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Dorit Bar-On Department of Philosophy University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill March 17, 2005 Thursday, 4:00pm-6:00pm BA (Close/Hipp), Room 008 As commonsense would have it my knowledge of what I am presently thinking is remarkably secure -- at least much more secure than my knowledge of my extra-mental world. My first aim in this paper is to examine whether the commonsense confidence about ordinary knowledge of content can be sustained in the face of a skepticism that proceeds by analogy to external-world skepticism. It might seem that we could get the right analogue, by enlisting the doctrine known as content externalism (externalism, for short). But I will argue that, for the analogy to work, the external-content skeptic must rely on a certain recognitional conception of our ordinary knowledge of content in particular and of ordinary self-knowledge more generally. I think there are good reasons to reject this conception. And my second aim will be to sketch an alternative to it -- a "neo-expressivist" view of avowals and self-knowledge -- which would allow us to sustain the commonsense notion that ordinary self-knowledge is not threatened by a skepticism that is analogous to external-world skepticism.  |
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Last updated 9/24/08 11:56 AM
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