Semantic Awareness for Skeptical Pragmatic Invariantism

Abstract

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.

Varieties of skeptical invariantism II

“…Standardly, infallibilist skepticism is motivated on the abductive basis of its explanatory ability to address a wide range of epistemic problems and puzzles in the theory of knowledge that fallibilist theories have found hard to address. In particular, Bonjour (2010) talks about the Gettier and lottery problems, Dodd (2011) about concessive knowledge attributions, Kyriacou (2017, 2019a, 2019b, forthcoming‐a, forthcoming‐b) about Gettier, the dogmatism paradox, concessive knowledge attributions, assertion and practical reasoning, semantic awareness and attributions of basic intellectual virtues/vices, Stoutenburg (2017, forthcoming) about knowledge denials and retraction, Climenhaga (forthcoming) about the lottery problem, assertion and epistemic modality, Nichols and Pinillos (2018) about language learning and Benton (2021) about the infallibilist presuppositions of hope.…”

“…7 7 See recent work along infallibilist lines by Dodd (2011), Kyriacou (2017, 2018, 2019a, 2019b, forthcoming‐a, forthcoming‐b), Stoutenburg (2017, forthcoming), Climenhaga (forthcoming). …”

‘Varieties of Skeptical Invariantism I & II’

“…4 The presented list of categories of skepticism is not meant to be exhaustive. 5 For some recent infallibilists, see Bonjour (2010), Dodd (2011), Kyriacou (2017, 2019a, 2019b, forth., Stoutenburg (2017 and Climenhaga (forth.). 6 See Stoutenburg (2017b) for some sympathetic discussion of 'the argument from absolute terms'.…”

“…5 5 For some recent infallibilists, see Bonjour (2010), Dodd (2011), Kyriacou (2017, 2019a, 2019b, forth., Stoutenburg (2017, forth.) and Climenhaga (forth.…”

“…19 19 See Kyriacou (2019a) on how modifiers can help us disambiguate infallible/fallible concepts of knowledge. …”