Replies to Leite, Turri, and Gerken

Abstract

Adam Leite is perplexed about my approach to external world skepticism: why not say that we know that we're not the victims of global deception?The resources for saying we have anti--skeptical knowledge seem ready to hand in a relevant alternatives approach to knowledge.What deeper philosophical motives make me say we do not have such knowledge?And what distortion of my own framework has me saying this?In reply, first, my motivation is simple: I take skeptical arguments from closure and from information--dependence seriously.1 Admittedly Austin himself is not moved by skeptical argument-he sees it as rather ramshackle; 2 but then the key skeptical argument he confronted was the argument from illusion, which was ramshackle.Skeptical arguments from closure and information--dependence are challenging arguments, and not so easily dismissed.Crucially, they explicitly represent themselves as growing out of common epistemic judgments and practice.I think 1 Closure based skeptical arguments are articulated by Dretske (1970) (1981); Nozick (1981); Stroud (1984); Vogel (1990), and form the basis of much contemporary epistemic discussion.See also Brueckner (1985); Cohen (1988) Hawthorne (2004).For the skeptical argument from information--dependence, see Wright (1985), ( 2002), who traces the idea to Wittgenstein. 2 Sense and Sensibilia reveals a disdainful attitude to skeptical thought."Ramshackle" is M.G.F.Martin's phrase in his manuscript, "Austin: Sense and Sensibilia Revisited."

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