the same conception. For instance, he ho Ids that

he has had arthritis for years, that his arthritis in hls wrists and

fingers is more painful than his arthritis in his ankles, that it is

58. Quine, W.V.O. '''l'wo Dogmas of ~piricismn in From a Logical Point of View. Harvard. 1953.

78

better to t~ve arthritis than cancer of the liver, etc. We argued,

however, that the patient entertains different counterpart intentional

mental states in the t~o situations and this is in virtue of his

entertaining different counterpart concepts.

Third, since ~e are concer~ed with the concept of knowledge, we

should rnake explicit sorne of our asst~tions about it. To begin, we are

assuminq that OUl usage on most occasior~ of the term 'know' in

expressions having the form '~knows that P', for sorne given A and P,

expreS5"~S the s~nse of the term vi th vhich 'fie are concerned and that

this sense involves a single concept which is to be understood in terms

of a tva-place relat.ion that applies ta ordered pairs whose first

members are normal cognitIve subjects and whose second members are

actual states of affairs. ~JO things should be said about this

assumption. First, it is meant to express a means of picking ou~ the

sens~ of know about which we have been speaking the sense upon which

discussions of skepticism and epistemology in general centre. Upon

looking up a dictionary, one will see that the verb 'to know' is used in

multifarious ways. To quote Ayer,

We can speak of knowing, in the sense of l~ing familiar vith, a person or place, of Knowing something in the sense of having t~d experience of it, as when sorne on~ says that he has known hunger or fear, of knowl ng in the sense of being able to recognize or distinguish, as vhen \;le claim to know an honest man when we see one or to knO\v butter from margarine. l maY be saio to know my Dirkens, If l have read, rernember, and can perhaps also quote il 1 :; writings, to knowa subject such as trigonometry, If l ~lve mastered it, to kno'W how to s'Wim or dr ive a car, to knO\ll ho'W to behave myself. (59)

59. Ayer, A.J. The Problem of Knovledge. Penguin Books, 1956, p.8.

79

In our context, none of these senses of knov have any particular

philosophical interest. The sense of know vhich does have such interest

for us is the one articulated by the dictionary as "'to be avan: or

apprized of', 'to apprehend or comprehend as fact or cruth', [i.e.] the

sense ... in which to have knovledge is to knov that s~mething or other

is the case. "( 60) Tt is this sense that we aim to isolate by our above

vords 'A knows that Pl. Second, the claim that a single concept i5

involved is not a trivial one. Sorne epistemologists, for instance

Norman Malcolm, maintain that the term 'knov' even vhen used in

expressions like 'A knows that P' is systematically ambiguous. On sorne

occasions of utterance, specifically the ones in vhich ve are seriously

concerned with what we really knov, the term expresses a strict or

philosophical sense. On other occasions, that is the every day ordinary

ones, the term expresses a veak or secondary sense. We vill have more

to say about this bifurcated construal latel, but in the meantlme, it

should be clear that we are rejecting it from the outset. Of course,

this is not to deny that on sorre bizarre occasions, ve do express other

senses vhen we say something like 'A knows that Pl; this is the reason

vhy we said "on m0st occasions" above and not "on aH occasions".

We are also assuming that the two-place relation is a vorld­

involving one, viz., that if A knows that P, then P. This second

assumption may be seen to be implicit in the fjrst one in that there we

said that the second member of any ordered pair to VhlCh the tvo-place

relation may apply must be an actual state of affalrs. No one

discussing knovledge vou Id deny that there is uni versaI consensus on

60. Ayer, p.S.

80

this point. Probably, the effort vhich has come the closest to

rejecting it 1s the one rnanifested by those epistemologists advancing

the "cr i ter ia 1 the ory of knowledge". These 'criterialists' claim that

it is part of the granunar of our language that, under certain

condi tions, one m3y he enti tled to say that A knmrs that P, even if in

fact P does not obtain. None of these epistemologists vould admit,

hovever, that we can have A knovs that P while not-P. Although this

assumption is not controversial in the sense of there being a question

about vhether or not it i5 true, the assumption has often been

rnisunderstood and this has lead to mlsconceptions about the nature of

knowledge. We vill come to this belov.

Lastly, we are assuming that the concept of knovledge vith which we

are concerned has a coherent set of rules application and that these are

deterrnined by just the standards of corr~ct usage that are manifested by

the linguistic communlty. The natural reaction to this last assumption

15 to exclairn "well, of course". We respond by saying that although i t

may appear to be tr i vial, in discussions about knovledge, it seerns to be

often forgotten or even denied. OUr mention of it, therefore, is meant

to serve as a useful reminder.

With these preliminary remarks having been rrade, we vill examine

the fallibilist and infallibilist conceptions of knovledge. Let us

first look at the infallibilist one. To get clear about this item, we

consider sorne of the conditions it maintains must be satisfied to have

knovledge. In particular, ve consider the folloving three conditions

vhose satisfaction is required for the truth of the ascription 'A knows

that P':

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81

(1) A has arrived at the judgement that P by infallible means.

On sorne accaunts, ta do 50, A must have followed sorne infallible

procedure which leads to the judgement that P, where such a procedure' 5

Infallibility consists in its always leading ta a correct judgernent when

properly executed.

(2) In the process of arriving at a judgernent that P, A has settled aIl

doubts as to P, where a 'doubt as to P' in this sense is ta be

understood as a conceivable way for the vorld to be from A's perspective

such that not-P. This condition has sometimes been expressed as

follows. From ~'s epistemic perspective, for aIl else A knows or c~n

tell, it is not possible that Q, for any Q that implies not-P.

(3) P belongs ta one of two classes of judgements of which we may have

knowledge; that is, either P belongs ta the class of observation

judgements or P belongs to t ~p ~lass of inferred judgements. If P

belongs to the first class, then A, who lS a normal cogmtive subject

with the usual sensory and intellectual capacities, has attentively

confronted sorne stdte of affairs of the kind with which A may l~

directlyacquainted -- to use Russell '5 terminology -- and, as a result,

A has corne to incorr igibly judge that P. The sense in which the

judgement ls incorrigible 1s that in wh1ch whenever A 50 judges that P,

then necessarily P(61). If P belongs to the second class, then A, who

i5 a normal cognitive subject, has vith the appropriate attention and

care corne to infer that P from ather judgements, vhere each of thesE~

61. That is, L(A incorrigibly judges that P -) Pl.

82

either belongs to the first class or 1s sim11arly inferred(62).

Those ~ho have articulated the infallibilist conception -- the

infalilbilists -- have maintained each of these conditions ta be a

requirement for knovledge. The best way ta appreciate this fact is by

simply surveying what infallib11ists have said. The first condition,

for instance, is expressed by Descartes in the beginning of his first

medl taUon: "reason already persuades me that l ought no less carefully

to ~ithhold my assent from matters ~hich are not entirely certain and

indubl table than from those ~hich appear to me mani festly false" (63) •

It is also expressed in this century Ly H.A. Prichard: "no state of

~hich ~e may be mistaken can posslbly he one of Kno~ledge" (64) .

The second of the above conditions 1s described by Barry Strouà as

'a simple and obvious fact about kno~ledge':

As soon as we see that a certain possibility is incompatible vith our knowing such-and-such, ... we irnrnediately recognize that it is a possibility that must be known not to obtain if ~e are to know the such-and-such in question(65).

In this respect, the requirement for empirical knowledge that Descartes

arrives at withln h1s celebrated 'dream argument', the requirement that

we must know that we are not drearning before we can arrive at knowledge

of the external world, can be construed as a special case of this second

62. The conditions on A here specified ~ere motivated by Kripke's considerations about the conditio~~ for belief ascription which he discusses in hts "A Puzzle about Belief".

63. Descartes, Rene. Meditations on the First Philosophy. trans. Haldane and Ross, CUP, p.145.

64. Prlchard, H.A. Knowledge and Perception. OUP, 1950, p.e3.

65. Stroud, Barry. The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism. OUP. 1985. p. 27.

-'

•

83

condition. If we are only dreaming that P, then from our epistemic

perspective, it is surely possible that Q, such that Q implies not-P.

50 to know that P, according to the second condition, we must first

settle that we are not dreaming that P. Likewise, other circumstances

which epistemologists have urged to be requirements for hnowledge-­

e.g. we must know that we are not hallucinating, we must know we are not

brains in vats, etc. -- can be also be construed as special cases of

this condition.

The third condition describes what rnany infallibi~tst5'­

Descartes, the British Empiricists, Russell, the Logical Positivists-­

have thought must be the structure of our knowledge given the first two

conditions. In fact, such a structure provides a recipe for an

infallible procedure of the kind that is required by the first

condition.

The conception of knowledge suggested by these conditions may

strike one as natural and correct. Indeed, most epistemologists since

Descartes have subscribed to it without ever questioning its

credibility. The competing fallibllist conception has been developed

only in this century. Moore, Malcolm, Austin, and others with a common

sense bent have been principally responsible for its development.

This competing conception i5 best understood by contrasting it with

its infallibilist counterpart. According to the conception, the

ascription that 'A know5 that P' may be true even though any or aIl of

the above three infallibilist conditions for knowledge may be

unfulfilled. ln his "Proof of an External World" (1939), G.E. Moore

tries to make this clear by claiming to know that he has two hands while

'.

84

at the same time failing to satisfy aIl three of the infallibilist

condi tions . He certainly has not arrlved at thls knowledge by

infallible me2 s: his eyesight may be faultyat the moment he takes

h1mself to be seeing his hands held up in front of him. He has not

settled aIl conceivable doubts as to his having two hands: whilst he vas

fast asleep the previous night, surgeons may have -- unbekno'WTlSt to him

-- replaced his hands vith sophisticated prosthetic devices. And he

could not have come to know that he has two hands by strictly inferring

this fact from a set of incorrigible judgements about his current

experience.

In his "ether Minds", Austin specifically denies the second

condition by maintalning that A may know that P whilst not having

settled aIl doubts as to P. To argue this point, he exami~2s the

situation of knowing that there 15 a goldflnch ln the garden. Depending

on the clrcumstances, according to Alffitin, aIl that rnay be requlred to

know this fact may be seeing and recogn1zing the bird's red head and

characterlstlc eye-rnarklngs. In hls words,

Enough Is enough: i t doesn' t mean everything. Enough means enough to show that (within reason, and present intents and purposes) It "can't" be anything else.... It does not mean, e.g., enough to show lt isn't a stuffed goldfinch.(66)

So that while in a given case, some doubts must be settled by A for A to

know that P, not aIl conceivable doubts are required to be settled. If

this is 50, then it follovs that A rnay know that P even though, for aIl

else A knovs or can tell, possibly Q, for sorne Q that implies not-P.

This last statement ts especially relevant since it Is specifically

66. AustIn, J .L. "other Minds" in Ar istotelian Society Sup. Vol. XX, p.156.

" . 85

involved in the explanation of our preferred view of appearance.

lmstin's examination raises the crucial question tha.t, given that

only:some of the totality of conceivable doubts must he settled ta have

knowledge in a given case, which of the se doubts are the relevant ones

that must be settled. Austin and others have' urged that this is a

worlcl-involving matter. For instance, if we changed the circwnstances

of i:he goldfinch example above, more doubts other than the ones

suggested may have to be settled. If during the night before seeing the

goldfinch in the garden, someone managec1 ta pl.3ce hundreds of stuffed

galdfinches in trees around our neighbourhood, then seeing and

recc~nizing the red h~ad and characteristic eye-narkings obviausly would

not be enough to knOli that what we would be seeing would he in fact a

genuine goldfmch. We would clearly be l:equired ln this case to settle

more doubts than in the original situation. ~re would have to ver if y

somE~how that the item that we would be see ing would not be stuffed.

Examples like this one are by now well lmown and have been effective in

sholl1ing the importance played by the wodd in deterrnining which doubts

as <~o P must he settled in a gi ven situation for A ta know that P.

Notwithstanding the world's impor~ince, other factors are relevant

to this determiL"ition as weIl. As may be apparent, the notion of

rea:sonableness or rationality plays ci crucial raIe. In fact, we

implicitly appealed to this notion above in our explication of the

change that oc:curs in our epistemological situation if stuffed

goldf Inches are planted in trees about us. That reasonableness plays

SUC:-l a crucial role should not be surpr ising since, after all, the

86

concept of knowledge i5 a normative one(67). Now, the exact way in

whlch rea50nableness is involved in determining the relevant doubts is

not ea5y to specify. In The Uses of Sense, Charles Travis proffers a

plausible account which relates the roles of reasonableness and the

vorld in an elegant manner. It may summarized as follows.

There remains the question what deterrnines which doubts count as real for a given claim that A knows that F. Since, on the account, different ôuch claims are properly understood to say different things .. r, and one such under5tanding i5 to he disting~ished from another by what one vould take to be the real doubts on it, it is a reasonable view that part of the story here is that it is part of what there is to be understood about a knovledge clairn that certain (sorts of) doubts are to he taken as real and certain sorts not. So one thing that may make a doubt real (or not) 15 that it Is to he understood to he 50 •

... [Andl how words are to he understood is fixed by how competent judges of that would react to them. So the beginning of the story here is that, to speak roughly, we, if normally sensitive to the facts of the speaking (of 'A knows that F. ') would react by treating certain doubts as real for it and certain as not.

Such begins the story but is not its end. For we also take it that the world is a further factor which rnay show that a doubt 1s real even where we would not initially react by taking it to he 50. Luc tells Hugo, 'There are stags in these parts. Odile told me, and she knows - she's actually seen them.' We would dismiss the possibility of rnechanical stags as irrelevant to this clairn. But suppose that, unknO\m tu us, Quisneycorp actually has heen sowing the landscape Wl th mechanical stags. Then perhaps that is what OUle saw. So she did not knaw after an. Showr. the facts of quisneycorp endeavors, we have been taught that this posslbllity 15 a real doubt after aIl. What the world shows ln such respects Is shawn, we suppose, by the reactlons of reasonable judges to the facts which show it. So a doubt, D, is not real for a knowledgr ascription, K, only if a) we vould not naturally take it to be and b) there are no facts of the vorld which ve vould react to by altering this initial reaction.(my italics) (68)

67. As we said in section II, we are assurning this from the heginning.

68. Travis, pp. 142-143.

87

In other words, a doubt as to P in a particular situation must be

settled for A to know that P just in case it is reasonable for us to

take it as requiring settlement -- or as Travis puts it, we as

reasonable judges would react 50 as to take it as requiring settlernent­

- provided that we know aIl of the relevant facts of the matter (i.e.

the world-involving component). What has been said of course leaves

open the question of what reasonableness itself consists in, but any

atternpt to consider this question here in an adequat~ way would take us

beyond the scope of the present discussion.

We said above that the fallibilist conception of knowledge may be

best understood by contrasting it vith its infallibilist counterpart.

With the resources developed within the above rnentioned account, Travis

provides a simple formulation of this conception. This formulation may

be construed as a denial of the second of the infallibilistls conditions

for the truth or the ascription lA knows that pl in a given situation.

Travis puts the formulation thw:.: "we thus propose the following

generallzation on the truth conditions for knowledge claims: lA knows

that F. l, where it ascribes knowledg~ of F ta A, is true iff no doubts

which count as real w3th respect to that knowledge ascription are 1ive

doubts for A." (69)

Let us now move on to examine the reasons for taking either the

infallibilist or the fallibilist conception as providing the more

accurate description of the nature of knowledge. Again, we will look at

the infallibilist conception fir~t.

~le reason ta prefer the infallibilist conception i5 that it ea5ily

69. Travis, p. 141.

88

lends itself to the view that knowledge 1s iterable whereas the

fallibilist conception does r~t. In other words, according to the

infallibilist conception, if A knows that P, then A can come to know

that s/he kno\iS that P. There are several ways to see how this can be

done. Consider the first infallibilist condition of knowledge listed

above: <A kno\iS that P> -) <A has arrived al the judgement that P by

means of an infallible procedure). Now, péirt of what i t is to be an

Infallible procedure is that in correctly carrying it out, we are or can

become infallibly aware of doing 50. This feature may be appealed to to

show that if A knows that P, then A can come to know that s/he knows.

For, again, if A knows that P, s/he has arrived at the judgement that P

by rneans of an infallible procedure. And in correctly carrying out such

a procedure, A either was or could become infallibly aware that it w.as

correctly carried out. And in being so avare, A likewise can determine

whether or not s/he knows that P. In short, if A knows that P, A knows

or can come to know that s/he knows that P(70).

By contrast, according to the fallibilist conception, A may know

that P without having arrivecl at the judgement that P by means of an

infallible procedure. If this be the case, then even by carrying out

whatever procedure correctly, A may have come to judge that P although

not-P. This consequence follows from the fact that A is employing a

fallible procedure. Hence, in some ca~I:!S, A may carry out such a

procedure correctly and yet not know that P because not-P. In this

70. Thls inferential move requires that knowledge be transmissible. That i5, [(A knows that I) & (A knows that (I-)P»1 -> [A knows that P1, where I is the following statement: the infallible procedure that leads to t:1e judgement that P has been carr ied out correctly.

"

89

respect, if A has come to know that P by means of a fallible procedure,

s/he cannot appeal to the fact that such a procedure was properly

carried out -- as r)pposed to what s/he can do in the counterpart

infallibilist case -- to determine that s/he knows that P. According to

the fa111bilist conception, therefore, A can know that P without an easy

means to come to know that s/he knows that P. There may of course be

ways to determine this issue. But the point is that, unlike ;n the

infallibilist case, A cannot always examine the execution of a pro~edure

s/he used to arrive at a judgement that P in order to know that s/he

kno'WS thàt P.

Several epistemologists have taken iterativity to be a desideraturn

for the concept of knowledge. Consider Descartes. To begin, insofar as

one of his aims in the Meditations is to investigate how much he

actually does know, Descartes must presume from the outset that he can

corne to know this about his '<nowledge. Nonetheless, he does in fact

provide sorne justification for this presumption and this may be

surnmarized as follo'WS. First., Descartes construes knowledge, l1ke other

propositional attitudes such as belief and desire, to be a particular

state of mind. Now, since aIl states of mind, according to his account

of the mental, are directly surveyable through our infallible faculty of

introspection, someone may e~ine any given particular state of mind

that s/he may entertain by means of this faculty ar~, as a result,

ascertain whether or not it is a state of knowledge -- or mere belief

(or something els~). Thus, knowledge on this construal 1s Iterative.

To quote Travis, "[this] is to say that, if we know something, we do or

can know that we k~ow it, and can do so merely by examining our own

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90

states of rnind."(71) Second, Descartes elaborates upon this first point

by explicating how one can, vith the appropriate use of the faculty of

introspection, pick out states ot knowledge from the other less valuable

cognitive states of mlnd, such as belief, supposition, and expectation.

On his constrl~l, states o[ knowledge bear distinctive and vievable

marks, viz., those of 'clarityand distinctness'. He first ma~es this

claim in the begtnning of medltation III:

Certainly in this first knowledge [of my existence] there 1s nothing that assures me of its truth, expecting the clear and distinct perception of that which l state, ~Jich vould not indeed suffiee to assure me that vhat l say is true, if it could ever happen that a thing vhich l eonceived 50

clearly and distinctly could he false; ànd accordingly it seerns to me that already l c&n establish as a general rule that aIl things which l perceive very clearly and very distinctly are true.(72)

So, by seeing and recognizing these marks of truth, one can infallibly

come to know which states of mind 5/he has a~e states of knowledge.

Third, Descartes argues that our kno.ledge must have a 'fourrlational'

structure whose foundation consists of a basic class of incorrigible

judgements about our current e~rience, apparent ~mories, etc., and

whuse upper tiers consist of classes of judgements ultimately inferred

from the judgements belonginy to this basic class. Such a view vas

mentioned in the third infallibilist condition above. As we said there,

the foundational structure i tself may be construed as providing the

infallible procedure required for arriving at knowledge. One may thus

determine vhether or not s/he knows that P and, hence, corne to know that

s/he knows or does not know that P by simply examining the execution of

71. Travis, p.120.

72. Descartes, p. 158.

,",

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91

the procedure, in the way just àescribed, by which sille came to believe

that P. Sa in virtue of this point, knowledge on Descartes's construal

is again iterative.

S1nce Descartes, several Who have maintained that knowledge 15

Iterative have provided sirnilar justification for this thesis. In this

Gentury" Prichard in his Knotfledge and Perception explicitly states that

knowledge 15 iterative. In his words,

We must recognize that whenever we know something we either do, o~ at least can, by reflecting, directly know that we are knowing it, and that whenever we believe sornething, we sirnilarly either do or can directly know that we are believing it and not knowing it.(73)

In defence of the thesis, he articulates the first and third of the

above cartesian points. Be denies the second one, however, by insisting

that we do not recognize lia state of mind as a state of knowledge by

first recognizing that it has sorne property -- pointedly, that of being

'clear and distinct' -- and then realizing that having that property is

a mark of a state of knowledge."(74) On Prichard '5 acconnt, states of

knowl\l~dge are just unmistakable to introspection as they are.

l'/e rnay ask why has iterativi ty been taken to be such a desideratum

for th1:! concept of knowledge. Probably, the reason is because most of

us, IH:e Descartes, want to construe knowledge as sûmething that we can

ascertain that we have from a first person ~int of Vié~. In not

upholdil~g iterativity as a necessary feature, the fallibilist conception

construe's knowledge as a relation 'Which may on occasion be best

ascertained to apply, to a particular cognitive subject A and state of

73. Prichard, p. 86.

74. Travis, p. 120.

""

92

affairs P, from a third person point of view. This consequence may be

50mething which we find disturbing. In any case, ir~ofar as we consider

iterativ~ty to b€. a necessary feature of the concept, we will be

comm1tted to taking the infallibilist çonception as providing the more

faithful description of the nature of knowledge.

Anothe~ reason for preferring the infallibilist conception follows

from taking the widelyaccepted maxim that 'if you know, then yeu can't

be wrong' to specify a necessary requirement for knowledge. As it 15

stated, the maxim may strike one as intuitively correct and, indeed,

almost no one writing on the subject of knowledge has disputed it. Many

infallibilists have appealed to thls intuitive correctness whlle at the

same time maintaining that acceptance of the maxim commits one to accept

the infallibilist conception of knowledge. How in fact one's acceptance

of the maxim does 50 commit one is often taken to be trivlal and 50 is

never really spelt out.

caution must be exercised here, however, because this maxim may be

understood in two distinct ways. On the one hand, we may understand it

to be saying that in any case where A knows that P, then P; this we

have maintained expresses a correct requirement for knowledge -- its so­

called world-involving feature. We may, moreover, accept this

requirement while remaining neutral in terms of committment to either

the infallibilist or the fallibilist conceptions. On the other hand,

we may understand It to he saying that in a case where A follows some

procedure that leads A to the judgement that P and, as a result, s/he

cornes to know that P, this procedure must be such that, when pursued

correctly on any occasion, it will lead A to arrive at the correct

--------_._~.~.- -

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judgement that P and, as a result, to come to the knowledge that P. Or,

to put it in another way, in any case where A is in an epistemological

position to take it that P such that, as a result, s/he comes to know

that P, there cannot be a deceptive situation S such that if A vere in

S, s/he would not be able to distinguish it from his/her actual

situation and, yet, P wou Id not be the case in S. It may be apparent

that the maxim when

atticulations

knowledge.

slmply

understood in terms of e i ther

expresses the infallibillst

of these last

conception of

Wl th thls disambiguation, It 15 easy to see that the maxim when

understood in the first vay offers no support to the infallibilist

conception whereas, when it is understood in the second way, i t does

offer such support. This support, however, is not anything to which the

infallibilist would vant to appeal since the maxim understood in the

second way amounts to just a re-statement of the infallibilist

conception. In this respect, such support has no epistemic merlt.

If this analysis 1s correct, ho..., can the maxim be used by the

infallibilist to persuade us to accept the Infallibllist conception of

knowledge? We suggest that, in this endeavour, s/he simply takes

advantage of the maxim's ambiguity. First, s/he tries to convince us of

its truth on the basis of the intuitive correctness of its first sense.

Then, while we are in the midst of conflating the two senses, s/he tells

us that acceptance of the maxim conuni ts us to accept the infallibi11st

conception of knowledge. But in the light of the above disambiguation,

i t is clear that what s/he is trying to put forward here as an argument

ls really specious and, 50, this second reason for preferring the

94

infallibilist conception of knowledge may safely be regarded as having

no logical force.

We can make a few remarks about the amblgulty of the maxlm. It

should he apparent that the amblguity trades on the various modalities

of the maxim' s contracted term "can' t" • According to the f irst

understanding, if A is in a position to know that P, then it is not

aetaphysically possible -- to use Kripke's terminology -- that P is not

the case. For it is a pre-condition for being in the position of

knowlng that P that P 15 the case. This is a constitutive point about

knowledge upon which we should all agree. However, according to this

first understanding, given that A is in such a position, it is certainly

epistemically possible -- to use Kripke's terminology again -- from A's

point of viev, that P ls not the case. In this respect, the first

understanding of the maxim construes the term "can't" as expressing

metaphysical but not necessarily epistemic impossibility. According to

the second understanding, however, if A is in a position to know that P,

then it is both metaphysicallyand eplstemically impossible that P ls

not the case. For as ve described the situation above, if A is in such

a position, A can tell that s/he is and, 50, from his/her point of view,

P must be the case. What these considerations show 15 that what makes

the above infal1ibilist '5 reasoning for his/her preferred conception of

knowledge specious is its appeal to the modal fallacy of Identify1ng

metaphys ical and epistemic impossibi Il ty.

We will nov look at reasons for taking the fallibilist conception

as providing the more fai thful descr iption of the nature of knowledge.

Three reasons will be considered.

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The first reason for preferr ing thp fallibi list conception stems

from the thought that its alternative -- the infallibilist conception--

1s the concept ion of knowledge to which most skeptical arguments that

have been put forward since Descartes have made appeal. This thought

itself has generally beem taken to be indisputable, even by

infallibilists themselves. Before we look at how the fallibilists

reason from it, \tIe should survey sorne of the skeptical arguments that

make appeal to i t. Let us begin with Descartes himself. As is \tIeH

known, he offers two distinct skeptical arguments in his Medita t i on r:

the dream aryurnent and the evil demon argument. The dream argument

m3intains that in order to acquire knowledge of the external yorld by

using our senses, we are required at the time of the supposed

acquisition of knowledge to ascertain that we are not in fact dreaming.

The ev!l demon argument maintains. on the other hand, that in order to

acquire any kno\tlledge at all, empirical or logico-mathernatical, by

whatever means, e.g reason or experience, ye are first required to

ascertain that no poyerful evil demon is bent on deceiving us yhile ye

are involved in the process of the supposed acquisition. Without going

into a detalled analysis of both of these arguments, ye can on prima

fade grounds say that both of them rely upon the infallibilist

conception of knowledge. In fact, the cartesian 'requirements' for

kno\tlledge of ascertainlng that \tIe are not dreaming and of ascertaining

that we are not the victim of an evil demon's deceit are really just

special cases of the second infallibilist condition listed above: A

knows that P only if, in the process of arr i ving at a judgement that p,

A has settled all doubts as to P.

96

Since Descartes, several other skeptical arguments have heen put

~;

forward and these have appealed to other special instances of this

second condition. Examples of these are those that rely upon the doubts

that we may he brains in vats, that we may he 'hard-wired' in the wrong

way so as ta reason incorrectly, that we may he hallucinating, etc. It

i5 noteworthy that, like the success of the two Cartesian skeptical

arguments, their success depends upon Inslsting that somethlng 1s a

requirement for knowledge -- like knowing that we are not brains in vats

which as a matter of fact is impossible ta meet.

Recently articulated skeptical argument~ have likewise made appeal

to the infallibilist conception of knowledge. One instance, as we

explained in sections III and IVabove, is Wright's skeptical argument,

• which relies upon the Argument from Illusion, which in turn relies upon

the infallibilist conception in virtue of relying upon a particular view

of appearance -- what we called the received view.

We should now look at how the fallibilist argues from the thought-

- that most skeptical arguments that have been advanced since De'3cartes

make appeal ta the infallibilist conception of knowledge -- in favour of

the fallibilist conception. His/her argument rnay be SUI'lU1\aI i zed as

follows:

(i) Insofar as skeptical arguments validly move from their premises to

the paradoxical conclusion that we cannot have knowledge of certain

sorts of facts, they impugn their premises. As such, skeptical

arguments are in this fashion treated as reduct i 0 type arguments.

(11 ) Since most skeptical arguments that have been ~dvanced since

Descartes appeal to the infallibilist conception -- that is, this

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conception serves as a premise in all of such arguments -- this i5

strong evidence for the conclusion that it is this conception which i5

the source of the problem and that, theretore, it must te revised.

(ili) We may be moved from this conclusion to try to explain why the

Infalilbilist conception should be the source of 50 much difficulty.

After a moment's reflection, we come to see that such a conception could

not accurately capture the actual nature of knowledge given that it

involves impossible, and hence unreasonable, requirements for knowledge

in the sense that it stipulates that even the most far-fetched doubts

(e.g. evil demons) must be settled before we can knowanything. In this

respect, to the extent that we accept the infallibilist conception, we

should not be surprised at the paradoxical conclusions that are reached

by arguments that appeal to it.

Against such an argument, the infallibilist may respond in various

ways. One response lS to say that instead of impugning the

infallibilist conception of knowledge, valid skeptical arguments arrive

at conclusions, albeit paradoxical, which accurately describe our

eplstemic position as one of knowing very little. In other woràs,

whereas the fallibilist says that we should contrapose, the

infallibilist says that we should detach. This response has been by far

the most popular. In this century for instance, Russell has proposed

that we concede knowledge to the skeptic while reserving the right to

work with reasonable belief(75). Prichard, who whole-heartedly accepts

the infallibilist conception, has concluded that aIl that we can know

75. Russell, Bertrand. The Problems of Philosophy. OUP, 1959, pp. 21-24.

1 1 l

98

are mathematical and logical truths, if simple enough, some conceptual

truths like bachelors are unmarried, and features of our exper1ence that

we can 'observe' via introspect ion. More exciting facts, however, such

as that sugar is sweet or that there is a tomc,co on the table are

forever beyond our ken.

Of course, such a response irnplies that most of our knowledge

ascriptions are fa Ise ! This. consequence has made sorne 1nfallibilists

feel the need to assuage our l 'lnguistic intuitions by explaining away

this bizarre phenomena. Thus, we have a second response which argues

similarly to the first but aàds to it by postulating a weak or man-in-

the-street sense of 'know'(76). Norman Malcolm in his "knoW'ledge and

Belief", for instance, clairns that ordinarily, when nothing i5 at stake,

we speak loosely ~hen uttering the term 'know'. In such circumstances,

we intend to express a secondary sense of 'know' which carries none of

the requirements which wei in our more serious moments, take knowledge

to have. According to Malcolm, for exarnple, this secondary sense does

not require the maxim that 'if you know, you can' t be wrong' to be

satisfied by our usage of the term. The point here, however, is that

when we seriously wish to speak strictly, literally, and truly in using

the word 'know', we intend the primary sense of the word which 1s best

described in infallibilist terms.

Many have taken these two responses to be correct. The

fallibilist, however, has a second argument in favour of his/her

conception of knowleàge which speaks directly to these two re5ponses and

to this we next turn.

76. Descartes does this when he speaks of his 'moral certainty' .

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The fallibiliEt asks us to consider how we actually use the term

'know' in our communication and why such a term would be useful. The

obvious reason why s/he asks th1s question 1s because s/he takes it that

1t 1s only by prov1ding an adequate answer to it that we can get clear

about what the actual requirernents for the proper application of the

concept of knowledg~ are.

thernselves, rnany fallibilists

data.

In an effort to answer the question

have offered much detailed linguistic

G.E. Moore, for instance, in his liA Defense of Common Sense"(1925)

offers a list of sorne of the things he takes hirnself to know, such as

that he has hands, that he has a body, that he vas born at sometime in

the past, and that he has never been very far from the surface of the

earth. With this list, he specifies a similar list of things most of

which each of us knows. For example, each of us probably knows that

s/he was born at sometime in the pasto His aim in providing these lists

is not to be dogmatic about what we know. In fact, as he hirnself says,

1t is conceivable that there 15 an item in his particular list about

which he may be wrong. It is conceivable that while he vas fast asleep

one night, martians landed here, took his body far off into deep space,

and then returned it to its original place before he awoke the next

morning. But aIl that this would mean would be that Moore picked a

wrong example to illustrate a case of his knowing. And it could he

replaced with another better example. The purpose of the lists is just

to offer paradigm cases of knowing such and such and, hence, paradigrn

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cases of the correct application of the concept of k 10wledge.(77)

.•. What Moore is doing is using examples to illustrate a sort of case he takes to exist. His examples may be effective in doing this even if he is Yrong about the facts of sorne particular one. What they point to ls the reasonable conclusion that no philosophical argument could successfully show that ve vere tha t Yrong aH along about the sorts of cases to which our concept of knowledge might apply. (78)

100

Like Moore, Austin also provides a set of examples of items that we

can and do know. As We mentioned earller, he sugg~sts that those of us

who are suitably trained can know that there is a goldfinch ln the

garden if We can recognize that there is one there. He tells us that we

can aiso know that the kettle is boiling and that so and so ls angry.

Of course, we do not need to be told any of this. It takes very little

reflection on our part to come up with similarly evident cases of

knowing. The pur pose behind what Moore and Austin are saying here 15 to

suggest just this point.

What can be argued from these data? In particuIar, consider the

two responses offered by the infaIIibilist against the first reason for

preferring the fallibilist conception. To repeat, the first response

asserted that although skeptical arguments that appeal to the

infailibilist conception lead to paradoxical conclusions, the drguments

themselves are sound and the conception i5 correct. The second response

maintains the content of this first one but aiso tries to assuage our

linguistic intuitions by postulating weaker senses of 'know' whlch make

much of what we ordinarily say by this term to be true. It is apparent

77. Thus, sorne have referred to this kind of effort as a 'paradigm case argument t •

78. Travis, p.131.

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101

that what the above data show is that we ordinarily suppose that under

favorable conditions we might be truly be said to know the kinCIs of

things to Whll:h they make reference. According to the first response,

hO'lo!ever, we could not know any of these. At this juncture, the

fallibilist replies thus:

•.• [a conception] of knowledge which has us being that wrong about what the notion applie5 to could not be right. It is as if someone claimet:1 that no one has ever WOIn shoes except for sorne obscure band of Bhuddist monks. The suspicion would be immense that such a person had mistaken what wearing shoes was. In the present case, the parallel conviction might be fortified by considering the immense disutil1ty of a notion of knowledge which was thus restricted, compared to that of a notion with roughly the applicat ions we took our not ion of knowledge to have. (79)

On occasion, we have discovered that we were ~ong about the application

of a concept or even about whether or not it 1s coherent. A classic

instance of such error 1s the one involving the 'concept' of phlogiston;

another one 1nvolves the 'concept' of simultaneity. But errors like

these must in general be dernonstrated by sorne d1scovery. And in the

present case, there has been no d1scovery at all.(80) In th1'5 respect,

Insofar as the first response fails to provide goOO independent grounds

that back the infallibilist conception of knowledge which it takes to be

correct, the conflict between the paradoxical conclusions arrived by the

skeptic and the paradigm instances of knowledge -- offered in the

linguistic data -- that would seem to have much to do with determining

the approprlate rules of application of the concept of knowledge

underrnines this response's credibility.

79. Travis, p. 125 .

80. Travis, p. 125.

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102

The second response does not avoid this criticism. Again, it

rnalntains that wi th the postulated veaker senses of knovleàge, ve can

preserve the truth of most of our ordinary knovledge ascriptlons. In

this respect, we may ask vhat Is It to whlch these ser.5es are veaker.

Slnce it vould always be a veaker sense that we wou Id ordlnarlly use in

ascribing knovledge (given the paradigm cases of such ascription and the

conclusion the skeptic arrives at), it seems that we vou Id have to

introduce the stronger sense by sorne devlce like sti~ulation. But

insofar as we are concerned vith the skeptic's conclusion, it 15 not

because it speaks about sorne stipulated sense of knowledge that only

sophist1cates wou Id understand. 1 t 15 because we take i t to be about

the notion of knowledge that ve all share and use. This problern can be

put the other vayaround:

Claims about 'moral certainty' [Descartes's postulated secondary sense of knovledge] and the like come to this: most of the tirne vhen ve use the word, 'know', ve do not use it to mean or refer to knowing. Most of the time, then, we use it to express something other tha'1 vhat it properly does express in English; ve say, 'knov', but we are really talklng about something else. First, what possible reason could there be to th~nk this 'WciS true (as a thesis about English usage, for example), and second, vhat is to show on which occasions we really use 'knov' t0 mean knov7 What argument couIc] there be that the above viey of knowledge has got this right7(81)

So, the infallibilist upholding the second response must speak to the

first or second construal of the problem. That 15, s/he must explain

either vhy the conclusion that we cannot know in the stipulated stronger

sense of the term is relevant, or vhy ..men we ordinarily use the term

'knov', ve are talking about something else. To the éxtent that this

81. Travis, pp. 125-126.

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103

sort of infallibilist has failed to do provide just such an explanation,

his/her credibility is Iikewise undermined.

Common sense philosophers l1ke Moore am Av;tin have been accused

of maklng banal, If not dogmatic, statements about the kinds of items we

usually take ourse Ives to know, rather than addressing the philosophicai

problem the skeptic has put forward. By our lights, a more enlightened

evaluatlon of their efforts would descrlbe them as questioning the

conception of knowledge upon whlch the skeptic' s arguments rely and,

moreover, as illustrating through the provision of linguistic data the

actual requirements that the concept of knowledge has as contrasted with

this conception. From what has been said, we may at this point concede

that the infallibilist conception could not be an accurate description

of the nature of knowledge given the extent to which the requirernents

that it articulates do not match with those suggested by the data of

linguistic usage and, in this regard, are unreasonable. Just in case we

do not concede this conclusion, however, the fallibilist has a third

argument in favour of his/her conception of knowledge.

The third argument is the rnost cogent of the three. It concerns

our ability to make incorrigible judgements. As indicated in the third

condition above, infallible knowl8dge requires a foundational structure

whose foundation consists of a basic class of incorrigible judgements

about our current sense-impressions, apparp.nt rnernories, etc. As a

result, insofar as infallibilists have thought we have knowledge of sorne

sorts of fact, they have thought that our cognitive abllities are

cornmensurate to the task of making incorrigible judgernents. Since J.L.

Austin, however, several arguments have been put forward which conclude

-104

that we do not have the required cognitive abilities and, as a result,

that we cannc,t have infall i ble knowledge over any clomain.

Austin h1mself advanc~s two distinct arguments. One which he

presents ln his "How to Talk - Sorne Simple Ways" relies on semantic

considerations. The gist of the argtunent is that since we mayalways be

in error about what the semantic features of our words may be and since

we must use such words to frame whatever judgements we may make, such

judgements are always open to bein) in error. Hence, none of our

judgements could be incorrigible.

The second argument, which we shall briefly discuss, Austin

presents in both his "Other Minds" and Sense and Sensibil ia. This one

relies on phenorneno10gica1 considerations. Before we discuss it,

however, sorne background will be he1pfu1.

Sinee Descartes, a long tradition of phi10sophy of mind has held

the position that a1though we may always be wrong in our judgements

about the external wor1d, we cannot be wrong about the 'direct1y

Introspectlble' features of our own mlnds. To quo te a standard text on

the philosophy of mind,

Introspection, i t has been argued, is fundamentally different from any form of external perception. OUr perception of the external wor1d is always mediated by sensations or impressions of some k ioo, and the external world is thus known only iooileetly and problematically. With introspection, however, our knowledge is immediate aoo direct. One does not introspective1y app~ehend a sensation by way of a sensation of that sensation, or apprehend an impression by way of an impression of that impression. As a result, one cannot be a victim of a false impression (of an impression), or a misleading sensation (of a sensation). Therefore, once one is considering the states of one's own mind, the distinction between appear3nce and reality dlsappears entirely. The mind is transparent to itself, and things in the mind are, necessari1y, exact1y as they 'seem' to be. Accordingly, one's candid introspective

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judgements about one' s O\m mental states -- or about one' s own sensations, anyway -- are incorrigible and infallible: it i8 logically impossible that they be mistaken.(82)

105

This position may be recognized as part and parce l of orthodox

e~pl~lcist epistemology. Empiricists like Priee have argued for the

plausibility of the position by reasoning that our knowledge of our

sensations cou Id not be mediated by further sensations. Any attempt to

deny this would lead either to an infinite regress of second-order

sensations, third-order sensations, and 50 on, or to sorne level of nth-

order sensations where our knowledge of them is at last unmediated.(83)

Let us now consider what Austin has to say. First consider the

above argument that the distinction between appearance and reality must

collapse in the case of sensations and, hence, we could not fall into

error in our reports about them since our apprehension of them is not

mediated by anything that might misrepresent them. This argument is

valid only if misrepresentation by an intermediary is the only way we

could 50 fall into error. But this view requires demonstration since

even if introspection is unmediated by second-arder sensations, nothing

without such demonstration has indicated that introspective judgements

5uch as that a particula~ sensation t i5 of sensation-type F will only

be made in situations where t is F.

In fact, this view appears to he faise. When we look at actual

situations where we make judgements about our sensations, we Und that

in such situations, we 3re anything but infallibie. As a first example,

82. Churchland, Paul. Hatter and Consciousness. MIT, p.75.

83. Churchland, p.75.

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106

take the situation where we may be trying to make a judgement about a

"magenta-ish" colour sensation. Austin is most convincing here:

It looks rather like magenta to me -- but then 1 wouldn't be too sure about distinguishing magenta from mauve or from heliotrope. Of course 1 know in a way it's purplish, but 1 don't really know whether to say it's magenta or not: 1 just can't be sure. (84)

A.~tin continues in this vein in considering judgements about other

sensations.

Take tastes, or take sounds: these are so much better as examples than colours, because we never feel so happy w1 th our other senses as with our eyesight. Any description of a tas te or sound or smell ... Involves say1ng that it 15 like one or sorne that we have experienced before: any descriptive word is classificatory, involves recognition and in that sense memory, and only when we use such words... are we knowing anything, or believing anything. But memory and recognition are often uncertain and unreliable.(85)

With these examples as data, Austin looks at two ways in which we may

fail to make an incorrigible judgement about our sensations:

(a)

Let us take the case where we are tasting a certain taste. We may say "1 s imply don' t know what i t 15: l' ve never tasted anything remotely like it before ••• No, it's no use: the more 1 think about it the more confused 1 get: it's perfectly distinct and perfectly distinctive, quite unique in my experience". This illustrates the case where 1 can find nothing in my past experience with which to compare the current case: l'm certain it is not appreciably like anything we know to merit the same description. (8G)

So Austin i~ claiming that we may fail to make the judgement or at least

he hesi tant to do so because we have not as }'et acquired an adequate

conceptual framework under which to subsume such types of sensations .

84. Austin, p.163.

85. Austin, p.163.

86. Austin, p. 164.

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(b)

Here, what I try ta do is ta savour the current experience, ta peer at it, ta sense it vividly. l'm not sure it 1S the taste of pineapple: isn't there perhaps just scmething about it, a tang, a bite, a lack of bite, a cloying sensation, which isn't quite right for pineapple? .•. There 15 a lack of sharpness in what we actually sense, which 1s to be cured not •.. by th1nk1ng, but by acuter discernment. (87)

107

Unlike the first case, we may have acquired an adequate conceptual

framework. The difficulty in arriving at a correct judgement, however,

stems from our limited powers of sens ory discrimination.

In the light of these consider~tions, we may wonder how we could

have taken the original empiricist position about our infallible

cognitive abilities sa seriously. Part of the answer lies in failing ta

make the distinction between our actual experience of whatever

sensations and our judgements of such experience. As Austin remarks, it

is as if we had "the view that sensations speak or are labelled by

nature, 50 that we can literally say what we see. It is as if

[sensations] were literally ta .•. 'identify themselves' ... "(88). But,

of course, sensations are not self-identifying, they are dumb, and only

previous experience enables us ta identify them.(89)

Since Austin, psycholog1cal studies of perception have provided

more definitive data whjch only strengthen his considerations. Not only

do they convincingly show that we are not infallible in our judgements

87. Austin, p. 164.

88. Austin, p.169.

89. There is a good extensive discussion of this issue in J.L. Hackie's "Are There Any Incorrigible Empirical Statements" in his togic and Knovledge, Selected Papers, vol. l, OUP, 1985, pp. 22-40.

1

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t

108

about our phenomenology, they have determined sorne of the conditions

under which we are disposed to make errors in such judgements. For

instance, we are more disposed to misidentify a given sensation, the

greater we expect a sensation that is different in kindi or the shorter

the duration of the sensation; or the longer the lapse in time sinee we

last experienced a sensation of the same kind.(90)

Now with the conclusion that we do not have the cognitive abilities

commensurate to the task of making incorrigible judgements (at least

about our phenomenology), we may go two ways. First, if we are diehard

infallibilists, we rnay simply come to accept tp~t we may have no

knowledge at aIl, even over our sensations, and, as a result, adopt an

even more severe skeptical stance than we may have previously thought

was required. But second, we may at just this point concede that the

Infallibilist conception articulates requirements that are completely

unreasonable and, consequently, could not accurately describe the actual

nature of knowledge. OUr most likely response to the dilemma here

posed, given the alternatives, is to regard the second disjunct as the

only coherent option. Indeed, we suggest that this disjunct is the only

rationally acceptable one.

If this is the case, how do we respond to the force of the first

argument offered by the infallibilist in favour of his/her conception.

To repeat, it concluded that insofar as we consider iterativity to be a

necessary feature of knowledge, we will be committed to taking the

infallibilist conception as providing the more faithful description of

its nature. One thing that can be said from the start is that this

90. See Churchland, pp. 76-79.

t 109

argument appeals to what may be regarded as a powp.rful intuition of ours

about the nature of knowledge. But intuitions are plastic and, without

independent reason to hold on to thern, ve often drop them vhen they lead

to difficulty. Many at one time held the intuition that heavier objects

fall faster than lighter ones. When this intuition vas considered

amongst the totality of recalcitrant evidence, however, holding on to it

becarne an unvieldy task and, as a result, i t was appropr iately

discarded. For the case at hand, given that the intuition about

iterativity conflicts vith the conclusions of the arguments just

considered and that its denial allovs for the adequate explanation of

the paradoxical phenomena of skepticisrn, i t vould likevise seern to be

appropriate to discard it. In this light, wi thout any independent

reason for not doiog so, we recommend that the intuition in fact be

discarded.

We should close this section by surnrnarizing what ve have herein

said. We started by characterizing the infallibilist and fallibilist

concepti ons of knowledge • In our effort to characterize the

infallibilist conception, ve listed three conditions lihich

infallibilists have typically taken to be requirements for knovledge.

We then characterized the fallibilist conception by contrasting it vith

the infallibilist one. According to this competing conception, we may

have knowledge without satisfying any or aIl of the three infallibilist

condi tions. What does in fact determine whether or not we do have

knowledge according to the conception is difficult to specify; but ve

1 carne to say that bath the vorld and the notion of reasonableness play

crucial roles in the matter. Next, we exarnined arguments for each of

,',

.-

110

the conceptions, as we have characterized them. The first argument for

the infallibilist conception reasoned that insofar as we consider

iterativity to be a necessary feature of knowledge, we will be committed

to taking this conception as providing the more faithful description of

its nature. The second argument for the conception appealed to the

intui t ive co:rrectness of the maxim that 'i f you know, then yeu can' t be

wrong'. This argument we found, however, to carry no logical force

because its plausibility traded on an instance of the fallacy of

equivocation. The first argument for the fallibilist conception moved

from the thought that its alternative -- the infallibilist conception--

is the conception of knowledge to which most skeptical arguments that

have been put forward since Descartes have made appeal. It concluded

that the infall ibilist conception articulates requirements for knowledge

that are unreasonable and, hence, that the conception i tself could not

be correct. The second argument appealed to paradigm cases of our usage

of the concept of knowledge. From the presumption that cases such as

these largely determine the concept's correct rules of applicatton, this

second argument pressed the same point that the requirements articulated

by the infallibilist conception are plainly unreasonable, sa that the

conception Itself could not be right. The third argument for the

fallibilist conception -- the most logically powerful

reasoned that one of the crucial requirements for

according ta the infallibilist, the requirement

of the three-­

any knowledge

of incorrigible

judgement, could not in principle bè met. This result left us with a

dilemma: either we Ilaintain the infallibil1st conception and concede

that aIl knowledge is simply impossible, or we take the fallibilist

111

conception to provide the more accurate description of the actual nature

l • of knovledge . At this point, we suggested that the second disjunct is

the only rationally acceptable one.

One of the aims of this section as specified at its beginning was

to explicate what the fallibilist and infallibilist conceptions of

knowledge are, given that much of the earlier discussion made reference

to them. Another aim was to offer sorne support for the fallibilist

conception since our earlier proposaI of the preferred view of

appearance hinged upon the correctness of this conception. Although

much more cou Id be sald with respect to these aims, what we have sald

will have to suffice for nov.

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112

IX Conclusion

Let us sum Up what has been sald. We started by indicating that we

are concerned with the particular skepticism about material object

discourse that 15 arrived at by a general form of argument -- what we

called the 'veil-of-perception' argument. We explained in section II

how this form of argL~nt could be ~pplied to arrive at skepticism about

other discourses as weIl, such as discourse about theoretical objects,

discourse about other minds, and discourse about the pasto We then

characterized in a cursory way this form of argument in terms of four

distinct steps. To repeat, the first step consists in arguing that our

knowledge about the particular discourse at issue mlffit be inferential in

nature; the second step consists in arguing that the required inference

cannot be deductive; the third step consists in arguing that neither can

it he inductive; and the fourth stEp consists in arguing that, given

steps one to three, we cannot have knowledge at aIl about the discourse

at issue.

In the following section, section III, we offered a typlcal

example, due to Crispin Wright, of a piece of reasoning that moves from

the premise that perceptual judgements about material object discourse

are inferential in nature -- the conclusion of the first step, the

empiricists's doctrine -- to the conclusion that neither can we know or

even reasonably believe any of such judgements. In section IV, we

examinl'd the mainstayof the empiricist's doctrine, vlz., the Argument

from Illusion. From this exarnination, we concluded that the argument is

inconclusive unless it appeals to a certain view of appearance -- what

~ l

., . ,

113

we called the received view. A competing view of appearance -- what we

called the preferred view was advanced which characterized our

perceptual knowledge of material object discourse as nc~-inferential.

In order to achieve this characterization, however, this view crucially

relied upon the fallibilist conception of knowledge. In section V, we

examined sorne of the arguments that uphold the received view: the

arg~~nt from phenomenology, the argument from evidence, and the

argument from methodological solipsisrn. The first two were easily

defused. The last one appealed to a methodological solipsist account of

the mind and 50, in sections VI and VII, we explored the inadequacy of

this account. In last section, section VIII, bath the fallibilist and

infallibilist conceptions of knowledge were characterized and from this

characterization, we came to conclude, after sorne deliberation, that the

fallibilist conception provides a more accurate description of the

actual nature of knowledge.

In closing, something should said about what has been accomplished.

This may be put in both negative and positive terms. On the negative

side, it may be said that we have defused the principal support for the

received view of appearance and, consequently, displaced the mainstay

for the empiricist doctrine that perceptual knowledge about rnaterial

object discourse is in general inferential. With this result, we have

managed to render otiose the entire genre of skeptical arguments that

likewise presuppose this doctrine. On the positive side, it rnay be sald

that we have offered the beginnings of an account that is, the

preferred view of appearance -- of how we can acquire knowledge about

material object discourse in a non-inferential manner. Moreover, we

114

have adduced support for this account by arguing in a preliminary vay

that the concept of knoviedge must he construed in faIIibilist terms.

It 1s clear that thi5 account in it5 present form i5 far from being

adequate. It i5 also clear that any effort to rnake it more adequate

vould have say sornething def1nite about hov the notion of rea50nablenes5

and the vorid conspire to confer or to fail to confer knovledge in a

g1ven perceptual situation. This in turn vould require a normative

account of what reasonableness consists ln and a descriptive account of

hov we interact vith the vorid. It notevorthy that none of these

matter5 15 very tractable.

115

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