ABSTRACT
Radical skepticism is the thought that we might know nothing about the so-called external world—either what it is like or whether it exists. Most contemporary epistemological proposals are concessive to skepticism in that they grant to the skeptic that unless we can demonstrate that we are not massively deceived, we can, at best, have knowledge of how things appear to us. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, thinks that radical skepticism is an illusion. The chapter has two main aims: (1) to explain why Wittgenstein believes this and (2) to show that Wittgenstein’s rejection of the idea that it makes sense to ‘ground’ the background does not imply that Wittgenstein is a friend of anti-realism. Rather, Wittgenstein is endorsing a “realism without empiricism”—a modest form of realism that eschews various empiricist dogmas, such as the Reasons Identity Thesis, that is, the thought that one’s perceptual reasons in both the good epistemic case and the bad one are the same and can never give one access to how things actually are. This will enable one to see why accepting that what stands fast cannot itself be either true or false does not threaten to undermine our epistemic practices.
