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Chapter 4 considers the response to scepticism found in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

According to Kant, all theories that leave the existence of things in space doubtful or insufficiently justified – Kant’s own terms for such views are ‘problematic idealism’ and ‘sceptical idealism’ – must be avoided if there is to be an explanation of how knowledge of the world around us is possible. In particular, Kant argues that in order to avoid scepticism all accounts of our knowledge as inferential or indirect must be rejected: the external things we know about must have a reality which is not inferred, but immediately perceived.

Stroud argues that this condition, which he refers to as the ‘conditional correctness of scepticism’, is indeed a condition of knowledge. Kant’s own attempt to meet the sceptical challenge, however, must be counted a failure: it is doubtful whether the doctrine of ‘transcendental idealism’, which is meant to establish ‘empirical realism’ and requires us to accept the ideality of all appearances, is even fully intelligible; more importantly, it is difficult to distinguish transcendental idealism, in its explanatory power, from the kind of scepticism that seemed inevitable to Descartes at the end of the First Meditation: it would not enable us to see any of the assertions or beliefs in science or everyday life as instances of knowledge of a mind-independent domain.

Chapter 2 focuses on the challenge to the sceptical reasoning that what Descartes says is a requirement for everyday knowledge of the world – and would destroy all everyday knowledge of the world if it were a genuine requirement because it cannot be fulfilled – is in fact no such requirement at all.

A particularly persuasive and influential version of that line of criticism is found in the work of J. L. Austin, who in his paper ‘Other Minds’ tries to show how the traditional philosophical investigation of knowledge significantly deviates from our normal practices. Austin observes that in our ordinary assessments of claims to knowledge we always presuppose a specific doubt about some specific knowledge claim, and he insists that a specific doubt about a specific knowledge claim can only be raised if there is some reason to think that a specific possibility that would undermine that knowledge claim actually obtains; if so, it would seem that there is no room for doubts about knowledge claims that rest on purely abstract considerations about possiblities that might obtain, or cannot be excluded, and therefore no room for a completely general scepticism of the kind Descartes envisions.

Drawing a distinction between conditions of assertion and conditions of truth, Stroud argues that even if we grant the point Austin makes about our ordinary assessments of knowledge it still does not follow that Descartes deviates in his reasoning from our everyday standards and procedures and changes or distorts the meaning of the word ‘know’. The requirement that there must be some ‘special reason’ for thinking a certain possibility might obtain should be seen as a requirement on the appropriate or reasonable assertion of knowledge, but not necessarily as a requirement on knowledge itself; and if the possibility that one is dreaming is a possibility that one must know not to obtain if one is to know something about the world, as the sceptic can plausibly insist it is, then one will simply not know that thing about the world if one has not been able to eliminate that possibility – even though it might be completely inappropriate or unreasonable on particular occasions in everyday life to insist on ruling out that possibility before saying that one knows.