free men
فريق العمـــــل *****
التوقيع : 
عدد الرسائل : 1500
الموقع : center d enfer
تاريخ التسجيل : 26/10/2009
وســــــــــام النشــــــــــــــاط : 6
 | |  Some responses, and further clarification of the issues | |
Various responses to the preceding objections have been suggested. Addressing the first will give us occasion to clarify typical current naturalists’ motivations, as well as—and relatedly—to get a better sense of what is, and is not, central to NE. Addressing the fourth and fifth will carry us beyond Quine and into the heart of current disagreements with, and within, NE.(1) Recall, first, the non sequitur objection, according to which Quine falsely equates TE with Cartesian epistemology. One response is that Quine’s arguments survive—at least in spirit—the recognition that many epistemologists had/have already moved away from infallibilistic requirements on foundational beliefs, and that even in its more lenient forms, “[f]oundationalism has simply failed to deliver the goods” (Kornblith 1995: 238). For the looser we make the requirements on justified beliefs in answer to our pretheoretic intuitions, the less we’re learning about knowledge, the less we’re seriously engaged with answering the skeptic, and the less we stand to gain any substantial epistemic advice (beyond, “keep believing more or less what you already believed”) (1995: 239). So foundationalism, in whatever form, “is an idea which [has] simply failed to work out” (1995: 239).[9]A different line of response to the non sequitur objection is simply to grant the point, but observe that, Quine’s arguments notwithstanding, more recent naturalists have not been motivated by the failure of Cartesian epistemology. Rather, they have sought to find an alternative to what was seen as a stagnating or otherwise unsatisfactory traditional approach. For instance, failed attempts to solve the Gettier problem by requiring more, and more subtle, logical relations among propositions, seemed to ignore the fact that, unless the subject’s psychology aligns with the suggested requirements, the proposed analysis will fail (Kitcher 1992: 59–60). Thus, Goldman’s early causal theory of knowing—an early appearance of NE in the aforementioned Roth & Galis volume—was expressly presented as an alternative to - اقتباس :
- [the] well-established tradition in epistemology, the view that epistemological questions are questions of logic or justification, not causal or genetic questions. (Goldman 1967: 82)
Along the same lines, when, at the end of his “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge”, Goldman contrasts his approach with that of Descartes, it’s not the latter’s infallibilism that gets special attention, but rather issues of a broadly explanatory-methodological nature: - اقتباس :
- The trouble with many philosophical treatments of knowledge is that they are inspired by Cartesian-like conceptions of justification or vindication. There is a consequent tendency to overintellectualize or overrationalize the notion of knowledge. In the spirit of naturalistic epistemology, I am trying to fashion an account of knowing that focuses on more primitive and pervasive aspects of cognitive life, in connection with which, I believe, the term “know” gets its application. A fundamental facet of animate life, both human and infra-human, is telling things apart, distinguishing predator from prey, for example, or a protective habitat from a threatening one. The concept of knowledge has its roots in this kind of cognitive activity. (Goldman 1976: 102)
Other naturalistic treatments of knowledge were similarly motivated. For instance, Dretske’s (1981) information-theoretic account was an attempt to move beyond justification-centered accounts of knowledge—accounts which took it for granted that knowledge required justification, the task then being to find what special combination of other ingredients must be added to yield knowledge. According to Dretske, such an approach faces “a variety of crippling objections” (1981: 85). In addition, “[t]he concept of justification (or some related epistemic notion) is often taken to be primitive”, with theorists using - اقتباس :
- firmer intuitions about when, and whether, someone knows something to determine when, and whether, someone has a satisfactory level of justification. (1981: 249)
Finally, like Goldman, Dretske associates justificationist accounts of knowledge with a tendency to over-intellectualize epistemic phenomena, to focus on “fancier” cases of knowing, cases which bring in (what he sees as) extraneous factors. The result is that the theorist is left having to reject some very clear cases of knowledge—in children, non-human animals, and unreflective adults—as not genuine knowledge at all (Dretske 1991). His own account of knowledge, - اقتباس :
- is an attempt to get away from the philosopher's usual bag of tricks (justification, reasons, evidence, etc.) in order to give a more realistic picture of what perceptual knowledge is. (1983: 58)
The same kind of broad methodological concerns are evident as well in naturalistic accounts of justification (warrant, etc.), rather than knowledge. Goldman’s reliabilism about justification (1979), for example, has among its starting points a critique of “ahistorical”, apsychological accounts of justification—i.e., accounts which state conditions on a belief’s being justified - اقتباس :
- without restriction on why the belief is held, i.e., on what causally initiates the belief orcausally sustains it. (1979: 112)[10]
Also worth noting here are a pair of more strictly meta-epistemological desiderata Goldman announces at the start of the same paper. The first is that an account of justification should be “substantive”—i.e., that it should specify in non-epistemic terms when a belief is justified (p. 105). This recalls, of course, meta-epistemic NE (Section 1.2)—i.e., the thought that evaluative epistemic properties are, or must be, reducible or otherwise appropriately related to, e.g., supervene upon, “natural” properties. And it is sometimes suggested that this—the demand, as Maffie puts it, that “epistemic value [be] anchored to descriptive fact, no longer entering the world autonomously as brute, fundamental fact” (1990a: 284)—is central to the debate over NE (ibid.; Steup 1996: 185–6). According to Kim, that epistemic properties do plausibly supervene on “natural facts” is what makes normative epistemology possible, and naturalistically respectable, even if no reduction[11] is forthcoming: - اقتباس :
- …is there a positive reason for thinking that normative epistemology is a viable program?…. The short answer is this: we believe in the supervenience of epistemic properties on naturalistic ones, and more generally, in the supervenience of all valuational and normative properties on naturalistic conditions…. That [a given belief] 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. Something like this, I think, is what we believe. (Kim 1988: 399)
As others have observed, however, it is doubtful that the question of whether epistemic properties at least supervene upon natural properties—hence, meta-epistemic NE, as written—sheds much light on the NE-vs-TE controversy (see Foley 1994: 243–244; Feldman 2012: Section 4; Maffie 1990a: 289; Kappel 2011: 839). For virtually everyone on both sides of that debate can be seen as agreeing that epistemic properties supervene. (The notable exception here is Lehrer 1997.) For example, Chisholm, who is hardly thought to be an advocate of NE, is explicit in holding that epistemic facts supervene on non-epistemic ones (1989: 42–43; cf. 1957: 31–39; 1982: 12)—for instance, that being appeared to in certain ways makes it evident to S that he is appeared to by an F, or makes S justified in believing that there is an F before him. And Feldman (2012) argues that evidentialism—which is usually regarded as an instance of TE, not NE—respects supervenience as well. (Evidentialism has it that what determines whether one is justified is a function of the evidence possessed, where one’s evidence, on the view Feldman himself favors, is some combination of one’s experiences, memories and other beliefs.)So we do not yet have a plausible candidate, in the vicinity of meta-epistemic NE, of something on which proponents of TE and NE might clearly divide. Taking Goldman as our representative of NE, we find a suggestion in his second desideratum—namely, that an account of justification be genuinely explanatory, or “appropriately deep and revelatory” (1979: 106). He writes: - اقتباس :
- Suppose, for example, that the following sufficient condition of justified belief is offered: “If S senses redly at t and S believes at t that he is sensing redly, then S’s belief at t that he is sensing redly is justified”. This is not the kind of principle I seek; for, even if it is correct, it leaves unexplained why a person who senses redly and believes that he does, believes this justifiably. (1979: 106)
So, while the stated Chisholmian principle itself respects supervenience—what’s mentioned in its antecedent is, plausibly, wholly psychological—it fails to be genuinely illuminating. As Feldman says, Chisholm holds that, underlying particular epistemic facts such as the one Goldman mentions are “principles of evidence other than the formal principles of deductive logic and inductive logic” (Chisholm 1977: 67) which are themselves fundamental. Further, Feldman continues, something similar is true of traditionalists more generally: - اقتباس :
- In addition to facts about particular people being justified in believing particular propositions, [traditionalists] are committed to the existence of epistemic facts about what beliefs are supported by a particular body of evidence. It remains unclear whether these are natural facts. Traditionalists often regard these facts as necessary truths, and it is their necessity that enables evidentialists to endorse the supervenience thesis. [On standard definitions of supervenience, necessary truths supervene on any facts—so, trivially, they supervene on natural facts.]….[But it] is legitimate to ask whether they count as natural facts. (Feldman 2012: Section 4)
However, regardless of the answer to the latter question, construed as a metaphysical query, it is clear that the relevant meta-epistemological concern of Goldman’s, at least, is methodological: he wants to explain justification, and thinks that an appeal to the reliability of the processes which generate and sustain a belief, for example, does just that, whereas an appeal to Chisholmian—or, presumably, evidentialist—principles does not. Similar concerns would apply to Chisholm’s (1977) taking reasonableness as primitive[12] and casting other central epistemic notions in terms of it (as Lehrer would later do; see his 1990: 127): while this is compatible with there in fact being some naturalistic basis for reasonableness[13]—i.e., with reasonableness being part of the real, natural world—the resulting account would not be “appropriately deep and revelatory”.Of course, opponents of NE may contest this claim and hold that there just are brute epistemic principles and sui generis epistemic properties—as Chisholm, Lehrer, and perhaps many other traditionalists believe (Fumerton, e.g., is quite explicit about this; 1988: 454–455). And, as Feldman (2012: Section 4) notes, the disagreement here appears to be over what is natural, as opposed to over whether extra-natural facts exist. Nevertheless, the present point is that the attempt to avoid any such fundamental epistemic properties or principles in one’s theorizing appears to be a real difference between NE and TE, and seems to be of more central importance than a concern for reduction-or-supervenience per se. In any case, it should now be clear that current naturalists are not directly inspired by the failure of specifically Cartesian epistemology. So even if it’s a mistake on Quine’s part to represent NE as having such a source, that point does not seem directly relevant here.(2) Turning now to the circularity objection, Quine himself addresses it when he says: - اقتباس :
- If the epistemologist’s goal is validation of the grounds of empirical science, he defeats his purpose by using psychology or other empirical science in the validation. However, such scruples against circularity have little point once we have stopped dreaming of deducing science from observations. (1969b: 75–76)
Moreover, this rejoinder aside, it may be that “we should expect question begging when the issue concerns our most fundamental methods of inquiry” (Foley 1994: 256). Further, there is no guarantee anyway that a given method will vindicate itself—a method may generate evidence that undermines its own reliability (ibid.). Finally, just when (if ever) circularity is epistemically bad, and why, is a matter of some controversy. (For general discussion and references, see Lammenranta n.d. in Other Internet Resources; see too Kappel 2011: 843.)(3) Broadly similar remarks have been suggested in reply to the objection that Quine’s response to skepticism is unsatisfactory. While that response may involve blatant circularity, for the reasons just given it’s an open question whether it is vicious. Further, Quine claims, in pointing out that skeptical doubts are scientific doubts, he did not take himself to be refuting the skeptic or subjecting skepticism to a reductio (1975: 68). More generally, questions might be raised about the underlying assumption that responding to the skeptic in such a way as to not beg any questions is an achievable end to begin with, and so something that deserves as much attention as it has traditionally been afforded. Here, proponents of NE diverge somewhat. Kornblith states that the project of responding to the skeptic is “a dead end” (1999: 166). In a similar vein, Kitcher says that “[s]keptics who insist that we begin from no assumptions are inviting us to play a mug’s game” (1993: 35). Dretske (1970, 1981) is more conciliatory, offering an explanation that grants certain skeptical claims their power, even correctness, while defending our knowledge nonetheless. And both Goldman (1986: 39–41, 55–57; 1976: 101) and Pollock (1986: 1–7) take it to be a task of epistemology to address skepticism—even if our goal therein is to understand and learn from it rather than to refute it, and even if the topic deserves less attention than it has historically received.(4) Kornblith sums up the normativity objection as follows: “Epistemology without normativity…is just Hamlet without the prince of Denmark” (1995: 250). As we saw above, it looks as though handing epistemology off to psychology (replacement NE) makes epistemology a purely descriptive enterprise (hence, yields eliminative NE). Certainly, Quine is hardly friendly to epistemology as standardly practiced. For example, he thinks that, as it’s usually understood, the notion of knowledge is so beset by imprecision that, for theoretical purposes, we should “give [it] up… as a bad job” (1989: 109; see too Johnsen 2005: 92–93). And no doubt “Epistemology Naturalized” encourages the standard interpretation of Quine as jettisoning a concern for normative epistemic matters. Nonetheless, as recent commentators have pointed out (see, e.g., Foley 1994 and Johnsen 2005; both cite numerous examples of the standard interpretation), in his later work, Quine insists that “[t]he normative is naturalized, not dropped” (1990: 229). He writes: - اقتباس :
- Naturalization of epistemology does not jettison the normative and settle for the indiscriminate description of ongoing procedures. For me normative epistemology is a branch of engineering. It is the technology of truth-seeking, or, in a more cautiously epistemological term, prediction. Like any technology, it makes free use of whatever scientific findings may suit its purpose. It draws upon mathematics in computing standard deviation and probable error and in scouting the gambler’s fallacy. It draws upon experimental psychology in exposing perceptual illusions, and upon cognitive psychology in scouting wishful thinking. It draws upon neurology and physics, in a general way, in discounting testimony from occult or parapsychological sources. There is no question here of ultimate value, as in morals; it is a matter of efficacy for an ulterior end, truth or prediction. The normative here, as elsewhere in engineering, becomes descriptive when the terminal parameter is expressed. (Quine 1986: 664–665)
| |
|
اليوم في 9:09 am من طرف