Replies to Commentators
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Replies to Commentators Nuno Venturinha 1 Received: 7 August 2019 / Revised: 31 October 2019 / Accepted: 21 November 2019 # Springer Nature B.V. 2019
Abstract This text consists of replies to commentaries by Michael Williams, Duncan Pritchard and Javier González de Prado on my book Description of Situations: An Essay in Contextualist Epistemology (Springer, 2018). Keywords Contextualism . Disclosure principle . Epistemic vertigo . Hinge epistemology .
Scepticism . Wittgenstein
1 Reply to Williams In his commentary, Michael Williams agrees with me that the version of contextualism developed by Wittgenstein in On Certainty furnishes the best means for dealing with sceptical claims. But Williams disagrees with me in regard to the incompleteness I still identify in Wittgensteinian contextualism—one that, as I argue in Chapter 12, can only be surpassed through a moral attitude. Williams criticizes the way I interpret Wittgenstein’s treatment of scepticism along the lines of hinge epistemology and is particularly against my endorsement of what Pritchard (2016: 71) calls “arational commitments”. To hold such a view, in the opinion of Williams, means “giving in to the skeptic” and he avows that this “concessive aspect of hinge epistemology is what leads Venturinha to conclude the spectre of skepticism continues to haunt epistemology”. At the centre of Williams’ argument, which expands recent work of his (2018, 2019), lies the idea that the “hinge” passages in On Certainty begin with § 340 and do not have to do with “general skepticism” but with “the logic of our scientific I am extremely grateful to all my commentators for their attentive reading of my Description of Situations (2018) and for the insightful questions they have raised. I am also very grateful to the editors of Philosophia for their receptivity to this symposium. It is a privilege to think about some central themes of the book from so many different angles. I hope that my replies will be able to do justice to the acute criticism I found in each of the commentaries.
* Nuno Venturinha [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy & IFILNOVA, Nova University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal
Philosophia
investigations” (Wittgenstein 1974: § 342). In fact, § 341, where the hinge metaphor appears for the first time, begins (like § 342) with the expression “That is to say”, thus working as a specification of the previous one. Williams accuses hinge epistemologists of generally omitting § 340 and concentrating merely on §§ 341–3, something that applies to Description of Situations, which just quotes in Chapter 7 from § 341. Given that § 340 opens with Wittgenstein stating that “[w]e know, with the same certainty with which we believe any mathematical proposition”, lots of things in experience, Williams’ point is that hinges cannot be arational commitments insofar as they are propositions that, he stresses, “are known to be true”. In this reply, I shall first contend that this reading of Wittgenstein is problematic and that the hinge passages, including
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