Sosa on scepticism and the background

Philosophical Studies https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-024-02203-w Sosa on scepticism and the background Duncan Pritchard1 Accepted: 29 July 2024 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2024 Abstract Sosa’s influential work on virtue epistemology includes an intriguing proposal about background commitments, which he in turn relates to the Wittgensteinian notion of a hinge commitment. A critique is offered of Sosa’s proposal, particularly with regard to how he aims to apply it to the problem of radical scepticism. In light of this critique, an alternative conception of hinge commitments is offered that enables them to play a very different role in our treatment of radical scepticism. Keywords Epistemology · Hinge commitments · Radical scepticism · Sosa · Ernest · Virtue epistemology 1 Introductory remarks It is always a delight to engage with Ernie Sosa’s work. His contribution to contemporary philosophy, and to epistemology in particular, is unique in its ambition and scope. One always comes away from reading his writing with a fresh appreciation of the issues and often also with a new slant on debates the main contours of which had previously seemed settled. There is a lot within Sosa’s epistemology that I am broadly congenial towards, but I want to focus here on one aspect of his view where I think he has, unusually, made a misstep. This concerns his treatment of radical scepticism. I will be engaging with this aspect of Sosa’s work by considering what he says in his most recent monograph—Sosa (2020)—about what we might broadly term our ‘background’ commitments. As we will see, Sosa offers an innovative version of a relevant alternatives line in this regard, one that he thinks has application to the problem of radical scepticism. I am not so sure. I will also be considering what Sosa says in this work about Wittgenstein’s (1969) discussion of the commonsense certainties that are held to play a ‘hinge’ role in our rational practices. According to Sosa, at least some of these hinge certainties—the ones most relevant to the problem of radical scepticism—should be construed as background assumptions. In response, * Duncan Pritchard 1 University of California, Irvine, USA Vol.:(0123456789) D. Pritchard I will be arguing that this is not the right way to understand hinge commitments. Indeed, I will be suggesting that Wittgenstein’s remarks in this regard are especially important to this debate because they hold the key to showing where Sosa’s line on radical scepticism goes awry. 2 Sosa on the background Let’s start with Sosa’s account of knowledge and the envisaged role of background commitments within that account. As will be familiar to anyone working in contemporary epistemology, Sosa understands knowledge in terms of what he terms aptness. Roughly, a performance is apt (‘accurate because adroit’) when one’s success in the target endeavour is properly attributable to one’s manifestation of relevant skill. As applied to the epistemic realm, we thus get the idea that knowledge is apt belief—i.e., one knows when one’s cognitive success (true belief) is properly attributable to one’s manifestation of relevant cognitive agency.1 Sosa makes the novel claim that apt performances can legitimately presuppose background assumptions that the agent might not know are true—indeed, in some cases, which cannot be known at all—and which might in fact obtain simply by luck. In support of this contention, he gives the example of the performance of a nighttime baseball fielder who presupposes that the lighting in the ballpark is working properly. (Sosa, 2020, 160 & ff.) Sosa argues that this background condition can be nonnegligently assumed to be in place (at least if one is given no explicit reason to consider it), even if its obtaining is just a matter of luck. More specifically, its obtaining can be unsafe, in the sense that such a presupposition could have very easily been false (i.e., in close possible worlds the lighting fails). Nonetheless, Sosa claims that even when unsafe such a presupposition can be entirely legitimate. Indeed, he claims that for the baseball fielder to concern himself with the obtaining of these conditions, and thereby weaken his focus on the skillful task in hand, would be negligent.2 Transposed to the epistemic realm, the corresponding idea is that so long as one’s background assumptions are held non-negligently (e.g., one is not ignoring some specific reason to doubt them), then they can be operative in one’s epistemic performance without this thereby undermining its aptness. In particular, it doesn’t matter whether the assumptions are unknown or even that they are unsafe. So long as they are true, then one can make use of these assumptions in forming apt belief and 1 For the key developments of Sosa’s virtue epistemology, see Sosa (1991, 2007, 2009, 2015, 2020). Note that these days Sosa (e.g., 2015, 2020) fleshes out apt belief in terms of what he calls ‘complete competence’, which he understands in terms of ‘seat’, ‘shape’, and ‘situation’. Take the competence to drive. Seat is the innermost competence (which you have even when indisposed, and thus in poor shape, such as when drunk or asleep). Then there is shape, such that seat + shape would be a competence manifest when one is not drunk, asleep, and so forth. Finally, the outermost competence is situation, as when driving conditions are appropriate for the manifestation of that competence. Complete competence is thus seat + shape + situation. 2 In terms of Sosa’s ‘triple-S’ account of complete competence (see endnote 1), the thought is thus that the background conditions that can be assumed when manifesting apt belief with complete competence are not part of the relevant features of the situation. Sosa on scepticism and the background thus acquiring knowledge. Given that one’s operative assumptions could easily be false, it thus follows, as Sosa acknowledges, that apt belief, and hence knowledge, doesn’t entail the corresponding safety principle for knowledge (roughly, that one’s true belief, so formed, couldn’t have easily been false).3 As Sosa (2020, 126–27) notes, the conception of knowledge that results is essentially a version of relevant alternatives theory whereby in order to know we don’t need to exclude all possibilities of error but just the relevant ones. The irrelevant error-possibilities can be legitimately assumed to be false (i.e., without one having any specific reason to think they are false).4 That certainly sounds right. Knowledge can be fallible, after all (i.e., acquired via fallible processes), and hence why would it be required for knowledge that all possibility of error be excluded? If that’s correct, however, then the view seems to have immediate anti-sceptical import, since if any error-possibility looks like it would be irrelevant in the target sense of the term it is surely radical sceptical scenarios. Accordingly, our everyday knowle (...truncated)