Reduction and Elimination in Philosophy and the Sciences

5. Conclusion
In this paper I did not address the debate between contextualism
and sensitive invariantism. This will be an important
issue when it comes to deciding whose position is
decisive for the evaluation of knowledge claims—the ascriber’s
or the subject’s. It will have to be discussed elsewhere.
I did argue for the idea that Wittgenstein’s Hinge
Propositions support the thesis that the truth of a given
knowledge claim can vary due to factors other than its
overt variables. It could be shown how the apparent
dogmatic deadlock between sceptics and Mooreans can
be avoided by relativizing the truth of knowledge claims to
sets of quasi-foundationalist HP. This move does not result
in relativism, because it was indicated that the higher order
question of which set of HP is preferable can be linked to
an externalism of justification. A brief recapitulation of
Common Ground then gave an idea of how to systematize
the account in conversational contexts and explain the
apparently contradicting intuitions about many of our
knowledge claims.
336
Scepticism, Wittgenstein's Hinge Propositions, and Common Ground — Erik Stei
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