4

VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM
James Conant

Much of this chapter is devoted to offering a partial taxonomy of various

kinds of philosophical scepticism and the various kinds of philosophical
response those scepticisms have engendered. 1 The aim of the taxonomic
exercise is to furnish a perspicuous overview of some of the dialectical relations that obtain across the range of problems that philosophers have called
(and continue to call) 'sceptical'.2 I will argue that such an overview affords
a number of forms of philosophical insight. The final three sections of the
chapter employ the taxonomy developed in the first part of the chapter to
show how some of Wittgenstein's finest commentators have misunderstood
one another's work by failing to command a clear overview of the philosophical terrain here.

1 Cartesian and Kantian varieties of scepticism a first pass at the distinction

The partial taxonomy presented in this chapter flows from an initial distinction between two varieties of scepticism which I will call Cartesian scepticism
and Kantian scepticism 3 (these labels are admittedly contentious and will be
discussed further below). Each of these varieties of scepticism has its origin
in a sceptical question (which I will call 'the Cartesian question' and 'theKantian
question' respectively); and each of these varieties of sceptical question leads
to a sceptical paradox ('the Cartesian paradox' and 'the Kantian paradox'). I will
call the imaginary philosopher who acquiesces in the Cartesian paradox 'a
Cartesian sceptic', and the (even more) imaginary philosopher who acquiesces
in the Kantian paradox 'a Kantian sceptic'. The customary response to each
of these paradoxes is to seek a way to entitle oneself to do something other
than acquiesce in the paradoxical conclusion, by refuting or dissolving or
diagnosing or by-passing the paradox in question. This gives rise to two
varieties of philosophical problematic, flowing from such attempts to address
each of these two sorts of sceptic, that I will call 'the Cartesian problematic' and
'the Kantian problematic' respectively. It is with these twin problematics that
I will be primarily concerned here and which I will be discussing and refer-

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JAMES CONANT

ring to as 'varieties of scepticism'. According to this unconventional idiom,

the term 'scepticism' (and its variants, such as 'Cartesian scepticism' or
'Kantian scepticism') therefore refers not just to one particular sort of philosophical position (i.e. that held by one or another sort of sceptic) but rather
to the wider dialectical space within which philosophers occupying a range of
apparently opposed philosophical positions (such as 'realism', 'idealism',
'coherentism', etc.) engage one another, while seeking a stable way to answer
the sceptic's question in the affirmative rather than (as the sceptic himself
does) in the negative. 4 So, according to the terminology I am here introducing, a philosopher can be concerned with the Cartesian sceptical problematic
without himself being a Cartesian sceptic; and, indeed, Descartes was such
a philosopher. And the same holds for the relation between being concerned
with the Kantian sceptical problematic, being a Kantian sceptic and being
Kant.
The following is an excerpt from the classic formulation of the Cartesian
problematic:
How often, asleep at night, am I convinced of just such familiar
events - that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire
- when in fact I am lying undressed in bed! Yet at the moment my
eyes are certainly wide awake when I look at this piece of paper; I
shake my head and it is not asleep; as I stretch out and feel my hand
I do so deliberately, and I know what I am doing. All this would not
happen with such distinctness to someone asleep. Indeed! As if I did
not remember other occasions when I have been tricked by exactly
similar thoughts while asleep! As I think about this more carefully,
I see plainly that there are never any sure signs by means of which
being awake can be distinguished from being asleep.... Suppose
then that I am dreaming, and that these particulars- that my eyes
are open, that I am moving my head and stretching out my hands
- are not true. Perhaps, indeed, I do not even have such hands or
such a body at all.
(Descartes 1986 (1641): 13)
I wish to contrast the sceptical problematic which figures in the above passage with the one which figures in the following excerpt from Kant:
The a priori conditions of a possible experience in general are at the
same conditions of the possibility of objects of experience. Now I
maintain that the categories ... _are nothing but the conditions of
thought in a possible experience .... [~.]nd without such_ unit_y ...
no thoroughgoing, universal, and therdo_r_... nec~ssar~; umty of eon.
would be met with in the !ll~llldold of . pen'I"'J>ttotts These,
sc10usness
.
perceptions would not then belong 10 any <:'Xpen!"nn, const'C"Jlll'Utly

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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

would be without an object, merely a blind play of representations,

less even than a dream.
(Kant 1961 (1781/1787):AI12)
The problematic of the first of these passages centres on how to distinguish between dreaming that one is experiencing something and actually
experiencing it. The problematic of the second of these passages centres on
what it takes to be able to dream that one is experiencing something. That is
to say, the second of these two problematics focuses on the conditions of the
possibility of something that the first problematic takes for granted. I take
the (apparent) difference here to be a consequential one.
The most familiar way of formulating the contrast between these two
problematics is as one of knowledge vs. the conditions '![knowledge. Thus, one is
often told something along the following lines: the Cartesian wants to arrive
at knowledge; the Kantian wants to arrive at the ground of the possibility of
knowledge. But what does that mean? There are lots of ways of unpacking
this contrast. I will briefly indicate a few of the different points upon which
the accent can fall in an unpacking of this contrast, though I would suggest
that these apparently distinct formulations can be seen, in the end, to come
to the same thing:

:i

Actuality vs. possibility. Cartesian scept1c1sm takes the possibility of

experience for granted; its question has to do with actuality. Hence the
importance of the word 'real' in Cartesian formulations of the sceptical
problematic: are things really as they seem? Kantian scepticism brings
within the scope of its worry that which the Cartesian sceptic takes for
granted: that experience possesses the requisite unity so much as to be
able to be about something. Hence the importance of the word 'possible'
in Kantian formulations of the sceptical problematic: how is experience
(so much as) possible?
Being so vs. being so.; Cartesian scepticism calls into question the being
of that which is disclosed by experience; Kantian scepticism calls into
question the intelligibility of experience. The Cartesian problematic is
concerned with the question: how can I know that things are as they
seem? Hence the worry in the Cartesian problematic focuses on an
inferential step from appearance to reality. The Kantian problematic
is concerned with the question: how can things so much as seem to be
a certain way? Hence the worry in the Kantian problematic focuses on
the conditions of the possibility of the kind of unity presupposed by the
Cartesian (i.e. that which the Cartesian seeks to infer.from): what sort of
unity must charanerisr: a 'play nfpresentations' for it to be more than 'a
11H'ITly hliud play. for it to posses~ the aspect ofofferingappearances-for
it to posst>ss til!' character of lwi11g qj"an object.
Truth \'S. objccti,e purport. The Cartesia11 wants to kuow which of his
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JAMES CONANT

thoughts are true, which of his experiences are veridical. The Cartesian
sceptic therefore worries about the transition from a sensory experience
to a judgement, from a thought to (what Frege calls) its truth-value.
Hence the Cartesian problematic inquires into the grounds of truth:
given that this is what we are inclined to judge, do we know that we
judge truthfully in so judging? The Kantian sceptic seems to deprive
us of the resources for so much as being able to enjoy an experience
(waking or dreaming), for so much as being able to frame a thought
(true or false). The Kantian problematic inquires into the grounds of
the possibility of being able to enjoy an experience, entertain a thoughtcontent. The Kantian asks: what does it take to have thoughts that are
vulnerable to how things are? The Kantian problematic is concerned, in
the first instance, not with truth but with what it is to stick your neck
out in thinking, with what Kant calls the objective validity of judgement
(the possibility of something's being a candidate for truth or falsehood)
-with what I will henceforth call the objective purport of judgement.
I will briefly indicate here a few of the guises in which Cartesian and
Kantian problematics surface across a number of (supposedly distinct)
'areas' of philosophy:
Philosophy of perception. This is the most classic instance of each of
these varieties of sceptical problematic. The Cartesian sceptic asks: how
can I know things are as my senses present them as being? Is there really
an external world? I am having an experience of a certain sort (say, that
I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting by the fire) but how can I know
that things are as my experience presents them as being? The case
under consideration is a best case of knowledge, 6 and yet there still seems
to be room for the question: how can I know that I am not, in fact, lying
undressed in my bed dreaming that I am here in my dressing-gown,
sitting by the fire? The Cartesian paradox thus takes the following
form: if I don't know this, then how can I be said to know anything? Why
should I ever trust the testimony of my senses? Should I ever endorse the
appearances with which my senses present me? The gap the Cartesian
seeks to bridge is from his own mind to the outer world. The paradox
lies in our apparent inability to answer the following question: how can
I penetrate the veil of sensory ideas and attain a view of what is really
happening outside of my mind? The Kantian sceptic is preoccupied by
different questions: how can my senses so much as presrnl things as being
a certain way? How can my ~xperience so much as be intelligibly of an
external world? The Kant ian problematic is fon1sed on the probkm how
the st:nscs must be so as to able to fun1ish testimouy. 'Vhat sort of unity
IllUSt experience possess in order to be able to prf'sent an appearance
about which the question could arise 'Shall I endorse it'? How am I
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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

so much as able to enjoy an experience that possesses a determinate

world-directed content (say, that I am here in my dressing-gown, sitting
by the fire)? The Kantian paradox lies in its coming to seem a mystery
how what impinges on my senses could so much as appear to be revelatory
of the world. The gap the Kantian seeks to overcome is from sensory
blindness to sensory consciousness - from a form of sensibility upon
which things merely causally impinge to one upon which things impress
themselves as being thus and so.
The problem of other minds. The Cartesian version of this problem goes
like this: The person before me is acting for all the world as if he were
in pain, but how can I know that he is in pain. Is he pretending? Or is
he really in pain? The Cartesian paradox here takes the form: if I don't
know this, how can I ever be said to know what someone else if feeling?
The Cartesian problematic here is focused on the problem of how to
underwrite the testimony of the human body. The gap the Cartesian
seeks to bridge here is from the other's outer bodily movements to
his inner states. This version of the Cartesian sceptic asks: how can I
penetrate the screen of the other's body and attain a view of what is
really happening inside the other himself? This version of the Kantian
sceptic is again preoccupied by a different question: how can the human
body so much as seem to express a mental state? The Kantian paradox
here lies in its coming to seem a mystery how an expanse of fleshy matter
could so much as appear to be revelatory of an inner life. The Kantian
problematic here is focused on the question: how does the human body
even seem to furnish a picture of the human soul? The gap the Kantian
seeks to overcome here is from an inexpressive physical entity to an
animated field of human expression - from a psychologically-neutral
locus of bodily movements to the communicative body of a palpably
suffering, desiring, pondering human being.
Philosophy of language. The Cartesian version of this problem goes
like this: how can I know that my interpretation of something (a text,
an utterance, a sign-post) is correct? How can I be sure that this is what
is really meant? I know how this sort of sign-post (in the shape, say, of a
pointing arrow) is usually to be interpreted, but how do I know that my
interpre-tation in this case is the right interpretation? But if! don't know
this, how can I rver be said to know what something means? The gap
that the Cartesian seeks to bridge here is between his understanding
of the meaning of a sign and what the sign actually means. This version
of the Cartesian sceptic asks: hm.,- can I penetrate the penumbra of
int~rpretation and attain a view of the meaning itsdf! This vnsion of
the Kantian sceptic again is preoccupied by a different question: how
can a sequ~n<.~e of marks or noises so much as seem to mean something?
The Kantian paradox here lies in it!; coming to see-m a mystery hm..- a
mere sequence of dead signs could so much as appear to be alive with
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.JA:'vfES CO:\'ANT

significance. The Kantian problematic here is focused on the question:

how does a linguistic performance acquire the physiognomy of meaning?
What sort of unity must a linguistic performance possess in order to
appear to be the sort of thing about which the question could arise 'Is
this what it means'? The gap the Kantian seeks to overcome here is from
meaningless sequences of marks and noises to determinate expressions
of thought - from a semantically neutral concatenation of scratches or
sounds to a legible field of intelligible meanings.
In any area of philosophy in which one finds one uf these two varieties
of scepticism, one generally also finds the other. This is not to deny that in
some areas of philosophy one of these problematics may come to seem more
gripping or otherwise deserving of interest than the other. I would want to
argue, however, that wherever one of these sorts of scepticism is possible, the
other is also possible. (The fact that these same problematics can and often
do surface in virtually every so-called 'area' of philosophy is itself a ground
for wondering whether philosophy is usefully divided into separate 'areas'
of enquiry as so many nowadays are prone to suppose.) Examples of these
varieties of scepticism arise in ethics, aesthetics, philosophy of law, philosophy of mind, philosophy of science, philosophy of mathematics, etc./ but the
foregoing three pairs of cases should suffice for the purpose of furnishing a
preliminary overview of the twin problematics that I am seeking to isolate
here.
This brings us to the first form of philosophical insight that a perspicuous
overview of various kinds of scepticism affords. It allows one to command a
clearer view of the sorts of relations of symmetry and asymmetry that obtain
among variants within a single variety of scepticism. If one commands a clear
view of the homology of structure exhibited, for example, across the three
variants of Cartesian or Kantian scepticism mentioned above, then one puts
oneself in a position to bring resources derived in the consideration of one of
these variants to bear on the consideration of others. It is quite remarkable,
for example, how many a philosopher today is clear that, whatever else she
v.-ants to do in philosophy, she wants to find a way to resist the Cartesian
assumption in the philosophy of perception that all perception of external
objects requires an inference from h01N things seem to how things are. She
wants to avoid such an assumption because she realises she will then be
saddled with a Cartesian gap (leaving herself sealed inside her own mind,
unable to claw her way back out to an unobstructed glimpse of the external
world). Yet this same philosopher, when she turns, say, to the philosophy of
language yields to the corresponding Cartesian temptation without a pang
-finding utterly innocent the assumption that all understanding presupposes
interpretation- thus saddling herself with a gap of a homologous sort (leaving herself sealed within a horizon of interpretations, unable way to claw her
way back out to an unobstl"ucted grasp of the meaning of an expression).

!02

VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

2 On the labels 'Cartesian', 'Kantian' and 'scepticism'

There is much that any conscientious historian of philosophy will find to
object to in my choosing to attach these labels to each of these varieties
of scepticism: does not (what I am calling) Cartesian scepticism antedate
Descartes?; is not the issue of scepticism a sideshow in Descartes' philosophy
and hence of relatively minor importance (compared with other things- say,
the new science, or the quarrel with the Church) for an understanding of
Descartes' work as a whole?; is not Kant more Cartesian than I suggest he
is?; is not scepticism equally a sideshow in Kant's larger endeavour?; and
what about Hume? Such oqjcctions are directed at the aptness of these
labels, and it would be a mistake to think that the integrity of this project
(of distinguishing the varieties of scepticism I choose to label 'Cartesian' and
'Kantian') is much threatened by such objections. Such objections speak only
to the question whether I wouldn't be better advised to relabel the varieties
of scepticism with which I am here concerned. For the most part, such historical qualms will have to go unaddressed here though I will indicate briefly
how I view two.
First, it is quite true that Descartes himself never poses most of the
sceptical worries that I will be calling variants of 'Cartesian scepticism'
(indeed, it is arguable that he only ever clearly poses one of them- namely,
scepticism about the external world). And, though Kant arguably explores
more of the possible variants of (what I will be calling) 'Kantian scepticism',
he seems to be quite oblivious to some of them. Thus, in claiming that the
philosophical problems I mention below represent variants of Cartesian and
Kantian scepticism respectively, I am not making an historical claim about
which problems are (and arc not) discussed in the writings of Descartes or
Kant. Rather, I am making a philosophical claim about a congmence to be
found in the shape of the problems themselves, regardless of whose writings
they appear in.
Second, the aptness of these labels for the purposes of distinguishing the
two varieties of scepticism at issue here does not turn on any claim to the
eilect that an interest in the other problematic (i.e. the one that does not
bear the author's name) is absent from the writings of either Descartes or
Kant. So it does not imply a denial that Kant was interested in Cartesian
scepticism. In fact, Kant addresses a variant of Cartesian scepticism (he calls
it 'problematical idealism') and seeks in 'The Refutation ofldealism' to show
how the proper treatment of (what he himself calls) 'scepticism' contains as
one of its corollaries the untenability of all such forms of idealism. Nor docs it
turn on a denial that there are incipient forms of a Kantian problematic to be
found in Descartes' writings (though I do not think that such a problematic
ever comes fully into view in Descartes' pages as a full-blown, self-standing variety of scepticism8). I denominate these problematics 'Cartesian'
and 'Kantian' respectively, in order to mark not the point of their earliest

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philosophical inception (the moment at which the seeds of the problematic

first began to blossom philosophically) nor their last philosophical flicker of
life (the moment past which they cease to have philosophical currency), but
rather the historical moment at which within at least one of their variants
their overall philosophical shape first became visible (the moment at which
the problematic first reaches full philosophical flower).
Even if one is willing to waive these historical scruples, there still remain
philosophical reasons why one might resist these labels. Thus, for example,
it will seem to some philosophers perverse of me to use the term 'scepticism'
in connection with what I am calling 'Kantian scepticism' precisely because
of the ways in which it fails to exhibit some of the characteristic features of
Cartesian scepticism. I purported, in originally furnishing ways one might
unpack the difference between Cartesian and Kantian scepticism, to be offering various ways of unpacking the contrast between a problematic centred
on knowledge and one centred on the conditions qfknowledge. This way of putting
the contrast makes it seem as if what were at issue were two forms of epistemological worry. As, however, should already be evident from the foregoing,
this is quite misleading. It is, indeed, constitutive of the Cartesian problematic that it be clothed in epistemological form; its focus is on knowledge
claims, bringing into question the relation between our knowledge claims
and reality. What makes someone such-and-such a sort of Cartesian sceptic
is that he is exercised by a doubt regarding whether we can have knowledge of
such-and-such a sort. Given the internal relation between the concepts of
doubt and knowledge, the Cartesian sceptic is quite aptly characterised as
someone who doubts. What figures in the Cartesian problematic as a worry
about the relation between knowledge claims and reality comes to look,
however, from the vantage point of the Kantian problematic, like only an
instance of a more general worry, a worry about the relation between any
claim (true, false or fantastic) and reality. In making a claim at all, whether
or not one thereby takes oneself to be knowledgeable, one makes oneself answerable to how things are. The Kantian asks: how is one able to accomplish
this feat? The Kantian problematic is therefore only optionally clothed in
epistemological form. It is, at its root, of a more general nature and the worry
that exercises such a sceptic is misunderstood if it is taken to turn exclusively
on matters having to do with knowledge. What comes into view in a Kantian
problematic under the initial heading of 'the conditions of the possibility of
knowledge' are the conditions of the possibility of minded ness as such. Kant
himself, with some frequency, alternates between characterising the sorts
of conditions at issue here as conditions of the possibility of knowledg{'" and
as conditions of the possibility of experience. (And he implies that they might
equally aptly be characterised ns, ;mwng other things, conditions of the
possibility of objectively valid judg{'"ment, and conditions of the possibility
of sensorv consciousness of an object.) The Kantian sceptic is therefore only
inaptly d~aracterised as someone who suffers from a doubt.
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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

This will seem to some philosophers to constitute a sufficient ground for

insisting that what I am calling 'a Kantian sceptic' is not a kind of sceptic
at all. So let me be clear on the following point: my aim here is never to
legislate how the word 'sceptic' should be used, but only to illuminate some
of the diverse ways in which philosophers, in fact, often use it - with the
eventual aim of permitting the formulation of the following question: how
are these various problematics (each of which is often called one of 'scepticism') related? 9 Nevertheless, if one insists upon restricting the application
of the term 'scepticism' to overtly epistemological contexts, one is going
to be unable to track much that is at issue when the term is employed by
Kant, by Wittgenstein, and (as the concluding sections of this chapter will
demonstrate) by many contemporary philosophers. Consider, for example,
the debate about the rule-following considerations and the threat of so-called
meaning scepticism. What is often at issue in that debate is not just how one can
know what something (or someone) means, but how it is so much as possible to
mean anything at all. The term 'scepticism' in that debate often names the
paradox that ensues if we cease to be able to make sense of the phenomenon
in question as something that is so much as possible. What threatens to lapse
here is not just our epistemic access to meaning but the very possibility of meaning. In reply to this, someone might want to insist that, if that is so, then
that is a good reason for not employing the term 'scepticism' in the context
of that debate. Perhaps so. My point, at the moment, is simply that if one
wants to track how the term is often used by many philosophers, one needs
to see that it sometimes ranges over philosophical contexts wider than the
merely epistemological. This oscillation between a narrowly epistemological
and a broader Kantian use of the term can make for many confusions; and it
is natural to think the short way to avoid such confusions is to initiate an act
of linguistic legislation that restricts the permissible use of the term. But it
is too early in our enquiry to adjudicate how the use of the term ought to be
restricted, if at all. In order to see how the term is best used, first we need to
sec more clearly how it is used and why it has come to admit of the variety of
uses it presently does.

3 Some features of the Cartesian and Kantian genres

of scepticism
In order to allow for a more fine-grained discrimination of these varieties
of scepticism, I will now proceed to distinguish nine generic features of
Cartesian and Kant ian scepticism respectively. '0 But before I do this, let
me caution that, as I employ the terms, 'Cartesian scepticism' and 'Kantian
scepticism' denote ideal types of philosophical problematic that are instantiated with varying degrees of faithfulness in any given actual philosophical
discussion. There are three dimensions of idealisation at work here.
The first dimension of idealisation lies in the idea that a fully realised
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JAMES CONANT

variant of, say, Cartesian scepticism will exhibit all nine of the mentioned
features. It is an idealisation because most philosophical discussions that
exhibit any one of the features (drawn from one of the two above lists offeatures) will not necessarily exhibit all of them (though it will probably exhibit
many of them). Thus, it should be understood that, henceforth, when I speak
of 'a Cartesian problematic', for example, I will mean a philosophical discussion that exhibits at least a large number of the Cartesian features specified
below, but not necessarily all of them. 1
The second dimension of idealisation concerns the way in which the
presentation of these feature-spaces may appear to preclude the possibility
of their overlap - to preclude an intermingling of Cartesian and Kantian
features within a single philosophical problematic. That is both a desirable
and a potentially misleading aspect of the presentation that follows. It is
desirable in as much as it is part of my aim to illuminate something about
the internal structure of each of these two (admittedly idealised) varieties
of philosophical problematic. Each has its own logic. The co-occurrence of
such features within a single philosophical discussion is generally (though
not necessarily 12) a symptom of philosophical confusion on the part of an
author; and it is part of my purpose to facilitate the diagnosis and treatment
of such forms of confusion. Nevertheless, it is potentially misleading because
- even if, in a resolutely executed philosophical enquiry, Cartesian and
Kantian features will tend to drive one another out -in the irresoluteness of
actual philosophical practice, such features can often be found squashed up
against one another. Borrowing some terms from Cavell's theory of genre 1\
one might say that Kantian scepticism represents an adjacent genre of scepticism- one in which each of the features of Cartesian scepticism is displaced 14
in a certain way. And, just as different genres of film (say, a western and a
romantic comedy) can be crossed with another- often (though not always)
with aesthetically jarring results - so, too, these genres of scepticism can
be crossed with another. In philosophy, when this happens, usually (though
not always) it is a sign that the author is no longer clear which of these two
philosophical problematics he wishes to inhabit.
The third dimension of idealisation concerns the presentation of each of
the features as apparently distinct from at least most of the other eight. One
reason for thus presenting them has already been indicated: If one reviews
actual philosophical discussions some of these features will feature explicitly
while others will not. So, by provisionally treating the features in question
as apparently distinct, we equip ourselves with a classificatory scheme that
can be applied more widely. Yet this raises a number of questions about how
we are to understand the philosophical discussions we are thus classifying:
are these features all really (as opposed to merely notationally) distinct?
And even where distinct, how independent are thf"y? Is it perhaps the case
that' any philosophical discussion that explicitly bears some of them must

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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

be implicitly entangled in a problematic that bears all of them? The initial

presentation of these features as apparently distinct should not be taken to
foreclose the possibility that the latter question is properly answered in the
affirmative.

Cartesian genre
With these cautionary remarks to be borne in mind, I will henceforth refer
to the following nine generic features of the Cartesian genre of scepticism
as Cartesian.features:

2
3

4
5
6
7
8
9

The Cartesian investigation begins with and turns on the exploration of

a certain sort of example- a best case ofknowledge.
Such a case is shown to be vulnerable to doubt.
The conclusion generalises - we can move from a conclusion about this
particular candidate item of knowledge to a general conclusion about all
such items.
The investigation thereby issues in a discovery.
The investigation ends in a mood of disappointment.
The disappointment is born of the impossibility of showing how what we
had taken to be possible could be actual.
It looks as if there is something we cannot do.
Our inability is the consequence of the existence of a Cartesian gap- a gap
we seem to be unable to bridge.
The sceptical discovery cannot be converted into practice: it is practically
unstable - yet we are obliged to live as if we could bridge the gap in
question.

First feature
To say that an exploration of the Cartesian problematic begins always with
'a best case of knowledge' is to say that it begins always with a carefully
selected example- one that possesses (or at least appears able simultaneously
to possess) at least the following four characteristics. First, the example
must involve a concrete claim to know: a particular person, at a particular time
and place must enter the claim. Second, the claim in question must be able
to serve as an exemplar of an entire class of claims: it must be sufficiently
representative so th;1t each of us can rehearse a version of such a claim in the
privacy of our own epistemological closet. Third, the claim must be directed
at an unremarkable object - the sort of o~ject which requires no special sort of
expertise in order to be able to tell one when you see one. Thus (what one
might be tempted to call) 'a kind of object' figur~s in Cartesian rxamples
- a hand, a tomato, an envelope, a chair (but ne\"er a nine i1on, an l'vi-16
rifte, ajapanese beetle, a goldfitiCh or a bubble chamber). One must begin

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JAMEi-1

CO~A:"'T

with the .-ight sort of example, in order to get the Cartesian problematic up
and running. 11 Fourth, the object must be encountered under optimal conditions: in good lighting, at short range, for an extended period of time, etc.
An important part of exploring the Cartesian problematic lies in exploring
the character and the legitimacy of the examples employed to introduce a
Cartesian sceptical recital and ascertaining whether they really do simultaneously possess all four of the required characteristics. A preoccupation with
~uch examples is a hallmark of the Cartesian problematic.

Secondfeature
The Cartesian paradox results from the susceptibility of the existence of
such an object to doubt. The Cartesian investigation initiates an enquiry into
the question what (in our experience of the relevant phenomenon) does and
does not admit of the possibility of doubt. It thereby seeks to decompose our
experience into two sorts of elements: those which are inherently indubitable
and those which involve some (even if perhaps minimal) element of risk. The
viability of the ensuing doubt lies in the disclosure of a reliance (on the part
of the candidate claim to knowledge) upon those strata of our experience involving this identifiable element of risk. Under the pressure of the Cartesian
investigator's demand for certainty; we are led to the discovery that very little
in our experience is invulnerable to such forms of doubt.
Thirdfeature

The possibility of such a discovery depends on the capacity of the initially

selected example to generalise. If we don't know this, then we don't know anything. That is, in the disclosure that this particular claim to knowledge is
vulnerable to doubt, we do not merely take ourselves to learn that we are
not able to know a particular thing that we mig-ht have thought we did know.
('Oh, OK, 1 guess I don't know that is a goldfinch after all.') Rather, we take
ourselves to learn something about knowledge as such- or at least about a
whole class of knowledge claims. ('If I don't know that there is a tomato in
front of me right now, then how can I be said to know anything- or at least
anything based on the testimony of my senses.') The vulnerability of our initially selected example to doubt seems, at one and the same time, to disclose
the vulnerability of vast portions of our supposed edifice of knowledge. Thus,
Descartes does not conclude: 'Well, then I don't know that I am sitting here
in my dressing gown by the fireplace:, after all.' Rather, Descartes finds himself drawn to take an apparently irr~sistible yet extraordinarily precipitous
step to a far more general conclusion of the following sort: 'Well, then I can
never know that things are as my senses tell me they ai"e.'

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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

Fourth .ftature
The possibility of such a doubt seems to yield a discovery. The sceptical
discovery takes the form of seeing through the surface of our practices to how
they really are. For the results of the Cartesian investigation seem to stand
in sharp conflict with our ordinary ways of talking and living. Our practices
of entering knowledge claims seem to be fundamentally at odds with what it
is that the investigation shows we are really entitled to claim. So, even if the
Cartesian inquirer finds himself unable to do other than to continue to speak
with the vulgar and to participate in ordinary ways of speaking and acting,
nonetheless, in the light of his discovery, these practices must now seem to
him to be unmasked as resting upon a tissue of illusion. To the extent that
the Cartesian acquiesces in the conclusion his investigation seems to force
upon him, he thereby takes himself to be able to see more clearly and deeply
into the true nature of these practices than the majority of his fellows who
unreflectively participate in them.

Fiflhfiature
The initial thrill of discovery gives way to a mood of disappointment with
knowledge. There no longer seems to any way for the sort of knowledge in
question to live up to its name. And this gives rise to a mood of disillusionment. One takes oneself to have an understanding of what would have had
to have been the case for this sort of knowledge to have been possible. But
it transpires that, at least for beings such as ourselves, that possibility is not
attainable. One is thus left with the feeling that there is something that
ought to have been possible but which, as it happens, turns out, at least for
us, not to be possible. (The mood of Cartesian scepticism is that of the heroes
of Shakespeare's tragedies: one of disappointment at being fated to live in a
world that will necessarily betray one's trust in it. 1") Such a prevailing mood
of disappointment or disillusionment as the apparently inescapable response
to philosophical enquiry is symptomatic of entanglement in a variant of the
Cartesian problematic.

Sixth feature
The disappointment lies in our not being actually able to do something that
we had always taken to be possible (we are unable to know that things are as
they appear). The world we had pre-reflectively taken ourselves to inhabit
-a world in which we were capable of attaining knowledge of a certain sort
- threatens to turn out not to be the world we actually inhabit. We can
formulate thoughts about what such a world would be like and can perhaps
still enjoy experiences that purport to be of such a world, but we now are
no longer able in our reflective moments to endorse the contents of such
thoughts and experiences.
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.JAMES CONANT

Seventhftature
The structure of the situation we inhabit therefore now seems to come
into view as one in which we cannot do something we want to be (and prereflectively thought of ourselves as fully) able to do. The sceptical discovery
seems to disclose a limit to our cognitive abilities- a limit that kicks in at a
far earlier point in the cognitive process than we, prior to our philosophical
investigation, had any reason to expect, a limit that we cannot penetrate or
circumvent, try as we might.

Eighth ftature
This inability is taken to be a function of our inability to bridge a certain sort
of gap. In the case of philosophy of perception, the gap looms between my
inner life and the outer world; in the case of other minds, it opens up between
his outer behaviour and his inner life, etc. The Cartesian takes himself to
have made a genuine discovery in having disclosed the existence of such a
gap. Cartesian strategies for finding a way around the Cartesian paradox
involve attempts to find a way to live with this gap. The Cartesian who wants
to avoid a sceptical conclusion wants to be able to negotiate his way across
the gap. (Descartes himself famously looked to God for some assistance in
this matter.) But the gap itself is one he still takes to be just there. As long
as one operates within the confines of the Cartesian problematic, the only
possible form of 'solution' to the problem of scepticism lies in attempting to
construct some such sort of bridge across the gap. I will call the sort of gap at
issue here 'a Cartesian gap'.

Ninth .feature
The Cartesian inquirer will wish to distinguish theoretical doubt from practical
doubt. His doubt, he will tell us, is a merely theoretical one. Though, as such,
it represents, he will insist, a perfectly intelligible outcome to an intellectual
enquiry; nevertheless, he will also insist, conviction in such a conclusion cannot be sustained by someone caught up in the midst of a practical situation.
Cartesian sceptical doubt thus possesses an inherent instability due to the
impossibility of its realisation in practice. 17 Indeed, we are often reassured by
philosophers who wish to introduce us to this problematic that the Cartesian
enquiry is one that can and should be suspended for practical purposes. 18
Such reassurances presuppose the standing possibility of practically abstaining from one's sceptical surmise andre-embracing the modes of experience,
thought and expression thereby brought into question. Such an insistence
upon the purely theoretical character of the generality of the form of doubt
that is at issue in philosophical enquiry is a hallmark of the Cartesian problematic.19

HO

VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

Kantian genre
Kantian scepticism does not quite share any of the above nine generic features. The Kantian genre of scepticism exhibits instead the following nine
Kantian features - each of which involves a peculiar displacement or reversal
or inversion of the corresponding Cartesian feature:

2
3

4
5
6

8
9

It is constitutive of the sort of investigation into knowledge that it is that

it is characterised by a peculiar sort of indifference to the character qfthe object
it takes up as an example.
It does not issue in a doubt, but a boggle.
The paradox is not the result of moving from a conclusion about a
particular object to a general conclusion about all objects of experience,
but rather a result of the inability to see how there could so much as be
an experience that purports to be cifa particular.
The investigation climaxes not in a sense of discovery, but one of mystery.
This investigation ends in a mood not of disappointment, but of despair.
The despair is born not of the impossibility of showing how what we take
to be possible could be actual, but of showing how what we take to be
actual could be possible.
It no longer looks as if there is something we cannot do, now it looks as if
there is nothing to do (not even dream) where we had previously thought
there was something.
The apparent disintegration of this something into a nothing is the
consequence of a Kantian gap.
The Kantian sceptical surmise is not merely practically unstable, but
theoretically unstable qua surmise.

First ftature
To say that it is constitutive of the Kant ian problematic that it is characterised by the absence qf a special category qf example is to say no more or less than
what Kant means to say when he says that transcendental logic, though it
does not abstract entirely from objects, is concerned only with the conditions
of the possibility of the pure thought of an object: with what it is for thought
to be able so much as to be able to have a bearing on the world, what it is for
our thought to be related to objects uberhaupt. Transcendental logic must abstract from all differences between objects- from what it is to be cognitively
related to this rather than that sort of object- but not from relatedness to
an object as such. The two sides of the Kantian problematic, in its classical
formulation, turn on how sensibility can yield deliverances that are of objects
and how thought can be directed at a (mind-independent) world. The problematic that unfolds here homogenises the field of possible examples. The
questions 'What it is to dream that I am in front of a fireplace?' and 'What is

Hl

JAMES CONANT

it to see a fireplace in front of me?' become simultaneously problematised and

equally urgent. The questions 'What is it to know that I am now in Auburn,
Alabama?' and 'What is it to think of a celestial city?' become equally urgent.
The differences between such kinds of example (which play such a crucial
role in the context of the Cartesian problematic) cease to be relevant. 20 It is
no less a problem for the Kantian to understand how we are so much as able
to think thoughts that are false than it is to understand how it is that we are
able to think thoughts that are true. The examples occurring in explorations
of the Kantian problematic therefore often exhibit a curiously schematic
character: they lack the concreteness of their Cartesian counterparts - not
only in the sense that they come in for less determinate characterisation, but
also in the comparative lack of specification of the epistemic standing of the
claim under investigation or of the cognitive attitude adopted towards it.

Second feature
Under the pressure of the Kantian question, all our cognitive capacities (the
capacity to doubt among them) come to seem equally questionable. Having
worked his way far into a particular philosophical dialectic, the Kantian sceptic comes to an impasse: it suddenly no longer seems to him possible that one
should be able so much as to frame thoughts that are about the world (or to
experience another's bodily movements as expressions of emotion, or to traffic in forms of words that are replete with meaning, etc.). This sort of sceptic
becomes perplexed as to what it is to be experiencing or thinking or meaning
things in ways that he also cannot help but take himself to be doing in and
through the very act of asking his sceptical question. To move in the direction
in which his question leads is apparently to deprive his question (along with
the whole of the rest of his 'thought') of the capacity to possess determinate
content. And yet he is unable to dismiss his question. It has come to seem
intellectually compulsory. So his mind boggles. Such a boggling of the mind, in
the face of a looming conclusion that can neither be approached nor avoided
- neither fully comprehended nor simply dismissed on the grounds of its
incomprehensibility- is a mark of entanglement in a variant of the Kantian
problematic.

Third feature
What is at issue in the Kantian problematic is the possibility of making
claims in general, not knowledge claims in particular. This means that the
point of departure for a Kantian inn,stigation is not a particular case of
knowledge, but rather the topic of the vulnerability of our thought to reality.
This in a certain sense, reverses the direction of the Cartesian investigation:
The 'Kantian paradox is not the result of moving from a conclusion about
the character of our experience of a particular case to a general conclusion
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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

about all objects of experience, but rather a result of inability to see how
there could so much as be an experience which purports to be qf a particular.
To respond to the Kantian sceptic is to show how our thinking can have a
sort of dependence on the world that allows our activity of making claims
to come intelligibly into view as one of claim-making at all. In the absence
of an adequate response here, the world threatens to recede from our grasp
- to the point where not only do we have reason to fear, with the Cartesian
sceptic, that we are unable to know which of our claims about it are true, but
rather- to the point where we cannot any longer even make sense of the idea
that we are able to enter claims about anything of a sufficiently determinate
character to be either true or false. This sense of the fading away of the
possibility of determinate empirical content in our thought, experience and
discourse is a mark of entanglement in the Kantian problematic.

Fourth fiature
We can only discover that which we can think. The Cartesian investigation
can issue in a discovery, because the Cartesian takes himself to be able to
form a stable conception of that which he discovers we do not have. The
Kant ian paradox takes the form not of a discovery, but of a mystery. In each of
the three variants of Kant ian scepticism briefly sketched above, the Kant ian
paradox is one in which the possibility of a sort of appearance usually taken
for granted in the corresponding variant of Cartesian scepticism suddenly
comes to seem mysterious: how what impinges on my senses could so much
as appear to be revelatory of the world; how the inert fleshy matter comprising someone's body could so much as appear to be revelatory of his inner
life; and how a mere sequence of dead signs could so much as appear to be
alive with significance. Our ordinary cognitive capacities appear intolerably
mysterious now and therefore seem to call for a philosophical project that
\\-i.ll relieve our discomfort by providing an account of these capacities that
drains them of their mystery. 21

Fifth feature
If such a Kantian imestigation (into the very possibility of our being able to
frame thoughts, enjoy experiences, express meanings, etc.) ends in sceptical
paradox, the resulting mood is not one of disappointment - for disappointment (like discovery) is possible only \vhere some glimmering of what it is
that one wants (but cannot have) is also available to one. Kant says (concerning what he calls) scepticism, that it is a 'way of thinking, in which reason
moves against itself with such violence, that it could never ha,-e ari.;en except
in volliger Ver.;:weifiung of achieving satisfaction with re10pect to reason's most
important aspirations' (Kant 1977 (1783): 19). The violence with which here,
in what K11nt calls scepticism, reasen turns against itself is a violence ef the
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JAMES CONANT

most extreme possible sort. What reason questions is itself. Our faculty for
rational thought arrives at the point where it asks itself (not just how this or
that cognitive capacity is possible, but) how it itself is possible, questioning
the possibility of the exercise of the very capacity exercised in the framing
of such a question. This question is one that reason would be driven to pose
only if it found itself in a state of volliger Verzweiflung- complete desperation
or despair- we might say: despair born of desperation. (The mood ofKantian
scepticism is that of the heroes of Kafka's parables: one of bewilderment at
the dissolution of the world's conditions of intelligibility.22 )

Sixth feature
When reason thus questions its own possibility, the natural history of reason
enters a new and radical stage - a sceptical paradox of a different order
from the Cartesian is broached. The problem is no longer to understand how
something we took to be possible can be actual. The problem is now one that
threatens the entire array of cognitive capacities which the Cartesian sceptic
takes to be unproblematically available: the capacities to doubt and dream,
to feel and think and believe, to enjoy sensory impressions of fireplaces and
frame hypotheses about evil demons. The problem now is to understand how
something that we take to be actual - for example, the exercise of those
cognitive capacities evidently actualised in our philosophical reflections
(reflections that themselves seek to address the question of the possibility of
such capacities)- can be possibleY

Seventh Jeature
This collapse of the space of possibilities leaves it looking not - as in the
Cartesian case - as if there is something we cannot do. Now it looks as if
there is nothing to do (not even to dream) where we had previously thought
there must be something. The Kantian sceptical discovery, rather than
disclosing a boundary which our cognitive abilities run up against, seems to
deprive us of any territory through which such a boundary might be able to
run. This sense that, in our philosophical enquiry, we have found a way to
make the Cartesian limit disintegrate (though at the possible cost of ceasing
to be able to make sense of our lives) is symptomatic of entanglement in the
Kantian problematic.

Eighth Jeature
The Cartesian takes himself to run up against a gap in his philosophising
{a gap between mind and world, between the body of th_c oth~r and hi~ soul,
between interpretation and meaning, etc.). He takes h_nnsdf to have made
a genuine discovery in having disdo~ed the existeue<~ ol such a gap. The gap
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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

itself is just there. The Kantian also seems to encounter a certain sort of gap
in his philosophising (between sensory blindness and sensory consciousness,
between an inexpressive expanse of mere flesh and the animated field of
an expressive human body, between meaningless sequences of marks and
noises and determinately meaningful expressions of thought, etc.). But it is
not clear what it would be to acquiesce in the existence of his gap. It must
already be bridged (as evidenced by his present ability to exercise his capacities for perception, expression, and thought); and yet, as long as the threat
of Kantian paradox has yet to be averted, it also appears that there is no way
to bridge the gap. Thus, the Kantian problematic tends to be most lucidly
adumbrated in the writings of kinds ofKantian who aim to show that where
we seem to be confronted with a Kantian gap, we are confronted with only
the illusion of a gap.

Ninth feature
If, as was said above, the philosophical outcome that now looms is one that
threatens the array of cognitive capacities which the Cartesian sceptic takes
to be unproblematically available (the capacities to doubt and dream, to feel
and think and believe, to enjoy sensory impressions of fireplaces and frame
hypotheses about evil demons), then the full import ofKantian sceptical paradox must remain intellectually unschematisable. There can be no such thing
as getting 'it' fully into focus, for getting things into focus seems precisely
to be just a further instance of the sort of thing which we now seem bound
to conclude we are unable to do. The Kantian worry is not merely (like the
Cartesian one) a form of philosophical perplexity that ceases to be sustainable when the attempt is made to translate it into practice. It cannot even be
sustained at the level of theory. The practical possibility of abstaining from
the modes of experience and thought and expression that are here brought
into question is not an option that can present itself even momentarily as a
live one. This form of sceptical paradox is therefore not unstable merely in
the way the Cartesian one is (i.e. because we cannot sustain our conviction
in it, as we leave the closet of our philosophy and immerse ourselves in the
practical exigencies of life), the Kantian paradoxical surmise already occupies a state of radical instability qua surmise. 21 The Kantian sceptic finds
himself drawn to a question he is both unable to hold stably in his mind and
yet unable to dismiss.25

4 The inflection of philosophical vocabulary in

Cartesian and Kantian registers
The perspicuous on:rvie"-I have offered of various kinds of scepticism allows
one to distinguish some of the very different sorts of things philosophers may
take themselves t0 mean when they employ Yocabulary such as 'sc~pticism',
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JAMES CONANT
'scepti~al paradox', etc. Moreover, which register- Cartesian or Kantian- a
philosopher is operating in will also determine the manner in which a great
deal of the rest of his philosophical vocabulary is inflected. Equipped with the
preceding overview of Cartesian and Kantian features, it becomes possible,
for example, to survey the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy
and to notice that philosophers (in their discussions of what they call 'scepticism') often tend to be preoccupied with one of these two registers to the exclusion of the other. Most of the mainstream of analytic philosophy has been
obsessed with the Cartesian problematic. Moore, Russell, Broad, Ayer, Price
and Chisholm are among the most distinguished members of this Cartesian
branch of the analytic tradition. But there is also a branch of the analytic
tradition that, though it has fewer members, is equally as distinguished,
and occupies itself almost entirely with the Kantian problematic. It includes
among its members C.l. Lewis, Wilfrid Sellars and Peter Strawson. If one
then examines how a great deal of philosophical vocabulary ('experience',
'epistemic', 'object', 'the given', etc.) is employed, one notices that it acquires
a very different inflection in the writings of one of these sets of authors than
it acquires in the writings of the other. 26
Not only individual bits of vocabulary but whole phrases, clauses, sentences and questions acquire a different philosophical valence depending
upon whether they occur in the context of the investigation of a Cartesian or
a Kantian problematic. Thus, for example, consider the following question:
'Can our cognitive powers reach all the way to the objects themselves?' This
can express a Cartesian anxiety about the existence of a gap between our
representations of outer objects and those outer objects themselves (the
anxiety here is that our cognitive powers always operate at an awkward
remove from the objects they represent), or it can express a Kantian anxiety about our capacity to direct our thought at objects (the anxiety here is
that our so-called cognitive powers are unable to furnish us with anything
which even amounts to a 'representation'.) Since the same form of words
can, on a particular occasion, express either a Cartesian or a Kantian anxiety, it becomes possible, as we shall soon see, for two philosophers to take
themselves to be in agreement with one another when they are not, or to
take themselves to be in disagreement with one another when they are not.
It thus becomes important, when seeking to identify the sort of philosophical
problematic in which a philosopher is entangled, to look beyond the most
superficial features of a his work, such as the forms of words that he is drawn
to employ when framing his problem. One must look instead to the character of the features that characterise his problematic. One philosopher may
adopt another philosopher's mode of speaking wholesale and yet miss his
.
.
problematic entirelyY
The remaining sections of this chapter will develop tlus pomt- that one
may be tempted by such superficial similarities _of \"Ocabulary to ~hor~10rJI
a sceptical paradox bearing Kantian featurc5 Jllto a proble~natlc ol the

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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

Cartesian form and vice versa - to clarify how some of Wittgenstein's most
distinguished commentators have misunderstood one another. Wittgenstein
and Kant are the outstanding figures in the history of philosophy whose
writings have been concerned to explore the nature and structure of the
Cartesian and K.antian problematics alike and, above all, to explore the relation between them. 28 By failing to identify clearly these varieties of sceptical
problematic while also failing to see that in both Kant's and Wittgenstein's
writings the term 'scepticism' is inflected broadly enough to range over both
these varieties (thereby failing to appreciate Kant's and Wittgenstein's
respective interests in their connection), otherwise insightful commentators have believed that they agree with one another (and with Kant or
Wittgenstein) when they do not and have believed that they disagree with
one another when they do not. I will illustrate this point here only in connection with Wittgenstein's work. As a first example of such a misunderstanding,
let us consider a misencounter between Hilary Putnam and John McDowell.

5 A case of apparent agreement: Putnam and

McDowell
In his 1994 Dewry Lectures, 29 Hilary Putnam attempts to identify a widespread
assumption that he claims runs throughout early modern philosophy - he
dubs the assumption in question 'the interface conception' - and he argues
that, three centuries later, it continues to be responsible for many of the
difficulties that plague contemporary philosophy. Putnam characterises the
consequences of the continuing hold of this assumption on the philosophical
imagination of our time as nothing short of a 'disaster':
[T]he key assumption responsible for the disaster is the idea that
there has to be an interface between our cognitive powers and the
external world- or, to put the same point differently, the idea that
our cognitive powers cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves.
(Putnam 1999: 10)
Putnam here glosses (what he calls) 'the key assumption' as follows: 'the idea
that our cognitive powers cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves'.
We will turn in a moment to the question of what assumption it is that these
words express. Let us simply note for now that Putnam wishes to claim that
if only we could overcome the assumption expressed by these words we would
tlu~n be in a position to embrace with a sound philosophical conscience what
hr- (following Williamjames) calls 'the natural realism of the common man'.
This locution- 'naturaliTalism'- as Putnam deploys it, is not meant to be
a labd for an alternative philosophical position; rath~r it is mcaut to denote
somct hing both mort> familiar and more dusiq:: om ow11 pte-philosuphical

JAMES CONANT

understanding of the character of our cognitive relation to the world, prior

to its corruption by certain forms of philosophising that have now come to
seem to be forms of post-scientific common sense. Thus, Putnam is able to
describe what he seeks to recommend in the Dewey Lectures as the cultivation
of a kind of second naivete about the objects of perception. But our philosophical consciences are troubled. Putnam knows this, and thus knows that,
in issuing his call for a return to a lost state of epistemological innocence, he
is bound to appear to many of his colleagues to be merely the most recent
incarnation of the proverbial philosophical ostrich burying his head in the
sands of our everyday ways of talking and thinking. What makes it inevitable
that things will so appear to many of his colleagues, according to Putnam,
is the interface conception: it is what makes it look as if the recommended
species of naivete cannot be anything other than mere naivete. Putnam credits John McDowell, in his book Mind and World, with having identified (what
Putnam calls in the passage above) the 'key assumption'. 30 But Putnam is
here misreading McDowdJ;3 1 and in order to pinpoint how such a misreading of McDowell comes about, it helps to be able to see how a phrase such
as 'our cognitive powers cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves'
can hover- and does hover on Putnam's pages- between two different sorts
of philosophical problematic: a Cartesian and a Kantian one. While often
faithfully paraphrasing or quoting McDowell's exact words, Putnam changes
the significance of McDO\Irell's words by transplanting McDowell's locutions
into the context of Putnam's own attack on the interface conception. As the
context in which the relevant stretches of McDowell's prose figure shifts
from the exploration of a Kantian to that of a Cartesian problematic, so does
their sense.
A central aim of McDowell's book is to make room for the following truism
(one that philosophy can easily seem to place out of reach) which Wittgenstein
expresses, in McDowell's favourite quotation from Wittgcnstein, as follows:
'When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case we- and our meaning
-do not stop anywhcre short of the fact' (PI 95)_:12 This sounds very much like
things Putnam himself wants to say, for example, in wishing to affirm that
'our cognitive powers can reach all to the objects themselves'. In affirming
this, Putnam represents himself, in the Dewey Lectures, as spelling out some
of the basic ideas behind McDowell's strategy for making room for truisms
of the above Wittgensteinian sort. And, of course, the negation of the claim
which figures in the last phrase in the above quotation from Putnam- 'that
our cognitive powers cannot reach all the way to the objects themselves' -can
be taken as merely paraphrasing the same truism that figures in McDowell's
favourite quotation from \Vittgens-tein. It is clear that Putnam, in aligning
himself with McDowell, wishes us to take it that way. But it is equally clear
that he also wishes us to takt~ the negation of the claim expressed by that
phrase as the expression of the repudiation of the disastrous assumption
forced on us by the interface conception. It is in wishing to be able to mean
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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISyl

words such as these in both of these ways at once that Putnam gets entangled both in his understanding of the structure and aim of the argument of
McDowell's Mind and World and in his proposals for a way out of the problems
that currently plague contemporary philosophy.
One sign that some slippage has taken place is that the Wittgenstein
passage -and McDowell's book generally- is concerned with the possibility
of meaning (with the possibility of our being able to mean something- rather
than nothing- by our words), whereas much of the Dewe; Lectures are focally
concerned with the possibility of knowledge (with how it is that we can know
things are as they seem). In his opening remarks, Putnam expresses the
thought he seeks to vindicate in his lectures as follows: 'there is a way to do
justice to our sense that knowledge claims are responsible to reality without
recoiling into metaphysical fantasy' (Putnam 1999: 4). But from McDowell's
point of view, the focus here on knowledge claims (as the paradigm for understanding the kind of responsibility to reality which philosophy brings
into question) must count as at best misleading, and at worst misguided.
For it invites a misidentification of the strand of philosophy that McDowell
is focally concerned to treat: it invites the substitution of a Cartesian for a
Kantian problematic. McDowell would, of course, not want to deny that we
should view knowledge claims as responsible to reality. But he would want to
insist that, for the purposes of his investigation, they constitute only a special
case of a more general (Kantian) problematic concerning the possibility of
the vulnerability of any claim to how things are. The sort of vulnerability to
reality under investigation in his book is exhibited in false claims equally
fully as in true ones, in our capacity for thinking (indeed, dreaming) as it
does in our capacity for knowing. McDO\vell's investigation does not single
out those of our claims that are knowledgeable. This is because it is concerned with what must be the case for any sort of human intellectual activity
to be intelligible as one of claim-making at all. It is the possibility of making
claims in general, not knowledge claims in particular, that comes to seem at
risk when our entitlement to the truism in Wittgenstein's remark seems to
come under threat.
As he proceeds in his lectures, as we shall see in a moment, Putnam
himself describes the issue with which he is concerned in terms that make
no particular reference to knowledge, for instance as the 'how does language
hook on to the world' issue. So it may seem an uncharitable quibble to raise
worries about h.is opening formulation of the issue in terms of knowledge.
But what I said above about the phrase 'our cognitive powers cannot reach
all the way to the objects themselves' applies equally to the question 'how
does language hook on the world?' In the pages of Putnam's Dewey Lectures,
these forms of words hover unstably between the expression of a Cartesian
and a Kantian worry- and that instability can be resolved only at the cost of
depriving Putnam's preferred diagnosis of the source of contemporary philosophy's ills of its intended generality. Putnam insists in his Dewey Lectures
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JAMES CONANT

on privileging a Cartesian problematic as holding the key to a diagnosis of

philosophy's most fundamental problems. 33 But Putnam's 'key assumption'
cannot unlock the problems that McDowell seeks to address.
Large stretches of the Dewey Lectures make sense only if the worry expressed in questions such as 'Can our cognitive powers reach all the way to
the objects themselves?' and 'How does language hook on the world?' is taken
to be of a Cartesian variety. Consider the following sequence of passages
from Putnam's Dewey Lectures:
Let us now ask just why realism about 'the external world' came
to seem problematical. Early modern philosophers assumed that
the immediate objects of perception were mental, and that mental
objects were nonphysical ... What is more, even their materialist
opponents often put forward accounts of perception that closely paralleled these 'Cartesian' accounts. Even in contemporary cognitive
science, for example, it is the fashion to hypothesise the existence
of 'representations' in the cerebral computer. If one assumes that
the mind is an organ, and one goes on to identify the mind with the
brain, it will then become irresistible to (I) think of some of the
'representations' as analogous to the classical theorist's 'impressions' ... (2) think that those 'representations' are linked to objects
in the organism's environment only causally, and not cognitively)
... I agree with James, as well as with McDowell, that the false
belief that perception must be so analysed is at the root of all the
problems with the view of perception that, in one form or another,
has dominated Western philosophy since the seventeenth century
... The tendency in the last thirty years to repress what continues to
puzzle us in the philosophy of perception obstructs the possibility of
progress with respect to the broader epistemological and metaphysical issues that do preoccupy us ... [H]ow could the question 'how
does language hook on the world?' even appear to pose a difficulty,
unless the retort: 'How can there be a problem about talking about,
say, houses and trees when we see them all the time' had not already
been rejected in advance as question-begging or 'hopelessly na'ive'.
The 'how does language hook on to the world' issue is, at bottom, a
replay of the old 'how does perception hook on to the world' issue.
And is it any wonder if, after thirty years of virtually ignoring ... the
task of challenging the view of perception that has been received
since the seventeenth century ... , the very idea that thought and
language do connect with reality has come to seem more and more
problematical? Is it any wonder that one can't see how thought and
language hook on to the world if one 111:ver )llentions perception?
(Putnam 1999: 9-13}

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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

If this sequence is taken as offering a diagnosis of most of what ails contemporary philosophy, and if the question at issue is taken to express both
the worry made urgent by the interface conception and yet somehow at the
same time the one that animates the sorts of philosophical worry McDowell
seeks to address in Mind and World, then Putnam may not claim McDowell as
an ally. What McDowell will take to be unsatisfactory in Putnam's diagnosis
can be put as follows: Putnam, in effect, suggests that the various forms of
Kantian scepticism that have come to seem so urgent in recent philosophy
can be exorcised simply through the treatment of Cartesian scepticism.
McDowell would want to press the following question: Is Putnam right in
claiming that the 'how does language hook on to the world?' issue is, at bottom, simply a replay of the old 'how does perception hook on to the world?'
issue? The correct answer to this question is: it depends on which 'how does
language hook on to the world' issue is at issue. (As I have indicated above,
there is a Cartesian and a Kantian version of the issue.) McDowell would
contend that Putnam's claim is not right about the version of the problem
that is, for the most part, the one that figures at the centre of concern in
the writings of, for example, Lewis or Sellars or Kripkenstein. The Kantian
difficulty (concerning thought's or language's capacity to be vulnerable to
reality), with which each of the aforementioned authors struggles, does not,
for the most part, have its source in a Cartesian difficulty (concerning the
indirect character of all perceptual contact with the 'external' world). None
of these authors is evidently concerned to urge a version of (what the Dewey
Lectures calls) the 'received' view of perception; and Putnam's efforts to highlight the dubious assumptions underlying the 'received' view do not evidently
bear on their problems.
Although it is true that McDowell, like Putnam, is concerned to vindicate
(what Putnam, following James, calls) 'the natural realism of the common
man', it is not an exaggeration to say that McDowell's diagnosis of the
sources of the perplexities with which contemporary philosophy struggles is
roughly the reverse of Putnam's most recent one: where Putnam argues that
it is only if we think through what is confused in the Cartesian sceptic's question 'Do we really see houses and chairs?' that will we free ourselves from the
confusions visited upon us by the analytical-Kantian sceptical question 'how
does language hook on to the world?', McDowell thinks that it is only once
we think through \'1-hat is hopeless about the sort of Kantian bind in which
someone like C. I. Lewis threatens to place himselfl- one in which it is no
longer possibk to see how thought can so much as be answerable to reality
-that we will be able fully to free ourselves from Cartesian worries about the
character of our perceptual relatedness to hou:ses and chairs. For Putnam,
in the Dtwey Lectures, the Cartesian paradox is the fundamental source of
(what Putnam calls) 'the broader epistemological and metaphysical is 8 ues'
that continue to 'preoccupy us' in contemporary philosophy (Putnam 1999:
II). For McDawell, in Mind flnd World, the Cartesian worry is an intelligible,
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JAMES CONANT

though inept, response to an inchoate form of philosophical anxiety that

achieves comparatively fuller expression in the sort ofKantian paradox that,
in his view, haunts the projects of authors such as Lewis, Sellars, Davidson
and Brandom.
This misencounter between Putnam and McDowell is not atypical. A
perspicuous overview of varieties of scepticism enables us to identify such occasions - occasions on which philosophers systematically misunderstand one
another's writings: sometimes paying one another undeserved compliments,
and at other times going to battle against one another when their views in
no way disagree. In Putnam's misappropriation of McDowell's diagnosis of
the sceptical paradox that haunts contemporary philosophy, we have a case
of merely apparent agreement between two of the finest philosophers of our
time. Now let us consider a complementary case- one of merely apparent
disagreement.

6 An apparent disagreement: Cavell and Kripke

Stanley Cavell's The Claim of Reason presents a brilliant account of certain
aspects of Wittgenstein's treatment of Cartesian scepticism. Saul Kripke's
book Wittgenstein on Rules and Priuate Language (Kripke 1982) explores certain
aspects of Wittgenstein's presentation of Kant ian scepticism. When Cavell,
at one point in The Claim of Reason, pauses to list (what he calls) 'three
phenomenologically striking features of the conclusion which characterises
scepticism', what he goes on to cite are clearly features of (what I have been
calling) Cartesian scepticism: (I) 'the sense of discovery expressed in the conclusion of the investigation'; (2) 'the sense of the conflict of this discovery with
our ordinary "beliefs"'; and (3) 'the instability of the discovery, the theoretical
conviction it inspires vanishing under the pressure (or distraction) of our
ordinary commerce with the world' (Cavell 1979: 129). Kripke devotes far
less care to characterising the phenomenologically striking features of the
conclusion that characterises the sort of scepticism that concerns him. But
one does not have to read far into his book before the following three aspects
of his sceptical paradox emerge with some clarity: ( 1) whatever Cartesian
features the paradox might initially appear to possess belong not properly to
it but rather merely to the initial motivating (but also misleading) exposition
of it (according to which 'the problem may appear to be epistemological');
(2) an encounter with the paradox takes the phenomenological form not
of an initial doubt that eventuates in a Cartesian discovery, but rather of
an initial 'eerie feeling' that eventuates in (something that bears all the
earmarks of) a Kantian boggle (about the ,ery possibility of ever being able
determinately to mean anything); so that (3) the form of the conclusion is
not one of generalised Cartesi<m doubt (about our ability evez to discover
what is really meant), but rather one of K..1.ntian unschematisability (in the
face of an impending yrt incomprehensible outcome in which 'the entire idea
of mt,aning vanishes into thin air'). 35

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Each of these books has a hold of a portion of philosophical territory

Wittgenstein is concerned to explore that the other misses. Cavell, however,
declares himself unable to recognise the problematic that Kripke calls one
of 'scepticism' to be a variety of scepticism at all, let alone one in which
Wittgenstein should interest himself. This misses something important in
Wittgenstein. In saying this, I do not mean here to express sympathy with
the substance of Kripke's suggestions for how to understand Wittgenstein's
preferred response to the (so-called) 'rule-following paradox' and especially
not with his attribution to Wittgenstein of a 'sceptical solution' to that (or any
other) sceptical paradox. I mean only to affirm that the paradox which Kripke
finds in Wittgenstein is one that Wittgenstein seeks to address, that it is only
one instance of a particular sort of philosophical paradox, that Wittgenstein
throughout his writings is repeatedly concerned to formulate and address
paradoxes of this shape, and that such paradoxes are ones that belong to that
broader genus of philosophical perplexity that Wittgenstein means to designate- as did Kant before him- by the term 'scepticism'. The paradox at
which Wittgenstein arrives in Section 20 l of Philosophical Investigations bears
all the earmarks of (what I have been calling) a Kantian sceptical paradox;
and the dialectic which threads its way through the preceding sections of the
Philosophical Investigations is mired in a Kant ian sceptical problematic. Indeed,
it is the third variant of the Kantian problematic mentioned early on in this
chapter- the one that centres on the question 'How can a sequence of marks
or noises so much as seem to mean something?'
Cavell says, in his discussion of Kripke in Conditions Handsome and
Unhandsome (Cavell 1990), that he wishes to question whether Kripke's
examples illustrate 'scepticism'; and Cavell evidently feels that conceding
that they do would threaten something important about his own reading
of Wittgenstein. But this perception on Cavell's part stems largely from a
failure to command a clear overview of the shape of the philosophical terrain
here. Armed with such an overview, it becomes possible to see that nothing
in Cavell's admirable corpus of work on Wittgenstein would be threatened
by such a concession. The term 'scepticism' in Cavell's work - and in his
writings on Wittgenstein - does exclusively denote a problematic of the
Cartesian variety. To concede, however, that Wittgenstein is interested in
variants of the Kantian paradox does not gainsay his equally ubiquitous
fascination with their Cartesian counterparts. Cavell, in his discussion of
Kripke's reading, begins with a surely sound observation- to wit: that what
Kripke calls Wittgenstein's 'sceptical solution' is not anything Wittgenstein
would countenance as a 'solution' to a philosophical problem. But Cavell
moves precipitously from this observation to the conclusion that if Kripke's
solution is not Wittgenstein's then 'the problem to which Kripke offers the
solution is not {quite) Wittgenstein's either' (Cavell 1990: 69}.This is a nonsequitur. The reason I think Cavell feels bound to take this step is because he
is quite prc;,perly unable to recognise the sceptical paradox of Section 201 of
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JAMES CONANT

Philosophical Investigations to be one that bears (what I have called) Cartesian

features. Hence Cavell goes on to remark:
Kripke reports that sometimes, contemplating the situation of
discovery that one may mean nothing at all, he has had 'something
of an eerie feeling' (p. 21 ), and that 'the entire idea of meaning
vanishes into thin air' (p. 22). Is this, I ask myself, like the feelings
I have had, under a sceptical surmise, of the world vanishing (as it
were behind its appearances), or my self vanishing (as it were behind
or inside my body)? These feelings have been touchstones for me of
sceptical paradox, of conclusions I cannot, yet become compelled to,
believe .... I would like to say that when the entire idea of meaning
vanishes into thin air what vanishes was already air, revealing no
scene of destruction.
(Cavell 1990: 80). 36
One can hear Cavell in this passage - and in much of the rest of his subsequent questioning of 'whether Kripke's examples illustrate scepticism'
- quite rightly pointing out that Kripke's alleged sceptical paradox bears
none of the Cartesian features: it does not begin with a best case rifknowledge,
the investigation does not issue in a discovery to which one is unable to accommodate oneself, the conclusions that Kripke draws about his examples
do not generalise in accordance with the logic of the Cartesian format, etc. I
therefore find myself agreeing with everything that Cavell has to say about
this, except his conclusion- that is, I agree that the paradox of Section 201 is
not a Cartesian sceptical paradox, but not that it is not a sceptical paradox.

7 A second apparent disagreement: Cavell and

McDowell
Before considering our second case of apparent disagreement, it will
help to contrast (what I will call) the Kantian way with scepticism with the
Wittgensteinian way with scepticism. The positive touchstone of the Kant ian way
is a radical following through of the implicit assumptions of a sceptical position up to the point at which the position founders in incoherence. The negative touchstone of the Kantian way is that it seeks to find a way to respond
to the Cartesian that by-passes the task of having to enter into the details
of Cartesian examples, exploring how they are motivated, and considering
how they differ from ordinary examples of knowledge. The Wittgensteinian
way is not an alternative to, but rather a supplementation of the Kantian
way. The difference between the two ways points up something original in
Wittgenstein's later treatment of philosophical problems that is absent from
Kant's treatment of scepticism. The Wittgensteinian way incorporates a further movement, pushing the sceptic in the opposite direction from the one
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VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

in which Kant seeks to push him: not only following the sceptic's presuppositions out to their ultimate consequences, but also examining the initial steps
in the Cartesian sceptic's progress towards doubt, identifying how the sceptic
passes from ordinary to philosophical doubt, from a claim to a non-claim
context, pinpointing the decisive movement in the philosophical conjuring
trick and diagnosing why it is the one that is bound to seem most innocent.
Thus, we might say, the Kantian way drives the sceptic forward in his doubt,
seeking to propel the sceptic to grace by forcing him to pass through utter
despair, whereas the Wittgensteinian way supplements this prospective
movement with a retrospective one, leading the sceptic back to the point of
entry into his problematic, returning him to the lost innocence of the everyday. The Kantian way compels the sceptic to progress further and further
forward, further and further from the ordinary, and deeper and deeper into
philosophical perplexity, to an ever more violent form of questioning, to the
point at which the sceptic's question consumes itself. The Wittgensteinian
way adds to this pressure an additional one that seeks to bring the sceptic
back to the place where he started, where he already is and never left, but in
such a way that he is able to recognise it for the first time.
These two movements that Wittgenstein's philosophical practice alternately seeks to execute are nicely summarised in the following two remarks:
My aim is: to teach you to pass from a piece of disguised nonsense to
a piece of undisguised nonsense.
(PI 464)
What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their
everyday use.
(PI 116)
We come therefore now to a further aspect of the fourth form of philosophical insight that a perspicuous overview of the various kinds of philosophical response to scepticism can afford. Commentators on Wittgenstein
can easily talk by one another by failing to keep in view the complementarity
of these two movements in later Wittgenstein's writingsY
We saw, while reviewing Putnam's misencounter with McDowell, how
McDowell wished to privilege the Kantian problematic over the Cartesian
one; and we saw in Cavell's misencounter with Kripke how Cavell seemed
to want to privilege the Cartesian problematic over the Kantian one. Thus,
based on the evidence reviewed thus far, the following conclusion might seem
tempting: McDowell is primarily concerned to explore the Kantian problematic and Cavell the Cartesian. This is not right, however, about the bulk of
either McDowell's or Cavell's work (or that of almost any other sensitive
commentator on Wittgenstein). What happens rather, in their respective
writi-ngs "bout;Wittgenatein,''is;'that Wittgenst~in'.s exploration of one of
l:l5

JAMES CONANT

these two sceptical problematics tends alternately to come into focus while
the other recedes into the background. (And, indeed, I think it is almost
inevitable that, in working on later Wittgenstein, one should find this happening to one in one's writing about him.) To illustrate the point, I will place
side by side some further passages from Cavell and McDowell - passages in
which their roles have been reversed - now McDowell will appear to be the
one more preoccupied by the Cartesian dimension and Cavell by the Kantian
dimension ofWittgenstein's concerns.
McDowell, in 'Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge', argues that (what
Wittgenstein calls) criteria are internally related to the justification of
claims to knowledge in the following way: if a claim to know that such-andsuch turns out not to be justified then the criteria for claiming such-and-such
were only apparently satisfied. Thus, for example, if you claim that someone
is in pain, and it turns out that that person is only pretending to be in pain,
then the criteria for pain were only apparently satisfied. Here is McDowell:
Commentators [on Wittgenstein] often take it that the possibility
of pretence shows that criteria are defeasible. This requires the
assumption that in successful deception one brings it about that
criteria for something 'internal' are satisfied, although the ascription for which they are criteria would be false. But is the assumption
obligatory? Here is a possible alternative; in pretending, one causes
it to appear that criteria for something 'internal' are satisfied (that
is, one causes it to appear that someone else could know, by what
one says and does, that one is in, say, some 'inner' state); but the
criteria are not really satisfied (that is, the knowledge is not really
available).
(McDowell 1998b: 380)
Cavell, in The Claim f!!Reason, is concerned to challenge almost exactly the
same interpretation ofWittgenstein on criteria that McDowell is concerned
to challenge and for many of the same reasons. Yet Cavell comes to (what is
at least verbally) precisely the opposite conclusion with regard to how to employ the concept of a criterion in connection with the very sorts of examples
that McDowell discusses. Thus, Cavell concludes that even if someone is only
pretending to be in pain, if it is pain that he is pretending to be in, then his
behaviour satisfies the criteria for pain. Here is Cavell:
[O]nly certain eventualities will count as [someone's] not being in
pain ... Circumstances, namely; ... in which we will say (he will be)
feigning, rehearsing, hoaxing, etc. Why such circumstances? What
differentiates such circumstances from those in which he is (said to
be) clearing his throat, responding to a joke, etc.? Just that for 'He's
rehearsing' or 'feigning', or 'It's a hoax', etc. to satisfy us as explana126

VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

tions for his not being in pain ... what he is feigning must be precisely
pain, what he is rehearsing must be the part of a man in pain, the
hoax depends on his simulating pain, etc. These circumstances are
ones in appealing to which, in describing which, we retain the concept
(here, of pain) whose application these criteria determine. And this
means to me: In all such circumstances he has satisfied the criteria
we use for applying the concept of pain to others. It is because of that
satisfaction that we know that he is feigning pain (i.e., that it is pain
he is feigning), and that he knows what to do to feign pain. Criteria
are 'criteria for something's being so', not in the sense that they tell
us of a thing's existence, but of something like its identity, not of its
being so, but of its being so.
(Cavelll979: 45)
The first thing to notice is that McDowell and Cavell appear, at first blush,
simply to disagree: in cases of pretending to be in pain, McDowell says the
criteria for pain are not satisfied, Cavell says they are. The second thing to
notice is that their roles now seem, as promised, to be reversed. McDowell
takes Wittgensteinian criteria to operate at a Cartesian level. The question
that is settled, according to him, if criteria are satisfied, is one concerning the
truth of a claim, the existence of the pain, the reality of the phenomenon.
Cavell takes Wittgensteinian criteria to operate at a Kantian level. The
question that is settled, according to Cavell, if criteria are satisfied, is not
one concerning the truth of a claim but one concerning its purport, not one
concerning the existence of something which falls under a concept but the
applicability of the concept itself, not one concerning the reality of a phenomenon but one concerning its possibility. Whichever of these two readers
of Wittgenstein you take to be on the right track, it is worth noticing that
this is the structure of the disagreement here, and that the level at which
you take criteria to operate, e.g. in connection with phenomena such as pain,
will have decisive consequences for the sort of response to scepticism that
,will issue from an appeal to 'criteria'. Now I myself take it that Cavell has
got the merely exegetical question right (about what question is settled if
Wittgensteinian criteria are satisfied) and McDowell has got it wrong. But I
will not argue that point here. (Nor does their difference over this interpretative question mean that there is any substantive philosophical disagreement
between McDowell and Cavell here. 38) What interests me here is the very
fact that their disagreement should, at this juncture, have this particular
structure. This has a twofold irony, stemming from the ways in which each
of them seems to have given up his previous role in the two misencounters
canvassed above.
The first irony is to be found in the fact that, in most of his writing about
Wittgenstein, McDowell appears to read Wittgenstein as - and in Mind
and Ji11orld follows his Wittgenstein in - seeking to take exclusively (what I
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JAMES CONANT

called at the beginning of this section) the 'Kantian way' with scepticism.
McDowell tends to see the Cartesian craving for epistemic security as an
intelligible, though inept, response to an inchoate form of the philosophical
anxiety that only arrives at clear expression when it is posed as a Kantian
sceptical paradox. Thus, despite his Cartesian construal of the grammar of
the concept of a criterion in his earlier essay, in Mind and World, McDowell
proceeds as if the treatment of philosophical scepticism can be prosecuted
primarily through attending to the Kantian problematic as a self-standing
form of philosophical confusion. Especially in Mind and World, he seems to
assume, in the manner of Kant himself, not only that the Cartesian sceptical
paradox can be shown to be merely a special case of a more general worry,
but more importantly that, once this is shown, Cartesian ism will be robbed of
all its force and will wither away of its own accord without requiring any additional form of specialised treatment. Whereas Cavell, despite his resolutely
Kantian construal of the grammar of a criterion, concentrates, above all, in
his philosophical writings, on the movement with which the Wittgensteinian
way supplements the Kantian way: the return to the ordinary. Cavell takes
(and takes Wittgenstein to take) the achievement of such a return to play an
essential role in attaining an understanding of the phenomenon of scepticism.39
The second irony to be noted in connection with the structure ofMcDowell's
and Cavell's disagreement about Wittgenstein's concept of a criterion lies in
the fact that Cavell, though he is far too acute a reader of Wittgenstein to
fail to appreciate that the Philosophical Investigations is frequently operating at
a Kantian level, nonetheless never sees that, for Wittgenstein, as for Kant,
the term 'scepticism' ranges over far more than a merely Cartesian sceptical
problematic - thus over far more varieties of philosophical perplexity than
a merely Cartesian inflection of the term is able to encompass. Nonetheless,
Cavell, through carefully following out the inner movement of the dialectic
traced in Wittgenstein's investigations, often finds himself fetching up in the
terrain of the Kantian problematic. Here is a characteristic passage that may
stand for a hundred others:
If you do not know the (non-grammatical) criteria of an Austinian
object (can't identify it, name it) then you lack a piece of information, a bit of knowledge, and you can be told its name, told what it
is, told what it is (officially) called. But if you do not know the grammatical criteria ofWittgensteinian objects, then you lack, as it were,
not only a piece of information or knowledge, but the possibility of
acquiring any information about such objects uberhaupt; you cannot
be told the name of that object, because there is as yet no object of
that kind for you to attach a forthcoming name to.
(Cavell 1979: 77)

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What is threatened here, with the loss of (what Cavell calls) Wittgenstein
criteria, is not merely the possibility of isolating an unimpeachable item
of knowledge, but the possibility of so much as turning up a candidate for
knowledge. At one point in The Claim ofReason, Cavell quotes the following
four passages from Philosophical Investigations in rapid succession:
... [O]nly of a living human being and what resembles (behaves
like) a living human being can one say: it has sensations; it sees; is
blind; hears; is deaf; is conscious or unconscious.
(PI 281)
What has to be accepted, the given, is - so one could say -forms of
life.
(PI 226)
What gives us so much as the idea that living beings, things, can feel?
(PI 283)
The human body is the best picture of the human soul.

(PI 178)
These are passages in which Wittgenstein presents what Cavell says he
understands 'as the background against which our criteria do their work;
even make sense' (Cavell 1979: 83). They are also quintessential examples
of moments in his work in which Wittgenstein's investigations move {from
the Cartesian) to the Kantian level. And, in commenting on these passages,
Cavell (taking the problem of other minds here as his example of a sceptical
problematic)) expresses what he takes to be the significance of such passages
in Wittgenstein's work:
To withhold, or hedge, our concepts of psychological states from a
given creature, on the ground that our criteria cannot reach to the
inner life of the creature, is specifically to withhold the source of my
idea that living beings are things that feel; it is to withhold myself,
to reject my response to anything as a living being; to blank so much
as my idea of anything as having a body. To describe this condition as
one in which I do not know (am not certain) of the existence of other
minds is empty. There is now nothing there of the right kind, to be
known. There is nothing to read from that body, nothing the body
is l!f; it does not go beyond itself, it expresses nothing; it does not
so much as behave. There is no body left to manifest consciousness
(or unconsciousness). It is not dead, but inanimate; it hides nothing

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jAMES CONANT

My problem is no longer that my words can't get past his body

to him. There is nothing for them to get to; they can't even reach
as far as my body ... The signs are dead; merely working them
out loud doesn't breathe life into them; even dogs can speak more
effectively.
(Cavell 1979: 83-4)
I take the presence of a Kantian problematic in this passage to be selfevident. If the worry that is here in play were to become urgent, it would
eventuate in (not merely a Cartesian doubt, but) a Kantian boggle. Though
Cavell, in such passages (and there are many such passages in The Claim of
Reason), sees that the transition to a Kantian problematic plays an essential
role in Wittgenstein's treatment of scepticism, he seems able to interest
himself in this transition only to the extent that it forms part of a response
to Cartesian scepticism; hence his view of the scope of this problematic in
Wittgenstein's writing is artificially blinkered. Central issues - concerning,
for example, the nature of the accord between a rule and its application
(not only, as in certain employments of the mathematical case, as a trope for
learning a word, but as a potentially philosophically perplexing instance of
the Kantian problematic in its own right), between an expectation or wish
and its fulfilment, etc. - recede into the background of Cavell's reading of
Wittgenstein. This blind-spot in Cavell's reading ofWittgenstein (and in his
reading of Kant) comes perhaps most visibly to the surface in his discussion
of Kripke's reading of Wittgenstein examined above. Although he sees that
Wittgenstein is concerned to explore the Kantian problematic, he does not
see (and feels that he must not allow) that it can issue in a distinctive (and, as
I have tried to show, distinctively Kantian) variety of philosophical paradox
-one that Wittgenstein views as a variety of scepticism. This leaves Cavell's
account of Wittgenstein's treatment of scepticism essentially incomplete.
Only a reading able to accommodate, both exegetically and philosophically,
the insights contained in both Cavell's and McDowell's respective readings
of Wittgenstein - that is, only one that understands why, in Wittgenstein's
treatment of the extended philosophical dialectic of which they each form a
part, neither variety of scepticism is to be privileged over the other- will be
complete.

8 Conclusion
The aim of this chapter has been to suggest that a perspicuous overview of
various kinds of scepticism and the kinds of response they engender affords
a number of different kinds of philosophical benefit: it allows one to command a clearer view of the sorts of relations that obtain across apparently
distinct areas of philosophy; it allows one to distinguish the very different
sorts of things philosophers mean when they employ (what is apparently)

VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

the same philosophical vocabulary; and it allows one to see more clearly why
authors such as Wittgenstein are often misread. {Here, I have also tried to
show how and why some of his best commentators misread one another and
misunderstand themselves -taking themselves to disagree with one another
when they do not, taking themselves to agree with one another when they do
not, and taking themselves to be in agreement with themselves when they
are not.) It may also allow one to see more clearly what is distinctive about
Wittgenstein's contributions to the history of thought about scepticism; but
a proper treatment of that issue must wait for another occasion.4

Notes

This chapter is a shorter and somewhat differently organised version of a longer

paper that will appear in Conant and Kern (forthcoming).
The taxonomy is meant to serve as a descriptive tool for distinguishing various
sorts of philosophical standpoint. It is constructed in as philosophically neutral a
fashion as possible. Some of the more specific philosophical claims that I myself
express sympathy for in the later part of this chapter (e.g. regarding how these
varieties of scepticism are related to one another) do, however, turn on collateral
philosophical commitments.
A reason for referring to the taxonomy offered here as 'partial' is because the
overview of varieties of scepticism set forth here is in no way intended to be
exhaustive. For example, it is not intended to accommodate (what I take to be)
a variety of scepticism that constitutes one strand in Hume's sceptical outlook
and which (for lack of a better label) I will call Pyrrhonian scepticism, nor a further
variety of scepticism, Agrippan scepticism, that some contemporary philosophers
might think ought to be sharply distinguished from the Pyrrhonian, Cartesian
and Kantian varieties (see, for example, Williams 2001: 61ff).
Such an inclusive use of the term 'scepticism', while unusual, is not unprecedented. For a similarly inclusive use, primarily in connection with Cartesian
scepticism, see, for example, Cavell 1979: 46.
I owe this way of formulating the contrast to Stanley Cavell. See Cavell 1979:
45. However, I make a use of this contrast here - to formulate the distinction
between Cartesian and Kantian scepticism - of which Cavell himse If might not
approve. Nevertheless, it is not an accident that Cavell's formulation of this
contrast should perfectly serve my purpose, as we shall see towards the end of
this chapter.
I borrow this characterisation of the sort of case explored within the Cartesian
problematic from Cavell. (It should perhaps be noted, however, that Cavell
himself thinks of the characterisation as applying to sceptical examples tout
court, rather than merely to those that figure within one particular variety of
scepticism.)
I say 'variants' of each of these varieties of scepticism arise in each of these
'areas' of philosophy (rather than 'a variant' of each arises) because in 'areas'
such as ethics and philosophy of science -'areas', that is, that involve a tangle
of different sorts of philosophical problem - a multiplicity of variants of each
variety are to be found. Indeed, in both ethics and philosophy of science, for
example, a version of each of the philosophy of perception variants and each
of the philosophy of language variants of sceptical problematic (along with a
great many others) are to be found. This furnishes yet a further reason why one

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JAMES CONANT

I0
11

12

13
14
15
16
17

18

19

ought to be suspicious of the idea that one should be able to limn the skeleton of
philosophy at its joints merely by effecting a division into areas based solely on
differences in subject-matter- ethics, science, mathematics, etc.
For some discussion of the presence of an incipiently Kantian problematic in
Descartes' thought, see Conant 1991. What I call in that paper 'a different kind
of Cartesianism' is a variant of (what I call in this chapter) 'Kantian scepticism'.
I speak here, rather tentatively, of varieties (rather thangenera) of scepticism, and
of these varieties as subtending variants (rather than species) of Cartesian and
Kantian scepticism respectively, in order to leave this question open. However, I
myself do favour a particular line, namely that the apparent 'kinds' in question
are, in the end, to be recognised as only apparently distinct kinds.
I do not mean to claim that either of these sets of features exhaustively characterise either of these varieties of scepticism.
I do not mean hereby to rule out cases of philosophical discussion that do
perfectly exemplify, without blemishes, either the Cartesian or Kantian format
respectively, but only to indicate that they are surprisingly rare.
For it not to be a symptom of (at least some degree of) confusion on an author's
part requires, I think, that the author already have thought through- and thus
have come to some stable view of his own concerning - the relation between
these two varieties of scepticism. There are such authors, but not many.
See Cavell 1981 and I996a.
Cavell's term for this is negated.
Cavell suggests we call the sort of object that figures in such examples 'a generic
object' (Cavell 1979: 52-3).
The internal relation between Cartesian scepticism and Shakespearean tragedy
is explored by Cavell in the essays collected in Cavell 1987.
This conflict between our ordinary practice and our philosophical reflection on
that practice is the source of the aura of paradox that accompanies any attempt
to acquiesce in a Cartesian sceptical conclusion. That conclusion, taken in isolation, does not have the outward form of a paradoxical assertion (in the way, say,
that the liar paradox does); its paradoxical aspect lies instead in our inability to
sustain our conviction in such a conclusion when, as Hume puts it, we leave our
philosophical study and return to the backgammon table.
For most everyday purposes, we cannot and should not try to do otherwise than
to take the perceptual appearances that present themselves to us - say, the
sudden appearance of an oncoming car- to constitute genuine instances of perceptual knowledge. The Cartesian sceptic knows this. He knows that we cannot
help but take someone writhing in pain to be in pain; we cannot help but take
certain ossified habits of interpretation to disclose the meaning of a sign; etc.
If he understands the structure of the Cartesian problematic, he will not take
such observations to impugn his procedures. Some philosophers have thought
- and have thought that later Wittgenstein thought - that such observations
themselves could suffice to overturn such forms of scepticism. That is a misunderstanding of Cartesian scepticism- and a misunderstanding of Wittgenstein's
understanding of it. This is not to deny that such observations (or 'reminders', as
Wittgenstein preferred to call them) might have a role to play i_n the tr~atment
of Cartesian scepticism. But they hardly suffice to overturn any mterestmg form
of scepticism.
Someone who is disinclined to believe in the trustworthiness of the government's
pronouncements, or the promises issued in television advertisements, or the
impartiality ofjudicial proceedings, etc., is sometimes called a sceptic i~ ordinary
language. I will refer to this character as the hard-headed customer. The differences

VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

20

21

22
23

24

between the hard-headed customer and the Cartesian sceptic are perhaps most
evident in the light of this ninth feature: There is no difficulty in imagining
that the hard-headed customer might be able to convert his various theoretical
doubts into practical ones: He may take care not to align his beliefs and actions
in accordance with the expectation that the government's pronouncements
will be fulfilled, he may make a point of not purchasing items advertised on
television, etc. Reflecting on the differences between the hard-headed customer
and the Cartesian sceptic can help to bring out how the nine Cartesian features,
listed above, are internally related to one another; a proper understanding of
each depends upon an appreciation of how it is related to the others. That the
hard-headed customer does not suffer from Cartesian scepticism can be seen
in part from the fact that he fails to begin with a sufficiently generic object;
this, in turn, can be seen from the way in which his doubt fails to generalise as
precipitously as in the Cartesian problematic, etc.
More precisely: the differences between these sorts of examples cease to be
relevant for the bulk of the Kantian enquiry. At a late stage in the enquiry, it
will become important to a Kant ian inquirer to recover these sorts of differences
- differences that underwrite the movement of thought in a Cartesian
investigation - but only once the Kantian paradox has been averted and the
intelligibility of object-directed thought and experience no longer stands under
threat.
Hence, in recent years, the increasingly important relationship between various
sorts of philosophical project calling for some sort of naturalistic reduction, on
the one hand, and the Kantian problematic in philosophy, on the other. The
demand for such reductions in the absence of a plausible programme for their
execution can, on the one hand, give rise to the relevant sense of mystery; while
a philosophically independently fuelled sense of Kantian paradox can, on the
other hand, fuel the sense that a programme of naturalistic reduction is the only
possible form of solution to the most urgent philosophical problems that face us
today.
I explore the engagement with a philosophical problematic of this sort in Kafka's
parables in Conant 2001.
To sum up this sixth Kant ian feature, one might adapt a joke -which I first heard
from Dan Dennett - in the following way: 'Scientists want to know whether
something possible is actual. Philosophers want to know whether something
actual is possible.'
Unlike the concluding statement affirmed by a Cartesian sceptic (see n. 17
above), formulations of the Kantian sceptical paradox tend to converge on
conclusions that have the canonical form of a logical paradox. This is perhaps
particularly evident if one considers the philosophy of language variant of
Kantian scepticism. Borrowing, for the moment, the terms in which Kripke
couches the paradox, the sceptical conclusion for this variant might, for
example, be formulated as follows: 'There is no fact of the matter as to whether
this sentence has a meaning.' Or more radically still: 'There isn't anything which
this sentence means.' The variant of Kant ian scepticism for which this is perhaps
least evident is perhaps that of (so-called) 'scepticism regarding other minds'.
This is partly because, once we think the Kantian variant of this problem all
the way through, we come to see that this ceases to be an apt way of denoting
the variety of scepticism that here comes to be at issue. To see that even this
variant veers towards a conclusion that has a self-annihilating structure, it is
important to see that the structure of the Kant ian version of this problem is one
in which the initial Cartesian distinction between the (putatively indubitable)
case of my own mindedness and. the (putatively comparatively dubitable) case

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of the mindedness of others is cut out from underneath one. The Kantian

25

26

27

28
29
30

sceptical conclusion here is not just that there is nothing which could count as
his expressing his mental states in a manner that could enable me to know them,
but rather: there is nothing which could count as anyone~ (and therefore: my)
expressing a mental state.
Just as it is important to distinguish the Cartesian sceptic from the hard-headed
customer, so, too, one should not confuse the Kantian sceptic with yet another
character who is often called a 'sceptic' in ordinary language: someone who does
not believe in divine revelation, or extrasensory perception, or astrology, etc.
I will refer to this character as the debunker. He differs from the hard-headed
customer in that he believes that the phenomena about which he is 'sceptical' are
such as not even to be possible. The harded-headed customer need not call into
question the bare possibility of a trustworthy government or a truthful television
advertisement; what he doubts is merely their actuality. The debunker's doubt,
on the other hand, is directed at the possibility of certain phenomena. Yet it
would be a confusion to think the debunker is a Kantian sceptic just because he
doubts something to be possible that others take to be actual. His doubt is not a
philosophical doubt any more than that of the hard-headed customer is: It does
not issue in philosophical paradox. That a successful bout of debunking does not
issue in a specifically .Kantian variety of paradox can be seen from the way in
which the outcome fails properly to satisfy any of the nine Kantian features listed
above. This is perhaps most evident in the case of the ninth feature: There is no
difficulty in imagining that the debunker might be able to dispense altogether
with recourse to, say, divine revelation. His capacity to conceive the impossibility
of divine revelation does not appear in any way to be an exercise of a capacity
whose very possibility has thereby been called into question. Reflecting on the
differences between the debunker and the Kantian sceptic may, again, help to
bring out how the nine Kantian features, listed above, are internally related
to one another: That the debunker does not suffer from Kantian scepticism
can be seen in part from the fact that he begins with a very particular sort of
example; its debunking does not eventuate in a Kantian boggle; for he is under
no intellectual obligation to take the phenomena (that thereby seem to him not
to be possible) to be actual, etc.
The distinction between these two varieties of scepticism can provide philosophically far less superficial categories for sorting philosophers into groups than those
we usually rely upon, such as the alleged divide between analytic and Continental
philosophy. One can learn to see past the common philosophical reference points
and superficial similarities in philosophical tradition and style that unite thinkers such as Heidegger and Sartre, on the one hand, and Wilfrid Sellars and H.H.
Price, on the other, and begin to discern certain fundamental divergences, thus
enabling one to notice fundamental philosophical affinities between thinkers
from different traditions, allowing one to sort together Heidegger and Sellars,
on the one hand, and Sartre and Price, on the other.
Conversely, one may resolutely avoid a particular philosopher's ways of speaking
as a strategy for avoiding his problems and yet end up mired in precisely the
philosophical problematic one sought thereby to avoid. This is part of the reason
why Richard Rorty's preferred strategies for dissolving philosophical problems
tend to be so ineffectual.
.
I argue for this claim in the longer version of this chapter cited in note 1.
Putnam ~s Dewey Uclures were given at Columbia University in March of 1994 and
first published inJqumal 'IfPhi!IJsop/ly. They are reprinted in Putnam ( 1999) and
all references to them will be to that publication.
The context ,,fthe previous quotation makes this evident.

134

VARIETIES OF SCEPTICISM

31 I do not mean to deny that McDowell is concerned to criticise the interface

conception in some of his writings, most notably in his essay 'Criteria,
Defeasibility, and Knowledge' (in McDowell 1998b), but only that McDowell
would not identify the target of that essay with 'the key' confusion that he seeks
to exorcise in Mind and World.
32 Quoted at McDowell1994:: 27.
33 Elsewhere in his writings, Putnam is extremely sensitive in his treatment of
philosophical problems that bear the earmarks of a Kant ian problematic, and
in showing how putative solutions to those problems, if strictly thought through,
can be seen to collapse into variants of Kantian scepticism. Putnam's criticisms
of attempts to naturalise meaning are an example of this. For a brief discussion,
see pp. xlii-xlvi of my 'Introduction' to Putnam 1994.
34 In the longer version of this chapter, cited in note 1, I discuss in some detail how
the work of C.I. Lewis is exemplary of a certain kind of Kantian philosopher
-one whose work, against its own intention, threatens to collapse into a form of
Kantian scepticism.
35 Kripke 1982: 21-2. Kripke initially presents his motivating example in terms
that alternate between a Cartesian worry and a Kantian worry. The Cartesian
worry can be put as follows: 'How can I know whether in the present case someone is adding or quadding~ and ifl do not know this, then [given that this would
appear to be a best case of knowledge of addition] how can I ever know if anyone
is really adding?' The Kantian worry can be put as follows: 'How can there ever
so much as be a fact of the matter as to whether someone is adding; and, if there
cannot then [given that this would appear to be as elementary a case as there
can be of someone meaning one thing rather than another] how can anyone ever
so much as determinately 1Mtlll anything?'. Kripke himself is- at least in certain
places in his book (see, for example, p. 21) -fairly clear that his initial Cartesian
characterisations of the issue (according to which, as he says: 'the problem may
appear to be epistemological') can serve him only as a provisional expository
device (thus he says: 'the ladder must finally be kicked away') for leading people
into a sceptical paradox of an altogether different and more fundamental variety.
36 It is peculiar that Cavell should think that his last remark might help to
differentiate his problematic from one that does not deserve to be characterised
as one of scepticism. It is true that, viewed from the standpoint of the Cartesian
sceptic's own self-understanding of the nature of his conclusion, we appear to be
faced with a scene of destruction as long as we permit the sceptical conclusion
to remain unchallenged. But tlr.at appearance is not one that Wittgenstein,
on Cavell's own reading of him, will be prepared to let go unchallenged. The
continuation of the remark from the lnliBStigations (PI 118) to which Cavell
here alludes is one that he himself has insisted is best translated: What we are
destroying is nothing but structures of air.. .' (see, for example, Cavell 1979 p.
xvii). The radicalisation of the Cartesian problematic represented in Kantian
~pti~ilm moves us in the direction of such a realisation. Of course, as long as
~t contmues to appear- as it does to a Kantian sceptic such as Kripkenstein- as
1f ou_r ~ryday concepts of thought, understanding, meaning, etc. are without
appbcahOn and thus themselvc:s nothing but mere structures of air. then the
treatment of scepticism will. for Wittgenstein, not yet be compiete. That
treatment will not be complete until our criteria for the application of those
concepts ar~ recov~re~. B~t it does not fol.low, as Cavell seems to suggest, that
:~~~ ;r~:~:~.rad1cahsat1on oft he Cartesian problematic cannot form a part of
37 One can think of these two movements that Wittgenstein seeks to execute as

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JAMES CONANT

the rruwemntl up 1M dialectictd ladJJrr (towards nonsense) and the movement down the
dia/eaical /adO.r (towards the ordinary). This way of putting things helps to bring
out both a fundamental moment of continuity and a fundamental moment of
discontinuity between Wittgenstein's early and later philosophical practice. The
former of these two remarks could seJVe equally aptly as a characterisation of the
aim of the author the Tmetatru. The latter could not. What I am herecalling'the
Wittgensteinian way' is therefore meant to designate a way with scepticism that
we first find only when we turn to Wittgenstein's later writings.
38 Cavell, if he were brought to see how McDowell is employing the term 'criterion',
could concede, without harm to any of his philosophical commitments, something

along the following lines: 'Well, that is not howWittgenstein uses the term; but
if you are determined to use the term in this (un-Wittgensteinian) way, then
the right (i.e. philosophieally Wittgensteinian) thing to go on and say, so using
it, is just what you say (e.g. that in cases of pretending the criteria for pain are
only apparently satisfied).' And McDowell, equally, if he were taught Cavell's
understanding of the term (criteria are not criteria for something's being so, but
for its being so) would have no ~ason not to concede that the right thing to say,
so using the term, is just what Cavell says (i.e, that in cases of pretending, if it
is pain you are pretending to be in, then the criteria for pain are satisfied). The
disagreement between Cavell and McDowell about criteria is a further instance
of a merely apparent disagreement in which the appearance of disagreement
is engendered through an unacknowledged transition from a Cartesian to a
Kantian problematic. Both McDowell and Cavell are in profound disagreement
with their respective and very similar sets of interlocutors (Baker, Wright,
Albritton, Malcolm, etc.), but they are disagreeing with them about different
things. (McDowell's point has to do with how justification and knowledge are
internally- and not merely externally- related to one another; Cavell's has to
do with how an appeal to criteria cannot do a sort of work that Wittgenstein calls
upon it to do, if criteria are understood in the manner of such commentators.)
Their respective focal philosophical motivations for disagreeing with such
commentators are perfectly compatible. This is not to deny that the differences
here in what they have to say about Wittgenstein's response to scepticism may be
tied to substantive differences in the details of their respective understandings
of the character of that response. It is only to insist that these differences can be
assessed only after we appreciate that what the one here affirms and the other
here denies (in affirming and denying that, in the case of someone's pretending
to be in pain, the criteria for pain are satisfied) are not the same thing.
39 It is worth noting that nothing McDowell says anywhere, as far as I can see, ever
denies the importance of such a return (and thus the sort of attention to the ordinary upon which Cavell places so much emphasis in his reading ofWittgenstein).
Indeed, much of what McDowell says would seem to presuppose it.
40 As should be evident to anyone familiar with their work, the project of this
chapter is pervasively indebted to the writings of Stanley Cavell,John McDowell,
and Hilary Putnam. This particular version of the chapter, as it appears here, is
indebted to Denis McManus- both for his suggestions about how to organise and
edit it and for his forbearance with its author.

l36