An argument often leveled against skeptical invariantism (SI) is – what we may call – ‘the argument from semantic awareness’. Roughly, the argument suggests that ordinary agents are not aware of the meaning of ‘know’ that SI proposes. Given that the semantic intuitions of ordinary agents are generally reliable, this implies that SI is implausible as a theory of ‘know’. Therefore, SI should be rejected. In this paper, I focus on the stronger extant formulation of the argument and explore how SI could, in principle, be rendered coherent with the argument (even if SI is not to be considered overall plausible). To this effect, I suggest an overlooked semantically externalist model of meaning and semantic awareness of ‘know’ that renders SI coherent with ‘the argument from semantic awareness’. The goal of the paper is modest. It is not to defend, let alone vindicate SI, but to indicate that SI is coherent with ‘the argument from semantic awareness’ in light of an externalist account of meaning and semantic awareness. I demur about the matter of the overall plausibility of SI.
Do irreducible moral and epistemic facts stand or fall together? In his critical engagement with Cuneo’s The Normative Web, Chris Heathwood maintains that they do not. Appealing to a version of the Open Question Argument, Heathwood argues that while reductionism in the moral domain is not feasible, it is so in the epistemic domain. Heathwood presents non-reductive realists with what appears to be a difficult choice: give up on either The Normative Web’s argument for non-reductive realism or the Open Question Argument. In this chapter, it is contended that non-reductive realists do not face this difficult choice. Central to the case is the claim that, while analyzing epistemic concepts in terms of descriptive ones has its attractions, it is considerably more challenging than Heathwood maintains. Some wider lessons are drawn by identifying the difficulties that face those who wish to defend a broadly reductive view of the epistemic domain.
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