Final Review

Problem with Pryor's view on dogmatism

If perception is receptive to input from the general cognitive system (i.e., beliefs), then it does not seem to be the kind of thing that can provide immediate (even prima facie) justification.

What is Quine's "holism" about meaning?

The usage of all our words seems interconnected, and runs into many problems because the resultant view can seem to conflict with (among other things) the intuition that meanings are by and large shared and stable.

Post-Quine

There has been a lot of work on evolutionary epistemology. There has also been a lot of work on the psychology of reasoning, and the ways in which our reasoning leads us astray. Bishop and Trout have tried to formalize this approach into a more serious epistemology, with mixed results.

REDUCTION

There is a strong assumption that we should reduce the claims of one science to another. For example, the claims of psychology might reduce to neuroscience, which then reduce to chemistry, which reduce to physics, etc., etc. But to what does the most fundamental physics reduce? -This is impossible to determine conclusively

PERCEPTUAL CONTENT

They represent a certain state of affairs; they represent the world as being a certain way Is misrepresenting the way the world is. (illusions)

Pryor

Thinks skepticism undermines dogmatism

According ti Quine, how do we fix traditional epistemology?

Use the psychological method: to study empirically how people transform sensory input into theoretical output.

Quine

VERY influential philosopher • Has a coherent but seemingly radical set of philosophical views • These views are focused on a strong suspicion of traditional philosophical methods and concerns.

JAEGWON KIM

Very influential philosopher • 2 generations younger than Quine (he's currently 84) • Worked on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, epistemology, and related areas.

Pryor

Wants to build on Moore: he too thinks we can know things without in any way having a separate proof or grounding reason to support it. This is what we get with perception: our experience gives us a reason to believe, but we don't need anything else (like a proof) except the experience itself.

Pryor

Wants to push back on the idea that perception can't give us knowledge.

HOLISM

We predict and explain experiences on the basis of whole theories, not individually. We experience the world through our theories; our theories are not simply constructed out of our experience. Quine is this.

Kim's Argument

• Epistemology is primarily concerned with justification • Justification is a normative concept • Therefore epistemology is a normative enterprise

JACK AND JILL CASE

• Suppose Jill believes that Jack is angry at her, and this makes her experience his face as expressing anger. • Now suppose she takes her cognitively penetrated experience at face value, as additional support for her belief that Jack is angry at him (just look at his face!). • She seems to have moved in a small circle, starting out with the penetrating belief, and ending up with the same belief, via having an experience. • From Jill's point of view, she seems to be gaining additional evidence from this experience for her belief that Jack is angry at her, elevating the epistemic status of that belief.

Problems of Jack and Jill Case

• This situation seems epistemically pernicious. In general, visual experience purports to tell you what the world is like, allowing you to check your beliefs against reality. • While experience will seem to let you check your beliefs against the world, really you'll just be checking your beliefs against your beliefs. • The tribunal will be corrupted. On the face of it, epistemic elevation in such a circumstance seems illicit. • Consider another hypothetical case involving context dependence.

Quine

rejects philosophical foundations.

Definition of Bullshit

"To a first approximation, my view will be that whenever you have an experience as of p's being the case, you thereby have immediate prima facie justification for believing p." -Pryor • SPK If you're to know a proposition p on the basis of certain experiences or grounds E, then for every q which is "bad" relative to E and p, you have to be in a position to know q to be false in a non-question- begging way—i.e., you have to be in a position to know q to be false antecedently to knowing p on the basis of E. • P6: The hypothesis that you're being deceived by an evil demon is "bad" relative to any course of experience E and perceptual belief p.

THE REJECTION OF NORMATIVE EPISTEMOLOGY

**Quine thinks we cannot reduce knowledge claims to anything certain or basic We cannot provide even a reconstruction of the claims about knowledge, because we cannot derive such claims by appeal to experience, logic, and set theory.

Fun Fact: So what?

**What Kim thinks of Quine's Argument "In urging 'naturalized epistemology' on us, Quine is not suggesting that we give up the Cartesian foundationalist solution and explore others within the same framework perhaps, to adopt some sort of 'coherentist' strategy, or to require of our basic beliefs only some degree of 'initial credibility' rather than Cartesian certainty, or to permit some sort of probabilistic derivation in addition to deductive derivation of non-basic knowledge, or to consider the use of special rules of evidence, like Chisholm's 'principles of evidence', or to give up the search for a derivational process that transmits undiminished certainty in favor of one that can transmit diminished but still useful degrees of justification." - translation: called Quine a biatch Then said: "Quine's proposal is more radical than that. He is asking us to set aside the entire framework of justification centered epistemology. That is what is new in Quine's proposals. Quine is asking us to put in its place a purely descriptive, causal-nomological science of human cognition." -flamed Quine again

Kim

**thinks beliefs are normative because of the principle of charity. Have to assume the beliefs of someone are rational. Holding/having a belief are subject to the principle of charity

KIM'S MAIN CRITICISMS

*If justification drops out of epistemology, knowledge drops out too. NE replaces an evidential relation for a causal one, and this is at best lame. • So the problem is how the one could ever be thought to replace the other. • Epistemology is a person-level, explanatory enterprise, full stop.

Circularity

*Quine is aware that this worry has been the motivation for avoiding empirical science in our epistemic investigations (philosophy is prior to science) 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

Quine

Anit-Foundationalist

Quine

Anit-Reductionalist

Why does Kim think epistemology is normative?

-Justification is a central concept of our epistemological tradition -It is understood by the tradition as a normative concept -Epistemology is therefore a normative inquiry -The chief goal of epistemology is to study systematically the conditions under which belief is justified

Quine

... argued that, rather than focus on normative concerns like justification or evidence or rationality, epistemology should concern itself only with the descriptive investigation of actual human reasoning. AN EXAMPLE • Humans often seem to behave irrationally • Causes of death: people radically undercount the most common causes and really really radically overcount low probability errors (like, by a 100 orders of magnitude). Such examples are meant to show the ways in which empirical science can inform us about (actual) human reasoning. • These results purport to show how we actually reason, and can provide practical (rather than normative) guidance for changing future decisions.

KIM ON DESCARTES

Cartesian epistemology consists in two projects: 1. identify criteria for acceptance and rejection of beliefs 2. determine what we know according to those criteria

PSYCHOLOGY Circularity

Circularity worry arises if we just look at psychology. It seems that we are using a science to explain/justify science itself. This would not allow for any foundations, and would not end the chain of justifications. And psychology itself would not be any better justified than any other science, so how could it justify anything?

Why does Pryor think his response to skeptics is better then foundationalist approaches?

Cocky mofo idk lmao

Goldman's reliabilist version of externalism

Accepts: the assumption that epistemology is normative Rejects: the idea that normativity requires an internal constraint. P.S. Other option is to reject "the assumption that epistemology is normative" making the second one irrelevant -----if epistemology is not normative, then there is no reason in-principle why it shouldn't be absorbed into empirical science.

If Quine is right, then there is nothing distinctively philosophical about epistemic questions. All of the epistemic questions we care about will be answered by psychology (and related scientific disciplines).

All of the epistemic questions we care about will be answered by psychology (and related scientific disciplines).

Beliefs and Circularity (I think Kim)

Beliefs cannot make a difference to perception or else there would be a vicious circularity and the belief would be begging the question.

What is Pryor's Response to the Skeptic?

Builds of Moore as in we know things without having separate justifications for them. Uses a dogmatist account (believing we can have knowledge without non-question-begging considerations) of perceptual justification which enables us to reject the skeptic's arguments that we have no justified perceptual beliefs. Ambitious Anti-Skeptical Response: refute the skeptic on his own terms, that is, to establish that we can justifiably believe and know such things as that there is a hand, using only premises that the skeptic allows us to use. Modest Anti-Skeptical Response: -establish to our satisfaction that we can justifiably believe and know such things as that there is a hand, without contradicting obvious facts about perception -attempts to diagnose and defuse those skeptical arguments; to show how to retain as many of our pretheoretical beliefs about perception as possible, without accepting the premises the skeptic needs for his argument. -aims to set our own minds at ease From the text: "Consider the skeptic about the external world. Let's straightaway concede to such a skeptic that perception gives us no conclusive or certain knowledge about our surroundings. Our perceptual justification for beliefs about our surroundings is always defeasible—there are always possible improvements in our epistemic state which would no longer support those beliefs. Let's also concede to the skeptic that it's metaphysically possible for us to have all the experiences we're now having while all those experiences are false. Some philosophers dispute this, but I do not. The skeptic I want to consider goes beyond these familiar points to the much more radical conclusion that our perceptual experiences can't give us any knowledge or even justification for believing that our surroundings are one way rather than another."

Pryor

Concedes to the skeptic that we can't be certain about our knowledge claims, and that it's possible that our experiences are deeply mistaken.

Kim

Contemporary epistemology has been dominated by a focus almost exclusively on justification. "The criteria of justified belief must be formulated on the basis of descriptive or naturalistic terms alone, without the use of any evaluative or normative ones, whether epistemic or of another kind."

Empirical Science

Descriptive; it tells us what we actually do.

Kim

Does not support Cartesian foundationalism

Quine's Epistemology

Does not tell us how we ought to reason, it only tells us how we do, in fact, reason. Quine doesn't worry about circularity, because we are not engaged in a normative, reductive, or foundational project: it's circles all the way down ***Epistemology just is psychology and always has been.

Pryor

Dogmatist

Perception has content that justifies beliefs based on that content. Unclear that perception is immune to the influence of other beliefs.

Dogmatist View

What does it mean to say epistemology is Normative?

Epistemologists are more interestingly - concerned with what people should believe, how confident they should be, and the conditions under which they should believe it and be so confident. Epistemology is the study of knowledge.

Quine

Epistemology is concerned with the foundation of science.

Strategy with Psychology

Epistemology is the study of making proper judgments • Proper judgments have consequences • Some practical judgments, especially social ones, have very serious, like-altering consequences • Epistemology should be in the business of assessing important, life-altering judgments • Psychology can help with this

Quine

Hates is normativity: he doesn't want us to be doing any normative enterprise. • This is why he proposes psychology: he thinks of psychology as nothing but pure description.

Moore's Argument

Holds up one hand, and pointing to it with the other, says, "here is one hand." Then he does the same with the other, saying, "here is another hand." Conclusion: There are two hands here now.

Quine

Holist (not cohernist)

COGNITIVE INFLUENCE

If a belief influences a perceptual experience, it is said to cognitively penetrate that experience. * This would seemingly undermine our perceptual justification, and therefore undermine the dogmatist view.

What is the relationship between empirical science and epistemology?

If we start with the assumption that epistemology is normative, then the answer is: there really isn't much of a relation. Empirical science is descriptive; it tells us what we actually do. Epistemology is normative, it tells us what we should do.

INDETERMINACY OF TRANSLATION

Important part of Quine's overall view: he thinks that sentences do not get their meaning from any individual experience. Instead, he thinks sets of sentences are confirmed or denied as a whole. For this reason, there simply cannot be a reduction from experience to science

Dumping Internalism

Instead of thinking about letting psychology do everything, we can instead reject internalism (the view that in order to have justification or knowledge, you must have some access to the reasons in support of your justification or knowledge). • This allows us to engage in psychology to help answer epistemic questions, but does not reduce epistemology to psychology.

How is dogmatism supposed to avoid the problems of early foundationalist views?

It is far more "permissive" in allowing a far more extensive range of beliefs to have foundational justification

Constraints on Moore's Argument

It would not have been a proof unless (1) the premise which I adduced as proof of the conclusion was different from the conclusion I adduced it to prove, (2) the premise which I adduced was something which I knew to be the case, and not merely something which I believed but which was by no means certain, and (3) the conclusion did really follow from the premise. Claimed that all three were satisfied

According to Kim, what is the problem with Quine's 'naturalization' of epistemology?

Kim realizes that Quine is moving epistemology into the realm of psychology, where Quine's main interest is based on the sensory input-output relationship of an individual. This account can never establish an affirmable statement which can lead us to truth, since all statements without the normative are purely descriptive (which can never amount to knowledge). The vulgar allowance of any statement without discrimination as scientifically valid, though not true, makes Quine's theory difficult to accept under any epistemic theory which requires truth as the object of knowledge.

Anti-reductionalists

Like Quine, dont worry about circularity since it is a reductionalist method and nothing can ever get too basic/simple Want explanations, not reductions Thinks reduction theory as involving reducing knowledge to a basic level through translating sentences into more rational reconstruction

Quine

Made the radical suggestion that epistemology is in fact merely a part of empirical science.

Preformationism

Many of the first users of microscopes favored preformationism about mammalian reproduction. • Some of them claimed to see embryos in sperm cells that they examined using a microscope. WE MIGHT THINK • At this time no theory of mammalian reproduction is well-confirmed, and the epistemically appropriate attitude to take toward preformationism is suspension of belief. • But our preformationist does not suspend belief. • When he looks under the microscope, he has an experience with content E2: There's an embryo in the sperm cell. ELEVATION PREDICTION • The elevation prediction in the preformationism case is that an experience with content E2 provides justification for believing E2. • When combined with the assumption that the particular case of an embryo in the sperm supports the general thesis of preformationism (e.g. by abduction), this elevation prediction results in justification for believing preformationism. ***But this not epistemically warranted.***

Justification

Normative Property One is justified in believing p when it's epistemically appropriate for you to believe p. A belief in p is immediately justified just in case your justification for p does not rely on any other beliefs.

Epistemology

Normative, it tells us what we should do.

PSYCHOLOGY for Kim

One of its goals is to explain the processes by which humans develop and construct knowledge of their surroundings. • For instance, it can explain how we make decisions, solve problems, gather evidence, etc.

RATIONAL RECONSTRUCTION (Carnap's Project)

Project was to reduce knowledge (sentences) to (sentences about) sense experience **This is a kind of translation It is an attempt to provide at least one way of moving from observations to a completed account of the world. Quine said it was doodoo with a capital sped.

Holist

Quine *Quine believes in the web of belief, that we confront the world with all of our beliefs.

Worry About Quine (that he didnt care about)

Quine simply gave up, and decided to change the subject. "[F]oundationalism was a bad solution to the normative questions epistemology traditionally asked; so we should stop asking those questions and do psychology instead." -Hilary *boom* roasted

Fun Fact: False

The Sense-Data theory is....

The Pivot

Quine suggests that science itself is our best method for understanding science. Rather than reconstruct science, why not see what humans actually do? We are, after all, simply physical creatures of a certain sort. "Better to discover how science is in fact developed and learned than to fabricate a fictitious structure to a similar effect."

NATURALISM

Radical shift in the very idea of epistemology: instead of talking about a normative enterprise (i.e., about how we should reason), Quine wants to focus on how we, mere organisms that we are, do reason. "Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject."

Quine

Rejects the Foundations Discusses the history of foundationalist empiricism (math and logic, especially), and rejects the idea that we can ever provide solid foundations for our knowledge claims. • Mathematics was our model, but it's a model that has failed. ****Then again, the regress problem seems unsolvable without a core of basic beliefs to hold everything up.

Pryor

Skepticism is possible vs knowledge is impossible

FALLIBILIST

Someone who believes that we can have knowledge on the basis of defeasible justification, justification that does not guarantee that our beliefs are correct.

Internist Argument

Strong Premises for _______________________________. (1) the assumption that epistemology is normative and (2) the idea that normativity requires an internal constraint.

Radical View of Dogmatism

The dogmatist's view is more radical than the ordinary fallibilist's. The dogmatist thinks that not only can we have perceptual knowledge and justified perceptual belief, we might have it without being in a position to cite anything that could count as ampliative, non-questionbegging evidence for those beliefs.

Generalization

This worry could apply to *any* information taken in by the senses. • There is no way to rule out that our prior beliefs are playing some role in modifying our experiences. ********************************************************And this would undermine the dogmatist view.

Pryor

Thought that perceptual experiences stand alone when it comes to epistemology • They give you reasons to believe the things picked out by the experience, and do so in a way that is (mostly) immune to manipulation by background beliefs. • So seeing an image should be, in some sense, encapsulated.

Pryor on Dogmatism

To have this justification for believing p, you need only have an experience that represents p as being the case. **No further awareness or reflection or background beliefs are required

According to Quine, why is traditional epistemology doomed to fail?

Traditional epistemology is concerned with the foundations of science, broadly conceived. It is supposed to show how the foundations of knowledge, whether it be the foundations of mathematics or natural science, reduce to certainty. -which he says is not possible Traditional epistemology has failed to refute the sceptic, and will never succeed in refuting them. Mathematics, for example, reduces only to set theory and not to logic; and thus does not enhance the certainty of anything.

PSYCHOLOGY

Treats human subjects as parts of the physical world, and studies them just like science studies anything else in the physical world. • One of its goals is to explain the processes by which humans develop and construct knowledge of their surroundings. • For instance, it can explain how we make decisions, solve problems, gather evidence, etc.

According to Kim, if we get rid of normativity, what happens to epistemology?

Well, justification is what makes knowledge valuable and normative and without it, what can rightly be said to be true or false? We are left with only descriptions of the processes by which we arrive at a belief.

Perceptual experience

Where do we get most of our justification from?

Kim

an internalist

Pryor

anti-quine

Quine

rejects epistemic normativity.

Quine

defended naturalizing epistemology: take out all the norms to make it a natural science

Kim

does not reject pyschology

Quine

epistemology is not normative and does not reject pyschology

Kim Says...

evidence is based on individual circumstances and its not objective. Science cant tell us anything is fact with evidence even it though it seems so

Pryor

foundationalist

Prima Facie Justification

initial, provisional, temporary, deferable justification. It is changing and not certain

Pryor

internalist

Pryor

not a skeptic

Quine

not a skeptic

Quine

nothing is certain and nothing is a basic belief

Dogmatism assumes

perception has content and that it can justify belief.

In order to justify a belief, a cognitive state must have ... content. Only a belief can justify a belief

representational or propositional

Kim

student of Chisolm

Quine

there is no constituted Truth no universal abstract rules are always true

Kim

thinks epistemology is normative because it has a set of objective standards

Dogmatism

• (1) Absent defeaters, having a perceptual experience with content p suffices to give you justification for believing p. • (2) When a subject S's experience justifies believing p, the justification is immediate: there need be no further propositions that S must be justified in believing, in order for experience to justify her in believing that p - or if there are, being justified in believing this proposition need not play a role in S's getting justification to believe p from her experience.

Context Dependent Case

• A student is constantly awesome in class, discussion section, via email, and in person. • When marking a passage in their essay, the grader interprets a vague passage in a favorable manner. • Another student writes a similar vague passage, but rather than awesome, this student is often seriously mistaken. • The second student's passage is marked harshly.