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A promising response to the threat of external world skepticism involves arguing that our commonsense view of the world best explains the sensory experiences that we have. Since our commonsense view of the world best explains our evidence, we are justified in accepting this commonsense view of the world. Despite the plausibility of this Explanationist Response, it has recently come under attack. James Beebe has argued that only a version of the Explanationist Response that provides an a priori justification of inference to the best explanation can hope to respond to two serious objections. Additionally, he has argued that providing such an a priori justification requires an acceptable account of a priori probability and that it is unclear whether such an account can be developed. In this paper I argue that Beebe fails to provide adequate support for either of these claims.

An evidentialist can be extreme about epistemic requirements in a couple of different ways. At the reductionist end of the spectrum are those who think our epistemic obligations are fully satisfied by the mere having of evidential fit—where having implies nothing about doing. Your beliefs ought to align with your evidence, in other words, but there’s nothing you’re obligated to do in order to get yourself into the epistemically optimal position. At the expansionist end of the spectrum are those who think we ought to do more—epistemically-speaking—than just bring about a state of evidential fit. We ought to get more evidence, for instance, if it’s somehow relevant to our beliefs. Rather leery of extremists, Stapleford and McCain prefer a moderate account of epistemic obligation. It’s a conjunction of three theses: (1) We never have an epistemic duty to believe any particular proposition; (2) We’re epistemically obligated to reflect on our evidence in order to produce a state of evidential fit; (3) We’re never epistemically obligated to acquire any additional evidence. The aim of this chapter is to make these plausible.

People strive for certainty due to an inherent desire for it. Uncertainty seems to be stressful in the same unconscious manner as anger and fear. We cannot really control this feeling, and we feel relaxed only when we feel certain about what we know or about what we should anticipate. However, our world is filled with uncertainty and so are most aspects of our life. Therefore, instead for looking for certainty where it does not exist, we had better learn to appreciate uncertainty and learn to live and deal with it. Education could play a major role here. But a major shift is necessary from the current educational practice of providing yes or no answers to one that would educate people to understand and deal with risk and uncertainty.

Jonathan Vogel has argued in support of an explanationist response to skepticism in several works. Central to this explanationist response is the fact that our non-skeptical view of the world (the Real World Hypothesis, rwh) is a better explanation of our experiences than its skeptical rivals. Despite the plausibility of this response to skepticism, it is not without its critics. Recently, Matthew Gifford has argued that Vogel’s response has problems on two fronts. First, Gifford argues that Vogel’s strategy for showing that the rwh is a better explanation than its skeptical rivals fails. Second, he argues that if Vogel’s strategy does succeed, then it accomplishes too much—it removes skeptical doubts when it should not. I argue that Gifford is mistaken on both accounts.

According to Roderick Chisholm, there are three ways of responding to the Problem of the Criterion and they all leave something to be desired. Michael DePaul, Paul Moser, and Earl Conee have each proposed variations of a fourth way of responding to this problem that rely on reflective equilibrium. We argue that these four options for responding to the Problem of the Criterion leave one with a tough choice: accept one of the three that Chisholm describes or DePaul’s reflective equilibrium approach and beg the question or accept a reflective equilibrium response of the sort Conee and Moser propose and embrace epistemic circularity.

This chapter discusses one of the major debates in philosophy of science related to scientific knowledge, the debate between realists and anti-realists. Realists maintain that our best-confirmed scientific theories are true (or at least approximately true), but anti-realists think we should only accept that our best-confirmed scientific theories are useful in some sense without committing to their truth, approximate or otherwise. Some of the major arguments on both sides of this debate are evaluated in this chapter, though special attention is paid to the so-called “miracle argument” for scientific realism. Throughout the chapter a realist stance, which allows for genuine scientific knowledge, is defended. Ultimately, the chapter concludes that while anti-realist arguments are important and worth taking seriously, they do not pose an insurmountable threat to a realist conception of science. Such a conception holds that in the case of our best-confirmed theories the truth of those theories best explains their success, which gives us justification for believing that they are true.

One way to challenge our scientific knowledge is to challenge all of our knowledge of the world around us. This chapter explores the classic philosophical problem of external world skepticism. This philosophical problem challenges whether we can know anything at all about the world outside of our own minds. In the process of examining and responding to arguments for external world skepticism important insights about the nature of scientific knowledge are revealed. One of the foremost of these insights is that knowledge in general does not require evidence that makes the believed proposition absolutely certain—beyond all possible doubt. Instead, significant, yet fallible, evidence is all that is required for knowledge, both scientific and mundane. Another insight is that the explanationist account of evidential support developed in the previous chapter helps to show that, despite initial appearances, external world skepticism is not a significant threat to our knowledge after all. We do have good evidence for believing the world is roughly the way we commonsensically take it to be.

Another way of challenging our scientific knowledge is to challenge our knowledge of all unobserved cases and our ability to make justified predictions about what will happen on the basis of previous observations. The skeptic about induction claims that while we might observe many, many instances of As that are Bs this does not allow us to know that the next A we observe will be a B (or even reasonably believe that it will be or is likely to be a B). This sort of inductive skepticism poses a major threat to our scientific knowledge as well as our commonsense knowledge of the world around us. After all, we depend on this sort of inference (from observed cases to what we expect to observe in the future) every day. This chapter argues that again the skeptical challenge can be overcome by carefully understanding the sort of explanationist account of evidential support which has been developed in earlier chapters.

Supporters of PC claim that it not only provides an internalist account of justification, but it offers a way to respond to external world skepticism, it can make plausible an account of ethical intuitionism, and it solves puzzles about noninferential justification, including the problem of the speckled hen. Despite all of these purported benefits, Nathan Hanna (Forthcoming) has recently argued that PC faces a serious problem; it is false. He supports his claim by way of a reductio ad absurdum of PC. Very roughly, Hanna argues that in some instances a belief that p can behave like an appearance that p, which would make PC equivalent to a version of epistemic conservatism in those instances. Since Hanna takes epistemic conservatism to be absurd, he concludes that PC must be false. In what follows I begin by explaining Hanna’s argument and his support for it. Next, I argue that given any of the four plausible ways of understanding what it is for a belief that p to behave like an appearance that p Hanna’s argument is unsound or has insufficiently supported premises. Acta Anal (2012) 27:45–54 DOI 10.1007/s12136-012-0148-2

The first step in responding to the challenge of external world skepticism is to get clear on the structure of the skeptic’s argument. The most prominent varieties of skeptical arguments either rely on closure principles or underdetermination principles. The relationship between these two sorts of arguments is contentious. Some argue that these arguments can independently motivate skepticism. Others argue that they are really equivalent. I argue that although these two arguments are distinct, their independence is not as obvious as some have thought. The fact that these arguments are not equivalent is important because skeptical arguments that appeal to underdetermination principles cannot be refuted by simply denying closure. So, the strategy for responding to skepticism offered by Nozick/Dretske does not seem an adequate solution.

Although several important methodologies implicitly assume the truth of epistemic conservatism, the view that holding a belief confers some measure of justification on the belief, recent criticisms have led some to conclude that epistemic conservatism is an implausible view. That conclusion is mistaken. In this article, I propose a new formulation of epistemic conservatism that is not susceptible to the criticisms leveled at earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism. In addition to withstanding these criticisms, this formulation of epistemic conservatism has several benefits. First, this formulation has the benefits of earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, that is to say it makes sense of our intuitions about justification in regard to both memory beliefs and beliefs for which we have forgotten our evidence. Second, it provides a good way of responding to the skeptic’s challenge concerning the possibility of possessing knowledge of the external world posed by the Alternative Hypotheses argument. Third, it provides responses to both forms of a new skeptical problem plaguing basic knowledge structure theories, the Problem of Easy Knowledge formulated by Stewart Cohen. I argue that given the many benefits of this formulation of epistemic conservatism and the fact that it is not vulnerable to the criticisms that undermine earlier formulations of epistemic conservatism, this formulation of epistemic conservatism is a plausible view to maintain.