ABSTRACT
A fundamental component of philosophy is its engagement with paradoxes. What is distinctive of paradoxes is that they seem to naturally arise out of our own pre-theoretical commitments and thereby expose a deep tension within our own conceptual framework, such that they appear to demand the revision of our natural ways of thinking. One way of responding to a paradox – the overriding strategy – involves embracing such revisionism, and thus in the process discarding the conceptual framework that generated the paradox. A second style of response – the undercutting strategy – involves instead demonstrating that the paradox is illusory, in that our pre-theoretical commitments are not in fact in conflict after all. Both strategies inevitably generate some degree of cognitive dissonance, whereby one’s commitment to the solution to the paradox sits side-by-side with a certain unease regarding one’s overall rational situation. Indeed, this dissonance is part of the phenomenology of our philosophical engagement with paradoxes. Taking the putative paradox of radical skepticism as an example, an exploration is offered of how even a fully adequate response to this puzzle – even one cast along undercutting lines – could nonetheless be compatible with a certain kind of ambivalence about the solution posed. This ambivalence is explained in terms of the notion of epistemic vertigo, in that it arises when one attempts a particular kind of detached perspective on one’s ordinary practices (when one philosophically “ascends,” as it were), and which is in addition a response to one’s overall rational position which is in a sense phobic. Ultimately, it is argued that this particular kind of ambivalence is not to be thought of as involving conflicting beliefs, in that the propositional attitude in play is not one of belief but rather an alief. Finally, a case is offered for thinking that this phenomenon is not restricted to the epistemic case, and hence that there might be a general phenomenon of philosophical vertigo.
