A Pyrrhonist Examination of Scientific Knowledge

In the recent literature in the philosophy of science there is much discussion of scientific knowledge, but rarely an explicit account of such knowledge. Employing the Pyrrhonist skeptics modes, I examine the implicit ‘justified true belief’ analysis of scientific knowledge presented by Stathis Psillos, the primitivist account offered by Alexander Bird, and Bas van Fraassen’s voluntarist epistemology. I conclude that all of these positions appear to fail. Psillos’ account relies on a theory of reference that cannot block skeptical challenges to scientific realism, nor can it identify natural kinds in a non-ad hoc manner. Bird’s account also cannot refute skeptical challenges to it, nor can it adequately show how the full truth necessary for knowledge is acquired. Van Fraassen’s voluntarist epistemology attempts to avoid skepticism at the cost of inconsistency. From this representative sample of accounts I argue that there is seemingly no account of scientific knowledge that can as yet withstand Pyrrhonist skeptical scrutiny.

In the first chapter of my dissertation, I give an overview of Pyrrhonist skepticism and the neo-Pyrrhonism of Robert Fogelin and Otavio Bueno, respectively. In the second chapter, I exposit Psillos’ semantic realist position, and argue that he gives an implicit justified true belief analysis of scientific knowledge. Moreover, I examine Bird’s primitivist account of knowledge. In chapter three, I discuss van Fraassen’s philosophy of science as stated in constructive empiricism and empiricist structuralism, and his voluntarist epistemology. In chapter four, I argue that all of these different views fail to provide a compelling theory of scientific knowledge. In the fifth chapter, I consider how the traditional Pyrrhonist take on the relation of theory to practice, and the positive epistemic additions of Fogelin and Bueno’s neo-Pyrrhonisms. I conclude that the traditional Pyrrhonists were acting inconsistently when they sought out new theories to influence their practice, and that the positive epistemic additions to the skeptical modes of Pyrrhonism fall prey to the modes themselves.