  Although, as I have indicated, Moore did not intend his ‘proof’ as a refutation of skepticism, he did frequently argue against skeptical views; and in his early writings, despite the passage quoted just now, he does sometimes give the impression that he thinks one can refute skepticism by simply bringing forward a straightforward case of knowledge, such as ‘I know that this is a pencil’. But on examination it turns out that his strategy here is more subtle; he wants to argue that we get our understanding of knowledge primarily through straightforward cases of this kind, and thus that skeptical arguments are self-undermining: for, on the one hand, they rely on general principles about the limits of knowledge and thus assume some understanding of knowledge but, on the other hand, they undermine this understanding by implying that there are no such straightforward cases of it. The force of arguments of this kind is, however, disputable, since the skeptic can always present his argument as a reductio ad absurdum of the possibility of knowledge; and the same point applies to Moore's other attempts to convict the skeptic of some kind of pragmatic incoherence.