McGlynn, Aidan

International Journal for the Study of Skepticism

Edinburgh Research Explorer

     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Book review of: The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Eds. Bernecker, S and Pritchard, D.  Routledge.Citation for published version:McGlynn, A 2013, 'Book review of: The Routledge Companion to Epistemology.  Eds. Bernecker, S andPritchard, D.  Routledge.', International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 72-75.https://doi.org/10.1163/221056912X640750Digital Object Identifier (DOI):10.1163/221056912X640750Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordPublished In:International Journal for the Study of SkepticismPublisher Rights Statement:© McGlynn, A. (2013). Book review of: The Routledge Companion to Epistemology.  Eds. Bernecker, S andPritchard, D.  Routledge.International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 3(1), 72-75.10.1163/221056912X640750General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 28. Nov. 202572 Book Reviews / International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 63–75 The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Edited by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard. London: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xxiii + 911. ISBN 978-0-415-96219-3.The core remit of contemporary epistemology at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century remains much as it was at the end of the twentieth: untangling the knot of issues concerning the nature of knowledge, the structure of justifica-tion, the threat of skepticism, the clash between externalism and internalism, the nature and scope of the a priori and privileged self-knowledge, the plausibility and epistemological significance of closure principles and contextualism, and so on. Superficial acquaintance with contemporary epistemology might suggest that there isn’t really an awful lot more to it than that. This wide-ranging, comprehen-sive, and accessible overview of epistemology should help to dispel this myth once and for all. The traditional concerns are very much on show here, naturally, but The Routledge Companion to Epistemology succeeds in showing that this is only one part of the picture.The volume consists of 78 short articles, written by contributors who have more often than not played a definitive role in shaping the topic they are charged with introducing. At over 900 pages, it is clearly the product of an extraordinary effort on the part of all of those involved, particularly the editors. The sheer size of the vol-ume means that I can only address a small fraction of its contents. I will begin with some general remarks on the volume as a whole, and then focus the remainder of my discussion on its treatment of skepticism. Responding to the suggestion that the news should give just as much attention to all the buses that make it safely to their destinations as to the one that crashes, Mark Corrigan very reasonably points out that this would take forever. For the same reason, when reviewing a volume of this size it is inevitable that one ends up spending a disproportionate amount of time pointing out things that could perhaps have been done better. But as the anal-ogy suggests, we shouldn’t let this blind us to the countless things it gets right.With this in mind, let me note two particular strengths of the volume. First, the volume boasts an unusually comprehensive and helpful section on the history of epistemology. What makes this so useful is not just that it covers a number of fig-ures often neglected in this kind of volume (for instance, Leibniz, Carnap, and Austin), but also that so many of these essays manage to get behind the caricatures that figure in contemporary debates. I don’t mean to suggest that such caricatures have no place or play no useful role, but only that we cannot allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact that these historical figures were often responding to pressures other than those that animate contemporary epistemologists, and that their views are frequently considerably more nuanced than they are given credit for. The his-tory of epistemology section of this volume is a significant contribution to ensur-ing we don’t lose sight of this (though I cannot help noting the striking absence of an entry on G. E. Moore, and the striking paucity of discussion of Wittgenstein in Marie McGinn’s entry on Wittgenstein). Second, as mentioned already, the vol-ume’s breadth is impressive. Of particular note is its coverage of recent important movements such as social epistemology, feminist epistemology, and experimental epistemology, as well as the entire section it devotes to formal epistemology.© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/221056912X640750 Book Reviews / International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 63–75 73Perhaps the principal weakness of the volume is the inconsistency in cross-ref-erencing. Some of the articles are filled with references to elsewhere in the volume, where issues discussed in passing are taken up more fully (for instance, Timothy McGrew’s piece on evidence is exemplary in this respect). Such cross-references are enormously helpful to someone trying to gain a clear view of how the different issues in epistemology fit together. And they are particularly crucial in a volume like this, where there is an inevitable degree of arbitrariness concerning how the articles are organized into sections. For example, the articles on contextualism and closure principles fall in the sections on knowledge attributions and formal episte-mology respectively, rather than in either of the sections on skepticism. This is a perfectly reasonable way to carve things up, though it’s then largely down to cross-referencing to guide a reader interested in skepticism to these other parts of the volume. However, most of the articles lack any such references. Jonathan Kvanvig’s piece on epistemic justification discusses coherentism, foundationalism, infinit-ism, the Gettier problem, Quinean epistemology, and knowledge-first epistemol-ogy, all topics with devoted entries in the volume, but without directing the reader to any of these entries. Paul Boghossian’s discussion of epistemic relativism briefly introduces Bayesian epistemology, but there’s no reference to Stephan Hartmann’s and Jan Sprenger’s more detailed and helpful introduction later in the volume. Peter Ludlow raises the Kripkenstein paradox in his discussion of semantic knowl-edge, but the reader is left to figure out that there’s an entire article devoted to the problem later on. And so on. Now, it would obviously have involved an enormous amount of work to go through the finished articles and add substantial cross-refer-ences to each, but the benefits to students using the volume would have been tre-mendous. As it stands, most of the entries sit in curious isolation from each other. This is a shame.I also found some of the articles rather misleading on points of significance. Now, many of the articles offer a somewhat opinionated treatment of their topic, which of course raises the potential for dissent, particularly if one is a somewhat opinionated reader! But I have in mind issues that arise even once we bracket these substantial points of disagreement. I’ll give just a couple of notable examples, which I think should have been picked up at an earlier point. First, Sandy Goldberg classifies Dretske’s displaced perception model of introspection as an “internal” or “inner” perception model, along with the Lockean accounts defended by Armstrong and Lycan (310). Treating these accounts together may be fine for certain purposes, but Goldberg then presents standard objections to Lockean accounts as if they are objections to “inner perception” models in general (311). This is not so; indeed, Dretske’s account was in part fashioned to avoid precisely the objections Goldberg raises. Second, Otávio Bueno’s article on logical and mathematical knowledge fails to adequately distinguish between the ambitions of Frege’s logicism and those of its neo-logicist descendents (359-60). Bueno correctly notes that while Frege starts with the inconsistent Basic Law V, neo-logicists take Hume’s Principle as basic, and he also notes in passing that they regard it as analytic. But this marks a point of considerable importance. Frege’s claim was that Basic Law V was not merely an analytic truth, but a logical one. Neo-logicists will stress that they claim no such status for Hume’s Principle, since the ‘number of ’ operator it introduces is not 74 Book Reviews / International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 63–75 logical. Rather, they’ll claim that Hume’s Principle enjoys a claim to be analytic because it implicitly defines the ‘number of ’ operator. This crucial point goes miss-ing in Bueno’s discussion; the aim of Frege’s logicism is described as that of show-ing “that arithmetical concepts [can] be reduced to logical concepts (such as identity, predication, negation, and conjunction) plus some definitions” (359), while the neo-logicist is portrayed as offering abstraction principles such as Hume’s Principle in order to show that “the relevant properties of the objects under consid-eration can be adequately captured in terms of only logic and definitions” (360).Let us now turn to the volume’s treatment of skepticism. There are two sections devoted to skepticism, with the first on varieties of skepticism and the second on attempted responses. The second section is strikingly thin, containing only three entries: one on anti-realist responses to skepticism, one on externalist responses, and one on responses drawing on content externalism. The first and third kinds of approach were very influential in their day, but neither seems to be currently all that popular, while a number of proposals that have been widely discussed in the past ten or twenty years aren’t covered here at all. For these reasons, I wasn’t con-vinced that this section gave a particularly good overview of the present state of play. Now, some of the deficiencies of this section are partly addressed by articles elsewhere in the volume: for example, Patrick Rysiew’s excellent overview of epis-temic contextualism in the section on knowledge attributions briefly discusses contextualist responses to skepticism (525-6). But a fuller treatment would have been welcome and, as noted above, readers are left to their own devices in finding the relevant discussion. Moreover, many important proposals simply aren’t cov-ered at all. For example, aside from Richard Fumerton’s references to his own view in his article on externalist responses to skepticism, contemporary internalist responses to skepticism—Jonathan Vogel’s recent defence of inference to the best explanation, Crispin Wright’s entitlement theory, and Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, to take some notable examples—are simply ignored.The prior section on varieties of skepticism is considerably more comprehen-sive. Its opening article, Richard Bett’s overview of Pyrrhonian skepticism, offers a fascinating account of some of the internal tensions in Pyrrhonism (such as those concerning whether or not the adoption of skepticism is itself the adoption of a definite “dogmatic” stance). It also offers a detailed description of the Pyrrhonian Modes, which nicely complements the discussions of contemporary engagement with Pyrrhonian skepticism elsewhere in the volume (particularly the engagement with Agrippa’s trilemma in the section of the volume on the structure of knowl-edge and justification). The other articles in this section cover Cartesian skepti-cism, and skepticism about self-knowledge, other minds, induction, rule-following, and morality.I found Fred Dretske’s article on skepticism about self-knowledge much too nar-rowly focused to be satisfying. This is a particularly vibrant and important topic right now. There is considerable pressure on the traditional picture of the nature and scope of so-called privileged access stemming from content externalists, from Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument (briefly covered in Williamson’s article on knowledge-first epistemology (211-3)), and from the work of empirically minded philosophers such as Eric Schwitzgebel and Peter Carruthers. Despite this, the  Book Reviews / International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 63–75 75traditional picture is still pretty entrenched amongst philosophers, and it under-writes a number of significant positions in epistemology (including some, though certainly not all, of the moderate versions of foundationalism that have been defended recently). Sadly, Dretske’s article doesn’t address any of this, instead defending his own idiosyncratic form of skepticism about self-knowledge. Unlike the other articles in the volume, it seemed much more like a short research article than any kind of overview of the topic.Geoffrey Sayre-McCord structures his discussion of moral skepticism in terms of a “standard account of the nature of knowledge” (464), which curiously turns out to be the traditional tripartite account, almost universally rejected nowadays due to Russell’s and Gettier’s counterexamples. However, it’s not clear why Sayre-McCord takes the play with the JTB account to be necessary. He structures his dis-cussion of skeptics about moral knowledge by classifying them according to whether they target the requirement of truth, belief, or justification. But this way of proceeding only requires that truth, belief, and justification are necessary for knowledge, and Russell’s and Gettier’s cases only call into question the claim that they are jointly sufficient. Moreover, I worry that structuring the debate in this way only courts confusion. Sayre-McCord’s discussion of skeptics who deny that any of our moral beliefs are justified soon gets caught up in the issue of what rea-sons we have to think that our moral beliefs are “appropriately sensitive to the facts” (472). And we might think that one moral of Russell’s and Gettier’s examples is that these are distinct issues, since these examples show that one can have a belief that is true and justified but which nonetheless fails to be knowledge because it fails to be “appropriately sensitive to the facts.” The danger, then, is that structur-ing the debate in terms of the JTB account invites us to fail to clearly distinguish between two somewhat different challenges to the possibility of moral knowledge: one that calls into question whether our moral beliefs can be justified, and a sec-ond that calls into question whether they can be appropriately sensitive to the moral facts (assuming that there are such facts).Recent discussions of skepticism have been disproportionately focused on Cartesian skepticism about the external world (particularly versions resting on epistemic closure principles). Despite the issues I have raised here, the volume suc-ceeds in redressing the balance somewhat, painting skepticism as a pervasive, mul-tifaceted, and historically rich set of problems. It does also have the effect of rather reinforcing the impression that philosophers are much better at generating skepti-cal worries than they are at addressing them. Whether one finds this a disappoint-ing or scandalous conclusion will depend on one’s conception of what philosophy can hope to achieve, and what constitutes philosophical progress. For my own part, I’m inclined to think that the discussions of the varieties and subtleties of skepti-cism in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology reflect the achievements of epis-temologists, rather than their failures.Aidan McGlynnNorthern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen aidan.mcglynn@gmail.com

English

Book review of: <em>The Routledge Companion to Epistemology</em>.  Eds. Bernecker, S and Pritchard, D.  Routledge.

     Edinburgh Research Explorer                                      Book review of: The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Eds. Bernecker, S and Pritchard, D.  Routledge.Citation for published version:McGlynn, A 2013, 'Book review of: The Routledge Companion to Epistemology.  Eds. Bernecker, S andPritchard, D.  Routledge.' International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, vol 3, no. 1, pp. 72-75. DOI:10.1163/221056912X640750Digital Object Identifier (DOI):10.1163/221056912X640750Link:Link to publication record in Edinburgh Research ExplorerDocument Version:Publisher's PDF, also known as Version of recordPublished In:International Journal for the Study of SkepticismPublisher Rights Statement:© McGlynn, A. (2013). Book review of: The Routledge Companion to Epistemology.  Eds. Bernecker, S andPritchard, D.  Routledge.International Journal for the Study of Skepticism, 3(1), 72-75.10.1163/221056912X640750General rightsCopyright for the publications made accessible via the Edinburgh Research Explorer is retained by the author(s)and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise andabide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.Take down policyThe University of Edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that Edinburgh Research Explorercontent complies with UK legislation. If you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright pleasecontact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately andinvestigate your claim.Download date: 28. Apr. 201772 Book Reviews / International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 63–75 The Routledge Companion to Epistemology. Edited by Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard. London: Routledge, 2011. Pp. xxiii + 911. ISBN 978-0-415-96219-3.The core remit of contemporary epistemology at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century remains much as it was at the end of the twentieth: untangling the knot of issues concerning the nature of knowledge, the structure of justifica-tion, the threat of skepticism, the clash between externalism and internalism, the nature and scope of the a priori and privileged self-knowledge, the plausibility and epistemological significance of closure principles and contextualism, and so on. Superficial acquaintance with contemporary epistemology might suggest that there isn’t really an awful lot more to it than that. This wide-ranging, comprehen-sive, and accessible overview of epistemology should help to dispel this myth once and for all. The traditional concerns are very much on show here, naturally, but The Routledge Companion to Epistemology succeeds in showing that this is only one part of the picture.The volume consists of 78 short articles, written by contributors who have more often than not played a definitive role in shaping the topic they are charged with introducing. At over 900 pages, it is clearly the product of an extraordinary effort on the part of all of those involved, particularly the editors. The sheer size of the vol-ume means that I can only address a small fraction of its contents. I will begin with some general remarks on the volume as a whole, and then focus the remainder of my discussion on its treatment of skepticism. Responding to the suggestion that the news should give just as much attention to all the buses that make it safely to their destinations as to the one that crashes, Mark Corrigan very reasonably points out that this would take forever. For the same reason, when reviewing a volume of this size it is inevitable that one ends up spending a disproportionate amount of time pointing out things that could perhaps have been done better. But as the anal-ogy suggests, we shouldn’t let this blind us to the countless things it gets right.With this in mind, let me note two particular strengths of the volume. First, the volume boasts an unusually comprehensive and helpful section on the history of epistemology. What makes this so useful is not just that it covers a number of fig-ures often neglected in this kind of volume (for instance, Leibniz, Carnap, and Austin), but also that so many of these essays manage to get behind the caricatures that figure in contemporary debates. I don’t mean to suggest that such caricatures have no place or play no useful role, but only that we cannot allow ourselves to lose sight of the fact that these historical figures were often responding to pressures other than those that animate contemporary epistemologists, and that their views are frequently considerably more nuanced than they are given credit for. The his-tory of epistemology section of this volume is a significant contribution to ensur-ing we don’t lose sight of this (though I cannot help noting the striking absence of an entry on G. E. Moore, and the striking paucity of discussion of Wittgenstein in Marie McGinn’s entry on Wittgenstein). Second, as mentioned already, the vol-ume’s breadth is impressive. Of particular note is its coverage of recent important movements such as social epistemology, feminist epistemology, and experimental epistemology, as well as the entire section it devotes to formal epistemology.© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2013 DOI 10.1163/221056912X640750 Book Reviews / International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 63–75 73Perhaps the principal weakness of the volume is the inconsistency in cross-ref-erencing. Some of the articles are filled with references to elsewhere in the volume, where issues discussed in passing are taken up more fully (for instance, Timothy McGrew’s piece on evidence is exemplary in this respect). Such cross-references are enormously helpful to someone trying to gain a clear view of how the different issues in epistemology fit together. And they are particularly crucial in a volume like this, where there is an inevitable degree of arbitrariness concerning how the articles are organized into sections. For example, the articles on contextualism and closure principles fall in the sections on knowledge attributions and formal episte-mology respectively, rather than in either of the sections on skepticism. This is a perfectly reasonable way to carve things up, though it’s then largely down to cross-referencing to guide a reader interested in skepticism to these other parts of the volume. However, most of the articles lack any such references. Jonathan Kvanvig’s piece on epistemic justification discusses coherentism, foundationalism, infinit-ism, the Gettier problem, Quinean epistemology, and knowledge-first epistemol-ogy, all topics with devoted entries in the volume, but without directing the reader to any of these entries. Paul Boghossian’s discussion of epistemic relativism briefly introduces Bayesian epistemology, but there’s no reference to Stephan Hartmann’s and Jan Sprenger’s more detailed and helpful introduction later in the volume. Peter Ludlow raises the Kripkenstein paradox in his discussion of semantic knowl-edge, but the reader is left to figure out that there’s an entire article devoted to the problem later on. And so on. Now, it would obviously have involved an enormous amount of work to go through the finished articles and add substantial cross-refer-ences to each, but the benefits to students using the volume would have been tre-mendous. As it stands, most of the entries sit in curious isolation from each other. This is a shame.I also found some of the articles rather misleading on points of significance. Now, many of the articles offer a somewhat opinionated treatment of their topic, which of course raises the potential for dissent, particularly if one is a somewhat opinionated reader! But I have in mind issues that arise even once we bracket these substantial points of disagreement. I’ll give just a couple of notable examples, which I think should have been picked up at an earlier point. First, Sandy Goldberg classifies Dretske’s displaced perception model of introspection as an “internal” or “inner” perception model, along with the Lockean accounts defended by Armstrong and Lycan (310). Treating these accounts together may be fine for certain purposes, but Goldberg then presents standard objections to Lockean accounts as if they are objections to “inner perception” models in general (311). This is not so; indeed, Dretske’s account was in part fashioned to avoid precisely the objections Goldberg raises. Second, Otávio Bueno’s article on logical and mathematical knowledge fails to adequately distinguish between the ambitions of Frege’s logicism and those of its neo-logicist descendents (359-60). Bueno correctly notes that while Frege starts with the inconsistent Basic Law V, neo-logicists take Hume’s Principle as basic, and he also notes in passing that they regard it as analytic. But this marks a point of considerable importance. Frege’s claim was that Basic Law V was not merely an analytic truth, but a logical one. Neo-logicists will stress that they claim no such status for Hume’s Principle, since the ‘number of ’ operator it introduces is not 74 Book Reviews / International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 63–75 logical. Rather, they’ll claim that Hume’s Principle enjoys a claim to be analytic because it implicitly defines the ‘number of ’ operator. This crucial point goes miss-ing in Bueno’s discussion; the aim of Frege’s logicism is described as that of show-ing “that arithmetical concepts [can] be reduced to logical concepts (such as identity, predication, negation, and conjunction) plus some definitions” (359), while the neo-logicist is portrayed as offering abstraction principles such as Hume’s Principle in order to show that “the relevant properties of the objects under consid-eration can be adequately captured in terms of only logic and definitions” (360).Let us now turn to the volume’s treatment of skepticism. There are two sections devoted to skepticism, with the first on varieties of skepticism and the second on attempted responses. The second section is strikingly thin, containing only three entries: one on anti-realist responses to skepticism, one on externalist responses, and one on responses drawing on content externalism. The first and third kinds of approach were very influential in their day, but neither seems to be currently all that popular, while a number of proposals that have been widely discussed in the past ten or twenty years aren’t covered here at all. For these reasons, I wasn’t con-vinced that this section gave a particularly good overview of the present state of play. Now, some of the deficiencies of this section are partly addressed by articles elsewhere in the volume: for example, Patrick Rysiew’s excellent overview of epis-temic contextualism in the section on knowledge attributions briefly discusses contextualist responses to skepticism (525-6). But a fuller treatment would have been welcome and, as noted above, readers are left to their own devices in finding the relevant discussion. Moreover, many important proposals simply aren’t cov-ered at all. For example, aside from Richard Fumerton’s references to his own view in his article on externalist responses to skepticism, contemporary internalist responses to skepticism—Jonathan Vogel’s recent defence of inference to the best explanation, Crispin Wright’s entitlement theory, and Jim Pryor’s dogmatism, to take some notable examples—are simply ignored.The prior section on varieties of skepticism is considerably more comprehen-sive. Its opening article, Richard Bett’s overview of Pyrrhonian skepticism, offers a fascinating account of some of the internal tensions in Pyrrhonism (such as those concerning whether or not the adoption of skepticism is itself the adoption of a definite “dogmatic” stance). It also offers a detailed description of the Pyrrhonian Modes, which nicely complements the discussions of contemporary engagement with Pyrrhonian skepticism elsewhere in the volume (particularly the engagement with Agrippa’s trilemma in the section of the volume on the structure of knowl-edge and justification). The other articles in this section cover Cartesian skepti-cism, and skepticism about self-knowledge, other minds, induction, rule-following, and morality.I found Fred Dretske’s article on skepticism about self-knowledge much too nar-rowly focused to be satisfying. This is a particularly vibrant and important topic right now. There is considerable pressure on the traditional picture of the nature and scope of so-called privileged access stemming from content externalists, from Williamson’s anti-luminosity argument (briefly covered in Williamson’s article on knowledge-first epistemology (211-3)), and from the work of empirically minded philosophers such as Eric Schwitzgebel and Peter Carruthers. Despite this, the  Book Reviews / International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 3 (2013) 63–75 75traditional picture is still pretty entrenched amongst philosophers, and it under-writes a number of significant positions in epistemology (including some, though certainly not all, of the moderate versions of foundationalism that have been defended recently). Sadly, Dretske’s article doesn’t address any of this, instead defending his own idiosyncratic form of skepticism about self-knowledge. Unlike the other articles in the volume, it seemed much more like a short research article than any kind of overview of the topic.Geoffrey Sayre-McCord structures his discussion of moral skepticism in terms of a “standard account of the nature of knowledge” (464), which curiously turns out to be the traditional tripartite account, almost universally rejected nowadays due to Russell’s and Gettier’s counterexamples. However, it’s not clear why Sayre-McCord takes the play with the JTB account to be necessary. He structures his dis-cussion of skeptics about moral knowledge by classifying them according to whether they target the requirement of truth, belief, or justification. But this way of proceeding only requires that truth, belief, and justification are necessary for knowledge, and Russell’s and Gettier’s cases only call into question the claim that they are jointly sufficient. Moreover, I worry that structuring the debate in this way only courts confusion. Sayre-McCord’s discussion of skeptics who deny that any of our moral beliefs are justified soon gets caught up in the issue of what rea-sons we have to think that our moral beliefs are “appropriately sensitive to the facts” (472). And we might think that one moral of Russell’s and Gettier’s examples is that these are distinct issues, since these examples show that one can have a belief that is true and justified but which nonetheless fails to be knowledge because it fails to be “appropriately sensitive to the facts.” The danger, then, is that structur-ing the debate in terms of the JTB account invites us to fail to clearly distinguish between two somewhat different challenges to the possibility of moral knowledge: one that calls into question whether our moral beliefs can be justified, and a sec-ond that calls into question whether they can be appropriately sensitive to the moral facts (assuming that there are such facts).Recent discussions of skepticism have been disproportionately focused on Cartesian skepticism about the external world (particularly versions resting on epistemic closure principles). Despite the issues I have raised here, the volume suc-ceeds in redressing the balance somewhat, painting skepticism as a pervasive, mul-tifaceted, and historically rich set of problems. It does also have the effect of rather reinforcing the impression that philosophers are much better at generating skepti-cal worries than they are at addressing them. Whether one finds this a disappoint-ing or scandalous conclusion will depend on one’s conception of what philosophy can hope to achieve, and what constitutes philosophical progress. For my own part, I’m inclined to think that the discussions of the varieties and subtleties of skepti-cism in The Routledge Companion to Epistemology reflect the achievements of epis-temologists, rather than their failures.Aidan McGlynnNorthern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen aidan.mcglynn@gmail.com

Aidan McGlynn

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Book review of: <em>The Routledge Companion to Epistemology</em>. Eds. Bernecker, S and Pritchard, D. Routledge.

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