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Home , Cartesian doubt, Mental substance, Skepticism, The World (book)

1 2 3 4 Two Varieties of 5 6 James Conant 7 8 This paper distinguishes two varieties of skepticism and the varieties of 9 philosophical response those skepticisms have engendered. The aim of 10 the exercise is to furnish a perspicuous overview of some of the dialec- 11 tical relations that obtain across some of the range of problems that phi- 12 losophers have called (and continue to call) “skeptical”. I argue that 13 such an overview affords a number of forms of philosophical insight.1 14 15 16 I. Cartesian and Kantian Varieties of Skepticism – A First Pass 17 at the Distinction 18 19 I will call the two varieties of skepticism in question Cartesian skepticism 20 and Kantian skepticism respectively.2 (These labels are admittedly conten- 21 tious.3 Nothing of substance hangs on my employing these rather than 22 23 1 The taxonomy is meant to serve as a descriptive tool for distinguishing various 24 sorts of philosophical standpoint. It is constructed in as philosophically neutral a 25 fashion as possible. The distinctions presented below upon which it rests are 26 ones that can be deployed by philosophers of very different persuasions regard- 27 less of their collateral philosophical commitments. A philosopher could make use of these distinctions to argue for any of a number of very different conclu- 28 sions. Some of the more specific philosophical claims that I myself express sym- 29 pathy for in the latter part of this part (e.g., regarding how these varieties of 30 skepticism are related to one another) do, however, turn on collateral philo- 31 sophical commitments. The taxonomy presented here affords the terminologi- 32 cal resources for a precise statement of these claims. It cannot and is not meant to do more. 33 2 A for referring to the taxonomy offered here as “partial” is because the 34 overview of varieties of skepticism set forth here is in no way intended to be 35 exhaustive. On the contrary, much of the point of this paper lies in showing 36 that philosophical illumination can be afforded by an attention to differences 37 among varieties of skepticism. It should be possible to uncover further ways in which it can prove helpful to introduce further distinctions between varieties 38 of skepticism – distinctions that are elided or overlooked in the admittedly sche- 39 matic taxonomy furnished here. An additional, more particular reason for refer- 40 ring of the taxonomy offered here as “partial” is because it is in no way intend- 2 James Conant

1 certain other labels that might serve equally well to mark the distinctions 2 to which I will be seeking to draw attention. What matters are the dis- 3 tinctions themselves.4) Each of these varieties of skepticism has its origin 4 in a skeptical question – I will call these the Cartesian question and the 5 6 7 ed to accommodate (what I take to be) the variety of skepticism which (for lack of a better label) I will call Pyrrhonian skepticism: one which has its roots in an- 8 cient skepticism, which remains a (seemingly) live philosophical option until at 9 least Montaigne, and which continues to remain a significant philosophical 10 point of reference to nineteenth-century thinkers as different from one another 11 as Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche – each of whom regard it (though not 12 entirely for the same ) as not only a distinct but also (as compared with modern varieties) as a philosophically comparatively superior form of 13 skepticism. To try to take proper account of the similarities and differences be- 14 tween this variety of skepticism and the Cartesian and Kantian varieties respec- 15 tively would make this (already too long) paper unmanageably long. I will, 16 nonetheless, occasionally remark in a passing footnote on some aspect of the re- 17 lation between the generic features of this comparatively ancient form of skep- ticism and those of the relatively modern varieties with which I am focally con- 18 cerned here. A yet further variety of skepticism that some might think ought to 19 be sharply distinguished from the Pyrrhonian, Cartesian, and Kantian varieties 20 respectively is Agrippan skepticism (see Williams (2001), 61 ff.) The question of 21 whether Agrippan skepticism is a genuinely distinct variety – and, if so, how 22 it is best formulated in order to bring out its distinctive generic features – is not one that I can afford to take up here. 23 3 There is much that any conscientious historian of will find to object 24 to in my choosing to attach these labels to each of these varieties of skepticism: 25 does not (what I am calling) Cartesian skepticism antedate Descartes?; is not the 26 issue of skepticism a sideshow in Descartes’ philosophy and hence of relatively 27 minor importance (compared to other things – say, the new , or the quarrel with the Church) for an understanding of Descartes’s work as a 28 whole?; are not features of (what I am calling) the Kantian problematic to be 29 found equally in Descartes?, is not Kant more Cartesian than I suggest he is?, 30 is not skepticism equally a sideshow in Kant’s larger endeavor?, and what 31 about Hume? Such objections are directed at the aptness of these labels; and 32 it would take considerable space to respond to each of them. The point of the present note is simply to remark that it would be a mistake to think that 33 the integrity of this project (of distinguishing the varieties of skepticism I choose 34 to label “Cartesian” and “Kantian”) is much threatened by such objections. 35 Such objections speak only to the question whether I wouldn’t be better ad- 36 vised to re-label the varieties of skepticism with which I am here concerned. 37 Later on, a brief attempt will be made both to explain why I choose these par- ticular labels and to respond to a few objections of the above sort. For the most 38 part, however, such historical worries will have to go unaddressed here. 39 4 As we shall see, there are – in addition to historical – also philosophical grounds 40 for suspecting the stability of these distinctions. Two Varieties of Skepticism 3

1 Kantian question respectively; and each of these varieties of skeptical 2 question leads to a skeptical paradox – which I will call the Cartesian par- 3 adox and the Kantian paradox respectively. I will call the imaginary phi- 4 losopher who acquiesces in the Cartesian paradox a Cartesian skeptic, and 5 the (even more) imaginary philosopher who acquiesces in the Kantian 6 paradox a Kantian skeptic. The customary response to each of these para- 7 doxes is to seek a way to entitle oneself to do something other than ac- 8 quiesce in the paradoxical conclusion, by refuting or dissolving or diag- 9 nosing or by-passing the paradox in question. This gives rise to two va- 10 rieties of philosophical problematic, flowing from such attempts to ad- 11 dress each of these two sorts of skeptic, that I will call the Cartesian prob- 12 lematic and the Kantian problematic respectively. It is with these twin 13 problematics that I will be primarily concerned here and which I will 14 be discussing and referring to as “varieties of skepticism”. According 15 to this unconventional idiom, the term “skepticism” (and its variants, 16 such as “Cartesian skepticism” or “Kantian skepticism”) therefore refers 17 not just to one particular sort of philosophical position (i.e., that held by 18 one or another sort of skeptic) but rather to the wider dialectical space 19 within which philosophers occupying a range of apparently opposed 20 philosophical positions (such as “realism”, “”, “”, 21 etc.) engage one another, while seeking a stable way to answer the skep- 22 tic’s question in the affirmative rather than (as the skeptic himself does) 23 in the negative.5 So, according to the terminology I am here introduc- 24 ing, a philosopher can be concerned with the Cartesian skeptical prob- 25 lematic without himself being a Cartesian skeptic; and, indeed, Des- 26 cartes was such a philosopher. And, according to this terminology, 27 28 5 Such an inclusive use of the term ‘skepticism’, while unusual, is not unprece- 29 dented. For a similarly inclusive use, especially in connection with Cartesian 30 skepticism, see, for example, Cavell (1979): 31 I do not … confine the term [‘skepticism’] to philosophers who wind up de- 32 nying that we can everknow; Iapply it to any view which takes the existence of to be a problem of .A crucial step for me, in calling an 33 argument skeptical, is that it contain a passage running roughly,“So we don’t 34 know (on the basis of the senses (or behavior) alone); then (how) do we kno- 35 w?”.It is at this stage that break into , Critical Re- 36 alism, etc…. I hope itwill not seem perverse that I lump views in such a way, 37 taking the very raising of the question ofknowledge in a certain form, or , to constitute skepticism, regardless of whether a philosophytakes itself to have 38 answered the question affirmatively or negatively. It is a perspective from which- 39 skepticism and (what Kant calls) dogmatism are made in one another’s image, 40 leaving nothing forchoice. (46) 4 James Conant

1 the same holds for the relation between being concerned with the Kant- 2 ian skeptical problematic, being a Kantian skeptic, and being Kant. 3 The following is an excerpt from the classic formulation of the Car- 4 tesian problematic: 5 How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar events – 6 that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire – when in I 7 am lying undressed in bed! Yet at the moment my eyes are certainly 8 wide awake when I look at this piece of paper; I shake my head and it 9 is not asleep; as I stretch out and feel my hand I do so deliberately, and I know what I am doing. All this would not happen with such distinctness 10 to someone asleep. Indeed! As if I did not remember other occasions 11 when I have been tricked by exactly similar thoughts while asleep! As I 12 think about this more carefully, I see plainly that there are never any 13 sure signs by means of which being awake can be distinguished from 14 being asleep…. Suppose then that I am dreaming, and that these particulars – that my eyes are open, that I am moving my head and stretching out my 15 hands – are not true. Perhaps, indeed, I do not even have such hands or 16 such a body at all.6 17 18 I wish to contrast the skeptical problematic which figures in the above 19 passage with the one which figures in the following excerpt from Kant: 20 The a priori conditions of a possible experience in general are at the same 21 time conditions of the possibility of objects of experience. Now I maintain 22 that the categories … are nothing but the conditions of thought in a pos- sible experience…. [A]nd without such unity … no thoroughgoing, uni- 23 versal, and therefore necessary, unity of would be met 24 with in the manifold of . These perceptions would not then be- 25 long to any experience, consequently would be without an object, merely a 7 26 blind play of representations, less even than a dream. 27 The problematic of the first of these passages centers on how to distin- 28 guish between dreaming that one is experiencing something and actually 29 experiencing it. The problematic of the second of these passages centers 30 on what it takes to be able to dream that one is experiencing something. 31 That is to say, the second of these two problematics focuses on the con- 32 ditions of the possibility of something that the first problematic takes for 33 granted. I take the (apparent) difference here to be a consequential one. 34 The most familiar way of formulating the contrast between these 35 two problematics is as one of knowledge vs. the conditions of knowledge. 36 Thus one is often told something along the following lines: The Carte- 37 38 6 The quotation is drawn from the fifth and sixth paragraphs of Descartes’s First 39 Meditation (Descartes (1986)). 40 7 Kant (1998), A111 f. Two Varieties of Skepticism 5

1 sian wants to arrive at knowledge; the Kantian wants to arrive at the 2 ground of the possibility of knowledge. But what does that mean? 3 There are lots of ways of unpacking this contrast. I will briefly indicate 4 a few of the different points upon which the accent can fall in an un- 5 packing of this contrast. I will, however, want to claim that these appa- 6 rently distinct formulations can be seen, in the end, to come to the same 7 thing. Here are three ways one might go about unpacking this contrast: 8 1. Actuality vs. possibility. Cartesian skepticism takes the possibility 9 of experience for granted; its question has to do with actuality. 10 Hence the importance of the word ‘real’ in Cartesian formulations 11 of the skeptical problematic: are things really as they seem? Kantian 12 skepticism brings within the scope of its worry that which the Car- 13 tesian skeptic takes for granted: that experience possesses the requi- 14 site unity so much as to be able to be about something. Hence the 15 importance of the word ‘possible’ in Kantian formulations of the 16 skeptical problematic: how is experience (so much as) possible? 17 2. Being so vs. being so.8 Cartesian skepticism calls into question the 18 veridicality of one’s experience; Kantian skepticism calls into question 19 the intelligibility of experience. The Cartesian problematic is con- 20 cerned with the question: How can I know that things are as they 21 seem? Hence the worry in the Cartesian problematic focuses on 22 an inferential step from appearance to . The Kantian problem- 23 atic is concerned with the question: How can things so much as seem 24 to be a certain way? Hence the worry in the Kantian problematic 25 focuses on the conditions of the possibility of the kind of unity pre- 26 supposed by the Cartesian (i.e., that which the Cartesian seeks to 27 infer from): what sort of unity must characterize a “play of presenta- 28 tions” for it to be more than “a merely blind play”, for it to possess 29 the aspect of offering appearances – for it to possess the character of 30 being of an object. 31 3. vs. objective purport. The Cartesian wants to know which 32 of his thoughts are true, which of his experiences are veridical. The 33 Cartesian skeptic therefore worries about the transition from a sen- 34 sory experience to a judgement, from a thought to (what Frege calls) 35 its truth-value. Hence the Cartesian problematic inquires into the 36 37 8 I owe this way of formulating the contrast to . See Cavell (1979), 38 45. (However, I make a use of this contrast here – to formulate the distinction 39 between Cartesian and Kantian skepticism – that Cavell himself might not ap- 40 prove of.) 6 James Conant

1 grounds of truth: given that this is what we are inclined to judge, do 2 we know that we judge truthfully in so judging? The Kantian skep- 3 tic seems to deprive us of the resources for so much as being able to 4 enjoy an experience (waking or dreaming), for so much as being 5 able to frame a thought (true or false). The Kantian problematic in- 6 quires into the grounds of the possibility of being able to enjoy an 7 experience, entertain a thought-content. The Kantian asks: What 8 does it take to have thoughts that are vulnerable to how things 9 are? The Kantian problematic is concerned, in the first instance, 10 not with truth but with what it is to stick your neck out in thinking, 11 with Kant calls the objective validity of judgment (the possibility of 12 something’s being a candidate for truth or falsehood) – with what 13 I will henceforth call the objective purport of judgement. 14 In any area of philosophy in which one finds one of these two varieties 15 of skepticism, one generally also finds the other. This is not to deny that 16 in some areas of philosophy one of these problematics may come to 17 seem more gripping or otherwise deserving of interest than the other. 18 I do want to argue, however, that wherever one of these sorts of skep- 19 ticism is possible, the other is also possible. (The fact that these same 20 problematics can and often do surface in virtually every so-called 21 “area” of philosophy is itself a ground for wondering whether philoso- 22 phy is usefully divided into separate “areas” of as so many nowa- 23 days are prone to suppose.) I will briefly indicate a few of the guises in 24 which the Cartesian and Kantian problematics respectively surface across 25 a number of (supposedly distinct) “areas” of philosophy. But before I do 26 so, it is worth noting one of the many respects in which the labels “Car- 27 tesian” and “Kantian” may seem tendentious: namely, as labels for some 28 of the specific variants I shall be concerned to distinguish within (what I 29 am here calling) the “Cartesian” and “Kantian” varieties of skepticism 30 respectively.9 Descartes himself, for example, never poses most of the 31 32 9 I speak here, rather tentatively, of varieties (rather than genera) of skepticism, and 33 of these varieties as subtending variants (rather than species) of Cartesian and 34 Kantian skepticism respectively, in order to leave open questions concerning 35 how these twin philosophical problematics relate to one another – questions 36 such as: to what extent do they constitute distinct kinds of philosophical 37 worry?, to what extent do they overlap?, or must they mutually exclude one another? I want the terminology I initially employ to introduce the philosoph- 38 ical phenomena under examination in a manner sufficiently neutral so as to 39 allow the question “How, if at all, are these – Cartesian and Kantian – skepti- 40 cisms related to one another?” to admit of a variety of answers, without pre- Two Varieties of Skepticism 7

1 skeptical worries that I will be calling variants of “Cartesian skepticism”. 2 (Indeed, it is arguable that he only ever clearly poses one of them – 3 namely, skepticism about the external world.) And, though Kant argu- 4 ably explores more of the possible variants of (what I will be calling) 5 “Kantian skepticism”, he seems to be quite oblivious to some of 6 them. Thus, in claiming that the philosophical problems I mention 7 below represent variants of Cartesian and Kantian skepticism respective- 8 ly, I am not making an historical claim about which problems are (and 9 are not10) discussed in the writings of Descartes or Kant. Rather I am 10 making a philosophical claim about a congruence to be found in the 11 shape of the problems themselves, regardless of whose writings they ap- 12 pear in. 13 In order to gain a clearer sense of what constitutes the unity of a sin- 14 gle variety of skepticism, it will help first to consider some variants on a 15 single variety. I will accordingly first present five examples of (what I 16 will call) Cartesian skepticism. I will then go on to present five examples 17 of Kantian skepticism. 18 19 20 judging any particular line of answer. However, as will become clear, I myself 21 do favor a particular line – one that this tentative mode of formulation (in terms 22 of “varieties” rather than “kinds”) is particularly concerned to leave room for (namely, that the apparent “kinds” in question here are, in the end, to be rec- 23 ognized as only apparently distinct kinds). 24 10 The aptness of these labels for the purposes of distinguishing the two varieties of 25 skepticism at issue here are not meant to turn on any claim to the effect that an 26 interest in the other problematic (i.e., the one that does not bear his name) is 27 absent from the writings of either Descartes or Kant. So it does not imply a de- nial that Kant was interested in Cartesian skepticism. As we shall see later on, 28 Kant addresses a variant of Cartesian skepticism (he calls it “problematical ideal- 29 ism”) and seeks in “The Refutation of Idealism” to show how the proper treat- 30 ment of (what he himself calls) “skepticism” contains as one of its corollaries the 31 untenability of all such forms of idealism. Nor does it turn on a denial that there 32 are incipient forms of a Kantian problematic to be found in Descartes’s writings. (Though I do think that such a problematic never comes fully into view in his 33 pages as a full-blown, self-standing variety of skepticism). For some discussion 34 of the presence of an incipiently Kantian problematic in Descartes’s thought, 35 see Conant (1992). The hypothesis of The First Meditation (unlike 36 the dreaming hypothesis), if pressed hard enough, does unfold into (what I 37 call) a Kantian skeptical problematic. The most vivid appearance in the Carte- sian corpus of such a problematic is to be found in the treatment of the problem 38 of the creation of eternal . But such a problematic is pervasively present in 39 the Cartesian corpus (albeit very incipiently) in the treatment of the fundamen- 40 tal Cartesian issue of what it is for an idea to possess objective reality. 8 James Conant

1 II. Five Examples of Cartesian Skepticism 2 3 I begin with the classic case: Cartesian skepticism about . The 4 important thing to see here is that this case represents just one instance 5 of a far broader genre: 6 1. Cartesian skepticism about perception. How can I know things 7 are as my senses present them as being? Is there really an external 8 world? I am having an experience of a certain sort (say, that I am 9 here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire) but how can I 10 know that things are as my experience presents them as being? I 11 can have experiences that are indistinguishable from this one (in 12 which I appear to be here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the 13 fire), such as when I am dreaming, and yet things are not as they ap- 14 pear. The case under consideration is a best case of knowledge, and 15 yet there still seems to be room for the question: How can I know 16 that I am not, in fact, lying undressed in my bed dreaming that I am 17 here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire? For there are no 18 marks or features that allow one conclusively to distinguish waking 19 from dreaming states. This leads to the following conclusion: if I 20 don’t know this, then how can I be said to know anything? Why 21 should I ever the testimony of my senses? Should I ever en- 22 dorse the appearances with which my senses present me? The gap 23 the Cartesian skeptic regarding perception seeks to bridge is from 24 his own mind to the outer world. The outer world is hidden behind 25 the veil of perception. The paradox lies in our apparent inability to 26 answer the following question: How can I penetrate the veil of sen- 27 sory ideas and attain a view of what is really happening outside of 28 my mind? 29 30 In the above case, the knowing lies on the mind side of a mind/ 31 world divide. The Cartesian skeptic of perception is left with a problem 32 of the following form: what must I add to (mere) perception to turn it 33 into knowledge? The Cartesian epistemologist’s analysis of our percep- 34 tual situation turns here on a particular way of conceiving wherein the 35 distinction consists between a veridical and a non-veridical perception. 36 Both cases are conceived as sharing something in common – as possess- 11 37 ing what John McDowell calls a highest common factor. Thus the 38 Cartesian epistemologist is drawn to understand the concept of an appa- 39 40 11 McDowell (1998). Two Varieties of Skepticism 9

1 rent perception as follows: An apparent perception of X is the compo- 2 nent in a subject’s experience which figures in both a veridical and a 3 non-veridical perceptual experience of X.12 This gives rise then to a fur- 4 ther question: what is the something extra which a veridical perception 5 has and a non-veridical perception lacks in virtue of which the latter is 6 veridical and the latter merely apparent. This gives rise to the search for 7 the special something which one must add to a merely apparent concep- 8 tion in order to turn it into a veridical perception. Once the problem is 9 conceived in this form it issues in Cartesian skepticism. 10 The question which animates the skeptic in the above case is the fol- 11 lowing: how do we bridge the gap from mind to world – from inner to 12 outer? In order to separate the essential from the accidental within this 13 genre of skepticism, it is helpful to consider the following case next: 14 2. Cartesian skepticism about other minds. The person before me 15 is acting for all the world as if he were in , but how can I know 16 that he is pain. Is he pretending? Or is he really in pain? The case of 17 someone convincingly pretending to be in pain can be indistin- 18 guishable from the case of someone actually being in pain. Thus I 19 am not able to conclude that I know he is in pain. For there are 20 no marks or features that conclusively distinguish a case of some- 21 one’s pretending to be in a state from his being in that state. The 22 conclusion here again takes the form: if I don’t know this, how 23 can I ever be said to know what someone else if feeling? The Car- 24 tesian problematic here is focused on the problem of how to under- 25 write the testimony of the human body. The gap the Cartesian seeks 26 to bridge here is from the other’s outer bodily movements to his 27 inner states. The inner world of the other is hidden behind the 28 veil of the body. This version of the Cartesian skeptic asks: How 29 can I penetrate the screen of the other’s body and attain a view of 30 what is really happening inside the other himself? 31 32 In this case, the direction of travel across the mind/world divide has 33 been reversed – the task is now to travel from outer to inner, rather 34 than in the opposite direction – but (what I will call) the form of the prob- 35 lematic is the same. The Cartesian skeptic about other minds is left with a 36 problem of the following form: what must I add to (mere) bodily be- 37 havior to turn it into an expression of an inner state? The Cartesian epis- 38 39 12 For further discussion of this point, see Thomas Lockhart’s paper in this vol- 40 ume. 10 James Conant

1 temologist’s analysis of bodily expressions of our mental life turns here 2 on a particular way of conceiving wherein the distinction consists be- 3 tween a genuine and a merely apparent expression of an inner state. 4 Both cases are again conceived as sharing something in common – as 5 possessing a highest common factor. Thus the Cartesian epistemologist 6 of other minds is drawn to understand the case of someone’s pretending 7 to be in pain as follows: The outward bodily pain-behavior is a common 8 component which can figure equally in both a case of someone’s pre- 9 tending to be in pain and someone’s being in pain. This gives rise 10 then to a further question: what is the something extra which the 11 case of someone’s genuinely being in pain has and someone’s pretending 12 to be in pain lacks in virtue of which the latter can yield knowledge of 13 another mind and the latter cannot. This gives rise to the search for the 14 special something – the inner state as such – which one must add to the 15 psychologically neutral layer of mere bodily behavior in order to turn 16 the latter into a case of genuine pain behavior. Once the problem is 17 conceived in this form it issues in Cartesian skepticism, only now it is 18 the screen of the body (rather than the veil of perception) which stands 19 in the way of our being able to gain knowledge of what we want. What 20 makes the behavior count as genuine pain behavior is something which 21 blankly obtains on the other side of the screen, beyond the reach of the 22 gaze of the subject who seeks knowledge of the other’s mental states. 23 The pain behavior in this case – like the sensory experience of the 24 outer world in the case – is conceived in 25 terms which render it by its very unable to ground a claim to 26 knowledge, for that which it presents us with (mere sensory experience 27 in the one case, mere bodily behavior in the other) is construed in such a 28 way that it, of necessity, falls short of that (the external world in the one 29 case, the other’s inner state in the other) which we seek knowledge. 30 31 Let us now move to (what is taken to be) a different area of philos- 32 ophy altogether: the . This is an area of philos- 33 ophy in which interest in Kantian skepticism is currently far more dom- 34 inant than interest in Cartesian skepticism. It is worth noticing, howev- 35 er, that one can also identify a problematic here which exhibits a Car- 36 tesian form: 37 3. Cartesian skepticism about language. How can I know that my 38 interpretation of something (a text, an utterance, a sign-post) is cor- 39 rect? How can I be sure that this is what is really meant? I know how 40 this sort of sign (say, a sign-post in the shape, say, of a pointing Two Varieties of Skepticism 11

1 arrow) is usually to be interpreted, but how do I know that my in- 2 terpretation in this case is the right interpretation? The physical ap- 3 pearance of the sign (text, utterance) could be indistinguishable 4 across two different contexts of use, and yet the sign can have entire- 5 ly different meanings in those two different contexts. Thus to un- 6 derstand the sign, I must first interpret it, and it is always possible 7 that my interpretation is incorrect – that it applies to the one con- 8 text, but not the other. Hence I cannot conclude that I know what 9 the sign here means. But if I don’t know this, how can I ever be said 10 to know what something means? The gap that the Cartesian seeks to 11 bridge here is between his understanding of the meaning of a sign 12 and what the sign actually means. The actual meaning of the sign 13 is never present to our view, but only our interpretation of it. 14 This version of the Cartesian skeptic asks: How can I penetrate 15 the penumbra of interpretations which stand between me and the 16 sign and attain knowledge of the meaning of the sign? 17 The foregoing problem has far more currency presently in English De- 18 partments and Law Schools and History Departments – that is, in 19 forms of academic and intellectual inquiry which must arrive at a deter- 20 minate understanding of a particular stretch of text or picture – than it 21 currently has in Philosophy Departments, where the practical task of 22 achieving an understanding of something’s meaning can be sacrificed 23 to the broader question of whether such understanding is so much as 24 possible. What matters for our present purposes is that it is a form of 25 problem which can arise. The Cartesian skeptic of language is left 26 with a problem of the following form: what must I add to a mere string 27 of signs in order to turn it something which can support knowledge of 28 their meaning The Cartesian epistemologist’s analysis of our linguistic 29 situation turns here on a particular way of conceiving wherein the dis- 30 31 tinction consists between a veridical and a non-veridical understanding 32 of meaning. Both cases are conceived as sharing something in common 33 – a highest common factor – in this case the particular set of signs which 34 can support differing interpretations. Any case of understanding the 35 meaning of a sign is then analyzed as a case of a mere sign plus an inter- 36 pretation (on the model of a mere sensory experience plus an outer fact 37 which obtains without in the world, or a mere bodily experience plus an 38 inner state which obtains within the subject). Thus the Cartesian linguist 39 is drawn to understand the case of someone’s misunderstanding a lin- 40 guistic performance as follows: The outwardly perceptible physical 12 James Conant

1 sign is a common component which can figure equally in both a case of 2 someone’s misunderstanding the sign and a case of someone’s under- 3 standing the sign. This gives rise then to the further question: what is 4 the something extra which must be added to the physical sign, consid- 5 ered in itself, so that the conjunction of the sign plus that extra element 6 can yield knowledge of meaning. This gives rise to the search for the 7 special something – the criterion of meaning – which one must add 8 to the semantically neutral layer of mere linguistic noises or marks in 9 order to turn the latter into a case of genuinely meaningful linguistic be- 10 havior. 11 It is also worth noticing that problems of a Cartesian form arise no 12 less in than in . Consider the 13 following case: 14 4. Cartesian skepticism about intentional action. The person be- 15 fore me appears to be raising his hand, but how can I know that he is 16 raising his hand. The movement of his limbs is certainly indistin- 17 guishable from what it would be if he were raising his hand. But 18 it is possible for a human hand to shoot up involuntarily, without 19 the subject acting upon an intention to raise it. And these two 20 sorts of cases – the case of a mere bodily movement and the case 21 of an intentional action – can be indistinguishable from one another. 22 So how can I know that the other is really acting on an intention, 23 i.e., that is his movements are genuine expressions of agency, rather 24 than the mere effects of biological (or psychological, or some other 25 sort of) causes beyond his control. The gap that the Cartesian seeks 26 to bridge here is between a merely bodily movement and the inten- 27 tion that lies beneath (or behind) it. This version of the Cartesian 28 skeptic asks: How can I get beyond an intervening set of bodily 29 events (whose etiology is explicable in, say, purely physiological 30 terms) and arrive at knowledge of the intentions which gave rise 31 to them? 32 33 The Cartesian skeptic about intentional action has a problem of the fol- 34 lowing form: what must I add to a mere bodily movement in order to 35 turn it something which can support knowledge of intentional action. 36 The Cartesian epistemologist’s analysis of the situation of the agent 37 turns here on a particular way of conceiving wherein the distinction 38 consists between a bit of genuine agency and a mere bodily movement. 39 Both cases are again conceived as sharing something in common – a 40 highest common factor – in this case the mere bodily movement. Two Varieties of Skepticism 13

1 Any case of intentional agency is then analyzed as a case of a mere bodily 2 movement being preceded by an intention which is then assigned to it 3 as its cause. Thus the Cartesian philosopher of action is forced to grapple 4 with the question of what is left of an intentional action once we sub- 5 tract the mere bodily movement (on the model of what is left of a case 6 of genuinely veridical sensory perception once we subtract the mere ap- 7 pearance, etc.). This triggers the search for the suitably connected some- 8 thing extra which must be linked to the bodily movement, so that the 9 conjunction of bodily movement supplemented with that extra element 10 can yield a case of intentional action. 11 It is instructive to consider a final case of the Cartesian problematic, 12 this time from the field of . Skeptical problems in the realm of 13 aesthetics are particularly interesting because the feedback loop between 14 theory and practice in the contemporary sphere of the is of a suffi- 15 ciently direct nature that it is possible to find any number of cases in 16 which instances of the practice of art itself has come to reflect the phil- 17 osophical assumptions implicit in a skeptical understanding of what art 18 is. Philosophical reflection in this sphere is no longer on a set of practices 19 for making knowledge-claims whose self-standing nature as a practice is 20 able to continue unaffected by the character of such forms of reflec- 21 tion.13 The following might therefore strike one as equally aptly express- 22 ing either a general (and thus contentious) philosophical conception of 23 what art is or a fairly banal description of the self-understanding implicit 24 in certain forms of avant-garde artistic practice: 25 5. Cartesian skepticism about art. While working at home, I have 26 accidentally turned over a can of paint, creating a pattern of splatter 27 across a piece of canvass that happened to be lying on the ground 28 below the can. From one point of view, what we now have is a 29 waste of some perfectly good paint and a perfectly good canvass. 30 But, let us imagine that downtown, in the Museum of Modern Art, 31 there happens to be hanging on the wall a canvass, sensuously indis- 32 tinguishable from the one before me, but it bears the caption “Splat- 33 ter, Artist: James Conant”. The object in the museum is declared by 34 the curators of that institution to be a work of art. From an episte- 35 mological point of view, apart from their respective locations, one 36 in my home and one in the museum, the two objects seem to be 37 38 13 Similar examples of such a feedback loop between epistemic practice and skep- 39 tical theory could be adduced from other areas of human life, such as, for ex- 40 ample, from the relation between the practice and theory of law. 14 James Conant

1 indistinguishable from one another. How can I tell which of them is 2 a mere accident and which is a work of art? Andy Warhol’s Camp- 3 bell’s Soup Can (or, if you prefer, Marcel Duchamp’s Urinal, to take 4 the other favorite example of philosophers of art) seems to be an ex- 5 ample of an artifact indistinguishable from one which I might en- 6 counter in my own home. But if I cannot tell what distinguishes 7 what is my home from what is in the museum in such a case, 8 then how can I ever claim to know whether something is really a 9 work of art? The gap that the Cartesian seeks to bridge here is 10 one between objecthood and art – between the mere physical ap- 11 pearance of the work of art and its status as a locus of aesthetic 12 value, as something that invites and merits the sorts of interest and 13 assessment appropriate to works of art. So this version of the Carte- 14 sian skeptic asks: How can I get beyond the mere objecthood of the 15 work (whose characteristics are describable in purely physical, aes- 16 thetically neutral terms) to the art? 17 18 19 III. Five Examples of Kantian Skepticism 20 21 Again, I begin with the classic case of the genre: (what I call) Kantian 22 skepticism about perception. Again, as before, the first task here is to 23 come to appreciate how the case given below represents just one in- 24 stance of a far broader genre: 25 1. Kantian skepticism about perception. How can my senses so 26 much as present things as being a certain way? How can my experi- 27 ence so much as be intelligibly of an external world? The Kantian 28 problematic in philosophy of perception is focused on the problem 29 how the senses must be so as to be able to furnish testimony. An 30 outer object’s impinging on the senses would appear, as such, to 31 be a mere transaction in nature, and, taken in and of itself, not to 32 be the sort of item that is “about” anything, let alone the sort that 33 ought to provide anyone with a reason for believing anything. 34 What sort of unity must an episode of sensory experience possess 35 in order to be able to present an appearance about which the ques- 36 tion could arise “Shall I endorse it”? The Kantian paradox lies in its 37 coming to seem a mystery how what impinges on my senses could 38 so much as appear to be revelatory of the world. How am I so much 39 as able to enjoy an experience that possesses a determinate world-di- 40 Two Varieties of Skepticism 15

1 rected content (e.g. that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by 2 the fire)? The gap the Kantian seeks to overcome is from sensory 3 blindness to sensory consciousness – from a form of sensibility 4 upon which things merely causally impinge to one upon which 5 things impress themselves as being thus and so. 6 Here what was previously taken for granted by the Cartesian, namely, 7 that there is a determinate way which things appear to me to be in per- 8 ception, has come under question. The question now is how such an 9 appearance is so much as possible. If we think of the Cartesian question 10 in the philosophy of perception as focusing on the topic of how I can 11 know which of my perceptions are veridical, then it can help to see 12 the issue in Kantian skepticism as turning on the topic of how one of 13 my perceptions can so much as be non-veridical. The very possibility 14 of non-veridicality or falsity in thought, judgment, experience, requires 15 the possibility of an intentional relation between the thought, judgment, 16 experience and reality; the Kantian question is how such a relation is so 17 much as possible. 18 Under the pressure of a parallel Kantian question, each of the further 19 following four counterparts to the examples of Cartesian skepticism 20 which we encountered above can be identified in the four further 21 areas of philosophy we considered above: 22 2. The . This version of the Kantian skeptic 23 is preoccupied by the following question: How can the human body 24 so much as seem to express a mental state? A human body is, as such, 25 nothing but so much bio-matter – i.e., a kind of substance whose 26 possible states, taken in isolation, are without psychological purport. 27 So how can any particular state of such a body itself possess the sort 28 of significance we attribute to it when we take ourselves to see that 29 someone is in pain, or happy, or angry. The Kantian paradox here 30 lies in its coming to seem a mystery how an expanse of fleshy matter 31 could so much as appear to be revelatory of an inner life. The Kant- 32 ian problematic here is focused on the question: How does the 33 human body even seem to furnish a picture of the human soul? 34 The gap the Kantian seeks to overcome here is from an inexpressive 35 physical entity to an animated field of human expression – from a 36 psychologically-neutral locus of bodily movements to the commu- 37 nicative body of a palpably suffering, desiring, pondering human 38 being. 39 40 16 James Conant

1 3. Philosophy of language. This version of the Kantian skeptic is 2 preoccupied by the following question: How can a sequence of 3 marks or noises so much as seem to mean something? Marks and 4 noises are, as such, mere physical entities, devoid of any semantic 5 content. How could such entities, in and of themselves, ever be 6 the sort of things that mean something? The Kantian paradox here 7 lies in its coming to seem a mystery how a mere sequence of 8 dead signs could so much as appear to be alive with significance. 9 The Kantian problematic here is focused on the question: How 10 does a linguistic performance acquire the physiognomy of meaning? 11 What sort of unity must a linguistic performance possess in order to 12 appear to be the sort of thing about which the question could arise 13 “Is this what it means”? The gap the Kantian seeks to overcome 14 here is from meaningless sequences of marks and noises to determi- 15 nate expressions of thought – from a semantically neutral concate- 16 nation of scratches or sounds to a legible field of intelligible mean- 17 ings. 18 4. The problem of intentional action. This version of the Kantian 19 skeptic is preoccupied by the following question: How can a mere 20 bodily movement, qua merely physiological , ever be the ex- 21 pression of an intention? The bodily movement is an event in the 22 natural world and, as such, the effect of purely physiological causes. 23 How can there be any sort of internal relation between such a trans- 24 action in the natural world (which is, taken in itself, explicable in 25 purely non-intentional terms) and something that supposedly hap- 26 pens in the mind (an event of an intrinsically intentional character)? 27 The Kantian paradox here lies in its coming to seem a mystery how 28 mere bodily movements could so much as possibly seem to be ex- 29 pressions of genuine full-blooded agency. The Kantian problematic 30 here is focused on the question: How does the execution of a se- 31 quence of such movements acquire the physiognomy of an inten- 32 tion? What sort of unity must such a sequence possess in order to 33 appear to be the sort of thing about which the question could 34 arise “Is this what he intended to do”? The gap the Kantian seeks 35 to overcome here is from the movements of muscles, tissues, and 36 limbs to determinate expressions of human willing – from an inten- 37 tionally neutral concatenation of jangling bodily appendages to a 38 legible field of purposeful human action. 39 40 Two Varieties of Skepticism 17

1 5. The philosophy of art. This version of the Kantian skeptic is pre- 2 occupied by the following question: How can a mere configuration 3 of clay or bronze, or paint on canvass, or sequences of tones, ever so 4 much as seem to be a structure of aesthetic significance and value? 5 Are not such configurations of matter or sound, as such, mere phys- 6 ical shapes or noises which are, considered in and of themselves, de- 7 void of aesthetic value? However fantastically improbable it might 8 be, couldn’t, in principle, any such configuration come into exis- 9 tence simply as the consequence of a bizarre sequence of physical 10 events? And, as such, wouldn’t such a mere effect of natural causes, 11 absent some further intervening moment of human activity (which 12 aspired to confer significance upon the configuration in question), 13 remain something less than a work of art? How can such mere con- 14 figurations of matter and sound ever be the sorts of thing that are 15 properly supposed to possess the features we take ourselves genuine- 16 ly to be able to discover in works of art? The Kantian paradox here 17 lies in its coming to seem a mystery how a mere sequence of shapes 18 and sounds could so much as appear to be alive with aesthetic signif- 19 icance. The Kantian problematic here is focused on the question: 20 How does an object acquire the physiognomy of aesthetic depth? 21 What sort of unity must it possess in order to appear to be the 22 sort of object about which the question could arise “Is this an orig- 23 inal work or merely derivative?”, “Does it move me (or speak to me 24 or provoke me) or just leave me cold (or chagrined, or disgusted)?”, 25 or even just “Does this object merit this sort of critical interest and 26 attention”? The gap the Kantian seeks to overcome here is from aes- 27 thetically inert constellations of matter and sound to objects that are 28 properly taken to invite and support forms of aesthetic appreciation 29 and criticism – from artistically neutral chunks of stuff or noise to 30 delightful or provocative exemplars of beauty and sublimity. 31 Each of the five varieties of skepticism above involves a problematic of a 32 similar form – (what I call) a Kantian form. Identifying a particular var- 33 iant of a skeptical problematic as being of this form is a matter of rec- 34 ognizing it as sharing a structure with each of the variants of Kantian 35 skepticism presented above. Beginning with the immense amount of at- 36 tention paid to the third case – Kantian skepticism about language – 37 which gained prominence in the 1970 s and 1980 s, over the past few 38 decades, this has increasingly become the form which so-called “skep- 39 tical” problems in philosophy now tend to exhibit. 40 18 James Conant

1 IV. Homology of Structure of the Variants within a Variety of 2 Skepticism 3 4 I could go on and multiply pairs of examples of these varieties of skep- 5 ticism from other areas of philosophy. I take it that variants of both Car- 6 tesian and Kantian skepticism arise in , aesthetics, philosophy of 7 law, , , philosophy of mathe- 8 matics, etc.14 The foregoing five pairs of cases should suffice, however, 9 for the purpose of furnishing a preliminary overview of the twin prob- 10 lematics that I am seeking to isolate here. 11 This brings us to the first form of philosophical insight that a per- 12 spicuous overview of various kinds of skepticism affords. It allows one 13 to command a clearer view of the sorts of relations of symmetry and 14 asymmetry that obtain among variants within a single variety of skepti- 15 cism. If one commands a clear view of the homology of structure exhib- 16 ited, for example, across the three variants of Cartesian or Kantian skep- 17 ticism mentioned above, then one puts oneself in a position to bring re- 18 sources derived in the consideration of one of these variants to bear on 19 the consideration of others. It is quite remarkable, for example, how 20 many a philosopher today is clear that, whatever else she wants to do 21 22 in philosophy, she wants to find a way to resist the Cartesian assumption 23 in the philosophy of perception that all perception of external objects 24 25 14 I say “variants” of each of these varieties of skepticism arise in each of these 26 “areas” of philosophy (rather than “a variant” of each arises) because in 27 “areas” such as ethics and philosophy of science – “areas”, that is, that involve a tangle of different sorts of philosophical problem – a multiplicity of variants of 28 each variety are to be found. Indeed, in both ethics and philosophy of science, 29 for example, a version of each of the philosophy of perception variants and each 30 of the philosophy of language variants of skeptical problematic (along with a 31 great many others) are to be found. This furnishes yet a further reason why 32 one ought to be suspicious of the idea that one should be able to limn the skel- eton of philosophy at its joints merely by effecting a division into areas based 33 solely on differences in subject-matter – ethics, science, mathematics, etc. An 34 extended discussion of the topic of the unity of philosophy is well beyond 35 the scope of this paper. It is, nonetheless, a topic that should be on the mind 36 of any reader who thinks that there is little intellectual cost to the increasing 37 specialization of philosophy into supposedly distinct sub-areas (such as philoso- phy of science, philosophy of language, moral philosophy, etc.) – especially one 38 who thinks that each of these areas requires a specialized form of professional 39 expertise that can be largely acquired in relative ignorance of what goes on 40 in other areas of philosophy. Two Varieties of Skepticism 19

1 requires an inference from how things seem to how things are. She 2 wants to avoid such an assumption because she realizes she will then 3 be saddled with a Cartesian gap (leaving herself sealed inside her own 4 mind, unable to claw her way back out to an unobstructed glimpse of 5 the external world). Yet this same philosopher, when she turns, say, 6 to the philosophy of language yields to the corresponding Cartesian 7 temptation without a pang – finding utterly innocent the assumption 8 that all understanding presupposes interpretation – thus saddling herself 9 with a gap of a homologous sort (leaving herself sealed within a horizon 10 of interpretations, unable way to claw her way back out to an unob- 11 structed grasp of the meaning of an expression). 12 The first step in learning to attain an overview of the problems in 13 this “area” of philosophy known as “the problem of skepticism” is to 14 learn to achieve a sensitivity to the forms of homology in structure 15 that supposedly distinct philosophical problems in supposedly distinct 16 areas of philosophy exhibit. One must learn to discern when and how 17 the form of the problem has gone unchanged, even though the clothing 18 in which the problem is dressed up has been changed. 19 20 21 V. Is Kantian Skepticism Really a Form of Skepticism? 22 23 I purported, in originally furnishing ways one might unpack the differ- 24 ence between Cartesian and Kantian skepticism, to be offering various 25 ways of unpacking the contrast between a problematic centered on 26 knowledge and one centered on the conditions of knowledge. This way of 27 putting the contrast makes it seem as if what were at issue were two 28 forms of epistemological worry. As, however, should already be evident 29 from the foregoing, this is quite misleading. It is, indeed, constitutive of 30 the Cartesian problematic that it be clothed in epistemological form. 31 The focus in the Cartesian problematic is on knowledge claims. The 32 Cartesian problematic brings the relation between our knowledge 33 claims and reality into question. What makes someone such-and-such 34 a sort of Cartesian skeptic is that he is exercised by a regarding 35 whether we can have knowledge of such-and-such a sort. Given the in- 36 ternal relation between the concepts of doubt and knowledge, the Car- 37 tesian skeptic is quite aptly characterized as someone who . What 38 figures in the Cartesian problematic as a worry about the relation be- 39 tween knowledge claims and reality comes to look, however, from 40 the vantage point of the Kantian problematic, like only an instance of 20 James Conant

1 a more general worry, a worry about the relation between any claim 2 (true, false or fantastic) and reality. In making a claim at all, whether 3 or not one thereby takes oneself to be knowledgeable, one makes one- 4 self answerable to how things are. The Kantian asks: How is one able to 5 accomplish this feat? The Kantian problematic is therefore only option- 6 ally clothed in epistemological form. It is, at its root, of a more general 7 nature. The worry that exercises such a skeptic is misunderstood if it is 8 taken to turn exclusively on matters having to do with knowledge. 9 What comes into view in a Kantian problematic under the initial head- 10 ing of “the conditions of the possibility of knowledge” are the condi- 11 tions of the possibility of mindedness as such. Kant himself, with 12 some frequency, alternates between characterizing the sorts of condi- 13 tions at issue here as conditions of the possibility of knowledge and as 14 conditions of the possibility of experience. (And he implies that they 15 might equally aptly be characterized as, among other things, conditions 16 of the possibility of objectively valid judgment, and conditions of the 17 possibility of sensory consciousness of an object.) The Kantian skeptic 18 is therefore only inaptly characterized as someone who suffers from a 19 doubt. And this will seem to some philosophers to constitute a sufficient 20 ground for insisting that what I am calling “a Kantian skeptic” is not a 21 kind of skeptic at all. So let me be clear on the following point: My aim 22 here is never to legislate how the word ‘skeptic’ should be used, but 23 only to illuminate some of the diverse ways in which philosophers, in 24 fact, often use it – with the eventual aim of permitting the formulation 25 of the following question: how are these various problematics (each of 26 which is often called one of “skepticism”) related?15 27 28 15 Since it will seem to some philosophers simply perverse of me to use the term 29 ‘skepticism’ in connection with what I am calling “Kantian skepticism”, given 30 my present insistence that what is at issue au fond in Kantian skepticism is not an 31 epistemological worry, perhaps I should briefly say, by way of defense, in an- 32 ticipation of the remainder of this paper, the following: if one insists upon re- stricting the application of the term ‘skepticism’ to overtly epistemological con- 33 texts, one is going to be unable to track much that is at issue when the term is 34 employed by Kant, by Wittgenstein, and by many contemporary philosophers. 35 Consider, for example, the debate about the rule-following considerations and 36 the threat of so-called meaning skepticism. What is often at issue in that debate is 37 not just how one can know what something (or someone) means, but how it is so much as possible to mean anything at all. The term ‘skepticism’ in that debate 38 often names the paradox that ensues if we cease to be able to make sense of 39 the phenomenon in question as something that is so much as possible. What 40 threatens to lapse here is not just our epistemic access to meaning but the very Two Varieties of Skepticism 21

1 Despite having just now acknowledged a perfectly good reason for 2 wanting to resist the invitation to call (what I have been calling) “Kant- 3 ian skepticism” a variety of skepticism at all, I will continue thus to refer 4 to it. As I go along, I will touch upon some of the reasons why some 5 philosophers have been drawn to project the term ‘skepticism’ into con- 6 texts exhibiting the earmarks of a Kantian problematic and why I think 7 there is a point to following their lead. As will become clear, whether a 8 given philosopher will be inclined to look favorably upon such an ex- 9 tension of the term is not a matter that can be adjudicated on philosoph- 10 ically neutral grounds: which fork in the terminological road one finds 11 less philosophically obfuscating here will depend in large part upon 12 one’s collateral philosophical commitments.16 13 Indeed, the question of whether Cartesian and Kantian skepticism, 14 as I have been allowing myself to call them, are properly conceived as 15 two species of a broader philosophical genus of problem (so that the 16 term “skepticism” therefore denotes some fundamental dimension of 17 philosophical concern of which they both partake) or whether the Car- 18 tesian and Kantian case, as described above, have little to do with one 19 another as forms of philosophical problem (so that the term “skepticism” 20 21 22 being of meaning. In reply to this, someone might want to insist that, if that is so, then that is a good reason for not employing the term ‘skepticism’ in the 23 context of that debate. Perhaps so. My point, at the moment, is simply that 24 if one wants to track how the term is often used by many philosophers, one 25 needs to see that it sometimes ranges over philosophical contexts wider than 26 the merely epistemological. Admittedly, this oscillation between a narrowly 27 epistemological and a broader Kantian use of the term makes for many confu- sions; and it is natural to think the short way to avoid such confusions is to ini- 28 tiate an act of linguistic legislation that restricts the permissible use of the term. 29 But it is too early in our inquiry to adjudicate how the use of the term ought to 30 be restricted, if at all. In order to see how the term is best used, first we need to 31 see more clearly how it is used and why it has come to admit of the variety of 32 uses it presently does. 16 To be more precise: I do not think any particular collateral philosophical com- 33 mitments need be in place in order to distinguish between those philosophical 34 problematics that bear (what we can call – leaving the term ‘skepticism’ to one 35 side for a moment) “Cartesian features” and those that bear “Kantian features” 36 respectively. A philosopher’s willingness to look upon these as equally instances 37 of something that is properly termed a skeptical problematic, however, may turn on such commitments, especially if what is at issue is the following more point- 38 ed question: To what degree is the term ‘skepticism’ across its employment in 39 Cartesian and Kantian contexts to be understood univocally (rather than as a 40 mere homonym)? 22 James Conant

1 is really just a homonym when employed in these two cases) is itself a 2 philosophical question. One of the aims of this essay is to attract interest 3 in this question. But we will only be in a position to pose this question, 4 regarding the relation between these two philosophical problematics, 5 once we have each properly in view. It is therefore in order that we 6 first introduce some further conceptual tools which permit us to identify 7 when we are faced with the one problematic and when with the other, 8 and when perhaps with both or neither. 9 10 11 VI. Some Features of the Cartesian Genre of Skepticism 12 13 In order to allow for a more fine-grained discrimination of these vari- 14 eties of skepticism, I will now proceed to distinguish nine generic fea- 15 tures of Cartesian and Kantian skepticism respectively.17 But before I do 16 this, let me caution that a considerable element of idealization is in- 17 volved in the idea of a philosophical problematic characterized by either 18 of the sets of features adumbrated below.18 There are two independent 19 dimensions of idealization at work here. The first dimension lies in the 20 idea that a fully realized variant of, say, Cartesian skepticism will exhibit 21 all nine of the mentioned features. It is an idealization because most 22 philosophical discussions that exhibit any one of the features (drawn 23 from one of the two above lists of features) will not necessarily exhibit 24 all of them (though it will probably exhibit many of them). Thus it 25 should be understood that, henceforth, when I speak of “a Cartesian 26 problematic”, I will mean a philosophical discussion that exhibits at 27 28 17 The point of specifying such features is to furnish criteria for determining which 29 sorts of philosophical rehearsals count, according to the taxonomy introduced 30 here, as cases of one or the other of these varieties of skepticism. In distinguish- 31 ing these nine features, I do not mean to be doing more than offering a rough 32 and ready characterization of the differences between these two varieties of skepticism. In particular, I do not mean to claim either that each of these fea- 33 tures is equally distinct from the other eight or that this set of nine features ex- 34 hausts the significant features that characterize either of these varieties of skep- 35 ticism. (Indeed, I think both of these claims are false.) But I do hope that these 36 features suffice to allow one to inspect a philosophical discussion of some topic 37 and determine whether it qualifies as participating in one or the other of the two varieties of skeptical problematic at issue here, and, if so, which one. 38 18 As I employ the terms, ‘Cartesian skepticism” and “Kantian skepticism’ denote 39 ideal types of philosophical problematic that are instantiated with varying degrees 40 of faithfulness in any given actual philosophical discussion. Two Varieties of Skepticism 23

1 least a large number of the Cartesian features specified below, but not 2 necessarily all of them. (The more of these features a given philosophical 3 under discussion exhibits, the more Cartesian the problematic in ques- 4 tion is.) And, similarly, when I speak of “a Kantian problematic”, I will 5 mean a philosophical discussion that exhibits at least a large number of 6 the Kantian features specified below. (The more such features a philo- 7 sophical problematic under discussion exhibits, the more Kantian it is.)19 8 The second dimension of idealization concerns the way in which the 9 presentation of these feature-spaces may appear to preclude the possibil- 10 ity of their overlap – to preclude an intermingling of Cartesian and 11 Kantian features within a single philosophical problematic. That is 12 both a desirable and a potentially misleading aspect of the presentation 13 that follows. It is desirable in as much as it is part of my aim to illuminate 14 something about the internal structure of each of these two (admittedly 15 idealized) varieties of philosophical problematic. Each has its own . 16 The co-occurrence of such features within a single philosophical discus- 17 sion is generally (though not necessarily20) a symptom of philosophical 18 confusion on the part of an author; and it is part of my purpose to fa- 19 cilitate the diagnosis and treatment of such forms of confusion. Never- 20 theless, it is potentially misleading because – even if, in a resolutely exe- 21 cuted philosophical inquiry, Cartesian and Kantian features will tend to 22 drive one another out – in the irresoluteness of actual philosophical 23 practice, such features can often be found squashed up against one an- 24 other.21 Borrowing some terms from Cavell’s theory of genre22, one 25 26 27 19 I, do not mean hereby to rule out cases of philosophical discussion that do per- fectly exemplify, without blemishes, either the Cartesian or Kantian format re- 28 spectively, but only to indicate that they are surprisingly rare. 29 20 For it not to be a symptom of (at least some degree of) confusion on an author’s 30 part requires, I think, that the author already have thought through – and thus 31 have come to some stable view of his own concerning – the relation between 32 these two varieties of skepticism. There are such authors; but not many. 21 For example, in his book Kripke (1982), initially presents his mo- 33 tivating example in terms that alternate between a Cartesian worry (“How can I 34 know whether in the present case someone is adding or quadding; and if do not 35 know this, then [given that this would appear to be a best case of knowledge of 36 addition] how can I ever know if anyone is really adding?”) and a Kantian 37 worry (“How can there ever so much as be a fact of the matter as to whether someone is adding; and, if there cannot then [given that this would appear to be 38 as elementary a case as there can be of someone meaning one thing rather than 39 another] how can anyone ever so much as determinately mean anything?”). 40 This alternation between Cartesian and Kantian idioms has confused some of 24 James Conant

1 might say that Kantian skepticism represents an adjacent genre of skepti- 2 cism – one in which each of the features of Cartesian skepticism is dis- 3 placed 23 in a certain way. And, just as different genres of film (say, a west- 4 ern and a romantic comedy) can be crossed with another – often 5 (though not always) with aesthetically jarring results – so, too, these 6 genres of skepticism can be crossed with another. In philosophy, 7 when this happens, usually (though not always) it is a sign that the au- 8 thor is no longer clear which of these two philosophical problematics he 9 wishes to inhabit. 10 The pair of reasons for calling the first set of features “Cartesian” 11 and the second “Kantian” is perfectly consistent with noting the pres- 12 ence of a problematic in Descartes’s writings exhibiting some of the fea- 13 tures of the second sort (and such a problematic is present in Descartes) 14 and with noting the presence of an aspiration in Kant’s writings to ad- 15 dress a problematic exhibiting all of the features of the first sort (and 16 such an aspiration forms a crucial part of Kant’s project). I denominate 17 these problematics “Cartesian” and “Kantian” respectively, in order to 18 mark not the point of their earliest philosophical inception (the moment 19 at which the seeds of the problematic first began to blossom philosoph- 20 ically) nor their last philosophical flicker of life (the moment past which 21 they cease to have philosophical currency), but rather the historical mo- 22 ment at which their overall philosophical shape first became visible (the 23 moment at which the problematic first reaches full philosophical flow- 24 er). I denominate the first problematic “Cartesian” because it is in Des- 25 cartes’s writings that it comes fully into view for the first time as one 26 27 Kripke’s commentators (who equate skepticism with Cartesian skepticism and 28 therefore cling to the Cartesian formulation because it strikes them as more 29 properly skeptical), thus obscuring their view of the problematic that is at the 30 center of Kripke’s concern and leading them to waffle alternately between 31 the Cartesian and Kantian variants of skepticism in philosophy of language dis- 32 tinguished above, without ever noticing that they thus waffle. Kripke himself, however, is – at least in certain places in his book (see, for example Kripke 33 (1982), 21) – fairly clear that ostensibly Cartesian characterizations of the 34 issue (according to which, as he says: “the problem may appear to be epistemo- 35 logical”) can serve him only as a provisional expository device (thus he says: 36 “the ladder must finally be kicked away”) for leading people into a skeptical 37 paradox of an altogether different and more fundamental variety than that with which we appear to be presented if we restrict ourselves to such Cartesian 38 characterizations. 39 22 See his Cavell (1981) and his Cavell (1996). 40 23 Cavell’s term for this is negated. Two Varieties of Skepticism 25

1 possessing all nine of the features specified below as Cartesian; and I de- 2 nominate the second “Kantian” because it is in Kant’s writings that it 3 first comes fully into view as one possessing all nine of the features 4 specified below as Kantian. 5 (1) With these cautionary remarks to be borne in mind, I will hence- 6 forth refer to the following nine generic features of the Cartesian 7 genre of skepticism as Cartesian features: 8 (2) The Cartesian investigation begins with and turns on the explora- 9 tion of a certain sort of example – a best case of knowledge. 10 (3) Such a case is shown to be vulnerable to doubt. 11 (4) The conclusion generalizes – we can move from a conclusion about 12 this particular candidate item of knowledge to a general conclusion 13 about all such items. 14 (5) The investigation thereby issues in a discovery. 15 (6) The investigation ends in a mood of disappointment. 16 (7) The disappointment is born of the impossibility of showing how 17 what we had taken to be possible could be actual. 18 (8) It looks as if there is something we cannot do. 19 (9) Our inability is the consequence of the existence of a Cartesian gap 20 – a gap we seem to be unable to bridge. 21 (10) The skeptical discovery cannot be converted into practice: it is 22 practically unstable – we are obliged to live as if we could bridge 23 the gap in question. 24 First feature. To say that an exploration of the Cartesian problematic be- 25 gins always with “a best case of knowledge” is to say that it begins al- 26 ways with a carefully selected example – one that possesses (or at least ap- 27 pears able simultaneously to possess) at least the following four charac- 28 teristics. First, the example must involve a concrete claim to know: a par- 29 ticular person, at a particular time and place must enter the claim. Sec- 30 ond, the claim in question must be able to serve as an exemplar of an en- 31 tire class of claims: it must be sufficiently representative so that each of 32 us can rehearse a version of such a claim in the privacy of our own epis- 33 temological closet. Third, the claim must be directed at an unremarkable 34 object – the sort of object which requires no special sort of expertise in 35 order to be able to tell one when you see one.24 Thus (what one might 36 37 38 24 The Cartesian skeptical recital always begins by inviting us to direct our atten- 39 tion at a hat, a hand, a chair, a tomato, an envelope – something with regard to 40 which we are all equally experts. As Austin notes, the Cartesian philosopher, 26 James Conant

1 be tempted to call) “a kind of object” figures in Cartesian examples – a 2 hand, a tomato, an envelope, a chair (but never a nine iron, an M-16 3 rifle, a Japanese beetle, a goldfinch, or a bubble chamber). One must 4 begin with the right sort of example, in order to get the Cartesian prob- 5 lematic up and running. (Stanley Cavell suggests we call the sort of ob- 6 ject that figures in such examples a generic object. We will return to this 7 suggestion.) Fourth, the object must be encountered under optimal con- 8 ditions: in good lighting, at short range, for an extended period of time, 9 etc. An important part of exploring the Cartesian problematic lies in ex- 10 ploring the character and the legitimacy of the examples employed to 11 introduce a Cartesian skeptical recital and ascertaining whether they 12 really do simultaneously possess all four of the required characteristics. 13 A preoccupation with such examples is a hallmark of the Cartesian 14 problematic. 15 Second feature. The Cartesian paradox results from the susceptibility 16 of the existence of such an object to doubt. The Cartesian investigation 17 initiates an inquiry into the question what (in our experience of the rel- 18 evant phenomenon) does and does not admit of the possibility of doubt. 19 It thereby seeks to decompose our experience into two sorts of ele- 20 ments: those which are inherently indubitable and those which involve 21 some (even if perhaps minimal) element of risk. The viability of the en- 22 suing doubt lies in the disclosure of a reliance (on the part of the can- 23 didate claim to knowledge) upon those strata of our experience involv- 24 ing this identifiable element of risk. An exploration of what is (and what 25 is not) susceptible to such forms of doubt is a hallmark of the Cartesian 26 problematic. And, under the pressure of the Cartesian investigator’s de- 27 mand for certainty, it leads to the discovery that very little in our expe- 28 rience is invulnerable to such forms of doubt. 29 Third feature. The possibility of such a discovery depends on the ca- 30 pacity of the initially selected example to generalize. If we don’t know 31 this, then we don’t know anything. That is, in the disclosure that this 32 particular claim to knowledge is vulnerable to doubt, we do not merely 33 take ourselves to learn that we are not able to know a particular thing 34 that we might have thought we did know. (“Oh, O.K., I guess I 35 don’t know that is a goldfinch after all.”) Rather we take ourselves to 36 learn something about knowledge as such – or at least about a whole 37 38 like the magician, begins by asking us first to be sure that what we have before is 39 nothing other than a perfectly ordinary hat, a perfectly ordinary chair, etc. (Aus- 40 tin (1979), 87). Two Varieties of Skepticism 27

1 class of knowledge claims. (“If I don’t know that there is a tomato in 2 front of me right now, then how can I be said to know anything – 3 or at least anything based on the testimony of my senses.”) The vulner- 4 able of our initially selected example to doubt seems, at one and the 5 same time, to disclose the vulnerability of vast portions of our supposed 6 edifice of knowledge. Thus Descartes does not conclude: “Well, then I 7 don’t know that I am sitting here in my dressing gown by the fireplace, 8 after all” Rather Descartes finds himself threatened with a far more gen- 9 eral conclusion of the following sort: “Well, then I can never know that 10 things are as my senses tell me they are.” An apparently irresistible yet 11 extraordinarily precipitous step of this sort – moving from a finding 12 about a particular claim to knowledge to a general conclusion about 13 the very possibility of knowledge of a certain sort – is a mark of entan- 14 glement in a variant of the Cartesian problematic. 15 Fourth feature. The possibility of such a doubt seems to yield a discov- 16 ery. The skeptical discovery takes the form of seeing through the surface of 17 our practices to how they really are. For the results of the Cartesian in- 18 vestigation seem to stand in sharp conflict with our ordinary ways of 19 talking and living. Our practices of entering knowledge-claims seem 20 to be fundamentally at odds with what it is that the investigation 21 shows we are really entitled to claim. So, even if the Cartesian inquirer 22 finds himself unable to do other than to continue to speak with the vul- 23 gar and to participate in ordinary ways of speaking and acting, nonethe- 24 less, in the light of his discovery, these practices must now seem to him 25 to rest upon a tissue of illusion. To the extent that the Cartesian acqui- 26 esces in the conclusion his investigation seems to force upon him, he 27 thereby takes himself to be able to see more clearly and deeply into 28 the true nature of these practices than the majority of his fellows who 29 unreflectively participate in them. The attainment of a discovery that 30 seems to unmask our practices in such a manner is symptomatic of en- 31 tanglement in a variant of the Cartesian problematic. 32 Fifth feature. The initial thrill of discovery gives way to a mood of 33 disappointment with knowledge. There no longer seems to any way for 34 knowledge (or, within a given variant of Cartesian skepticism: knowl- 35 edge of a certain sort) to live up to its name. And this gives rise to a 36 mood of disillusionment. One takes oneself to have an understanding 37 of what would have had to have been the case for knowledge (or 38 knowledge of a certain sort) to have been possible. But it transpires 39 that, at least for beings such as ourselves, that possibility is not attainable. 40 One is thus left with the feeling that there is something that ought to 28 James Conant

1 have been possible but which, as it happens, turns out, at least for us, not 2 to be possible. (The mood of Cartesian skepticism is that of the heroes 3 of Shakespeare’s tragedies: one of disappointment at being fated to live 4 in a world that will necessarily betray one’s trust in it.25) Such a prevail- 5 ing mood of disappointment or disillusionment as the apparently ines- 6 capable response to philosophical inquiry is symptomatic of entangle- 7 ment in a variant of the Cartesian problematic. 8 Sixth feature. The disappointment lies in our not being actually able 9 to do something that we had always taken to be possible (we are unable 10 to know that things are as they appear). The world we had pre-reflec- 11 tively taken ourselves to inhabit – a world in which we were capable 12 of attaining knowledge of a certain sort – threatens to turn out not to 13 be the world we actually inhabit. We can formulate thoughts about 14 what such a world would be like and can perhaps still enjoy experiences 15 that purport to be of such a world, but we now are no longer able in our 16 reflective moments to endorse the contents of such thoughts and expe- 17 riences. 18 Seventh feature. The structure of the situation we inhabit therefore 19 now seems to come into view as one in which we cannot do something 20 we want to be (and pre-reflectively thought of ourselves as fully) able to 21 do. The skeptical discovery seems to disclose a limit to our cognitive 22 abilities – a limit that kicks in at a far earlier point in the cognitive proc- 23 ess than we, prior to our philosophical investigation, had any reason to 24 expect. This sense that, in our philosophical inquiry, we run up against 25 such a limit or barrier that we cannot penetrate or circumvent, try as we 26 might, is a mark of entanglement in a variant of the Cartesian problem- 27 atic. 28 Eighth feature. This inability is taken to be a function of our inability 29 to bridge a certain sort of gap. In the case of philosophy of perception, 30 the gap looms between my inner life and the outer world; in the case of 31 other minds, it opens up between his outer behavior and his inner life; 32 etc. The Cartesian takes himself to have made a genuine discovery in 33 having disclosed the existence of such a gap. Cartesian strategies for 34 finding a way around the Cartesian paradox involve attempts to find 35 a way to live with this gap. The Cartesian who wants to avoid a skeptical 36 conclusion wants to be able to negotiate his way across the gap. (Des- 37 cartes himself famously looked to God for some assistance in this mat- 38 39 25 The internal relation between Cartesian skepticism and Shakespearean tragedy 40 is explored by Stanley Cavell in the essays collected in his Cavell (1987). Two Varieties of Skepticism 29

1 ter.) But the gap itself is one he still takes to be just there. As long as one 2 operates within the confines of the Cartesian problematic, the only pos- 3 sible form of “solution” to the problem of skepticism lies in attempting 4 to some such sort of bridge across the gap. I will henceforth 5 call the sort of gap at issue here a Cartesian gap. 6 Ninth feature. The Cartesian inquirer will wish to distinguish theoret- 7 ical doubt from practical doubt. His doubt, he will tell us, is a merely the- 8 oretical one. Though, as such, it represents, he will insist, a perfectly in- 9 telligible outcome to an intellectual inquiry; nevertheless, he will also 10 insist, conviction in such a conclusion cannot be sustained by someone 11 caught up in the midst of a practical situation. Cartesian skeptical doubt 12 thus possesses an inherent instability due to the impossibility of its realiza- 13 tion in practice. Indeed, we are often reassured by philosophers who 14 wish to introduce us to this problematic that the Cartesian inquiry is 15 one that can and should be suspended for practical purposes.26 Such re- 16 assurances presuppose the standing possibility of practically abstaining 17 from one’s skeptical surmise and re-embracing the modes of experience, 18 thought and expression thereby brought into question. Such an insist- 19 ence upon the purely theoretical character of the generality of the 20 form of doubt that is at issue in philosophical inquiry is a hallmark of 21 the Cartesian problematic. 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 26 For most everyday purposes, we cannot and should not try to do otherwise than 30 to take the perceptual appearances that present themselves to us – say, the sud- 31 den appearance of an oncoming car – to constitute genuine instances of percep- 32 tual knowledge. The Cartesian skeptic knows this. He knows that we cannot help but take someone writhing in pain to be in pain; we cannot help but 33 take certain ossified habits of interpretation to disclose the meaning of a sign; 34 etc. If he understands the structure of the Cartesian problematic, he will not 35 take such to impugn his procedures. Some philosophers have 36 thought – and have thought that later Wittgenstein thought – that such obser- 37 vations themselves could suffice to overturn such forms of skepticism. That is a misunderstanding of Cartesian skepticism – and a misunderstanding of Witt- 38 genstein’s understanding of it. This is not to deny that such observations (or 39 “reminders”, as Wittgenstein preferred to call them) might have a role to 40 play in the treatment of Cartesian skepticism. 30 James Conant

1 VII. Some Features of the Kantian Genre of Skepticism 2 3 Kantian skepticism can be differentiated from Cartesian skepticism by 4 noticing that it does not quite share any of the above nine generic fea- 5 tures. Kantian genre of skepticism exhibits instead the following nine 6 Kantian features – each of which involves a peculiar displacement or re- 7 versal or inversion of the corresponding Cartesian feature: 8 (1) It is constitutive of the sort of investigation into knowledge that it is 9 that it is characterized by a peculiar sort of indifference to the character of 10 the object it takes up as an example. 11 (2) It does not issue in a doubt, but a boggle. 12 (3) The paradox is not the result of moving from a conclusion about a 13 particular object to a general conclusion about all objects of experi- 14 ence, but rather a result of the inability to see how there could so 15 much as be an experience that purports to be of a particular. 16 (4) The investigation climaxes not in a sense of discovery, but one of 17 mystery. 18 (5) This investigation ends in a mood not of disappointment, but of de- 19 spair. 20 (6) The despair is born not of the impossibility of showing how what 21 we take to be possible could be actual, but of showing how what 22 we take to be actual could be possible. 23 (7) It no longer looks as if there is something we cannot do, now it 24 looks as if there is nothing to do (not even dream) where we had pre- 25 viously thought there was something. 26 (8) The apparent disintegration of this something into a nothing is the 27 consequence of a Kantian gap. 28 (9) The Kantian skeptical surmise is not merely practically unstable, but 29 theoretically unstable qua surmise. 30 31 First feature. To say that it is constitutive of the Kantian problematic that 32 it is characterized by the absence of a special category of example is to say no 33 more or less than what Kant means to say when he says that transcen- 34 dental logic, though it does not abstract entirely from objects, is con- 35 cerned only with the conditions of the possibility of the pure thought 36 of an object: with what it is for thought to be able so much as to be 37 able to have a bearing on the world, what it is for our thought to be 38 related to objects überhaupt. Transcendental logic must abstract from 39 all differences between objects – from what it is to be cognitively related 40 to this rather than that sort of object – but not from relatedness to an Two Varieties of Skepticism 31

1 object as such. The two sides of the Kantian problematic, in its classical 2 formulation, turn on how sensibility can yield deliverances that are of 3 objects and how thought can be directed at a (mind-independent) 4 world. The problematic that unfolds here homogenizes the field of pos- 5 sible examples. The questions “What is it to dream that I am in front of a 6 fireplace?” and “What is it to see a fireplace in front of me?” become 7 simultaneously problematized and equally urgent. The questions 8 “What is it to know that I am now in Auburn, Alabama” and “What 9 is it to think of a celestial city?” become equally urgent. The differences 10 between such kinds of example (which play such a crucial role in the 11 context of the Cartesian problematic) cease to be relevant.27 It is no 12 less a problem for the Kantian to understand how we are so much as 13 able to think thoughts that are false than it is to understand how it is 14 that we are able to think thoughts that are true. The examples occurring 15 in explorations of the Kantian problematic therefore often exhibit a cu- 16 riously schematic character: they lack the concreteness of their Cartesian 17 counterparts – not only in the sense that they come in for less determi- 18 nate characterization, but also in the comparative lack of specification of 19 the epistemic standing of the claim under investigation or of the cogni- 20 tive attitude adopted towards it.28 21 Second feature. Under the pressure of the Kantian question, all our 22 cognitive capacities (the capacity to doubt among them) come to 23 seem equally questionable. Having worked his way far into a particular 24 25 26 27 More precisely: the differences between these sorts of examples cease to be rel- 27 evant for the bulk of the Kantian inquiry. At a late stage in the inquiry, it will become important to a Kantian inquirer to recover these sorts of differences – 28 differences that underwrite the movement of thought in a Cartesian investiga- 29 tion – but only once the Kantian paradox has been averted and the intelligibility 30 of object-directed thought and experience no longer stands under threat. 31 28 It does not disrupt the recital of the Kantian problematic – as it would the Car- 32 tesian – for the object in question to be of a less than utterly unremarkable sort (a goldfinch can serve the Kantian as well as a tomato) and for no assurances to 33 be forthcoming concerning the epistemic conditions under which the object is 34 encountered. (The lighting, etc., for the Kantian, just has to be good enough to 35 afford some view of the object in question). Early on in the Kantian inquiry, 36 what matters is how we are so much as able to schematize the deliverances 37 of our senses into something that has the determinate character of an appearance – the appearance of, say, a tomato before us. It is a further and comparatively 38 peripheral question, for the Kantian, under what conditions we should or 39 should not endorse the content of such an appearance – and thus judge there 40 to be a tomato before us. 32 James Conant

1 philosophical dialectic, the Kantian skeptic comes to an impasse: it sud- 2 denly no longer seems to him possible that one should be able so much 3 as to frame thoughts that are about the world (or to experience another’s 4 bodily movements as expressions of emotion, or to traffic in forms of 5 words that are replete with meaning, etc.). This sort of skeptic becomes 6 perplexed as to what it is to be experiencing or thinking or meaning 7 things in ways that he also cannot help but take himself to be doing 8 in and through the very act of asking his skeptical question. To move 9 in the direction in which his question leads is apparently to deprive 10 his question (along with the whole of the rest of his “thought”) of 11 the capacity to possess determinate content. And yet he is unable to dis- 12 miss his question. It has come to seem intellectually compulsory. So his 13 mind boggles. Such a boggling of the mind, in the face of a looming con- 14 clusion that can neither be approached nor avoided – neither fully com- 15 prehended nor simply dismissed on the grounds of its incomprehensibil- 16 ity – is a mark of entanglement in a variant of the Kantian problematic. 17 Third feature. What is at issue in the Kantian problematic is the pos- 18 sibility of making claims in general, not knowledge claims in particular. 19 This means that the point of departure for a Kantian investigation is not 20 a particular case of knowledge, but rather the topic of the vulnerability 21 of our thought to reality. This, in a certain sense, reverses the direction 22 of the Cartesian investigation: The Kantian paradox is not the result of 23 moving from a conclusion about the character of our experience of a 24 particular case to a general conclusion about all objects of experience, 25 but rather a result of inability to see how there could so much as be 26 an experience which purports to be of a particular. To respond to the 27 Kantian skeptic is to show how our thinking can have a sort of depend- 28 ence on the world that allows our activity of making claims to come in- 29 telligibly into view as one of claim-making at all. In the absence of an 30 adequate response here, the world threatens to recede from our grasp 31 – to the point where not only do we have reason to fear, with the Car- 32 tesian skeptic, that we are unable to know which of our claims about it 33 are true, but rather – to the point where we can not any longer even 34 make sense of the idea that we are able to enter claims about anything 35 of a sufficiently determinate character to be either true or false. This 36 sense of the fading away of the possibility of determinate empirical con- 37 tent in our thought, experience, and discourse is a mark of entanglement 38 in the Kantian problematic. 39 Fourth feature. We can only discover that which we can think. The 40 Cartesian investigation can issue in a discovery, because the Cartesian Two Varieties of Skepticism 33

1 takes himself to be able to form a stable conception of that which he 2 discovers we do not have. The Kantian paradox takes the form not of 3 a discovery, but of a mystery. In each of the three variants of Kantian 4 skepticism briefly sketched above, I characterized the Kantian paradox 5 in question as one in which the possibility of a sort of appearance usually 6 taken for granted in the corresponding variant of Cartesian skepticism 7 suddenly comes to seem mysterious. The Kantian paradox regarding 8 perception lies in its coming to seem to me a mystery how what im- 9 pinges on my senses could so much as appear to be revelatory of the 10 world. The Kantian paradox regarding other minds lies in its coming 11 to seem a mystery to me how the inert fleshy matter comprising his 12 body could so much as appear to be revelatory of his inner life. The 13 Kantian paradox regarding meaning lies in its coming to seem a mystery 14 how a mere sequence of dead signs could so much as appear to be alive 15 with significance. This sense of our ordinary cognitive capacities as 16 being intolerably mysterious – and therefore calling for a philosophical 17 project that relieves our discomfort by providing an account of these ca- 18 pacities that drains them of their mystery – is symptomatic of entangle- 19 ment in the Kantian problematic.29 20 Fifth feature. If such a Kantian investigation (into the very possibility 21 of our being able to frame thoughts, enjoy experiences, express mean- 22 ings, etc.) ends in skeptical paradox, the resulting mood is not one of 23 disappointment – for disappointment (like discovery) is only possible 24 where some glimmering of what it is that one wants (but cannot 25 have) is also available to one. Kant says (concerning what he calls) skep- 26 ticism, that it is a “way of thinking, in which reason moves against itself 27 with such violence, that it could never have reason arisen except in vçl- 28 liger Verzweiflung of achieving satisfaction with respect to reason’s most 29 important aspirations”.30 The violence with which here, in what Kant 30 calls skepticism, reason turns against itself is a violence of the most ex- 31 32 29 Hence, in recent years, the increasingly important relationship between various 33 sorts of philosophical project calling for some sort of naturalistic reduction, on 34 the one hand, and the Kantian problematic in philosophy, on the other. The 35 demand for such reductions in the absence of a plausible program for their ex- 36 ecution can, on the one hand, give rise to the relevant sense of mystery; while a 37 philosophically independently fueled sense of Kantian paradox can, on the other hand, fuel the sense that a program of naturalistic reduction is the only 38 possible form of solution to the most urgent philosophical problems that face 39 us today. 40 30 Kant (1997), 4:271. 34 James Conant

1 treme possible sort. What reason questions is itself. Our faculty for ra- 2 tional thought arrives at the point where it asks itself (not just how 3 this or that cognitive capacity is possible, but) how it itself is possible, 4 questioning the possibility of the exercise of the very capacity exercised 5 in the framing of such a question. This question is one reason would be 6 driven to pose only if it found itself in a state of vçlliger Verzweiflung – 7 complete desperation or despair – we might say: despair born of desper- 8 ation. (The mood of Kantian skepticism is that of the heroes of Kafka’s 9 parables: one of bewilderment at the dissolution of the world’s condi- 10 tions of intelligibility.31) Such a prevailing mood of despair as the out- 11 come of philosophical inquiry is symptomatic of entanglement in a var- 12 iant of the Kantian problematic. 13 Sixth feature. When reason thus questions its own possibility, the 14 natural history of reason enters a new and radical stage – a skeptical para- 15 dox of a different order from the Cartesian is broached. The problem is 16 no longer to understand how something we took to be possible can be 17 actual. The problem is now one that threatens the entire array of cog- 18 nitive capacities which the Cartesian skeptic takes to be unproblemati- 19 cally available: the capacities to doubt and dream, to feel and think and 20 believe, to enjoy sensory impressions of fireplaces and frame hypotheses 21 about evil demons. The problem now is to understand how something 22 that we take to be actual – for example, the exercise of those cognitive 23 capacities evidently actualized in our philosophical reflections (reflec- 24 tions that themselves seek to address the question of the possibility of 25 such capacities) – can be possible.32 26 Seventh feature. This collapse of the space of possibilities leaves it 27 looking not – as in the Cartesian case – as if there is something we can- 28 not do. Now it looks as if there is nothing to do (not even to dream) 29 30 31 I explore the engagement with a philosophical problematic of this sort in Kaf- 31 ka’s parables in Conant (2001). 32 32 There is a joke – which I first heard from Dan Dennett – that goes as follows: “Scientists are the sort of people who, once they see that something is possible 33 in principle, want to know whether it is possible in practice. Philosophers are 34 the sort of people who, once they see that something is possible in practice, 35 want to know whether it is possible in principle.” In order to bring out its per- 36 tinence to the topic at hand, we might reformulate the joke in even starker 37 terms as follows: “Scientists want to know whether something possible is actual. Philosophers want to know whether something actual is possible.” Dennett in- 38 tended the joke, I think, as a swipe at a certain sort of philosopher. But the joke 39 neatly sums up an important yet elusive aspect of a certain sort of philosophical 40 problematic – the one at issue in this (sixth) Kantian feature. Two Varieties of Skepticism 35

1 where we had previously thought there must be something. The Kant- 2 ian skeptical discovery, rather than disclosing a boundary which our 3 cognitive abilities run up against, seems to deprive us any territory 4 through which such a boundary might be able to run. This sense 5 that, in our philosophical inquiry, we have found a way to make the 6 Cartesian limit disintegrate (though at the possible cost of ceasing to 7 be able to make sense of our lives) is symptomatic of entanglement in 8 the Kantian problematic. 9 Eighth feature. The Cartesian takes himself to run up against a gap in 10 his philosophizing (a gap between mind and world, between the body of 11 the other and his soul, between interpretation and meaning, etc.). He 12 takes himself to have made a genuine discovery in having disclosed 13 the existence of such a gap. The gap itself is just there. The Kantian 14 also seems to encounter a certain sort of gap in his philosophizing (be- 15 tween sensory blindness and sensory consciousness, between an inex- 16 pressive expanse of mere flesh and the animated field of an expressive 17 human body, between meaningless sequences of marks and noises and 18 determinately meaningful expressions of thought, etc.). But it is not 19 clear what it would be acquiesce in the existence of his gap. It must al- 20 ready be bridged (as evidenced by his present ability to exercise his ca- 21 pacities for perception, expression, and thought); and yet, as long as the 22 threat of Kantian paradox has yet to be averted, it also appears that there 23 is no way to bridge the gap. Thus the Kantian problematic tends to be 24 most lucidly adumbrated in the writings of kinds of Kantian who aim to 25 show that where we seem to be confronted with a Kantian gap, we are 26 confronted with only the illusion of a gap. 27 Ninth feature. If, as was said above, the philosophical outcome that 28 now looms is one that threatens the array of cognitive capacities 29 which the Cartesian skeptic takes to be unproblematically available 30 (the capacities to doubt and dream, to feel and think and believe, to 31 enjoy sensory impressions of fireplaces and frame hypotheses about 32 evil demons), then the full import of Kantian skeptical paradox must re- 33 main intellectually unschematizable. There can be no such thing as get- 34 ting “it” fully into focus, for getting things into focus seems precisely to 35 be just a further instance of the sort of thing which we now seem bound 36 to conclude we are unable to do. The Kantian worry is not merely (like 37 the Cartesian one) a form of philosophical perplexity that ceases to be 38 sustainable when the attempt is made to translate it into practice. It can- 39 not even be sustained at the level of theory. The practical possibility of 40 abstaining from the modes of experience and thought and expression 36 James Conant

1 that are here brought into question is not an option that can present it- 2 self even momentarily as a live one. This form of skeptical paradox is 3 therefore not unstable merely in the way the Cartesian one is (i.e., be- 4 cause we cannot sustain our conviction in it, as we leave the closet of 5 our philosophy and immerse ourselves in the practical exigencies of 6 life), the Kant paradoxical surmise already occupies a state of radical in- 7 stability qua surmise. The Kantian skeptic finds himself drawn to a ques- 8 tion he is both unable to hold stably in his mind and yet unable to dis- 9 miss. 10 11 12 VIII. The Inflection of Philosophical Vocabulary in Cartesian 13 and Kantian Registers 14 15 This brings us to the second form of philosophical insight that a perspic- 16 uous overview of various kinds of skepticism affords. It allows one to 17 distinguish some of the very different sorts of things philosophers may 18 take themselves to mean when they employ vocabulary such as ‘skepti- 19 cism’, ‘skeptical paradox’, etc. Moreover, which register – Cartesian or 20 Kantian – a philosopher is operating in will also determine the manner 21 in which a great deal of the rest of his philosophical vocabulary is in- 22 flected. Equipped with the preceding overview of Cartesian and Kant- 23 ian features, it becomes possible to survey the history of twentieth-cen- 24 tury and to notice that philosophers (in their discus- 25 26 sions of what they call ‘skepticism’) often tend to be preoccupied with 27 one of these two registers to the exclusion of the other. Most of the 28 mainstream of analytic philosophy has been obsessed with the Cartesian 29 problematic. Moore, Russell, Broad, Ayer, Price, and Chisholm are 30 among the most distinguished members of this Cartesian branch of 31 the analytic tradition. But there is also a branch of the analytic tradition 32 that, though it has fewer members, is equally as distinguished, and oc- 33 cupies itself almost entirely with the Kantian problematic. It includes 34 among its members C.I. Lewis, , and Peter Strawson. If 35 one then examines how a great deal of philosophical vocabulary (‘expe- 36 rience’, ‘epistemic’, ‘object’, ‘the given’, etc.) is employed, one notices 37 that it acquires a very different inflection in the writings of one of these 38 sets of authors than it acquires in the writings of the other. A preoccu- 39 pation with a Kantian problematic characterizes the work of a philoso- 40 pher such as Heidegger no less than it does that of a philosopher such as Two Varieties of Skepticism 37

1 Sellars. Thus, armed with the distinction between these two varieties of 2 skepticism, one can also notice points of affinity and divergence across 3 the alleged divide between analytic and . This 4 can provide philosophically far less superficial categories for sorting phi- 5 losophers into groups than those we usually rely upon. (One can learn to 6 see past the common philosophical reference points and superficial sim- 7 ilarities in philosophical tradition and style that unite thinkers such as 8 Heidegger and Sartre, on the one hand, and Wilfrid Sellars and H.H. 9 Price, on the other, and begin to discern certain fundamental divergen- 10 ces, thus enabling one to notice fundamental philosophical affinities be- 11 tween thinkers from different traditions, allowing one to sort together 12 Heidegger and Sellars, on the one hand, and Sartre and Price, on the 13 other.) 14 Not only individual bits of vocabulary but whole phrases, clauses, 15 sentences and questions acquire a different philosophical valence de- 16 pending upon whether they occur in the context of the investigation 17 of a Cartesian or a Kantian problematic. Thus, for example, the question 18 “Can our cognitive powers reach all the way to the objects themselves?” 19 can express a Cartesian anxiety about the existence of a gap between our 20 representations of outer objects and those outer objects themselves (the 21 anxiety here is that our cognitive powers always operate at an awkward 22 remove from the objects they represent) or it can express a Kantian 23 anxiety about our capacity to direct our thought at objects (the anxiety 24 here is that our so-called cognitive powers are unable to furnish us with 25 anything which even amounts to a “representation”.) Since the same 26 form of words can, on a particular occasion, express either a Cartesian 27 or a Kantian anxiety, it becomes possible, as we shall soon see, for 28 two philosophers to take themselves to be in agreement with one anoth- 29 er when they are not, or to take themselves to be in disagreement with 30 one another when they are not. It thus becomes important, when seek- 31 ing to identify the sort of philosophical problematic in which a philos- 32 opher is entangled, to look beyond the most superficial features of a his 33 work, such as the forms of words that he is drawn to employ when 34 framing his problem. One must look instead to the character of the fea- 35 tures that characterize his problematic. One philosopher may adopt an- 36 other philosopher’s mode of speaking wholesale and yet miss his prob- 37 lematic entirely.33 38 39 33 Conversely, one may resolutely avoid a particular philosopher’s ways of speak- 40 ing as a strategy for avoiding his problems and yet end up mired in precisely the 38 James Conant

1 Even if one confines one’s survey of varieties of skepticism solely to 2 noting the presence or absence of only the first of the nine generic fea- 3 tures mentioned above (i.e., to noting the character of the examples 4 that figure in each of these two varieties of skepticism), that alone 5 ought to suffice to make one begin to wonder whether Price, Ayer 6 and Austin might not, for the most part, be participating in a tradition 7 of thought about skepticism very different from the one that runs 8 through the writings of Heidegger and Lewis and Sellars. (This is, of 9 course, not to deny that Lewis and Sellars ultimately wish to address 10 some of the concerns of a Price or an Ayer, anymore than it is to 11 deny that Kant ultimately wishes to address Descartes.) A pair of passages 12 from Price and Lewis respectively will serve briefly to illustrate the 13 point. 14 In these passages, Price and Lewis are each concerned to isolate a 15 certain stratum or strand of our experience – one which they each 16 call the “given” (thus illustrating that the term “given” functions very 17 differently in the context of a Cartesian and a Kantian investigation). 18 First, here is Price’s tomato: 19 When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it 20 is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can 21 doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. Perhaps what I took 22 for a tomato was really a reflection; perhaps I am even the victim of some 23 hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a back- 24 ground of other colour-patches, and having a certain visual depth, and 25 that this whole field of colour is directly present to my consciousness. 26 What the red patch is, whether a substance, or as a state of a substance, 27 or an event, whether it is physical or psychical or neither, are questions 28 that we may doubt about. But that something is red and round then and there I cannot doubt. Whether the something persists even for a moment 29 before and after it is present to my consciousness, whether other minds can 30 be conscious of it as well as I, may be doubted. But that it now exists, and 31 that I am conscious of it – by me at least who am conscious of it this cannot 32 possibly be doubted. And when I say that it is ‘directly’ present to my con- 33 sciousness, I mean that my consciousness of it is not reached by inference, nor by any other intellectual process … nor by any passage from sign to 34 significate…. This peculiar and ultimate manner of being present to con- 35 36 37 38 philosophical problematic one sought to avoid. This is part of the reason why 39 ’s preferred strategies for dissolving philosophical problems tend 40 to be so ineffectual. Two Varieties of Skepticism 39

1 sciousness is called being given, and that which is thus present is called a 34 2 datum. 3 Now here is Lewis’s fountain-pen: 4 5 At the moment, I have a fountain pen in my hand. When I so describe this item of my present experience, I make use of terms whose meaning I have 6 learned. Correlatively I abstract this item from the total field of my present 7 consciousness and relate it to what is not just now present in ways which I 8 have learned and which reflect modes of action I have acquired. It might 9 happen that I remember my first experience of such a thing. If so, I should 10 find that this sort of presentation did not then mean “fountain pen” to me. 11 I bring to the present moment something which I did not then bring; a re- lation of this to other actual and possible experiences, and a classification of 12 what is here presented with things which I did not then include in the same 13 group. This present classification depends on that learned relation of this 14 experience to other possible experience and to my action, which the 15 shape, size, etc. of this object was not then a sign of. A savage in New 16 Guinea lacking certain interests and habits of action which are mine, would not so classify it…. In whatever terms I describe this item of my ex- 17 perience, I shall not convey it merely as given, but shall supplement this by a 18 meaning which has to do with relations, and particularly with relation to 19 other experiences which I regard as possible but which are not just now 20 actual…. The infant may see it much as I do, but still it will mean him 21 none of these things I have described it as being, but merely “plaything” 22 or “smooth biteable”. But for any mind whatever, it will be more than what is merely given if it be noted at all.35 23 24 One of the things one can say about Price’s tomato can, with equal jus- 25 tice, be said of both Price’s tomato and Lewis’s fountain-pen: Price’s ex- 26 pression, “When I see a tomato” has the force of “whenever I see any 27 object”. But another of the things one can say of Price’s tomato does 28 not hold of Lewis’s fountain-pen: the entire existence of the world is 29 squeezed into that tomato. That is to say, Price’s tomato and Lewis’s 30 fountain-pen each aspire to be in some way representative of the object 31 of knowledge as such. Each of these examples aspires to a sort of gen- 32 erality, but not the same sort. 33 Price’s tomato seeks to represent the object of knowledge as such in 34 virtue of its alleged optimality – in virtue of the supposition that if 35 knowledge fails here it will fail everywhere. Price’s tomato is selected 36 as a best case of knowledge and the point of rolling it on to the scene 37 is to see what in one’s experience of it is susceptible to doubt, what 38 39 34 Price (1932), 3. 40 35 Lewis (1929), 49 f. 40 James Conant

1 isn’t, and what the consequences of such doubt are. Its capacity for rep- 2 resentativeness therefore turns on its being a fully determinate case of 3 knowledge. Its representativeness is a function of the way it allows us 4 to infer something about knowledge in general from a consideration 5 of this particular case of knowledge. (Many of the deeper investigations 6 into the Cartesian paradox therefore probe whether there is a tension in 7 the Cartesian skeptic’s desire to furnish an example of knowledge that is 8 supposed to be at one and the same time fully representative of knowledge 9 as such and yet a fully determinate instance of a knowledge-claim.) Lew- 10 is’s fountain-pen seeks to represent the object of knowledge as such in 11 virtue of its exhibiting general characteristics which any instance of em- 12 pirical knowledge must possess – in virtue of the supposition that all 13 knowledge possesses a common structure and therefore this instance 14 of knowledge must possess that structure. Lewis’s fountain-pen is select- 15 ed not as a best case of knowledge, but as a coherent candidate for 16 knowledge. It is offered not as an exemplary instance, but merely as a 17 run-of-the-mill specimen of the sort of thing that can figure in a 18 claim to knowledge. What is at issue for Lewis is not the unimpeachable 19 certainty, but rather the bare intelligibility of that with which his expe- 20 rience presents him. His example’s capacity for representativeness there- 21 fore turns on its being susceptible not to a certain sort of doubt, but to a 22 certain sort of abstraction – an abstraction to which any determinate case 23 of knowledge can be subjected. Its representativeness is a function of the 24 way conclusions about this particular instance of knowledge flow from a 25 consideration of what is constitutive of knowledge in general. (Many of 26 the deeper investigations into the Kantian paradox therefore probe 27 whether the conditions – e.g., the sensible and intellectual conditions 28 – that Kantian skeptics allege to be constitutive of knowledge as such, 29 and yet which as conceived by the skeptic appear not to be co-satisfia- 30 ble, are properly conceived by the skeptic.) The existence of the world 31 is not at stake in Lewis’s example of an object, though the possibility of 32 its schematizability – its availability to our thought – is. The point of the 33 example is not to inquire into whether we can know that there is a foun- 34 tain-pen here, but how it is that we are able to apprehend this particular 35 colligation of sense qualities as a fountain-pen. The point of Lewis’s 36 fountain-pen is to present something (and, for this purpose, he could 37 have chosen a much less generic object) knowledge of which involves 38 both a contribution of sensibility and a contribution of understanding. 39 The point of Lewis’s exploration of his example is not to see what 40 will and what will not withstand doubt, but to isolate the respective Two Varieties of Skepticism 41

1 contributions of sensibility and understanding in our apprehension of 2 the object. Now I do not mean here to claim that Lewis’s sort of inves- 3 tigation does not figure in the work of authors oblivious to the possibil- 4 ity of Kantian skepticism. (Descartes’s exploration of his example of the 5 piece of wax figures in The Second Meditation precisely as part of an ex- 6 ercise of isolating the respective contributions of the senses and the in- 7 tellect.) I mean only to claim that if such an example, treated in such a 8 way, is pressed to the point at which it begins to issue in a skeptical 9 problematic, then the ensuing skeptical problematic will exhibit Kantian 10 features. 11 I have allowed myself, just now, to speak of “Lewis’s sort of exam- 12 ple”. But this way of speaking is potentially misleading. What is at issue 13 here is not (what philosophers usually mean when they talk about) “a 14 kind of object”. (Lewis could have chosen a tomato. But he could 15 also have chosen a goldfinch.) Instead of speaking of “Lewis’s sort of ex- 16 ample”, I would have done better to speak of Lewis’s manner of taking 17 up an example. Cavell, after introducing the terminology of “generic 18 object” and “specific object” in The Claim of Reason, goes on to caution 19 that these terms should not be taken to mean “that there are two kinds 20 of objects in the world”, rather the point of such ways of speaking is to 21 characterize “the spirit in which an object is under discussion, the kind 22 of problem that has arisen about it, the problem in which it presents it- 23 self as a focus of investigation”.36 So, also, when I say that the object at 24 the focus of the Cartesian problematic, call it the Cartesian object, is dif- 25 ferent from the object at the focus of the Kantian problematic, call it the 26 Kantian object, this is not because there are two different kinds of objects 27 in the world; rather the point is to characterize two different ways of 28 taking up a possible object of experience and investigating the character 29 of the relation that obtains between it and a cognizing subject. The 30 Kantian object is not to be confused with the Cartesian object.37 This 31 32 36 Cavell (1979), 55. 33 37 Contrary to what Cavell suggests in various passing remarks, therefore, the 34 Kantian notion of an “object in general” is radically different from Cavell’s no- 35 tion of a generic object. The latter is Cavellian shorthand for the sort of object 36 that figures in a Cartesian skeptical recital; the former is Kantian shorthand for 37 what is left of our concept of an object once it has been subjected to a severe degree of abstraction. The Cavellian locution stands for the notion of a certain 38 sort of actual concrete particular that is only very indeterminately characterized 39 – yet, this indeterminacy notwithstanding, it is still meant to be something that 40 can be exhibited in experience. Whereas the Kantian locution stands for the no- 42 James Conant

1 does not mean that the Cartesian object is an object which, due to its 2 unusual properties, does not fall under the genus of Kantian object, 3 but rather that the sort of concept of an object that is at issue in each 4 of these skeptical problematics – and the sort of generality that attaches 5 to each of these concepts – is different. 6 What the example of the pair passages from Price and Lewis respec- 7 tively are intended to illustrate is the way in which a whole raft of phil- 8 osophical terminology – of which the term ‘object’ is meant to serve 9 merely as one representative instance – acquires a new significance 10 when the context of philosophical investigation shifts from the context 11 of a Cartesian to that of a Kantian problematic. 12 13 14 IX. The Kantian Way with Skepticism 15 16 We now come to the third form of philosophical insight that a per- 17 spicuous overview of various kinds of skepticism affords. It allows us to 18 see more clearly some of the ways in which philosophers have had 19 something original and penetrating to contribute to an understanding 20 of the sources and nature of skepticism. One way the work of a philos- 21 opher can stand out in this regard is in its appreciation of the symmetries 22 and asymmetries that obtain across the variants of, say, Cartesian skep- 23 ticism. Another way the work of a philosopher can stand out is in its 24 exploration of the connection between Cartesian and Kantian skepticism. 25 There are two classic figures in the history of philosophy whose writings 26 thus stand out – figures who have been concerned to explore the nature 27 and structure of the Cartesian and Kantian problematics alike and, above 28 all, to explore the relation between them. They are Kant and Wittgen- 29 stein. One way of plunging oneself into the heart of their respective 30 philosophies – and of measuring the singular achievement of their re- 31 spective contributions to the history of thought about skepticism – is 32 33 tion of a bare abstract concept of a particular – a concept every actual concrete 34 individual equally instantiates and none properly exemplifies. To mistake this 35 Kantian concept of an object for the name of a sort of item that some sort of 36 being could encounter in experience is a mistake Kant himself warns against. 37 The concept that one arrives at through this severe application of the Kantian procedure of abstraction is, as Kant puts it, an “entirely indeterminate concept”; 38 and he warns that fatal confusion results when one “is misled into treating this 39 entirely indeterminate concept … as if it were a determinate concept of an en- 40 tity that allows of being known in a certain manner” (Kant (1998), B307). Two Varieties of Skepticism 43

1 to focus one’s attention on their respective into the relation 2 that obtains between these two varieties of skepticism. 3 This last touches directly on a further respect in which 4 my employment of the labels ‘Cartesian’ and ‘Kantian’ might seem ten- 5 dentious. Was not Kant as interested in (what I am here calling) “Car- 6 tesian skepticism” as anyone? My invocation of Kant, in calling the sec- 7 ond of these kinds of skepticism “Kantian”, is not meant to suggest that 8 Kant does not know about or does not care to address Cartesian skep- 9 ticism. Before turning to the task of clearing up this misunderstanding, it 10 will help to draw a distinction between weaker and stronger senses in 11 which a philosopher might be termed “Kantian”. 12 To be a Kantian in the weak sense – what I will henceforth call mild 13 – requires only that one share with Kant a philosophical 14 problem of a certain form; to be a Kantian in a yet stronger sense – 15 which I will henceforth call medium-strength Kantianism – requires that 16 one also share with Kant a conception of the form that the solution 17 to such a problem must assume and what the philosophical implications 18 of such a solution are. I take what I have just said to come to the same 19 thing as this: To be a mild Kantian (the only sense of “Kantian” that has 20 thus far been at issue in this paper) is to be someone who finds himself 21 embroiled in some phase of (what I have been calling) the Kantian prob- 22 lematic; to be a medium-strength Kantian involves not merely finding 23 oneself in the predicament of being thus embroiled, but also wishing to 24 implement a very particular philosophical strategy for liberating oneself 25 from such a predicament – namely, the one that Kant himself sought to 26 implement.38 27 I remarked earlier (in my elucidation of the eighth Kantian feature) 28 that the Kantian problematic tends to be most lucidly adumbrated in the 29 writings of kinds of Kantian who aim to show that where we seem to be 30 confronted with a Kantian gap, we are confronted with only the illusion 31 of a gap. The strategy of such Kantians is to find a way to make the 32 seeming gap disappear. Part of the motivation for such Kantians in mak- 33 ing their gap disappear is that, in the process, they hope to show that the 34 corresponding Cartesian gap can also be made to vanish. I am taking it 35 that Kant himself was such a Kantian. That is to say, where I have been 36 37 38 The proper account of what it is to be a medium-strength Kantian therefore 38 ultimately rests on a detailed reading of the most difficult portions of The Cri- 39 tique of Pure Reason. I will make no attempt to defend such a reading here; but I 40 will, in various ways, presuppose such a reading. 44 James Conant

1 distinguishing between two problematics, Kant (as I read him), and cer- 2 tain Kantians, will insist that there is only one extended philosophical 3 problematic. I earlier canvassed a reason why someone might not 4 want to call (what I have been calling) “Kantian skepticism” a variety 5 of skepticism at all. We now see a reason why some philosophers will 6 consider what is at issue here a philosophical problematic that is properly 7 subsumed under the rubric of “skepticism”: namely, because they think 8 that what is at issue in the Kantian skeptical problematic is a philosoph- 9 ically more perspicuous and resolute understanding of single philosoph- 10 ical anxiety that, as it comes to understand itself better, comes to assume 11 an increasingly radical form – a philosophical anxiety that (both histor- 12 ically and systematically) comes into view (and achieves a comparatively 13 less clear and distinct form of expression) in the initial guise of Cartesian 14 skepticism. 15 A variant of what I have been calling “Cartesian skepticism” comes 16 in for special treatment in the Critique of Pure Reason under the rubric of 17 idealism. So the first thing to notice here is that when Kant is restricting 18 his attention to (what I have been calling) Cartesian skepticism he does 19 not employ the term ‘skepticism’. Idealism, for Kant, centers around a 20 doubt about the existence of mind-independent objects or as Kant 21 sometimes calls them “material objects”. (Thus Kant, employing a 22 label that has not found favor with posterity, also refers to this philo- 23 sophical position as material idealism.) Kant writes: “Idealism … is the 24 theory which declares the existence of objects in space outside us to 25 be either merely doubtful and indemonstrable, or else false and impos- 26 sible”.39 Skeptical doubt here can be directed at the demonstrability of 27 the existence of such objects (and can thus issue in about 28 their existence); or it can be directed at whether we can so much as 29 make sense of the idea of such objects (and can thus issue into the ma- 30 terial-object counterpart of ). Thus Kant distinguishes two spe- 31 cies of idealism (he calls them “problematic idealism” and “dogmatic 32 idealism”. (He attributes the former to Descartes and the latter to Ber- 33 keley.) The former sort of idealist doubts that we are able to attain 34 knowledge of mind-independent objects. The latter sort of idealist 35 doubts that there are any such objects. 36 The version of idealism that Kant attributes to Descartes, and with 37 which Kant is focally concerned in “The Refutation of Idealism”, turns 38 crucially, Kant thinks, on a certain way of drawing the distinction be- 39 40 39 Kant (1998), B274. Two Varieties of Skepticism 45

1 tween inner and outer sense. Descartes does not doubt that we have 2 inner sense – that is that we have experiences of objects of some sort. 3 There is a kind of experience that is immune to doubt. The objects re- 4 garding which we have such an indubitable variety of experience are all 5 modes of , res cogitans. Whereas outer objects – modes 6 of corporeal substance, – figure in Descartes’s philosophy as 7 radically dissimilar to inner objects in that their existence is inherently 8 open to skeptical doubt and consequently in need of philosophical dem- 9 onstration. The inherent vulnerability of Cartesian outer experiences to 10 doubt, according to Kant, is to be traced to the manner in which expe- 11 riences of outer objects are conceived by Descartes. Outer objects are 12 conceived by Descartes in such a way that they themselves never fall 13 within the immediate purview of experience. They are never experi- 14 enced immediately, but only indirectly. The only objects of immediate 15 experience are inner experiences. If one wishes to speak of “outer ex- 16 periences” then, on a Cartesian conception, the only thing that one 17 can mean by such a phrase is a species of inner experience – something 18 that happens in the mind – where the mental happening in question is 19 one that purports to be about what is outside the mind. So-called “outer 20 experiences” are happenings within the mind which involve represen- 21 tations of what is happening outside the mind. A so-called “outer expe- 22 rience” is thus conceived by Descartes to be an inner experience pur- 23 porting to be both of something outer and caused by the object it is of. 24 Thus, on Kant’s reading of him, Descartes takes the possibility of ex- 25 perience of how things seem outside of us – the possibility of an expe- 26 rience’s being thus “about” or “of” something outer – to be a compa- 27 ratively unproblematic phenomenon. The skeptical problem for Des- 28 cartes – what Kant calls the problem of idealism – only begins when 29 we turn to the question of how we can reason reliably from how things 30 seem to us to how things actually are outside of us. Thus Kant stresses 31 that the apparent coherence of the idealist’s position rests on the presup- 32 position of the apparent coherence of an inference from how things are 33 within the mind to how things are without the mind: “Idealism assume 34 [s] that the only immediate experience is inner experience, and that 35 from it we can only infer outer things – and this, moreover, only in 36 an untrustworthy manner, as in all cases where we are inferring from 37 given effects to determinate causes.”40 Kant characterizes his argu- 38 ment-strategy in “The Refutation of Idealism” as one in which “the 39 40 40 Ibid. B276. 46 James Conant

1 game played by the idealist is turned against itself”.41 Kant aims to show 2 that without what the idealist wants to infer to there would be nothing 3 to infer from. To turn idealism’s own game against itself is, for Kant, to 4 show “that we have experience, and not merely imagination of outer 5 things”; and Kant thinks that the way to show this is to show that 6 “even our inner experience, which for Descartes is indubitable, is pos- 7 sible only on the assumption of outer experience”.42 What Descartes 8 takes to be a separable and self-contained realm of experience – the 9 sphere of inner life (the domain of res cogitans) – Kant wants to show 10 to be not in the least self-standing in the way that Descartes imagines 11 it to be. Kant wants to show that the capacity for inner sense is only pos- 12 sible for a being which also already has the capacity to enjoy immediate 13 experiences of outer objects, and, moreover, that these two capacities 14 are not separable in the way Descartes imagines inner and outer sense 15 to be. Rather they are equally constitutive aspects of the unitary con- 16 sciousness of any being capable of experience.43 17 Kant’s argument in “The Refutation of Idealism” itself presupposes 18 the results of the preceding pages of the Transcendental Analytic; and 19 the aim of the Transcendental Analytic, as a whole, is to try to get 20 the Kantian paradox into view and to show how to make it go away. 21 That is to say, Kant’s treatment of the Cartesian problematic presuppos- 22 es his treatment of (what I have been calling) the “Kantian problemat- 23 ic”. The question that the Transcendental Analytic seeks to address is: 24 what sort of unity must characterize a play of representations for them 25 so much as seem to be of objects. The decisive step in the Transcenden- 26 tal Deduction lies in showing that a play of representations, for it to have 27 objective purport, must be in accord with the unity that the categories 28 prescribe. In showing that anything worthy of the title of experience 29 must accord with these conditions of unity, Kant takes himself to be ad- 30 dressing someone whom he calls “the skeptic”. When, in such contexts, 31 32 41 Ibid. 33 42 Ibid. B275. 34 43 The argument that inner and outer sense mutually depend upon one another 35 comes in two steps. The argument that all objects – and hence also the objects 36 of outer sense – depend upon the form of inner sense is presented in the Tran- 37 scendental Aesthetic. This shows that outer experience is only possible on the as- sumption of inner experience. The Refutation of Idealism shows that inner expe- 38 rience is only possible on the assumption of outer experience. These two argu- 39 ments jointly show that neither of these two sorts of experience is possible ex- 40 cept as part of a larger package which also includes the other. Two Varieties of Skepticism 47

1 we find Kant using the word ‘skepticism’ what is at issue is a (Kantian) 2 boggle, not a (Cartesian) doubt. Here is an example of such a context: 3 The concept of cause, for instance, which expresses the necessity of an 4 event under a presupposed condition, would be false if it rested only on 5 an arbitrary subjective necessity, implanted in us, of connecting certain em- 6 pirical representations according to the rule of causal relation. I would not 7 then be able to say that the effect is connected with the cause in the object, 8 that is to say, necessarily, but only that I am so constituted that I cannot think this representation otherwise than as thus connected. This is exactly 9 what the skeptic most desires. For if this be the situation, all our insight, 10 resting on the supposed objective validity of our judgements, is nothing 11 but sheer illusion.44 12 What is at issue in this passage is not a Cartesian worry (that we might be 13 subject to illusions of knowledge), but rather that we might be subject 14 15 to an even more radical form of illusion: an illusion of objective pur- 16 port. In order to understand better who this skeptic is and how he 17 comes to be called a “skeptic”, it helps further to distinguish a particular 18 sub-species of the Kantian problematic – which one might call the Hu- 19 mean problematic with regard to causation. One then needs to see how a cer- 20 tain sort of radicalization of the Humean problematic, from the category 21 of cause to the other categories, issues directly into the Kantian prob- 22 lematic. A proper discussion of this topic would require considerably 23 more space and take us well beyond what is required for the purposes 24 of the schematic distinction here at issue between varieties of Kantian- 25 ism of various strengths. 26 It will help now to discriminate more finely the possible strengths of 27 Kantianism and to distinguish between medium-strength and (what I 28 shall call) maximum-strength Kantianism. I earlier defined the former 29 grade of Kantianism by saying that it requires that one share with 30 Kant a conception of the form that the solution to the Kantian problem- 31 atic must assume and what the philosophical implications of such a sol- 32 ution are. To be a maximum-strength Kantian requires not only that 33 one share Kant’s philosophical aim and strategy for liberating oneself 34 from the Kantian skeptical predicament, but also to have mastered the 35 requisite nuances of such a strategy to be able to implement it success- 36 fully. Since the application of the term ‘Kantian” in this strongest pos- 37 sible sense thus depends upon the successful execution of a philosophical 38 endeavor, it can remain a philosophically open question whether it is so 39 40 44 Kant (1998), B168. 48 James Conant

1 much as possible to be a maximum-strength Kantian. If one takes it that 2 it is possible (that is, if one is a medium-strength Kantian), but if one’s 3 philosophical endeavor fails to live up to its own aspirations (thus plac- 4 ing in jeopardy the possibility of being a maximum-strength Kantian), 5 then one is threatened with a skeptical outcome of a different order 6 from that which seems to threaten the unsuccessful execution of a Car- 7 tesian inquiry. 8 Historically, the possibility of such an outcome first comes fully into 9 view with the possibility of a Kantian response to Kant’s own radicali- 10 zation of the Humean problematic. This opens up the possibility of an 11 investigation climaxing in a form of skeptical paradox of a sort apparent- 12 ly quite distinct from that of the Cartesian paradox. In order to gain a 13 firmer sense of how a distinctively Kantian form of skeptical paradox 14 can come to seem a philosophically urgent matter, it is worth returning 15 for a moment to the case of C.I. Lewis.45 Building on his example of the 16 fountain pen, consider how Lewis goes on to argue for his thesis that we 17 must acknowledge a given element in perceptual experience. Lewis’s 18 opening moves are unimpeachably Kantian. Lewis starts from the 19 thought that conceptual activity is a form of activity, and as such freely 20 undertaken. Here Lewis is following Kant in taking it that all cognition 21 must involve an element of spontaneity – that element in knowledge 22 which we, as knowers, must freely bring to the world in order for knowl- 23 edge of it to be a possible achievement for us. But, according to Lewis, 24 this requires that we also recognize a given element in experience – 25 something that operates as a constraint from outside on the freedom 26 of conceptual activity – the element in knowledge which we, as know- 27 ers, must unresistingly take in from the world in order for our “knowl- 28 edge” of “the world” to be something more than the contemplation 29 30 45 This case is discussed by McDowell in his paper “Putnam on Natural Realism”. 31 (McDowell’s paper was written and first read by me in or around 1998. It has 32 been forthcoming ever since in the Library of Living Philosophers volume on The Philosophy of – a volume which apparently is now scheduled to be 33 published in 2012.) The ensuing discussion of Lewis simply summarizes in 34 McDowell’s own language McDowell’s treatment of Lewis. It seeks to do so 35 in a manner which brings out as vividly as possible how the climax of Lewis’s 36 own Kantian skeptical problematic is of such a sort as to issue in a form of para- 37 dox quite different from the Cartesian one. That McDowell’s own way of sum- marizing the upshot of Lewis’s Kantianism should be able to bring this point 38 out so vividly itself illustrates how very clear McDowell himself is regarding 39 the differences between Cartesian and Kantian skepticism which form the 40 main topic of this paper. Two Varieties of Skepticism 49

1 of our own reflection, for it to be of something outside us. Here Lewis is 2 following Kant in taking it that all cognition must therefore equally in- 3 volve an element of passivity.46 Without some contribution of spontane- 4 ity, the deliverances of our senses would be mere impacts – as Kant says: 5 blind – less even than a mere dream. But, on its own, the mere activity of 6 thinking is empty – as Kant says: ohne Sinn oder Bedeutung – as long as its 7 play remains unconstrained from without. What Lewis calls “the given” 8 is that which is thus delivered up to the mind, furnishing it with content 9 upon which to operate, thus rescuing its operations from emptiness and 10 arbitrariness. Lewis takes us to have no choice but to acknowledge such 11 a given element in experience, if we wish to frame a conception of what 12 it is to have an empirical world-view according to which (that which we 13 wish to be able to look upon as) our “world-view” amounts to some- 14 thing more than wholly unconstrained fabrication. Indeed, without the 15 constraint of the given, what we are left with is less even than a mere 16 fabrication. For there can only be fabrication where there can be some- 17 thing more; and without any constraint on the operations of our spon- 18 taneity, the distinction between mere fabrication and something better 19 lapses. There is no longer any basis for distinguishing between those 20 of our constructions that afford a glimpse of how things are and those 21 that are mere caprice. Without the possibility of drawing a distinction 22 between mere caprice and genuinely world-guided , there is no 23 longer anything in our so-called “world-view” that is recognizable as 24 world-directed thought. 25 Lewis, however, construes the second condition on knowledge in a 26 very particular way and takes himself, in thus construing it, to be follow- 27 ing Kant (thereby participating in a long-tradition of “followers” of 28 Kant): he assumes that the freedom of conceptual activity must be 29 seen as constrained from outside its own sphere, if we do not wish to 30 lose our grip on thought’s possession of content. Hence Lewis declares 31 not only something Kant would be happy to declare: “If there be no 32 datum given to the mind then knowledge must be contentless and arbi- 33 trary; there would be nothing which it must be true to.”47 But he also 34 35 46 It is constitutive of any robust (i.e., non-mild) form of Kantianism that it pos- 36 tulates both of these elements and seeks to illuminate and render intelligible the 37 possibility of their productive cooperation with one another. The difference between medium-strength and maximum-strength Kantianisms tends, above 38 all, to turn on the relative degree of failure or success in rendering these appa- 39 rently independent conditions on knowledge productively co-satisfiable. 40 47 Lewis (1929), 38 f. 50 James Conant

1 goes on to declare: “The pure concept and the content of the given are 2 mutually independent; neither limits the other.”48 Lewis insists that the 3 given, qua merely given, must remain utterly uncorrupted by the con- 4 cepts which we bring to it, on pain of our falling into a vicious form of 5 idealism, in which we are no longer able to see our conceptual activity 6 as constrained by anything from outside its own sphere. 7 Lewis, however, also needs find a way to allow that the data given to 8 the mind be more than bare and brute. They must be able to “guide” 9 belief. He thus needs also to be able to conceive the postulated given 10 element in experience as such that it be able to direct and underwrite 11 our conceptual activity. So he here finds himself in a bind: the given 12 must be able to “guide” experience without in any way “limiting” it. 13 The given must constrain conceptual activity, while exercising its con- 14 straining influence from wholly outside the sphere of conceptual activ- 15 ity. The bind that Lewis finds himself in is that these two requirements 16 on the given are not obviously co-satisfiable. He must locate the given 17 as far enough “outside” the sphere of the conceptual to allow it to serve 18 its function as “external constraint” (keeping our cognitive wheels from 19 spinning in a frictionless vacuum), while placing it close enough “in- 20 side” that sphere to permit it to serve its “guiding” function (warranting 21 the application of some of our concepts, while refusing that of others). 22 Lewis is thus faced with the following challenge: How is the given able 23 to offer guidance to our concepts while remaining itself always concep- 24 tually unarticulated in nature? Lewis heroically strives to tell a story 25 which allows him to walk this tightrope – a story according to which 26 the given can serve its warranting function in spite of itself being that 27 which by its very nature cannot be captured by concepts. It is to this 28 end that he attempts to draw the distinction between being an instance 29 of a quale and being an instance of a concept. He wants to be entitled to 30 see the former sorts of instances as possessing many of the features that 31 instances of the latter sort possess without themselves being instances of 32 the latter sort. He says (in the fountain-pen passage quoted above) of 33 that which is given in the diverse possible experiences of the fountain 34 pen (i. e., those of the infant, the professor, and the savage) that, qua 35 given, what is “presented” is “a colligation of sense-qualities”.49 He 36 wants to be able to say that the same (in some non-conceptual sense 37 of “same”) colligation of sense-qualities is presented in each such 38 39 48 Ibid. 37. 40 49 Ibid. 49. Two Varieties of Skepticism 51

1 case; and that it is this that in each guides the use of concepts. This re- 2 quires that he be able to make sense of the idea that one can recognize (in 3 some sense of “recognize”) such colligations as the same without the 4 mediation of concepts. In order to cash out this idea of a non-concep- 5 tual mode of recognition, he needs to be able to exploit the implication 6 of universality in the term “qualities” while conceiving the sort of uni- 7 versality here at issue as utterly distinct from the universality of concepts 8 (on pain of having the supposedly “external” constraint collapse into the 9 sphere of conceptual activity). But Lewis is unable to pull off the trick, 10 he keeps falling off the tightrope, with the consequence that the argu- 11 ment of Mind and the World Order, utterly contrary to Lewis’s own in- 12 tention, threatens to collapse into a distinctively Kantian variety of skep- 13 tical paradox – one which leaves us unable to make sense of ourselves as 14 so much as in possession of a “world-view”. 15 Lewis is the sort of a medium-strength Kantian who has helped to 16 convince many that maximum-strength Kantianism is unattainable 17 and thus that Kantianism represents nothing more than a philosophical 18 dead-end. It is crucial to a proper understanding of Kant’s own way of 19 avoiding the outcome threatening Lewis’s inquiry (and thus to an un- 20 derstanding of “Kantianism” in the maximum-strength sense of the 21 term) to see that it is absolutely central to the aim of the Transcendental 22 Analytic not only to show (as Lewis himself seeks to do) that there are 23 these two dimensions of knowledge – sensibility and understanding – 24 - each of which is a necessary and neither of which is a sufficient con- 25 dition of knowledge, but also to show precisely what Lewis imagines he 26 must avoid (on pain of sacrificing the external constraint on knowledge 27 that saves it from being contentless and arbitrary): namely, that these 28 twin aspects of our cognitive constitution – our capacity to receive a 29 sensory impression that things are thus and so and our capacity to direct 30 our thought at an object (real or imaginary) are in no way independently 31 satisfiable conditions on the possibility of knowledge.50 On my under- 32 standing of what maximum-strength Kantianism entails, what is original 33 in Kant’s understanding of the relation between the two varieties of 34 skepticism distinguished above is that he thinks that it is only once 35 you see the way in which the intelligibility of each of these conditions 36 presupposes the other – that is, that it is only once you see (1) what is 37 transcendentally required in order to exercise the capacity to enjoy sense 38 39 50 For more on this point, see Thomas Land’s contribution in the companion vol- 40 ume to this volume, Rethinking vol. 1 (Land 2012). 52 James Conant

1 impressions that purport to be of something and (2) what is transcenden- 2 tally required in order to exercise the capacity to entertain thoughts that 3 purport to be about something, and (3) why you can only have one of 4 these capacities if you have both – that you are able to equip yourself 5 with the resources to dispose of the Cartesian skeptic. If the Cartesian 6 skeptic grants, as he must, that he has the resources to enjoy impressions 7 and entertain thoughts – resources required in order so much as to frame 8 his doubt – then, having thought your way through the dialectic of the 9 Kantian problematic, you will be in a position to show him that the gap 10 he seeks to bridge is only the illusion of a gap. Thus, for Kant, the way 11 to handle Cartesian skepticism is not to answer it head-on, but to think 12 through the implications of an even more radical skeptical problematic. 13 In coming to see what is incoherent in Kantian skepticism, we are to 14 come to see what is incoherent in Cartesian skepticism as well. I will 15 call this two-phased approach to the twin problematics of Cartesian 16 and Kantian skepticism the Kantian way with skepticism. 17 Most readers of Kant utterly misunderstand The Critique of Pure Rea- 18 son by taking its response to Cartesian skepticism to begin much earlier 19 in the book than it does. And such a misreading of the book is inevitable 20 if one fails to see that the Cartesian problematic represents for Kant only 21 a special case of a more general problematic. Kant’s generic term for this 22 more general problematic – of which Cartesian skepticism is eventually 23 to be recognized as only a limiting case – is “skepticism”. This furnishes 24 yet another reason why, even if you yourself wish to reserve the term 25 ‘skepticism’ for a problematic exhibiting characteristically Cartesian fea- 26 tures, it is important to be able to realize that in speaking of “skepticism” 27 a philosopher may have (what I have been calling) “Kantian skepticism” 28 in mind: namely, because, unless you allow for this possibility, it will 29 become impossible to see what Kant, and certain Kantians, are up to 30 in their treatments of (what they call) “skepticism”. 31 If one groups together the writings of philosophers who practice 32 something akin to the Kantian way with skepticism, it induces an inter- 33 esting canon—one which includes, among others, writings as diverse as 34 T.H. Green’s critiques of Locke and Hume, Frege’s critique of psycho- 35 logism, early Wittgenstein’s attempt in the Tractatus to show that realism 36 and idealism strictly thought through can be seen to collapse into one 37 another, and more recently John McDowell’s criticism of Davidson 38 in Mind and World. The positive touchstone of this way with skepticism 39 is a radical following through of the implicit assumptions of a skeptical 40 position up to the point at which the position founders in incoherence. Two Varieties of Skepticism 53

1 The Kantian way with skepticism involves the ascent up a dialectical 2 ladder that one eventually recognizes as one that is to be thrown away. 3 4 5 X. A Case of Apparent Agreement: Putnam and McDowell 6 7 We now come to a fourth form of philosophical insight that a perspic- 8 uous overview of the various kinds of philosophical response to skepti- 9 cism can afford. A number of the finest contemporary philosophers 10 writing about skepticism today misunderstand one another’s writings 11 by trying to shoehorn a skeptical paradox bearing Kantian features 12 into a problematic of Cartesian form and vice versa. As a first example 13 of such a misunderstanding, let us consider a recent misencounter be- 14 tween Hilary Putnam and John McDowell.51 15 In his 1994 Dewey Lectures52, Hilary Putnam attempts to identify a 16 widespread assumption that he claims runs throughout early modern 17 philosophy – he dubs the assumption in question “the interface concep- 18 tion” – and he argues that, three centuries later, it continues to be re- 19 sponsible for many of the difficulties that plague contemporary philos- 20 ophy. Putnam characterizes the consequences of the continuing hold of 21 this assumption on the philosophical imagination of our time as nothing 22 short of a “disaster”. His summary statement of how contemporary phi- 23 losophy managed to place itself in its present disastrous position runs as 24 follows: 25 26 [T]he key assumption responsible for the disaster is the idea that there has to 27 be an interface between our cognitive powers and the external world – or, 28 to put the same point differently, the idea that our cognitive powers cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves.53 29 30 31 51 My discussion of this example is indebted throughout to John McDowell’s 32 paper “Putnam on Natural Realism” mentioned above. This section of my paper contains nothing original that is not to be found in McDowell’s beyond 33 the way in which it seeks to show how the disagreement between McDowell 34 and Putnam at issue is usefully reframed in terms of the two varieties of skep- 35 ticism distinguished above and therefore how the disagreement here is au fond 36 one regarding the relative priority of these two varieties of skepticism. 37 52 Putnam’s Dewey Lectures were given at Columbia University in March of 1994 and first published in Vol. XCI, No. 9 of the Journal of Philosophy. They are re- 38 printed in Putnam’s book The Threefold Cord (1999) and all references to them 39 will be to this latter publication. 40 53 Putnam (1999), 10. 54 James Conant

1 Putnam here glosses the crucial assumption as follows: “the idea that our 2 cognitive powers cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves”. If 3 we could overcome the assumption expressed by these words, Putnam 4 suggests, we would be in a position to embrace with a sound philosoph- 5 ical conscience what Putnam (following ) calls “the nat- 6 ural realism of the common man”. This locution – “natural realism” 7 – as Putnam deploys it, is not meant to be a label for an alternative phil- 8 osophical position; rather it is meant to denote something both more 9 familiar and more elusive: our own pre-philosophical understanding 10 of the character of our cognitive relation to the world, prior to its cor- 11 ruption by certain forms of philosophizing that have now come to seem 12 to be forms of post-scientific . Thus Putnam is able to de- 13 scribe what he seeks to recommend in the Dewey Lectures as the cultiva- 14 tion of a kind of second naiveté about the objects of perception. But our 15 philosophical consciences are troubled. Putnam knows this, and thus 16 knows that, in issuing his call for a return to a lost state of epistemolog- 17 ical innocence, he is bound to appear to many of his colleagues to be 18 merely the most recent incarnation of the proverbial philosophical os- 19 trich burying his head in the sands of our everyday ways of talking 20 and thinking. What makes it inevitable that things will so appear to 21 many of his colleagues, according to Putnam, is the interface concep- 22 tion: it is what makes it look as if the recommended species of naiveté 23 cannot be anything other than mere naiveté. Putnam credits John 24 McDowell, in his book Mind and World, with having identified (what 25 54 26 Putnam calls in the passage above) the “key assumption”. But Putnam 27 28 29 54 The context of the previous quotation makes this evident: 30 Let us now ask just why realism about “the external world” came to seem 31 problematical. Early modern philosophers assumed that the immediate objects 32 of perception were mental, and that mental objects were nonphysical…. What is more, even their materialist opponents often put forward accounts of 33 perception that closely paralleled these “Cartesian” accounts…. 34 In his 1991 Lectures [published in Mind and World] John McDo- 35 well argues persuasively that this picture, whether in its classical version or in its 36 modern materialist version, is disastrous for just about every part of 37 and epistemology. In McDowell’s view the key assumption responsible for the disaster is the idea that there has to be an interface between our cognitive pow- 38 ers and the external world – or, to put the same point differently, the idea that 39 our cognitive powers cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves (Put- 40 nam (1999), 10). Two Varieties of Skepticism 55

1 is here misreading McDowell;55 and in order to pinpoint how such a 2 misreading of McDowell comes about, it helps to be able to see, as 3 we already have, how a phrase such as “our cognitive powers cannot 4 reach all the way to the objects themselves” can hover – and does 5 hover on Putnam’s pages – between two different sorts of philosophical 6 problematic: a Cartesian and a Kantian one. 7 To see how Putnam is here misreading McDowell, we need to see 8 how Putnam manages to change the significance of McDowell’s prose 9 while often faithfully paraphrasing or quoting McDowell’s exact words. 10 We need to see how Putnam’s employment of stretches of philosophical 11 prose – prose which he lifts directly from the pages of McDowell’s book 12 – does not leave their sense unchanged. By transplanting McDowell’s 13 locutions into the context of Putnam’s own attack on the interface con- 14 ception, Putnam confers a sense upon McDowell’s locutions different 15 from that which they possessed in the context of McDowell’s own in- 16 vestigation. As the context in which the relevant stretches of McDo- 17 well’s prose figure shifts from the exploration of a Cartesian to that of 18 a Kantian problematic, so does their sense – in ways parallel to the 19 ways in which the central locutions common to both Price’s and Lewis’s 20 passages above (“object” or “thing”, “consciousness”, “object”, “the 21 given”, etc.) shift from the one passage to the next. 22 A central aim of McDowell’s book is to make room for the follow- 23 ing truism (one that philosophy can easily seem to place out of reach) 24 which Wittgenstein expresses, in McDowell’s favorite quotation from 25 Wittgenstein, as follows: “When we say, and mean, that such-and- 26 such is the case we – and our meaning – do not stop anywhere short 27 of the fact.”56 This sounds very much like things Putnam himself 28 wants to say, for example, in wishing to affirm that “our cognitive pow- 29 ers can reach all to the objects themselves”. In affirming this, Putnam 30 represents himself, in the Dewey Lectures, as spelling out some of the 31 basic ideas behind McDowell’s strategy for making room for truisms 32 of the above Wittgensteinian sort. And, of course, the negation of the 33 claim which figures in the last phrase in the above quotation from Put- 34 35 55 I do not mean to deny that McDowell is concerned to criticize the interface 36 conception in some of his writings, most notably in his essay “Criteria, Defea- 37 sibility, and Knowledge”, but only that McDowell would not identify the tar- get of that essay with “the key” confusion that he seeks to exorcize in Mind and 38 World. 39 56 Wittgenstein (1973), section 95. The passage is quoted by McDowell (1994), 40 27. 56 James Conant

1 nam – “that our cognitive powers cannot reach all the way to the ob- 2 jects themselves” – can be taken as merely paraphrasing the same truism 3 that figures in McDowell’s favorite quotation from Wittgenstein. It is 4 clear that Putnam, in aligning himself with McDowell, wishes us to 5 take it that way. But it is equally clear that he also wishes us to take 6 the negation of the claim expressed by that phrase as the expression 7 of the repudiation of the disastrous assumption forced on us by the in- 8 terface conception. It is in wishing to be able to mean words such as 9 these in both of these ways at once that Putnam gets entangled both 10 in his understanding of the structure and aim of the argument of 11 McDowell’s Mind and World and in his proposals for a way out of the 12 problems that currently plague . 13 One sign that some slippage has taken place is that the Wittgenstein 14 passage – and McDowell’s book generally – is concerned with the pos- 15 sibility of meaning (with the possibility of our being able to mean some- 16 thing – rather than nothing – by our words), whereas much of the 17 Dewey Lectures are focally concerned with the possibility of knowledge 18 (with how it is that we can know things are as they seem). In his open- 19 ing remarks, Putnam expresses the thought he wants to vindicate in his 20 lectures as follows: “there is a way to do justice to our sense that knowl- 21 edge claims are responsible to reality without recoiling into metaphysical 22 fantasy”.57 But from McDowell’s point of view, the focus here on 23 knowledge claims (as the for understanding the kind of respon- 24 sibility to reality which philosophy brings into question) must count as 25 at best misleading, and at worst misguided. For it invites a misidentifi- 26 cation of the strand of philosophy that McDowell is focally concerned 27 to treat: it invites the substitution of a Cartesian for a Kantian problem- 28 atic. McDowell would, of course, not want to deny that we should view 29 knowledge claims as responsible to reality. But he would want to insist 30 that, for the purposes of his investigation, they constitute only a special 31 case of a more general (Kantian) problematic concerning the possibility 32 of the vulnerability of any claim to how things are. The sort of vulner- 33 ability to reality under investigation in his book is exhibited in false 34 claims equally fully as in true ones. The kind of vulnerability to reality 35 at issue in his investigation figures equally in our capacity for thinking 36 (indeed, dreaming) as it does in our capacity for knowing. McDowell’s 37 investigation does not single out those of our claims which are knowl- 38 edgeable because it is concerned with what must be the case for any sort 39 40 57 Putnam (1999), 4. Two Varieties of Skepticism 57

1 of human intellectual activity to be intelligible as one of claim-making at 2 all. It is the possibility of making claims in general, not knowledge 3 claims in particular, that comes to seem at risk when our entitlement 4 to the truism in Wittgenstein’s remark seems to come under threat. 5 As he proceeds in his lectures, as we shall see in a moment, Putnam 6 himself describes the issue with which he is concerned in terms that 7 make no particular reference to knowledge, for instance as the “how 8 does language hook on to the world” issue. So it may seem an unchar- 9 itable quibble to raise worries about his opening formulation of the issue 10 in terms of knowledge. But the narrowness of the epistemological man- 11 ner in which he introduces his topic is symptomatic of a disabling un- 12 clarity that pervades his lectures – an unclarity regarding the character of 13 the philosophical problematic which he seeks to address. As we saw in 14 the previous section of this paper, the phrase “our cognitive powers 15 cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves” can be inflected 16 in either a Cartesian or a Kantian register. The phrase can be taken to 17 denote the idea of either a Cartesian or a Kantian gap. Inflected in a 18 Cartesian register, the meaning of the phrase can happily be glossed as 19 Putnam glosses it: as “the idea that there has to be an interface between 20 our cognitive powers and the external world”. But it is only in its Kant- 21 ian inflection that the phrase tracks the problematic that stands at the 22 center of McDowell’s investigation in Mind and World, and, thus inflect- 23 ed, it cannot simply be identified – as Putnam throughout wishes to 24 identify it – with the Cartesian assumption that there has to be “an in- 25 terface between our cognitive powers and the external world”. It is only 26 through this conflation of the kinds of “responsibility to reality” at issue 27 in Cartesian and Kantian skepticism respectively that Putnam is able to 28 take the diagnosis that McDowell aims to advance in Mind and World to 29 be coincident with the one he himself seeks to advance in the Dewey 30 Lectures. To see this more clearly, consider the following sequence of 31 passages from Putnam’s Dewey Lectures: 32 Let us now ask just why realism about “the external world” came to seem 33 problematical. Early modern philosophers assumed that the immediate ob- 34 jects of perception were mental, and that mental objects were nonphysi- 35 cal…. What is more, even their materialist opponents often put forward ac- 36 counts of perception that closely paralleled these “Cartesian” accounts. 37 Even in contemporary cognitive science, for example, it is the fashion to hypothesize the existence of “representations” in the cerebral computer. 38 If one assumes that the mind is an organ, and one goes on to identify the 39 mind with the brain, it will then become irresistible to (1) think of some 40 of the “representations” as analogous to the classical theorist’s “impres- 58 James Conant

1 sions” … and (2) to think that those “representations” are linked to objects 2 in the organism’s environment only causally, and not cognitively…. 3 … I agree with James, as well as with McDowell, that the false belief that perception must be so analyzed is at the root of all the problems with 4 the view of perception that, in one form or another, has dominated West- 5 ern philosophy since the seventeenth century…. The tendency in the last 6 thirty years to repress what continues to puzzle us in the philosophy of per- 7 ception obstructs the possibility of progress with respect to the broader 8 epistemological and metaphysical issues that do preoccupy us…. 9 … How could the question “how does language hook on the world?” even appear to pose a difficulty, unless the retort: “How can there be a 10 problem about talking about, say, houses and tress when we see them all 11 the time?” had not already been rejected in advance as question-begging 12 or “hopelessly naïve”. The “how does language hook on to the world” 13 issue is, at bottom, a replay of the old “how does perception hook on to 14 the world” issue. And is it any wonder if, after thirty years of virtually ig- 15 noring … the task of challenging the view of perception that has been re- ceived since the seventeenth century …, the very idea that thought and 16 language do connect with reality has come to seem more and more prob- 17 lematical? Is it any wonder that one can’t see how thought and language 18 hook on to the world if one never mentions perception?58 19 In the above sequence of remarks, Putnam wishes to identify the diffi- 20 culty posed in the question “how does language hook on the world?” 21 22 with the difficulty made urgent by the interface conception. Elsewhere 23 in his writings, Putnam is extremely sensitive in his treatment of philo- 24 sophical problems that bear the earmarks of a Kantian problematic, and 25 in showing how putative solutions to those problems, if strictly thought 59 26 through, can be seen to collapse into variants of Kantian skepticism. 27 But in the above sequence, Putnam insists on privileging a Cartesian 28 problematic as holding the key to a diagnosis of philosophy’s most fun- 29 damental problems. I do not mean to suggest that Putnam is entirely 30 clear or resolute in his Dewey Lectures in his desire to privilege a Carte- 31 sian problematic over a Kantian one. On the contrary: as the Dewey Lec- 32 tures proceed, it is clear that Putnam also wishes to identify the difficulty 33 posed in the question “how does language hook on the world?” with 34 the difficulty (at the heart of much contemporary philosophy of mind 35 36 58 Ibid. 9–13. 37 59 Putnam’s criticisms of attempts to naturalize meaning are an example of this. He sees such views as degenerating into a variant of Kantian skepticism. Putnam is 38 here influenced by certain arguments of Frege’s. For a brief discussion of the 39 strain of Putnam’s thought that I have in mind here, see my “Introduction” 40 to Putnam (1994), xlii-xlvi. Two Varieties of Skepticism 59

1 and language) which McDowell seeks to address in Mind and World – 2 one that, as we saw from our brief discussion of C.I. Lewis, does not 3 fit into a Cartesian mould. It is precisely this irresoluteness on Putnam’s 4 part that I am seeking to bring into focus: Putnam wants what is at issue 5 throughout to be the same “how does language hook on the world?” 6 issue. But what I said above about the phrase “our cognitive powers 7 cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves” applies equally to 8 the question “how does language hook on the world?”. In the pages 9 of Putnam’s Dewey Lectures, these forms of words hover unstably be- 10 tween the expression of a Cartesian and a Kantian worry – and that in- 11 stability can be resolved only at the cost of depriving Putnam’s preferred 12 diagnosis of the source of contemporary philosophy’s ills of its intended 13 generality. Putnam’s “key assumption” cannot unlock the problems that 14 McDowell seeks to address. 15 Large stretches of the Dewey Lectures make sense only if the worry 16 expressed in questions such as “Can our cognitive powers reach all 17 the way to the objects themselves?” and “How does language hook 18 on the world?” is taken to be of a Cartesian variety. This is equally 19 true of the entire sequence of passages quoted above; and if that se- 20 quence is taken as offering – as it clearly intends to – a diagnosis of 21 most of what ails contemporary philosophy, and if the question at 22 issue is taken to express both the worry made urgent by the interface 23 conception and yet somehow at the same time the one that animates 24 the sorts of philosophical worry McDowell seeks to address in Mind 25 and World, then Putnam may not claim McDowell as an ally. For 26 what Putnam then says in that sequence of passages must be fundamen- 27 tally at odds with the diagnosis McDowell seeks to put forward in Mind 28 and World. What McDowell will take to be unsatisfactory in Putnam’s 29 diagnosis can be put as follows: Putnam, in effect, suggests that the var- 30 ious forms of Kantian skepticism that have come to seem so urgent in 31 recent philosophy can be exorcised simply through the treatment of 32 Cartesian skepticism. 33 McDowell would want to press the following question: Is Putnam 34 right in claiming that the “how does language hook on to the world?” 35 issue is, at bottom, simply a replay of the old “how does perception 36 hook on to the world?” issue? The correct answer to this question is: 37 it depends on which “how does language hook on to the world” issue 38 is at issue. (As I have indicated above, there is a Cartesian and a Kantian 39 version of the issue.) McDowell would contend that Putnam’s claim is 40 not right about the version of the problem that is, for the most part, the 60 James Conant

1 one that figures at the center of concern in the writings of, for example, 2 Lewis or Sellars or Kripkenstein or . The Kantian diffi- 3 culty (concerning the very idea of thought’s or language’s capacity to be 4 vulnerable to reality) with which each of the aforementioned authors 5 struggles does not, for the most part, have its source in a Cartesian dif- 6 ficulty (concerning the indirect character of all perceptual contact with 7 the “external” world). None of these authors are evidently concerned to 8 urge a version of (what the Dewey Lectures calls) the “received” view of 9 perception; and Putnam’s efforts to highlight the dubious assumptions 10 underlying the “received” view do not evidently bear on their prob- 11 lems. 12 A fourfold worry about the recent turn that Putnam’s thought has 13 taken in the Dewey Lectures emerges here: (1) that Putnam in the 14 Dewey Lectures tends to conflate the Cartesian and Kantian varieties of 15 problematic potentially at issue in his discussion, (2) that the problematic 16 that is increasingly pressing in contemporary philosophy is the Kantian 17 one and that Putnam does not seem to be sufficiently cognizant of this, 18 (3) that the difficulties to which that problematic gives rise will not be 19 made to vanish simply by exposing what is dubious in the assumptions 20 of the Cartesian skeptic, and (4) that a satisfying treatment of Cartesian 21 skepticism itself requires that we also think through what is confused in 22 Kantian skepticism. This last claim is central both to Kant’s and to 23 McDowell’s own Kant-inspired arguments. Once such a fourfold 24 worry about Putnam’s procedure in the Dewey Lectures comes into 25 focus, it also becomes possible to see what is misplaced in Putnam’s ef- 26 fort to generously credit John McDowell’s Mind and World with having 27 furnished the outline of the diagnosis Putman himself seeks to offer in 28 the Dewey Lectures. Although it is true that McDowell, like Putnam, 29 is concerned to vindicate (what Putnam, following James, calls) “the 30 natural realism of the common man”, it is not an exaggeration to say 31 that McDowell’s diagnosis of the sources of the perplexities with 32 which contemporary philosophy struggles is precisely the reverse of 33 Putnam’s most recent one: where Putnam argues that it is only if we 34 think through what is confused in the Cartesian skeptic’s question 35 “Do we really see houses and chairs?” that will we free ourselves from 36 the confusions visited upon us by the analytical-Kantian skeptical ques- 37 tion “how does language hook on to the world?”, McDowell thinks 38 that it is only once we think through what is hopeless about the sort 39 of Kantian bind in which someone like C. I. Lewis threatens to place 40 himself – one in which it is no longer possible to see how thought Two Varieties of Skepticism 61

1 can so much as be answerable to reality – that we will be able fully to 2 free ourselves from Cartesian worries about the character of our percep- 3 tual relatedness to houses and chairs. For Putnam, in the Dewey Lectures, 4 the Cartesian paradox is the fundamental source of (what Putnam calls) 5 “the broader epistemological and metaphysical issues” that continue to 6 “preoccupy us” in contemporary philosophy.60 For McDowell, in Mind 7 and World, the Cartesian worry is an intelligible, though inept, response 8 to an inchoate form of philosophical anxiety that achieves comparatively 9 fuller expression in the sort of Kantian paradox that, in his view, haunts 10 the projects of authors such as Lewis, Sellars, Davidson and Brandom. 11 This misencounter between Putnam and McDowell is not atypical. 12 The fourth form of philosophical insight that a perspicuous overview of 13 varieties of skepticism can afford is to help us identify such occasions – 14 occasions on which philosophers systematically misunderstand one an- 15 other’s writings: sometimes paying one another undeserved compli- 16 ments, and at other times going to battle against one another when 17 their views in no way disagree. In Putnam’s misappropriation of McDo- 18 well’s diagnosis of the skeptical paradox that haunts contemporary phi- 19 losophy, we have a case of merely apparent agreement between two of 20 the finest philosophers of our time. Now let us consider a complemen- 21 tary case – one of merely apparent disagreement. 22 23 24 XI. An Apparent Disagreement: Cavell and Kripke 25 26 Stanley Cavell’s The Claim of Reason presents a brilliant account of cer- 27 tain aspects of Wittgenstein’s treatment of Cartesian skepticism. Saul 28 Kripke’s book Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language explores certain 29 aspects of Wittgenstein’s presentation of Kantian skepticism. Each of 30 these books has a hold of a portion of philosophical territory Wittgen- 31 stein is concerned to explore that the other misses. Cavell, however, de- 32 clares himself unable to recognize the problematic that Kripke calls one 33 of “skepticism” to be a variety of skepticism at all, let alone one in 34 which Wittgenstein should interest himself. 35 One can take Kripke to have correctly identified the problem which 36 Wittgenstein means to be grappling with the in the sections which run 37 from §§185 to 201 of the Philosophical Investigations without having to 38 endorse Kripke’s suggestions for how to understand Wittgenstein’s pre- 39 40 60 Putnam (1999), 11. 62 James Conant

1 ferred response to the (so-called) “rule-following paradox” and especial- 2 ly not his attribution to Wittgenstein of a “skeptical solution” to that (or 3 any other) skeptical paradox. In saying that what Kripke calls “skepti- 4 cism about meaning” is a species of skepticism which Wittgenstein 5 seeks to treat, I mean to affirm nothing more than that the paradox 6 which Kripke finds in Wittgenstein is one that Wittgenstein seeks to ad- 7 dress, that it is only one instance of a broader genre of philosophical par- 8 adox, that Wittgenstein throughout his writings is repeatedly concerned 9 to formulate and address paradoxes of this genre, and that such paradox- 10 es are ones that belong to that broader genus of philosophical perplexity 11 that Wittgenstein himself often designates – as did Kant before him – 12 through his application of the term “skepticism”. (The scope of the 13 term “skepticism” as employed by Wittgenstein is sufficiently capacious 14 so as to encompass both Cartesian and Kantian varieties of skepticism.) 15 The paradox at which Wittgenstein arrives in section 201 of Philosophical 16 Investigations bears all the earmarks of (what I have been calling) a Kant- 17 ian skeptical paradox; and the dialectic which threads its way through 18 the preceding sections of the Philosophical Investigations is mired in a 19 Kantian skeptical problematic. Indeed, it is the third variant of the Kant- 20 ian problematic mentioned early on in this paper – the one that centers 21 on the question “How can a sequence of marks or noises so much as 22 seem to mean something?” 23 Cavell says, in his discussion of Kripke in Conditions Handsome and 24 Unhandsome, that he wishes to “question whether Kripke’s examples il- 25 lustrate skepticism”, and Cavell evidently feels that something important 26 about his own reading of Wittgenstein would be threatened by the con- 27 cession that Kripke’s examples illustrate (something that could be called) 28 “skepticism”. But this perception on Cavell’s part stems from a failure to 29 command a clear overview of the shape of the philosophical terrain 30 here. Armed with such an overview, it becomes possible to see that 31 nothing in Cavell’s admirable corpus of work on Wittgenstein would 32 be threatened by such a concession. The term “skepticism” in Cavell’s 33 work – and in his writings on Wittgenstein – exclusively denotes a 34 problematic of the Cartesian variety. To concede, however, that Witt- 35 genstein is interested in variants of the Kantian paradox does not gainsay 36 his equally ubiquitous fascination with their Cartesian counterparts. 37 Cavell, in his discussion of Kripke’s reading, begins with a surely 38 sound observation – to wit: that what Kripke calls Wittgenstein’s “skep- 39 tical solution” is not anything Wittgenstein would countenance as a 40 “solution” to a philosophical problem. But Cavell moves precipitously Two Varieties of Skepticism 63

1 from this observation to the conclusion that if Kripke’s solution is not 2 Wittgenstein’s then “the problem to which Kripke offers the solution 3 is not (quite) Wittgenstein’s either”.61 This is a non-sequitur. The reason 4 I think Cavell feels bound to take this step is because he is quite properly 5 unable to recognize the skeptical paradox of section 201 of Philosophical 6 Investigations to be one that bears (what I have called) Cartesian features. 7 Hence Cavell goes on to remark: 8 Kripke reports that sometimes, contemplating the situation of discovery 9 that one may mean nothing at all, he has had “something of an eerie feel- 10 ing” (21), and that “the entire idea of meaning vanishes into thin air” (22). 11 Is this, I ask myself, like the feelings I have had, under a skeptical surmise, of 12 the world vanishing (as it were behind its appearances), or my self vanishing 13 (as it were behind or inside my body)? These feelings have been touch- 14 stones for me of skeptical paradox, of conclusions I cannot, yet become compelled to, believe…. I would like to say that when the entire idea of 15 meaning vanishes into thin air what vanishes was already air, revealing 16 no scene of destruction.62 17 18 One can hear Cavell in this passage – and in much of the rest of his sub- 19 sequent questioning of “whether Kripke’s examples illustrate skepti- 20 cism” – quite rightly pointing out that Kripke’s alleged skeptical para- 21 dox bears none of the Cartesian features: it does not begin with a best 22 case of knowledge, the investigation does not issue in a discovery to 23 which one is unable to accommodate oneself, the conclusions that 24 Kripke draws about his examples do not generalize in accordance with 25 the logic of the Cartesian format, etc. I therefore find myself agreeing 26 with everything that Cavell has to say about this, except his conclusion 27 – that is, I agree that the paradox of section 201 is not a Cartesian para- 28 dox, but not that it is not a skeptical paradox. 29 30 31 XII. The Wittgensteinian Way with Skepticism 32 33 I said earlier that the positive touchstone of the Kantian way with skep- 34 ticism is a radical following through of the implicit assumptions of a 35 skeptical position up to the point at which the position founders in in- 36 coherence. The negative touchstone of the Kantian way with skepticism 37 is that it seeks to find a way to respond to the Cartesian skeptic that by- 38 39 61 Cavell (1991), 69. 40 62 Ibid. 80. 64 James Conant

1 passes the task of having to enter into the details of Cartesian examples, 2 exploring how they are motivated, and considering how they differ 3 from ordinary examples of knowledge. We can contrast the Kantian 4 way with skepticism with what we might call the Wittgensteinian way 5 with skepticism. The Wittgensteinian way is not an alternative to, but 6 rather a supplementation of the Kantian way. The difference between 7 the two ways points up what I take to be utterly original in Wittgen- 8 stein’s later treatment of skepticism and what I take to be utterly absent 9 from Kant’s treatment of skepticism. The Wittgensteinian way incorpo- 10 rates a further movement, pushing the skeptic in the opposite direction 11 from the one in which Kant seeks to push him: not only following the 12 skeptic’s presuppositions out to their ultimate consequences, but also 13 examining the initial steps in the Cartesian skeptic’s progress towards 14 doubt, identifying how the skeptic passes from ordinary to philosophical 15 doubt, from a claim to a non-claim context, pinpointing the decisive 16 movement in the philosophical conjuring trick and diagnosing why it 17 is the one that is bound to seem most innocent. Thus we might say, 18 the Kantian way drives the skeptic forward in his doubt, seeking to pro- 19 pel the skeptic to grace by forcing him to pass through utter despair, 20 whereas the Wittgensteinian way supplements this prospective move- 21 ment with a retrospective one, leading the skeptic back to the point 22 of entry into his problematic, returning him to the lost innocence of 23 the everyday. The Kantian way compels the skeptic to progress further 24 and further forward, further and further from the ordinary, and deeper 25 and deeper into philosophical perplexity, to an ever more violent form 26 of questioning, to the point at which the skeptic’s question consumes 27 itself. The Wittgensteinian way adds to this pressure an additional one 28 that seeks to bring the skeptic back to the place where he started, 29 where he already is and never left, but in such a way that he is able 30 to recognize it for the first time. 31 These two movements that Wittgenstein’s philosophical practice al- 32 ternately seeks to execute are nicely summarized in the following two 33 remarks: 34 (1) My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense 35 to a piece of undisguised nonsense. (Philosophical Investigations, sec- 36 tion 464) 37 (2) What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their 38 everyday use. (Philosophical Investigations, section 116) 39 40 Two Varieties of Skepticism 65

1 I will henceforth refer to these two movements that Wittgenstein seeks 2 to execute as the movement up the dialectical ladder (towards nonsense) and 3 the movement down the dialectical ladder (towards the ordinary). This way 4 of putting things helps to bring out both a fundamental moment of con- 5 tinuity and a fundamental moment of discontinuity between Wittgen- 6 stein’s early and later philosophical practice. The former of these two 7 remarks could serve equally aptly as a characterization of the aim of 8 the author the Tractatus. The latter could not. What I am here calling 9 “the Wittgensteinian way” is therefore meant to designate a way with 10 skepticism that we first find only when we turn to Wittgenstein’s 11 later writings. 12 We come therefore now to a further aspect of the fourth form of 13 philosophical insight that a perspicuous overview of the various kinds 14 of philosophical response to skepticism can afford. A number of the fin- 15 est contemporary philosophers writing about skepticism today misun- 16 derstand one another’s writings by specifically failing to appreciate the 17 complementarity of these two movements in later Wittgenstein’s writ- 18 ings, thereby approaching those writings with oppositely occluded 19 blind-spots. 20 H.H. Price and C.I. Lewis – as we saw earlier – are philosophers 21 who are usefully categorized as a Cartesian and Kantian respectively. 22 Price’s thinking moves exclusively within the dialectical space of the 23 Cartesian problematic; Lewis seeks to short-circuit the Cartesian prob- 24 lematic through a prior exploration of the Kantian problematic. John 25 McDowell and Stanley Cavell are, initial appearances to the contrary, 26 philosophers who are not quite so easily categorized. We saw, while re- 27 viewing Putnam’s misencounter with McDowell, how McDowell 28 wished to privilege the Kantian problematic over the Cartesian one; 29 and we saw in Cavell’s misencounter with Kripke how Cavell seemed 30 to want to privilege the Cartesian problematic over the Kantian one. 31 Thus, based on the reviewed thus far, the following conclusion 32 might seem tempting: McDowell is primarily concerned to explore the 33 Kantian problematic and Cavell the Cartesian. And that conclusion, in 34 turn, might pave the way for another, possibly equally tempting one, 35 with regard to how each of these philosophers read Wittgenstein: Cavell 36 and McDowell have complimentary blind-spots in their readings of 37 Wittgenstein – each is relatively sensitive to those stretches of Wittgen- 38 stein’s writings in which a philosophical problematic bearing one of 39 these sets of features comes in for extended discussion in its own 40 right, and each is relatively insensitive to those stretches of Wittgen- 66 James Conant

1 stein’s writings in which a philosophical problematic bearing the other 2 comes in for extended discussion in its own right. And there is certainly 3 some truth to this. 4 Cavell is masterful in his exposition of Wittgensteins diagnosis and 5 treatment of the ways in which the Cartesian skeptic is led to speak 6 “outside language-games”, but has, for example, little to say that is in- 7 structive about Wittgenstein’s treatments of the (Kantian) problematics 8 of rule-following and intentionality. McDowell is masterful in his expo- 9 sition of the winding dialectic of sections 185–201 of Philosophical Inves- 10 tigations and its bearing on the later treatment of, for example, the rela- 11 tion between an expectation and its fulfillment, but has almost nothing 12 to say about the route by means of which the Cartesian skeptic enters his 13 problematic and thus about any of the countless moments Wittgenstein 14 seeks to isolate in which, in our philosophizing, we first begin to lapse 15 into those forms of verbal inflection in which language goes on holiday. 16 If we look more closely at more of Cavell’s and McDowell’s respec- 17 tive writings, however, it becomes less tempting to say that each of 18 them is peculiarly sensitive to only one of these problematics at the ex- 19 pense of the other, either in their own work or in their respective read- 20 ings of Wittgenstein. Each of them is far too attentive a reader of later 21 Wittgenstein to allow a pervasive focus of philosophical concern in 22 Wittgenstein’s corpus to drop entirely out of view in their own render- 23 ing of Wittgenstein’s thought. What happens rather, in their respective 24 writings about Wittgenstein, is that Wittgenstein’s exploration of one of 25 these two skeptical problematics tends alternately to come into focus 26 while the other recedes into the background. And, indeed, I think it 27 is almost inevitable that, in working on later Wittgenstein, one should 28 find this happening to one in one’s writing about him. To illustrate 29 the point, I will place side by side some further passages from Cavell 30 and McDowell – passages in which their roles have been reversed – 31 now McDowell will appear to be the one more preoccupied by the 32 Cartesian dimension and Cavell by the Kantian dimension of Wittgen- 33 stein’s concerns. 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 Two Varieties of Skepticism 67

1 XIII. A Second Apparent Disagreement: Cavell and 2 McDowell 3 4 John McDowell, in “Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge” argues that 5 (what Wittgenstein calls) criteria are internally related to the justification 6 of claims to knowledge in the following way: if a claim to know that 7 such-and-such turns out not to be justified then the criteria for claiming 8 such-and-such were only apparently satisfied. Thus, for example, if you 9 claim that someone is in pain, and it turns out that that person is only 10 pretending to be in pain, then the criteria for pain were only apparently 11 satisfied. Here is McDowell: 12 13 Commentators [on Wittgenstein] often take it that the possibility of pre- tence shows that criteria are defeasible. This requires the assumption that 14 in successful one brings it about that criteria for something “in- 15 ternal” are satisfied, although the ascription for which they are criteria 16 would be false. But is the assumption obligatory? Here is a possible alter- 17 native; in pretending, one causes it to appear that criteria for something “in- 18 ternal” are satisfied (that is, one causes it to appear that someone else could know, by what one says and does, that one is in say, some “inner” state); 19 but the criteria are not really satisfied (that is, the knowledge is not really 20 available).63 21 22 Stanley Cavell, in The Claim of Reason, is concerned to challenge almost 23 exactly the same interpretation of Wittgenstein on criteria that McDo- 24 well is concerned to challenge and for many of the same reasons. Yet 25 Cavell comes to (what is at least verbally) precisely the opposite conclu- 26 sion with regard to how to employ the concept of a criterion in connec- 27 tion with the very sorts of examples that McDowell discusses. Thus 28 Cavell concludes that even if someone is only pretending to be in 29 pain, if it is pain that he is pretending to be in, then his behavior satisfies 30 the criteria for pain. Here is Cavell: 31 [O]nly certain eventualities will count as [someone’s] not being in pain… 32 Circumstances, namely …. in which we will say (he will be) feigning, re- 33 hearsing, hoaxing, etc. Why such circumstances? What differentiates such 34 circumstances from those in which he is (said to be) clearing his throat, re- 35 sponding to a joke, etc.? Just that for “He’s rehearsing” or “feigning”, or “It’s a hoax”, etc. to satisfy us as explanations for his not being in pain 36 … what he is feigning must be precisely pain, what he is rehearsing must 37 be the part of a man in pain, the hoax depends on his simulating pain, 38 etc. These circumstances are ones in appealing to which, in describing 39 40 63 McDowell (1998), 380. 68 James Conant

1 which, we retain the concept (here, of pain) whose application these criteria 2 determine. And this means to me: In all such circumstances he has satisfied the criteria we use for applying the concept of pain to others. It is because 3 of that satisfaction that we know that he is feigning pain (i.e., that it is pain 4 he is feigning), and that he knows what to do to feign pain. Criteria are 5 “criteria for something’s being so”, not in the sense that they tell us of 6 thing’s existence, but of something like its identity, not of its being so, 64 7 but of its being so. 8 The first thing to notice is that McDowell and Cavell appear, at first 9 blush, simply to disagree: in cases of pretending to be in pain, McDo- 10 well says the criteria for pain are not satisfied, Cavell says they are. The 11 second thing to notice is that their roles now seem, as promised, to be 12 reversed. McDowell takes Wittgensteinian criteria to operate at a Car- 13 tesian level. The question that is settled, according to him, if criteria 14 are satisfied, is one concerning the truth of a claim, the existence of 15 the pain, the reality of the phenomenon. Cavell takes Wittgensteinian 16 criteria to operate at a Kantian level. The question that is settled, accord- 17 ing to Cavell, if criteria are satisfied, is not one concerning the truth of a 18 claim but one concerning its purport, not one concerning the existence 19 of something which falls under a concept but the applicability of the 20 concept itself, not one concerning the reality of a phenomenon but 21 one concerning its possibility. Whichever of these two readers of Witt- 22 genstein you take to be on the right track, it is worth noticing that this is 23 the structure of the disagreement here, and that the level at which you 24 take criteria to operate, e.g., in connection with phenomena such as 25 pain, will have decisive consequences for the sort of response to skepti- 26 cism that will issue from an appeal to “criteria”. Now I myself take it 27 that Cavell has got the merely exegetical question right (about what 28 question is settled if Wittgensteinian criteria are satisfied) and McDowell 29 has got it wrong. But I will not argue that point here. (This does not, 30 however, mean that there is any substantive philosophical disagreement 31 between McDowell and Cavell here.65) What interests me here is the 32 33 64 Cavell (1979), 45. 34 65 Cavell, if he were brought to see how McDowell is employing the term ‘cri- 35 terion”, could concede, without harm to any of his philosophical commit- 36 ments, something along the following lines: “Well, that is not how Wittgen- 37 stein uses the term; but if you are determined to use the term in this (un-Witt- gensteinian) way, then the right (i.e., philosophically Wittgensteinian) thing to 38 go on and say, so using it, is just what you say (e.g., that in cases of pretending 39 the criteria for pain are only apparently satisfied).” And McDowell, equally, if 40 he were taught Cavell’s understanding of the term (criteria are not criteria for Two Varieties of Skepticism 69

1 very fact that their disagreement should, at this juncture, have this par- 2 ticular structure. This has a two-fold irony, stemming from the ways in 3 which each of them seems to have given up his previous role in the two 4 misencounters canvassed above. 5 The first irony is to be found in the fact that in much of his writing 6 about Wittgenstein McDowell reads Wittgenstein as seeking to address 7 Kantian skepticism and in Mind and World follows his Wittgenstein in 8 seeking to take an exclusively Kantian way with skepticism. McDowell 9 tends to see the Cartesian craving for epistemic security as an intelligible, 10 though inept, response to an inchoate form of the philosophical anxiety 11 that only arrives at clear expression when it is posed as a Kantian skep- 12 tical paradox. Thus, despite his Cartesian construal of the grammar of 13 the concept of a criterion, McDowell tends to see the treatment of phil- 14 osophical skepticism as requiring attention only to the Kantian problem- 15 atic. He assumes, in the manner of Kant himself, not only that the Car- 16 tesian skeptical paradox can be shown to be merely a special case of a 17 more general worry, but more importantly that, once this is shown, 18 will be robbed of all its force and will wither away of its 19 own accord without requiring any additional form of specialized treat- 20 ment. 21 The second irony to be noted in connection with the structure of 22 McDowell’s and Cavell’s disagreement about Wittgenstein’s concept 23 of a criterion lies in the fact that Cavell, though he is far too acute a 24 reader of Wittgenstein to fail to appreciate that the Philosophical Investi- 25 gations is frequently operating at a Kantian level, nonetheless, never sees 26 that for Wittgenstein, as for Kant, the term “skepticism” ranges over far 27 28 something’s being so, but for its being so) would have no reason not to concede 29 that the right thing to say, so using the term, is just what Cavell says (i.e., that in 30 cases of pretending, if it is pain you are pretending to be in, then the criteria for 31 pain are satisfied). The disagreement between Cavell and McDowell about cri- 32 teria is a further instance of a merely apparent disagreement in which the ap- pearance of disagreement is engendered through an unacknowledged transition 33 from a Cartesian to a Kantian problematic. Both McDowell and Cavell are in 34 profound disagreement with their respective and very similar sets of interlocu- 35 tors (Baker, Wright, Albritton, Malcolm, etc.), but they are disagreeing with 36 them about different things. (McDowell’s point has to do with how justification 37 and knowledge are internally – and not merely externally – related to one an- other; Cavell’s has to do with how an appeal to criteria cannot do the work that 38 Wittgenstein calls upon it to do, if criteria are understood in the manner of such 39 commentators.) Their respective philosophical motivations for disagreeing with 40 such commentators are perfectly compatible. 70 James Conant

1 more than a merely Cartesian skeptical problematic – thus over far more 2 varieties of philosophical perplexity than a merely Cartesian inflection of 3 the term is able to encompass. Nonetheless, Cavell, through carefully 4 following out the inner movement of the dialectic traced in Wittgen- 5 stein’s investigations, often finds himself fetching up in the terrain of 6 the Kantian problematic. Here is a characteristic passage that may 7 stand for a thousand others: 8 If you do not know the (non-grammatical) criteria of an Austinian object 9 (can’t identify it, name it) then you lack a piece of information, a bit of 10 knowledge, and you can be told its name, told what it is, told what it is 11 (officially) called. But if you do not know the grammatical criteria of Witt- 12 gensteinian objects, then you lack, as it were, not only a piece of informa- 13 tion or knowledge, but the possibility of acquiring any information about 14 such objects überhaupt; you cannot be told the name of that object, because there is as yet no object of that kind for you to attach a forthcoming name 15 to.66 16 17 What is threatened with the loss of (what Cavell calls) Wittgenstein cri- 18 teria is not merely the possibility of isolating an unimpeachable item of 19 knowledge, but the possibility of so much as turning up a candidate for 20 knowledge. At one point in The Claim of Reason, Cavell quotes the fol- 21 lowing four passages from Philosophical Investigations in rapid succession: 22 … [O]nly of a living human being and what resembles (behaves like) a liv- 23 ing human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is blind; hears; is 24 deaf; is conscious or unconscious. (section 281) 25 What has to be accepted, the given, is – so one could say – forms of life. 26 (section 226) 27 What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel? (section 283) 28 The human body is the best picture of the human soul. (section 178) 29 30 These are passages in which Wittgenstein presents what Cavell says he 31 understands “as the background against which our criteria do their 32 work; even make sense”67. They are also quintessential examples of mo- 33 ments in his work in which Wittgenstein’s investigations move (from 34 the Cartesian) to the Kantian level. And, in commenting on these pas- 35 sages, Cavell (taking the problem of other minds here as his example of a 36 skeptical problematic) expresses what he takes to be the significance of 37 such passages in Wittgenstein’s work: 38 39 66 Cavell (1979), 77. 40 67 Cavell (1979), 83. Two Varieties of Skepticism 71

1 To withhold, or hedge, our concepts of psychological states from a given 2 creature, on the ground that our criteria cannot reach to the inner life of the creature, is specifically to withhold the source of my idea that living be- 3 ings are things that feel; it is to withhold myself, to reject my response to 4 anything a living being; to blank so much as my idea of anything as having a 5 body. To describe this condition as one in which I do not know (am not 6 certain) of the existence of other minds is empty. There is now nothing 7 there of the right kind, to be known. There is nothing to read from that 8 body, nothing the body is of; it does not go beyond itself, it expresses noth- ing; it does not so much as behave. There is no body left to manifest con- 9 sciousness (or unconsciousness). It is not dead, but inanimate; it hides noth- 10 ing…. 11 My problem is no longer that my words can’t get past his body to him. 12 There is nothing for them to get to; they can’t even reach as far as my 13 body…. The signs are dead; merely working them out loud doesn’t breathe life into them; even dogs can speak more effectively.68 14 15 I take the presence of a Kantian problematic in this passage to be self- 16 evident. Though Cavell in such passages (and there are many such pas- 17 sages in The Claim of Reason) sees that the transition to a Kantian prob- 18 lematic plays an essential role in Wittgenstein’s treatment of skepticism, 19 he seems only able to interest himself in this transition to the extent that 20 it forms part of a response to Cartesian skepticism; hence his view of the 21 scope of this problematic in Wittgenstein’s writing is artificially blin- 22 kered. Central issues – concerning, for example, the nature of the ac- 23 cord between a rule and its application (not only, as in certain employ- 24 ments of the mathematical case, as a trope for learning a word, but as a 25 perplexing instance of the Kantian problematic in its own right), be- 26 tween an expectation or wish and its fulfillment, etc – recede into the 27 background of Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein. This blind-spot in 28 Cavell’s reading of Wittgenstein (and in his reading of Kant) comes per- 29 haps most visibly to the surface in his discussion of Kripke’s reading of 30 Wittgenstein. Although he sees that Wittgenstein is concerned to ex- 31 plore the Kantian problematic, he does not see (and feels that he must 32 not allow) that it can issue in a distinctive (and, as I have tried to 33 show, distinctively Kantian) variety of philosophical paradox – one 34 that Wittgenstein, like Kant, views as a variety of skepticism. This leaves 35 Cavell’s account of Wittgenstein’s treatment of skepticism essentially in- 36 complete. Only a reading able to accommodate, both exegetically and 37 philosophically, the insights contained in both Cavell’s and McDowell’s 38 respective readings of Wittgenstein – that is, only one that understands 39 40 68 Ibid. 83 f. 72 James Conant

1 why, in Wittgenstein’s treatment of the extended philosophical dialectic 2 of which they each form a part, neither variety of skepticism is to be 3 privileged over the other – will be complete. 4 5 6 XIV. Conclusion 7 8 The aim of this paper has been to suggest that a perspicuous overview of 9 various kinds of skepticism and the kinds of response they engender af- 10 fords a number of different kinds of philosophical benefit: it allows one 11 to command a clearer view of the sorts of relations that obtain across 12 apparently distinct areas of philosophy, it allows one to distinguish the 13 very different sorts of things philosophers mean when they employ 14 (what is apparently) the same philosophical vocabulary (and especially 15 when they employ the word ‘skepticism’), it allows one to see more 16 clearly what is distinctive about Kant’s and Wittgenstein’s respective 17 contributions to the history of thought about skepticism, and it allows 18 one to see more clearly why these authors are often misread and why 19 their best commentators often misread one another and misunderstand 20 themselves – taking themselves to disagree with one another when 21 they do not, taking themselves to agree with one another when they 22 do not, and taking themselves to be in agreement with themselves 23 when they are not.69 24 25 References 26 27 Austin (1979): John L. Austin, Philosophical Papers, Oxford. 28 Cavell (1979): Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason, Oxford. 29 Cavell (1981): Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness, Cambridge/MA. 30 Cavell (1987): Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge, Cambridge/MA. 31 Cavell (1991): Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, Chicago. Cavell (1996): Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears, Chicago. 32 Conant (1992): James Conant, “The Search for Logically Alien Thought: Des- 33 cartes, Kant, Frege and the Tractatus”, in: The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam, 34 Philosophical Topics 20 (1), 115–180. 35 36 37 69 As should be evident to anyone familiar with their work, this paper is pervasive- 38 ly indebted to the writings of Stanley Cavell, John McDowell, and Hilary Put- 39 nam. A much shorter version of this paper was published in Wittgenstein and 40 Skepticism, edited by Denis McManus. Two Varieties of Skepticism 73

1 Conant (2001): James Conant, “In the Electoral Colony: Kafka in Florida”, in: 2 Critical Enquiry 27 (4), 662–702. Descartes (1986): René Descartes, Meditationes de Prima Philosophia, Stuttgart. 3 Kant (1997): , Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Cam- 4 bridge. 5 Kant (1998): Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge. 6 Kripke (1982): Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Cam- 7 bridge/MA. Land (2012): Thomas Land, “Kantian ”, in: G. Abel/J. Conant 8 (eds.), Rethinking Epistemology, Vol. 1, Berlin/New York, 197–239. 9 Lewis (1929): Clarence Irving Lewis, Mind and the World Order, New York. 10 McDowell (1994): John McDowell, Mind and World, Cambridge/MA. 11 McDowell (1998): John McDowell, “Criteria, Defeasibility, and Knowledge”, 12 in: J. McDowell, Meaning, Knowledge, & Reality, Cambridge/MA, 369– 394. 13 Price (1932): Henry Habberley Price, Perception, London. 14 Putnam (1994): Words and Life, Cambridge/MA. 15 Putnam (1999): Hilary Putnam, The Threefold Cord, New York. 16 Williams (2001): Michael Williams, Problems of Knowledge, Oxford. 17 Wittgenstein (1973): , Philosophical Investigations, New Jer- sey. 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40