MICHAEL WILLIAMS

CONTEXTUALISM, EXTERNALISM AND EPISTEMIC STANDARDS1

1. INTRODUCTION

I want to discuss an approach to knowledge that I shall call simple conversational contextualism or SCC for short. Proponents of SCC think that it offers an illuminating account of both why scepticism is wrong and why arguments for scepticism are so intuitively appealing. I have my doubts. SCC was rst developed in detail by Stewart Cohen, following a suggestion of David Lewis. But whereas Cohens version of SCC involves linking knowledge with justication, Lewis himself thinks that contextualist ideas are best worked out without supposing any essential connection between the two, a view endorsed by Keith DeRose.2 Since I have discussed a justicationist version of SCC elsewhere, in connection with some of Robert Fogelins ideas,3 it is conversational contextualism in its non-justicational or externalist version that I shall mostly be considering here. To keep the discussion within bounds, I shall restrict most of my detailed commentary to externalist SCC in Lewiss version. But I hope it will be clear that my objections are more than ad hominem. Not only do the problems I nd arising Lewis haunt other externalist contextualists, such as De Rose, my deepest reservations, I believe, apply to SCC in all its forms.
2. SIMPLE CONVERSATIONAL CONTEXTUALISM

Consider: you ask me whether I know when the next train leaves for the city and I tell you Yes, two oclock. Imagine that I have I
This paper is accompanied by Timothy Williamson comments (see pp. 2533).
Philosophical Studies 103: 123, 2001. 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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have derived my information from an impeccable source, such as the latest timetable, so that it seems clear that I really do know. However, you explain that you have an appointment that you absolutely cannot miss. Moreover, it does happen occasionally that repairs to the track require temporary timetable changes. Have I looked into whether any such changes have been announced for today? No. So do I really know that the next train leaves at two? Suddenly, things seen less clear. Reection on examples like this suggest the following ideas: (i) Our practices of epistemic evaluation embody mechanisms that raise and lower the standards for attributing knowledge. (ii) this raising and lowering of standards consists in the expansion and contraction of the range of error-possibilities in play. (iii) Standards are raised and lowered primarily by changes in the conversational context, in particular what claim has been made and/or by what error-possibilities (defeaters) have been brought up or are being attended to. Epistemologies built around these ideas are contextualist because they admit that standards for attributing knowledge are subject to contextual variability. They are simple because they recognise only one principle dimension of epistemically relevant contextual variation: the raising and lowering of standards. And they are conversational because standards are raised and lowered by conversational developments: i.e. by what claims have been made or what error-possibilities have been brought up (explicitly or implicitly and either in conversation with others or in some internal dialogue). I do not think that proponents of SCC are committed to holding that conversational developments are the only factors capable of effecting changes in epistemic standards. However, it is essential to SCC that such developments be sufcient to induce standard-shifts. SCC links up with scepticism by way of an account of the special context of epistemic evaluation created by philosophical reection. In ordinary contexts, the error-possibilities we attend to are kept in bounds by various practical interests, such as my need to get to the meeting. But when reecting philosophically, we step back from all such everyday concerns. Accordingly, to make a true knowledgeclaim in the context of philosophical reection, we need to be able to rule out any and all possibilities of error, no matter how remote

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or implausible. But we cannot do this: indeed, sceptical hypotheses such as that I am the victim of an Evil Deceiver or a brain-in-a-vat are designed to resist being ruled out.Thus SCC adopts (iv) Philosophical reection, or doing epistemology, creates a context where, because there is no limit on the errorpossibilities that may brought into play, epistemic standards rise to the maximal level, where they turn out to be unsatisable. At rst, it seems that philosophical reection shows that the sceptic is right after all. When we set aside practical concerns and ask whether we ever really know anything about the external world, the very way we ask the question seems to force us to answer No. But, given (i), (ii) and (ii) above, we can resist this conclusion. We need only admit: (v) Although doing epistemology raises standards so as to make sceptical conclusions true, this does not invalidate everyday knowledge-attributions, which are true at everyday standards. Given that epistemic standards are subject to contextual variation, attributions of knowledge may indeed be false in the extraordinary context of philosophical reection. But this does not mean that they are false in more ordinary circumstances, when different standards are in force. The aim of contextualism is thus to insulate everyday knowledge from sceptical undermining. Turning the point around, scepticism is not so much straightforwardly rejected as contained. This way of dealing with scepticism is appealing for the following reason: a good response to scepticism should be diagnostic and not merely dialectical. We do not want merely to be shown that sceptical arguments go awry: we want an explanation of how they go wrong that also accounts for why they can seem so compelling. This is just what contextualism offers. The sceptic is difcult to dismiss because he is partly right: knowledge or perhaps truly claiming or attributing knowledge really is impossible in the rareed context of philosophical reection. The sceptics (plausible) mistake is to think that this result licenses the conclusion that knowledge is impossible generally. He takes himself to have discovered, while doing epistemology, that knowledge is impossible, when

MICHAEL WILLIAMS

he has discovered only that knowledge is impossible while doing epistemology. This conclusion can be taken two ways.4 One possibility is that doing epistemology temporarily destroys knowledge. Knowledge is elusive it comes and goes because it can always be undermined by unbridled reection. Alternatively, we might say that we while we always know everyday things by everyday standards, we cannot defend that knowledge by explicit anti-sceptical pronouncements. So, although we ordinarily know that sceptical possibilities do not obtain, we cannot express this knowledge in explicit claims. Knowledge-claims that bring sceptical possibilities into play create a context in which those claims are false. This position may have afnities with certain ideas of Wittgenstein, who stresses the impropriety of claiming to know such things as that the Earth has existed for many years past. Still, however we interpret (v), the sceptic, while crucially wrong, is partially right. Either way, then, SCC explains why the intuitions that seem to lead to scepticism have such a grip on us. It is a satisfyingly diagnostic response to the sceptical problem.

3. VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

The question is not whether the kind of contextual variation highlighted by SCC exists (it does) but whether a response to scepticism that appeals only contextual sensitivity of this type is diagnostically adequate. In approaching this question, I want begin with some remarks about why is scepticism a problem worth taking seriously. Then I want to discuss what sort of argumentative strategies might lead to scepticism of a suitably problematic variety. These remarks are necessary, if we are to command a clear view of what SCC is supposed to accomplish. Briey, scepticism is a problem because the sceptic presents us with apparently intuitive arguments for wholly unacceptable conclusions. In describing sceptical arguments as intuitive, I mean that they seem not to depend on elaborate or contentious theoretical ideas about knowledge or justication. If sceptical arguments were obviously non-intuitive, we could dismiss them (as artifacts of ideas we are not compelled to accept). Equally, if they led only

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to anodyne conclusions, we could accept them. But neither option seems available, hence the problem. There are two conditions that any type of scepticism must meet if it is to be properly unacceptable (hence worth taking seriously) today. The rst is that scepticism must make an unusually general claim about our epistemic disabilities. The sceptic must do more than remind us of our vast contingent ignorance, which none of us will deny. While the exact nature of the generality of the sceptics claims is a difcult matter, this much seems clear: the sceptic must issue a negative verdict on what seem pre-theoretically to be the clearest cases of knowledge, the cases such that, if we fail to have knowledge here, it is hard to see where we could ever have it. The second condition is that scepticism must be severe. Scepticism is often stated as the doctrine that knowledge is impossible. But whether this conclusion ought to bother us depends on how exacting we take the standards for knowledge to be. Scepticism that results from setting extremely high standards for knowledge is a problem only if we have some clear and compelling interest in living up to standards set that high. For example, philosophers of the early modern period restricted knowledge to truths that are demonstratively certain: truths that are either themselves intuitively self-evident, or deducible by intuitively self-evident steps from selfevident premises. By this standard, we know very little, if anything. However, this is a conclusion that most of us are willing to live with, indeed eager to embrace. We are all fallibilists nowadays. The general point is this: the more exacting the conditions for knowledge, the milder the scepticism that results from denying that knowledge is possible. Or rather, this is true with respect to scepticism that is knowledge-specic. The need to distinguish between forms of scepticism that are knowledge-specic and forms that are not is forced on us by Gettiers argument to the effect that the standard justied-true-belief analysis fails to state a sufcient condition for knowledge. Many philosophers try to handle Gettiers problem by adding a fourth clause, restricting the type of justication capable of yielding knowledge. If we adopt this strategy, we must recognise two ways of denying that knowledge is possible. One way concedes that lots of our beliefs have positive epistemic status

MICHAEL WILLIAMS

even high positive epistemic status but denies that they have a high enough status to amount to knowledge properly so-called: that is, the sceptic allows that we can meet the rst three conditions on knowledge, denying us only the ability to satisfy the fourth. This is what I mean by scepticism that is knowledge-specic. But another way is to reject our ability even to rise to the level to justied belief, in effect to challenge our capacity for making wellfounded distinctions with respect to epistemic status. This is radical scepticism. There are grades of knowledge-specic scepticism, depending on how exacting the standards for knowledge are supposed to be. Most fourth-clause theorists identify knowledge with true belief that is indefeasibly justied. Indefeasible justication is justication that cannot be undermined by the acquisition of further true beliefs. An even more severe standard would be that knowledge requires absolute certainty: that it rest on evidence that excludes every logically possible defeater for the belief in question. This gives us a distinction between indefeasibility-scepticism and certainty-scepticism, both of which are knowledge-specic. By virtue of being knowledge-specic, both indefeasbilityand certainty-scepticism are forms of high-standards scepticism. Neither is much of a problem. To be sure, certainty-scepticism was controversial once upon a time (when the demonstrative ideal of knowledge held sway), but it is not a very serious issue today. And I am not sure that indefeasibility-scepticism is much more problematic. While it might be nice to have indefeasibly justied beliefs, we can get along without them. And since we are not ever to be in a position to know that our best available evidence is actually indefeasible, the ideal of indefeasibility does not appear to be of much methodological signicance. Indeed, it is not clear that knowledgespecic scepticism amounts to more than fallibilism, which is less a problem than a rationally anti-dogmatic outlook. But there is no comparably benign way of viewing radical scepticism, which threatens to wipe out all distinctions of epistemic status. So I think that scepticism is clearly a problem only if it is radical as well as general.

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4. EXTERNALISM AND RADICAL SCEPTICISM

Strategically, scepticism comes in two main varieties, Cartesian and Agrippan. In the broadest terms, Cartesian scepticism depends on getting us to consider sceptical hypotheses that I am the victim of Descartess Evil Deceiver or a brain in a vat which seem difcult or impossible to rule out. To come to terms with Cartesian scepticism is to explain why such possibilities or apparent possibilities are not in fact the obstacles to everyday knowledge that they seem to be. Agrippan scepticism, which is centered on the problem of the regress of justication, has no particular connection with sceptical hypotheses. SCC is concerned with Cartesian scepticism, offering an explanation of why the remote possibilities described by sceptical hypotheses are not obstacles to everyday knowledge. SCC, in the form we are considering, has nothing to say or anyway nothing to add to discussion of Agrippan scepticism. Agrippan scepticism is essentially scepticism with respect to justication and concerns knowledge only to the extent that knowledge depends always and everywhere on justication. But SCC, in the version under examination, is developed in conjunction with radically externalist or non-justicational accounts of knowledge. For externalist advocates of SCC, Agrippan scepticism is handled by their externalism, before their contextualism comes on the scene. Returning to Cartesian scepticism, how do sceptical hypotheses lead to sceptical conclusions? One suggestion is that sceptical hypotheses pose underdetermination problems. The crucial feature of the brain-in-a-vat example is that the victim enjoys exactly the same perceptual experience as he would in his normal state. But surely, the sceptic argues, when it comes to forming beliefs about the external world, perceptual experience is all that any of us has to go on. If this evidence fails to discriminate between our ordinary beliefs and bizarre counter-possibilities, how can those beliefs amount to knowledge? For contextualists like Lewis and DeRose, this account of Cartesian scepticism links scepticism far too closely with internalist or evidentialist ideas about knowledge. If Cartesian problems depended essentially on such ideas, Cartesian scepticism, like Agrippan scepticism, would be met by externalism alone, leaving

MICHAEL WILLIAMS

no real work for contextualism to do. Accordingly, externalist proponents of SCC focus on an apparently simpler form of sceptical argument. Let O be a proposition about the external world that I would ordinarily take myself to know and H a suitably chosen sceptical hypothesis, such as that I am a brain in a vat. Then, in DeRoses formulation, this Argument from Ignorance (AI) goes as follows: 1. I dont know that not-H. 2. If I dont know that not-H, then I dont know that O. 3. So, I dont know that O. By itself, this reformulation gets us nowhere. Everything depends on the sceptics reasons for afrming 1. If these turn out to involve the undetermination of worldly knowledge by perceptual experience, no alternative account of Cartesian scepticism has been offered. But perhaps they need not.5 Our thoughts on why scepticism is a problem are relevant here. An advantage of understanding Cartesian scepticism as focused on underdetermination problems is that this account shows how we are threatened with radical scepticism. But there is a disadvantage too: it is not at all obvious that sceptical arguments from underdetermination are genuinely intuitive. The sceptic reaches his conclusion by placing us under epistemic disabilities that do not ow in any clear way from how knowledge and justication are ordinarily understood. The sceptic challenges us to rule out his bizarre hypotheses on the basis of experiential evidence alone. Even supposing that he is correct in claiming that we cannot do this, it is not clear that this is problem. We need to be shown that the sceptics demand is something that we are ourselves rationally committed to. This thought reinforces the need, felt by contextualists like Lewis and DeRose, to nd a simpler, less theoretically loaded way of posing Cartesian problems. However, turning away from underdetermination problems, focusing on the argument from ignorance, and characterising sceptical hypotheses as remote possibilities that do not normally need to be ruled out, itself threatens to exact a heavy cost. This is that, by understanding scepticism in these terms, contextualists like Lewis and DeRose seem to restrict themselves ab initio to an uninteresting high standard- or even certainty-scepticism.6

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To the extent that the Argument from Ignorance does not depend on undetermination problems, it surely invokes a conception of knowledge that makes knowledge hostage to our ability to eliminate of all logically possible (as opposed to all commonsensically relevant) defeaters. Lewis is quite explicit about this. The sceptical argument, he says, is just that
it seems as if knowledge must be denition infallible. If you claim that S knows that P, and yet you grant that S cannot eliminate a certain possibility in which notP, it certainly seems that you have granted that S does not after all know that P. To speak of fallible knowledge, of knowledge despite uneliminated possibilities of error, just sounds contradictory (419, emphasis in original).

Now even assuming that we have infallibilist intuitions, it is not obvious that they should be taken seriously. Maybe they are just leftovers from a discarded ideal of certainty. But let this go. Let us agree that we should take our infallibilist intuitions seriously: what follows? Scepticism, because ordinary knowledge simply isnt infallible? According to Lewis, no. By allowing shifting standards for fallibility, SCC offers a way out of the dilemma between fallibilism and scepticism. But why is this dilemma worth worrying about? Lewiss fallibilism is the doctrine that knowledge might be fallible: whereas what is ordinarily thought of as fallibilism is a doctrine about justication. And not justication narrowly conceived, but our epistemic resources generally. It is the view that, even when we are on our best behaviour epistemically speaking, we can never entirely exclude the possibility that the results we are led to may need revision. As for the infallibility that leads to scepticism, it makes knowledge depend on eliminating all logically possible ways of going wrong. So Lewiss scepticism is just the view that this cannot be done. In other words, Lewiss scepticism is just fallibilism as it ought to be understood. If SCC offers no more than an escape from Lewiss dilemma, it cannot be diagnostically adequate to the scepticism that really ought to trouble us. It is not even addressed to the right problem. Now some readers may have suspected for a while that my insistence that scepticism be radical is itself tantamount to a refusal to take externalist SCC seriously. An externalist will surely want to claim that, if we can detach knowledge from justication and still show how knowledge is possible, we can drain the interest

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from radical scepticism and the justication-centered arguments on which it depends. Of course, we will still have to deal with any forms of knowledge-specic scepticism that threaten to arise for non-justicational anlayses of knowledge. But knowledge-specic scepticism, not radical scepticism, will be the interesting problem. Matters are not so simple. For one thing, as we shall see, it is far from clear that any version of SCC offers a purely externalist account of knowledge (although, as we shall also see, advocates of externalist SCC are far from clear about this). But there are other complications to take into account. It is true that an externalist who takes no interest in justication, if he is concerned with scepticism at all, will be concerned with it only in some knowledge-specic form. However, this does not preclude an interest in radical scepticism. The general contrast is between radical scepticism and high-standards high-standards scepticism, not radical scepticism and knowledge-specic scepticism. For a justicationist about knowledge, who takes Gettiers problem seriously, knowledge-specic scepticism is inevitably a form of high-standards scepticism. For an externalist, at least an externalist who is also a contextualist, this need not be so. Such an externalist will insist that epistemic standards however understood are variable. In particular, they are much less severe in everyday situations than in the context of philosophical reection or of doing epistemology. This makes conceptual room for radical scepticism: the sceptic has only to argue that knowledge fails even by everyday, relaxed standards. If successful, the sceptic will erase all epistemic distinctions, even if they are explained in the externalist contextualists non-justicational terms. This means that the externalist proponent of SCC must have something to say about radical scepticism after all. SCC must be developed in a way that successfully insulates everyday knowledge-claims from sceptical undermining. The possibility of combining externalism with contextualism complicates the picture in another way. Once contextualism is in play, high-standards scepticism can become interesting as the diagnostic key to radical scepticism. The advocate of SCC can argue that the sceptics pretended radical scepticism is itself highstandards scepticism in disguise. Drawing on his account of the variability of epistemic standards, he can claim that we will suspect that

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knowledge fails in ordinary circumstances only if we mistakenly conate ordinary standards with the articially high standards induced by doing epistemology.7 So we have a diagnosis of radical scepticism that SCC needs anyway: the sceptic imports the severe standards appropriate to doing epistemology into ordinary contexts of epistemic appraisal. Scepticism, so to say, is always high standards scepticism, though an illusion of radical scepticism can be produced by reading inappropriately high standards into everyday situations.

5. JUSTIFICATION: TWO ASPECTS

Let us now look more closely at Lewiss case for the elusiveness of knowledge. For Lewis, knowledge is infallible in the following sense: S knows that P if and only if Ss evidence for P eliminates every possibility in which P is false. However, what counts as every possibility varies with context. Thus the standards for infallibility also vary: they are more severe in some contexts than others. Depending on turns in the conversation or someones train of thought, the range of error-possibilities in play expands or contracts, moving us between more an less demanding epistemic contexts. S knows that P if and only if Ss evidence eliminates every currently conversationally relevant or appropriate error-possibility. Since our evidence may eliminate all error-possibilities in play in one context but not all those in play in another, knowledge is elusive: it comes and goes. Context-shifts the expansion and contraction of the range of relevant error-possibilities occur in accordance with rules governing conversational presuppositions. We presuppose proposition Q iff we ignore all possibilities in which not Q; equivalently, we ignore whatever possibilities falsify our presuppositions. But we cant presuppose, or ignore, whatever we like: that would make knowledge too easy to obtain. The rules in question are rules of proper presupposition or proper ignoring. Knowledge is thus subject to what Lewis calls the sotto voce proviso: S knows that P iff Ss evidence eliminates every possibility in which not P Psst, except for those possibilities that conict with our proper presuppositions

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(426). I take it that the proviso is sotto voce because an explicit relativisation to context is not (intuitively) part of the content of an everyday knowledge-claim. This seems right. Some presupposition-rules are prohibitive: they tell us which possibilities may not be left uneliminated, if we are to have knowledge. For example:
Rule of Belief. A possibility that the subject believes to obtain is not properly ignored, whether or not he is right to do so. Neither is one that he ought to believe to obtain one that evidence and arguments justify him in believing whether or not he does so believe. (428)

Other are permissive. For example, a Rule of Conservatism allows us, defeasibly, to adopt the usually and mutually expected presuppositions of those around us. It allows us to ignore what they ignore, unless other rules force some commonly ignored possibility on our attention. Now Lewis presents this account of knowledge as nonjusticational. In Lewiss view, justication is neither sufcient nor necessary for knowledge. But Lewiss account of knowledge is much less purely non-justicational than he thinks. Lewis ties knowledge to the elimination of error-possibilities by evidence. However, he understands both evidence and elimination is a fully externalist way. When perceptual experience, Lewiss paradigm of evidence, eliminates a possibility, W, this is not because the propositional content of the experience conicts with W . . . Rather, it is the existence of the experience that conicts with W: W is a possibility in which the subject is not having experience E (422).8 In general, a possibility W is uneliminated iff the subjects perception and memory in W exactly match his perceptual experience and memory. If there is no such match, W is eliminated. The subjects evidence thus eliminates W whether or not he is aware that it does. Lewiss appeal to evidence, then, does not by itself introduce an obviously justicational dimension into his account of knowledge. But his presupposition-rules do. As Hilary Kornblith and Robert Fogelin have argued, justication has two aspects, both of which are involved in knowledge.9 One aspect the procedural aspect concerns epistemic responsibility: to be justied in holding a particular belief, a person must have formed it, or be retaining it, in an epistemically respon-

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sible way. Lewiss presupposition-rules are clearly concerned with justication in this sense: they are normative principles governing the possibilities that a person may properly i.e. responsibly ignore. Notice, here, how strong a normative constraint the Rule of Belief imposes: one may not ignore possibilities arising from what one ought to believe, whether or not one actually does believe it. Imposing such a constraint would be unintelligible unless we recognised justication, in the sense of epistemic responsibility, as necessary for knowledge. But as we have noted, and as Lewis insists, if knowledge were not subject to such normative constraints if we could x by at the possibilities that our evidence must eliminate we could presuppose our way into knowing anything we liked. We would lose any sense of knowledges being a positive or desirable epistemic state. The second aspect of justication has to do with the subjects grounds, which must be objectively adequate if he is to have knowledge. Now Fogelin happily concedes that, in some cases, evidence is best understood along externalist lines. So unless Lewis thinks that the elimination of error-possibilities by the propositional content of a persons evidence is never relevant to his knowing possessing knowledge, Lewiss non-justicationalist account of knowledge is identical with Fogelins justicationist analysis. But Lewis cannot think anything of the sort: his rules stand in the way. Once it is conceded that sometimes error-possibilities cannot be ignored because their relevance has been have been conceded which the Rule of Belief certainly implies they cannot be eliminated in a purely externalist way. Suppose you accuse me of improperly ignoring an errorpossibility, W. I cannot reply: Maybe Im not ignoring it; maybe my total current perceptual/memory state (whatever it is) would be different if W were to obtain; so I may have knowledge, though I dont know whether I do. To allow this reply would be to let go of the idea of epistemic responsibility hence the need for rules anything like those Lewis proposes altogether. When errorpossibilities are in play because consciously recognised, they must be evidently eliminated by the evidence at ones disposal, not just eliminated de facto. The admission that justication, in the sense of

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epistemic responsibility, is required for knowledge limits the extent to which one can be an externalist with respect to evidence. Lewis, however, fails to keep the normative character of his rules, hence the justicational element in his account of knowledge, consistently in view. Or perhaps it would be better to say, that other aspects of his position which are integral components of SCC prevent him from so doing. Seeing why, exposes the limits of SCCs diagnostic power.

6. HOW ELUSIVE IS KNOWLEDGE?

The nal standard-setting rule that Lewis introduces is the Rule of Attention:
When we say that a possibility is properly ignored, we mean exactly that; we do not mean that it could have been properly ignored. Accordingly, a possibility that is not ignored at all is ipso facto not properly ignored. (559, emphasis in original.)

Lewis calls this more a triviality than a rule (434). But it is the key to his position. And it is anything but trivial. One result of adopting the Rule of Attention is that Lewis can explain away apparent cases of failure of epistemic closure. The proposition that I have hands implies that I am not a brain in a vat. So by closure, if I know that I have hands, then I know that I am not a brain in a vat. But I dont know that I am not a brain in a vat: what could eliminate that possibility? So by modus tollens, I dont know that I am not a brain in a vat. It seems that, if we agree that sceptical hypotheses cannot be eliminated by evidence, but want to hold on to everyday knowledge, denying closure is our only hope. But it isnt. Wild sceptical hypotheses are properly ignored in ordinary circumstances, with he result that our evidence need not eliminate them. But if we try to draw explicit anti-sceptical conclusions from correct everyday knowledge-claims, the Rule of Attention effects a presupposition shift, creating a context in which sceptical hypotheses are no longer properly ignored. This presupposition-shift creates an apparent failure of closure: you know things at the start of the argument that you (temporarily) dont know at the end. This is plausible. Nevertheless, there is something shy about the Rule of Attention. Lewiss rules are introduced to prevent our

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obtaining knowledge too easily. But the Rule of Attention makes retaining knowledge too hard. Conceding for the present that farfetched sceptical possibilities brains-in-vats, demon-deceivers resist elimination by evidence, the Rule ensures that a persons knowledge vanishes every time such a possibility enters his head. Although the point of introducing presupposition-rules was to prevent knowledge-by-at, the Rule of Attention provides for ignorance at will. This is a striking asymmetry. Lewis is aware that the thought that the mere mention of a possibility makes it epistemically relevant has counter-intuitive consequences. He imagines two epistemologists off on a hike, imagining all sorts of wild error-possibilities, thus knowing nothing. But they dont get lost, which seems to mean that they retain a good deal of knowledge. Lewis suggests that a persons thinking may be compartmentalised, the philosophy compartment attending to sceptical scenarios, the navigation compartment ignoring them. What then does a person know? Lewis thinks this question is not felicitous, which it isnt if compartmentalisation relativizes knowledge to context. One knows for the purposes of navigation that one has reached the top of the hill; for the purposes of doing epistemology one does not know any such thing: there is nothing that one knows simpliciter. Now Lewis is clearly not altogether happy with this position. Indeed (recall the sotto voce proviso), his contextualism was originally structured so as to avoid the explicit relativisation of knowledge to context. He is therefore reluctant simply to refuse to answer the question about what a person knows simpliciter. If this question has to be answered, he suggests, the best answer is that a person knows that P iff one of his compartments does (443). But if we accept this answer, we are in danger of losing the elusiveness of knowledge and, with it, the diagnosis of scepticism. Doing epistemology now threatens only knowledge-in-a-compartment. Knowledge simpliciter is safe as long as there is knowledge in some compartment or other. The best we can do, by way of diagnosis, is to say that the sceptic confuses knowledge-in-a-compartment with knowledge simpliciter. But this is plausible only if we agree that we have two notions of knowledge, relative and non-relative. Moreover, the strategy of relativization threatens to play into the sceptics hands.

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What compartmentalisation really shows, the sceptic may say, is that, while we have all sorts of knowledge-for-this-or-that practical purpose, we never have knowledge simpliciter. This follows from our failure to command knowledge in the context of doing epistemology, which differs from other contexts precisely by prescinding from all particular practical purposes. Something has gone wrong. What? One clear defect in the Rule of Attention is that it wrongly equates ignoring something not being aware of it. If (rudely or quite understandably) I ignore you at a party, this is not because I dont realise you are there. On the contrary, I have to know you are there to ignore you. So too in epistemic matters. I can (properly or improperly) ignore i.e. not take into account possibilities of which I am fully aware. Lewis forgets the normative character of his rules. The psychological fact of noticing a possibility does not settle the normative question of whether it deserves notice. Purged of confusion, the Rule of Attention stipulates that no consciously recognized possibility may properly be ignored. But why should anyone accept this? In fact, Lewis has a reason. Because, like all advocates of SCC, he thinks of sceptical hypotheses as bizarre or remote possibilities which are, nevertheless, constructed so as to be beyond evidence, pro or contra, he has no way of explaining why they might deserve notice. In this way, sceptical possibilities are quite unlike everyday knowledge-defeaters. My worries about the train timetable, if they are not just neurotic, are triggered: either economically by the costs of error (I just have to make that interview), or informationally (I heard something about track repairs on the local news). But in the context of doing epistemology, practical interests are beside the point and informational triggers out of the question. So in order to say why sceptical hypotheses may not properly be ignored in the context of doing epistemology, the site of the sceptics somewhat hollow victory, Lewis must hold that merely thinking of such possibilities turns them into relevant alternatives.10 The Rule of Attention is an inevitable consequence of Lewiss which is SCCs conception of doing epistemology. This suggests that there is something amiss with that conception.

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I see no reason to accept the Rule of Attention, no reason to fall in with Lewiss attenuated conception of doing epistemology, and so no reason to accept the elusiveness of knowledge. But even if we accept all these things, we are led to nothing more than a bloodless high-standards scepticism, which need not perturb us.
7. RADICAL SCEPTICISM AGAIN

We are not yet out of the woods. To see why, we have to look at three further Rules, two prohibitive and one permissive: Rule of Actuality. The possibility that actually obtains is never properly ignored; actuality is always a relevant alternative; nothing false may be presupposed. (426) Rule of Resemblance. Suppose one possibility saliently resembles another. Then if one of them may not properly be ignored, neither may the other. (429) Rule of Reliability. [P]rocesses whereby information is transmitted to us . . ., perception, memory and testimony . . ., are fairly reliable . . . We may properly presuppose that they work without a glitch in the case under consideration. (432) All are important. Actuality and Resemblance solve the Gettier problem. Reliability captures what is right about causal or reliabilist theories of knowing (432). In my terms, it is Lewiss (externalist) answer to Agrippan scepticism. In a Gettier case, I form a true belief that P on the basis of evidence, E, that is a normally reliable indicator of the truth of P, so my belief is also justied. But in the special circumstances of a Gettier case, P is true for reasons that have nothing to do with E. In accepting P on the basis of E, I ignore possibilities in which E is available even though P is false. Since, depending on the details of the case, these possibilities will resemble actuality in various salient ways, they are ignored improperly, so that my belief does not amount to knowledge. Actuality and Resemblance permit Lewis to handle Gettier cases by giving him a way to capture the idea of good but circumstantially misleading evidence. The trouble is that, without some way of restricting their application, they get out of hand. According to Lewis:

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. . . it is possible to hallucinate even to hallucinate in such a way that all my perceptual experience and memory would be just as they actually are. That possibility can never be eliminated. But is can be ignored. And if it is properly ignored as it mostly is then vision gives me knowledge. (423)

The problem, as Lewis notes with admirable candour, is that actuality is a possibility uneliminated by the subjects evidence (430). So if I am a victim of demon-deception, I am always improperly ignoring this possibility: Actuality defeats Reliability. Here we have a powerful form of meta-scepticism. But this is not all:
Any other possibility W that is . . . uneliminated by the subjects evidence thereby resembles actuality in one salient respect: namely, in respect of the subjects evidence. That will be so even if W is in other respects very dissimilar to actuality even if, for instance, it is a possibility in which the subject is radically deceived by a demon. Plainly, we dare not apply the Rules of Actuality and Resemblance to conclude that any such W is a relevant alternative that would be capitulation to scepticism. (430)

Lewis says that we seem to have an ad hoc exception to the Rule of Resemblance. Clearly, it would better to reformulate the Rule so as to avoid ad hoc exceptions but, again with admirable candour, Lewis says that he does not see how. Notice the strikingly different attitude Lewis takes to Attention and Resemblance. The former Rule is welcomed for its power to destroy knowledge. Indeed, Lewis explicitly repudiates attempts to restrict it in ways that would limit its sceptical potential. The latter is treated in exactly the opposite way: its sceptical potential must be limited, even at the cost of a restriction that is completely ad hoc. But perhaps even more striking is the fact that Lewis does not even attempt to appeal to his contextualism to resolve the problem, even though the virtue of contextualism is supposedly its power to put the sceptic in his place. The reason for all this is exactly what I have been suggesting all along. Lewiss contextualism generates and handles only an uninteresting form of high standards scepticism. This scepticism can be handled by variable standards contextualism (SCC) precisely because it arises only in contexts where unusually high standards are in force. By contrast, the scepticism threatened by the Rules of Actuality and Resemblance is not contextually bounded in this way. If it arises at all, it arises in even the most ordinary contexts: it is, in

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fact, radical scepticism, as that problem arises within an externalist approach to knowledge. Lewis must repudiate radical scepticism precisely because it is a problem that a diagnosis tailored to high standards scepticism cannot handle. I said earlier that focusing on high standards scepticism might still provide they key to radical scepticism if it could be shown that the threat of radical scepticism is an illusion, arising from illicitly importing the high standards appropriate to doing epistemology into ordinary acceptance-contexts. But it should be clear that, without an explanation of the ad hoc exception to Resemblance, there is no way of saying whether or not this line of defence is even available to Lewis. The effect of the Rule of Resemblance, in its unrestricted form, is that even the remotest defeaters are improperly ignored in even the most ordinary contexts. In other words, the Rule obliterates the idea of contextually variable standards. Accordingly, everything depends on how the exception is explained. Once more, a sceptic might say that we ignore certain resemblances, thus certain relevant possibilities, for practical purposes. But we never have knowledge, or even epistemically (as opposed to practically) justied belief. Because such explanations must be ruled out, if we are to make any progress against scepticism, explaining the exception isnt a supplement to a diagnosis of scepticism: it is the diagnosis. I began by discussing two ways that arguments for Cartesian scepticism might be supposed to arise. One located the signicance of sceptical hypotheses within a range of underdetermination problems. The other made them crucial components of the argument from ignorance. The problem was that underdetermination scepticism, while unquestionably radical, was dubiously intuitive. Argument-from-ignorance scepticism, by contrast, while less theoretically loaded, seemed to amount to no more than an uninteresting high-standards or certainty-scepticism. We have conrmed these suspicions. Unmodied, the Rule of Resemblance combines with the Rule of Actuality to generate undetermination problems: that is how these Rules threaten Lewis with radical scepticism. Demon worlds resemble actuality in respect of the evidence at our disposal. This resemblance is so striking that it seems ad hoc and totally unsatisfactory simply to dismiss its relevance. But Lewiss contextualism suggests no other course, since is

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tailored to the high-standards scepticism generated by the Rule of Attention.

8. REMOTE POSSIBILITIES

The critical source of Lewiss difculties is his lack of clarity about the normative-justicational dimension of his account of knowledge. In stating the Rule of Resemblance, Lewis once more elides the distinction between the psychological and the normative. Here, the vehicle this elision is the notion of salience, which remains nicely poised between the psychologically striking and the epistemologically signicant. Purged of ambiguity, the Rule of Attention amounted to the implausible constraint that anything noticed is deserving of notice. Comparably purged, the Rule of Resemblance makes the same claim on behalf of whatever is noticeable. Or rather it would do so, if ad hoc exceptions were not imposed. The inadequacies of the Rules are thus mirror-images. For no apparent reason, mere notice can destroy knowledge. But also for no apparent reason, mere noticeability cannot. The question is: does contextualism of the kind Lewis defends have the resources to repair these deciencies? I do not think that it does. The diagnostic limitations of Lewiss epistemology are not an idiosyncratic feature: they are inherent in the general approach to knowledge that I have called simple conversational contextualism. The high-standards scepticism that this approach can handle is closely linked to SCCs conversational or dialectical character. Error-possibilities become relevant simply by being brought up or, more generally, attended to. When they return to the unspoken background, they cease to be relevant. Conversational contextualism lets knowledge disappear and reappear, in exactly the same way. However, the radical scepticism threatened by the Rules of Resemblance and Actuality has nothing to do with conversational factors. It arises out of the similarity between our epistemic situation in the actual world and our epistemic situation in worlds involving massive deception. It is this fundamental similarity, not the vagaries of conversation or attention, that poses the problem. Indeed, so far as the resources of conversational contextualism are concerned, this similarity is an invariant feature of our epistemic

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position. Result: no version of contextualism that limits its conception of context-shifting to conversational considerations will be able to handle it. The second limitation of SCC is its simplicity. SCC postulates a simple scale of standards for knowledge, from lax to severe, with severity as a function of the range of defeaters in play. The more remote the defeaters deemed relevant, the higher the standards for knowledge. However, there is no such simple scale of severity because there is more than one way of being remote. The idea of remoteness involved in the high-standards scepticism associated with the Rule of Attention is the commonsense idea of factual remoteness: sceptical possibilities represent worlds in which most of what we ordinarily believe is false. But according to the sceptic, while such worlds are factually remote (that is the point) they are epistemically close. So recognising this is not a matter of imposing higher than normal standards. It is just a matter of recognising the x we are always in. Of course, this could be questioned: are the ways of knowing available in normal and demon worlds really the same? How should ways of knowing be individuated? These are good questions, but following them up would take us far beyond the theoretical resources of SCC. Let me indicate very briey how I think they should be followed up. The place to begin is with the idea of the special context created by doing epistemology. There is something right in the idea that doing epistemology involves a distinctively unrestricted examination of our claims to knowledge. But this special character is not captured by the admissibility of arbitrarily far-fetched errorpossibilities, which become relevant simply by being noticed. On the contrary, the admissibility of sceptical hypotheses does not dene the context of doing epistemology. It is doing epistemology that makes sceptical hypotheses seem relevant. The sceptic, as I understand him, wants to ask certain highly general questions about human knowledge. For example, he wants to know how it is, or why we are entitled to suppose, that we know anything whatsoever about the external world. The key feature of sceptical error-possibilities, therefore, is not that they are remote but that they are generic. The thought that I might be a brain in a vat

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defeats every claim to knowledge of the external world, if it defeats any.11 Back to epistemology. If the legitimacy of sceptical defeaters is closely tied to the methodological demands of a particular theoretical project, the context of appraisal created by doing epistemology involves more than raising standards, ratcheting up what Robert Fogelin nicely calls the level of scrutiny. In a very real way, it involves changing the subject: the angle of scrutiny. A physicist can raise indenitely the level of scrutiny to which the results of a particular experiment are subject, repeating the experiment under ever more stringently controlled conditions. But if he starts wondering whether he is a brain in a vat, this will not inaugurate an even more scrupulous approach to his research: rather, the introduction of the generic defeater submerges the given inquiry in a completely different kind of investigation. Only if we concede the legitimacy of this distinctively general examination of knowledge do generic defeaters exert a normative claim on our attention. Accordingly, subjecting this traditional philosophical project to a close critical examination is the strategy I recommend. Following it through leads to a version of contextualism which is considerably more complex than SCC12 . SCC is a shallow contextualism. It cannot cope with deep forms of scepticism.

NOTES Versions of this paper were given at a conference New Directions in Epistemology, held at the University of Tuebingen, January 1999, and the 1999 Oberlin Colloquium. I want to thank the participants in those conferences for much stimulating discussions, but especially Stewart Cohen, Fred Dretske, Thomas Grundmann, Hilary Kornblith, Bill Lycan, Karsten Stueber and my commentator at Oberlin, Tim Williamson. 2 See e.g. Stewart Cohen, Knowledge, Context and Social Standards, Synthese 73 (1987), pp. 326. Lewis original hint is found in David Lewis, Scorekeeping in a Language Game, in Lewis, Philosophical Papers, vol 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983). Lewis gives a detailed discussion of knowledge and scepticism in Elusive Knowledge, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996), pp. 549567; reprinted in Lewis, Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); subsequent references are to this reprinting and are given in the main text by page numbers in parentheses. Keith
1

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DeRose offers an intricate development of non-justicationist contextualism in Solving the Skeptical Problem, Philosophical Review 104 (1995), pp. 851. I hope to discuss DeRoses views in detail on another occasion. 3 Robert Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reections on Knowledge and Justication (Oxford, Oxford University Press 1994). I should note, however, that Fogelin is less straightforwardly anti-sceptical than the others, using contextualist ideas to argue for the correctness, or at least irrefutability, of a certain kind of scepticism. 4 Lewis takes the rst option, DeRose the second. 5 For a defence of the view that underdetermination is the key to Cartesian scepticism, see Anthony Brueckner, The Structure of the Skeptical Argument, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LIV (1994). Stewart Cohen replies to Brueckner in Two Kinds of Skeptical Argument, Ibid., LVIII (1998). 6 I owe the phrase high standards scepticism to Hilary Kornblith, who presented a powerful critique of DeRoses contextualism at the 11th Annual SOFIA conference, University of Oviedo, June 1998. 7 This reply was suggested to me by Stewart Cohen. 8 This is, in effect, Dretskes (externalist) notion of a conclusive reason: E is a conclusive reason for P in the sense that, if P were false, S would not have experience E. See Fred Dretske, Conclusive Reasons, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 29 (1971), pp. 122. 9 Hilary Kornblith, Ever Since Descartes, The Monist 68 (1985), pp. 264276. Fogelin, op. cit., ch. 1. 10 He is not alone in this: for example, Fogelin also holds that the level of scrutiny to which knowledge-claims are subject can be raised by reection alone. See Pyrrhonian Reections, p. 93ff. 11 Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Oxford, Blackwell 1992; paperback edition, Princeton N.J., Princeton University Press 1996). 12 I give further details in Problems of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Department of Philosophy 347 Gilman Hall John Hopkins University Baltimore, MD 21218, USA