What's Wrong with Moore's Argument?

1 Some Diagnoses Moore looked at his hands and argued: (1) Here are two hands. (2) If hands exist, then there is an external world. (3) So there is an external world. 1 Something about this argument sounds funny. As we'll see, though, it takes some care to identify exactly what Moore has done wrong. I will assume that Moore knows premise (2) to be true. One could inquire into how he knows it, and whether that knowledge can be defeated; but I won't. I'll focus instead on what epistemic relations Moore has to premise (1) and to his conclusion (3). It may matter which epistemic relations we choose to consider. Some philosophers will diagnose Moore's argument using Contextualist machinery. They'll say: In some contexts, it'd be true to count Moore as knowing he has hands and that there is an external world. In more restrictive contexts, it would not. Moore's argument sounds funny because Moore plays fast and loose with the context. His straightforward assertion ''Here are two hands'' invites us to occupy a lax context; but one would only be concerned to argue that there's an external world in a more restrictive context, where the existence of the external world is an open question. If these philosophers are right to count 'knows' as context-sensitive, 2 then they're probably right in their complaint that Moore's performance plays