Epistemological disjunctivism and the biscopic treatment of radical scepticism

Duncan Pritchard

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapter (peer-reviewed)peer-review

Abstract

Epistemological Disjunctivism Epistemological disjunctivism - at least as I defend the view anyway - holds that in paradigm cases of perceptual knowledge one knows in virtue of possessing rational support which is both factive (i.e., it entails the target proposition) and reflectively accessible. In particular, it holds that one can have perceptual knowledge that p in virtue of seeing that p, where seeing that p is factive, and where it is reflectively accessible to one that one sees that p. My interest in this chapter is to determine how best to embed epistemological disjunctivism within an anti-sceptical proposal. Accordingly, in what follows I will take it as given that epistemological disjunctivism is a defensible position, and that it has been shown to be rooted in our everyday epistemic practices, and focus instead on its anti-sceptical import. As we will see, while one can extract a particularly robust response to this problem exclusively from the philosophical resources provided by epistemological disjunctivism, I think a more nuanced approach is required, one that draws on insights from Wittgenstein. Nonetheless, let me first offer a brief overview of the view and its distinctive features. Epistemological disjunctivism is rooted in the pioneering work of John McDowell (e.g., 1995), but our focus here will be on the specific rendering of the thesis just offered. The view is highly controversial, to the extent that I think it is fair to say that until recently it was not seriously considered at all by epistemologists, on the grounds that it was obviously false. The main reason for this was that epistemologists have generally tended to accept the so-called new evil genius intuition regarding the nature of one’s reflectively accessible rational support. According to this intuition, since one cannot discriminate between normal (non-sceptical) conditions and parallel sceptical scenarios where one is radically deceived (e.g., as when one is a brain-in-a-vat, or ‘BIV’ for short), it follows that the rational support reflectively available to one in the former scenario (the ‘good’ case) can be no better than the rational support reflectively available to one in the latter scenario (the ‘bad’ case).
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationThe Factive Turn in Epistemology
EditorsVeli Mitova
PublisherCambridge University Press
Pages15-31
ISBN (Electronic)9781316818992
ISBN (Print)9781107175655
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Feb 2018

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Epistemological disjunctivism and the biscopic treatment of radical scepticism'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this