Tuesday, April 28, 2026

Matt Duncan on certainty

 
32m: Duncan makes a distinction between a psychological sense of doubt and an epistemic sense of doubt. The more epistemic justification you have (whatever that is), then the less psychological doubt you should have.
 
"And I distinguish that psychological sense of doubt with this kind of epistemic sense of doubt, where it's something like you've got a very strong form of justification or something – lot of different ways to spell that out . . . 
 
Duncan goes on to discuss when we can be certain:   
 
. . . the way I prefer is that it's immune from skeptical doubt, where that means that there's no skeptical scenario consistent with the way things seems to you where the relevant thing doesn't exist."
 
34m: "[I] argue ultimately that the phenomenal properties of our experiences pass the doubt test. I mean, this is a familiar idea, you know, Descartes, I can't doubt that I exist . . . I spend a lot of Chapter 3 unpacking the epistemology there. . . there are two routes to doubt here. One is lack of acquaintance . . . But there's this other route, phenomenal indistinguishability, that still leaves room for some kind of doubt, and that's why I think acquaintance itself doesn't foreclose doubt. Now in the case of phenomenal properties, I think both routes are foreclosed. There's the acquaintance route – foreclosed – and then there's the phenomenal indistinguishability, and the reason why that route is foreclosed here is because phenomenal properties are defined and individuated by the way they seem, the way they appear. And so there couldn't be any skeptical scenario in which things appear like this and yet your different phenomenal properties are instantiated in your experience because it would just follow that things wouldn't seem like this, they would seem at least a little bit different. . . . for phenomenal properties, there really is no skeptical scenario consistent with the way things seem in which those aren't instantiated in your experience. It's really phenomenal acquaintance where we get full certainty, because both of these routes to doubt are foreclosed."

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