Memory Scepticism and Particularism

Abstract

Memory sceptics typically argue that we don’t possess memory knowledge because our memory beliefs are underdetermined by memorial evidence. In response, the particularist anti-sceptical proposal argues that our anti-sceptical beliefs can be justified by our case-intuitions that identify certain beliefs as paradigmatic cases of knowledge. Those case-intuitions, as Michael Bergmann recently argued, should overweigh our principle-intuitions supporting scepticism-inducing epistemic principles. However, Bergmann’s proposal is dialectically ineffective in the absence of substantial reasons for prioritising our anti-sceptical case-intuitions over rival principle-intuitions. To overcome this defect, a transcendental particularist argument against scepticism is defended in this paper, which provides empirically supported reasons for favouring our anti-sceptical case-intuitions. Drawing on prototype theory and exemplar theory in cognitive linguistics, I argue that the conceptual categorisation of ‘memory knowledge’ is premised on its paradigmatic cases that we possess. Therefore, the sceptic’s categorisation of memory knowledge is groundless and the sceptical argument is inherently self-undermining.