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This paper aims to argue in support of the neo-Moorean attempt(s) to solve a skeptical paradox. It defends the thesis that neo-Mooreans retain advantages and avoid disadvantages of rival anti-skeptical strategies – namely epistemic contextualism. The puzzle that a radical skeptic poses is exemplified by Nozick’s famous Brain in a Vat thought experiment, which enables construing valid arguments consisting of jointly inconsistent but independently plausible premises. The first and the second part of the paper are devoted to Nozick’s conditional analysis of knowledge and De Rose’s epistemic contextualism, both based on the sensitivity principle. Referring to De Roses’ contextualist theory, we demonstrate that the failure of Nozick’s conditional analysis of knowledge to provide a satisfactory answer to a skeptical paradox does not concern the sensitivity principle but rather closure denial and embracing the so-called “abominable conjunction”. In the third part, we point out the weaknesses of the presumably most successful, contextualist response to the paradox. We explain that even though DeRose’s anti-skeptical strategy is built upon Nozick’s theory, he successfully surmounts its difficulties. Yet it seems that as a contextualist, he necessarily makes some concessions to a radical skeptic. Eventually, the article introduces Black’s neo-Moorean anti-skeptical theory based on the sensitivity principle as a strategy that makes neither concessions, nor counterintuitive proposals. Cilj ovog rada je da pruži podršku neomurovskom rešenju skeptičkog paradoksa. Branićemo tezu da ovakva epistemološka pozicija zadržava prednosti i izbegava nedostatke rivalskih antiskeptičkih pozicija, pre svega epistemičkog kontekstualizma. Radi ilustracije problema koji skeptik postavlja pred nas, pozivamo se na Nozikov poznati primer „mozga u posudi“ koji omogućava formulisanje valjanih argumenata koji se sastoje od međusobno nekonzistentnih, ali nezavisno plauzibilnih premisa. Prvi i drugi deo rada biće posvećeni Nozikovoj, i Dirouzo-voj teoriji znanja baziranim na principu osetljivosti. Pozivajući se na Dirouzov epistemički kontekstualizam, pokazaćemo da neuspeh Nozikove kondicionalne analize znanja u pružanju zadovoljavajućeg odgovora na skeptički paradoks nije posledica njene zasnovanosti na prin-cipu osetljivosti, već odbacivanja principa deduktivne zatvorenosti i usvajanja takozvane „nepodnošljive konjunkcije“. Treći deo biće posvećen ukazivanju na slabosti po pretpostavci najuspešnijeg, kontekstualističkog odgovora na paradoks. Pokazaćemo da iako Dirouz pre-vazilazi prepreke Nozikove teorije na kojoj je jednim delom sama njegova teorija izgrađena, kontekstualista pravi svojevrsne ustupke radikalnom skeptiku. Na kraju uvodimo Blekovo neomurovsko stanovište bazirano na principu osetljivosti, kao ono koje ne pravi ustupke, niti kontraintuitivne predloge.

In this paper, I provide a detailed analysis of Putnam's conclusion (derived from the externalist interpretation of meaning and mental content) that the skeptical hypothesis, according to which we have always been brains in vats, is self-refuting. I confine my attention to the following question: If we assume that semantic externalism is plausible on independent grounds, does it follow that the semantic argument against skepticism (as articulated by Putnam) is indeed successful? In the first section, I briefly review the basic contention of Putnam's semantic externalism. In the second section, I outline and reexamine Putnam's, Brueckner's, and Warfield's version of the semantic argument. I hope to show that Putnam's version of this argument remains on a purely meta-linguistic level, which means that it can only prove that the phrase 'We are brains in a vat' must be false when it is considered in the context of the argument, although it most certainly does not prove that we are not brains in a VAT after all. In the third section, I argue that Brueckner's and Warfield's attempt to modify Putnam's argument, and consequently provide an a priori proof that we are not brains in a VAT, are ultimately unsuccessful, for both attempts beg the question against the skeptic. In the final section, I draw a comparison between the skeptical hypothesis and other cases of self-refuting statements and conclude that Putnam was ultimately right in claiming that the skeptical hypothesis is self-refuting in a weak sense, in which it is unassertible, although it might be true nevertheless.

Putnam's argument that we are not brains in a VAT has recently seen a resurgence in interest. Although objections to it are legion, an emerging consensus seems to be that even if it successfully refutes one version of the brain in a VAT scenario, lifelong envatment, it is powerless against a different one, recent envatment. Although initially appealing, I argue in this paper that this response-merely replacing lifelong envatment by recent envatment-is a bad response to Putnam's argument. Yet there is a different version of the brain in a VAT scenario, recent memory-altering envatment, that Putnam's argument does not refute and is also sufficiently radical. The crucial issue turns out to be which epistemic sources sceptical scenarios may attack. I argue that there's no convincing reason for exempting memory from the sceptical attack: Sceptical scenarios must target memory to be sufficiently radical and they can do so without violating any constraint on sceptical scenarios. In the end Putnam's argument doesn't fail because of some 'deep' philosophical mistake, but because it overlooks how flexible and adjustable sceptical scenarios are.

Recently, a detailed epistemic reasoning framework for multi-agent systems with byzantine faulty asynchronous agents and possibly unreliable communication was introduced. We have developed a modular extension framework implemented on top of it, which allows to encode and safely combine additional system assumptions commonly used in the modeling and analysis of fault-tolerant distributed systems, like reliable communication, time-bounded communication, multicasting, synchronous and lock-step synchronous agents and even agents with coordinated actions. We use this extension framework for analyzing basic properties of synchronous and lock-step synchronous agents, such as the agents' local and global fault detection abilities. Moreover, we show that even the perfectly synchronized clocks available in lock-step synchronous systems cannot be used to avoid "brain-in-a-vat" scenarios.

This article is dedicated to the question: may the subject who uses an artificial device for storing information and consulting it literally know the information contained in this device and got by the subject by way of consulting it? Some philosophers claim the thesis of extended mid, i.e. they consider human mind as a system some parts of which may be external to human body. From this point of view the subject may know the information which is stored not in his memory, but in some computer implanted in him or even in some external storage. The author does not agree with this thesis and think that we don’t have sufficient reasons for its statement. But the hypothesis that someone may know what is stored outside of his memory might seem more justified if it could be shown that at least a system consisting from human brain and computer could have the same knowledge as that which corresponding human being would have. Unlike systems consisting from human beings and some external storages working as substitutes of human memory, systems with human brains is based on the same biological processes which provide the work of normal human memory. Can such system have normal human knowledge? The author critically analyzes this hypothesis and shows that we don’t have sufficient reasons to answer this question positively.

Along just over a century of research we moved from learning how to cultivate tissues in a dish to grasping the concepts for creating an entire brain in a vat. As we approach the divisive moment in which we can first detect signs of awareness in such artificially developed organoids, we need to lay foundation for what lays ahead. It is crucial that ethical, legal and moral implications of organoid research are clear and that boundaries are set to separate scientific progress from human life preservation. The largest obstacle may be the definition of consciousness itself, which has arguably been historically neglected by philosophy, psychology and neurosciences at large. One reason may be the difficulties posed by the underlying qualities of awareness, such as its subjective and heterogeneous nature. Another reason may lie on the possibly that consciousness is an overarching emergent property of our brain. For the time being, one can see brain organoids as philosophical zombies, physical analogues of the human brain which mimic sentient human reactions but lack experiential properties of sensation (a.k.a. qualia).

Putnam’s vat argument is intended to show that I am not a permanently envatted brain. The argument holds promise as a response to vat scepticism, which depends on the claim that I do not know that I am not a permanently envatted brain. However, there is a widespread idea that the vat argument cannot fulfil this promise, because to employ the argument as a response to vat scepticism I would have to make assumptions about the content of the premises and/or conclusion of the argument that beg the question against the sceptic. In this paper, I show that this idea is mistaken.

In recent work, Sosa proposes a comprehensive account of epistemic value based on an axiology for attempts. According to this axiology, an attempt is better if it succeeds, better still if it is apt (i.e., succeeds through competence), and best if it is fully apt, (i.e., guided to aptness by apt beliefs that it would be apt). Beliefs are understood as attempts aiming at the truth. Thus, a belief is better if true, better still if apt, and best if fully apt. I raise a Kantian obstacle for Sosa’s account, arguing that the quality or worth of an attempt is independent of whether it succeeds. In particular, an attempt can be fully worthy despite being a failure. I then consider whether Sosa’s competence-theoretic framework provides the resources for an axiology of attempts that does not place so much weight on success. I discuss the most promising candidate, an axiology grounded in the competence of attempts, or what Sosa calls adroitness. An adroit attempt may fail. I raise doubts about whether an adroitness-based axiology can provide a plausible explanation of the worthiness of subjects’ beliefs in epistemically unfortunate situations, such as the beliefs of the brain in a vat. I conclude by speculating that the notion of a belief’s fit with what the subject has to go on, a notion missing from Sosa’s competence-theoretic framework, is crucial to explaining epistemic worth.

Recently we proposed “quantum language” (or, “the linguistic Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics”), which was not only characterized as the metaphysical and linguistic turn of quantum mechanics but also the linguistic turn of Descartes = Kant epistemology. We believe that quantum language is not only the scientific final goal of dualistic idealism but also the language in which science is written. Hence there is a reason to want to clarify, from the quantum linguistic point of view, the following problems: “brain in a vat argument”, “the Cogito proposition”, “five-minute hypothesis”, “only the present exists”, “Copernican revolution”, “McTaggart’s paradox”, and so on. In this paper, these will be discussed in quantum language. And we clarify that these are not propositions in quantum language. That is, these are metaphysical and not scientific. Also, we emphasize that Leibniz’s relationalism in Leibniz-Clarke correspondence should be regarded as one of the most important parts of the linguistic Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Thought experiments involving The Matrix, brains-in-vats, or Cartesian demons have traditionally thought to describe skeptical possibilities. Chalmers has denied this, claiming that the simulations involved are real enough to at least sometimes defeat the skeptic. Through an examination of the meaning of kind terms in natural language I argue that, though the Chalmers view may be otherwise attractive, it is not an antidote to skepticism.

For several decades renewed interest in the role of perception in knowledge has sustained a robust debate over external world skepticism (ews). Traceable to the antirealist movement of the 1980s, the dispute centers on the question of our epistemic access to the external world.1However, a growing consensus holds that such challenges have been substantially met and that realism in some robust form is again deservedly king of the hill. "In the current thriving field of first-order ontology, the most popular view is heavyweight realism," observes David Chalmers, "with a minority of lightweight realists and anti-realists" (Chalmers 2007: 1).I invite us to rethink this consensus in a two-phase response. The first forges a temporary alliance with skepticism against prominent forms of contemporary realism. That these fail to rebuff Ews bolsters Barry Stroud's call for a new paradigm of objectivity (Stroud 1994: 292-293). The second sketches such a paradigm, based upon a transactional interpretation of John Dewey's pragmatism, and indicates it's resilience to skeptical challenges.1 The Skeptical Argument ( sa)Though most pragmatists endorse Peirce's dismissal of philosophical skepticism as "paper doubts," a few have recently joined the chorus of epistemologists who find such arguments interesting. As John Greco notes, since dismissive responses don't engage skepticism, they miss the opportunity to evaluate its role in improving our understanding of objectivity and knowledge (Greco 2000: 61).2 Embracing the skeptical challenge also helps pragmatists gauge how well their notion of objectivity sustains what Dewey calls the "primary integrity" of subject and object (Dewey 1981: 18).3Besides, the intuition behind Ews is strong: If I can doubt these are my hands, in seemingly optimal conditions, then how can I claim to know anything about the external world? Many believe Descartes' "evil demon" presents this intuition in its strongest light.4 Descartes famously imagines all his thoughts, including percepts and even mathematical inferences, being induced by a powerful demon bent upon deceiving him at every turn. In 1981, Hilary Putnam revitalized the argument in his memorable "Brain-in-a-Vat" (biv) thought experiment, where I'm a disembodied brain in a vat whose stimulated nerve endings simulate all the experiences I commonly associate with the real world.5BIV-type skepticism is customarily framed in the form of a simple valid argument:The Skeptical Argument (sa):P1. I don't know not-S.P2. If I don't know not-S, then I don't know O.C. Therefore, I don't know O.Here S is any suitably radical skeptical hypothesis, e.g. "I am a handless Biv," and O is an ordinary belief, such as "I have hands." The ensuing kerfuffle pits skeptics who endorse SA against non-skeptics bent upon undermining it.2 Location! Location!Before joining the fray, let's clarify an important distinction. As stated, Ews is ambiguous as to whether it challenges 1) the certainty of knowledge claims, or 2) our basic ability to get beyond representations to say anything about what's really there in the external world. I wholeheartedly agree that demands for absolute certainty are unconvincing, and will thus focus on the second option- the relation between appearances and mind-independent reality. This view of Ews, dubbed the "ego-centric predicament" by Ralph Barton Perry (Perry 1910: 5-14) more than a century ago, has a surprising corollary: Likelihood or probability has no bearing upon attempts to characterize the external worldfrom the standpoint of our representations.Let's consider this carefully. Ews's challenge to representation is not one of probability or plausibility, but of location-of cognitive access within what we'll call the containment paradigm. Given the presumption that we directly perceive only a representation (the sensation or neural event below on the left), how do we get beyond this to experience the physical, mind-independent existence (the "real" hand on the right) it purportedly represents? …

Mario Villalobos and Pablo Razeto-Barry argue that enactivists should understand living beings not as autopoietic systems, but as autopoietic bodies. In doing so, they surrender the principle of multiple realizability of the spatial location of living beings. By way of counterexample, I argue that more motivation is required before this principle is surrendered.

This paper addresses several objections that have been leveled against a behavioral approach to psychological categories. It reconstructs and critically assesses (a) the so-called causal objection; (b) alleged counterexamples whereby one can exhibit the typical behaviors associated with a psychological phenomenon without exhibiting the latter, including Lewis’ “perfect actor” case and Kirk’s “zombie”; (c) alleged counterexamples whereby organisms can exemplify psychological phenomena without exhibiting any behavior associated with them, including Armstrong’s imagined brain in a vat, Putnam’s “super-super-spartans” scenario, and related cases; and (d) the holistic objection. Mistaken assumptions in each of these objections are pinpointed. The paper starts with a brief characterization of behaviorism about psychological categories and a summary of the particular version thereof supported here, which draws upon Ryle and Skinner, among others.

What is the role of sceptical scenarios—dreams, evil demons, brains in a vat—in sceptical arguments? According to the error view, sceptical scenarios illustrate the possibility of massive falsity in one’s beliefs, whereas according to the ignorance view, they illustrate the possibility of massive ignorance not necessarily due to falsity. In this paper, the ignorance view is defended by surveying the arguments in favour of it and by replying to two pressing objections against it. According to the first objection, the ignorance view illicitly introduces thekk-principle into sceptical arguments. In reply I argue thatkkis not less plausible than its main rival, the closure principle. According to the second objection, relying on veridical ignorance-possibilities contradicts the transparency of belief. In reply I introduce a version of transparency that is consistent with the ignorance view.

Rather than advancing a global skeptical hypothesis, Anthony Brueckner and Jon Altschul construct a skeptical strategy in which they posit a plurality of skeptical hypotheses for distinct propositions that someone claims to know. I show that such “piecemeal” skepticism fails, suggesting that the skeptic is better off sticking with a global skeptical hypothesis.

Many philosophers claim that interesting forms of epistemic evaluation are insensitive to truth in a very specific way. Suppose that two possible agents believe the same proposition based on the same evidence. Either both are justified or neither is; either both have good evidence for holding the belief or neither does. This does not change if, on this particular occasion, it turns out that only one of the two agents has a true belief. Epitomizing this line of thought are thought experiments about radically deceived “brains in vats.” It is widely and uncritically assumed that such a brain is equally justified as its normally embodied human “twin.” This “parity” intuition is the heart of truth-insensitive theories of core epistemological properties such as justification and rationality. Rejecting the parity intuition is considered radical and revisionist. In this paper, I show that exactly the opposite is true. The parity intuition is idiosyncratic and widely rejected. A brain in a vat is not justified and has worse evidence than its normally embodied counterpart. On nearly every ordinary way of evaluating beliefs, a false belief is significantly inferior to a true belief. Of all the evaluations studied here, only blamelessness is truth-insensitive.

I begin my presentation of Hilary Putnam’s paper “Brains in a Vat” by sketching Putnam’s strategy in large, cartoonlike strokes. Like Bostrom’s paper, Putnam’s engages in a form of radical speculation, albeit in a different and more sophisticated way. The best way to bring out what is radical in Putnam’s program is to caricature it in a way that puts its radicalism into relief. Fundamentally, the radicalism of Putnam’s program is associated with his claim that philosophy can do a sort of work of that physics, or more generally any natural science, is incapable of doing. To insist on this point, Putnam has to uphold a distinction between logical and practical possibility—or something like that. I begin by emphasizing the way he does this.

Putnam’s argument against the sceptical Brain-in-a-Vat hypothesis continues to intrigue. I argue in what follows that the argument refutes a particular kind of sceptic and make a proposal about its more general significance. To appreciate the soundness of the argument, I explain, we need to appreciate that the sceptic’s contention is that I cannot know that I am not a brain in a vat even if I am not. This is why in response to the sceptic it is legitimate to make a transition from knowing that a sentence is true to knowing the truth it expresses, which is the crucial move in the argument.

On a common view of scenario-based sceptical arguments sceptical scenarios are error-possibilities, i.e. their point is to introduce the possibility of having only false beliefs (about the external world). However, global error is impossible for purely logical/conceptual reasons: Even if one’s beliefs are consistent, the negations of one’s beliefs need not be consistent as well. My paper deals with the question of what the consequences of this result are. Two attempts (made by Muller and Genova) at repairing scenario-based sceptical arguments within the framework of understanding sceptical scenarios as error-possibilities are found wanting. Instead, what should be given up is the assumption that sceptical scenarios are error-possibilities. What is thought-provoking about the scenario of the brain in a vat is not that none of its empirical beliefs are true, but that all of its empirical beliefs fall short of knowledge at the same time. Hence, sceptical scenarios are not error-possibilities, but ignorance possibilities. If this is so, both the closure argument and the underdetermination argument commit a subtle mistake and should be replaced by slightly different arguments. The principle of excluded ignorance-possibilities turns out to be an epistemological principle that is faithful to scepticism’s tenets without misinterpreting sceptical scenarios as error-possibilities.

The conclusive reasons view of knowledge entails the “abominable conjunction” that I know that I have hands but I do not know that I am not a brain in a vat. The argument from abomination takes this as a reason to reject the view. This paper aims to buttress the argument from abomination by adding a new sort to this list: the logical abominations. These include: “I know that argument is sound and that sound arguments have true conclusions but I don’t know whether the conclusion of that argument is true”. Two standard replies to the argument from abomination are raised. It is argued that the logical abominations open new holes in both.

A general education course is presented that would consider Western intellectual history from the brain’s point of view. Although the sciences of the brain have developed rapidly only in recent decades, the figure of the brain as humanity’s uniquely distinguishing organ has loomed large for centuries. The course, which is designed for a ten-week term and includes both books and films, is organized around signature contexts in which the brain has taken centre stage, such as ‘the mind of God’, ‘world brain’, ‘brainwashing’ and ‘brain in a vat’. The course description is accompanied by a justification that draws attention to the perennial and pervasive human desire to fixate on the brain, often as a means to transcend our default biological settings.

We argue that the minimal biological requirements for consciousness include a living body, not just neuronal processes in the skull. Our argument proceeds by reconsidering the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment. Careful examination of this thought experiment indicates that the null hypothesis is that any adequately functional “vat” would be a surrogate body, that is, that the so-called vat would be no vat at all, but rather an embodied agent in the world. Thus, what the thought experiment actually shows is that the brain and body are so deeply entangled, structurally and dynamically, that they are explanatorily inseparable. Such entanglement implies that we cannot understand consciousness by considering only the activity of neurons apart from the body, and hence we have good explanatory grounds for supposing that the minimal realizing system for consciousness includes the body and not just the brain. In this way, we put the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment to a new use, one that supports the “enactive” view that consciousness is a life-regulation process of the whole organism interacting with its environment.

Modern-day heirs of the Cartesian revolution have been fascinated by the thought that one could utilize certain hypotheses that one is dreaming, deceived by an evil demon, or a brain in a vat to argue at one fell swoop that one does not know, is not justified in believing, or ought not believe most if not all of what one currently believes about the world. A good part of the interest and mystique of these discussions arises from the contention that the seeds of such arguments lie in our ordinary epistemic practices, so that external world skepticism can arise "from within". But is this contention correct? I doubt it.

[...] imagine that a human being (you can imagine this to be yourself) has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain (your brain) has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc; but really all the person (you) is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings.

Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream story can be read as a skeptical response to the Cartesian Cogito, ergo sum solution, for it presents I exist as fundamentally unprovable, on the grounds that the notion about “I” that it is guaranteed to refer to something existing, which Descartes seems to assume, is unwarranted. The modern anti-skepticism of Hilary Putnam employs a different strategy, which seeks to derive the existence of the world not from some “indubitable” truth such as the existence of myself, but from the meaning of some particular assertion I make. In this paper, I argue, however, that Putnam’s argument fails to deliver on the promise of showing the self-refuting nature of the skeptical hypothesis, as it relies on a double use of “I”, a fallacy of equivocation, reflecting an unsolved tension between the argument’s general premise, which is rather Zhuangzian in spirit, and his unwitting adoption of that unwarranted notion about “I”. I try to show further that the skepticism in Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream not only can be used to refute the proofs of the existence of the empirical I, but also is effective against accounts concerning the existence of the transcendental I.

Now it is not possible that both these claims are false. The negations of (1) and (2) are jointly inconsistent. So, necessarily, at least one of (1) and (2) is true. So, it is not possible that all my experience-based beliefs are false. So, contra the widely accepted view, the possibilities that one is dreaming, or is being deceived by a deceitful demon, or is a brain in the vat, do not show that it is possible that all one's experience-based beliefs are false.2 Q.E.D.