Good Quote #4
[You can find Moser’s essay in Ernest Sosa and His Critics (edited by John Greco) where it figures as chapter 12 and takes up pages 135 to 144]
Skeptics who question the reliability of belief-forming sources should not thereby question the reliability of all truth-indicators. They should not call for a non-question-begging truth-indicator for visual beliefs, for example, while calling into question all truth-indicators. That would be to demand with one hand what has already been taken away with the other. A better metaphor: that would be to demand that we stand somewhere while we are not allowed to stand anywhere. Such a demand would suffer from a kind of incoherence: demand incoherence, we might say. Skeptics could coherently question the reliability of all truth-indicators (available to humans), but then they could not coherently demand a non-question-begging truth-indicator from their interlocutors. Necessarily, if all truth-indicators are under question, then none will be non-question-begging. That much is analytically true, and importantly analytically true. The important lesson is that the non-question-begging challenge cannot coherently come with unrestricted questioning of truth-indicators. Skeptics, in their skeptical zeal, have not always taken this lesson to heart. So we do well to remind them of the real threat of demand incoherence in their position. (141–142)
The metaphor I thought of long ago (the sentiment of which Moser captures in the above quote) is a skeptic is demanding us to get us to get his head out of the sand which we can only do if his head is already first out of the sand.
