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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Serie: This is Philosophy
- Sprache: Englisch
What is knowledge? Why is it valuable? How much of it do we have (if any at all), and what ways of thinking are good ways to use to get more of it? These are just a few questions that are asked in epistemology, roughly, the philosophical theory of knowledge. This is Epistemology is a comprehensive introduction to the philosophical study of the nature, origin, and scope of human knowledge. Exploring both classic debates and contemporary issues in epistemology, this rigorous yet accessible textbook provides readers with the foundation necessary to start doing epistemology.
Organized around 11 key subtopics, and assuming no prior knowledge of the subject, this volume exposes readers to diverse, often contentious perspectives—guiding readers through crucial debates including Hume’s problem of induction, Descartes’ engagement with radical skepticism, rationalist and empiricist evaluations of a priori justification, and many more. The authors avoid complex technical terms and jargon in favor of an easy-to-follow, informal writing style with engaging chapters designed to stimulate student interest and encourage class discussion. Throughout the text, a wealth of up-to-date references and links to online resources are provided to enable further investigation of an array of epistemological topics.
A balanced and authoritative addition to the acclaimed This is Philosophy series, This is Epistemology is a perfect primary textbook for philosophy undergraduates, and a valuable resource for general readers with interest in this important branch of philosophy.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgments
Introduction
I.1 What Is Epistemology?
I.2 Overview of the Book's Themes
Free Internet Resources
1 THE REGRESS PROBLEM
1.1 Introduction: A Thought Experiment
1.2 Infinitism and the Regress Problem
1.3 Objections to Infinitism
1.4 Coherentism
1.5 Foundationalism
1.6 Objections to Foundationalism
1.7 Conclusion
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2 PERCEPTION
2.1 Introduction
2.2 How to Stop an Epistemic Regress
2.3 How to Talk about Experience
2.4 Are We Ever Directly Aware of External Objects?
2.5 Against Naïve Realism
2.6 Evaluating Indirect Realism
2.7 The Return of Direct Realism
2.8 Does Experience Provide Us with Reasons to Believe?
2.9 Conclusion: Choosing a View
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3 THE A PRIORI
3.1 Introduction
3.2 Negative Characterizations of A Priori Justification
3.3 In What Sense Is A Priori Justification “Independent” of Experience?
3.4 Positive Characterizations of A Priori Justification
3.5 Bealer on the A Priori
3.6 BonJour on the A Priori
3.7 Is There A Priori Justification?
3.8 Quine's Attack on the Analytic–Synthetic Distinction and Its Significance
3.9 Against the Reliability of Intuitions
3.10 Rationalism and Skepticism
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4 INFERENCE
4.1 Introduction
4.2 Inference and the Scope of our Knowledge
4.3 The Problem of Induction
4.4 Solving the Problem
4.5 A Pragmatic Justification
4.6 No Justification? No Problem!
4.7 Deductive Reasoning and Closure
4.8 Against Closure
4.9 In Defense of Closure
4.10 Conclusion
4.A Appendix: When Does a Body of Evidence Justify Belief?
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5 ON KNOWING THE TRUTH
5.1 Introduction
5.2 A Simple View
5.3 Gettier's Cases
5.4 Causation?
5.5 Modal Approaches
5.6 Ability
5.7 What If There Is No Analysis?
5.8 Conclusion
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6 MEMORY
6.1 Introduction
6.2 Awareness of the Past
6.3 Memory and Knowledge
6.4 Memory and the Justification of Belief
6.5 Justifying Our Reliance on Memory
6.6 The Problem of Easy Knowledge
6.7 Conclusion
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7 TESTIMONY
7.1 Introduction
7.2 Reductionism and Non‐Reductionism
7.3 Testimony and Transmission
7.4 Caveat Emptor? On the Speaker's Responsibilities
7.5 Disagreement
7.6 Conclusion
7.A Appendix: Testimonial Injustice
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8 KINDS OF KNOWLEDGE
8.1 Introduction
8.2 Knowing‐How and Knowing‐That
8.3 Is Understanding a Species of Knowledge?
8.4 Animal and Reflective Knowledge
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9 INTERNALISM VS. EXTERNALISM
9.1 Introduction
9.2 An Early Argument for Externalism
9.3 Objections to Reliabilism and/or Externalism
9.4 Arguments for Externalism
9.5 Conclusion
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10 THE ETHICS OF BELIEF
10.1 Introduction
10.2 Plantinga's Peritrope
10.3 The Costs and Benefits of Ungrounded Belief
10.4 Ought and Ability
10.5 Ethics and Epistemology
10.6 Conclusion
10.A Appendix: When and Why the Evidence Is “Sufficient”
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11 SKEPTICISM
11.1 Introduction
11.2 An Argument for Radical Skepticism
11.3 Moore's Proof
11.4 Sensitivity
11.5 The Explanationist Reply
11.6 A Contextualist Solution
11.7 Darker Demonology: Schaffer's Demon
11.8 New Skepticism
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References
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 The
Supporting Justified Belief Rule
tells us that we need belief...
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 Adelson's Checker‐Shadow Illusion.
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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THIS IS EPISTEMOLOGY
Series editor: Steven D. Hales
Reading philosophy can be like trying to ride a bucking bronco—you hold on for dear life while “transcendental deduction” twists you to one side, “causa sui” throws you to the other, and a 300‐word, 300‐year‐old sentence comes down on you like an iron‐shod hoof the size of a dinner plate. This Is Philosophy is the riding academy that solves these problems. Each book in the series is written by an expert who knows how to gently guide students into the subject regardless of the reader’s ability or previous level of knowledge. Their reader‐friendly prose is designed to help students find their way into the fascinating, challenging ideas that compose philosophy without simply sticking the hapless novice on the back of the bronco, as so many texts do. All the books in the series provide ample pedagogical aids, including links to free online primary sources. When students are ready to take the next step in their philosophical education, This Is Philosophy is right there with them to help them along the way.
This Is Philosophy, Second editionSteven D. Hales
This Is Philosophy of MindPete Mandik
This Is EthicsJussi Suikkanen
This Is Political PhilosophyAlex Tuckness and Clark Wolf
This Is Business EthicsTobey Scharding
This Is MetaphysicsKris McDaniel
This Is BioethicsRuth F. Chadwick and Udo Schuklenk
This Is EpistemologyJ. Adam Carter and Clayton Littlejohn
This Is Philosophy of ReligionNeil Manson
Forthcoming:
This Is Philosophy of Mind, 2nd editionPete Mandik
This Is Philosophy of ScienceFranz-Peter Griesmaier and Jeffrey A. Lockwood
THIS IS EPISTEMOLOGY
AN INTRODUCTION
J. ADAM CARTER AND CLAYTON LITTLEJOHN
This edition first published 2021© 2021 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by law. Advice on how to obtain permission to reuse material from this title is available at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions.
The right of J. Adam Carter and Clayton Littlejohn to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with law.
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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data is applied for
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Cover design: Wiley
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors are grateful to Steven D. Hales for his encouragement, support, and patience during the completion of this book, and to three anonymous referees whose extensive comments on the initial version of the manuscript have improved the final version greatly.
This Is Epistemology was written between 2014 and 2020, and the narrative arc that emerged reflects a range of epistemological topics that the authors themselves (sometimes collectively, sometimes individually) hold near and dear. The result is, we hope, a more comprehensive and apt picture of epistemology than either of us would have presented individually.
Adam would like to thank those epistemologists who have shaped his own reading of the lay of the land in epistemology. There are many, but two who stand out in particular are Duncan Pritchard and Ernest Sosa. Both have been in different ways invaluable guides. In addition, Adam would like to thank Chris Kelp and Mona Simion for very helpful discussion, Clayton Littlejohn for being a great co‐author throughout, and Emma C. Gordon for years of loving support (especially during the chapter on the a priori, which was trying for us both).
Clayton would like to thank his students, colleagues, and former teachers for philosophical conversation, Steven Hales for encouragement, and Amy Revier for her support. He also wants to thank his co‐author for his excellent work on this project.
Notes
1
For a comprehensive overview of late‐twentieth‐century literature on the analysis of knowledge, see Borges et al. (2017) and, for more advanced discussion, Shope (1983). See also Dutant (2015) and Ichikawa and Steup (2017) for helpful discussion of the analysis of knowledge as a philosophical project.
2
“If and only if” can be abbreviated to “iff.”
3
In English grammar, a “that” clause is a subordinate clause that begins with the word “that”.
4
We should note that the matter of just how widely held this “justified, true belief” account of knowledge was prior to the 1960s – when it was famously challenged by Ed Gettier (1963) – is somewhat contentious. Gettier himself thought that Ayer and Chisholm, as well as Plato, embraced the account, and this has been often taken for granted. Rosa Antognazza (2015) and Julien Dutant (2015) have recently argued that the received version of the history of the justified, true belief account is in fact inaccurate.
5
See, especially, Williamson (2000).
6
This idea is often expressed as: there is no empirical knowledge, where empirical knowledge is knowledge whose sources derive in some way from sense experience.
7
In the
Meditations
, Descartes begins – in Meditation One – by raising two famous skeptical scenarios, one involving dreaming, and another involving an evil genius. The Descartes of this first Meditation was a skeptic in despair. But, and this is why we note that referring to Descartes as a skeptic is a bit misleading, Descartes' skeptical peril was merely temporary. By Meditation Two he already believes he has found the key to overcoming the skeptical challenges he'd previously posed.
8
This is an adaptation of a description of a skeptical case by Crispin Wright (2007, p. 27).
9
This bit of reasoning, as we'll see in
Chapter 11
, relies on what is called the “closure principle”; roughly, this principle says that if one knows something,
p
, and competently deduces something else,
q
, from
p
, while retaining one's knowledge that
p
, then one knows that
q
. As a brief exercise, think a moment about this principle and its implications for whether you can know you have a hand if you don't know you're not a victim of the
Simulation
scenario.
10
See, for example, Williamson (2000, pp. 2–5; 2017, pp. 163–165).
11
This “direction of fit” language owes a debt most notably to Anscombe (1957) and has been developed in various ways by (along with Williamson), Searle (1983), Humberstone (1992), Smith (1994), and Velleman (2000), among others.
12
For related discussion, see our treatment of direct realism in
Chapter 2
.
1THE REGRESS PROBLEM
1.1 Introduction: A Thought Experiment
1.1 Imagine that a team of scientists develops a device that can scan your brain and record everything you believe. You put on the special helmet, the device scans your brain, and the scientists print it all out so you can take home Your Book of Beliefs. Thumbing through the pages, you come across many beliefs you expected to find in Your Book of Beliefs. You also discover some beliefs you didn't expect to find in there – for example, beliefs that play a role in guiding your behavior but which are for the first time being brought to your attention for critical inspection.1 For better or worse, none of your beliefs has escaped detection by this remarkable helmet (not even the embarrassing ones).
1.2 Your Book of Beliefs is, in one sense at least, very useful. You find out, once and for all, everything you believe – which is very helpful to know! But you realize something important is missing. You notice there is nothing anywhere in Your Book of Beliefs that tells you which of your beliefs are actually worth keeping and which ought to be abandoned.
1.3 If you've read a bit of psychology, you probably know that certain kinds of beliefs can be helpful to have simply because thinking about them makes you feel better about yourself, allows you to cope effectively with stressful experiences, etc. Such beliefs might be good to have simply because having them helps us get by.
1.4 While it might be nice to know which beliefs can help you to get by or find peace, the very fact that you're reading an epistemology book suggests you might not care only about whether your beliefs are useful to you in this way. If you have an inquiring mind, you might also be interested in having beliefs that actually match up with how things are, regardless of whether having them makes you feel happy or comfortable or helps you cope.
1.5 Let's assume you're like this, and so you want to work out which of your beliefs are worth keeping and which ought to be abandoned from the specific point of view (the epistemic point of view of interest in epistemology) where what matters is things like getting to the truth and having knowledge. That is, you want to sort your epistemically justified beliefs from your epistemically unjustified beliefs – and not to have them have them unhelpfully lumped all together (as they presently are in the book the scientists have given you).
1.6 So you begin creating a new book: Your Book of (Epistemically) Justified Beliefs.2 Unfortunately, the scientists who created the helmet are simply not willing or able to help you fill out this second book. (They say that, as scientists, they are “in the business of describing, not evaluating”.) When they scan your brain, the helmet is simply unable to detect things anything that philosophers call normative – like good and bad, right and wrong, justified and unjustified.3 It simply includes in the book whatever beliefs you in fact do have, for better or worse. If you want to know which beliefs from Your Book of Beliefs belong in Your Book of Justified Beliefs (where being “justified” is a normative matter), you need to do some epistemology, which is the area of philosophy that studies this kind of thing. Epistemology, if done well, can help you figure out not only which (if any) beliefs you have are epistemically justified, but also which ones are known, and even how much knowledge you have.
1.7 But where to start? Here it helps to take things slowly. In order to figure out which beliefs from Your Book of Beliefs should make it in to Your Book of Justified Beliefs, you'll obviously need to apply some kind of sorting method.4
1.8 Fortunately, you already have a decent grip – before doing much or any epistemology – of which beliefs of yours seem already like the best candidates for justified beliefs (and which ones don't). Looking through Your Book of Beliefs, you notice the first two entries as:
B1 (Belief 1). Rental prices will continue to increase in London in the coming year.
B2. There are ghosts.
You are fairly confident that B1 is justified and that B2 is not, and this is helpful because if whatever sorting method or rule you apply doesn't get these rather easy cases right, it's – like flipping a coin – probably not a very good way to sort the justified from the unjustified beliefs.5
1.9 At any rate, it seems like something must account for why B1 and B2 differ in their being justified.6 In a bit more detail, B1 must have some feature that B2 lacks, and this feature must surely account for the difference in justification.
1.10 This basic idea – that any difference in justification must be explained by some other difference that is not itself just a difference in justification – is an instance of a more general philosophical principle which is helpful for thinking about normative matters. Call it the Principle of Sufficient Difference.7
Principle of Sufficient Difference: if there is some normative difference between X and Y, there must be some further non‐normative difference between X and Y that is responsible for this normative difference: that is, there must be some non‐normative feature F such that (i) X has F, (ii) Y lacks F, and (iii) this difference is responsible for the normative difference between X and Y.
Note that the Principle of Sufficient Difference is not itself a full‐blown method for determining which of your beliefs are justified. But it is a principle that any good method you apply with that aim in mind will have to respect. (Consider that a method that did not respect this principle would have to allow, for example, that two beliefs could have all the same properties with the exception that one of them is justified and the other is not. But that would be quite a pill to swallow.)
1.11 Back to business. With the Principle of Sufficient Difference in hand (along with an intuitive sense that B1 is justified and B2 is not), can you think of any difference between B1 and B2 that might plausibly account for why B1 is justified and B2 is not? If so, you're in a good position to appeal to this very difference when proposing a method for sorting your justified from your unjustified beliefs.8
1.12 But what might such a feature be? What seems to favorably distinguish your belief that rental prices will continue to increase in London in the coming year from your belief that there are ghosts? As you look through the pages of Your Book of Beliefs, you notice a good candidate for such a feature: you find various other entries that support B1. By ‘support’ here, what is meant is: entries that might serve as premises of good arguments, arguments that support B1. For example, you come across these entries:
B645. There will not be an increase in the supply of housing in London during the coming year.
B646. There will be increased demand for housing in London during the coming year.
B87. Price will increase if there is an increase in demand without an increase in supply.
B645, B646, and B87 all support B1. You don't see any other beliefs that support the ghost belief. So here's one difference between B1 and B2: B1 is supported by further beliefs, and B1 is not. Perhaps extrapolating from this difference will give us a good rule for determining which beliefs get to be entries in Your Book of Justified Beliefs:
Supporting Belief Rule: an entry in Your Book of Beliefs gets to be an entry in Your Book of Justified Beliefs iff it is supported by further beliefs.
The Supporting Belief Rule seems like a promising idea until you notice that there's another entry in the book:
B465789. Your friends at school saw a ghost when they were camping.
You still think that B2 isn't justified, but the Supporting Belief Rule suggests that it is justified – after all, it is supported by a further belief: B465789.
1.13 The Supporting Belief Rule isn't a good rule. If it's silly to believe in ghosts, it's silly to believe that your friends saw a ghost. If a silly belief supports another silly belief, they remain equally silly, and neither seems to be a good candidate for justification. (Compare: you can't boost the strength of a weak link in a chain by supporting it with another weak link.) The trouble with the Supporting Belief Rule, then, seems to be that it doesn't place any sensible restrictions on which beliefs could confer justification by providing this support.
1.14 To fix this, we might modify the rule as follows:
Supporting Justified Belief Rule: an entry in Your Book of Beliefs gets to be an entry in Your Book of Justified Beliefs iff it is adequately supported by more justified beliefs.9
That's better, surely, for it explains why B2 doesn't get into Your Book of Justified Beliefs. It isn't justified, because the only beliefs that support it are unjustified. Notice, however, that if we move to the Supporting Justified Belief Rule, we face a new and entirely different problem.
1.15 In explaining why B1 is justified, you cited further beliefs (i.e. B645, B646, and B87). There's a nice little argument that takes you from these beliefs to B1, but the argument doesn't justify B1 unless its premises are themselves justified. So: are B645, B646, and B87 justified or not?
1.16 The Supporting Justified Belief Rule tells us that we need more justified beliefs (and not merely more beliefs) that support B645, B646, and B87 if these beliefs are going to justify B1. Convinced that B1 really is justified, you press on. Surely something must support B645, B646, and B87. So surely these further beliefs contained in the pages of Your Book of Beliefs will show that B1 belongs in Your Book of Justified Beliefs.
1.17 The situation we face here is similar to the situation we faced earlier. We notice that there's a normative difference between two things (e.g. B1 and B2). The Principle of Sufficient Difference tells us that such a difference is possible only when there's some further difference that accounts for it (e.g. B1 is supported by justified beliefs and B2 is not). When we cite the factors that distinguish a justified belief like B1 from an unjustified belief like B2, the Supporting Justified Belief Rule tells us that the factors will be more justified beliefs (e.g. B645, B646, and B87). The Principle of Sufficient Difference will apply again to these new beliefs and the Supporting Justified Belief Rule will tell us that we need beliefs other than B645, B646, and B87 to justify B645, B646, and B87 (Figure 1.1). This could go on for a while, in a way that seems to threaten an infinite regress.
Figure 1.1 The Supporting Justified Belief Rule tells us that we need beliefs other than B645, B646, and B87 to justify B645, B646, and B87.
1.18 It is beginning to look as though demonstrating that B1 is justified (which we originally thought was obviously justified) is difficult to do. And this looks like a problem – what epistemologists call a regress problem. After all, repeated application of the Supporting Justified Belief Rule tells us to find more and more justified beliefs (threatening infinite regress), but perhaps the required stock of justified beliefs just isn't there.
1.19 One somewhat depressing move at this juncture is to abandon the attempt to show that B1 (or any other of your beliefs is justified) and simply accept skepticism about epistemic justification:
Skepticism about epistemic justification: no beliefs are justified.10
If skepticism is correct, Your Book of Justified Beliefs is (despite what you may think) empty; none of your beliefs, including B1 and other beliefs you originally took to be justified, are actually justified. Unfortunately, Your Book of Beliefs – the one the scientists gave you – is filled with entries. Its pages should be blank. Or so this view maintains.11
1.20 Although some serious thinkers have reached this skeptical conclusion,12 the very idea that your beliefs are unjustified en masse takes us a long way from common sense, which tells us that some of our beliefs are in much better shape than others. Plus, the skeptic hasn't offered any compelling positive argument for skepticism yet, so we shouldn't be too hasty to conclude that none of our beliefs are justified. After all, doesn't the Supporting Justified Belief Rule tell us that justification is within reach? All it takes to have justified beliefs like B1 is to have more justified beliefs like B645, B646, and B87. We haven't seen any reason yet to think that these beliefs aren't justified, have we?
1.21 In the remainder of this chapter, we'll articulate and critically discuss three non‐skeptical views: infinitism, coherentism, and foundationalism. In outline form, these views maintain the following:
Infinitism: all justified beliefs are justified because of support from further justifiers. The chain of justifiers justifies beliefs only when it forms an infinite series of non‐repeating justifiers. No belief can be justified without support from a further justifier that belongs to such a series.
Coherentism: all justified beliefs are justified because they belong to a coherent set of beliefs that support them (i.e. beliefs that are mutually supporting in that they lend deductive, inductive, or abductive support to other members). No belief can be justified without support from a further justified belief.
Foundationalism: all justified beliefs are justified because of support from further justified beliefs or because they are justified without such support. Any justified belief is either a properly basic belief or it derives its justification from such beliefs.
1.2 Infinitism and the Regress Problem
1.22 Infinitism tells us that a belief is justified iff it is appropriately supported by an infinite collection of non‐repeating justifiers (i.e. justified beliefs or available supporting reasons). This is tantamount to accepting the Supporting Justified Belief Rule and taking it to its logical conclusion without ceding to the skeptic.
1.23 For obvious reasons, infinitism looks like quite a difficult pill to swallow. The elephant in the room here is that the collection of non‐repeating justifiers must be infinite. Should a view that is premised upon such a seemingly overwhelming suggestion be dismissed out of hand? Perhaps not. As proponents of infinitism John Turri and Peter Klein have suggested, the principal reason that we should accept infinitism is that whatever problems infinitism faces, the problems that face the only two alternatives are worse.13 They state this overarching “process of elimination argument” for (non‐skeptical14) infinitism as follows:
Master Argument for Epistemic Infinitism
P1 (Premise 1). There are three possible, non‐skeptical solutions to the regress problem: foundationalism, coherentism, and infinitism.
P2. There are insurmountable difficulties foundationalism and coherentism.
P3. Infinitism faces no insurmountable difficulties.
P4. Not having insurmountable difficulties is better than not.
C (Conclusion). Therefore, infinitism is the best non‐skeptical solution to the regress problem.15
P1 is widely taken for granted by all parties to the dispute, and P4 is likewise uncontentious.16
