One way that hinges might be used to block scepticism is
this. One concedes the MP version of closure and hence one looks vulnerable to
a MT version which argues from the fact that we don’t know we’re not BIV (or
any other relevant phenomenological indiscernible) to the fact that we don’t
know some ordinary knowledge claim. But then while one concedes that we don’t
know that not-BIV, we are committed to not-BIV as a hinge. Hinges are not
knowledge claims but commitments of a different sort which lie outside closure.
So not knowing not-BIV is no threat to ordinary knowledge. Pritchard argues
this. He accepts that we are committed to hinges but not as either knowledge or
as knowledge-apt belief (ie reason responsive belief). Hinges are commitments
but not the sort of propositional attitude that can come under closure. Wright
gives a pragmatic acceptance version of hinges according to which it is
reasonable to act as though they are correct. It’s a rational bet.
Even if this were coherent - and frankly Pritchard doesn’t
tell us enough while Wright gives us an obviously inadequate picture - it would
still leave open the following possibility. While we realise that we have
always a-rationally accepted hinges in the past, now we want to know whether it
is reasonable to believe we’re not-BIVs. Now that that question has been raised
in a philosophy class, we want to run the closure argument either way. What’s
to reassure us that the propositional content that we’re not-BIV is held for
good enough reason?
I see no hope this way.
You ask - reasonably enough - whether a knowledge-based
version of hinges (according to which they are conceptually structured, are the
objects of attitudes and, even more, are known) provides a reason to rule out
sceptical ringer arguments. Frankly, I’m not sure. I didn’t try to sell you my
idea of hinges - as bits of knowledge held in place by holistic considerations
and serving as the framework for the explicit asking for reasons - as an answer
to scepticism. I’m proceeding by elimination.
Hinges cannot be just animal certainties - as Stroll and
Malcolm suggest - because they are / would be blankly external to our epistemic
practices. (And the fact that we don’t check the checking of apples looks to be
a problem if this animal fact is external to our epistemic practices. It looks
like an oversight.)
Hinges cannot be extra-conceptual quasi conceptual entities
as Moyal Sharrock suggests because there’s no conceptual space for that. (Here
I add in a premises about the resolute reading of LW.)
They cannot be what Pritchard and Wright say.
So they must be conceptual. But if so and if not the
non-epistemic attitudes of Pritchard and Wright, they must be contributions to
our epistemic standing. I can only think they are known. That’s the argument
from elimination.
OK so now you raise the standard sceptical argument from
indiscernability / sceptical ringers. What could I invoke? Austin? McDowell? I
need a way to suggest a difference between an actual possibility of being
misled and a merely idling philosophical one. If there’s an actual possibility
I should have addressed about the apples then I don’t know they were apples
even if they were and I was lucky. But if it is idle talk of what might have
been in the Matrix or a dream then I do know.
One thing: LW’s worry that Moore cannot achieve very much by
saying ‘I know’ is neither here nor there. Sincerity isn’t enough. About a
third of OC goes after the wrong target by worrying about what isn’t achieved
in the ‘I know’. ‘I know’ expresses objective certainty about the content of a
knowledge claim but it does not, just by saying, achieve or guarantee it. This
doesn’t imply that knowledge isn’t factive. It just implies that saying ‘I
know’ isn’t factive. It seems remarkable that LW made such heavy weather of
that.
Might that be enough? Knowledge is a genuine state achieved by ruling out real possibilities of error but, as Austin says, ‘enough is enough’. Better to focus on ‘he knows’ than ‘I know’ but also to realise that even that always leaves space in the game for the question: ‘Do you really know that he knows?’. ‘If he knows X then X, after all. Do you know X?’ But that question idles unless we can give it point.
