Title:
How to Contain Skepticism
Abstract:
Tracking theories of knowledge seem to offer a response to external world skepticism but suffer from a major structural defect: they predict that one can know a conjunction without knowing its conjuncts. Truthmaker semantics offers a very natural solution, in terms of its notion of containment. One knows a true proposition when one tracks the truth of the propositions it contains. This approach guarantees that knowledge is closed under conjunction and allows that one may know an everyday truth without having to rule out far-fetched skeptical hypotheses. The skeptic may have their revenge, however. For under plausible hypotheses, epistemic contents under the truthmaker approach will coincide with classical intensional contents, thereby relinquishing any improvement supposedly offered by truthmaker semantics. I will offer some strategies for resisting this conclusion.