Book Symposium: Duncan Pritchard, Epistemic Angst (Princeton University Press, 2015, xiii + 236 pages)

Abstract

This book symposium features three critical pieces dealing with Duncan Pritchard's book, 'Epistemic Angst'; the symposium also contains Pritchard's replies to his critics. Manuscrito -Rev. Int. Fil. Campinas, v. 41, n. 1, pp. 115-165, jan.-mar. 2018. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Duncan Duncan PritchardI have struggled with the problem of radical skepticism for many years. Epistemic Angst (Princeton University Press, 2015) opens by saying that this problem is both my first love, philosophically speaking, and my true love. It was certainly this puzzle that got me hooked into philosophy, and it was this puzzle that I found myself returning to at regular intervals. In earlier workespecially Epistemic Luck (Oxford University Press, 2005)I tried to meet the difficulty head-on, by offering a form of neo-Mooreanism that was motivated by epistemic externalism and situated within a research program I referred to as anti-luck epistemology. 1 The careful reader of this book will have spotted, however, that I was not fully persuaded, in that the anti-skeptical proposal on offer starts to look very much like a "skeptical solution" once the details are unpacked. Indeed, I found myself arguing in effect that a form of radical skepticism that is aimed specifically at the rational standing of our beliefs was pretty much correct.Over the years, my response to radical skepticism became increasingly bifurcated. On the one hand, I developed an anti-skeptical theory (the essentials of which were already present in Epistemic Luck) that was inspired by Wittgenstein's (1969) remarks on the structure of rational evaluation in On Certainty. 2 Simultaneously, I also advanced a separate proposal, inspired by John McDowell's (e.g., 1995) work, which was cast along epistemological disjunctivist lines. On the face of it, these two proposals are radically different. Nonetheless, I was convinced that they belonged together, though at the outset I couldn't quite see how to connect them. Fortunately, since each of these 1 I submit that anti-luck epistemology is still going strong, even though I now realize that it doesn't contain the materials to deal with radical scepticism. That is, I now realize that the philosophical task of offering a theory of knowledge is orthogonal to the philosophical challenge of showing whether, contra the radical skeptic, we have any knowledge. In any case, I claim that anti-luck epistemology is adequate to the former task, as part of a wider view I call anti-luck virtue epistemology (or, more recently, anti-risk virtue epistemology). For more on anti-luck epistemology in general, see Pritchard (2005a;2007;2015a). For more on anti-luck virtue epistemology, see Pritchard, Millar & Haddock (2010, chs. 1-4) and Pritchard (2012a). For more on anti-risk virtue epistemology, see Pritchard (2016; forthcoming).