Abstract

The external world sceptic tells some familiar narratives involving massive deception. Perhaps we are brains in vats. Perhaps we are the victim of a deceitful demon. The sceptic proceeds by observing first that victims of such deceptions know nothing about their external environment and that second, since we cannot rule out being a victim of such deceptions ourselves, our own external world beliefs fail to attain the status of knowledge. Discussions of global external world scepticism tend to focus on the second step, where a number of well-known lines of resistance have been offered. But there has been little attention to the first, seemingly innocuous step. That will be the focus of this talk. Part one explains why these standard narratives are not convincing examples of cases where there is no knowledge of the external world. Part two undertakes a useful case study. David Lewis’s “Elusive knowledge” (1996) is often thought of as presenting an epistemological vision that is friendly to external world scepticism: as Lewis himself presents things, there are contexts where external world knowledge ascriptions are uniformly false and where true knowledge ascriptions are limited to either axiomatic truths or truths about our inner life. An examination in the light of the preceding reflections shows that the framework he presents is not so concessionary to global external world scepticism after all.

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