Demon Skepticism and Non-Veridical Concepts

In The Matrix, the celebrated movie premised on a brains-in-a-vat scenario, there is an interesting conversation among “the rebels”, i.e., persons living in the devastated physical world of the 22 nd century, who originally acquired their concepts in the virtual reality of “the Matrix”, a computer program feeding artificially generated humans, nurtured in complete sensory isolation from physical reality, the virtual experiences of 21 st century America as we know it. The conversation concerns what the artificial peptide goo served for dinner tastes like. The suggestions range from runny egg to Tasty Wheat to snot. But it soon turns out that the main concern is not that one of the interlocutors makes an error in judgment in the sense that what he deems, say, Tasty Wheat taste is really oatmeal, or chicken, or tuna taste. Rather, the concern is that the interlocutors literally have no idea of Tasty Wheat taste or chicken taste or tuna taste, or of genuine chicken or real tuna, for that matter. Having acquired their concept of, say, chickens in the virtual reality of the Matrix, in complete cognitive isolation from a real world that at least used to be populated by real chickens, this concept can only represent the virtual objects of this virtual reality, whatever those are, but not the real objects of physical reality.