UC Irvine

When philosophers consider Hilary Putnam’s contribution to the topic of radical scepticism, they usually think of his famous content externalist argument about brains-in-a-vat. Putnam also made more general forays into this debate, however, not least by bringing to bear a kind of occasion-sensitivity about meaning that he derives from the work of Stanley Cavell, and which has its roots in the work of Wittgenstein and J. L. Austin. It is argued that this meaning-centered approach offers only a partial handle on the problem of radical scepticism, and that it needs to be supplemented with a further idea that we also get from Wittgenstein. This is the distinctive thesis about the structure of rational evaluation, which has the notion of a hinge commitment at its heart, that is found in his final notebooks (published as On Certainty). While Putnam never considers this anti-sceptical aspect of Wittgenstein’s thought in any detail, it is maintained that embracing it would be in the spirit of Putnam’s general Cavellian approach to radical scepticism.