The Illusion of Doubt, by Genia Schönbaumsfeld

Tattva - Journal of Philosophy, 2015

Theoria Revista De Teoria Historia Y Fundamentos De La Ciencia, 2014

Essays on Traditional Epistemic Internalism, 2016

In this paper, I present and criticize three 'Wittgenstein-inspired' influential antiskeptical proposals, namely Williams' 'Wittgensteinian Contextualism', Pritchard's 'uber hinge commitment' strategy and Moyal-Sharrock' s 'non epistemic' account. I argue that these proposals fail to represent a valid response to skeptical worries.

The goal of this paper is to critique the prominent inferential contextualist response to radical scepticism offered by Michael Williams. A core criticism is that Williams fails to recognise that the sceptical problem that he engages with is not a single problem at all, but rather two logically distinct difficulties which trade on separate sceptical claims. It is further argued that the Wittgenstein-inspired account of “methodological necessities” that Williams offers is fundamentally flawed, and that he would have been better to have stuck more closely to Wittgenstein’s own characterisation of hinge commitments. Inferential contextualism is also independently shown to be problematic in various ways, not least in the manner in which it is in danger of collapsing into a form of epistemic relativism. It is argued that the right way to deal with the sceptical problem involves allying a Wittgensteinian account of the structure of rational evaluation with a radical thesis about the nature of perceptual knowledge in paradigm epistemic conditions, known as epistemological disjunctivism.

This paper examines the relevance of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty to the contemporary debate regarding the problem of radical scepticism. In particular, it considers two accounts in the recent literature which have seen in Wittgenstein’s remarks on “hinge propositions” in On Certainty the basis for a primarily epistemological anti-sceptical thesis—viz., the inferential contextualism offered by Michael Williams and the ‘unearned warrant’ thesis defended by Crispin Wright. Both positions are shown to be problematic, both as interpretations of Wittgenstein and as anti-sceptical theses. Indeed, it is argued that on a reading of On Certainty which has Wittgenstein advancing a primarily epistemological thesis, there is in fact strong evidence to suggest that Wittgenstein thought that no epistemic response to the sceptic was available—at best, it seems, only a pragmatic anti- sceptical thesis is on offer. Such a conclusion is not without import to the present debate regarding radical scepticism, however, since it poses a general challenge for how the sceptical argument is conceived in the contemporary literature.

Such enquiries are like puzzling over the question whether we are now asleep or awake. All such questions have the same force. These people demand that a reason shall be given for everything… But their mistake is what we have stated it to be; they seek a reason for that for which no reason can be given; for the starting-point of demonstration is not demonstration. (Aristotle, Metaphysics 4.6.1011a6-13.) The supposition of this book is that we are now awake and that we are directly experiencing the real world outside us, the world within which we live and move and have our being. This world moreover, because it is directly perceived, not only exists but exists more or less the way we perceive it to exist. No serious question can arise about whether it really exists and as we perceive it to exist; the answers to such questions are immediate and immediately known; they are not inferred from anything more immediate or more known. The sort of questions instead that do arise and excite our interest and stimulate our curiosity do not concern the 'that' of the world, but the 'what' and the 'how' of it, and the 'why' and the 'wherefore' and the like. Such alone, then, are the questions that, on the basis of this supposition, it makes sense to ask and not ask. But while the supposition of the book is thus clear, it may at once seem that the supposition cannot be sustained. For it seems plain that our experience, however immediate it may appear to be, is in fact not so but is subject rather to several hallucinations and illusions, or to cases of seeming to perceive things that are not in fact there or of seeming to perceive things that, even if there, are not there as they are perceived to be. Illusions is the word often used to refer, as it were, to piecemeal errors, errors that call into question particular senses on particular

Belgrade Philosophical Annual, 2019

The paper explores the anti-skeptical bearing of the kind of hinge epistemology I have developed in Extended Rationality. A Hinge Epistemology. It focuses, in particular, on the moderate account of perceptual justification, the constitutive response put forward against Humean skepticism, and the denial of the unconditional validity of the Closure principle, which is key in rebutting Cartesian skepticism. Along the way, a comparison with Wittgenstein’s own views in On Certainty and with the positions held by other prominent hinge epistemologists, particularly Moyal-Sharrock, Pritchard and Wright, is provided.

Philosophical Books, 2007