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pragmatist comments on [Poll] Less Wrong and Mainstream Philosophy: How Different are We? - Less Wrong
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Non-skeptical realism: A mind-independent reality exists, and we have epistemic access to its structure. We can acquire substantial knowledge about reality.
Skepticism: A mind-independent reality exists, but we lack epistemic access to it. We cannot know the nature of reality. We only have access to how things appear to us, and we should take seriously the possibility that this is very different from how things actually are.
Idealism: Reality is not mind-independent. It is either wholly or partly mentally constituted. We can know about reality because there is not much (or no) distance between how things appear to us and how things actually are.
I'm not sure how well this fits with fallibilist accounts of knowledge (e.g. probabilism, Bayesianism). A Bayesian doesn't "rule out" possibilities when setting probabilities strictly between 0 or 1, so this technically looks like "skepticism". But if I claim that I'm 99.9999% certain that a mind-independent reality exists and I have substantial knowledge about it, that really doesn't sound very skeptical!
You can read "rule out" as "no longer take seriously". The probability of a hypothesis doesn't have to go down all the way to 0 before I stop taking it seriously. I've edited the original description to reflect this.
Thanks for this clarification. I was going for "lean towards non-skeptical realism" but would say "accept non-skeptical realism" under your new formulation. I don't rule out a simulation hypothesis, for instance, but can't say I give it serious probability weighting. (Bostrom considers it one of three disjuncts, and I can give reasons to assign the other disjuncts much higher probability.)
Exactly what I was going to say.
Three problems:
This seems to entail the absurd proposition "p, but we have no way of knowing that p". I.e., it's not clear how to cash out 'epistemic access' in a way that allows us to know that there is a mind-independent world, without knowing anything further about that world. This uncharitably commits skepticism to an internal tension, if not an outright contradiction.
"We only have access to how things appear to us", inasmuch as it implies "We have access to how things appear to us", is itself a substantive doctrine about how reality breaks down, and one skepticism need not endorse. So this uncharitably assigns certain doctrinal commitments to skeptics as a group.
This reading assumes that skeptics are realists of some sort, or that they privilege realism as a hypothesis over idealism. The original question does not state this, so idealistic or neutral skeptics may be unfairly biased by this interpretation.
'Mentally constituted' is vague. If this just means that part of reality is mental (or irreducibly mental), then it seems to treat dualism as a form of idealism, which is very nonstandard.
Fair enough. I should have said something like: "A mind-independent reality might exist, and if it does then we lack epistemic access to it."