| There are two main parts to this project. Together they comprise an argument that being justified in holding one's beliefs rarely, if ever, requires responding to Cartesian skepticism. The first component is an argument for strong semantic externalism: I argue that for a word or thought to be meaningful, it must play a role in a community with a certain kind of normative structure. The second component of my anti-skeptical argument is a naturalistic account of epistemic properties. I argue that we should see epistemic properties as a product of the interaction of members of a community who rely on each other as sources of information and as collaborators in practical and cognitive projects. I present an account of the structure a community must have in order to establish epistemic standards that would allow for beliefs to be justified or unjustified, and I argue that this structure guarantees that most community members, on many occasions, have evidence that is sufficient to justify their beliefs.;I go on to argue that, for most people, no response to skepticism is possible. Any response to skepticism that most people are in a position to offer is one that essentially relies on the semantic properties of beliefs. But since semantic properties depend not simply on the state of the speaker's mind, but also the nature of the community in which the speaker lives, any such response would beg the question against the skeptic. So: most people in many situations have the resources available to justify their beliefs, but most people are unable to respond to skepticism, so justifying one's beliefs does not require responding to skepticism. |
