21 April 2008: Fergus Cantwell on Williams' Unnatural Doubts

I will present an account of Michael William’s rejection of radical scepticism in Unnatural Doubts (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1996)

For Williams:
• All sceptical problems are essentially dependant upon a foundational, internalist view of knowledge.
• Sceptical problems are intelligible to the extent that a diagnosis of the problem which attempts to show that scepticism is incoherent or not meaningful will not constitute an adequate antisceptical response to scepticism.
• Foundationalist presuppositions are present in all traditional attempts at direct refutation of scepticism (foundationalism & coherentism); these presuppositions are the source of the failure of these projects.
• There is an alternative approach to confronting scepticism: rather than denying its meaningfulness or attempting a refutation of scepticism, it is possible to discover theoretical presuppositions of scepticism that can be shown to be not present in nor necessary for ordinary epistemic practices and not independently shown to be true by the sceptic.
• Foundational views of knowledge and their sceptical counterparts hold that the objects of epistemological enquiry are of fixed, natural, epistemic kinds such as classes of belief (ordered by epistemic privilege) and relations between different classes of belief. He calls this view ‘epistemological realism’.
• Epistemological realism is an unfounded assumption. Constraints on knowledge depend on the context of enquiry which is set by semantic, disciplinary, dialectic, situational and economic constraints.
• There is no fact of the matter about what the conditions for knowledge are independent of consideration of such constraints.
• The negative results obtained by philosophical assessments of knowledge of the world merely reflect the methodological necessities, (such as not presupposing any knowledge of the world), of conducting such a project, and have no implications for the epistemic status of our beliefs in more particular forms of enquiry. Furthermore, these methodological necessities are mistakenly taken to reflect what is objectively and invariably required for any kind of knowledge and mistakenly taken to be real, objective, features of our epistemic position brought into focus by abstracting from the constraints involved in practical kinds of enquiry.

I want to examine William’s argument for the rejection of epistemological realism and also the externalist aspect of his contextualist theory of knowledge, specifically how he attempts to show that externalism does not open the door to scepticism.

Sources for Williams:
A neat summary of his contextualism can be found in:

Williams: 'Why (Wittgensteinian) Contextualism Is Not Relativism', Episteme Vol. 4, Issue 1 2007, pp 93-114,
(http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/episteme/v004/4.1williams.pdf)

The relevant chapter in Unnatural Doubts is 3: Epistemological Realism pp 89-134,

Also, there is a less demanding account in:
Williams (2001), Problems of Knowledge, (O.U.P.) pp 146-172 or (ch. 13-16 & ch.19 for a fuller picture)

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