Rethinking the Human Condition: Skepticism, Realism, and Transactional Pragmatism

For several decades renewed interest in the role of perception in knowledge has sustained a robust debate over external world skepticism (ews). Traceable to the antirealist movement of the 1980s, the dispute centers on the question of our epistemic access to the external world.1However, a growing consensus holds that such challenges have been substantially met and that realism in some robust form is again deservedly king of the hill. "In the current thriving field of first-order ontology, the most popular view is heavyweight realism," observes David Chalmers, "with a minority of lightweight realists and anti-realists" (Chalmers 2007: 1).I invite us to rethink this consensus in a two-phase response. The first forges a temporary alliance with skepticism against prominent forms of contemporary realism. That these fail to rebuff Ews bolsters Barry Stroud's call for a new paradigm of objectivity (Stroud 1994: 292-293). The second sketches such a paradigm, based upon a transactional interpretation of John Dewey's pragmatism, and indicates it's resilience to skeptical challenges.1 The Skeptical Argument ( sa)Though most pragmatists endorse Peirce's dismissal of philosophical skepticism as "paper doubts," a few have recently joined the chorus of epistemologists who find such arguments interesting. As John Greco notes, since dismissive responses don't engage skepticism, they miss the opportunity to evaluate its role in improving our understanding of objectivity and knowledge (Greco 2000: 61).2 Embracing the skeptical challenge also helps pragmatists gauge how well their notion of objectivity sustains what Dewey calls the "primary integrity" of subject and object (Dewey 1981: 18).3Besides, the intuition behind Ews is strong: If I can doubt these are my hands, in seemingly optimal conditions, then how can I claim to know anything about the external world? Many believe Descartes' "evil demon" presents this intuition in its strongest light.4 Descartes famously imagines all his thoughts, including percepts and even mathematical inferences, being induced by a powerful demon bent upon deceiving him at every turn. In 1981, Hilary Putnam revitalized the argument in his memorable "Brain-in-a-Vat" (biv) thought experiment, where I'm a disembodied brain in a vat whose stimulated nerve endings simulate all the experiences I commonly associate with the real world.5BIV-type skepticism is customarily framed in the form of a simple valid argument:The Skeptical Argument (sa):P1. I don't know not-S.P2. If I don't know not-S, then I don't know O.C. Therefore, I don't know O.Here S is any suitably radical skeptical hypothesis, e.g. "I am a handless Biv," and O is an ordinary belief, such as "I have hands." The ensuing kerfuffle pits skeptics who endorse SA against non-skeptics bent upon undermining it.2 Location! Location!Before joining the fray, let's clarify an important distinction. As stated, Ews is ambiguous as to whether it challenges 1) the certainty of knowledge claims, or 2) our basic ability to get beyond representations to say anything about what's really there in the external world. I wholeheartedly agree that demands for absolute certainty are unconvincing, and will thus focus on the second option- the relation between appearances and mind-independent reality. This view of Ews, dubbed the "ego-centric predicament" by Ralph Barton Perry (Perry 1910: 5-14) more than a century ago, has a surprising corollary: Likelihood or probability has no bearing upon attempts to characterize the external worldfrom the standpoint of our representations.Let's consider this carefully. Ews's challenge to representation is not one of probability or plausibility, but of location-of cognitive access within what we'll call the containment paradigm. Given the presumption that we directly perceive only a representation (the sensation or neural event below on the left), how do we get beyond this to experience the physical, mind-independent existence (the "real" hand on the right) it purportedly represents? …