WMContextualism, Externalism and Epistemic Standards

8/12/2019 WMContextualism, Externalism and Epistemic Standards

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MICHAEL WILLIAMS

CONTEXTUALISM, EXTERNALISM ANDEPISTEMIC STANDARDS1

1. INTRODUCTION

I want to discuss an approach to knowledge that I shall call simple

conversational contextualism or SCC for short. Proponents of SCC

think that it offers an illuminating account of both why scepti-

cism is wrong and why arguments for scepticism are so intuitively

appealing. I have my doubts.SCC was first developed in detail by Stewart Cohen, following

a suggestion of David Lewis. But whereas Cohens version of SCC

involves linking knowledge with justification, Lewis himself thinks

that contextualist ideas are best worked out without supposing any

essential connection between the two, a view endorsed by Keith

DeRose.2 Since I have discussed a justificationist version of SCC

elsewhere, in connection with some of Robert Fogelins ideas,3 it

is conversational contextualism in its non-justificational or exter-

nalist version that I shall mostly be considering here. To keep

the discussion within bounds, I shall restrict most of my detailedcommentary to externalist SCC in Lewiss version. But I hope it

will be clear that my objections are more than ad hominem. Not

only do the problems I find arising Lewis haunt other externalist

contextualists, such as De Rose, my deepest reservations, I believe,

apply to SCC in all its forms.

2. SIMPLE CONVERSATIONAL CONTEXTUALISM

Consider: you ask me whether I know when the next train leaves

for the city and I tell you Yes, two oclock. Imagine that I have I

This paper is accompanied by Timothy Williamson comments (see

pp. 2533).

Philosophical Studies 103: 123, 2001.

2001Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.


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2 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

have derived my information from an impeccable source, such as

the latest timetable, so that it seems clear that I really do know.

However, you explain that you have an appointment that you

absolutely cannot miss. Moreover, it does happen occasionally thatrepairs to the track require temporary timetable changes. Have I

looked into whether any such changes have been announced for

today? No. So do I really know that the next train leaves at two?

Suddenly, things seen less clear.

Reflection on examples like this suggest the following ideas:

(i) Our practices of epistemic evaluation embody mechanisms

thatraise and lowerthe standards for attributing knowledge.

(ii) this raising and lowering of standards consists in the expansion

and contraction of the range of error-possibilities in play.

(iii) Standards are raised and lowered primarily by changes inthe conversational context, in particular what claim has been

made and/or by what error-possibilities (defeaters) have

been brought up or are being attended to.

Epistemologies built around these ideas are contextualist because

they admit that standards for attributing knowledge are subject

to contextual variability. They are simple because they recognise

only one principle dimension of epistemically relevant contextual

variation: the raising and lowering of standards. And they are

conversationalbecause standards are raised and lowered by conver-

sational developments: i.e. by what claims have been made or what

error-possibilities have beenbrought up(explicitly or implicitly and

either in conversation with others or in some internal dialogue).

I do not think that proponents of SCC are committed to holding

that conversational developments are the only factors capable of

effecting changes in epistemic standards. However, it is essential to

SCC that such developments be sufficientto induce standard-shifts.

SCC links up with scepticism by way of an account of the special

context of epistemic evaluation created by philosophical reflection.

In ordinary contexts, the error-possibilities we attend to are kept in

bounds by various practical interests, such as my need to get to the

meeting. But when reflecting philosophically, we step back from allsuch everyday concerns. Accordingly, to make a true knowledge-

claim in the context of philosophical reflection, we need to be able

to rule out any and all possibilities of error, no matter how remote


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CONTEXTUALISM, EXTERNALISM AND EPISTEMIC STANDARDS 3

or implausible. But we cannot do this: indeed, sceptical hypotheses

such as that I am the victim of an Evil Deceiver or a brain-in-a-vat

aredesignedto resist being ruled out.Thus SCC adopts

(iv) Philosophical reflection, or doing epistemology, creates

a context where, because there is no limit on the error-

possibilities that may brought into play, epistemic standards

rise to the maximal level, where they turn out to be unsatis-

fiable.

At first, it seems that philosophical reflection shows that the sceptic

is right after all. When we set aside practical concerns and ask

whether we ever really know anything about the external world, the

very way we ask the question seems to force us to answer No. But,

given (i), (ii) and (ii) above, we can resist this conclusion. We needonly admit:

(v) Although doing epistemology raises standards so as to make

sceptical conclusions true, this does not invalidate everyday

knowledge-attributions, which are true at everyday standards.

Given that epistemic standards are subject to contextual variation,

attributions of knowledge may indeed be false in the extraordinary

context of philosophical reflection. But this does not mean that they

are false in more ordinary circumstances, when different standards

are in force. The aim of contextualism is thus to insulate everyday

knowledge from sceptical undermining. Turning the point around,

scepticism is not so much straightforwardly rejected as contained.

This way of dealing with scepticism is appealing for the fol-

lowing reason: a good response to scepticism should be diagnostic

and not merely dialectical. We do not want merely to be shown that

sceptical arguments go awry: we want an explanation of how they

go wrong that also accounts for why they can seem so compelling.

This is just what contextualism offers. The sceptic is difficult to

dismiss because he is partly right: knowledge or perhaps truly

claiming or attributing knowledge really is impossible in the

rarefied context of philosophical reflection. The sceptics (plausible)mistake is to think that this result licenses the conclusion that know-

ledge is impossible generally. He takes himself to have discovered,

while doing epistemology, that knowledge is impossible, when


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4 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

he has discovered only that knowledge is impossible while doing

epistemology.

This conclusion can be taken two ways.4 One possibility is that

doing epistemology temporarily destroys knowledge. Knowledge iselusive it comes and goes because it can always be under-

mined by unbridled reflection. Alternatively, we might say that we

while we always know everyday things by everyday standards, we

cannot defend that knowledge by explicit anti-sceptical pronounce-

ments. So, although we ordinarily know that sceptical possibilities

do not obtain, we cannot express this knowledge in explicit claims.

Knowledge-claims that bring sceptical possibilities into play create

a context in which those claims are false. This position may have

affinities with certain ideas of Wittgenstein, who stresses the impro-

priety of claiming to know such things as that the Earth has existed

for many years past.Still, however we interpret (v), the sceptic, while crucially wrong,

is partially right. Either way, then, SCC explains why the intuitions

that seem to lead to scepticism have such a grip on us. It is a

satisfyingly diagnostic response to the sceptical problem.

3. VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

The question is not whether the kind of contextual variation high-

lighted by SCC exists (it does) but whether a response to scepticism

that appeals only contextual sensitivity of this type isdiagnostically

adequate. In approaching this question, I want begin with some

remarks about why is scepticism a problem worth taking seriously.

Then I want to discuss what sort of argumentative strategies might

lead to scepticism of a suitably problematic variety. These remarks

are necessary, if we are to command a clear view of what SCC is

supposed to accomplish.

Briefly, scepticism is a problem because the sceptic presents us

with apparently intuitive arguments for wholly unacceptable conclu-

sions. In describing sceptical arguments as intuitive, I mean that

they seem not to depend on elaborate or contentious theoreticalideas about knowledge or justification. If sceptical arguments were

obviously non-intuitive, we could dismiss them (as artifacts of

ideas we are not compelled to accept). Equally, if they led only


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to anodyne conclusions, we could accept them. But neither option

seems available, hence the problem.

There are two conditions that any type of scepticism must meet

if it is to be properly unacceptable (hence worth taking seriously)today.

The first is that scepticism must make an unusually general claim

about our epistemic disabilities. The sceptic must do more than

remind us of our vast contingent ignorance, which none of us will

deny. While the exact nature of the generality of the sceptics claims

is a difficult matter, this much seems clear: the sceptic must issue

a negative verdict on what seem pre-theoretically to be the clearest

cases of knowledge, the cases such that, if we fail to have knowledge

here, it is hard to see where we could ever have it.

The second condition is that scepticism must be severe. Scepti-

cism is often stated as the doctrine that knowledge is impossible.But whether this conclusion ought to bother us depends on how

exacting we take the standards for knowledge to be. Scepticism

that results from setting extremely high standards for knowledge

is a problem only if we have some clear and compelling interest

in living up to standards set that high. For example, philosophers

of the early modern period restricted knowledge to truths that are

demonstratively certain: truths that are either themselves intuitively

self-evident, or deducible by intuitively self-evident steps from self-

evident premises. By this standard, we know very little, if anything.

However, this is a conclusion that most of us are willing to live with,indeed eager to embrace. We are all fallibilists nowadays.

The general point is this: the more exacting the conditions for

knowledge, the milder the scepticism that results from denying that

knowledge is possible. Or rather, this is true with respect to scep-

ticism that is knowledge-specific. The need to distinguish between

forms of scepticism that are knowledge-specific and forms that are

not is forced on us by Gettiers argument to the effect that the

standard justified-true-belief analysis fails to state a sufficient

condition for knowledge. Many philosophers try to handle Gettiers

problem by adding a fourth clause, restricting the type of justifica-

tion capable of yielding knowledge. If we adopt this strategy, wemust recognise two ways of denying that knowledge is possible. One

way concedes that lots of our beliefs have positive epistemic status


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6 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

even high positive epistemic status but denies that they have

a high enough status to amount to knowledge properly so-called:

that is, the sceptic allows that we can meet the first three condi-

tions on knowledge, denying us only the ability to satisfy the fourth.This is what I mean by scepticism that is knowledge-specific.

But another way is to reject our ability even to rise to the level to

justified belief, in effect to challenge our capacity for making well-

founded distinctions with respect to epistemic status. This is radical

scepticism.

There are grades of knowledge-specific scepticism, depending on

how exacting the standards for knowledge are supposed to be. Most

fourth-clause theorists identify knowledge with true belief that is

indefeasibly justified. Indefeasible justification is justification that

cannot be undermined by the acquisition of further true beliefs. An

even more severe standard would be that knowledge requires abso-lute certainty: that it rest on evidence that excludes every logically

possible defeater for the belief in question. This gives us a distinc-

tion between indefeasibility-scepticism and certainty-scepticism,

both of which are knowledge-specific.

By virtue of being knowledge-specific, both indefeasbility-

and certainty-scepticism are forms of high-standards scepticism.

Neither is much of a problem. To be sure, certainty-scepticism was

controversial once upon a time (when the demonstrative ideal of

knowledge held sway), but it is not a very serious issue today. And

I am not sure that indefeasibility-scepticism is much more problem-atic. While it might be nice to have indefeasibly justified beliefs, we

can get along without them. And since we are not ever to be in a

position to know that our best available evidence is actually inde-

feasible, the ideal of indefeasibility does not appear to be of much

methodological significance. Indeed, it is not clear that knowledge-

specific scepticism amounts to more than fallibilism, which is less

a problem than a rationally anti-dogmatic outlook. But there is

no comparably benign way of viewing radical scepticism, which

threatens to wipe out all distinctions of epistemic status. So I think

that scepticism is clearly a problem only if it is radical as well as

general.


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4. EXTERNALISM AND RADICAL SCEPTICISM

Strategically, scepticism comes in two main varieties, Cartesian and

Agrippan. In the broadest terms, Cartesian scepticism depends ongetting us to consider sceptical hypotheses that I am the victim

of Descartess Evil Deceiver or a brain in a vat which seem difficult

or impossible to rule out. To come to terms with Cartesian scepti-

cism is to explain why such possibilities or apparent possibilities

are not in fact the obstacles to everyday knowledge that they seem

to be. Agrippan scepticism, which is centered on the problem of the

regress of justification, has no particular connection with sceptical

hypotheses.

SCC is concerned with Cartesian scepticism, offering an explan-

ation of why the remote possibilities described by sceptical hypo-

theses are not obstacles to everyday knowledge. SCC, in the formwe are considering, has nothing to say or anyway nothing to

add to discussion of Agrippan scepticism. Agrippan scepticism

is essentially scepticism with respect to justification and concerns

knowledge only to the extent that knowledge depends always and

everywhere on justification. But SCC, in the version under exam-

ination, is developed in conjunction with radically externalist or

non-justificational accounts of knowledge. For externalist advo-

cates of SCC, Agrippan scepticism is handled by their externalism,

before their contextualism comes on the scene.

Returning to Cartesian scepticism, how do sceptical hypotheses

lead to sceptical conclusions? One suggestion is that sceptical hypo-

theses poseunderdetermination problems. The crucial feature of the

brain-in-a-vat example is that the victim enjoys exactly the same

perceptual experience as he would in his normal state. But surely, the

sceptic argues, when it comes to forming beliefs about the external

world, perceptual experience is all that any of us has to go on.

If this evidence fails to discriminate between our ordinary beliefs

and bizarre counter-possibilities, how can those beliefs amount to

knowledge?

For contextualists like Lewis and DeRose, this account of

Cartesian scepticism links scepticism far too closely with inter-nalist or evidentialist ideas about knowledge. If Cartesian prob-

lems depended essentially on such ideas, Cartesian scepticism, like

Agrippan scepticism, would be met by externalism alone, leaving


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8 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

no real work for contextualism to do. Accordingly, externalist

proponents of SCC focus on an apparently simpler form of sceptical

argument. Let O be a proposition about the external world that

I would ordinarily take myself to know and H a suitably chosensceptical hypothesis, such as that I am a brain in a vat. Then, in

DeRoses formulation, this Argument from Ignorance (AI) goes

as follows:

1. I dont know that not-H.

2. If I dont know that not-H, then I dont know that O.

3. So, I dont know that O.

By itself, this reformulation gets us nowhere. Everything depends on

the sceptics reasons for affirming 1. If these turn out to involve the

undetermination of worldly knowledge by perceptual experience, no

alternative account of Cartesian scepticism has been offered. Butperhaps they need not.5

Our thoughts on why scepticism is a problem are relevant here.

An advantage of understanding Cartesian scepticism as focused on

underdetermination problems is that this account shows how we are

threatened with radical scepticism. But there is a disadvantage too:

it is not at all obvious that sceptical arguments from underdetermin-

ation are genuinely intuitive. The sceptic reaches his conclusion by

placing us under epistemic disabilities that do not flow in any clear

way from how knowledge and justification are ordinarily under-

stood. The sceptic challenges us to rule out his bizarre hypotheses

on the basis of experiential evidence alone. Even supposing that he

is correct in claiming that we cannot do this, it is not clear that

this is problem. We need to be shown that the sceptics demand is

something that we are ourselves rationally committed to.

This thought reinforces the need, felt by contextualists like Lewis

and DeRose, to find a simpler, less theoretically loaded way of

posing Cartesian problems. However, turning away from underde-

termination problems, focusing on the argument from ignorance,

and characterising sceptical hypotheses as remote possibilities

that do not normally need to be ruled out, itself threatens to

exact a heavy cost. This is that, by understanding scepticism inthese terms, contextualists like Lewis and DeRose seem to restrict

themselves ab initio to an uninteresting high standard- or even

certainty-scepticism.6


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To the extent that the Argument from Ignorance does not depend

on undetermination problems, it surely invokes a conception of

knowledge that makes knowledge hostage to our ability to elim-

inate of all logically possible (as opposed to all commonsensicallyrelevant) defeaters. Lewis is quite explicit about this. The sceptical

argument, he says, is just that

it seems as if knowledge must be definition infallible. If you claim that S knows

that P, and yet you grant that S cannot eliminate a certain possibility in which not-

P, it certainly seems that you have granted that S does not after all know that P.

To speak of fallible knowledge, of knowledge despite uneliminated possibilities

of error, justsoundscontradictory (419, emphasis in original).

Now even assuming that we have infallibilist intuitions, it is not

obvious that they should be taken seriously. Maybe they are just

leftovers from a discarded ideal of certainty. But let this go. Letus agree that we should take our infallibilist intuitions seriously:

what follows? Scepticism, because ordinary knowledge simply isnt

infallible? According to Lewis, no. By allowing shifting standards

for fallibility, SCC offers a way out of the dilemma between falli-

bilism and scepticism. But why is this dilemma worth worrying

about? Lewiss fallibilism is the doctrine that knowledge might

be fallible: whereas what is ordinarily thought of as fallibilism

is a doctrine about justification. And not justification narrowly

conceived, but our epistemic resources generally. It is the view that,

even when we are on our best behaviour epistemically speaking,

we can never entirely exclude the possibility that the results we

are led to may need revision. As for the infallibility that leads to

scepticism, it makes knowledge depend on eliminating all logically

possible ways of going wrong. So Lewiss scepticism is just the view

that this cannot be done. In other words, Lewiss scepticism is

just fallibilism as it ought to be understood. If SCC offers no more

than an escape from Lewiss dilemma, it cannot be diagnostically

adequate to the scepticism that really ought to trouble us. It is not

even addressed to the right problem.

Now some readers may have suspected for a while that my insist-

ence that scepticism be radical is itself tantamount to a refusalto take externalist SCC seriously. An externalist will surely want

to claim that, if we can detach knowledge from justification and

still show how knowledge is possible, we can drain the interest


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10 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

from radical scepticism and the justification-centered arguments on

which it depends. Of course, we will still have to deal with any

forms of knowledge-specific scepticism that threaten to arise for

non-justificational anlayses of knowledge. But knowledge-specificscepticism, not radical scepticism, will be the interesting problem.

Matters are not so simple. For one thing, as we shall see, it is

far from clear that any version of SCC offers a purely externalist

account of knowledge (although, as we shall also see, advocates of

externalist SCC are far from clear about this). But there are other

complications to take into account.

It is true that an externalist who takes no interest in justification,

if he is concerned with scepticism at all, will be concerned with

it only in some knowledge-specific form. However, this does not

preclude an interest in radical scepticism. The general contrast is

between radical scepticism and high-standards high-standards scep-ticism, not radical scepticism and knowledge-specific scepticism.

For a justificationist about knowledge, who takes Gettiers problem

seriously, knowledge-specific scepticism is inevitably a form of

high-standards scepticism. For an externalist, at least an externalist

who is also a contextualist, this need not be so. Such an exter-

nalist will insist that epistemic standards however understood

are variable. In particular, they are much less severe in everyday

situations than in the context of philosophical reflection or of doing

epistemology. This makes conceptual room for radical scepticism:

the sceptic has only to argue that knowledge fails even by everyday,relaxed standards. If successful, the sceptic will erase all epistemic

distinctions, even if they are explained in the externalist contex-

tualists non-justificational terms. This means that the externalist

proponent of SCC must have something to say about radical scep-

ticism after all. SCC must be developed in a way that successfully

insulates everyday knowledge-claims from sceptical undermining.

The possibility of combining externalism with contextualism

complicates the picture in another way. Once contextualism is

in play, high-standards scepticism can become interesting as the

diagnostic key to radical scepticism. The advocate of SCC can

argue that the sceptics pretended radical scepticism is itself high-standards scepticism in disguise. Drawing on his account of the vari-

ability of epistemic standards, he can claim that we will suspect that


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knowledge fails in ordinary circumstances only if we mistakenly

conflate ordinary standards with the artificially high standards

induced by doing epistemology.7 So we have a diagnosis of

radical scepticism that SCC needs anyway: the sceptic imports thesevere standards appropriate to doing epistemology into ordinary

contexts of epistemic appraisal. Scepticism, so to say, is always high

standards scepticism, though an illusion of radical scepticism can be

produced by reading inappropriately high standards into everyday

situations.

5. JUSTIFICATION: TWO ASPECTS

Let us now look more closely at Lewiss case for the elusiveness

of knowledge.For Lewis, knowledge is infallible in the following sense: S

knows that P if and only if Ss evidence for P eliminates every

possibility in which P is false. However, what counts as every

possibility varies with context. Thus the standards for infallib-

ility also vary: they are more severe in some contexts than others.

Depending on turns in the conversation or someones train of

thought, the range of error-possibilities in play expands or contracts,

moving us between more an less demanding epistemic contexts. S

knows that P if and only if Ss evidence eliminates every currently

conversationally relevant or appropriate error-possibility. Since our

evidence may eliminate all error-possibilities in play in one context

but not all those in play in another, knowledge is elusive: it comes

and goes.

Context-shifts the expansion and contraction of the range

of relevant error-possibilities occur in accordance with rules

governing conversational presuppositions. We presuppose propos-

ition Q iff we ignore all possibilities in which not Q; equivalently,

weignorewhatever possibilities falsify our presuppositions. But we

cant presuppose, or ignore, whatever we like: that would make

knowledge too easy to obtain. The rules in question are rules of

properpresupposition orproperignoring. Knowledge is thus subjectto what Lewis calls the sotto voce proviso: S knows that P iff Ss

evidence eliminates every possibility in which not P Psst, except

for those possibilities that conflict with our proper presuppositions


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12 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

(426). I take it that the proviso is sotto voce because an explicit

relativisation to context is not (intuitively) part of the content of an

everyday knowledge-claim. This seems right.

Some presupposition-rules are prohibitive: they tell us whichpossibilities may notbe left uneliminated, if we are to have know-

ledge. For example:

Rule of Belief. A possibility that the subject believes to obtain is not properly

ignored, whether or not he is right to do so. Neither is one that he ought to believe

to obtain one that evidence and arguments justify him in believing whether or

not he does so believe. (428)

Other are permissive. For example, a Rule of Conservatism allows

us, defeasibly, to adopt the usually and mutually expected presup-

positions of those around us. It allows us to ignore what they ignore,

unless other rules force some commonly ignored possibility on ourattention.

Now Lewis presents this account of knowledge as non-

justificational. In Lewiss view, justification is neither sufficient nor

necessary for knowledge. But Lewiss account of knowledge is

much less purely non-justificational than he thinks.

Lewis ties knowledge to the elimination of error-possibilities by

evidence. However, he understands both evidence and elim-

ination is a fully externalist way. When perceptual experience,

Lewiss paradigm of evidence, eliminates a possibility, W, this is

not because the propositional content of the experience conflicts

with W. . .

Rather, it is the existence of the experience that conflicts

with W: W is a possibility in which the subject is not having exper-

ience E (422).8 In general, a possibility W is uneliminated iff the

subjects perception and memory in W exactly match his perceptual

experience and memory. If there is no such match, W is eliminated.

The subjects evidence thus eliminates W whether or not he is aware

that it does. Lewiss appeal to evidence, then, does not by itself

introduce an obviously justificational dimension into his account of

knowledge. But his presupposition-rules do.

As Hilary Kornblith and Robert Fogelin have argued, justifica-

tion has two aspects, both of which are involved in knowledge.9

One aspect the procedural aspect concerns epistemic responsi-

bility: to be justified in holding a particular belief, a person must

have formed it, or be retaining it, in an epistemically respon-


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sible way. Lewiss presupposition-rules are clearly concerned with

justification in this sense: they are normative principles governing

the possibilities that a person may properly i.e. responsibly

ignore. Notice, here, how strong a normative constraint the Ruleof Belief imposes: one may not ignore possibilities arising from

what one ought to believe, whether or not one actually does believe

it. Imposing such a constraint would be unintelligible unless we

recognised justification, in the sense of epistemic responsibility, as

necessary for knowledge. But as we have noted, and as Lewis insists,

if knowledge were not subject to such normative constraints if we

could fix byfiatthe possibilities that our evidence must eliminate

we could presuppose our way into knowing anything we liked. We

would lose any sense of knowledges being a positive or desirable

epistemic state.

The second aspect of justification has to do with the subjectsgrounds, which must be objectively adequate if he is to have

knowledge. Now Fogelin happily concedes that, in some cases, evid-

ence is best understood along externalist lines. So unless Lewis

thinks that the elimination of error-possibilities by the propositional

content of a persons evidence is never relevant to his knowing

possessing knowledge, Lewiss non-justificationalist account of

knowledge is identical with Fogelins justificationist analysis. But

Lewis cannot think anything of the sort: his rules stand in the

way. Once it is conceded that sometimes error-possibilities cannot

be ignored because their relevance has been have been conceded which the Rule of Belief certainly implies they cannot be

eliminated in a purely externalist way.

Suppose you accuse me of improperly ignoring an error-

possibility, W. I cannot reply: Maybe Im not ignoring it; maybe

my total current perceptual/memory state (whatever it is) would be

different if W were to obtain; so I may have knowledge, though

I dont know whether I do. To allow this reply would be to let

go of the idea of epistemic responsibility hence the need for

rules anything like those Lewis proposes altogether. When error-

possibilities are in play because consciously recognised, they must

be evidently eliminated by the evidence at ones disposal, not justeliminatedde facto. The admission that justification, in the sense of


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14 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

epistemic responsibility, is required for knowledge limits the extent

to which one can be an externalist with respect to evidence.

Lewis, however, fails to keep the normative character of his

rules, hence the justificational element in his account of knowledge,consistently in view. Or perhaps it would be better to say, that other

aspects of his position which are integral components of SCC

prevent him from so doing. Seeing why, exposes the limits of SCCs

diagnostic power.

6. HOW ELUSIVE IS KNOWLEDGE?

The final standard-setting rule that Lewis introduces is the Rule of

Attention:

When we say that a possibilityis properly ignored, we mean exactly that; we do

not mean that itcould have beenproperly ignored. Accordingly, a possibility that

is not ignored at all isipso factonot properly ignored. (559, emphasis in original.)

Lewis calls this more a triviality than a rule (434). But it is the key

to his position. And it is anything but trivial.

One result of adopting the Rule of Attention is that Lewis can

explain away apparent cases of failure of epistemic closure. The

proposition that I have hands implies that I am not a brain in a vat.

So by closure, if I know that I have hands, then I know that I am not

a brain in a vat. But I dont know that I am not a brain in a vat: what

could eliminate that possibility? So by modus tollens, I dont know

that I am not a brain in a vat. It seems that, if we agree that sceptical

hypotheses cannot be eliminated by evidence, but want to hold on

to everyday knowledge, denying closure is our only hope. But it

isnt. Wild sceptical hypotheses are properly ignored in ordinary

circumstances, with he result that our evidence need not eliminate

them. But if we try to draw explicit anti-sceptical conclusions from

correct everyday knowledge-claims, the Rule of Attention effects

a presupposition shift, creating a context in which sceptical hypo-

theses are no longer properly ignored. This presupposition-shift

creates an apparent failure of closure: you know things at the startof the argument that you (temporarily) dont know at the end.

This is plausible. Nevertheless, there is something fishy about

the Rule of Attention. Lewiss rules are introduced to prevent our


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obtaining knowledge too easily. But the Rule of Attention makes

retaining knowledge too hard. Conceding for the present that far-

fetched sceptical possibilities brains-in-vats, demon-deceivers

resist elimination by evidence, the Rule ensures that a personsknowledge vanishes every time such a possibility enters his head.

Although the point of introducing presupposition-rules was to

prevent knowledge-by-fiat, the Rule of Attention provides for ignor-

ance at will. This is a striking asymmetry.

Lewis is aware that the thought that the mere mention of a

possibility makes it epistemically relevant has counter-intuitive

consequences. He imagines two epistemologists off on a hike,

imagining all sorts of wild error-possibilities, thus knowing nothing.

But they dont get lost, which seems to mean that they retain a good

deal of knowledge. Lewis suggests that a persons thinking may be

compartmentalised, the philosophy compartment attending to scep-tical scenarios, the navigation compartment ignoring them. What

then does a person know? Lewis thinks this question is not feli-

citous, which it isnt if compartmentalisation relativizes knowledge

to context. One knows for the purposes of navigation that one has

reached the top of the hill; for the purposes of doing epistemology

one does not know any such thing: there is nothing that one knows

simpliciter.

Now Lewis is clearly not altogether happy with this position.

Indeed (recall thesotto voceproviso), his contextualism was origin-

ally structured so as to avoid the explicit relativisation of knowledgeto context. He is therefore reluctant simply to refuse to answer the

question about what a person knowssimpliciter. If this question has

to be answered, he suggests, the best answer is that a person knows

that P iff one of his compartments does (443). But if we accept this

answer, we are in danger of losing the elusiveness of knowledge

and, with it, the diagnosis of scepticism. Doing epistemology now

threatens only knowledge-in-a-compartment. Knowledge simpli-

citer is safe as long as there is knowledge in some compartment

or other. The best we can do, by way of diagnosis, is to say that

the sceptic confuses knowledge-in-a-compartment with knowledge

simpliciter. But this is plausible only if we agree that we havetwo notions of knowledge, relative and non-relative. Moreover, the

strategy of relativization threatens to play into the sceptics hands.


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I see no reason to accept the Rule of Attention, no reason to fall

in with Lewiss attenuated conception of doing epistemology, and

so no reason to accept the elusiveness of knowledge. But even if we

accept all these things, we are led to nothing more than a bloodlesshigh-standards scepticism, which need not perturb us.

7. RADICAL SCEPTICISM AGAIN

We are not yet out of the woods. To see why, we have to look at

three further Rules, two prohibitive and one permissive:

Rule of Actuality. The possibility that actually obtains is never

properly ignored; actuality is always a relevant alternative;

nothing false may be presupposed. (426)

Rule of Resemblance. Suppose one possibility salientlyresembles another. Then if one of them may not properly be

ignored, neither may the other. (429)

Rule of Reliability. [P]rocesses whereby information is trans-

mitted to us . . ., perception, memory and testimony . . ., are

fairly reliable. . .We may properly presuppose that they work

without a glitch in the case under consideration. (432)

All are important. Actuality and Resemblance solve the Gettier

problem. Reliability captures what is right about causal or reli-

abilist theories of knowing (432). In my terms, it is Lewiss

(externalist) answer to Agrippan scepticism.

In a Gettier case, I form a true belief that P on the basis of

evidence, E, that is a normally reliable indicator of the truth of P,

so my belief is also justified. But in the special circumstances of a

Gettier case, P is true for reasons that have nothing to do with E.

In accepting P on the basis of E, I ignore possibilities in which E

is available even though P is false. Since, depending on the details

of the case, these possibilities will resemble actuality in various

salient ways, they are ignored improperly, so that my belief does

not amount to knowledge.

Actuality and Resemblancepermit Lewis to handle Gettier cases

by giving him a way to capture the idea of good but circumstan-tially misleading evidence. The trouble is that, without some way

of restricting their application, they get out of hand. According to

Lewis:


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18 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

. . . it is possible to hallucinate even to hallucinate in such a way that all my

perceptual experience and memory would be just as they actually are. That possi-

bility can never be eliminated. But is can be ignored. And if it is properly ignored

as it mostly is then vision gives me knowledge. (423)

The problem, as Lewis notes with admirable candour, is that actu-

ality is a possibility uneliminated by the subjects evidence (430).

So if I am a victim of demon-deception, I am always improperly

ignoring this possibility:ActualitydefeatsReliability. Here we have

a powerful form of meta-scepticism. But this is not all:

Any other possibility W that is. . .uneliminated by the subjects evidence thereby

resembles actuality in one salient respect: namely, in respect of the subjects evid-

ence. That will be so even if W is in other respects very dissimilar to actuality

even if, for instance, it is a possibility in which the subject is radically deceived

by a demon. Plainly, we dare not apply the Rules of Actuality and Resemblanceto conclude that any such W is a relevant alternative that would be capitulation

to scepticism. (430)

Lewis says that we seem to have an ad hocexception to the Rule of

Resemblance. Clearly, it would better to reformulate the Rule so as

to avoidad hoc exceptions but, again with admirable candour, Lewis

says that he does not see how.

Notice the strikingly different attitude Lewis takes to Attention

and Resemblance. The former Rule is welcomed for its power to

destroy knowledge. Indeed, Lewis explicitly repudiates attempts to

restrict it in ways that would limit its sceptical potential. The latter

is treated in exactly the opposite way: its sceptical potential must be

limited, even at the cost of a restriction that is completely ad hoc.

But perhaps even more striking is the fact that Lewis does not even

attempt to appeal to his contextualism to resolve the problem, even

though the virtue of contextualism is supposedly its power to put the

sceptic in his place.

The reason for all this is exactly what I have been suggesting all

along. Lewiss contextualism generates and handles only an unin-

teresting form of high standards scepticism. This scepticism can

be handled by variable standards contextualism (SCC) precisely

because it arises only in contexts where unusually high standardsare in force. By contrast, the scepticism threatened by the Rules of

Actuality and Resemblance is not contextually bounded in this way.

If it arises at all, it arises in even the most ordinary contexts: it is, in


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fact, radical scepticism, as that problem arises within an externalist

approach to knowledge. Lewis must repudiate radical scepticism

precisely because it is a problem that a diagnosis tailored to high

standards scepticism cannot handle.I said earlier that focusing on high standards scepticism might

still provide they key to radical scepticism if it could be shown

that the threat of radical scepticism is an illusion, arising from

illicitly importing the high standards appropriate to doing epistem-

ology into ordinary acceptance-contexts. But it should be clear that,

without an explanation of the ad hoc exception to Resemblance,

there is no way of saying whether or not this line of defence is even

available to Lewis. The effect of the Rule of Resemblance, in its

unrestricted form, is that even the remotest defeaters are improperly

ignored in even the most ordinary contexts. In other words, the Rule

obliterates the idea of contextually variable standards. Accordingly,everything depends on how the exception is explained. Once more,

a sceptic might say that we ignore certain resemblances, thus certain

relevant possibilities, for practical purposes. But we never have

knowledge, or even epistemically (as opposed to practically) justi-

fied belief. Because such explanations must be ruled out, if we are

to make any progress against scepticism, explaining the exception

isnt a supplement to a diagnosis of scepticism: it is the diagnosis.

I began by discussing two ways that arguments for Cartesian

scepticism might be supposed to arise. One located the signifi-

cance of sceptical hypotheses within a range of underdeterminationproblems. The other made them crucial components of the argu-

ment from ignorance. The problem was that underdetermination

scepticism, while unquestionably radical, was dubiously intuitive.

Argument-from-ignorance scepticism, by contrast, while less theo-

retically loaded, seemed to amount to no more than an uninteresting

high-standards or certainty-scepticism.

We have confirmed these suspicions. Unmodified, the Rule of

Resemblance combines with the Rule of Actuality to generate

undetermination problems: that is how these Rules threaten Lewis

with radical scepticism. Demon worlds resemble actuality in respect

of the evidence at our disposal. This resemblance is so striking thatit seems ad hoc and totally unsatisfactory simply to dismiss its rele-

vance. But Lewiss contextualism suggests no other course, since is


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20 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

tailored to the high-standards scepticism generated by the Rule of

Attention.

8. REMOTE POSSIBILITIES

The critical source of Lewiss difficulties is his lack of clarity about

the normative-justificational dimension of his account of know-

ledge. In stating the Rule of Resemblance, Lewis once more elides

the distinction between the psychological and the normative. Here,

the vehicle this elision is the notion of salience, which remains

nicely poised between the psychologically striking and the epistem-

ologically significant. Purged of ambiguity, the Rule of Attention

amounted to the implausible constraint that anything noticed is

deserving of notice. Comparably purged, the Rule of Resemblancemakes the same claim on behalf of whatever is noticeable. Or

rather it would do so, ifad hoc exceptions were not imposed. The

inadequacies of the Rules are thus mirror-images. For no apparent

reason, mere notice can destroy knowledge. But also for no apparent

reason, mere noticeability cannot.

The question is: does contextualism of the kind Lewis defends

have the resources to repair these deficiencies? I do not think that

it does. The diagnostic limitations of Lewiss epistemology are not

an idiosyncratic feature: they are inherent in the general approach to

knowledge that I have called simple conversational contextualism.

The high-standards scepticism that this approach can handle

is closely linked to SCCs conversational or dialectical character.

Error-possibilities become relevant simply by being brought up or,

more generally, attended to. When they return to the unspoken

background, they cease to be relevant. Conversational contextu-

alism lets knowledge disappear and reappear, in exactly the same

way. However, the radical scepticism threatened by the Rules of

Resemblance and Actuality has nothing to do with conversational

factors. It arises out of the similarity between our epistemic situ-

ation in the actual world and our epistemic situation in worlds

involving massive deception. It is this fundamental similarity, notthe vagaries of conversation or attention, that poses the problem.

Indeed, so far as the resources of conversational contextualism are

concerned, this similarity is an invariant feature of our epistemic


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position. Result: no version of contextualism that limits its concep-

tion of context-shifting to conversational considerations will be able

to handle it.

The second limitation of SCC is its simplicity. SCC postulates asimple scale of standards for knowledge, from lax to severe, with

severity as a function of the range of defeaters in play. The more

remote the defeaters deemed relevant, the higher the standards

for knowledge. However, there is no such simple scale of severity

because there is more than one way of being remote. The idea of

remoteness involved in the high-standards scepticism associated

with the Rule of Attention is the commonsense idea of factual

remoteness: sceptical possibilities represent worlds in which most

of what we ordinarily believe is false. But according to the sceptic,

while such worlds are factually remote (that is the point) they are

epistemically close. So recognising this is not a matter of imposinghigher than normal standards. It is just a matter of recognising the

fix we are always in.

Of course, this could be questioned: are the ways of knowing

available in normal and demon worlds really the same? How

should ways of knowing be individuated? These are good questions,

but following them up would take us far beyond the theoretical

resources of SCC.

Let me indicate very briefly how I think they should be followed

up. The place to begin is with the idea of the special context created

by doing epistemology. There is something right in the idea thatdoing epistemology involves a distinctively unrestricted exam-

ination of our claims to knowledge. But this special character is

not captured by the admissibility of arbitrarily far-fetched error-

possibilities, which become relevant simply by being noticed. On

the contrary, the admissibility of sceptical hypotheses does not

define the context of doing epistemology. It is doing epistemology

that makes sceptical hypotheses seem relevant.

The sceptic, as I understand him, wants to ask certain highly

general questions about human knowledge. For example, he wants

to know how it is, or why we are entitled to suppose, that we know

anything whatsoever about the external world. The key feature ofsceptical error-possibilities, therefore, is not that they are remote

but that they aregeneric. The thought that I might be a brain in a vat


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22 MICHAEL WILLIAMS

defeats every claim to knowledge of the external world, if it defeats

any.11

Back to epistemology. If the legitimacy of sceptical defeaters is

closely tied to the methodological demands of a particular theo-retical project, the context of appraisal created by doing epistem-

ology involves more than raising standards, ratcheting up what

Robert Fogelin nicely calls the level of scrutiny. In a very real

way, it involves changing the subject: theangleof scrutiny. A phys-

icist can raise indefinitely the level of scrutiny to which the results

of a particular experiment are subject, repeating the experiment

under ever more stringently controlled conditions. But if he starts

wondering whether he is a brain in a vat, this will not inaugurate an

even more scrupulous approach to his research: rather, the intro-

duction of the generic defeater submerges the given inquiry in a

completely different kind of investigation.Only if we concede the legitimacy of this distinctively general

examination of knowledge do generic defeaters exert a normative

claim on our attention. Accordingly, subjecting this traditional

philosophical project to a close critical examination is the strategy

I recommend. Following it through leads to a version of contex-

tualism which is considerably more complex than SCC12. SCC

is a shallow contextualism. It cannot cope with deep forms of

scepticism.

NOTES

1 Versions of this paper were given at a conference New Directions in Epistem-

ology, held at the University of Tuebingen, January 1999, and the 1999 Oberlin

Colloquium. I want to thank the participants in those conferences for much

stimulating discussions, but especially Stewart Cohen, Fred Dretske, Thomas

Grundmann, Hilary Kornblith, Bill Lycan, Karsten Stueber and my commentator

at Oberlin, Tim Williamson.2 See e.g. Stewart Cohen, Knowledge, Context and Social Standards, Synthese

73 (1987), pp. 326. Lewis original hint is found in David Lewis, Score-

keeping in a Language Game, in Lewis, Philosophical Papers, vol 1 (Oxford:

Oxford University Press 1983). Lewis gives a detailed discussion of knowledge

and scepticism in Elusive Knowledge,Australasian Journal of Philosophy74(1996), pp. 549567;reprinted in Lewis, Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); subsequent references are to this

reprinting and are given in the main text by page numbers in parentheses. Keith


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DeRose offers an intricate development of non-justificationist contextualism in

Solving the Skeptical Problem, Philosophical Review 104 (1995), pp. 851. I

hope to discuss DeRoses views in detail on another occasion.3 Robert Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification

(Oxford, Oxford University Press 1994). I should note, however, that Fogelin is

less straightforwardly anti-sceptical than the others, using contextualist ideas to

argue for the correctness, or at least irrefutability, of a certain kind of scepticism.4 Lewis takes the first option, DeRose the second.5 For a defence of the view that underdetermination is the key to Cartesian

scepticism, see Anthony Brueckner, The Structure of the Skeptical Argument,

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LIV (1994). Stewart Cohen replies

to Brueckner in Two Kinds of Skeptical Argument, Ibid., LVIII (1998).6 I owe the phrase high standards scepticism to Hilary Kornblith, who

presented a powerful critique of DeRoses contextualism at the 11th Annual

SOFIA conference, University of Oviedo, June 1998.7 This reply was suggested to me by Stewart Cohen.

8 This is, in effect, Dretskes (externalist) notion of a conclusive reason: E isa conclusive reason for P in the sense that, if P were false, S would not have

experience E. See Fred Dretske, Conclusive Reasons, Australasian Journal of

Philosophy29 (1971), pp. 122.9 Hilary Kornblith, Ever Since Descartes, The Monist68 (1985), pp. 264276.

Fogelin, op. cit., ch. 1.10 He is not alone in this: for example, Fogelin also holds that the level of scru-

tiny to which knowledge-claims are subject can be raised by reflection alone.

SeePyrrhonian Reflections, p. 93ff.11 Michael Williams,Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis

of Scepticism (Oxford, Blackwell 1992; paperback edition, Princeton N.J., Prin-

ceton University Press 1996).12 I give further details in Problems of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University

Press, forthcoming).

Department of Philosophy

347 Gilman Hall

John Hopkins University

Baltimore, MD 21218, USA


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