Inferring and Explaining

15 Te intellectual standards of certainty and indubitability have the advantage that the per- son who insists on themwill never be mistaken. Descartes’s procedure—sometimes calledmeth- odological doubt—is a very efective way of avoiding intellectual error. It may be, however, that the demand for absolute certainty comes at too high of a price. It strikes most of us as extreme to reject all of what the senses tell us or all mathematics and logic because we were able to imagine bizarre confdence-undermining possibilities. Perhaps the lesson that we should learn from the skeptic is to set our standards a little more realistically. If insisting on certainty leads to skepticism, and I am willing to provi- sionally concede that it does, thenwe should not insist on certainty. I am not suggesting that we should not demand some very exacting intellectual stan- dards for those things that we really know. We need stringent criteria for knowledge, but they must be realistic enough to produce some non- trivial examples of genuine knowledge. In the remainder of this book, Iwill argue that afeshed- out concept of good evidence will allow us to dis- tinguish many instances of genuine knowledge fromother intellectual temptations forwhichwe should reserve a healthy skeptical attitude. skePtICIsm exerCIses 1. What is a confdence-undermining possibility? How does the possibility of one lead to skepticism? 2. Could it be that you are not really considering this exercise but merely dreaming that you are? How could you tell one way or another? What does all this have to say about knowledge? QuIz two In chapter 2, I make a big deal about Dr. Malgenius. Explain what this little story (or example or thought experiment) was—that is, how it works. What is the epistemological point the story makes? What does it tell us about the nature of knowledge? Explain my suggested view about the nature of knowledge that attempts to negate the infuence of Dr. Malgenius and other similar stories such as the dream hypothesis. 3 Descartes, 12. Notes 4 Descartes, 12. 1 René Descartes, Meditations of First Philosophy , trans. 5 Descartes, 15. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16. 6 Descartes, 15. 2 Descartes, 12. 7 Descartes, 16–17.