Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to get clear on how we should think about Mooreanism. I will argue that Mooreanism is best understood as a metaphilosophical response to skepticism rather than a particular position on specialized debates in first-order epistemology. This ecumenical understanding of Mooreanism implies that a broad array of epistemologists is free to be Moorean. In Sect. 2 I discuss several non-Moorean responses to skepticism. In Sect. 3 I provide an exposition of Mooreanism itself. In Sect. 4 I show that most epistemologists are free to be Mooreans. This is important for the following reason: to the extent that we want a non-concessive reply to the skeptic – rather than a reply that is partially or potentially concessive – we should be highly attracted to Mooreanism.
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Notes
To be envatted is to be a brain in a vat. As Steup (2011:105) explains, “If you are a brain in a vat, your brain was removed from your skull and is kept alive, floating in a vat. The nerve endings of your brain are stimulated in such a way that you have exactly the sort of experiences you would have if you had a normal body and were enjoying a normal life.”.
For a denial of closure, see Dretske (2005).
One problem with denying closure is that it allows “abominable conjunctions” such as that I know I have hands, but I don’t know that I’m not a handless BIV or I know the Easter Bunny doesn’t exist, but I don’t know that I’m not being deceived by the Easter Bunny. The phrase “abominable conjunction” comes from DeRose (1995). The Easter Bunny example comes from Steup (2011).
As Schaffer (2004:77) notes, “this implies that all knowledge ascriptions contain a syntactically real contrast variable q in their logical forms.”.
My characterization of contrastivism, and the example of hands rather than stumps vs. hands rather than hand-images, comes from Schaffer (2004).
As Pryor (2004:356) notes, one way we can defend our own favored response to skepticism is by “highlighting how unconvincing other answers to skepticism are.”.
My Mooreanism is very similar to Bergmann’s Commonsensism (2012:10): “Commonsensism: the view that (a) it is clear that we know many of the most obvious things we take ourselves to know (this includes the truth of simple perceptual, memory, introspective, mathematical, logical, and moral beliefs) and that (b) we also know (if we consider the question) that we are not in some skeptical scenario in which we are radically deceived in these beliefs.”.
A referee points out that my conception of Mooreanism or commonsensism builds in the idea that commonsense propositions are known, and that this is potentially too commissive. After all, couldn’t a Moorean get by with saying, in less committal fashion, that the truths of commonsense are more justified for us than are skeptical arguments to the contrary? This is a fair point and so two quick replies are in order. First, anyone who is sympathetic to the Moorean point of view but also nervous about the knowledge claim is free to substitute, for a sentence like “S’s knowledge that she has hands is immune to skeptical defeat by way of philosophical argumentation,” a sentence like “The proposition that S has hands has more going for it, epistemically speaking, than does a philosophical skeptical argument to the effect that S is not justified in believing she has hands.” Indeed, I will often speak this way myself. On my view, in any normal situation in which S is not a Gettier victim, S will know that she has hands, in spite of being aware of philosophical skeptical arguments to the contrary, in virtue of the fact that she has far more justification to believe that she has hands than she does to believe in the skeptic’s premises (supposing, obviously, that S’s belief that she has hands satisfies the other conditions on knowledge). Second, it seems to me that although Mooreans could get by with the less commissive way of putting their point, i.e. to speak in terms of justification or rationality rather than in terms of knowledge, they often do articulate and cash out the view in the more commissive way, in terms of knowledge.
I should point out that Mooreanism does not include the view that knowing that P allows one to simply ignore evidence against P. I agree with Baumann (2013) that knowledge doesn’t imply this kind of license. Baumann’s view is that knowing that P is compatible with ceasing to inquire whether P but also that this ceasing is compatible with a requirement to check whether P if you are presented with a reason R against P. Again, a Moorean can accept all this. The Moorean addition to this would be that when P is a commonsense proposition and R is a philosophical argument, this checking will favor P over R.
Huemer (2001:33) suggests that we can define “common sense beliefs” as those that “have the highest initial plausibility of all beliefs.” I think that commonsense beliefs do have this kind of plausibility, but I don’t here take a position on whether we should define them in this way.
As Bergmann (2008:62) says, “We tend to classify as ‘common-sense beliefs’ beliefs that are peculiar to our own culture or upbringing. Reid does not – or at least does not want to. His intention is to include only propositions that almost everyone believes (and knows) non-inferentially – things that are immediately accepted by sane persons once considered and understood.”.
As Rescher (2005:37) nicely puts this point, “The structure of the-earth-as-a-whole, the material composition of the moon, and the causative basis of sea-storms all represent issues that transcend the resources of common sense as we here understand it. None of these are matters which figure patently in the common experiences of great masses of peoples.”.
According to Rescher (2005:24), “even if reasoning is involved…the matter can still be one of common sense provided that the reasoning is sufficiently obvious that its availability is effectively universal.”.
As Rescher (2005:33–34) puts it, “The fact that common-sense beliefs are obvious and evident means that they do not require further substantiation because no substantiating consideration could be markedly more evident and unquestionable than that belief itself.”.
For a defense of evaluative Moorean facts, see Lemos (2020) and Fuqua (forthcoming).
This example, and the point it is meant to illustrate, come from Rescher (2005:22, 27).
As Rescher (2005: 90) puts it, “we are well advised to concede the credibility of common-sense teachings not because we happen to like them but because there are good reasons for doing so.” In the fourth chapter of his (2005) Rescher makes the interesting point that accepting commonsense propositions is the best way to make progress in the “project of inquiry” (98). If we don’t deign to accept commonsense propositions until we have come up with an independent validation of them, we shall be hamstrung in our attempt to get at the truth – this seems to be his idea. He calls this the “functional rationale for relying on common sense” (99), but it is clear that this functional rationale is a kind of epistemic reason: the most efficient way of getting truth is to proceed by accepting commonsense propositions until we’ve got a reason not to.
Some of our beliefs in Moorean truths, however, are probably absolutely indefeasible, such as my belief that I exist.
I am tempted to say that Mooreanism is a metaepistemological claim, but Fumerton (1995) has already used “metaepistemology” to refer to the analysis of epistemic concepts, and that is not what I am doing here, and that is not what Mooreanism is.
Thanks to a referee for helping me see the need to address this point.
A point also made by Pryor (2004:370).
Madden (1983) explicates and argues for the idea that commonsensism is a metaphilosophy.
For a nice discussion of all four of Moore’s anti-skeptical essays – “Hume’s Theory Examined,” “Certainty,” “Proof of an External World,” and “A Defence of Common Sense” – see Lycan (2007).
For a recent rejection of evidentialism, see Moon (2012).
Thanks to a referee for helping me see the need to make this point.
See Huemer’s essay, “The Lure of Radical Skepticism,” in his (2001), for a reconstruction of a skeptical argument that uses the Methodist Requirement.
For a recent argument that philosophers do rely on intuitions in this way, see Climenhaga (2018).
The Methodist Requirement targets my knowledge that I have hands, but I’m here saying I have good evidence for the proposition that I have hands. The former (I know I have hands) is an epistemic proposition, the latter (I have hands) isn’t. Does this matter? Most Mooreans do not seem to worry much or tarry over this distinction. As Lemos (2004) and others point out, simple epistemic propositions such as that I know I have hands are also matters of commonsense: they are also Moorean truths. Additionally, many skeptical arguments have specifically epistemological conclusions, e.g. you don’t know you have hands, your belief in other minds is unjustified, etc. It seems that a commonsense, Moorean response to such arguments would also need to have epistemic content, e.g. “no, I do know I have hand” or “no, my belief in other minds is justified.” Of course, it is not hard to imagine skeptical or revisionary arguments – such as might be made by an idealist – that conclude with “your hands don’t exist” rather than “you don’t know you have hands” (though the epistemic claim would then be an obvious entailment of the idealist conclusion). A Moorean who thinks that “I have hands” is the best way to understand the content of the commonsense truth in question will need to understand the skeptical arguments as more “metaphysical” than “epistemological.” In other words, for such a Moorean, the proper way to think about the dialectic is something like this: the skeptic says “based on argument A, thing X doesn’t exist” and the Moorean person says “no, X does exist, and I’ve got more reason to believe that than I do to believe A.”.
The point here can easily be reformulated for a non-evidentialist Moorean: I should believe what I have most reason to believe, and in the case at hand I have more reason to believe I have hands than I do to believe the Methodist Requirement.
There are minor differences in how these positions are formulated, but my formulations capture the way these terms are typically used. For discussions of liberalism and conservatism, see Pryor (2004), Silins (2008), Tucker (2010a), Neta (2010), and Willenken (2011). The choice of the terminology here is unfortunate, in my view, for Huemer (2001) had coined the term “phenomenal conservatism” just before those engaged in debate about perceptual justification started using the phrases “liberalism” and “conservatism.” Huemer used, and uses, “phenomenal conservatism” for the view that, roughly, a seeming that p gives one prima facie justification to believe that p. Owing to Pryor (2000) and Tucker (2010b) that view is often called “dogmatism.” A dogmatist about perceptual justification says that a perceptual seeming that P is enough, all by itself, to give one justification to believe that P – no independent justification to rule out skeptical hypotheses incompatible with P is needed for one’s perceptual seeming that P to give one justification to believe that P.
There are two ways that having an independent justification for ~ S might bear on having justification for H. First, it might be that the independent justification for ~ S is an enabling condition on having justification for H; second, it might be that independent justification for ~ S is part of the justification for H itself. These distinctions, and others, are drawn in Silins (2005).
Silins (2008) makes the same mistake I am attributing to Neta.
I am not myself partial to this version of Mooreanism. The idea that you have justification for believing that you have hands only if you also have independent justification for believing that you are, say, not a BIV seems to imply the very skepticism deplored by Mooreanism. It seems to be an instance of the following principle, as Huemer (2000) points out: “If P entails Q, then a precondition on S’s being justified in believing P is that S be justified in believing Q.” But, as Huemer also points out, this principle implies that “one could never be justified in believing anything” (406).
For an example of this sort of view, see Steup (2011).
The final version of explanatory coherentism that Poston favors includes a complication I’m here ignoring; cf. Poston (2014: 90).
Disjunctivists can say the same thing; for a Moorean disjunctivism, see Pritchard (2012:116–122).
This, in essence, is one of Cohen’s (2014) responses to Conee.
After reviewing the literature, Dougherty (2011:137) says that “there’s a clear consensus view that fallible knowledge is knowledge based on non-entailing reasons.” As the denial of fallibilism, infallibilism requires entailing reasons or grounds.
Given infallibilism’s apparently skeptical implications, it makes sense that, as Dougherty (2011:137) says, “there has been a tendency to treat fallibilism as an alternative to either dogmatism or skepticism.”.
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Fuqua, J. An Ecumenical Mooreanism. Philosophia 49, 2019–2040 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00380-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00380-0