Epistemology as “Thoroughly Empirical” 4.1 Knowledge and Epistemology

Unlike Quine, Kornblith retains knowledge as a central epistemological notion. However, his position departs dramatically from TE in how the nature of epistemological investigation is understood. Here, in both its proper target and its methods, epistemology is held not to be as TE and its practitioners portray them. As to the first, recall (Section 1.3) that a, if not the, central task of analytic epistemology following the demise of logical empiricism was “the analysis of knowledge”, by which was meant the attempt to provide an analysis, typically in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, of the concept of knowledge. (See, for instance, the various papers in the aforementioned Roth and Galis volume.) Against this, it is suggested that the concept of knowledge is of little if any theoretical interest; it is no more the proper target of epistemological theory than the concept of aluminum is a worthy target of inquiry for one trying to understand various metals. Likely, Kornblith says, our concept of knowledge is defective in various ways anyway. (For example, in spite of its now near-universal rejection among epistemologists, the idea that knowledge required certainty enjoyed the favor of many, and is arguably still attractive among many non-philosophers.) What epistemologists should seek is “to provide an account of a certain natural phenomenon, namely, knowledge itself” (1999: 161). “It is the investigation of knowledge as a phenomenon in the world”, he writes, “which distinguishes naturalism from other approaches to knowledge” (1995: 245).
As to method, the epistemologist should proceed as would our imagined metallurgist: we begin by examining apparently clear cases of knowledge, and look to find what they have in common. Part of what happens here, very likely, is that we will reclassify some of these examples along the way. What emerges, however, is a picture of the true nature of knowledge. Specifically, and as is evident in the work of cognitive ethologists in particular—that is, those whose job it is to study intelligent animal behavior—what emerges is an essentially reliabilist picture of knowledge:

اقتباس :: …true beliefs that are reliably produced, that are instrumental in the production of behavior successful in meeting biological needs and thereby implicated in the Darwinian explanation of the selective retention of traits. (Kornblith 2002: 62)

Knowledge, on this view, is a natural kind, one that’s realized in both human and non-human animals. It has a particular nature, and a particular causal-explanatory role in our general understanding of the life and success of certain types of biological organisms. In better understanding that place, and through an empirical investigation of

اقتباس :: the various mechanisms of belief production and retention, we may determine where we are most in need of guidance, and what steps can be taken, given our capabilities, to overcome our shortcomings. (Kornblith 1999: 163; on NE and epistemic improvement, see too Kornblith’s 1994b)

So, both at the stage of understanding the worldly epistemological target, and in recommending possible improvements to our epistemic strategies, “a proper naturalistic epistemology is empirical all the way down” (Kornblith 1995: 243). While epistemology thus has no distinctivemethod, there is a sense, Kornblith thinks, in which it retains its autonomy:

اقتباس :: Questions about knowledge and justification, questions about theory and evidence, are...legitimate questions, and they are ones in which philosophy has a special stake….If the autonomy of a discipline consists in dealing with a distinctive set of questions, or in approaching certain phenomena with a distinctive set of concerns, then philosophy is surely an autonomous discipline. There is no danger that these questions and concerns will be somehow co-opted by other disciplines. (Kornblith 2002: 26)

4.2 Epistemic Normativity

While Kornblith thus denies that epistemology is to be replaced by some other discipline(s) (replacement NE), it is perhaps less clear what becomes of the normativity of epistemology on his view. Unlike Quine as he is standardly interpreted—but as appears to be Quine’s view in later writings—Kornblith is “quite sympathetic with the suggestion that the normative dimension of epistemological inquiry is essential to it” (Kornblith 1995: 250). And Kornblith, like reliabilists generally, portrays truth (true belief) as the epistemic goal—much as Quine, in describing his view of the normative dimension of epistemology (Section 3), presumes that truth (or prediction) is “the terminal parameter”. But how is this established, such that a “thoroughly empirical” (1995: 250) epistemology can, after all, retain the normative dimension of TE?
One response to this question is that epistemic norms have a “practical grounding” (Kornblith 1993b, 2002). While it is compatible with the possible intrinsic value of true belief (Kornblith 2002: 161, 373), such an account features its instrumental value. Importantly, however, the argument is not cast (just) in terms of the instrumental value of individual true beliefs; the central claim, rather, is that everyone “has pragmatic reasons to favor a cognitive system which is effective in generating truths” (2002: 156). This point can perhaps be best illustrated by considering an alternative naturalistic account of the source of epistemic normativity—the “pragmatist” account favored by Stephen Stich (1990, 1993).
According to Stich, there is nothing special about truth, and no reason to take it to be the epistemic goal. In fact, for pragmatists, there are no special cognitive or epistemological values at all—“[t]here are just values” (1993: 9). Good reasoning becomes a matter of effectively promoting your goals (what you value), whatever they are. Stich says that, “the pragmatist project for assessing reasoning” proceeds by determining one’s goals—what one wants to achieve—and then identifying the reasoning strategies that others have successfully employed in achieving those same goals (ibid: 9–10). However, it is hard to see how this is to be done unless one has some reliable cognitive systems or strategies in place. That is, even if happiness, say, rather than true belief, is what one really values, in order to effectively pursue that goal one will need some way of determining how best to achieve it. One will need, that is, a (reasonably) reliable cognitive system—or, to put it in more traditional terms, one will need some reliable faculties. Further,

اقتباس :: [p]recisely because our cognitive systems are required to perform evaluations relative to our many concerns, and to perform these evaluations accurately, the standards by which we evaluate these cognitive systems themselves must remain insulated from most of what we intrinsically value, whatever we may value. (Kornblith 2002: 158)

So, whatever else one cares about, one has an interest in—one should care about—having a cognitive system (or systems) that produces true beliefs reliably; one has an interest in—a reason to care about—evaluating, not just individual beliefs, but our various systems and methods for producing them, in terms of their reliability. “And this”, as Kornblith says, “is precisely what epistemic evaluation is all about. Truth plays a pre-eminent role here” (2002: 158).
Whether one finds the preceding account of the grounding of epistemic normativity satisfactory will depend largely upon how one conceives of epistemic normativity, even normativity generally, to begin with. For example, the above argument seems to rely upon the instrumental or means-end norm. Speaking of his own view, which is in this respect similar to Kornblith’s, Maffie says:

اقتباس :: epistemology is normative only within the framework of instrumental reason and…its normativity is parasitic upon that of the latter. (1990b: 333)

There is debate, however, about the nature and status of instrumental reason, as well about whether a reliance upon it should be acceptable to a naturalist. (See, e.g., Hampton 1992, Dreier 2001, Siegel 1990;[17] for general discussion, see Wallace 2014.) So too, some philosophers regard epistemic norms as categorical—as binding on any rational agent, regardless of the goals or desires which s/he happens to have (Kelly 2003: 616, 621). Now, there are no specific goals or desires that one must have in order to be so bound, according to Kornblith: his argument requires only that one have some goals. Since this condition is fulfilled in all normal humans the hypothetical norm—“If you have some desire or goal you wish to satisfy or attain, seek the truth”—is in effect a categorical one (it is “universal”, as Kornblith puts it; 2002: 161). However, some may find even this still too contingent a ground upon which to base epistemic norms. (Compare Husserl’s and Frege’s concerns about the intrusion of psychology into logic and mathematics; Section 1.3.) Others, on the other hand, may doubt whether TE itself has ever been able to provide any entirely unconditional recommendations (e.g., Grandy 1994: 345). And Kornblith, like other naturalists, is bound to question whether attempting to understand epistemic normativity while setting aside such obvious and inescapable facts as that we do have goals and desires is likely to yield any useful insight into our actual epistemic situation (see, e.g., Kornblith 1995: 251, and Wrenn 2006: 73, commenting on Goldman 1986).

4.3 Intuitions and the A Priori

As we saw previously, one prevalent form of the self-defeat objection to NE is that it inevitably itself relies upon “[t]he a priorism involved in the traditional sort of armchair methodological research” (Kaplan 1994: 359) and makes use of “the very sorts of epistemic intuitions which the naturalists are so eager to disparage” (ibid.: 360; cf. Almeder 1990: 266–267). In this way, EN itself requires or presumes the legitimacy of appeals to a priori or “armchair” intuition, a key element of “the standard justificatory procedure” in philosophy (Bealer 1992). So the position of the proponent of NE is self-defeating—“it seeks to justify naturalized epistemology in precisely the way in which, according to it, justification cannot be had” (Siegel 1984: 675).
According to the form of NE currently being considered, a reliance on intuitions, particularly in the early stages of inquiry, may be practically necessary. However, it may be argued that “the method of appeals to intuitions is…easily accommodated within a naturalistic framework” (Kornblith 2002: 12). Thus, were you to describe to me a certain animal you observed in your back yard, I might naturally and correctly judge it to have been a squirrel. Clearly, this does not involve or require any a priori insight on my part; it simply reflects some easily gotten knowledge about the relevant local fauna. In the same way, Kornblith thinks, our seemingly spontaneous judgments about whether this or that actual or hypothetical case constitutes an instance of knowledge is an a posteriori judgment, backed by our already-acquired knowledge of the relevant worldly epistemic phenomenon. So “appeals to intuition do not require some non-natural faculty or a priori judgment of any sort….The practice of appealing to intuition has no non-natural ingredients. (2002: 21).[18]
What of the charge that, in presenting various philosophical arguments, the naturalist is tacitly relying upon various principles of good reasoning, themselves known only a priori (e.g., BonJour 1994)? One obvious response is that this begs the question. On a reliabilist view, the legitimacy of the relevant principles of reasoning—what makes them good principles—is a function of whether they are, in fact, reliable. They needn’t be known to be such, much less must they be known to be such a priori (Kornblith 2002: 21–23; 1995: 252). So the objector “is simply taking for granted certain constraints on good reasoning which the naturalist rejects” (1995: 253). Moreover, there is the concern that such constraints, if consistently applied, would be rarely if ever be satisfied. Insofar as they have such skeptical consequences, such constraints cannot be reasonable (1995: 253; 2006: 347–348).
As with his response to the normativity problem, there are questions as to whether Kornblith’s attempt to diffuse the self-defeat objection is successful. For example, both BonJour (2006) and Siegel (2006) have replied to Kornblith’s arguments, claiming that the threat of self-defeat is as strong as even. For instance, Siegel claims that “it is unclear how [Kornblith’s] appeal to reliabilism can be justified without either contravening naturalism or presupposing it” (2006: 246–248; cf. Kappel 2010: 845). Or, to take another example, Kornblith at one point says, in passing, “knowledge is, surely, more than just true belief” (2002: 54), and a proponent of TE might wonder what justifies that claim. Of course, it is not difficult to imagine how Kornblith is apt to respond to such worries—that knowledge involves reliably produced true belief is an empirical discovery, arriving at by studying apparently clear cases of the phenomenon. There may be some circularity here, but no more than is involved in Siegel’s or BonJour’s pointing to some cases and saying, with the presumed backing of rational insight, that they reveal what knowledge (justification, rationality, etc.) really is.
Obviously, there is to be no fast and easy resolution of this debate—not least because the nature of status of the a priori, as well as what is required for knowledge, for example, are themselves hotly contested. (For general discussion of the a priori, see Russell 2014; for a representative sampling of current work on the topic, see Casullo and Thurow 2013. Ichikawa and Steup 2014 provide an overview of issues surrounding knowledge.) For our purposes, however, what is especially noteworthy is that some of the very same worries as Siegel and BonJour register about Kornblith’s attempt to cast epistemology as “empirical all the way down” have been voiced by Alvin Goldman, himself an extremely prominent advocate of NE:

اقتباس :: Where does the assertion that knowledge is “more than just true belief” come from? What licenses it? Surely it doesn’t come from cognitive ethology. It would have to come, one supposes, from a semantico-conceptual account of the term “knowledge”. But many would say that this is precisely what philosophy, in its analytic phase, aims to provide. So that job is not taken over by biological science, as Kornblith often suggests that it is. (2005: 407)

Epistemology as “Thoroughly Empirical” 4.1 Knowledge and Epistemology

4.2 Epistemic Normativity

4.3 Intuitions and the A Priori

Epistemology as “Thoroughly Empirical” 4.1 Knowledge and Epistemology :: تعاليق

Epistemology as “Thoroughly Empirical” 4.1 Knowledge and Epistemology