Epistemological Realism as an Intuitive Doctrine

Ron Wilburn
University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Is the skeptic's reasoning our own? That is, is the skeptic's reasoning recognizably ordinary, or is it a product, so to speak, of premises and inferential standards peculiar to distinctively philosophical preoccupations? Is his negative proclamation a discovery about what we can all reflectively recognize as our true epistemic relation to the world, or is it an artifact of some perverse obsession which the skeptic has with an idealized epistemological relation of concern only to him? In the time I have available here, I would like to address at least one aspect of this question?

Michael Williams, in his recent work on skepticism, has introduced a new type of realism. All arguments for skepticism, he tells us, ultimately presuppose Epistemological Realism, which he describes as a thin but seminal "contribution to a theory of the concept of knowledge." A realist claim about the objects of epistemological inquiry, epistemological realism maintains that "there are objective epistemological relations underlying the shifting contexts and standards of everyday justification." It contends that different kinds of "knowledge" group themselves into distinct epistemic natural kinds (e.g., "experiential" vs. "external worldly"), some of which are just intrinsically epistemically prior to others. Thus, at its deepest level, epistemological realism is the view that "empirical knowledge," by virtue of its singular and unified objectificatory structure, has "theoretical integrity" as a subject matter, constituting a genuine kind of thing which is properly subject to investigation at the very general level characteristic of traditional epistemological study. Now, skepticism, Williams tells us, is underwritten, first and foremost, by epistemological realism. And this makes skepticism implausible, on his account, because epistemological realism is "a false -- or at least completely unsupported -- thesis," dependent upon a great deal of contentious philosophical doctrine. It is this last claim regarding the plausibility of epistemological realism with which I take issue with in this paper.