I. Our Questions

We started with a general and common sense view - The Standard View - according to which we know a great deal about the world around us. We know things of various sorts and we have several sources of knowledge. A general theme of the course has been to examine this picture of ourselves. Does this view withstand scrutiny?

 

The common sense view comes into question, or needs clarification and elaboration, for three main reasons.

 

A. There are hard conceptual questions about exactly what the view is. Falling under this heading are questions about what knowledge is, what rational belief is, what truth is, what belief is. A reasonable way to look back on what we’ve done is to say that during the first part of the semester we attempted to clarify and make more precise this common sense view. We wanted to see if it really could be filled out in a consistent and plausible way.

 

B. We then turned to skepticism. This challenges the view that we really do know anything. Aspects of this challenge did arise from time to time during the first part of the course, but we set them aside. But skeptical arguments raise question about whether we are right in thinking that we know as much as we think we do, or even know anything much at all.

 

C. Finally, and very briefly, we examined a different sort of challenge to the common sense idea. This arises more from science than from philosophy. Some empirical results suggest that we are seriously unreliable believers, that our thinking is full of biases and errors. This can make you wonder whether our common sense view is anything close to correct. According to our own conception of knowledge and rationality, our beliefs are not cases of knowledge and are not rational if they result from biased thinking of the sort some take the evidence to suggest they do result from. Evidence about human cognitive differences can be used to suggest that our own views are more a result of facts about our own minds than truths about the world (but we didn’t really get to think about this idea).

 

II. Clarifying the Common Sense View

 

A. The Traditional Analysis of Knowledge

Each component - truth, belief, justification - raises questions. We discussed the first briefly, the latter in detail.

 

Truth: we've pretty much assumed an "objective" notion of truth throughout the semester. We could have spent more time on this, since there are many who question it. But I think that the points that they want to make are, in the end, best seen as points about rationality or justification. That is, they think that there are competing ways of making sense of the world that are equally reasonable, not that competing views are all true.

 

Belief: again, there are issues (especially in phil. of mind) about exactly what this comes to. But the gist of it is pretty clear. To believe a prop. is to accept it. The alternatives are disbelieving and suspending judgment. There are issues here that we’ve avoided. One main one is this: people often speak of degrees of belief, or partial belief. This has some connection to how confident one is that a proposition is true. But there surely is the phenomenon of simply believing (even if beliefs differ among themselves in something like strength). And there are good and interesting puzzles that result from thinking this through. Too bad we didn’t get to them.

 

Justification: initially (and ultimately) this amounts to having good reasons, or evidence. That’s my view, anyway. But there are complications. We’ll turn to them later in this summary.

 

B. The Gettier Examples

These showed that the TAK was wrong.

One important implication of this was that if we were to avoid skepticism, we had to be fallibilists.

Responses to Gettier: We looked at several responses: a) No false reasons; b) Undefeated justification; c) No “essential” falsehood. I defended the latter, but it is somewhat obscure.

 

C. Justification

This is the central topic of recent epistemology. In part, the Gettier problem made philosophers see that there was more complexity here than they realized. One way to think about justification is against the background of the regress argument, which we formulated. Theories of justification can be classified by how they respond to that argument.

 

1. Evidentialism

Before looking at responses to the regress argument, it’s worth identifying a general perspective on justification. Evidentialism is one - it says that justification depends entirely on the nature of the evidence you have.

 

But important aspects of the theory need to be worked out, esp. what exactly counts as the evidence a person "has" at a time and how exactly the notion of "fitting the evidence" or "evidential support" is to be understood.

 

What evidentialism emphasizes is that rationality and justification are entirely matters of forming beliefs in ways that fit one's evidence - evidence is all that matters. And what's important about this is what this leaves out - things like being responsible, gathering a lot of evidence, being serious, believing things that are important. According to this view, you are being completely rational, epistemically, just in case at every moment you are believing just those things that are supported by your evidence.

 

Whatever evidential support is, it is an "objective notion". This means that it isn't in any way up to you what your evidence supports. Thinking your evidence supports something doesn't make it so. If two people have the same evidence, then the same beliefs are rational for them.

 

2. Foundationalism

The regress argument is sound. There are basic beliefs.

Classical, or strong, foundationalism held that basic beliefs were in some sense absolutely certain, incorrigible, etc. This is often associated with Descartes. Some critics identify foundationalism, or even all of epistemology, with strong foundationalism.

 

Lots of very complicated things get said about strong foundationalism. Many of them are also confused. But it does seem that there are serious questions about it: a) it's not at all clear that there is anything that is certain in the sense typically required by the theory. You can have evidence, such as testimonial evidence, against anything. b) Even if some small set of beliefs satisfy the test for being certain, it's very hard to see how those beliefs could support the other things we apparently know.

 

3. Coherentism

The basic idea should be fairly clear: a belief is justified iff it coheres with the believer's system of beliefs. But what exactly is coherence? And what exactly counts as the system? It turns out that formulating coherentism in a clear is difficult.

 

One common objection - the alternative systems objection - is that it is wrong because alternative systems can't all be justified. But they can, or so I argued. You and I have somewhat different systems, you and some ancient person have radically different systems of beliefs. But they might be completely rational and fully justified. So, this objection fails. There can't be knowledge on conflicting props., but there can be justified belief in them.

 

But another objection - that if all that matters to justification is what other beliefs one has, then experience doesn't matter. And that, I asserted, is a serious problem for pure coherence theories.

 

4. Reliabilism and other non-evidentialist theories

 

This is a major departure from evidentialism. Variations on the thermometer model of knowledge. We considered the causal theory, truth tracking, reliabilism. I argued that: a) given an intuitive understanding of each theory, there are counterexamples. b) There are serious obscurities in each theory, esp. those resulting from the fact that we don't have any good account of what the processes are that reliabilists are talking about. This is the generality problem. Furthermore, there are problems concerning “accidental reliability”. c) These problems in part result from not emphasizing evidence enough.

 

5. Modest Foundationalism

This is a revised version of foundationalism. Evidence is all that matters - so it avoids the problems of reliabilism. Experiences are evidence - so it avoids the problems of coherentism. Standards are not so ridiculously high as in strong foundationalism - so it avoids the obvious problems there. But there are residual questions, and they emerge in the discussion of skepticism.

 

III. Skepticism

A. Background

1. Skeptics assert that we don't know anything at all (global skepticism) or that we don't know anything about some particular subject matter (local, or limited, skepticism).

2. It's important to realize that skeptics are denying that we have knowledge about a certain area. In its most interesting versions, it asserts that there are truths that we don't, or can't know. This is to be distinguished from those who say, for example, that there are no facts in ethics. If there are no facts, then we lack knowledge. But in this case only because there is nothing for us to know, not because there are truths we are not able to know.

 

B. Arguments for Skepticism

We considered a series of arguments for skepticism. I won’t review them now. The key idea of the response was fallibilism. The key idea of fallibilism is that knowledge does not require absolutely perfect evidence. It requires instead the sort of evidence we have in the ordinary cases of knowledge. Fallibilists thus accept the traditional analysis of K, with a Gettier condition added. But they interpret justification in a way that makes it attainable. And this implies that a belief can be justified and false. In one way or another, the original arguments for skepticism all seemed to turn on setting too high a condition on justification, and thus on knowledge. They assumed, implicitly or explicitly, that knowledge requires certainty or the impossibility of error. But it doesn’t. It requires justified true belief + whatever it takes to deal with the Gettier problem.

 

C. A Remaining Problem

Unfortunately, not all skeptical arguments turn on the idea that K requires certainty. We've arrived at this way of thinking of things: our evidence provides us with extremely strong, but not absolutely conclusive, evidence for believing the things we ordinarily believe (or at least at lot of them, the ones we think we know). But there are rival hypotheses we could hold: life is a dream, I'm a brain in a vat, etc. These rivals appear to be ridiculous and completely unreasonable. But the last argument for skepticism in effect challenges us to say what's wrong with them and why our ordinary beliefs are better.

 

The usual answer has to do with the simplicity and explanatory value of our ordinary hypothesis over these rivals. I claim that our ordinary view of the world, or that part of it that is reasonable to believe, is part of the best available explanation of our experiences. Others say something about the “naturalness” of our ordinary views. Best explanationism seems right to me, but it is controversial.

IV. Common Sense, Epistemology and Science

We had only a little time to take up a few other challenges that fall under this heading.

 

A. Quinean Naturalism [Not covered in class]

Quine and his followers argue that the traditional task of defending the common sense view (or science) can’t work. They suggest replacing it by science. But (I would argue that) this results from equating epistemology with what is often taken to be Cartesianism - the idea that knowledge requires certainty and thus that we must have infallible knowledge of basic beliefs and be able to deduce our other beliefs, our science, from them. So, Quine seems to ignore the possibility of fallibilist epistemological theories.

 

B. Scientific Studies of Reasoning and Human Rationality

We used the rationality tests to identify a large number of cases in which people form mistaken beliefs. Some people conclude that these are cases of systematic irrationality. And this calls into question the adequacy of the general view with which we began.

I argued that the experiments often are not evidence of so pessimistic a conclusion. Some were cases of mere ignorance, some were cases in which people believed just what they should given the evidence they had, and others were cases in which people simply followed plausible rules in situations in which those rules didn't work so well. Hard to evaluate these cases for rationality. It's helpful to think of them in evidentialist terms.

I asserted that there are lots of cases of irrationality - primarily cases in which people believed not on the basis of evidence but instead were guided by their emotions. This is not to say that emotions are bad things or that we should ignore them. But when they lead us to believe other than what we have evidence for, they make us epistemically irrational. This might be a good thing from prudential or moral perspectives.

But this leaves open the plausibility of the something close to the common sense view with which we began. These problems don’t undermine the idea that we know quite a lot about the world.

 

V. Relativism

 

We had very little time for this.

 

Some have argued that the ideas I’ve been defending are simply a defense of a certain very limited point of view. Roughly, western white male ways of thinking. I don’t think so.