Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism: Essays on the Later Philosophy

By Marie McGinn

Central to any interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is an understanding of his philosophical method and the nature of the turn which characterises the evolution from his early to his later work. In the essays in Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism, Marie McGinn argues that this methodological shift has at its heart a highly distinctive form of naturalism, which has its roots in the works of Goethe. This form of naturalism emphasises achieving a clarified view of complex, natural phenomena in their natural setting, with a view to describing patterns and connections that are in plain view. Wittgenstein is seen as applying these methods to the task of conceptual clarification, whose aim is to dissolve philosophical problems and paradoxes. The essays cover the following topics: scepticism about the external world; scepticism about other minds; knowledge and belief; meaning and rule-following; psychological states and the distinctive first-person use of psychological concepts; the relation between the early and the later philosophy; and the nature of Wittgenstein’s naturalism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthem Press
• Release date: Dec 7, 2021
• ISBN: 9781785278396

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Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism

Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein

Anthem Studies in Wittgenstein publishes new and classic works on Wittgenstein and Wittgensteinian philosophy. This book series aims to bring Wittgenstein’s thought into the mainstream by highlighting its relevance to 21st-century concerns. Titles include original monographs, themed edited volumes, forgotten classics, biographical works and books intended to introduce Wittgenstein to the general public. The series is published in association with the British Wittgenstein Society.

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Series Editor

Constantine Sandis – University of Hertfordshire, UK

Forthcoming Titles in the Series

Extending Hinge Epistemology

Logos and Life: Essays on Mind, Language and Ethics

Normativity, Meaning and Philosophy: Essays on Wittgenstein

Practical Rationality, Learning and Convention: Essays in the Philosophy of Education

Wittgenstein and Modernist Fiction: The Language of Acknowledgment

Wittgenstein and the Life We Live with Language

Wittgenstein, Human Beings and Conversation

Wittgenstein on Other Minds

Wittgenstein Rehinged

Wittgenstein, Scepticism and Naturalism

Essays on the Later Philosophy

Marie McGinn

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CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgements

Works by Wittgenstein

Chapter

One

Wittgenstein on Certainty

Chapter

Two

The Real Problem of Others: Cavell, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Scepticism about Other Minds

Chapter

Three

The Everyday Alternative to Scepticism: Cavell and Wittgenstein on Other Minds

Chapter

Four

Wittgenstein and Knowledge

Chapter

Five

Wittgenstein and Williamson on Knowing and Believing

Chapter

Six

Wittgenstein and Moore’s Paradox

Chapter

Seven

Wittgenstein and Naturalism

Chapter

Eight

Naturalism and ‘Turning Our Whole Inquiry Around’

Chapter

Nine

Liberal Naturalism: Wittgenstein and McDowell

Chapter

Ten

‘Recognizing the Ground That Lies before Us as Ground’: McDowell on How to Read the Philosophical Investigations

Chapter

Eleven

Grammar in the Philosophical Investigations

References

Index

PREFACE

I am very grateful to Constantine Sandis for asking me to make a collection of my papers on Wittgenstein’s later philosophy. It proved the perfect project for the coronavirus lockdown in England, which began in March 2020 and continued more or less for the rest of the year.

I have chosen papers which focus on the themes of scepticism and knowledge and which emphasize and explore the role of naturalism in Wittgenstein’s later thought. Central to any interpretation of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy is an understanding of his philosophical method, and the nature of the turn which characterizes the evolution from his early to his later work. In these chapters, I argue that the methodological shift has at its heart a highly distinctive form of naturalism. Wittgenstein himself emphasizes this naturalistic turn when he remarks that ‘what we are supplying are really remarks on the natural history of human beings’ (PI §415).

This form of naturalism has nothing to do with the kind of scientific naturalism that is associated with accounting for all phenomena in terms of the conceptual resources of the natural sciences. It is closer to the Aristotelian naturalism defended by John McDowell, although, in Wittgenstein’s case, the principal influence is Goethe, whose conception of how to understand the phenomena of nature is self-consciously opposed to the reductive approach of scientific naturalism. Goethe places emphasis on achieving a clarified view of complex, natural phenomena in their natural setting, with the aim of describing patterns and connections that are there in plain sight. The novelty of Wittgenstein’s later work is that it applies these methods to the task of conceptual clarification, which aims at dissolving philosophical problems and paradoxes.

The chapters in this volume cover the following topics: scepticism about the external world, scepticism about other minds, knowledge and belief, meaning and rule-following, psychological states and the distinctive first-person use of psychological concepts, the relation between the early and the later philosophy and the nature of Wittgenstein’s naturalism.

Chapter One, ‘Wittgenstein on Certainty’, addresses the question whether Wittgenstein’s notes collected in OC contain the makings of a philosophically satisfactory response to scepticism about the external world. I consider three approaches to the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks: he refutes scepticism by showing it is self-defeating; he reveals the truth in scepticism and offers an accommodation with it; and he sets out to diagnose the misconceptions that underpin sceptical doubt, which does not itself offer a refutation of scepticism but opens the way to our liberating ourselves from its philosophical grip. I defend the third of these approaches and aim to show that through his investigation of the concepts of knowledge and empirical judgement, Wittgenstein provides a self-understanding on which it no longer appears that we are forced to surmise or assume something in order for empirical enquiry to get off the ground.

Chapter Two, ‘The Real Problem of Others’, presents a critique of Stanley Cavell’s claim that the philosophical problems of scepticism about other minds and scepticism about the external world stand in a different relation to our everyday practice and that there is, in particular, no equivalent, in the case of other minds, of our everyday rejection of scepticism about the external world. I contrast Cavell’s claim with the views of both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein, which are seen as drawing a distinction between the doubt that characterizes our adult relations with others and the doubts of the philosophical sceptic. I argue that Cavell’s attempt to bring them closer together ends by misrepresenting the nature of the ordinary doubts and disagreements in our everyday relations with others.

Chapter Three, ‘The Everyday Alternative to Scepticism’, continues the themes of the previous chapter and explores in more detail the idea that Cavell’s position concerning scepticism about other minds is at odds with the fundamental lessons of Wittgenstein’s remarks on the philosophy of psychology. I argue that Wittgenstein is deeply opposed to the idea that our everyday doubts about others amount to a way of ‘living scepticism’ or reveal a truth in the sceptic’s image of our metaphysical separation. Wittgenstein’s central aim is to trace the physiognomy of doubt, and in doing so, I claim, he is careful not only to make a ‘logical’ distinction between our everyday doubts and philosophical doubt but also to differentiate the uncertainty which characterizes our psychological language-game from the real doubts that arise in particular concrete cases.

Chapter Four, ‘Wittgenstein and Knowledge’, returns to the themes of the first chapter and explores in more detail Wittgenstein’s treatment of what is sometimes called ‘non-inferential knowledge’, that is, judgements we make ‘straight off, without any doubt interposing itself’ (OC §524, original emphasis). The chapter is particularly concerned with the question of the nature of authority of the judgements which provide both the starting point for empirical enquiry and its ultimate court of appeal. What I characterize as Wittgenstein’s ‘naturalistic’ treatment of this question is contrasted with the approaches of Wilfrid Sellars and John McDowell, both of whom, in different ways, aim to provide a philosophical account of non-inferential knowledge that explains how it is possible.

Chapter Five, ‘Wittgenstein and Williamson on Knowing and Believing’, focuses on Wittgenstein’s understanding of how the concept of knowledge functions, by exploring what an apparent disagreement between him and Timothy Williamson actually amounts to. Williamson affirms that knowing is a mental state, something Wittgenstein appears to deny. However, there is a question whether, in claiming that knowing is a mental state, Williamson means to affirm what Wittgenstein means to deny, when he asserts that it is not one. I argue that careful examination shows it is impossible to give expression to a thesis that is clearly a matter of dispute between them. The question then shifts to one of whether Williamson attempts to use the idea that knowing is a mental state in a response to the sceptic, which Wittgenstein would consider dogmatic.

Chapter Six, ‘Wittgenstein and Moore’s Paradox’, concerns the interpretation of a set of remarks that Wittgenstein makes, in PI, PPF, section x, on Moore’s observation that it is absurd for someone to say ‘It is raining but I do not believe it is.’ Commentators have generally focused on Wittgenstein’s critique of Moore’s pragmatic solution to the paradox, in which Wittgenstein claims that ‘p but I do not believe that p’ is an outright contradiction and that ‘I believe p’ is equivalent to ‘p’. I argue that these observations on their own do not resolve Wittgenstein’s reformulation of the paradox – that what I assert in ‘I believe that p’ does not appear to be what is supposed in ‘Suppose I believe that p’ – which is the main focus of his investigations. I show how Wittgenstein’s reformulation allows him to make a deeper point about the priority of the distinctive first-person indicative use of the verb ‘believe’, which is missed by the traditional reading of these remarks.

Chapter Seven, ‘Wittgenstein and Naturalism’, starts from the fact that Wittgenstein’s later philosophy embodies some form of philosophical naturalism and raises the question of how it is to be understood. The question is important for the interpretation of Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following as his naturalism is recognized as central to his escape from the sceptical paradox that he expresses in PI §201. Crispin Wright has argued that the central notion in Wittgenstein’s naturalism is that of a ‘primitive disposition’ and that this notion is employed in a constructive account of what constitutes meaning, which is revisionary of our ordinary understanding. John McDowell has claimed that Wittgenstein’s naturalism does not retreat to a set of non-normative concepts and proceed to a constructive account of meaning but merely shows that our ordinary concept of meaning depends for its sense upon a background of normative practices which are part of the natural history of human beings. These two conflicting interpretations of Wittgenstein’s naturalism are presented and assessed, particularly in relation to his discussion of the practice of inference and calculation in RFM.

Chapter Eight, ‘Naturalism and Turning Our Whole Inquiry Around’, examines Wittgenstein’s remarks in what is known as ‘the chapter on philosophy’ in PI. The chapter focuses particularly on the question of how we are to understand what Wittgenstein characterizes as ‘our tendency to sublimate the logic of our language’ (PI §38). Wittgenstein sees this tendency at work in Russell’s idea that ‘this’ is the only real name and in the idea that ‘thought must be something unique’, an occult process whose essence is logic. The role of these ideas in the TLP is used to explore in detail what our tendency to sublimate amounts to. Wittgenstein clearly believes that resisting this tendency represents the decisive shift in his understanding of his philosophical aims. I argue that Wittgenstein’s distinctive form of naturalism is fundamental to understanding the nature of this shift.

Chapter Nine, ‘Liberal Naturalism: Wittgenstein and McDowell’, focuses on the clear parallel between the naturalism of John McDowell and the kind of naturalism that is central to PI. Both are committed to avoiding a reductive approach to meaning and also what McDowell calls ‘supernaturalism’: the idea that meaning and thinking are ‘strange processes’ that are alien to ordinary nature. I argue that this similarity conceals significant contrasts between the way in which McDowell and Wittgenstein conceive of the philosophical project of clarifying the nature of meaning and understanding. McDowell is committed to defending a realist conception of meaning, thinking and understanding as inner states with an intrinsic, determinate content which in itself settles what counts as conformity and non-conformity with them. I argue that this view of meaning and understanding commits McDowell to an idea of ‘shadows’ – something between a sign and its application – which Wittgenstein’s naturalism aims to liberate us from.

Chapter Ten, ‘Recognizing the Ground That Lies before Us as Ground: McDowell on How to Read the Philosophical Investigations’, investigates John McDowell’s claim that Wittgenstein sets out to defend a ‘common sense conception’ of what it is to follow a rule, which McDowell calls ‘naturalized platonism’. The chapter raises the question of whether McDowell succeeds in making good his claim that this version of platonism escapes Wittgenstein’s critique or whether it really gets beyond the ‘strange idea’ that the use of a word is already present in the act of understanding. I argue that McDowell’s commitment to this idea of a common-sense conception, which he holds cannot be abandoned without destroying the notion of meaning altogether, leads him to misread Wittgenstein’s remarks on rule-following and to misrepresent what Wittgenstein means by ‘recognizing the ground before us as ground’. I claim that the chief weakness of McDowell’s interpretation is that it neglects the idea, central to Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, of a ‘grammatical investigation’.

Chapter Eleven, ‘Grammar in the Philosophical Investigations’, considers how Wittgenstein’s ideas of ‘depth grammar’ and ‘grammatical investigation’ are to be understood. The chapter can be seen as a summary piece which makes explicit the interpretation of the aims and methods of Wittgenstein’s later philosophy that has informed the chapters collected in this volume. It examines, in particular, two contrasting views on the idea of depth grammar that have been put forward by Peter Hacker and Gordon Baker. I argue that Gordon Baker’s understanding of this concept, which is close to the one I have been operating with in these chapters, fundamentally changes how the philosophical aims of PI are to be understood and achieved and that it provides a much more convincing account of Wittgenstein’s remarks.

I have made minor editorial changes to the original versions of these chapters, and where the original quotations from PI are from G. E. M. Anscombe’s translations, I have replaced them with quotations from the revised translation by P. M. S. Hacker and J. Schulte.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I’m grateful to publishers for permission to republish the following papers. I have made some minor stylistic changes to the content of the papers, in the interest of clarity, and allowed some small degree of repetition in order to preserve each chapter’s integrity. The main change has been to use quotations from the fourth edition and revised translation of PI by G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte throughout.

  1. ‘Wittgenstein’s On Certainty ’, originally published in The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism , ed. J. Greco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 372–91.

  2. ‘The Real Problem of Others: Cavell, Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein on Scepticism about Other Minds’, originally published in European Journal of Philosophy , April 1998, pp. 45–58.

  3. ‘The Everyday Alternative to Scepticism: Cavell and Wittgenstein on Other Minds’, originally published in Wittgenstein and Scepticism , ed. D. McManus (London: Routledge, 2004), pp. 240–59.

  4. ‘Wittgenstein and Knowledge’, originally published in Routledge Companion to Epistemology , ed. Duncan Pritchard and Sven Bernecker (London: Routledge, 2011), pp. 763–73.

  5. ‘Wittgenstein and Williamson on Knowing and Believing’, originally published in Conceptions of Knowledge , ed. Stefan Tolksdorf (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), pp. 671–91.

  6. ‘Wittgenstein and Moore’s Paradox’, originally published in Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science and the Arts , vol. 1, Publications of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, ed. Richard Heinrich, Elisabeth Nemeth, Wolfram Pichler and David Wagner (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2011), pp. 59–72.

  7. ‘Wittgenstein and Naturalism’, originally published in Naturalism and Normativity , ed. Mario De Caro and David McArthur (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), pp. 322–52. Copyright © 2010, Columbia University Press. Reprinted with permission of Columbia University Press.

  8. ‘Naturalism and Turning the Examination Round’, originally published in Wittgenstein’s Early Philosophy , ed. J. Zalabardo (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 241–59.

  9. ‘Liberal Naturalism’, originally published in Philosophical Methodology: The Armchair or the Laboratory , ed. Matthew C. Haug (London: Routledge, 2014), pp. 62–85.

10. ‘Recognizing the Ground That Lies before Us as Ground: McDowell on How to Read Philosophical Investigations ’, originally published in Language and World: Essays on the Philosophy of Wittgenstein, ed. V. Munz, K. Puhl and J. Wang (Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2010), pp. 147–68.

11. ‘Grammar in Philosophical Investigations ’, originally published in The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein , ed. O. Kuusela and M. McGinn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 646–66.

WORKS BY WITTGENSTEIN

Chapter One

WITTGENSTEIN ON CERTAINTY

1. Wittgenstein’s philosophical purpose vis-à-vis the sceptic in OC is a matter of dispute.¹ He has variously been held to refute scepticism, by showing it is self-defeating;² to reveal the truth in scepticism and to offer an accommodation with it;³ and to diagnose the misconceptions that underlie sceptical doubt, which does not itself constitute a refutation of scepticism but which opens up the way to our liberating ourselves from its philosophical grip.⁴ These three approaches to interpreting the remarks collected in OC do not, I’m sure, amount to an exhaustive classification of the interpretations put forward in the secondary literature. However, they do at least represent three importantly distinct ways of responding to scepticism that have been attributed to Wittgenstein, and this invites the question whether, on any of these interpretations, Wittgenstein’s notes contain the makings of a philosophically satisfactory response to philosophical scepticism.

2. It may seem, prima facie, that the interpretation that offers the best hope of a philosophically satisfactory response to scepticism is one that holds that Wittgenstein’s remarks contain a demonstration that scepticism is self-refuting. This approach promises to show that there simply is no intelligible doubt that needs to be removed before our ordinary knowledge claims can count as legitimate. Avrum Stroll defends an interpretation along these lines. He argues that Wittgenstein’s remarks present a non-conventional and unique form of foundationalism. The idea is that the foundations of human knowledge do not themselves belong to the category of things that are known. The propositions that belong to the foundation are called ‘hinge propositions’, and they are exempt from epistemic evaluation. Our attitude towards what lies at the foundation of knowledge is a form of non-epistemic certainty, a form of sureness, which, Stroll claims, is not the product of ratiocination but ‘is something primitive, instinctual, or animal’, a way of acting that ‘derives from rote training in communal practices’ (Stroll 1994: 157). By means of training in communal practices, we inherit a picture of the world, which is expressed not merely in how we think about the world but in how we live and act; our picture of the world constitutes the framework within which all ordinary doubt and enquiry, all ordinary confirmation and disconfirmation of belief, take place. It is this description of the structure of our ordinary practice, according to Stroll, that provides the basis for Wittgenstein’s refutation of scepticism.

On this account, Wittgenstein holds that the hinge propositions that form the framework of our practice lie outside the route taken by enquiry. They ‘stand fast for us’, and that means, within the practice in which we have been trained, the question of truth or falsity does not arise for them. Stroll allows, however, that a sceptic might concede that Wittgenstein’s description of our attitude to the common-sense framework within which the justification of knowledge claims ordinarily takes place is quite correct: ordinarily we are certain concerning the propositions of the frame and would normally disregard any serious attempt to doubt them. But the sceptic is not concerned with the question of whether we are certain that the world exists, that it has existed for a long time past, that there are other human beings who think and feel as we do and so on. He is concerned with whether we know these things, and that we know does not, as Wittgenstein observes, follow from the fact that we are certain. It’s at this point, on Stroll’s interpretation, that the real refutation of scepticism begins. According to Stroll, Wittgenstein argues that, by trying to raise a doubt about the propositions of the frame, the sceptic is employing expressions that belong to our language-game and at the same time attempting to doubt the presuppositions on which the existence of the language-game depends: ‘The sceptic is thus engaged in an activity that is sensible only if he rejects the conditions that make that activity sensible’ (Stroll 1994: 162). If the expressions that the sceptic uses to express his doubt belong to our language-game, then the sceptic, by engaging in the game, is committed to treating as certain the very things that he attempts to doubt. Scepticism is not, therefore, a coherent position: it is inherently unintelligible and no counter argument to it needs to be mounted.

3. Does this provide a satisfactory response to the sceptic? Let us assume that Stroll is correct in holding, and in holding that Wittgenstein holds, that sceptical doubt has no place in our ordinary language-game of doubt and enquiry. Let us accept also that, if we put the presuppositions that constitute the framework of our ordinary practice in doubt, all possibility of confirming or disconfirming beliefs breaks down, and our capacity to engage in the language-game is put under threat. The question is what follows from this? Does it follow that the doubt that the sceptic raises about the propositions of the framework is senseless?⁵ Against that, we might point out that the sceptical conclusion arises when our everyday practice of investigating whether a claim to know rests on unwarranted presuppositions is directed at our practice of claiming to know about the world, as a whole. Such a process of reflection need not question the fact, or the role, of our certainty concerning these presuppositions in the enquiries we ordinarily undertake; the sceptic can even concede that, as far as our ordinary lives go, there is no alternative to it. What the sceptic draws our attention to is the utter groundlessness of our certainty. He may concede that we cannot dispense with these groundless beliefs and still take part in our practice, while holding that we cannot, from a position of philosophical reflection, regard what is achieved within the context of these groundless presuppositions as knowledge. The kind of non-epistemic or instinctual certainty that Stroll claims makes us immune to sceptical doubt appears, from the perspective of philosophical reflection, actually to invite the conclusion that the foundation of our language-game is, epistemically speaking, insecure; our language-game appears to rest upon a leap in the dark, which we all quite naturally make, but which cannot properly constitute a framework for the achievement of knowledge.⁶

4. Crispin Wright also claims (tentatively) that OC ‘gesture[s]‌ at a principled and stable response to […] scepticism about our knowledge of the material world’ (Wright 2004: 22; McManus 2004). Wright, like Stroll, begins with Wittgenstein’s distinction between knowledge properly so recognized – what Wright calls ‘a state of cognitive achievement, based on completed enquiry’ (Wright 2004: 31) – and certainties or propositions that ‘stand fast for us’. These framework, or hinge, propositions, Wright suggests, play a regulative or presuppositional role in our language-game of gathering and assessing evidence; they ‘play a pivotal role in our methodology of empirical investigation and thereby contribute to the background necessary to make cognitive achievement possible’ (32). A proposition which, in a particular context, belongs to the presuppositional framework of enquiry functions as a norm of description: its certainty is something against which evidence is assessed. To doubt these propositions would not only bring down whole systems of beliefs but also threaten the methods by which we assess evidence and appraise opinions. What distinguishes Wright’s interpretation of the key ideas of OC from Stroll’s is that he doesn’t attempt to use these reflections as the basis for an outright refutation of scepticism. Indeed, as Wright sees it, Wittgenstein’s reflections effectively take the sceptic’s point, for he has conceded that what we ordinarily count as knowledge depends upon essential, groundless assumptions that we have no positive reason to affirm are true. On Wright’s reading, what Wittgenstein sets out to show in OC is that the groundlessness of the framework to what we ordinarily regard as cognitive achievement does not have the sceptical consequences that it has been thought to have.

Wright believes that there is only limited mileage in the idea that the norms that define a practice cannot, as norms, be considered correct or incorrect. He argues that the fact that empirical enquiry is directed at the discovery of truths means that the question whether the norms that define our practice are such as to achieve its overall point must make sense.⁷ He writes:

It will therefore seem as though there has to be a good question whether and with what right we suppose that the rules we actually rely on in empirical enquiry are conducive to the divination of what is true and the avoidance of what is false. (Wright 2004: 43)

He goes on:

To allow that ‘The earth has existed for many years past’ serves as a rule of evidence – plays a role in determining our conception of the significance of presently available states and processes – is not even superficially in tension with thinking of it as a substantial proposition, apt to be true or false. It goes without saying that our conception of the significance of items of evidence we gather will depend on what kind of world we take ourselves to be living in. That in no way banishes the spectre of profound and sweeping error in the latter regard. (47)

Wright recognizes that these ideas may appear to be at odds with the later Wittgensteinian view that the rules of our language-game do not have to answer to anything external to it. However, he believes not only that there is very little prospect of establishing the thesis that the propositions of the frame are not genuinely factual but also that this idea is ‘much less obtrusive in On Certainty’ (45) than in the Investigations and that it doesn’t play a central role in Wittgenstein’s response to scepticism. Wright does not, therefore, want to see Wittgenstein’s key idea as one that challenges the intelligibility of scepticism but as one that makes ‘a liveable accommodation with it’ (47).

Wright believes that we should think of the propositions of the frame as ‘collateral information’, the assumption of which provides us, on a given occasion, with a warrant either for the direct assertion of a particular proposition or for the inferring of a particular proposition from defeasible evidence. Even in the case of a non-inferential warrant for a proposition, there will always be presuppositions about the proper functioning of the relevant cognitive capacities, the suitability of the occasion for their effective functioning and so on, on which our possession of the warrant rests. The problem with Moore’s reply to the sceptic is that he attempts to use the warrant for a particular proposition (‘This is a hand’) as a premise from which he infers a proposition of the frame (‘There is a material world’), when the warrant for the premise consists in defeasible evidence that provides a warrant only if the proposition of the frame is presupposed as collateral information. It is clearly the case, Wright argues, that a warrant does not transmit from a premise ‘to a validly inferred conclusion in cases where the very possession of the warrant for the premise in the first place depends on a prior warrant for the conclusion’ (Wright 2004: 48).⁸

However, Wright believes that once we realize that any warrant for a proposition is necessarily achieved courtesy of some specific set of presuppositions for which we have no earned warrant, then we can also recognize that our ordinary concept of an acquired warrant cannot require that we achieve an earned warrant for every presupposition: the requirement is essentially incoherent. Wright concludes:

The general source of the limitations on warrant transmission […] is thus a consideration about the essential limitations of any particular cognitive achievement: wherever I achieve warrant for a proposition, I do so courtesy of specific presuppositions – about my own powers, and the prevailing circumstances, and my understanding of the issues involved – for which I will have no specific, earned warrant. This is a necessary truth. (Wright 2004: 48)

We are thus led to accept ‘each and every cognitive project as irreducibly involving elements of adventure – I take a risk on the reliability of my senses, the amenability of the circumstances, etc’ (Wright 2004: 49). Our response to the essential limitations on cognitive achievement that sceptical doubt exposes is not to conclude ‘that the acquisition of genuine warrant is impossible, but rather that since warrant is acquired wherever investigation is undertaken in an epistemically responsible manner, epistemic responsibility cannot, per impossibile, involve an