Epistemological Theories

In this dissertation, I provide an interpretation and defense of Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception, namely, the thesis that all knowledge is founded in perceptual experience. I take as an interpretative and argumentative key Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological conception of motivation. Whereas epistemology has traditionally accepted a dichotomy between reason and natural causality, I show that this dichotomy is not exhaustive of the forms of epistemic grounding. There is a third type of grounding, the one characteristic of the grounding relations (...) found in perception: motivation. I argue that introducing motivation as a form of epistemic grounding allows us to see how Merleau-Ponty's thesis of the primacy of perception avoids both rationalism and empiricism. Whereas empiricism has argued that all the content of our knowledge is grounded in causal interactions between the world and our senses, and rationalism has held that experience does not suffice as a reason for knowledge, thinking of the relation between experience and knowledge in terms of motivation accommodates the best insights of rationalism and empiricism. Motivation allows us to see how knowledge can be grounded in experience without the content of knowledge being reducible to that of experience. (shrink)

Theism and its cousins, atheism and agnosticism, are seldom taken to task for logical-epistemological incoherence. This paper provides a condensed proof that not only theism, but atheism and agnosticism as well, are all of them conceptually self-undermining, and for the same reason: All attempt to make use of the concept of “transcendent reality,” which here is shown not only to lack meaning, but to preclude the very possibility of meaning. In doing this, the incoherence of theism, atheism, and agnosticism is (...) secondary to the more general incoherence of any attempts to refer to so-called “transcendent realities.” -/- A recognition of the conceptually fundamental incoherence of theism, atheism, and agnosticism compels our rational assent to a position the author names “paratheism.”. (shrink)

An invited High Table Address given before the students and faculty of Raymond College, University of the Pacific, Stockton, California, December 10, 1969. An impressionistic and idealistic paper from the author’s youth suggesting how his _de-projective approach to phenomenology_ could lead to an actual, lived, worldview.

Familiar versions of empiricism overemphasize and misconstrue the importance of perceptual experience. I discuss their main shortcomings and sketch an alternative framework for thinking about how human sensory systems contribute to scientific knowledge.

Fear of Knowledge was in many ways an exercise in foolhardiness. It was to be a short book, accessible to the general reader, that would treat some of the trickiest issues in the foundations theory of knowledge, but that would nevertheless not seriously shortchange the subtleties that they involve. Someone should have warned me.

One finds a surprising number of defenses of the legitimacy of some kinds of question-begging arguments or beliefs in the literature. Without wanting to deny the importance of dialectical analyses of begging the question, what I do here is explore the epistemic side of the issue. In particular, I want to explore the legitimacy of “epistemically circular” arguments and beliefs. My tentative conclusion is that epistemically circular arguments and beliefs are never legitimate. *Note: this is an unpublished manuscript presented at (...) the 2011 conference of the Ontario Society for the Study of Argumentation. A copy of the manuscript is hosted at the OSSA conference archive, linked above. Some of the central ideas in this paper appear in my "Epistemic Circularity, Reliabilism, and Transmission Failure," Episteme (2014). (shrink)

Can we understand epistemic justification in terms of epistemic rights? In this paper, we consider two arguments for the claim that we cannot and in doing so, we provide two arguments for the claim that we can. First, if, as many think, William James is right that the epistemic aim is to believe all true propositions and not to believe any false propositions, then there are likely to be situations in which believing a proposition serves one of these goals, whereas (...) suspending judgement serves the other, equally important goal. Second, it is in principle always possible to have different epistemic standards for evaluating the evidence for the proposition in question, so that one can have a right to believe that proposition and a right to suspend judgement on it. Whereas the first consideration counts in favour of the idea that believing justifiedly is at least sometimes a matter of having an epistemic right, the latter consideration favours the view that believing justifiedly is always a matter of having an epistemic right. (shrink)

According to proper functionalist theories of warrant, a belief is warranted only if it is formed by cognitive faculties that are properly functioning according to a good, truth-aimed design plan, one that is often thought to be specified either by intentional design or by natural selection. A formidable challenge to proper functionalist theories is the Swampman objection, according to which there are scenarios involving creatures who have warranted beliefs but whose cognitive faculties are not properly functioning, or are poorly designed, (...) or are not aimed at truth. In this paper, we draw lessons from cognitive science in order to develop a novel argument for the conclusion that the Swampman objection fails against proper functionalist theories of warrant. Our argument not only shows that the underlying, central intuition motivating Swampman-like scenarios is false but also motivates proper function as a necessary condition for warrant, thereby lending support to the claim that any theory of knowledge that lacks a proper function requirement is false. (shrink)

Decision theory explicates norms of rationality for deriving preferences from preferences and beliefs. Empirical studies have found that actual preferences regularly violate these norms, launching a debate on whether this shows that subjects are prone to certain forms of irrationality or that decision theory needs to be revised. It has been claimed that such a revision is necessitated by the fact that normative uses of decision theory must be justified by a reflective equilibrium. The paper discusses three points. First, the (...) debate over the impact of empirical studies on decision theories is only meaningful with respect to a decision theory that includes not only a formal system but also a theory of application. Second, differences in the concepts of reflective equilibrium appealed to are a source of confusion in the debate on rationality. Third, the assumption that normative uses of decision theory are justified by reflective equilibrium is not sufficient ground for arguing that the empirical studies call for a revision of decision theory. Such an argument must rely on substantive claims about rationality, preferences and beliefs. (shrink)

This is a full length review in which I discuss the strengths and weaknesses of Jane Geaney's On the Epistemology of the Senses in Early Chinese Thought. Geaney's strengths lie in her refusal to import Western epistemological presuppositions into depictions of Early Chinese philosophy, her meticulous canvassing of key Warring States texts, and her insightful reconstruction of Early Chinese epistemology as based on perception rather than abstract concepts. Her weaknesses are the limited range of her representative texts and her occasional (...) overgeneralizations. In the first half of the review, I summarize Geaney's solid conclusions: knowledge in Warring States texts was stated in terms of, and even constituted by, seeing and hearing (as opposed to the primacy of sight in the West); seeing and hearing were referred to in paired tropes; the epistemology of seeing and hearing generally involved moral evaluation; and the heartmind had a triple role in this process as verifier, as ruler, and as a sense in its own right. In the second half of the review, I demonstrate the limitations of Geaney's methodology, using her example of the relationship of qi and wind. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to show how context, in its multiple forms, as well as having influence in localization, organization, government, and business of firms, is also fundamental on an epistemological level because it acts directly on the dynamics of scientific knowledge construction. It will be shown how context takes on the role of a constraint that strongly influences the growth of the endless possibilities from which a scientific knowledge emerges, and how epistemology has to rethink the definition (...) of science, taking into account that it evolves in relation with its multiple contexts with which it reinvents itself every day. (shrink)

CHAPTER ONE Is the Sex of the Knower Epistemologically Significant? The Question A question that focuses on the knower, as the title of this chapter does, ...

According to epistemic deontologism, attributions of epistemic justification are deontic claims about what we ought to believe. One of the most prominent objections to this conception, due mainly to William P. Alston (1988), is that the principle that ‘ought’ implies ‘can’ (OIC) rules out deontologism because our beliefs are not under our voluntary control. In this paper, I offer a partial defense of Alston’s critique of deontologism. While Alston is right that OIC rules out epistemic deontologism, appealing to doxastic involuntarism (...) is not necessary for generating that tension. Deontologists would still have a problem with OIC if doxastic voluntarism turned out to be true or if deontologism did not require voluntarism. This is because, in short, epistemic justification does not imply ‘can’. If, as deontologists maintain, epistemic justification implies ‘oughts’, then epistemic justification must also imply ‘can’ given OIC. But since epistemic justification does not imply ‘can’, OIC dictates that we reject deontologism. I end by exploring the possible consequences of this incompatibility between OIC and deontologism. My conclusion is that at least one of the following claims must be true. Either (i) ‘ought’ does not imply ‘can’, (ii) attributions of epistemic justification are not deontic claims, or (iii) epistemic claims lack categorical normative authority. (shrink)

Bradford Hill (1965) highlighted nine aspects of the complex evidential situation a medical researcher faces when determining whether a causal relation exists between a disease and various conditions associated with it. These aspects are widely cited in the literature on epidemiological inference as justifying an inference to a causal claim, but the epistemological basis of the Hill aspects is not understood. We offer an explanatory coherentist interpretation, explicated by Thagard's ECHO model of explanatory coherence. The ECHO model captures the complexity (...) of epidemiological inference and provides a tractable model for inferring disease causation. We apply this model to three cases: the inference of a causal connection between the Zika virus and birth defects, the classic inference that smoking causes cancer, and John Snow’s inference about the cause of cholera. (shrink)

This research addresses the justificatory role of conscious reflection within a naturalized, reliabilist epistemology. Reliabilism is the view that implicit, mechanistic processes can justify beliefs, e.g. perceptual beliefs formed after a history of consistent exposure to normal lighting conditions are justified in a given context with normal lighting. A popular variant of reliabilism is virtue epistemology where the cognitive circumstances and abilities of an agent play a justificatory role, e.g. the cooperation of the prefrontal cortex and primary visual cortex of (...) the individual perceiving the Müller-Lyer illusion partly justify the belief that the lines are equi-length. While virtue epistemology is a well-endorsed reliabilism for implicit beliefs, its application to explicit, consciously reflective processes is more controversial. Critics ask: How can iterations of dumb reliabilist processes produce higher order justification? To respond to this concern, I draw on another agent-centred, normative and reliabilist epistemology—Bayesian epistemology. A Bayesian virtue epistemology argues that reflective hypothesis-testing generated by implicit Bayesian mechanisms offers higher order reliabilist justification for beliefs. Iterative Bayesian mechanisms explain the development of higher order beliefs about abstract concepts such as causation, natural laws and theoretical entities traditionally explained by recourse to vague concepts such as ‘the a priori’, ‘intuition’ or ‘the intellect’. A hybrid Bayesian virtue epistemology offers an iterative reliabilist framework to explain how conscious reflection justifies beliefs. However, I acknowledge limitations on Bayesian accounts of justification such as confirmational holism, commutativity, and the frame problem. (shrink)

Dewy argues for the realist stance of his pragmatism as regards epistemology--as contrasted with moral idealism.

My aim is to relate Søren A. Kierkegaard’s early theory of stages as described basically in “Either-Or” to the theory of interest underlying the two process model of cognition of the Canadian psychologist Keith E. Stanovich with regard to the question of the highest formal goal we can pursue in our life. On the basis of Stanovich’s distinction between type 1 and type 2 processing and Kierkegaard’s distinction between an esthetical and an ethical stage of life, I argue for an (...) extension of Stanovich’s understanding of the goal structure of type 2 processing, for Kierkegaard’s ethical stage of life being a natural expression of our cognitive faculties and for a critical approach to Kierkegaard's idea of a religious stage as hinted at in “Fear and Trembling”. (shrink)

Interpretive Reasoning. By Laurent Stern.

Among recent naturalistic epistemologies, one class of theories, 'rough psychologistic' theories, is the most promising. These claim that for our belief-formation processes to yield knowledge is for them to be sufficiently reliable. The study of cognition, then, is best conducted by dividing labor between two groups: psychologists, who should describe what, and how reliable, the processes we use to form beliefs are; and philosophers, who should formulate normative standards of reliability. ;One promising version of rough psychologism is Alvin Goldman's nativistic (...) reliabilism . According to NR, reliability ultimately must be attributed to innate processes responsible for belief fixation; justified beliefs are beliefs produced by reliable innate processes. ;But NR is unsatisfactory. Agent-environment relations, not innate processes, determine whether beliefs are justified. ;This is because naturalized epistemologies, including NR, are externalistic in character. They hold that justification consists in reliability, and the latter is an objective fact about the agent's situation . Reliability is a matter of direct causal relations between him and conditions that make true the proposition he believes. ;NR is not truly externalistic, however. It holds that to have justified belief is simply to have the right innate processes, rather than to be directly related to environmental conditions. Its notion of innateness is spurious; there are no innate processes in its sense. NR fails to account for externalistic justification. ;Since justification depends on immediate environmental relations, a new, more satisfactory theory is required. This theory, here called 'contextualism', holds that beliefs are justified just in case they are related properly to the world around the subject. Beliefs must: normally be caused by appropriate environmental conditions; be of a type that, historically, has usually been true under such conditions; and be true according to available objective information. The dissertation goes on to develop and defend this new theory. (shrink)