SCHAFFER’S DEMON by NATHAN BALLANTYNE AND IAN EVANS

Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – which he calls the debasing demon – that apparently threatens all of our purported knowledge. We show that any debasing skeptical argument must attack the justification condition and can do so only if a plausible thesis about justification is false. Jonathan Schaffer (2010) has summoned a new sort of demon – what he calls the debasing demon – that apparently threatens all of our purported knowledge. Schaffer’s incantation begins with three plausible principles (p. 232): 1. Knowledge requires the production of belief, properly based on the evidence. 2. Any belief can be produced on an improper basis. 3. It is always possible, when a belief is produced on an improper basis, for it to seem later as if one had produced a belief properly based on the evidence. These principles make possible Schaffer’s debasing demon – a demon that can systematically ensure all of our beliefs are improperly based (by 2), though they appear to be properly based (by 3). The demon can eliminate our knowledge (by 1) – without making any of our beliefs false. ‘The debasing demon threatens universal doubt,’ says Schaffer, ‘in the sense of threatening knowledge of any proposition p’ (p. 228). Shall we fear the debasing demon? Anthony Brueckner (2011) claims this demon is a threat only if an implausible epistemic thesis, the ‘KK’ thesis, is true. But Brueckner takes it for granted that debasing skepticism must go through a particular argument schema. We establish a stronger result here. To begin with, we show that any debasing skeptical argument must attack the justification condition (§1). This result brings an important consequence: debasing skepticism attacks justification only if a plausible Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 94 (2013) ••–•• DOI: 10.1111/papq.12013 © 2013 The Authors Pacific Philosophical Quarterly © 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd & University of Southern California.