page 3 of Scepticism and Justification

Prescinding from the details of Kant's endeavour, it is arguable that the strategy has much to recommend it, and it is has been worked out in more detail both by the present writer and P. F. Strawson. Strawson was criticised by Stroud and others for having smuggled a verification principle into his version of the Kantian transcendental argument; my defence of the strategy consists in describing the foundational beliefs identified by such argument as undischargeable assumptions of our conceptual scheme. If that manoeuvre is right, it shifts the sceptic's position from a challenge about justification to a challenge over the question whether the conceptual scheme is the only one possible – for if it is not, then ultimate security for the practice of making knowledge claims is still lacking since the claims in question are only justified parochially to the given scheme. The task then is to show that it does indeed make sense to talk only of one conceptual scheme (on Davidson's grounds – perhaps, indeed, that 'the very idea of a conceptual scheme' is itself empty if there can only be one). And this is to say that arguing against scepticism thus, and finally, takes the form of arguing against relativism.

IX

So the claim being made here is this: properly anatomised, scepticism is a challenge, in a given area of discourse, to justify the epistemic grounds we assume or employ in that discourse. The motivations (the sceptical considerations adduced) identify where the positive task of justification is to be carried out. To shift attention to relativism as the last resort of the sceptic, it is necessary to make out more fully the claim that invoking facts about our frameworks of discourse (the conceptual scheme presupposed to given types of epistemic activities) settles the sceptical challenge at the level at which it has been traditionally pitched.

The intuition from which to begin is that one cannot know or believe just one thing. A commonplace belief about some object or sate of affairs in the world comes as a component of a network of beliefs between which there are complex relations of support and dependency. Questions about these relations, especially about those which provide justification for particular knowledge claims, are among the most important in epistemology. An idea worth examining, therefore, is that the network of beliefs constitutes an implicit inference-licensing scheme, in which specifiable general beliefs play something like a foundational role and in which a particular pattern of inference (I shall suggest that it is deductive inference on something like the covering-law model) is dominant. Each of the points here requires examination.

The expression 'foundational role' has just occurred. A characteristic shortcoming of foundationalist theories of any kind is their failure to yield satisfactory explanations of the relation between what they respectively identify as basis and superstructure in the epistemic edifice. Across a range of proposals there is little persuasive detail about the logical mechanisms by which these different candidates for the role of conceptual support play their part. A promising model of this relationship is suggested by the concept of a 'covering law', the idea being that an assertion about some particular matter is legitimate when its being inferable from a description of its grounds is a result of that inference's being licensed by our conceptual commitments for that region of interest, in the form of one or more covering generalisations. More fully, the idea is that certain assumptions serve as inference-licensers which stand to particular inferences either in the direct relation of a major premise, or as setting the terms in which particular arguments are permitted to count as sound in the standard logical sense. This intuition seems promising; the task is to make it out more fully.

The strategy is to argue that finitary constraints on our capacities as investigators prompt the need for a conceptual framework which enables us to mitigate the restrictions they impose. The two tasks confronting us at the outset are (a) to specify the constitution of the framework, and (b) to describe the relations between the framework and particular beliefs deployed in our ordinary epistemic practice. Because of the enormous practical difficulties of carrying out these tasks, an appropriate starting-point is to explore some possibilities for constructing a model which conservatively satisfies (a) and (b) together. The model is conservative because it attempts to specify the relationships at issue in (b) in standard logical terms, and because the commitments at issue in (a) are thought of, as uncontroversially as possible, in this familiar way: as the belief that there are causally-interactive particulars (and events involving them) occupying space and, whether or not they are objects of thought or experience while doing so, persisting through stretches of time. Because of the causal character of the relations between the elements of this ontology, we can be regarded as assuming also that the physical realm is nomological in character, a fact which allows us to place a high degree of confidence in the regularities we take it to display. This picture is straightforwardly realist, the key to its being so lying in our commitment to the independent existence and character of the realm over part of which we take our thought and experience to range. The rest we take to be concealed from view, its constituents inaccessible to us either in fact or in principle, depending upon the manner in which they transcend our investigatory capacities.

At this level of generality the description is neutral with respect to finer-grained metaphysical issues, in particular the questions whether there are other things beside concrete spatio-temporal items, and whether some or all of these latter should be thought of as events rather than particulars. On the question of causal laws, however, something more definite is implied by the suggestions to follow.

Certain commonplaces about our limitations as individual epistemic agents, together with certain other commonplaces about our powers in the same respect, offer to explain the role of the first order realist assumptions just nominated as constituting the (model) framework; as follows.

X

It is an all too familiar fact that the epistemic capacities of humans are finite. We suffer the 'finitary predicament'; our empirical resources for acquiring and testing information about the world are limited, and so are our powers of inference, analysis, recognition and memory.

A standard way of dramatising this predicament is to reflect on the circumstances of a lifelong solitary and in particular the question of what he might construct for himself in the way of a world-view with nothing available to him beyond his native cognitive equipment. There are several such models in the recent literature of epistemology, including influential suggestions by Russell, Strawson and Ayer. But one must guard against the failure to distinguish between different notions here: that of the egocentric predicament (the epistemically solipsistic predicament) which is what a true solitary would suffer, and the finitary predicament, which is suffered even by members of a community who share a language and pool their epistemic resources. If the notion of an egocentric predicament makes sense, it does so as a species of finitary predicament, for although what is central to its being effectively a form of solipsism is the individual's isolation, the problem which this renders insurmountable is the limited character of the individual's native cognitive resources, that is, his epistemic finitude. But there is good reason to think that talk of an egocentric predicament fails to make sense. This is because it turns on the idea of a wholly subjective perspective, in which the subject is supposed to recognise his perspective as his own without having any way of locating it in a setting of other perspectives, since these ex hypothesi do not exist. And this is controversial: for it would seem that the notion of a sense of self, or at least of a sustained centre of experience which in some sense recognises that experience as its own, cannot be rendered intelligible independently of systematic relations to other such perspectives - other selves - and this implies that to be a self is necessarily to be a member of a community of such things. Among other things, membership of such a community seems to be a necessary condition for acquisition of the scheme, best thought of as embodied in language as the base theory its semantics requires, and by reference to which such experience is enjoyed.

But recognising that the notion of an egocentric predicament is incoherent does not diminish the demands made on our epistemology by the fact of epistemic finitude. Here what is crucial is that even as members of a co-operative we suffer sharp finitary constraints on our epistemic capacities, and the dramatisation of that predicament which the egocentric case affords serves only to identify a gap in need of filling: the gap between what any individual might be imagined capable of constructing by way of a world-view on his own account, and the contents of the conceptual scheme we in fact possess.

Recognising both the existence and character of the gap is what, as noted, forces the abandonment of the Cartesian perspective in epistemology. According to that perspective our privileged access to the data of our own consciousnesses, and their incorrigibility, is what is supposed in large part to underwrite our confidence in what they convey. The sceptical challenges – based on what opens the gap, and renders it unbridgeable; namely, the considerations about perceptual relativities, psychological contingencies, test cases like deception by a evil demon, and the mediate and inferential nature of perception itself – are responsible for this; they are in effect fatal to Cartesian epistemology.

But there are still lessons to be learned from examining the gap which Cartesian epistemologists tried in so many ingenious ways to bridge or close. The lessons flow from trying to answer the question posed above, and which in fuller form runs: if we take seriously the fact that the cognitive capacities of individuals are limited, what follows for an understanding of the global theories we formulate and employ concerning the objects of those capacities? That is: how, given their epistemic limitations, do individuals come to have and use a shared theory of the world with putatively inclusive ambitions, namely, our common-sense conceptual scheme as adjusted and supplemented by science? What status can we suppose that scheme to have, given its radical underdetermination by the evidence which subscribers to it can acquire in the course of activities bearing upon the verification or falsification of the beliefs constituting it?

....4/