Abstract of the
Dissertation
Varieties of Naturalized Epistemology:
Criticisms and Alternatives
Benjamin Bayer
There
is a widespread belief among intellectuals that the domain of philosophy
shrinks as the domain of the special sciences expands, and that someday,
science might swallow up philosophy entirely. Some philosophical naturalists think
that this day may have already arrived. These naturalists believe that philosophy's
methodology should be the same as that of natural science; they imply that
philosophy has no distinctive "armchair" methodology of its own.
To
determine whether these naturalists are right, one useful approach is to
examine proposals for naturalistic (or "naturalized") epistemology, the recent attempt to transform theory of knowledge
into a branch of natural science. In Western philosophy, epistemology has long
been considered one of the most distinctively philosophic subjects. If even it
can be naturalized, there may be little subject matter left for philosophy to
call its own.
Traditional
epistemologists object to naturalism on the grounds that it dispenses with the
distinctively philosophical content of epistemology. In this dissertation, I
argue that traditional epistemologists are correct to reject naturalism, but that
new arguments are needed to show why they are correct. I establish my thesis
first by critiquing two prominent varieties of naturalism—which I call
"optimistic" and "pessimistic"—and then by offering a proposal for how a
renewed non-naturalistic epistemology must move forward. In essence, I argue
that naturalism fails because it neglects the possibility of a form of
epistemological foundationalism which most traditional epistemologists have
also neglected.
My
first chapter presents a new taxonomy of naturalized epistemologies, dividing
them first according to the goals they seek to achieve ("optimistic" and
"pessimistic"), and then according to the methodologies used to achieve them. The
first variety of naturalism, "optimistic naturalism," attempts to use
scientific methods to give positive answers to traditional epistemological
questions. For example, optimistic naturalists like Goldman, Kitcher, and Kornblith propose
using results from psychology or evolutionary biology to refute the skeptic and
show that our beliefs are justified. "Pessimistic naturalism"—what I call
Quine's view—takes for granted that our beliefs cannot be logically justified,
traditionally or naturalistically, and instead offers a pragmatic account of
the development of our theory of the world.
In
my second chapter, however, I argue that the optimistic project of naturalizing
epistemic normativity is more difficult than it might originally seem. In this
chapter, I show how some of naturalism's most basic principles thwart the
achievement of traditional epistemological goals. Quine's principles—the underdetermination of theory by evidence, the indeterminacy
of translation, and extensionalism—are regarded as paradigmatically
naturalistic if anything is. Drawing on the example of Jaegwon Kim's critique
of Quine, I show how any naturalist (or non-naturalist) taking these principles
for granted cannot show our beliefs to be justified.
My
third chapter develops a new argument against optimistic naturalized
epistemology that is independent of the traditional concern about epistemic
normativity. I suggest that a deeper problem is with the naturalists' use of
the concept of "belief." I argue that naturalistic philosophy of mind, while
perhaps acceptable for other purposes, does not deliver a concept of "belief"
consistent with the constraints and needs of naturalized epistemology. I achieve
this by offering a taxonomy of different methodologies
of naturalizing "belief," and show how they either require appeal to
substantive semantic or intensional concepts at odds with naturalism, or fail
to deliver a concept of "belief" usable by an epistemology of advanced,
scientific beliefs.
In
my fourth chapter, I will look at the attempt by pessimistic naturalists to deflate the concept of belief, as
illustrated by the simulation theory of Robert Gordon. I argue that simulation
theory cannot itself be naturalized because it cannot be squared with evidence
from developmental psychology or account for the explanatory power of folk
psychology without appeal to explicit mentalistic
concepts. In particular, I show how implicit belief attributions via simulation
rely on explicit theories of knowledge. This helps undermine one brand of
pessimistic epistemology (Michael Williams' epistemological deflationism)
which relies on the claim that the concept "knowledge" has no pre-philosophical
theoretical significance.
My
fifth chapter describes the project of the remaining pessimistic naturalized
epistemology, Quine's. I examine the debate surrounding Quine's proposal to
respond to skepticism by showing that skeptical doubts are themselves
scientific. I argue that Quine's strategy is not meant to answer skepticism by
showing our beliefs to be logically justified after all, but by showing that they
are at the very least pragmatically justified. Naturalized epistemology, then, concerns
itself with identifying the various steps (justified or otherwise) by which
human subjects develop their current pragmatically successful scientific
theory. But I question whether a pragmatic account of justification can handle
responses from more radical pragmatists, who see no pragmatic basis for
privileging natural science over other forms of human discourse.
Whatever
we say about the adequacy of pragmatic naturalism, my sixth and final chapter
argues that it lacks adequate motivation. The putative motivation for pursuing
a pragmatic rather than a traditional program stems from the alleged failure of
foundationalism and the inevitability of indeterminacy of translation
(underpinned by the underdetermination thesis). First, I argue that looking at
the wider context of scientific practice challenges the underdetermination
thesis, because it thesis relies on a crude and scientifically unrealistic hypothetico-deductivist view of confirmation (the view that
hypotheses are always and only confirmed by their empirical consequences). I
show how this anti-skeptical strategy can be generalized to resolve other
skeptical problems (at least in part): whenever skeptics themselves assume
points of science for the sake of reductio
ad absurdum, anti-skeptics have the logical right to make appeal to further
science to show how the reductio does
not go through. I argue, for instance, that the classical problem of induction
can be addressed by appeal to a material rather than a formal theory of
induction, which recognizes the variety of methods of confirmation practiced by
scientists. Second, I show how regress problems about inductive justification
can be resolved in light of evidence from psychology regarding perception and
concept-formation which point to the possibility of a new kind of
foundationalism. At the same time, I argue that skeptical problems about
epistemological foundations are more philosophical and less scientific than
Quine seems to allow. This means we cannot fully generalize his anti-skeptical,
but it also means that the proposal to make philosophy continuous with natural
science is not consistent with the fact that naturalism itself arises as a
pragmatic solution to problems generated by non-naturalistic philosophic
presuppositions.