Quinean Naturalized Epistemology
Conceptual Project (What is
the project that Carnap attempted and failed to carry
through?)
Carnap’s failure shows the
impossibility of translating statements about bodies into statements about
experience. Recall Quine’s
holism.
Doctrinal
Project (Where did Hume leave us? In skepticism about bodies,
about causes, about the future, etc.)
The Conceptual and Doctrinal
Projects were part of the Proof Paradigm:
Epistemology as Top-Down.
(1) The Cartesian Project
(described by Kornblith on pp. 322-3): (a) foundational beliefs and (b) set of
epistemic principles of inference.
(2) Rational
Reconstruction: Top-Down justification
of beliefs about bodies (Hume's problem) or of scientific theories (Carnap's problem).
Quine's Naturalized Epistemology is a Response to the Perceived
Failures of the Conceptual and Doctrinal Projects of Traditional
Epistemologists—the failure of epistemology as “first philosophy”. (What does this mean?)
Quine’s Proposal: Epistemology
becomes a chapter of empirical psychology, where the goal is "to
understand the link between between observation and
science."(290)
[Need not
assume that psychology is limited by Quine's
behaviorist tendencies (e.g., his equation of evidence with “the stimulation of
sensory receptors”.]
“Epistemology still goes on,
though in a new setting and a clarified status. Epistemology, or something like
it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural
science”(292).
Three Potential Problems:
(1) The Circularity Problem:
"the old threat of circularity"(293).
Why does Quine
think that evolution can help to clarify induction?
(2) The Normativity Problem: Justification and Knowledge are normative
(they concern what I ought to believe); psychology is purely descriptive. Can there be epistemology without anything
normative?
(3) BonJour’s
Intellectual Suicide Objection. Quine is giving up a priori justification. How can he do that without committing
intellectual suicide?
Three Epistemological
Projects:
(1) Account of knowledge and
justification.
(2) Show the extent of our
knowledge.
(3) Provide epistemic advice
(how to get more true beliefs and fewer false ones).
Cartesian Foundationalism is
a "Good Argument" Account. It
is a fruitless research project. It
provides no good answers to any of the three questions that motivated it.
Essential components of
naturalized epistemology:
(1) Rejection of a priori
knowledge.
(2) Realization that
skeptical questions arise within science.
At least much of epistemology
becomes an empirical discipline.
(Why
"at least much"? (p.
326))
Kornblith’s rejection of universality (compare Zagzebski): The
topic is human knowledge, not an analysis of the concept of knowledge: “Knowledge is a natural phenomenon”(326).
What is human knowledge? “Reliably produced belief”(327).
Human knowledge is produced
by belief producing mechanisms that are well-adapted to this world.
Examples: (1) Visual illusion of motion (328).
(2) Generalizing from small samples (328).
Kornblith thinks it is a mistake to search for principles of
reasoning which would work in any possible world. Our concern is with reliability in this
world.
"The good-making
features of the psychological mechanisms need not be such that they would tend
to produce true beliefs in every possible world; rather, they only be
well-adapted to this world" (325).
According to Kornblith, the reliability of our cognitive processes is
deeply contingent (329).
What about the reasoning that
leads to the discovery of visual illusions, cognitive biases, and other
mistake-correcting reasoning?
Three Objections
I. What is Kornblith's
answer to the Circularity Problem?
II. What is Kornblith's
answer to the Normativitity Problem?
III. BonJour’s
Intellectual Suicide Objection: Is
naturalized epistemology self-referentially inconsistent?
Kornblith’s reply:
"Naturalists believe that human beings are so provided by nature
that they are inclined to make certain kind of inferences which are in fact
reliable, long before they have evidence that those inferences are reliable.
. . . BonJour
is simply taking for granted certain constraints on good reasoning which the
naturalist rejects”(332).
This response is developed by
Nozick.
To evaluate the Kornblith/Nozick response, we need to distinguish
universality from a prioricity:
(1) Universality. Are there universal concepts of knowledge and
justification?
Are there universal
principles of good reasoning?
(2) A Prioricity. If so, how are they knowable? Could they be discovered, rather than known a
priori?
NOZICK’S REVERSAL OF THE KANT’S COPERNICAN REVOLUTION
Nozick’s Question About Reasons: What is the nature of the connection between
a reason (r) and what it is a reason for (h)?
Three ways of answering the
question:
(1) On the a priori approach,
there is an objective logical relation of support between r and h that we
directly apprehend.
(2) On the simple factual
approach, there is an objective factual relation between r and h such that when
r is true, h is likely to be true.
(3) On Nozick's
sophisticated factual approach, the following addition is made to the simple
factual approach: Evolution has selected
for beings to whom it seems self-evident that when r
is true h is likely to be true.
(Evolution selects for seeming self-evidence [i.e., the apparent
a priori].)
“Reason tells us about
reality because reality shapes reason.”(112)
Example of
Euclidean geometry.
Selection for approximate truth.
Serviceability rather than truth.
“To explain why such
principles seem self-evident to us, one need not invoke their necessity.”(111)
Necessary truths are not
necessary to explain why we believe in them!
Kant's
Copernican Revolution and Nozick's reversal of it.
What is Nozick's
response to the Problem of Induction?
NOZICK'S SUBJUNCTIVE ARGUMENT AGAINST NECESSARY TRUTH
"The strength and depth
of our intuitions about certain statements cannot be used as powerful evidence
for their necessity if those statements are of a kind that, were they
contingent facts, would have led to selection favoring strong intuitions of
their self-evidence."(111)
Brandom’s Linguistic Rationalism
A Parochial Communitarian Internalist
(Pragmatic) Epistemology
Semantics as use in a
rule-governed game. (What is the
game?)
Declarative sentences are
normatively evaluated in two ways:
(1) (subjective/deontological appraisal): Whether the speaker
followed the rules of the game so as not to be blameworthy for producing the
assertion. Involves
inferential consequences and inferential antecedents.
(2) (objective appraisal): Whether the assertion is correct in that
things really are as it says they are.
(Truth = objective representational correctness)
The Language Game of Epistemology
The game of giving and asking
for reasons has two kinds of rules:
(1) rules of consequential commitment
(the committive dimension) [these correspond to truth
conditions]
(2) rules of entitlement (the critical
dimension) [these correspond to the requirements for justification]
(a) Committive. Commitment-preserving inference generalizes
deductive inference;
(b) Permissive. Entitlement-preserving
inference generalizes inductive inference;
(c) Incompatibility Entailments. Generalizes modal
(counter-factual supporting) inference.
(e.g., If there were no oxygen in this room, we
would die.)
What about Objectivity/Truth?
On Brandom’s pragmatic approach, how can normative assessments
be rich enough to transcend the attitudes of practitioners? How can two sentences have the same assertibility conditions but different truth conditions?
Key idea: Use the
distinction between commitments and entitlements to distinguish two kinds of
normative status: subjective appraisal
(justified) from objective appraisal (true).
Example:
1. “The swatch is red.”
2. “The claim that the
swatch is red is properly assertible by me now.”
3. “I do not exist.”
4. “Rational beings
never evolved.”
Brandom’s Semantics and Epistemology are Parochial,
Based on Community Norms
What is the result?
Justification and truth are understood as “social statuses, instituted by the
attitudes of linguistic practitioners”(189).
Parochial norms of
justification and truth: Consider an
analogy to the rules of baseball. They
could have been different. Could the
rules of propriety for “justified” and “true” have been different?
Talbott’s
Universalist Epistemology
Implicit vs. Explicit Sensitivity
1. Universal concepts of Knowledge,
Justification, and Truth
Explicit Sensitivity/Explicit A Priori Insight Model: Logical analyses of these concepts are the
product of a priori insight into necessary truth
Implicit Sensitivity Model:
Logical analyses of these concepts are the product of the imagination’s
ability to conceive of possibilities.
Tentatively proposed necessary truths are those to which no one has been
able to imagine a counterexample.
Logical analyses require us to be able to imagine a wide variety of
cases and to make reliable judgments about particular actual and hypothetical
cases.
(a) Knowledge à True Belief?
(b) Knowledge à Truth?
2. Universal principles of reasoning (e.g.,
mistake-correcting reasoning).
Explicit Sensitivity/Explicit A Priori Insight Model: Reasoning involves direct a priori insight
into the principles of rational belief change, or at least, direct a priori
insight into logical relations between premises and conclusion.
Mistake correcting reasoning is an illustration of equilibrium
reasoning, because it is non-monotonic (and thus non-inferential). It involves judgments about what makes the
most sense to believe.
Given the information:
(1) My sister Madeline’s child is named Ryan.
Your preliminary conclusion:
Ryan is male.
Given the additional
information:
(2) Ryan is my nephew.
Your conclusion: Ryan is
female.
Implicit Sensitivity Model:
We do not have a priori insight into such principles, we must discover
them. How could we discover them? If there are universal principles of
reasoning that our good reasoning is implicitly sensitive to, then we might
discover those principles by attempting to find principles that would explain
the difference between our good reasoning and our bad reasoning. This requires us to be able to imagine a wide
variety of cases of good and bad reasoning, to make reliable judgments about
particular actual and hypothetical cases of good and bad reasoning, and to be
able to formulate principles that would explain the difference. If our judgments about good and bad reasoning
are reliable enough, the principles that explain the difference between our
good and bad reasoning will approximate the true principles of good
reasoning.
(Implicit Sensitivity) Agent
A's coming to believe that p as a result of a transition from B1 and E to B2 is
rational « There is a principle of
rational belief change P which is such that agent A's coming to believe that p
is appropriately implicitly sensitive to the application of principle P
to the rational beliefs in B1 and A's experience E.
(Test for Appropriate Implicit Sensitivity) Test for whether an
agent A's acquisition of belief that p as a result of a transition from B1 to
B2 given experience E is appropriately sensitive to the application of
principle P to A's rational beliefs in B and to A’s experience E: (a) If Principle P had not licensed A's
believing that p on the basis of the rational beliefs in B1 and experience E, A
would not have come to believe p as a result of B1 and E; (b) If Principle P had licensed A's believing
that p on the basis of the rational beliefs in B1 and experience E, A would
have come to believe p as a result of B1 and E.
THE NATURALIST’S CHALLENGE TO TALBOTT’S
UNIVERSALISM
How
could evolution have made human beings sensitive to universal principles of
rational belief change?
The early Nozick’s surprising reply
(before his “Copernican Revolution”):
Let R be the rational
relation between the set of propositions B1 and the set of propositions
B2. Evolution could have selected for
belief transitions that mirror rational relations. Let b1 be the initial neurophysiolgical
state of subject S and b2 be the final
neurophysiological state of subject S.
Perhaps part of the explanation of subject S’s being caused to believe
b2 on the basis of b1 is that b1 corresponds to B1 and B2 corresponds to b2 and
B1 stands in R to B2.
Nozick’s
Test: If B2 did not stand in relation R
to B1, then it would not have been the case that both S is in b1 and b1 causes
b2.
Talbott’s
Generalization of Nozick’s Idea: Consider certain circumstances in which
neurophysiological state b2 is the causal result of
neurophysiological state b1 and neurological input e. Where b1 corresponds to set of beliefs B1, e
corresponds to a specification of experiential input E, b2 corresponds to set
of beliefs B2, and the Principle of Rational Belief Change P licenses the
transition from B1 and E to B2:
(Generalized TIS) If P had
not licensed the transition from B1 and E to B2, then it would not have been
the case both that S was in state b1 and that b1 and e caused b2 in S (in these
circumstances); and if P had licensed the transition from B1 and E to B2, then
it would have been the case that b1 and e caused b2 in S (in these
circumstances).
The surprising
possibility: Evolution selected for
rational relations among beliefs and experiential input.
Talbott’s
Challenge To Naturalists
It is plausible to think that evolution endowed us with
cognitive processes, including processes of reasoning, that
are reliable sources of information about middle-sized objects in the kind of
environment in which our ancestors evolved.
But what about our scientific (and epistemological
beliefs)? There is no reason to
expect that evolution would have our beliefs about unobservable objects and
phenomena reliable or our epistemological beliefs reliable. Unless evolution provided us with all-purpose
cognitive processes that are reliable across domains (and across possible
worlds), there is no reason to think that our scientific beliefs and
epistemological beliefs are true.
This implies that there is no reason to believe that our belief
in evolutionary theory. Since
naturalistic epistemology assumes the truth of evolutionary theory, if there is
no reason for us to think that evolutionary theory is true, naturalistic
epistemology is undermined. But it is
also undermined if, even on the assumption that evoulutionary
theory is true, there is no reason to believe that our epistemological beliefs
are true.
Naturalistic epistemology
undermines itself if it does explain how we acquired our cognitive processes in
a way that also explains why their results are likely to be true in domains
(such as science and epistemology) that are far removed from the domains in
which reliability was selected for by evolution. One potential explanation of why we are
justified in trusting our cognitive processes in all domains is that they are
implicitly sensitive to conditions of justification (or rational belief) that
are true in all possible worlds.
The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Epistemology
|
Universal A Priori Explicit Sensitivity |
Universal No A Priori Implicit Sensitivity |
Parochial A Posteriori Or Other Non- A Priori |
|
1. Universal concepts of knowledge,
justification, and truth. A priori
insight into necessary and sufficient conditions. |
1. Universal concepts of knowledge,
justification, and truth. Bottom-Up
reasoning to necessary and sufficient conditions. |
1. Parochial concepts (e.g., human
knowledge). Non-apriori
knowledge of truths about our parochial concepts. |
|
2. Universal principles of good reasoning. A priori insight into the universal rules
or into the appropriate relation between premises and conclusion. |
2. Universal principles of good reasoning
(e.g., mistake-correcting reasoning). Our implicit sensitivity to
them may enable us to discover them. |
2. Parochial rules of good reasoning (for our
situation). Non-a priori knowledge of
such rules (e.g., of which rules are reliable in our actual environment). |