VARIETIES OF NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY:
CRITICISMS AND ALTERNATIVES
BY
BENJAMIN JOHN BAYER
B.A.,
M.A.,
DISSERTATION
Submitted
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of Ph.D. in Philosophy
in the
ABSTRACT
“Naturalized epistemology”—the recent
attempt to transform the theory of knowledge into a branch of natural
science—is often criticized for dispensing with the distinctively philosophical
content of epistemology. In this dissertation, I argue that epistemologists are
correct to reject naturalism, but that new arguments are needed to show why
this is so. I establish my thesis first by evaluating two prominent varieties
of naturalism— “optimistic” and “pessimistic”—and then by offering a proposal
for how a new version of non-naturalistic epistemology must move forward.
“Optimistic naturalism” attempts to use scientific methods to give positive
answers to traditional epistemological questions. Epistemologists, for example,
are urged to draw on psychology and evolutionary biology in order to show our
beliefs are justified. I argue that this project fails. First, the naturalist’s
thesis that theory is underdetermined by evidence poses difficulties for the
optimist’s attempt to show that our beliefs are
justified, even according to naturalized standards. Second, while critics
usually contest naturalists’ logical right to use the concept of normative justification, I suggest that a deeper
problem is with the naturalists’ use of the concept of belief. 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. “Pessimistic
naturalism”—Quine’s project—takes it for granted that “belief” is problematic
and logical justification elusive, and instead offers a pragmatic account of
the development of our theory of the world. This project, while deeply
unsatisfactory to the traditional epistemologist, also faces the challenge of
privileging scientific discourse over other pragmatically successful modes of
discourse. Whatever its merits, we can undermine its motivation by challenging
the underdetermination thesis it rests on. We can do this by appealing to facts
about scientific practice that undermine the conception of confirmation driving
the thesis, by appealing to other facts about scientific practice, and by
challenging some philosophical preconceptions, in order to make room for a new
brand of inductivist foundationalism.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Writing my dissertation took far
longer than it should have, but not because this
dissertation took so long. The problem was the three or four previous
dissertation topics, none of which ever got off the ground. So the first person
I would like to thank is Gary Ebbs, who saw me through all of these many topic
changes, even after he left UIUC for another school. His knowledge and interest
in Quine is what inspired and enabled the present project. I would also like to
thank Jonathan Waskan in particular, for providing lots of useful and detailed
feedback, especially during the last year in
Ben
Bayer
July
5, 2007
TABLE OF
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1: CONCEPTUAL AND DOCTRINAL PROJECTS IN
NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY 1
........... The
variety of conceptual and doctrinal projects............................................................ 2
........... Optimistic
naturalized epistemology.............................................................................. 4
....................... Analytic
naturalized epistemology.................................................................... 4
....................... Two-factor
semantical naturalized epistemology............................................... 6
....................... Epistemic
supervenience naturalized epistemology........................................... 11
........... Pessimistic
naturalized epistemology........................................................................... 13
....................... Deflationary
naturalized epistemology............................................................. 13
....................... Quinean
naturalized epistemology................................................................... 17
........... A
representative objection to naturalism: the normativity objection................................ 19
........... Outline
of the dissertation.......................................................................................... 27
CHAPTER 2: KIM’S CRITIQUE OF QUINE’S NATURALIZED
EPISTEMOLOGY............................................................................................................... 31
........... “Epistemology
naturalized” in brief............................................................................. 33
........... Kim’s
non-Quinean alternatives to deductivist foundationalism..................................... 36
........... Kim’s
alternative methodology: epistemic supervenience............................................. 43
........... Quinean
doubts about supervenience on beliefs........................................................... 50
........... Conclusion................................................................................................................ 52
CHAPTER 3: NATURALIZING BELIEF FOR NATURALIZED
EPISTEMOLOGY............................................................................................................... 55
........... Why
naturalized epistemology needs naturalized beliefs............................................... 58
........... Belief
naturalization proposals.................................................................................... 64
....................... Analytic
naturalism....................................................................................... 65
....................... Conceptually-regulated
scientific naturalism.................................................... 75
....................... Conceptually
indifferent scientific naturalism................................................... 93
........... Conclusion.............................................................................................................. 111
CHAPTER 4: DEFLATIONARY NATURALISM ABOUT BELIEF: THE
CASE OF SIMULATION THEORY 113
........... Theory-theory
vs. simulation theory.......................................................................... 115
........... Preliminary
challenges from false belief task evidence............................................... 118
........... The
problem of adjustment....................................................................................... 123
........... The
problem of epistemological adjustment and the complexity of simulation
........... theory..................................................................................................................... 126
........... Conclusion:
Implications for deflationary naturalized epistemology.............................. 132
........... Chapter
appendix: Gordon on reason explanations and counterfactuals........................ 137
CHAPTER 5: QUINE’S ACQUIESCENCE IN SKEPTICISM............................................ 141
........... Quinean
skepticism via underdetermination and inscrutability?.................................... 144
........... Quinean
responses to skeptical challenges................................................................ 151
........... Pragmatism
and naturalism...................................................................................... 159
........... Does
pragmatism support naturalism?....................................................................... 168
........... Proximate
sources of inscrutability and indeterminacy................................................ 172
........... Conclusion:
Reciprocal containment revisited............................................................ 181
CHAPTER 6: ESCAPE FROM THE HUMEAN PREDICAMENT..................................... 186
........... Understanding
the scientific roots of the underdetermination thesis............................. 189
........... Undermining
underdetermination: the scientific roots in context.................................. 197
....................... Premise
1: Are there always empirically equivalent rivals?............................. 197
....................... Premise
2: Equal deductive confirmation? .................................................... 200
....................... Premise
2: Alternative sources of empirical confirmation?.............................. 204
....................... Premise
2: Do empirical consequences always confirm?................................ 209
....................... Concluding
notes on pragmatism and confirmation......................................... 213
........... A
scientific solution to Humean doubts?.................................................................... 217
........... Clearing
the naturalistic ground for inductivist foundations.......................................... 223
........... Conclusion.............................................................................................................. 239
REFERENCES................................................................................................................... 242
BIOGRAPHY.................................................................................................................... 255
CHAPTER 1:
Conceptual and doctrinal projects in naturalized epistemology
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 philosophers—philosophical naturalists—believe that this day may
have already arrived. Naturalists hold that philosophy does or should share the
same basic concepts and methodologies of natural science.
To determine whether the 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,”
the days of philosophy as an autonomous discipline could be numbered.
Traditional epistemologists object to
naturalized epistemology on the grounds that it eliminates 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 versions of naturalism—which I call “optimistic”
and “pessimistic”—and then by offering a proposal for how a renewed
non-naturalistic epistemology must move forward.
Before I can outline how I plan on
critiquing these two varieties of naturalism, I need to provide some important
background exposition. In this introductory chapter, I will describe just what
naturalized epistemology is supposed to be, in particular what it means for
epistemology to “share the same concepts and methodologies of natural science.”
It turns out that apart from sharing this very generic credo, advocates of
“naturalized epistemology” have deep differences over what it means for epistemology to be continuous with science. I
will show how these different recognized approaches fit into my categorization
of “optimistic” and “pessimistic” naturalized epistemology.
Having surveyed different conceptions
of the naturalist’s project, I will then describe one of the most prominent
objections to it: the charge that naturalism unnecessarily eliminates the
normativity of epistemology. Briefly I will sketch the typical responses
naturalists will offer. With this as a background, I will describe how my own
distinctive critique of naturalized epistemology compares to this traditional
objection, and outline the course this objection will take through the rest of
my dissertation.
The variety of
conceptual and doctrinal projects
In his influential essay “Epistemology Naturalized” (1969a), W.V. Quine
draws a distinction between “conceptual” and “doctrinal” projects in the
traditional epistemology to which his naturalism is presented as an
alternative. I find it useful to invoke this distinction to explain distinct
but related projects within naturalized epistemology itself. Even though Quine
critiques the manner in which traditional epistemology attempts to base its
doctrinal project on its conceptual one, I find that many versions of
naturalism follow the same pattern. (Whether or not Quine’s naturalism does the
same is somewhat more obscure.)
Quine begins
by discussing the doctrinal project in mathematics, which he compares to a
similar project in epistemology. This project is concerned with “clarifying
concepts by defining them, some in terms of others” (69). The doctrinal project
is concerned with “establishing laws by proving them, some on the basis of
others.” (69-79). Quine then notes that the two projects are closely connected:
For, if
you define all the concepts by use of some favored subset of them, you thereby
show how to translate all theorems into these favored terms. The clearer these
terms are, the likelier it is that the truths couched in them will be obviously
true, or derivable from obvious truths (70).
In epistemology, the doctrinal project attempts to explain
how we might justify “our knowledge of the truths of nature in sensory terms”
(71), whereas the conceptual project aids by defining the terms of that
knowledge. Famously, Quine argues that the traditional epistemological project
of translating concepts of physical objects into the language of sense data had
to fail, because of his indeterminacy of translation thesis. This failure,
combined with the failure of traditional foundationalist proposals, spelled the
death of traditional doctrinal projects in epistemology—not only the classical
empiricist attempt to justify scientific knowledge by reference to the senses,
but even the modern empiricist attempt to legitimize scientific discourse by
“demarcation.”
No
naturalized epistemologist is interested in traditional epistemology’s
reductivist conceptual project or foundationalist doctrinal project. However
the conceptual-doctrinal distinction is still at play for many naturalists,
although at a higher, meta-epistemic
level. While naturalized epistemologists no longer concern themselves with
translating the content of empirical knowledge for the sake of justifying it,
many are still concerned with analyzing or in some way defining the concept of “knowledge” itself, in order
to answer the doctrinal question of
whether and to what extent we have any knowledge in the sense provided by that
definition.
In what follows, I first classify
naturalized epistemologists according to their “optimistic” and “pessimistic”
answers to the doctrinal question. The optimism and pessimism here is in
relation to the traditional goals of epistemology, which I myself share.
“Optimists” affirm that we can show human beliefs to be justified, by applying
some naturalized conceptual project. “Pessimists” deny this, but would not
consider themselves to be pessimists, because they urge that epistemology adopt
new goals.
Optimistic
naturalized epistemologists are united in the conviction that the empirical
methodology of natural science can somehow show our beliefs to be justified,
but there is a variety of views about what this methodology amounts to. Not
surprisingly, every major semantic theory of the twentieth century—analytic,
two-factor, natural kinds—has been applied to the project of understanding the
reference of the concept of knowledge. I will, therefore, classify subvarieties
of optimistic naturalism according to the semantic theories they rely upon.
Having presented these optimistic
projects, I will turn to the pessimists. The first of these is Michael Williams
(1996), who offers a “deflationary” approach to the concept of knowledge, which
focuses on the use of the term “knowledge,”
rather than its reference in the world. The most prominent pessimist, however,
is Quine himself. Though Quine would, in some moods, speak of human knowledge,
the concept of “knowledge” does not figure prominently as a technical concept
in his naturalized epistemology. Quine’s behaviorism generally rendered the
epistemologist’s reference to subjects’ internal cognitive states to be of
largely passing concern. As we will see in later chapters, Quine’s deep
commitment to the principles of naturalism not only caused him to distance
himself from the very idea of a conceptual project, but from many of the
philosophical mechanisms used by epistemologists (naturalistic or otherwise) to
engage in this project.
Optimistic naturalized
epistemology
Analytic naturalized epistemology
The first
putatively naturalist epistemology worth discussing engages in a meta-epistemic
conceptual project with deep ties to traditional epistemology. This approach
seeks to offer genuine conceptual analyses of epistemic concepts such as
“knowledge” and “justification,” but hopes to analyze these concepts into more
basic concepts that are naturalistically respectable. This approach is
exemplified in the epistemology of Alvin Goldman. Goldman’s early views sought
to analyze the normative language of “justification,” for example, into the
purely descriptive terms such as “‘believes that’, ‘is true’, ‘causes’, ‘it is
necessary that’, ‘implies’, ‘is deducible from’, ‘is probable’.” These latter
terms are “(purely) doxastic, metaphysical, modal, semantic, or syntactic
expressions” and therefore neither epistemic nor normative (Goldman 1979, 2).
Examples of
this analytic approach to the naturalistic conceptual project originally gained
prominence as responses to the Gettier problem. One challenge of that problem
was to identify a condition for knowledge that would explain why justified true
beliefs that were merely “accidentally” true did not count as knowledge. A
natural solution was to individuate knowledge by the causal origin of the belief. David Armstrong’s account, for
example, treats knowledge as a kind of reliable indicator, like a thermometer,
in which “reliability” is understood as a lawlike connection between beliefs
and facts (1973). Robert Nozick’s (1981) theory speaks of knowledge as
“tracking” the truth, and analyzes “reliability” in counterfactual terms: a
true belief counts as knowledge just in case the following holds: if it was
true, it would be believed, but not otherwise. Goldman’s own (1986) version of
reliabilism holds that a belief is justified just in case it results from a
reliable belief-forming process, one that yields a greater percentage of truths
than falsehoods, and counts as knowledge if it is both true and discriminates
the truth from “relevant alternative” possibilities.
In the next chapter we shall examine
whether the mere non-epistemic or non-normative status of doxastic,
metaphysical, modal or semantic concepts is sufficient to guarantee their
status as naturalistic. For the time being, however, the more interesting
question is whether the approach of conceptual analysis itself is consistent
with naturalism. Recognizing that the armchair approach of analysis has long
been rejected by naturalists, Goldman urges that any adequate epistemology
seems to “involve, or presuppose, analyses (or ‘accounts’) of key epistemic
terms like ‘knowledge’ and ‘justification’” (Goldman 1986, 36). He goes on to
protest against Quine’s infamous (1953b) attacks on analyticity, by insisting
that there must be “some substance to the commonsense notions” of meaning and
synonymy, that even philosophers who reject analyticity often perform something
like conceptual analysis when they
reason philosophically, and that presenting necessary and sufficient conditions
is an indispensable approach to philosophical reasoning, even if it has a long
record of failure (1986, 38-9).
In chapter 3, we will examine
attempts to address Goldman’s first concern, and make naturalistic sense of
analyticity. Suffice it to say that it is no small task. As to Goldman’s second
concern, we will shortly discuss whether there is something sufficiently like conceptual analysis to do the
philosopher’s task. This is particularly urgent, because Goldman’s third point
about the indispensability of analysis in the face of its failure looks
particularly implausible twenty years later, after the analytical debate over
the Gettier problem has long fizzled out, and if any consensus has been reached,
it is only that a new approach to epistemology is needed. Naturalists, now
under the guise of “experimental philosophy,” stress the diversity and cultural
dependence of philosophical intuitions (Nichols, Stich and Weinberg 2003).
Indeed it is arguable that the analytic “naturalists” whose roots are found in
the Gettier problem are only accidentally related to naturalists like Quine,
whose motivations were very different, as we shall find in chapter 2 and
chapter 5.
If some version of analytic naturalism
can be salvaged as a conceptual project, however, its doctrinal implication
becomes apparent. Combining a successful analysis of “knowledge” (in terms of
reliability, etc.) with results from cognitive psychology enables us to
determine whether and to what extent human knowledge exists. Goldman thinks
that his analysis at least permits us to accept that knowledge is logically
possible, even if the analysis does not entail that such knowledge exists and
doesn’t permit a knock-down answer to skepticism (1986, 55-6). To know if we
know would require that we know our beliefs to result from a reliable process,
and it is logically possible to know this
(56-7). Only our best psychology, not any analysis, can inform us as to whether
that possibility is actual. It is at this point that objections of circularity
usually enter, but Goldman has the option of noting that arguments for
skepticism only arise because of conceptions of knowledge uninformed by
reliabilism, conceptions that require ruling out Cartesian alternatives that
are not relevant. Of course not all naturalists are as confident as Goldman
about the power of cognitive psychology to deliver good news (Stich 1990). And
if the success of this doctrinal project depends on the success of conceptual
analysis, doubts about the latter could turn the former into a “degenerating
research program.”
Two-factor semantical naturalized epistemology
We need, therefore, to seek an
approach to the conceptual project that is like
traditional conceptual analysis, but not committed to the same substantive
presuppositions about meaning and synonymy. Even if a philosopher is not tied
to philosophic intuitions about the meaning of concepts like “knowledge” and
“justification,” it may profit him to begin
with those intuitions as an entrée to a more sophisticated scientific theory,
the results of which may or may not end up bearing much resemblance to the
original intuitions. What counts for
this kind of conceptual project is not so much allegiance to prior intuitions,
but the predictive and explanatory power of the theorist’s ultimate
conceptualization. The current literature features proposals for theories of
concepts supplanting the classical theory of concepts drawn on by conceptual
analysis, and these proposals are relied upon, implicitly or explicitly, for
alternative formulations of naturalized epistemology. I will mention two such
theories of concepts, and some paradigm applications in epistemology.
The classical theory of concepts
drawn on by conceptual analysis held that concepts expressed conjunctions of
necessary and sufficient conditions, which could be discovered by the
introspective reflection of the theorist. This theory was called into question
by the Twin Earth thought experiments, which seemed to indicate that meaning of
concepts could not be “in the head,” because the reference of a term like
“water” seems to vary in relation to the environment in which it is originally
deployed (whether it is an environment containing H20 or XYZ). A
recent view of concepts seeks to capture the insight of these thought
experiments, while also preserving an element of the classical view. These “two
factor” or “causal-descriptive” theories urge that one factor of meaning is
determined by a priori factors, while
a second is determined by external aspects of the natural or social
environment. In the view of Frank Jackson (1998), for example, we begin with a
description of water as a clear, liquid stuff found in rivers and streams
around here. We need to grasp at
least this much, if ever we are to eventually discover the reference of “water” in the external world (either H20
or XYZ). Importantly, we may end up revising our concept of “water,” but we
need to appeal to our intuitions about it before we can ever make that
discovery. Other two-factor theories are even more unabashedly naturalistic
than
How might the two-factor view of
concepts be implemented in naturalized epistemology? One theorist who seems to
be implicitly committed to the view is Philip Kitcher. In his essay “The
Naturalists Return” (1992), Kitcher considers Goldman’s reliabilism to be a
holdover of analytic epistemology, and claims that while “reliabilism gives a
promising start to formulating a
meliorative naturalistic enterprise,” it is “not the panacea for the problem of
analyzing justification” (69). He believes that when analytical naturalists
define ideal standards of justification in advance of inquiry, they invite
skepticism and fail to shoulder the proper task of epistemology. Goldman’s
reliabilism, treated as an analysis of knowledge, invites counterexamples of
true beliefs caused by reliable processes in a bizarre manner, for instance. It
is always possible to refine definitions to better capture our intuitions about
knowledge, but this does little to improve our understanding of worthwhile cognitive
goals or improve our ability to reach them. What Kitcher means by the
“meliorative project” is precisely the kind we might guess to be recommended by
a two-factor approach to reference[1]:
Traditional
epistemology has an important meliorative dimension. Bacon and Descartes were
moved to epistemological theorizing by their sense of the need to fathom the
ways in which human minds can attain their epistemic ends. If analysis of
current concepts of rationality and justification, or delineation of accepted
inferential practices, is valuable, it is because a clearer view of what we now
accept might enable us to do better. Conceptual clarification has a role to
play in advance of inquiry, even when we understand that our current concepts
might give way to improved ones (64).
Kitcher speaks here of the meliorative project of traditional
epistemology, but it is clear from the rest of the essay that he sees naturalism
as sharing the tasks of traditional epistemology, if not the means.
How, on Kitcher’s view, do we come to
understand these worthwhile cognitive goals and assess our prospects of
achieving them? He would implement the doctrinal project of naturalized
epistemology by looking to the history of science, and more fundamentally, to
our evolutionary heritage. In the course of examining our actual cognitive
practices, and the basic equipment we inherited to undertake them, we may
discover that achieving our cognitive goals is not always consistent with our a priori epistemic standards. We may
find that we need to replace rather than analyze the dichotomies of
“rational/irrational” or “justified/unjustified,” out of the need to give a
richer portrait of factors contributing to the limited human animal’s
achievement of its cognitive goals.
Kitcher is aware, of course, that not
all naturalists would find epistemological solace in an examination of the history of science or in the human
evolutionary heritage. The bulk of his doctrinal studies concentrate on
answering their worries. These skeptics might doubt, for example, that the
cognitive equipment of our ancestors needed to be geared towards the
acquisition of significant truths in order for the race to evolve successfully.
But even if our ancestors developed some remedy to possible evolutionary
shortcomings, the more serious naturalist challenge to the possibility of
outlining the means and ends of human cognitive progress is that posed by
Quinean and Kuhnian underdetermination arguments. These suggest that science
has not developed by a series of logically-sanctioned steps aimed at an
ultimate cognitive goal, but instead by a series of paradigm shifts that could
have been otherwise, because of pragmatic decisions about auxiliary hypotheses,
etc. Kitcher believes that the only response to this challenge is to examine
the historical record even more carefully, to show that instances of
underdetermination are not as pervasive as critics suggest. (In the final
chapter of this dissertation, we will return to the topic of the
underdetermination, which underpins some of the most basic naturalistic
assumptions—a point Kitcher does not seem to fully appreciate.) Kitcher also
believes he can examine the history of science to answer persistent objections
from Larry Laudan (1984) and to show that the putative diversity of historical
scientists’ goals can be reduced to “a single, compelling, conception of
cognitive value,” which Kitcher calls “significant truth” (1992, 102). Kitcher
delivers a ground-level examination of these very questions in his exhaustive
treatment, The Advancement of Science
(1993).[2]
Another
naturalized epistemologist, Hilary Kornblith (2002), subscribes to the same
conceptual project as Kitcher, but goes further still. Appealing explicitly to
Boyd’s two-factor semantics, Kornblith argues that the epistemologist’s
reference to knowledge can be understood as reference to a natural kind, understood on Boyd’s model of natural kinds as causal
homeostatic mechanisms. A homeostatic mechanism is a natural cluster of highly
correlated properties or elements, the combination of which promotes a
self-reinforcing stability, such that predicates describing the cluster are
readily projectible. The combination of hydrogen and oxygen atoms in the water
molecule is a good example.
Kornblith thinks that knowledge is a
natural kind like water because cases of knowledge “have a good deal of
theoretical unity to them” rather than being a “gerrymandered kind” constructed
by human convention (10). The “theoretical unity” of knowledge is first
understood by reference to the theoretical unity of belief. Kornblith looks to animal ethology’s extensive use of
intentional idioms to describe, explain and predict a variety of animal
behavior. Even ants returning to the colony seem to “represent” their direction
and distance traveled. More sophisticated animals exhibit genuine beliefs and
desires, when the information represented comes to form a stable product
available for multiple uses, depending on the animal’s desire. Kornblith
understands knowledge as a species of belief, and adds that it features an
extra dimension of explanatory/predictive value, also recognized by animal
ethologists. Whereas the actions of individual animals could always be easily
explained by reference to mere beliefs, explaining how it is their species
possesses the cognitive capacities that permit successful interaction with the
environment requires the appeal to reliable
belief-forming processes, i.e. knowledge. In short, nature has selected these
cognitive capacities for their survival value, which in turn ensures the
perpetuation of the capacities themselves (57-9).
Kornblith’s natural kinds-oriented
conceptual project has important doctrinal implications. To show that organisms
really do possess the relevant reliable capacities, he must answer critics like
Brandom (1998) who allege that judgments about reliability vary in relation to
the scope of the organism’s environment, and theorists may circumscribe
environments arbitrarily, according to their interests. Kornblith responds that
the concept of an environment is itself a technical concept of ecology, one
that is just as naturalistically respectable as many used by biologists (2002,
65-9). Knowledge, then, is specifically an ecological
natural kind. Kornblith must also oppose popular positions in epistemology
according to which animals cannot possess knowledge or beliefs, because both
concern the essentially social practices of giving and asking for reasons
(69-102), and because knowledge requires a kind of self-conscious reflection of
which animals are incapable (89-136).
As we have progressed from analytic
naturalism to Kornblith’s two-factor natural kinds naturalism, we have become
less focused on the concept of
knowledge and more focused on the metaphysics
of knowledge itself. Kornblith goes the furthest here, seriously downplaying
the need to appeal to philosophic intuition. Responding to Goldman’s (1993)
contention that naturalized epistemology should at least describe our epistemic
“folkways” (our inherited intuitions about knowledge) before engaging in
object-level study, he notes that in chemistry, we do not bother cataloguing
folk chemistry; instead we “can simply skip straight to the project of
understanding the real chemical kinds as they exist in nature.” He concludes
that “we should take seriously the possibility that a similar strategy might be
equally fruitful in epistemology” (Kornblith 2002, 19). Arguably the next
version of naturalism would seem to push Kornblith’s suggestion to the extreme,
avoiding discussion of concepts entirely and going straight to the metaphysics
of knowledge.
Epistemic supervenience naturalized epistemology
In an influential critique of Quine’s
naturalized epistemology—and cognizant of Quine’s antipathy towards conceptual
analysis—Jaegwon Kim (1988) proposes a method of formulating epistemological
criteria that avoids controversial reliance on philosophical accounts of
meaning. Utilizing a concept he has developed in detail largely in connection
with topics in the philosophy of mind, Kim argues that it must be that
epistemic properties supervene on
natural ones:
[I]f a
belief is justified, that must be so because
it has certain factual, nonepistemic properties, such as perhaps that it is
“indubitable”, that it is seen to be entailed by another belief that is
independently justified, that it is appropriately caused by perceptual
experience, or whatever. That it is a justified belief cannot be a brute fundamental
fact unrelated to the kind of belief it is. There must be a reason for it, and this reason must be
grounded in the factual descriptive properties of that particular belief (399).
A number of other philosophers,
including Van Cleve (1985) and Sosa (1980), have endorsed the notion of
epistemic supervenience, without necessarily seeing it as a naturalization
proposal. Although Kim is widely recognized as a critic of Quine’s naturalism,
his critique acknowledges the viability of naturalistic projects rivaling
Quine’s, such as Kitcher’s and Goldman’s (Kim 1988, 394-9). His own
supervenience proposal, in fact, can be transformed into a kind of naturalism,
provided that the properties that epistemic properties supervene upon are
themselves natural properties, and also provided that the nature of the
supervenience relation itself is naturalistically respectable.
Speaking loosely, supervenience is
the determination of a higher level property by a lower level property. To say
that higher-level property A supervenes on lower-level property B is to say
that any two objects which do not differ in lower-level B properties must not
differ in their higher-level A properties. Or: there cannot be a difference in
A properties without a difference in B properties. Supervenient A properties
must have some subvenient B
properties of some type or other, but if anything has these subvenient B
properties, the supervenient A properties must obtain. The nature of that
“must” is of some importance. The strong notion of supervenience needed to
support a determination relation
between B and A properties requires some kind of necessity. At one point in his
discussion of supervenience of the mental, Kim’s favored option is to find a
kind of nomological necessity (1985).
If there is a lawlike relationship between B and A properties, that would
secure the necessary strong supervenience.
We will discuss this view of necessity in chapter 2.
With the concept of supervenience in
hand, Kim seems to have formulated a metaphysical stand-in for the conceptual
project in epistemology, and can proceed to look for answers in the doctrinal
project. He can search the relevant science to see if a lawlike relationship
does exist between any properties and epistemic properties. In an essay on the
supervenience of the mental on the
physical, he considers the possibility of psycho-physical laws in the context
of the problem of the multiple realizability of the mental. He proposes that
the physical instantiation of these psycho-physical laws may consist of lengthy
disjuncts of distinct properties. Whether science could ever uncover or deal
with laws of this type is not clear. To the extent that epistemic properties
are themselves dependent on doxastic ones, the same problem may apply to
epistemic supervenience.
The nomological supervenience concept
is at best a placeholder for scientific discoveries waiting to be made. To the
extent that it requires the discovery of nomological relationships, it may draw
strength from discovery of the very kind of homeostatic mechanisms that
Kornblith believes animal ethology to have catalogued. Indeed if supervenience requires a notion of
nomological necessity, there may be little difference between Kim’s and
Kornblith’s views in the end. Later (2005), Kim appears to rely on a conceptual
form of necessity. Either way, supervenience has affinity to conceptual
projects we have already considered.
Common to
Goldman, Kitcher, Kornblith and Kim is the conviction that knowledge really is something. Consequently they
look to the natural sciences to “uncover” knowledge of what that something
really is. But this is not the only possible naturalistic approach to answering
skepticism. It is possible to affirm the truth of statements concerning
knowledge without being ontologically committed to the substantive existence of knowledge-stuff. This
possibility is one that has been explored by the next category of naturalized
epistemology, one that has not always been recognized as such: deflationary
naturalism. In discussing this next category, however, we enter into the realm
of what I call “pessimistic” naturalized epistemology.
Pessimistic naturalized
epistemology
Dividing
philosophical views according to the labels of “optimistic” and “pessimistic”
is, of course, loaded with value judgments. An optimistic expects success; a
pessimist, failure. The present category of pessimistic naturalized
epistemologies counts as pessimistic only insofar as they expect failure to
achieve traditional epistemological goals. But these epistemologies are not
absolutely pessimistic: they believe that their proposals offer alternative
goals that can be readily achieved. I can only state here that I myself happen
to side with (most of) the goals of traditional epistemology, and for this
reason I am exercising the privilege of categorizing epistemologies relative to
that position. At the end of the dissertation, I hope to have established that
traditional epistemological goals—including some of the traditional means to
these goals—should not be abandoned for the reasons naturalists are wont to
abandon them. So hopefully the present categorization will prove to be useful.
Deflationary naturalized epistemology
Deflationary
views in philosophy are generally concerned with explaining how one might
affirm a type of philosophic truth without being committed to the existence of
substantive properties related to predicates expressed in those truths. The
classic example is the deflationary view of truth, which holds that the meaning
of the truth predicate is exhausted by the disquotational formula: “Snow is
white” is true if and only if Snow is
white. This conception avoids the commitment to a substantive truth
relation, and consequently avoids thorny metaphysical questions about the
nature of correspondence or of facts to which truths must correspond. For some
time now, deflationary views of “knowledge” have also been available,
particularly from the contextualist wing of epistemology.[3]
Until recently, however, it has not been obvious how deflationism might also
count as a form of naturalism.[4] If
knowledge is not a substantive existent, what about it would scientists have to
study?
One clue is offered by Huw Price
(2004). Speaking of philosophic issues apart from epistemology, Price notes
that we can make a distinction between object-naturalist
and subject-naturalist approaches to
central concepts in these fields. The object-naturalist is concerned with
discovering the substantive properties to which philosophic concepts refer, and
as such employs the methods of natural science to discover them. The
naturalized epistemologies we have considered so far surely count as
object-naturalist. But the subject-naturalist is not so much concerned with
substantive properties as he is with subjects’ use of philosophic terms.
The subject-naturalist in epistemology, then, would be primarily concerned with
human use of the term “knowledge.” This, as it happens, is the celebrated
project of the contextualists.
An excellent case in point is Michael
Williams (1996). Williams himself characterizes his position as deflationary
(111-3), drawing explicit inspiration from Quine’s deflationism about truth.
For reasons we will discuss later in chapter 5, Williams later critiques
Quine’s views on naturalized epistemology (254-65). Nevertheless, his own
deflationary view may count as a form of subject-naturalism, if Price’s
conception here is useful. He is surely no object-naturalist: contrary to
Kornblith, he denies that knowledge is anything like a “natural kind,” or any thing at all, denying the position he
calls “epistemological realism.” Williams’ motivation for adopting this
position emerges out of his critique of traditional epistemology. He has argued
that skepticism is a consequence of foundationalism, in particular the view
that our beliefs have foundations in the senses, and a consequence of the
“totality condition,” the idea that all of our knowledge can be assessed at
once. When the skeptic considers these possibilities, he loses confidence in
the possibility of sensory foundations, and in doing so loses confidence in the
totality of knowledge. Williams urges that we abandon foundationalism and the
totality condition in order to avoid the problem of skepticism. But this
solution to skepticism is very dissatisfying: without foundationalism, we crave
some other assessment of the source of our knowledge. Williams, therefore,
takes it upon himself to explain what is wrong with the craving in the first
place. His main response is that knowledge is not an object of theory in need
of any explanation.
Williams thinks that it may be true
that we know many things in the proper contexts, but that this is not in virtue
of anything in common among the cases called “knowledge.” To show that there is
something significant in common among such cases, one would need to demonstrate
that cases of knowledge have a kind of “theoretical integrity” (103). But our
beliefs—to say nothing of our knowledge—are not topically integrated. We do not store them in the form of a single,
all-encompassing axiomatized system. All that remains is the possibility that
they are epistemologically
integrated, i.e., subject to the same constraints, tracing from the same
sources. Of course Williams believes that foundationalism only leads to skepticism,
so the claim that knowledge exhibits this kind of integrity is in danger of
giving “knowledge” the status of a theoretical term (like “phlogiston”) that
fails to refer if the theory behind it is false. There are also terms such as
“table” or “heat” whose reference is thought to be fixed pre-theoretically or
theory-independently. But Williams can find no reason to think “knowledge”
functions in the same way (109-10). In chapter 4, after considering evidence
about our formation of the concept of “know” that casts doubt on deflationism
about “belief,” we will return to the question of the pre-theoretical integrity
of “knowledge.”
For this reason, Williams thinks all
we can hope for from epistemology is a deflationary account of knowledge:
A deflationary account of “know” may show how
the word is embedded in a teachable and useful linguistic practice, without
supposing that “being known to be true” denotes a property that groups
propositions into a theoretically significant kind. We can have an account of
the use and utility of “know” without supposing that there is such a thing as
human knowledge (113).
This is as close as Williams comes to stating a conceptual
project for his epistemology. Unlike previous object-naturalists, he is not
concerned with the question of what knowledge really is. He is primarily interested in the concept itself, and
even then, mainly the word. The
naturalistic investigator can then make use of this proposal for the conceptual
project, by examining our actual linguistic practices to see if they stand up
to Williams’ contention that our attributions of knowledge lack any obvious
theoretical integrity. If the investigator determines that this is true, this
amounts to Williams’ version of the doctrinal project in epistemology: by
debunking knowledge as a natural kind, he will have dissolved our craving for
epistemological explanations, and in doing so he will have shown why we can
reject skepticism without needing to assess the totality of our knowledge.
We need,
then, to briefly describe the kinds of investigations that would be relevant to
supporting Williams’ contentions about the linguistics of “knowledge.” These, I
think, would be little more than the familiar examples entertained by
contextualists, concerning the shifting standards of justification from context
to context. To defeat the foundationalist view of theoretical integrity,
Williams believes that he need only show that there is never any single type of
proposition which, in virtue of its contents, “will have an epistemic status it
can call its own” (113). Here is a sample of the kind of ordinary survey that
would support this:
In both
science and ordinary life, constraints on justification are many and various.
Not merely that, they shift with context in ways that are probably impossible
to reduce to rule. In part, they will have to do with the specific content of
whatever claim is at issue. But they will also be decisively influence by the
subject of inquiry to which the claim in question belongs (history, physics,
ornithology, etc.)…. Not entertaining radical doubts about the age of the Earth
or the reliability of documentary evidence is a precondition of doing history at all. There are many things that, as
historians, we might be dubious about, but not these (117).
To these “disciplinary” constraints, Williams also adds
“dialectical” constraints and “situational” constraints, which derive from
idiosyncrasies of conversational and evidential contexts. The role of context
is even more important to Williams than simply providing evidence against
foundationalist theory. It not only helps to show why we shouldn’t worry about
skepticism, but shows the consequences of what happens if we do. The disciplinary constraints he mentions not
only keep us on task as historians and physicists, but stop us from doing epistemology (122). Paradoxically, it turns out
that this “methodological necessity” is epistemically good for us, the
epistemologist’s questions about the totality of our knowledge actually cause
us to lose our knowledge insofar as
we share his doubts, insofar as they cause us to suspend the “interact
relations with our environment that…are crucial to much ordinary knowledge”
(358).
At one point, I almost decided to classify Williams’ deflationism as a kind of “optimistic” naturalized epistemology. Williams does attempt to show how deflationism helps respond to skepticism by affirming our knowledge of many things. For all of this, however, his theory may still be deeply dissatisfying to the traditional epistemologist. He would blame this dissatisfaction on philosophers’ lingering foundationalism, which he takes to be hopeless. (In the final chapter of this dissertation, we will revisit the question of whether better formulations of foundationalism might solve rather than cause the pr