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Preface
There’s an increasing awareness that one of the most pressing problems facing society today is a simple failure of people to recognize and act in accordance with available evidence. And while there’s nothing new about this general human limitation, this dysfunction may now be reaching a critical stage where essential institutions and even entire civilizations are threatened. To pick one example of many, climate scientists have been warning us of tragic global outcomes if we don’t curb carbon emissions. But this message is often met with skepticism by many decision-makers and the people who keep them in power. The result of this complacency may be catastrophic for our planet.
There have been many recent attempts to explain the current wave of pernicious ignorance. Broadly speaking, these attempts focus on epistemic matters as opposed to economic or moral issues. At the societal level, the internet and social media have made it easier for echo chambers and filter bubbles to proliferate, making it more difficult for knowledge to be widely disseminated. At the individual level, it has been said that a lack of trust in institutions or our fellow peers, plus various cognitive shortcomings like confirmation or self-serving biases have also contributed to the spread of misinformation.
However, there’s another potential source of error which is seldom brought up in discussions of practical matters. The source is philosophical skepticism, which is the topic of this book. This kind of doubt can shake one’s confidence in even the most well supported of beliefs. As we will see, there is a sense in which this type of doubt is much more powerful than those associated with the list of
epistemic pitfalls mentioned in the previous paragraph, and many others. If we go through that list, we notice that it is not very hard to say, in broad strokes, where the errors lie. One can very quickly get the sense for why suffering from confirmation bias or being stuck in an echo chamber can be problematic. In contrast, it is very hard to say what is wrong with philosophical doubt, if anything. In fact, despite hundreds of years of trying to respond to philosophical skepticism, there’s no agreed upon solution forthcoming from philosophers. The problem is so difficult that René Descartes felt like the only way he could overcome this doubt was to appeal to a supernatural entity. And others have simply succumbed to this skepticism, arguing that pervasive doubt is what rationality requires.
Despite the rational power of philosophical doubt and its potential to wreak havoc on entrenched beliefs, there’s been relatively little work trying to uncover its practical implications. I think this is due to both a misunderstanding of its scope and, relatedly, a prevailing attitude that philosophical doubt is nothing but an intellectual exercise. For example, David Hume thought that as soon as we leave our study, “nature” takes hold and philosophical skepticism dissolves. And Charles Sanders Peirce called this type of doubt “paper,” “illusory,” and “fictitious” lacking any type of real human impact. Admittedly, it is easy to have this impression since philosophical skepticism is usually presented in an extreme, almost cartoonish manner, where we are asked to consider the possibilities that we are living in a dream or under some mass illusion. But there are more local types of skepticism which basically work the same way as the more extreme variety.
I believe that this attitude we’ve inherited from Hume and Peirce has hindered investigations into the practical aspects of philosophical doubt, including how it is embedded in the mind and its impact on behavior. This is unfortunate. Research in this area, I think, can bear some real fruit not just in the areas just mentioned, but also with traditional questions in epistemology. For understanding where our philosophical judgments come from is relevant to assessing their quality, and hence relevant for assessing the quality of the theories
built on them. I am not alone in thinking this. The past twenty years has seen an increased appreciation for the importance of uncovering the cognitive underpinnings of philosophical judgments, including epistemic judgments. Although skepticism is an old subject, this book could not have been written twenty years ago.
I owe my gratitude to many individuals who were generous enough with their time to listen to what I had to say. I want to thank Peter Momtchiloff at Oxford University Press for helping to make this project into reality and for recruiting such an excellent group of reviewers, all of whom gave me brilliant and critical advice on earlier versions of the manuscript. I also want to thank Brad Armendt, Yuval Avnur, Nathan Ballantyne, Avner Baz, James Beebe, Samuel Cantor, David Chalmers, Juan Comesaña, Keith DeRose, Tyler DesRoches, Marcello Di Bello, Sinan Dogramaci, Julien Dutant, Natalie Fabert, Eugen Fischer, the Gaberdiels, Mikkel Gerken, Simon Goldstein, Michelle Hanna, Nat Hansen, John Hawthorne, Allan Hazlett, Zachary Horne, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Sara Jaramillo, Christos Kyriacou, the Knopfs, Bernard Kobes, Peter Kung, Bryan Lietz, Tania Lombrozo, John MacFarlane, Edouard Machery, Ron Mallon, Matthew McGrath, Sarah Moss, Jennifer Nagel, Shyam Nair, Shaun Nichols, Talia Paskuski, Isabela Pinillos-Fabert, Doug Portmore, François Recanati, David Rose, Jonathan Schaffer, Mark Schroeder, Jonathan Schwenker, Nicholas Wade, Timothy Williamson, and Noah Zimmerman for their insightful comments. I also want to thank audiences at talks I gave at the Institut Jean Nicod in Paris, the University of Pittsburgh, the Society of Exact Philosophy in Toronto, the University at Buffalo, the Free University in Berlin, and Washington University in St. Louis, as well as seminars I taught on the subject over the years at Arizona State University. Finally, I’d like to thank my partner, Natalie Fabert, for all the illuminating conversations on the topic over the years.
Contents
ListofFigures
Introduction and Book Summary
Skeptical Doubt
The Rational Tension Created by Our Skeptical Judgments
The Importance of Knowledge
The Traditional and Cognitive Projects
The Skeptical Rule
Hidden Rules and Reflective Thought
Determining the Rule
The Function of the Skeptical Rule
Applications
Outline of the Book
I. SKEPTICAL TENSION
The Need for an Explanation
Chapter Summary
Closure-Based Skeptical Paradoxes
Probabilistic Rational Tension without Closure
Knowledge or Justification
Getting Clear on “Skeptical Doubt”
Intuitions or Arguments?
Five Arguments for the Skeptical Premise
Summary of What Needs to Be Explained
The Human Attraction to Skepticism
Direct vs Indirect Doubt
Cognitive Explanations
II. THE POSITIVE ACCOUNT
The Skeptical Rule
Chapter Summary
The Guiding Idea
The Focus on Error
Sensitivity as the Core of the Skeptical Rule
Principal Base Sensitivity as a Heuristic for Doubt
Explaining Lottery, Local, and Statistical Cases
Explaining the Attraction to Global Skepticism
The Under-Determination Argument for the Skeptical Premise and Sensitivity
The Cartesian Argument for the Skeptical Premise and Sensitivity
The “Prior Justification” Argument for the Skeptical Premise and Sensitivity
Broad Function (Part 1)
Chapter Summary
Guided by First-Person Cases
Meta-Cognitive Preliminaries
A Model for Meta-Cognition
Meta-Cognitive Experiences
The Role of Meta-Cognitive Experiences
The Skeptical Experience
Some Negative Epistemic Feelings Will Not Be Produced by Meta-Cognitive Processes
Some States of Uncertainty Do Not Involve Feelings
Broad Function (Part 2)
Chapter Summary
General Description of the Model
Philosophical Reflection and the Monitor-Control Dynamics
Summary of Evidence that Skeptical Inclinations Fit the Model
Black Box Status
Functional Role of Skeptical Judgments
Evidence from Our Intuitive Assessments of Reasoning Knowledge-Action Norms
Experimental Work on Knowledge and Action
Knowledge and Practical Interests
Priority of First- vs Third-Person Judgments
Narrow Function
Chapter Summary
Taking Stock
Sosa and DeRose on Why We Deploy Sensitivity in Forming
Skeptical Judgments
The Bottom-Up Approach
The Bayesian Function of Principal Base Sensitivity
Further Remarks on PBS and Norm
What Counts as Explanatory Success?
III. APPLICATIONS
Solving the Skeptical Paradox
Chapter Summary
Three Grades of Solutions to Skepticism
Two Models of Justification from Heuristics
A Defeating Principle for Heuristic-Based Beliefs
Defeating Global Skepticism
Local, Lottery, and Statistical Cases
Are We Begging the Question?
Skepticism in Society
Chapter Summary
Creative Inquiry
Do Knowledge Norms Dampen Creativity?
Skepticism as an Antidote to Conservativism Bias
When Skepticism Hinders Inquiry
Conspiracy Theories
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder
Chapter Summary
OCD and Skepticism
The Doubting Disease
The Skeptical Model of OCD Doubt (SMOD)
Support for SMOD: Seven Features of OCD That Can Be Explained by SMOD
Final Remarks
Varieties of Doubt
Chapter Summary
Characterizing Doubt
Sub-Personal States of Doubt
Can We Doubt Things We Never Believed? The Spinozan Model
Heuristic Doubt
Doubt without Denials of Knowledge
Principal Base Sensitivity without Meta-Cognition
Doubt in the Brain: Deficiencies of Doubt
IV. COMPETING VIEWS AND OBJECTIONS
Philosophically Accommodating Accounts
Chapter Summary
Language and Philosophy
External World Skepticism
Relevant Alternative Theory
Eliminating Alternatives
What Counts as a Relevant Alternative?
Psychological Accounts
Chapter Summary
General Remarks about Extant Accounts
Availability Heuristic
Gerken’s Stereotypical Knowledge Ascriptions
Nagel’s Ego-Centric Approach
Hawthorne’s Sub-Cases
Turri’s Explanations
Objections to Sensitivity
Chapter Summary
Genuine Counter-Examples to PBS: The Closure Worry
Genuine Counter-Examples to PBS: Probative Yet
Insensitive Evidence Which Puts You over the Knowledge
Threshold; Preemption with Perfect Replacement?
Some Failed Counter-Examples
Grandparent
Williamson’s Under-Estimator
Ice Cubes and Garbage Chutes
Extreme Cases
Statistical Evidence
Small Changes in Statistical Evidence
Bold Prisoner
WorksCited Index
3.1
3.2
4.1
10.1
List of Figures
Simplified meta-cognitive model
Generic meta-cognitive model
Skeptical meta-cognitive model
Decision diagram for relevant alternatives
Introduction and Book Summary
Skeptical Doubt
This book is an attempt to investigate an important set of philosophical and practical problems related to skeptical doubt from the perspective of human cognition, an area where there has been quite a bit of progress in the past fifty years. The road will take us to some unexpected places. For example, I will argue that the capacity which draws us to philosophical skepticism serves a human rational function—which is to weed out hasty reasoning in our everyday life. The capacity also seems to play a role in creative outside-the-box thinking, conspiratorial thought, and even in some mental health issues, such as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Finally, our approach will allow us to develop a philosophical response to the skeptical challenge. A key to this argument will be to show that our inclinations toward skeptical doubt have a certain logic to them which has an identifiable flaw. We exploit this flaw to answer the skeptic. We will get to these points in this introduction and in the book, but we first need to clarify some terminology.
What is “skeptical doubt”? The term has meant different things throughout history as it does today. The following sharpening of the term is a good first-pass on how I will be using the notion, while capturing how the term is often deployed in the philosophical literature: A skeptical doubt is an inclination to judge we don’t know things where (i) this judgment appears to be in rational tension with some of our other ordinary commitments, and (ii), the inclination has a special source, one that many philosophers characterize as involving a focus on a scenario where there is a possibility of error.
There are fascinating open questions about skeptical doubt. First, there’s the normative project of explaining why giving in to skeptical doubt may be irrational or incorrect (or the opposite if the skeptic is right). Second, there’s the descriptive question of how and why skeptical doubt arises in the mind. Third, there’s the question of its scope: is skeptical doubt limited to just philosophical contexts or is it something that plays a significant role in our daily, social and political lives?
Historically, philosophers have mostly focused on the normative question. In addition, I think there’s been a tendency to think that the scope of skeptical doubt is limited mostly to esoteric philosophical contexts. On this conception, skeptical doubt is not seen as revealing anything deep about the human mind. Instead, it is seen as mainly revealing an interesting puzzle at the abstract level of rationality as opposed to manifesting a robust phenomenon at the level of cognition.
In this book, I take a different approach to skepticism. The centerpiece is a descriptive project. I try to uncover the mental rule (or rules) behind our inclinations towards skeptical doubt. Once we become clear on the rule, we can more easily address the normative project of determining what, if anything is wrong with the skeptic’s position. In addition, it will be easier to determine the extent to which skeptical doubt arises outside of philosophical contexts and in our practical lives.
I begin this introduction by discussing a few well-known or paradigm cases which exemplify the range and diversity of skeptical doubt. They include skepticism that might arise in scientific, legal, statistical, perceptual and (most famously) global contexts. Epistemologists will notice that the content of the doubts surveyed below continue to play a starring role in contemporary epistemology.
The Rational Tension Created by Our Skeptical Judgments
Let’s begin with the most famous type of skeptical thought experiment, often credited to the seventeenth-century French philosopher, René Descartes. Although Descartes was not a skeptic himself (he ultimately didn’t give in to his doubt, he tried to refute it by appealing to God’s benevolence) his discussion of skepticism was monumental in shaping the subsequent history of western philosophy. A modern rendition of Descartes’s thought experiment depends on reflecting carefully about the following fantastical scenario. Imagine that unbeknownst to you, you have lived your entire life as a brain kept alive in a vat filled with a liquid of nutrients. Your experiences don’t come from your eyes or ears—you have none—but from wires attached to your brain, hooked up to a super-computer. The programmer of the computer has simulated a rich life for you. Your spouse, parents, and children are props created by the programmer in a grand experiment to simulate relationships. Your travels, adventures, triumphs, and failures are fictions. None of it is real. You are just a brain, all alone in a vat of nutrients. Let’s call this the “brain in a vat” (BIV) hypothesis.
There are many variations of the BIV hypothesis all of which make essentially the same point. Descartes (1984/1641) himself imagined that we could be massively deceived by an evil demon. Recently, some philosophers have been talking about the possibility that we are living in a computer-generated simulation. Hollywood has popularized related ideas. For example, in the movie franchise “The Matrix,” human bodies are kept in pods and fed “real world” experiences by super computers who harvest the bodies for energy. All these hypotheses work the same way. Our total experiences of the world around us are posited to have an alternate aberrant cause. One is tempted to conclude, as we carefully reflect on these possibilities and our epistemic situation, that we can’t quite rule them out, no matter how far-fetched they happen to be. Few philosophers actually think that the BIV hypothesis is true or even likely to be true. It is a challenge, however, to say how we can know that we are not BIVs. What reasons can we give? Whatever we tell ourselves would be the exact same thing we would be saying if we
were in fact BIVs. Of course, many of us simply dismiss the hypothesis, but dismissing the hypothesis is not the same as showing that the hypothesis false. We should be able to give good reasons for why the BIV hypothesis is mistaken if that is what we think. It’s a scandal of rationality if we cannot do this.1
The BIV scenario tends to elicit an inclination to judge that we don’t know we are not BIVs. Indeed, many of us have the inclination to judge we are currently in no position to know we are not BIVs. This is so, even if we in fact believe we are not BIVs (which most of us do). I said above that skeptical doubt is in rational tension with our other commitments. Philosophers have very precise ways of bringing out this tension including the deployment of “closure” principles for knowledge. We will get to these more precise ways in the book. But we can still bring out the rational tension more informally here.
First, as just noted, most of us believe that we are not BIVs. Most of us believe that we are not being massively deceived by some super-computer or evil demon. It is an important feature of our modern conception of the world that we are not under some cosmic illusion. Presumably this is a rational belief—we have good reason to think this. But we saw that we also have an inclination to judge we don’t know we are not BIVs—we can’t rule out the possibility that we are BIVs. This puts pressure on the idea that we have good reason to think we are not BIVs. This rational tension needs to be addressed.
Second, in ordinary circumstances, we take ourselves to know many perceptual claims. For example, we take ourselves to know that we are standing by the kitchen counter or that we are sitting outside feeling the sun’s warmth on our face. But if we know these propositions, then we should be in a position to know other things that trivially follow from these propositions. For example, it trivially follows from the fact that you are standing by your kitchen counter that you are not a brain sitting in a vat (a BIV). By definition, a BIV is not standing by the kitchen counter (a BIV has no legs). So, if you know you are standing by the kitchen counter, then you are in a
position to know that you are not a BIV. But this last claim is in rational tension with your inclination to judge that you don’t know you are not BIVs. This is the second way in which skeptical doubt gives rise to a rational tension. This kind of tension requires us to adopt a “closure” principle for knowledge which, though widely accepted, some philosophers reject (more on this later).
Here’s another way of bringing out the tension which doesn’t depend on closure. Call this, the “probabilistic” tension. We saw that the proposition that you are standing by your kitchen counter entails that you are not a BIV (by definition). If we want to adhere to the laws of probability, for any single premise entailment, the probability you assign the premise must be less than or equal to the probability you assign the conclusion. So, the probability you assign to the proposition that you are standing by your kitchen counter should be less than or equal to the probability that you are not a BIV. So, here’s the rational tension. If you know you are standing by your kitchen counter, then you should be in a position to know you are not a BIV. This is because your rational confidence in the latter proposition (you are not a BIV) should be greater than your rational confidence in the former proposition (you are standing by your kitchen counter). But we saw that it seems to us like we are not in any position to know that we are not BIVs. This bit of probabilistic reasoning is another way of bringing out the rational tension between our apparent knowledge of ordinary things, and the apparent lack of knowledge that we are not BIVs.
Let’s move on to another skeptical scenario, this time involving perception. Unlike BIV cases, this scenario doesn’t threaten allof our beliefs about the external world. The skepticism is local. Imagine that you are looking at a red table in a store you have never visited before. Ordinarily, we would say that you know the color of the table, it is red. But what if you consider a slightly different question. Ask yourself, do you know this table is not white with tricky red lights shining on it? You probably feel the inclination to say you are in no position to know this (unless you directly investigated the lighting situation). This inclination is another type of skeptical doubt.
As before, we will be able to bring out the tension between this kind of pull to deny knowledge and our inclination to judge we do know things like that the table in front of us is red just by looking at it. For example, if I really know the table is red then I should just be able to deduce and come to know that it’s not white. In particular, I should just be able to deduce and come to know it’s not white with tricky red lighting shining on it.
Consider now a simple real-world example of skeptical doubt in a scientific context (which might have spontaneously occurred to you at some point). You just got a positive lab result for a medical condition (and suppose you in fact do have the condition). As you read the fine print, you notice it says that the test has a certain very low false positive rate. This is the probability of a certain type of error: getting a positive result when you don’t in fact have the condition. But now you wonder how you can know that your result is not one of those false positives that happen once in a while. Certainly, it doesn’t seem like you are in a position to know such a thing just based on your positive result. After all, the lab result doesn’t say: “this is not a false positive.” No such assurance has been given. As I will argue, our inclination to judge we are in no position to know our test result is not a false positive is in rational tension with our regular practice of straight-forwardly judging we know we are positive based on reliable tests (we regularly affirm things like “I know I have high cholesterol, I just got the results” or “I know I have Covid, I just got the tested”). Notice that from the fact that we are a real positive case, it trivially follows that we are not a false positive case. So, if we really know that are we positive based on some test result, then we should just be able to straightforwardly deduce and come to know that we are not a false positive instance. But it doesn’t seem like we can know we are not a false positive instance in this way. This is one way of bringing out the rational tension in our inclinations. In the book, we will further explore a probabilistic version of this puzzle.
Finally, let’s move from a scientific context to a legal one (Wells 1992). Suppose you are a judge deciding on a civil suit. The
prosecuting attorney is suing the Blue Bus company for damages because they believe that one of their buses ran over a dog (in fact, they did). However, the evidence presented is just that some bus or other killed the dog and that 95 percent of the buses in town are owned by the Blue Bus company. In other words, the evidence put forward is purely “statistical” and “by the numbers.” There is no concrete evidence which incriminates the Blue Bus company over the other buses in town. Many people say the judge should not find the defendant guilty on this evidence. (As an aside, I note that this is already a strange reaction since in civil cases, the threshold for guilt is often seen to be merely above 50 percent. See Wells 1992 for more details on the studies he conducted.) More pertinent for us, many people think the judge cannot know the Blue Bus company was guilty on this evidence. But this pull to say the judge does not know is in rational tension with our other commitments. In this example, we bring out the tension in a different way than in the previous cases. We are more willing to say the judge would know the defendant is guilty if instead of “statistical” evidence, we had a reliable witness where this reliability is also stipulated to be at 95 percent. So, although both sources of evidence seem to be equally reliable, we are less likely to trust the statistical evidence. There is something strange about this. The elements in this pattern of judgments seem to be in rational tension with each other.
We just surveyed some cases of skeptical doubt. These are inclinations to judge we don’t know in a range of cases. For example, in the scientific context, the skeptical doubt is the inclination to judge we don’t know our result is a false positive. In the global scenario, it is the inclination to judge we don’t know we are not BIVs, and so on. We noted that these inclinations are in tension with some of our other ordinary commitments. This is troubling because it reveals a potential inconsistency or incoherence in our epistemic concepts, especially the concept of knowledge. The fact that these doubts can creep into scientific, legal, and perceptual contexts suggests a practical urgency to getting a better understanding of this tension.
The Importance of Knowledge
The puzzles we have been discussing all involve the concept of knowledge. Getting to the bottom of them will help us better understand that notion. This is worth doing since knowledge is a valuable commodity. Humans often go through great lengths to possess knowledge. And in many cases go through great lengths to prevent others from having it. Humans often have a need to represent others as possessing or lacking knowledge. A survey of the Oxford English Corpus which is comprised of over 2 billion words reveals that “knows” is the fifty-ninth most frequently used word in English. It is even more common than “good,” “think,” “any,” “most,” “some,” or “could.” As philosophers have also pointed out, “knows” is used very naturally to explain behavior (he is here because he knew you were coming), to criticize (you knewthe bomb was armed, why were you careless?), and to recommend a course of action (we don’t know if this road will be safe, better take the other one). And in a recent target article in the prestigious journal Brain and Behavioral Sciences, Jonathan Phillips and collaborators (Phillips et al. 2021) argued forcefully for the prominence of “knowledge” representations in cognition. For example, they suggest that non-human primates attribute knowledge to conspecifics and point out that young human children attribute knowledge even before they attribute belief. These remarks suggest that representations of knowledge are central to how humans see each other and the world. This adds to the stakes of having a proper understanding of the skeptical puzzles under discussion.
The Traditional and Cognitive Projects
As I mentioned above, philosophers have long been fascinated by skeptical doubt. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there is no consensus on what (if anything) has gone wrong. Interestingly, the cases
discussed are often not treated in a uniform manner. For example, although philosophers feel the inclination to judge they don’t know they are not BIVs, many think that they do have such knowledge. But when they turn to the legal or statistical cases, their considered judgment often follows the intuitive skeptical pull. They say that the judge fails to know the Blue Bus Company is guilty when the judge bases their belief on statistical evidence.
In the literature, a variety of proposals have been raised to diagnose skeptical problems. There are three main strategies philosophers follow. First, it may be argued that skeptical doubt has led us astray. We really do know our test result is not a false positive, or we really do know that the table in front of us not white with deceptive light shining on it. This project is often seen as extremely challenging. In the case of global skepticism, it is tantamount to showing how we know that we are not BIVs. David Chalmers (2022, 45) notes that the challenge here is “one of the hardest problems in modern philosophy.” Refutations of skepticism in the history of philosophy are legendary. They have played central roles in the development of major philosophical world views espoused by important philosophers like René Descartes, Immanuel Kant, George Berkeley, and others.
Second, it may be argued that it is our ordinary non-skeptical judgments and practices that need revision. On this view, we really don’t know that we are feeling the sun on our face or that the table in front of us is red. The palatability of this strategy depends on the case in focus. For global skepticism, it constitutes a total capitulation to the skeptic and a revision of most of our ordinary epistemic practices.
Finally, we could argue that the apparent rational conflict or tension between skeptical doubt and our ordinary non-skeptical practices is an illusion. In fact, they are perfectly compatible. For example, it might be thought that “knows” is context sensitive. Sometimes it means something like “certainty,” expressing a high epistemic standard, and other times it means something much less epistemically demanding. When we are in the grips of the skeptical
scenario, we deploy a high standards version of the concept. That’s why we say we don’t know. But when we turn our attention to everyday matters, we opt for lower standards. So, on those lower standards we are happy to say we know. Thus, there’s no conflict between the skeptical and everyday judgments. These perspectives are talking about different things.
Let’s call the project which aims to decide between the three options just discussed in order to resolve the rational tension brought out by skepticism, “the traditional project.” This debate is still raging on with little consensus. In the last twenty years, however, there’s been an increasing interest in a different type of project. Proponents of this perspective aim to give a cognitive or psychological explanation for why feel skeptical doubt in the first place. The project is largely empirical because it focuses on why our minds are producing this doubt. Let’s call this the “cognitive” project. This book spends a lot of time on the cognitive project, but it has a lot of implications for the traditional project.
The cognitive project concerning skepticism is an instance of a growing research program which aims to uncover the psychological underpinnings of our epistemic and philosophical inclinations more broadly. This program is uniquely valuable on the assumption, which appears to be commonplace, that these inclinations (or their contents) are what counts as “evidence” in philosophical theorizing. Thus, in a recent introductory textbook, leading epistemologists Alvin Goldman and Matthew McGrath (2014, 39) tell us that “In assessing the merits and demerits of each [epistemic] theory, the evidence to which we appeal is to ask what judgments, verdicts, evaluations, or attributions people make, or are inclined to make, about the target belief’s epistemic status.” If this perspective is right, we simply cannot afford to ignore the cognitive project. For it becomes important in assessing the quality of this or that piece of philosophical evidence, and hence the soundness of philosophical theories built from them.
Unsurprisingly, the cognitive project has analogues in some other specific areas of philosophical inquiry. For example, philosophers
working on the meta-problem of consciousness are interested in exploring why we tend to think that there’s a problem about consciousness in the first place—why we find it puzzling that phenomenal experience can arise from physical and functional properties. The meta-problem of consciousness contrasts with the hard problem of consciousness which is to explain how phenomenal experience can arise from physical and functional properties. David Chalmers (2018, 10–11) has pointed that he has “long thought that solving the meta-problem might be a key to solving the problem of consciousness” and that “the meta-problem opens up a large and exciting empirical and philosophical research programme.” I think both of these remarks carry over to the cognitive project in skepticism. It can both help solve the traditional problem of skepticism and it is also a fruitful project on its own.
Now, to be sure, what we might call the meta-problem of skepticism is broader than the cognitive problem. This is because we can try to explain why we find skepticism alluring by appealing to other things besides cognition. In fact, there’s a long tradition of philosophers who think that the appeal to skepticism is to be explained via language or semantics. This tradition includes a line-up of distinguish thinkers such as Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Keith De Rose, and Stew Cohen. As I will argue later, linguistic approaches to the attraction of skepticism are importantly incomplete. I consider the cognitive perspective I pursue in this book to constitute a sharp break from linguistic approaches.
So, what is the exact connection between the cognitive and the traditional epistemic projects. There are different views one could have on this. First, one might think that there’s no interesting connection whatsoever between the traditional and cognitive projects. Each may be valuable on its own, but they are tangential from each other.2 Second, one might have the Humean-inspired pessimistic thought that after hundreds of years of trying, we should be resigned to the fact that there’s no solution to the traditional epistemic project. The best that we can do with respect to skepticism is to provide an explanation for why we were drawn to it
at all. Third, one might think that the cognitive and epistemic projects complement each other in the sense that a full explanation of the rational tension brought out by skeptical doubts needs to say why we were drawn to skepticism to begin with. The rational tension is not fully resolved until we understand why skepticism pulls us in (Schiffer 1996). This is the therapeutic version of the role of the cognitive explanation. It aims to calm our intellectual anxiety. Fourth, it might be thought that there’s a close connection between the cognitive and the traditional epistemic projects. For example, once we find out how skeptical doubt is produced, we might have some independent reason to not trust the pull towards skepticism. This would not constitute a proof of the external world. But it would tell us that the reasons we have to believe in skepticism are weaker than previously thought. This would seriously undermine the strength of the skeptic’s position.
Now it should be noted that these aren’t mutually exclusive, nor exhaustive options. My own view is that the cognitive project is required for a full solution to skepticism (the third option). And in addition, I think the fourth option is correct. The cognitive account I provide for skeptical doubt will tell us why the skeptic’s doubt is not justified. However, even those who accept the first and second options may be interested in the project undertaken here since they might find the purely descriptive accounts interesting on their own, as they illuminate our practices of attributing and denying knowledge to others.
So, let’s be clear about the nature of our project. I will be providing a unified cognitive account for why we are prone to skeptical doubt. For example, I will give an account for why we are inclined to judge that we don’t know we are not BIVs, why we are inclined to judge that we don’t know our test result is not a false positive, why we are inclined to judge that we don’t know that the table in front of us is not white with a deceptive red light shining on it, and so on, where these inclinations arise in contexts similar to those we discussed above. Part of the reason why I focus on these
judgments is that their contents have played a starring role in much of contemporary epistemology.
In our search for the correct cognitive explanation of our skeptical leanings, there will be some potential accounts which will not be contenders for us and can be ruled out immediately. This will happen for one of two reasons. First, they don’t capture the fact that the pull towards skepticism has rational force. Second, they may not be appropriately discriminating—they won’t be able to explain why we are drawn to skepticism in some cases but not others.
To give an example of the first kind of account, suppose some student is attracted to skepticism not because they find the skeptic’s doubts rationally compelling but because of other reasons, perhaps they find the teacher charismatic. This is not the kind of account we are seeking because it doesn’t capture the rational pull of skepticism. By “rational” pull here, we mean an epistemic type of rationality as opposed to a purely practical one.
Second, an agent may find skepticism rationally compelling because they think that if a belief is justified it must be ultimately justified by some foundational belief, but they also think that foundational beliefs are unjustified. It may follow, on her view, that all beliefs are unjustified. This account of the appeal of skepticism is intriguing and has a distinguished history, as we will see, but it treats all beliefs on a par. It’s not discriminating enough. It doesn’t explain why the pull towards skepticism arises so strongly for judgments like “I don’t know my test result was a false positive” as opposed to “I don’t know that I live in Arizona.” It is pretty easy for me to feel the inclination towards the first judgment. The second one requires a lot more work. So, although this kind of account for why we are drawn to skepticism may satisfy our rationality requirement, it does not satisfy our discrimination requirement.
We now have some constraints on possible solutions to our problem. Our account must make rational sense of our doubt, and also be appropriately discriminating. Let’s call a cognitive account which has both of these properties “rational and discriminating.” And let’s stipulate now that “skeptical doubt,” as we will be using the
term, only refers to inclinations to doubt produced by rational and discriminating processes.
We should not expect that there’s just one rational and discriminating cognitive process responsible for all skeptical doubt for all people and for all places. In fact, my view is that these inclinations can in principle be produced in a variety of ways. Sometimes, they can be the result of an explicitly laid out argument, they can be the product of a loose configuration of consciously accessible considerations, or they can be the result of a quick subconscious process. However, I argue that behind all these different ways of forming skeptical doubts, there is a single unifying core principle or rule ultimately responsible for the doubt. The content of this principle or rule is not something that is in normally introspectable. And in general, agents are not in the position to articulate this rule with any precision. This is our job as theorists.
The skeptical rule I have in mind was not invented by western philosophers and passed down to students through generations. I say this because skeptical doubt seems to arise for non-philosophers living in western and non-western cultures. In addition, it plays a role in ancient philosophical traditions not just in the west. As Barry Stroud (1984, 39) put it, skepticism “appeals to something deep in our nature and seems to raise a real problem about the human condition.” One main goal of this book is to provide further vindication of this perspective.
The Skeptical Rule
So, let’s turn now to the principle which I think is behind these various ways of getting at skeptical doubt. Most of the cognitive accounts in the literature have borrowed some known psychological process or bias and tried to repurpose it to explain the skeptical doubt philosophers have been concerned with. Unfortunately, those approaches have been unsuccessful. I propose we reverse the
strategy. We start with some principle or rule from the philosophical literature and then try to show that it is psychologically real. We do this by seeing what other behavior this rule may explain, and also by determining its place and function in the overall economy of the human mind. There’s great precedence for this kind of strategy. For example, a common assumption in the developmental literature is that children are like little scientists learning about the world. Psychologists construct models of children’s minds borrowing notions of confirmation and theory selection from the philosophy of science. Similarly, I think it is fruitful to borrow ideas from epistemology to understand how ordinary people think about epistemic matters.
Let’s take the case from above where we get a positive test result from the lab. Intuitively, we don’t know that this result is a false positive case. A natural reconstruction of our reasoning is perhaps this: “well, my test result says I am positive. But if my test result were a false positive, then this is exactly what we would expect— that my test result says I am positive. So, I can’t know that my test result is a false positive just based on getting a positive test result.” If this is a faithful reconstruction of our reasoning, then it looks like we are implicitly adhering to the following rule. If you know p, then your evidence E for it must be sensitive to p. Here, what it means for Eto be sensitive to pis that the following counter-factual is true: if p were false, Ewould have a different truth-value. Simply put, the rule says that if you know p, then your evidence for E would be different if pwere false.
This rule just mentioned bears some similarity to the principles of sensitivity defended by epistemologists. It is closest to the version put forward by Fred Dretske in his paper “Conclusive Reasons.” This rule won’t be the one that I endorse (as the rule which explains skeptical doubt). But it is well known that sensitivity principles do a good job explaining some of the core skeptical judgments we are interested in explaining. I will have much to say about these rules, but an important difference between my approach and many other sensitivity theories is that I don’t take the rule I endorse to reflect a true epistemic principle. Instead, I think of it is as a useful, but false
heuristic deployed by agents to generate doubt. As such, we can avoid many of the critiques that have been leveled against sensitivity principles from the literature.
The package thesis that some version of sensitivity can explain the attraction to skepticism together with the claim that sensitivity is not a genuine condition on knowledge has been defended separately by Ernest Sosa, Keith DeRose, and others. This book can be seen as an attempt to work out this idea in detail. My approach differs from previous accounts in four major ways. First, the type of sensitivity heuristic I deploy is different from theirs. It is a type of evidence sensitivity as opposed to belief sensitivity (this feature will allow us to straight-forwardly make sense of this principle in terms of Bayes’ theorem). Second, I give a different explanation for why we deploy sensitivity. Third, the explanation I focus on tells us how the sensitivity rule fits in the overall economy of the mind including applications to identifiable phenomena outside philosophy. And fourth, I deploy the insight in a unique way to give a novel solution to skepticism.
It is worth pointing out that critiques of sensitivity are often paired with endorsements of a different counter-factual condition: Safety. According to a typical version of Safety, if you know p, then there’s no close world where you believe falsely that p. This is a reasonable principle, but it won’t do for the purposes of explaining the attraction towards skepticism. This is because Safety is touted exactly for having anti-skeptical properties. For example, it won’t predict that we fail to know we are not BIVs. BIV worlds are distant worlds, so Safety has nothing to say about them. In contrast, sensitivity principles appear to get those cases right. It may seem to us that if I were in a BIV world, my evidence for my belief that I am not a BIV would be the same. So how can I really know that I am not a BIV?
