Tom Swann Thesis Topics Map

I’ve been looking at the possibility of a naturalistic understanding of epistemic normativity. Pursuit of this theme has lead me to traverse a range of different literature. I’ve laid out here what I’ve looked at in what is as close to an intelligible line of thought as I could muster. Bold headings are for topics, arrows (>>>) indicate my comments.

By ‘epistemic normativity’ I am pointing to concepts such as justification; reasons for beliefs, claims and theories; norms of inquiry. These concepts are normative because they are presupposed by questions like ‘what should I think?’ and ‘how should I work out what to think?’ Epistemology, I take it, is centrally if not constitutively concerned with these concepts—their content and objects, their limits and proper application, their role in our thought and practices. But not only are there many ways of understanding these concepts, there are many ways of asking questions about them, which in turn are connected to different ways of conceiving what one should be after in epistemology.

Naturalism is a name given to a wide range of views along many theoretical dimensions. Most broadly, naturalism is a meta-philosophical attitude: philosophy must be conducted in accordance with modern natural science. So naturalism is a view about what philosophy now most properly is, or should become. The impetus behind such an attitude was nicely canonised by Sellars: ‘science is the measure of all things.’ What ‘science’ should mean in all of this depends largely on how one conceives how philosophy should be ‘in accordance with’ it. This is where the main divergence of programs occurs; naturalism splits into epistemological and ontological themes. Epistemologically, a naturalist might argue that ‘the scientific method’ is an ideal epistemological practice, the measure of all things. A principle job for philosophy might then be to explain why science measures things so well, and one might strive to utilise such a method within philosophy to solve its own problems. Such epistemological naturalism in turn might motivate you to think that science is, or become, the measure of all things. Ontologically, a naturalist might argue that ‘the scientific world-view’ is an ideal world-view, or at least is some way along in pursuit of that ideal. The kind of ideal operative here is explanatory: science best says ‘what’ there is, because it explains why things unfold as they do. So the ontological naturalist thought here is that everything that happens should be explicable in this sense, describable in terms of its function in this explanation.

General doubts about the ontological naturalist agenda. Often Quine’s ‘On What There Is’ is read as providing an algorithm for working out what there ‘really’ is. (Schaffer: ) Using our ‘best theory’ as a datum, fed through some choice of canonising logic, then whatever would have to exist to make it true is what there is. It might be better to read Quine differently, not as inviting rival ontological programs or as showing us how to extract something new from our science, but rather like this (Price ): in doing science we become committed to there being various things, and the canonical logical form is to help us clarify and minimise the extent of this commitment. (Quine’s has his own ideas about what the commitments should turn out as.) But this is just to say that from within the scientific perspective we are committed to what science talks about. We are naturalists when using the language of science, but need not confine ourselves to that language and its commitments. Quine’s ontology is naturalist because of his conception of what counts as ‘best theory’. On Quine’s account science is adopted and adjudicated on pragmatic terms. On his own account of just these terms, all changes to our web of belief, our ‘total theory’, are to be appraised on how well they help us predict communal assent to observation sentences with the most elegant web possible. The fact that they are not appraised with respect to their commitments leaves room is left open for other constraints for other purposes, which again makes room for non-naturalist ontology even in the Quinean key. (Price: Quining Naturalism,) It is only if one supplements it with something like the ‘eleatic principle’, that only the causally involved is real, that this possible pluralism is blocked. But even accepting this, one can doubt the unity of the notion of causation. (Price: Introduction to Causal Republicanism.) This leaves a question about how we should think of the relations between ontological commitments from different discourses. Price’s approach is to see them as distinct worlds; as the theorist we mention the various vocabularies and talk about how use of them will commit us to their objects, but only when one uses them is one thereby committed to them. So the oddity of there being disjoint ‘worlds’ is visible only from a certain philosophical perspective, Schaffer’s approach is to accept the plurality of commonsensible properties and to ask how they all fit together in one world, in terms of what grounds what. Price holds on to Quine’s pragmatism, read in a Carnapian tolerance, while Schaffer considers the commitments of ‘total theory’ broadly in order to pursue a successor metaphysical project of building a picture that places them all in a chain of beings. Schaffer takes the bottom levels of the grounding hierarchy to inhabited by the entities and properties of natural science, however ‘higher up’ he wants to allow for all other properties we might talk of; these will not be revealable by natural scientific empirical investigation.

General doubts about the epistemological naturalist agenda Similar points can be reiterated in the epistemological naturalist case. At a certain level of abstraction, scientific method just is the method of rational inquiry, of working out what follows from what we are committed to, posing problems, and especially testing conjectures. At the finer resolution that is the province of philosophy concerned with science as actually practiced, with empirical sensitive theorising about the act or process of science rather than with a certain idealised conception of the world-picture that is said to be its product, it has long been appreciated that there is no clear sense in which all of what is uncontroversially called science has one method. Of course, one is not denying the impressive accumulation of theoretical mastery that has occurred through our world-historically important traditions of science. Of course, we should be clear about what questions should be addressed by empirical experimental investigation, and not try to answer them from our armchairs. This is consistent with insisting that what counts as the ‘best method’ of inquiry in any case is entirely up for grabs. This depends on the objects of study, also one’s theoretical goals. This point is particularly germane with regards to philosophy.

Quine’s Epistemology Naturalized - na’ve reading Traditional phenomenalist foundationalism has failed. But we don’t need to worry about grounding science on a philosophically vindicated foundation. Commitment to naturalism just is the commitment to address philosophical problems by starting with and proceed by appeal to the going theory. This means we can use science to explain how science works. Science here is conceived in terms of empirical knowledge most broadly. So ‘epistemology becomes a chapter of psychology’ (Famous quotes, often taken out of context:) >>>What Quine is pointing to here are undoubtedly many legitimate and important lines of inquiry’cognitive psychology, neurology, evolutionary anthropology, history of science’many of which were well under way at the time of this paper. The philosophical issue centres on just what the relevance of such research should be for philosophy. Quine seems to be saying that epistemology can just be replaced with such empirical study.

Backlash from traditional epistemology Epistemology is concerned with normative relations between evidence and theory, or more broadly: reasons and beliefs or claims. Quine’s directive to study only the causal connections between theory and evidence cannot give us anything like this. So it is not really epistemology at all. Kim 1988, Sosa 1983: knowledge supervenes on properties of belief states. Assuming naturalisation of belief, this gives a kind of naturalised epistemology, in the sense that the normative properties that are the concern of epistemology thus conceived are shown to fit ‘onto’ the natural world. >>>But perhaps not as a part of it? Analogy here with Moore’s intuitionism. It is crucial to the Kim/ Sosa response to Quine, as premised on the reason/ cause dichotomy, that these normative properties are not to be found (merely) by means of scientific activity that could have proceeded anyway, independently of epistemology. This leaves two problems. First, it leaves untouched the central tasks of epistemology as traditionally conceived, namely to say something principled about what is justified and what justification is. Indeed now it has the further burden of saying just how these matters are overlain on the ‘natural’ structure of our beliefs and their circumstances. But furthermore, it also now must say just how these properties could enter into our epistemic practices or be objects of our epistemic considerations.

Conceptual Analysis One way to pursue the first issue would be to pursue a Canberra Plan style analysis of our platitudes for knowledge to then work out what satisfies them. Thus epistemic normativity would be a function of our concepts, but would be ‘found’ in the natural world. Experimental philosophy There’s a fair bit of work on epistemic norms and intuitions cross-culturally, including across the non/philosopher divide. This work really just confirms what is anthropologically obvious, that human cultures effect the way humans develop and think. Work in this tradition typically tries to unsettle the methodological assumptions of the platitude aspect of conceptual analysis. >>>I think that it doesn’t change the essential point of the conceptual analytic approach, merely forces it to be clearer about what it really amounts to. It is open to say that our concepts overlap and diverge in different ways, and correspondingly so will the objects of those concepts. >>>Unclear whether the conceptual analytic approach would be able to underwrite the concerns of traditional epistemology. The concerns there are typically to say something principled about how we should think, not just to say something about how we think we should think.

Colyvan’s Naturalised Normativity Just as we should let our best scientific theories tell us what the natural world contains, we should let our best theories of rationality tell us what it is to be rational. Then we can say that natural things, e.g. us, are rational to the extent that they instantiate these structures. Colyvan has in might Bayesian belief theory, decision theory, etc. This echoes Davidson’s approach (see Could there be a Science of Rationality), which takes such formal theories to explicate the conditions of the possibility of interpreting another as being rational, and so of being rational. >>>This is naturalism in the epistemic key; it leads one to say that there are properties that are not straightforwardly studyable by natural science, in the sense that they aren’t governed by functional laws. But what counts as ‘best theory’ is up for grabs. In this instance, the matter is a particularly philosophical one.

Quine’s Naturalised Epistemology ’ what it was actually about Quine’s essay E.N. is really a just a programmatic application of views he had held for a long time. When he talks about ‘epistemology’, he means (as he explicitly says in the first sentence:) ‘the foundations of science.’ The combination of confirmation and therefore meaning holism, where the entire web of belief is always (in some sense) up for grabs (though not all at once), and Quine’s naturalistic denial of first philosophy, by which he means that all theoretical inquiry is to be understood as engaged in pursuit of theories that best fit the aforementioned pragmatic constraints of prediction and elegance, mean that science is rationally unreconstructable. The process of construction of ‘our theory’ proceeds by jumps under the pressures of sensory stimulus that one can give a pragmatic justification for, but cannot formalise in the way wanted by certain kinds of foundationalisms. The lesson Quine takes from Hume: knowledge of the world, causation etc impossible to deductively justify from sense experience. Carnap (as Quine reads his failure): the meaning of statements about the world are not reducible to statements about sense experience. Quine can be read here as responding to a Humean predicament in Humean terms. But it is even more radical than Hume: Hume’s distinction between truths of fact (rather, of immediate experience) and of logic is the basis for his skepticism about all other knowledge claims. For Quine, all we can only say of what we hold-true is the extent that it is pragmatically advisable to do so. In this we appeal to other parts of our web of belief, which contain even one’s standards of pragmatic advisability, moreover the standards of logic that one appeals to in adjudicating the coherence of one’s web for the purpose of achieving this end, indeed that constitute the very strands of the web (Two Dogmas). Quine’s notion of epistemology is technological. The only normativity he recognises in the last analysis is that of ‘engineering’.

naturalistic epistemological engineering There’s a line of thought that follows Quine here in thinking that the only epistemological questions are engineering questions, where we should use science to help us perfect our processes of thoughts and practices. Stich argues that epistemology should be pragmatic, in the sense that it should be geared towards delivering to us more of the things we find cognitively intrinsically valuable. This thought can be given a more metaphysical interpretation: (Someone else) argues that we can think of the goals as relative to an assessor, but this determines specific natural structures, processes, practices as most epistemically valuable for those goals, into which we can conducty naturalistic inquiry. In many cases, where truth is our goal or is the best way to that goal, the most relevant facts will be those of reliability. >>>I think this is a very different sense of pragmatism, and I think it might verge on incoherence. Quine would willingly accept the idea of naturalistic inquiry into best ways to pursue some goals, even goals of naturalistic inquiry. But I don’t think he could accept it as a replacement for his pragmatism about holding-true. For to work out what natural facts constitute or underwrite the best ways to our goals, we first need to hold-true a naturalistic picture.

Deeper reactions to Quine’s N.E. Many’e.g. Putnam (Why Reason Can’t be Naturalised), Sosa (ASDF), and Mc Dowell (Afterword I in Mind and World) argue that Quine’s philosophy is incoherent because torn between his logical positivism, albeit of a holistic, pragmatic variety, and his naturalised epistemology. On the one hand, he wants to be able to talk about sensory evidence as the final ‘checkpoint’ for all theory, a point which remains even if we focus as he tends to on falsification rather than confirmation. Moreover, much of his work concerns the logical structures of theory. On the other hand, even early on, before addressing and elaborating his naturalised epistemology later in his career, he talks (e.g. in Two Dogmas) about the impacts of sensory stimulation only in terms of how it as a matter of fact happens to affect our web of belief. It is not merely that Quine destroys traditional epistemology, but that he destroys the ability to think of ourselves as rational.

I have thought a lot about this, but it is still not clear to me how to think about it. Perhaps the overarching idea in the response is that it becomes unclear what sense the idea that the web of belief is logically structured if we can only describe its contents in terms of how their connections to one another are affected(or would be, despite Quine’s abhorence of modal talk) by different circumstances. Rorty’s reaction to this kind of point is to bifurcate two views of epistemic practices, one external, in terms of causal processes (which might align with this reading of Quine’s N.E.), and one internal, from the perspective of the practice of inquiry after the truth. Putnam and Mc Dowell resist this.

Subject Naturalism Price distinguishes two ways one can be a naturalist. The first, ‘object naturalism’, is exhibited in the conceptual analytic approach. We clarify our concepts, and then ask how what they are about could be found in the scientific world-picture. The second, ‘subject naturalism’, starting from the insistence that philosophy should not contradict our status as natural beings, engages in a broadly anthropological investigation to see what role the concepts or vocabularies in question play in our lives. Two advantages of doing this: one doesn’t assume at the outset that (all) language is to be understood representationally, as meaningful in virtue of its referents or truthmakers construed metaphysically naturalistically, which Price thinks is problematic for various reasons; this in turn holds out the promise of being able to avoid the placement problems of object naturalism altogether. >>>possible that one could engage in object naturalistic study for certain domains, but this would have to be demonstrated. >>>Question mark over what ‘natural’ here amounts to. Redding disambiguates a scientistic and a weaker reading where it simply amounts to denial of philosophical views that presuppose magical or infinite cognitive powers. In pursuit of subject naturalism Price wants to globalise the quasi-realist’s project. We earn the theoretical right to use all vocabulary ‘with the folk’ in all domains without thereby signing up to /any/ metaphysical projects. This is done via semantic minimalism, where internally we understand talk of ‘X’ to refer X, and for it to be that "P’ is true iff P’, but externally, say from the perspective of natural science, we merely mention ‘X’ and ‘P’, and so are bear no commitments with respect to X and P either way. He splits the notion of representation into two: e-representation is causal covariation with the world; i-representation is a place in a semantic network (functional or inferential). Thus we get an e-world and i-world, as the objects corresponding to each. The e-world is the i-world of science. It maintains a perspectival priority in our theorising, because it is the perspective from which the subject naturalist seeks to understand the why we go in for various lines of talk, including the talk that is involved in doing science. A good example, with which he responds to Rorty, is talk of truth. Rorty thinks truth is a redundant concept, as all the pragmatically relevant work in our epistemic lives is done by concepts of justification. Price argues that without a normative notion of truth functioning, by its communal adoption, as an trans-subjective ideal on discourse, we could not properly be said to disagree about anything. For we would merely be expressing commitments to different lines of thought. In order for claims to justification to have normative force over a discourse, the interlocutors must be governed by the ideal that there is only one way things are, and so that incompatible justifications ought to be adjudicated. >>>Price thinks his account of i-reps can proceed in the wake of Brandom’s inferentialist expressivism. But this is multiply problematic. Brandom’s account is not one merely of attributions of content in normative terms, but of the normative constitution of content. Brandom emphasises how non-naturalist this move is. There is a big gap between a subject naturalist construal of epistemically normative terms and Brandom’s account of content. Moreover Brandom’s expressivism is not like the globalised quasi-realism that Price thinks can account, without metaphysics, for the connection between the e-and i-reps ’ that is, i-reps showing up as e-reps within the e-world, which is the i-world of science. For Brandom we express a sense, make explicit a commitment, not ‘give voice to’ a psychological state in order to perform some function of social co-ordination. For Brandom a certain notion of social co-ordination, that is involvement in shared practices, is constitutive of content.

Reliabilism Emerged for Gettier reasons, but seemed ready for naturalisation. If knowledge is reliably produced true belief, then it seems we can get a handle on ‘reliably’ by means of natural science.

Brandom’s response Brandom accepts that in cases where P and S believes P and S is a reliable believer of P and yet S believes that they are not a reliable believer of P, the subject deserves to be said to know P, despite the ‘cognitive irresponsibility’ involved. Actually, he really only needs to concede the weaker point, that S can have knowledge when they do not believe that they are reliable. But Brandom resists the idea that reliability can simply supersede the notion of justification. The cases described above are possible only in the context of a broader practice that does involve giving and asking for reasons. A reliably differential responsive disposition must be recognised as such in order for knowledge to be thereby attributed, and to do so is eo ipso to give reasons for believing what is reported. Broader critique of reliabilism as naturalistic: the gerrymandering problem for the reference classes. Not a problem for Brandom’s account. From various kinds of information about the ‘reference class’ for some report, we can infer reliability or not; endorsement or rejection of such inferences may be implicit in ascriptions of reliability, which can be pulled into question by the relevant information. The bearing such indeterminately enumerable possible information might bear on our inferences will be resolutely non-monotonic and. >>>Brandom’s account is most basically understood as an account of what it is to /treat/ something as knowledge. A general problem hangs over his whole system: what is it to be, that is to be properly treatable as knowledge?

Response from Kornblith Knowledge is a natural kind. We can study it naturalistically, through cognitive science and ethology and ecology. We don’t have to study its concept, or to study what it is to attribute it. Kornblith resists the Sellarsian demarcation of nature and ‘freedom’ that is operative in Brandom (and Mc Dowell and William’s) accounts. He argues that complex behavioural learning and adaptiveness is prevalent throughout the animal kingdom. >>>I think Brandom and Kornblith are operating with different notions of knowledge. Kornblith is broadly reliabilist, and so externalist, and uses a correspondence notion of truth. Brandom’s account is grounded in social practices of endorsing and questioning material inferences. One is tempted to disambiguate senses of knowledge. One might do this along Price’s lines. Still I think Brandom might have a case to make against Kornblith, via a critique of the notion of content at play. It’s not clear that a notion of ‘truth’ one could construct for the context of causal co-variations could be legitimately said to be semantic. At the least, Kornblith himself, as with many reliabilists, simply assumes the notion of true belief, and doesn’t say anything about the question of naturalising intentionality. Complicated debate to have though…

Response to Kornblith from Williams Haven’t read this yet. But Williams says ‘Knowledge is not natural’.