Why You’re So Ignorant, and Why That’s a Good Thing

Bryan Frances

University of Leeds

I’m going to argue for a set of restricted skeptical results: we don’t know that fire engines are red, we don’t know that Abe Lincoln was honest, we don’t know that we sometimes have pains in our lower backs, and we don’t even know that we believe any of those truths.  However, my daughter, who is seven, does know all those things.

The skeptical argument is traditional in form: here’s a skeptical hypothesis; you can’t neutralize it, you have to be able to neutralize it to know P; so you don’t know P.  But the skeptical hypotheses I plug into it are “real, live” scientific-philosophical hypotheses often thought to be actually true, unlike any of the outrageous traditional hypotheses (e.g., ‘You’re a brain in a vat’).  So I call the resulting skepticism Live Skepticism.  Notably, the Live Skeptic’s argument goes through even if we adopt all the clever anti-skeptical fixes thought up in recent years: reliability, relevant alternatives, contextualism, safety, sensitivity, and the rejection of epistemic closure.  Furthermore, the scope of Live Skepticism is bizarre: although we don’t know the simple facts noted above, we can know that there are black holes and other amazing facts.