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 | |  Moderate Naturalism 5.1 Conceptual Analysis, Intuitions, and Epistemological Methodology | |
As the passage just quoted suggests, Goldman sees conceptual analysis and appeals to intuition as playing an ineliminable role within epistemological practice.[19] While, as noted above, within TE such an analysis has standardly taken the form of a search for necessary and sufficient conditions, Goldman is dubious of that specific approach (e.g., 1986: 38–39, 2015, 2007: 23 and papers there cited). Nonetheless, he insists that “armchair” conceptual investigation must be the starting point of epistemological theorizing. For this reason he is dubious that a satisfactory epistemology can be entirely concerned with “extra-mental phenomena”. In his most recent writing on the subject, Goldman frames the problem (as he sees it) for Kornblith’s view as follows: - اقتباس :
- …for a given analysandum, there will often be multiple candidates for being the relevant extra-mental phenomenon. If we set out to study knowledge empirically, as Kornblith instructs us, we will have an excess of candidate extra-mental phenomena. Starting with Kornblith’s preferred candidate, there is the set of states that consist in a creature believing a true proposition as a result of using a reliable process. Second, there is the set of states that consist in a creature believing something true (period). Third, there is the set of states consisting in a creature believing a proposition justifiedly (without its being true). Finally, there is a host of additional candidates, each corresponding to a different theory that was floated in response to the Gettier problem. Which of these many candidate extra-mental phenomena should philosophers of knowledge seek to investigate empirically? And how should they choose the one that is really knowledge?
What emerges here is that the epistemologist would need some prior method for choosing the right extra-mental phenomenon. And it seems inevitable that the method for making this choice will have to be something like the traditional one of consulting speakers' judgments about which states qualify—“intuitively”—as states of knowing. In short, a prior method is needed to pick out which set of extra-mental events in the world should be the target of a Kornblithian empirical investigation. Without such a prior method, the epistemologist would be like a blind man sent on a mission without a guide, or guide dog, to help him. Without a guide, how can one select the relevant extra-mental phenomenon? But Kornblith seems intent on denying the epistemologist any such guide. (Goldman 2015)[20] Given that it is anchored in precisely the sort of intuitional methodology and conceptual investigation that is characteristic of TE, Goldman’s approach does not of course face any immediate threat of (apparent) self-defeat. In what respect, though, is the view naturalistic? In one place, Goldman characterizes his preferred form of naturalism—he calls it “moderate naturalism”—as the combination of two theses.[21] The first thesis states his commitment, which we encountered above (Section 3.2), to a psycho-etiological approach to understanding justification (warrant, etc.). The second embodies his own view as to how, or how far, the methodology of TE needs to be altered and its autonomy modulated (see the discussion of methodological NE in Section 1.2 above):Moderate Naturalism
- (A)All epistemic warrant or justification is a function of the psychological (perhaps computational) processes that produce or preserve belief.
- (B)The epistemological enterprise needs appropriate help from science, especially the science of the mind. (Goldman 1999: 26)
What sort of help from science might philosophy need? In Epistemology and Cognition (1986) Goldman presents a “two-stage” model of epistemological inquiry: the first involves traditional armchair, conceptual analysis to determine the key contours and of the relevant concepts (according to Goldman, it reveals the centrality of considerations of reliability thereto); thereafter it is (or should be) epistemology’s task to determine “which cognitive processes are available and reliable”; and it is here, at this second stage, that “collaboration to with the empirical science of psychology, or cognitive science” is needed (2005: 408).Note: (A) here states that justification is a function of the psychological processes that produce or preserve belief. It represents a commitment to a certain form or degree of psychologism (Section 1.3). It does not state that all such justification is a posteriori: Goldman rejects the sort of strongly empiricist brand of NE that Kornblith and Quine embrace, [22] and he takes pains to argue that his own reliabilist way of underwriting (A) is perfectly compatible with the existence of a priori justification (see his 1999). (Kitcher too has suggested “that the concept of a priori knowledge can be embedded in a naturalistic epistemology”; 1980: 4.) And in his Epistemology and Cognition (1986), for example, Goldman appears to regard the conceptual analysis and consulting of intuitions that he sees as essential to epistemology as itself a priori (see 1989: 143).In more recent work (Goldman 1999, 2005, 2007; Goldman & Pust 1998), however, Goldman has suggested that the conceptual work characteristic of epistemological theorizing is a form of a posteriori, empirical investigation. For example, conceptual analysis typically involves the eliciting (or “testing”) of intuitions—a sample case is presented, and the epistemologist asks himself (or others) whether s/he thinks that the subject therein possesses knowledge, for example. Rather than seeing this as individuals’ employing some special faculty geared towards answering non-empirical questions, for example, it can be seen as the employment of an essentially experimental, “proto-scientific method” (2005: 408), geared towards the discovery of facts about the “experimenter’s”, or others’, epistemic concepts. On this view, even the consultation of one’s own intuitions is thoroughly empirical: - اقتباس :
- Classificational intuitions should not be assimilated to mathematical or logical intuitions. They are somewhat more like introspections or readouts of one’s own internal states, in this instance, the classificational implications of one’s own concepts. Although they are not perceptual, they share some features with observations….even intuition-based evidence of the first-person kind is not a priori evidence. Moreover, optimal use of one’s intuitions to arrive at theories of the contents of concepts, or the meanings of predicates, should take account of semantical and psychological theory, both empirical rather than a priori disciplines. (Goldman 2005: 409)
In thus (re)casting conceptual analysis and the consulting of intuitions as an empirical endeavor, Goldman is moving away from Bealer (1992) and BonJour (1994), for example, who take it as obvious that the conceptual orientation characteristic of traditional epistemological practice marks it as a priori. Just as importantly, Goldman is here moving closer to Kornblith. According to Goldman, while a reliance on intuitions, especially in connection with the project of analysis, constitutes an obvious difference between philosophical methodology and the methodology of empirical science, that methodology is still empirical. In this respect, philosophical methodology is not distinctive after all. It can appear to be such only because philosophical investigation, at least in its initial stage, has as its target the empirical examination of our concepts. It is his insistence upon the latter—that the target of armchair empirical investigations are concepts, rather than any extra-mental epistemic phenomena themselves—that remains the crucial point on which Goldman and Kornblith disagree.[23] | |
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