ROCKS ONE ENORMOUS AND SUPERFLUOUS LIE. ”
The 19th-century author Charles Kingsley, doubting the view that God made the world complete with fossils that appear to predate the Creation.
SCEPTICISM
How might we respond to the sceptic, and counter their arguments? The sceptic points out that our belief that appearance is a good guide to reality is not justifi ed. But perhaps we don’t need to justify it.
Reliabilism claims that a belief (that a rose lies before me, for example) counts as knowledge if and only if it is true and is produced by a reliable process: one that produces a high percentage of true beliefs. Usually, what makes a process reliable is a causal
connection between what the belief is about (the rose) and the belief. In this case, the connecting process is vision.
Vision is indeed a fairly reliable process for producing true beliefs (it sometimes leads us astray, of course, but not that often). So, my belief that a rose lies
before me does indeed qualify as knowledge for the reliabilist.
DEEPER INTO DOUBT Of course, it is debatable whether reliabilism’s defi nition
of knowledge is true.
Nonetheless, it does
55
Reliabilism
Alvin Goldman has explored many aspects of knowledge in his work.
ALVIN GOLDMAN
The American philosopher Alvin Goldman (b. 1938) fi rst presented his “causal theory of knowing,” in which he outlined the reliabilist thesis, in 1967. In response to criticisms of the theory, he later argued that knowledge also requires the ability to discriminate between relevant alternatives.
Goldman then turned his attention to the links between theories of
knowledge and cognitive science, and then to situating knowledge in a social context, including law and education. He is also known for his work in the philosophy of mind.
seem that if the reliabilist is correct about what knowledge is, then the sceptic’s objections
can be countered.
But of course, even if the sceptic is defeated, another problem arises.
Perhaps the sceptic is mistaken. Perhaps I can know that there is a rose before me. But can I know that I know that there is a rose before me? In order to know that there is a rose, I would also need to know that I am indeed in possession of reliable senses. But actually there is no reliable way of establishing this. After all, even if my senses were unreliable, and my brain were at the mercy of a deceiving supercomputer, I would still trust in my senses, because the computer would deceive me into thinking they were reliable.
So it seems that even if the battle against scepticism has been won, a deeper worry remains. I don’t just want to know that there is a rose before me;
I want to know that this is something I know. And that kind of knowledge is something even the reliabilist must concede that I cannot have.
Reliabilism says that if the mechanisms by which beliefs are formed (such as sight) are reliable, then they constitute knowledge.
One response to scepticism claims that it doesn’t make sense, and in fact contradicts itself.
For example, we might argue that what “knowledge” and
“know” mean is determined by how we usually use the terms. If so, the sceptic’s claim that, say, “I don’t know I’m reading this page,”
makes no sense. For it is precisely through cases like this that we learn what “know” means.
Can such an appeal to
“everyday language” be made to work against scepticism? It seems not. Sceptics argue that even in such typical cases of
“knowledge,” we are making an unjustifi ed assumption. They claim it is a condition of knowing things about the world that we know appearance is a good guide to reality. We ordinarily just assume that this condition is satisfi ed, which is why we then typically say I
“know” that there is a rose before me, and so on. The sceptic then points out that this condition is not satisfi ed: for all I know, I might be experiencing a virtual reality that has been created to deceive me.
In which case, I have no grounds for supposing appearance to be a good guide to reality. So, even if we do learn the meaning of the word “know” by having typical “ordinary language” cases pointed out to us, it remains an open question whether the word is applied correctly in such cases.
Taking a different tack, the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle (see p.331) argues that the very idea of “error”
raised by scepticism presupposes that we sometimes “get it right.” Without
The incoherence of scepticism
correctness, the idea of error makes no sense, just as counterfeit art would
make no sense if there were no genuine art.
But do our notions of “error”
and “correctness” function in a similar way? Or do they perhaps function more like the terms
“perfect” and “imperfect?” True, we can’t have the idea of
imperfection without that of perfection. But it doesn’t follow that in order for us to have the idea of imperfection, something
perfect must actually exist.
Likewise, we cannot infer that we do know some things
simply because scepticism raises the possibility that we may be in error.
DOUBTING DOUBT The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (see
pp.326–7) developed a more sophisticated version of the ordinary- language approach. He believes the sceptic is wrong to suppose it makes sense to doubt claims like
“There is an external world.” “The external world exists,” and other fundamental beliefs are “background assumptions.” Wittgenstein concludes that these are not things that we can doubt or even know.
Take my claim to know that this is a hand that I am holding up before my face.
True, there are occasions when the sentence “This is a hand” can be used to make a knowledge claim (an authoritative statement of belief ) : on an archaeological dig, perhaps, when rummaging among small bones. But if I hold up my hand in broad daylight and say, “This is a hand,”
am I then making a knowledge claim?
Not according to Wittgenstein. Notice that holding up your hand under such circumstances and saying, “This is a hand” is something you would do if you were teaching others the meaning of the word “hand.” The sentence, under these circumstances, is used, not to make a claim, but to show what the word “hand”
Without real coins, counterfeits couldn’t exist. Ryle argued that, similarly, we must have some knowledge of truth to make sense of being mistaken.
The Venus de Milo perhaps represents a being of perfect beauty. Is the concept of imperfection only meaningful if perfect things exist?
SCEPTICISM 57