Mark Johnston acknowledges the potential significance of investigating the nature and prospects of metaphysical ambition as I try to do with respect to the colors of things in The Quest for Reality. But he is not impressed with the actual achievement. He thinks I spend too much time rejecting views that nobody nowadays, or perhaps ever, would take seriously, and too little time—and in some cases no time at all—opposing views contrary to mine that almost everybody who is anybody nowadays (...) accepts. He raises some objections that I certainly have not answered or even explicitly forestalled in the book. The most I can do here is to indicate the directions in which I think adequate replies might be found, if they can be found at all. (shrink)

Mark Johnston acknowledges the potential significance of investigating the nature and prospects of metaphysical ambition as I try to do with respect to the colors of things in The Quest for Reality. But he is not impressed with the actual achievement. He thinks I spend too much time rejecting views that nobody nowadays, or perhaps ever, would take seriously, and too little time—and in some cases no time at all—opposing views contrary to mine that almost everybody who is anybody nowadays (...) accepts. He raises some objections that I certainly have not answered or even explicitly forestalled in the book. The most I can do here is to indicate the directions in which I think adequate replies might be found, if they can be found at all. (shrink)

Some years ago, it was fashionable for philosophers not to take sceptica arguments seriously. Now, it seems no longer so.

A widespread concern within philosophy has been, and continues to be, to determine which domains of discourse address real, robust, not‐merely‐deflationary facts, and which do not. But a threat to the legitimacy of this concern is the extreme lack of consensus amongst philosophers on the question of how to tell whether or not a given domain is oriented towards ‘robust reality’. The present paper criticizes Kit Fine’s attempt to settle that question. This discussion is followed by some considerations suggesting that (...) there is no good answer to it, that the notion of ‘robust reality’ is defective and ought to be abandoned. (shrink)

In chapter 1 of Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam argues from some plausible assumptions about the nature of reference to the conclusion that it is not possible that all sentient creatures are brains in a vat. If this argument is successful, it seemingly refutes an updated form of Cartesian skepticism concerning knowledge of physical objects. In this paper, I will state what I take to be the most promising interpretation of Putnam's argument. My reconstructed argument differs from an argument (...) strongly suggested by Putnam's text. I will show that the latter argument obviously does not work. The more promising argument which I reconstruct on behalf of Putnam raises some interesting questions about the relation between the contents of one's beliefs and one's environment and about how this relation affects the evaluation of anti-skeptical arguments. I conclude that my reconstructed argument ultimately fails as a response to Cartesian skepticism: the argument engenders a skepticism about knowledge of meaning, or propositional content, which undercuts its anti-skeptical force. (shrink)