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expressed subjunctively. His belief is sensitive to the facts, and so we
can say of the believer that if the proposition were true he would
believe it, and if it were not he would not.
Now this account of knowledge seems to require us to capitulate
to the skeptic, since the whole point of his story about the tank and
the psychologists was to show that we might think that we were now
reading or writing even if we were not. Our belief that we are not in
the tank does not" track" the fact that we are not, even if we are not ;
the story actually puts us in the tank while being stimulated to
believe that we are in our study reading. So even if we were in this
tank we should think that we were not. Therefore, on the account of
knowledge developed by Nozick, we do not know that we are not
now in the tank.
Nevertheless, says Nozick, we can know that we are reading or
writing when we are reading or writing. How is this? It is because
the belief that we are reading or writing may "track" the fact that
we are doing so . One would think, of course, that the subjunctive
"If
we were not reading or writing we should not believe that we
were " must fail, because we should believe it if suitably stimulated
in the tank. But this is what Nozick, drawing on recent discussions
of the truth of conditional statements, denies . Suppose, to take an
analogy by way of illustration, I say that if I had not expected to
meet a certain person at a party I should not have come to it. I cer–
tainly imply that in some conditions, lacking the expectation, I
should have stayed away. But what if I had been threatened with a
penalty of death for non-attendance? Surely I should have come.
What would have happened in these circumstances, remote from the
actual situation, does not affect the truth of what I said. Along simi–
lar lines Nozick argues that facts about what would happen if there
were these psychologists and their tanks does not affect the truth of
the proposition that I should not think I was reading if I were not
(now) reading. So I can perfectly well know that I am.
Apart from the intrinsic interest of this part of
Philosophical
Explanations,
it illustrates in a fascinating way the immediate rele–
vance of academic-seeming discussions to skeptical doubts, which,
in one form or another, might strike anyone of a speculative turn of
mind. Moreover, Nozick here writes with such clarity and precision
that a lack of previous knowledge of the subject would not rule out
complete understanding. Anyone who seriously wants to know what
philosophy is like nowadays in those parts of the world where the
