Naturalized Epistemology

Bishop and Trout here present a unique and provocative new approach to epistemology, which aims to liberate it from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and to treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science.

Recently, Hilary Kornblith has argued that epistemological investigation is substantially empirical. In the present paper, I will first show that his claim is not contingent upon the further and, admittedly, controversial assumption that all objects of epistemological investigation are natural kinds. Then, I will argue that, contrary to what Kornblith seems to assume, this methodological contention does not imply that there is no need for attending to our epistemic concepts in epistemology. Understanding the make-up of our concepts and, in particular, (...) the purposes they fill, is necessary for a proper acknowledgement of epistemology's role in conceptual improvement. (shrink)

The traditional approaches to epistemology are task-oriented and enjoy prescriptive aspects. They do not allow the employment of empirical sciences in epistemology. This is because they believe that such sciences lack any kind of prescriptive aspect and enjoy a descriptive nature. Some contemporary epistemological theoreticians, such as realist naturalists, believe that we have no choice but to employ empirical sciences in epistemology, for they provide us with a more accurate understanding of concepts such as justification and knowledge. It appears that (...) we are able to provide the necessary answers to the problems posed by traditional epistemologists in this regard. Therefore, the use of empirical sciences in epistemology is not only permissible but also necessary. (shrink)

When reviewing the literature of epistemology, we find that very few papers discuss the topic of naturalized epistemology as a unified domain. The field of naturalized epistemology does not get the attention it deserves. Therefore, my main aim in this dissertation is to establish a framework and criterion that enables us to define, explain, and classify theories of naturalized epistemology in order to present naturalized epistemology as a well-organized and unified domain. In addition, I aim to select and argue in (...) favor of one type of or approach to theories of naturalized epistemology that will be considered the right and successful theory that should replace other types and approaches. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the naturalism of Carnap and Quine. I examine Quine's naturalized epistemology and argue that Carnap's naturalism is considerably more attractive.

In this paper I examine the claim that no theory of\nepistemic justification is possible because whatever\ndefinition one gives admits of the question "Are you\njustified in accepting your definition of justification?"\nwhich cannot be answered without begging the question in\nfavor of the original definition offered. I examine various\nreplies to the argument and then argue that the question\nneed not be answered.

Philosophically inclined psychologists and psychologically inclined philosophers often hold that the substantive discoveries of psychology can provide an empirical foundation for epistemology. In this paper it is argued that the ambition to found epistemology empirically faces certain unnoticed difficulties. Empirical theories concerned with knowledge?gaining abilities have been historically associated with specific epistemological views such that the epistemology gives preferential support to the substantive theory, while the theory empirically supports the epistemology. Theories attribute to the subject just those epistemic abilities which (...) associated epistemologies attribute to the scientist. The concept of epistemological significance is introduced as the significance a psychological theory can have for modifying the epistemological suppositions with which the theory was originally associated. Substantive psychological theories are strongly constrained by the epistemologies used in their development; the endorsement an epistemology receives from its associated theory should carry no weight. The alliance between psychology and epistemology is not progressive to the development of either field. Alternative sources of progress in epistemology and psychology are suggested. (shrink)

Feminist epistemology has often been understood as the study of feminine "ways of knowing." But feminist epistemology is better understood as the branch of naturalized, social epistemology that studies the various influences of norms and conceptions of gender and gendered interests and experiences on the production of knowledge. This understanding avoids dubious claims about feminine cognitive differences and enables feminist research in various disciplines to pose deep internal critiques of mainstream research.

situation in the sciences of man and show it to be fallacious. On the view to be 6 rejected, the sciences of man are undergoing the first serious attempt in history to 7 thoroughly naturalize their subject matter and thus to put an end to their separate sta- 8 tus. Progress has (on this view) been quite considerable in the disciplines in charge 9 of the individual, while in the social sciences the outcome of the process is moot: 10 the (...) naturalistic social sciences are still in their infancy, and whether they will even- 11 tually engulf or at least profoundly transform the field of social science is unclear. 12 The dichotomous conception pits two camps against one another. On the one hand, 13.. (shrink)

This dissertation is about naturalism; in it, I take the position that naturalism is the practice of accepting only public empirical evidence, and that that practice is untenable. The dissertation is divided into three chapters. In the first chapter, I review the literature on naturalism and conclude that most accounts of it must be incorrect; in that chapter, I also argue for my account of naturalism. The second chapter examines versions of naturalized epistemology and philosophy of science which wish to (...) preserve normativity, and concludes that they are unworkable; the practice of naturalism gives us no resources with which to privilege any belief-claims over any other in terms of their justification, cognitive virtue, origin from a process which reliably leads to the truth, or similar. In the third chapter, I discuss versions of naturalized epistemology which attempt to dispense with normativity and conclude that beliefs are cognitively virtuous only relative to contingent and local goals and principles of hypothesis choice; I conclude that such radical naturalized epistemologies find themselves enmeshed in a skepticism which renders them unable to declare any cognitive state even relatively virtuous, and thus that radical naturalized epistemologies cannot succeed, even by their own standards. (shrink)

Epistemology is sometimes said to be a normative discipline, but what this characterization means is often left unclear. This paper distinguishes two kindsof normativity and thereby provides a new way of understanding attributions of normativity. Associated with this distinction are two kinds of epistemological reflection. These are shown to be parallel to two kinds of ethical reflection. In the light of what emerges in showing these points, the paper clarifies the requirements for naturalizing epistemology, the place normativity might have, given (...) certain kinds of naturalization, and the sense in which knowledge and justification may be viewed as normative. (shrink)

This paper examines the nature and varieties of philosophical naturalism. A central question it pursues is whether there is any unifying conception of naturalism and, if so, whether it is substantive or methodological. Another question addressed is the extent to which naturalism is motivated by or depends on empiricism. The paper explores the connection between naturalism and scientific method---often taken as central in defining it---and critically discusses naturalistic positions in metaphysics (including philosophical theology), epistemology, and ethics. Given the ambitions of (...) philosophical naturalism---which extend to construing philosophy itself as broadly empirical in the way that natural science is---and given some of the difficulties that confront naturalism, its success remains a matter of lively controversy. (shrink)

This book is a massive study of epistemology and its connections with cognitive psychology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. Its aim is to redirect the field of epistemology, which “should be a multidisciplinary affair, not the province of pure, a priori philosophy.”.

This paper defends the view that a correct analysis of knowledge must take empirical data into consideration. The data here provided is from experimental psychology, namely from phenomena involving unconscious cognition.

My aim in this paper is to critically deal with two issues confronting naturalist philosophers who want to steer a middle course between radical naturalism and total a-priorism in epistemology. These issues are the role of a priori in ordinary human knowledge, and who succeeds and who fails in properly dealing with the skeptical challenge. I focus on the views of P. Kitcher and L. BonJour with an aim to display the strengths and weaknesses of the naturalist perspective. My conclusion (...) is that there are prospects for a viable synthesis between a naturalist approach and old-fashioned normativity in epistemology. Moreover, it seems that neither camp is in an inherently advantageous position with regard to skeptical worries or challenges. (shrink)

The A to Z of Epistemology provides an overview of this field of study and of the theories, concepts, and personalities through the use of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and more than 500 cross-referenced dictionary entries, covering notable concepts, theories, arguments, publications, issues, and philosophers. Students and others who wish to acquaint themselves with epistemology will be greatly aided by this reference.

By naturalized epistemology, I mean those views expressed by Nozick and Margolis among others who favor an evolutionary account of human rationality as an adaptive mechanism which is unlikely to provide the means for its own legitimation and therefore unlikely to produce a single set of rules or norms which are certifiably rational. Analyzing the likely relativism that stems from such a view, namely that there could be divergent standards of rationality under different historical or environmental conditions, I conclude that (...) evolutionary epistemologies are unable to account for rationality as an experienced capacity on the part of human beings. After giving a few examples of what seem to me to be cases where we do experience a form of reason that appears antinomian, I challenge a naturalized view of mind to embrace and provide some sort of explanatory account of this kind of mental elasticity that it both seems to make room for and is certainly not unfamiliar to other philosophical perspectives such as that of Zen Buddhism. (shrink)

The basic aim of Alvin Goldman’s approach to epistemology, and the tradition it represents, is naturalistic; that is, epistemological theories in this tradition aim to identify the naturalistic, nonnormative criteria on which justified belief supervenes (Goldman, 1986; Markie, 1997). The basic method of Goldman’s epistemology, and the tradition it represents, is the reflective equilibrium test; that is, epistemological theories in this tradition are tested against our intuitions about cases of justified and unjustified belief (Goldman, 1986; Markie, 1997). I will argue (...) that the prospect of having to reject their standard methodology is one epistemologists have to take very seriously; and I will do this by arguing that some current rival theories of epistemic justification are in fact in reflective equilibrium with our intuitions about cases of justified and unjustified belief. That is, I will argue that intuition underdetermines theory choice in epistemology, in much the way that observation underdetermines theory choices in empirical sciences. If reflective equilibrium leads to the underdetermination problem I say it leads to, then it cannot satisfy the aims of contemporary epistemology, and so cannot serve as its standard methodology. (shrink)

This paper offers an interpretation of Quine’s naturalized epistemology through the lens of Jaegwon Kim’s influential critique of the same. Kim argues that Quine forces a false choice between traditional deductivist foundationalism and naturalized epistemology and contends that there are viable alternative epistemological projects. However it is suggested that Quine would reject these alternatives by reference to the same fundamental principles (underdetermination, indeterminacy of translation, extensionalism) that led him to reject traditional epistemology and propose naturalism as an alternative. Given this (...) interpretation of Quine, it is essential that a successful critic of naturalism also examine Quine’s aforementioned principles. The divide between naturalist and nonnaturalist epistemology turns out to be defined by the divide between more fundamental naturalist and nonnaturalist approaches to semantics. (shrink)

“Naturalized epistemology” is a recent attempt to transform the theory of knowledge into a branch of natural science. Traditional epistemologists object to this proposal on the grounds that it eliminates the distinctively philosophical content of epistemology. In this thesis, I argue that traditional philosophers are justified in their reluctance to accept naturalism, but that their ongoing inability to refute it points to deeper problems inherent in traditional epistemology. I establish my thesis first by critiquing three versions of naturalism, showing that (...) each version either fails to implement its objectives consistently or starts from dubious objectives. “Optimistic naturalism” attempts to use naturalistic methods to give positive answers to traditional epistemological questions (such as by affirming that our beliefs can be justified). This fails because the form of traditional questions requires the concept “belief,” a concept that I argue naturalistic methodology cannot countenance (because of the severe constraints of naturalistic semantic theory). “Pessimistic naturalism,” the version advocated by Quine, is more consistent with naturalistic methodology, but fails because hidden behind its conclusions are assumptions (such as the underdetermination thesis) that cannot themselves be naturalized in the full context of scientific evidence. A final attempt to naturalize epistemology, deflationary naturalism, dispenses with traditional questions entirely, urging that the terms “knowledge” and “justification” be taken as mere pragmatic devices whose use can, nevertheless, be studied scientifically. Curiously, this view fails to take account of important facts about the actual use of those terms, as studied by psychologists. In the end, despite problems with each of these versions, traditional philosophers can learn something from their encounter with naturalism. In the course of showing how various naturalistic doctrines cannot themselves be naturalized, I identify the flaws in traditional epistemology (such as its reliance on a priorism, and its resulting inability to articulate a workable empirical foundationalist theory of justification) that make naturalism harder to challenge. These flaws must be corrected if philosophers are to preserve the autonomy of their discipline. (shrink)

This paper explores Kornblith's proposal in "Knowledge and its Place in Nature" that knowledge is a natural kind that can be elucidated and understood in scientific terms. Central to Kornblith's development of this proposal is the claim that there is a single category of unreflective knowledge that is studied by cognitive ethologists and is the proper province of epistemology. This claim is challenged on the grounds that even unreflective knowledge in language-using humans reflects forms of logical reasoning that are in (...) principle unavailable to nonlinguistic animals. (shrink)

In “Epistemology Naturalized”, Quine famously suggests that epistemology, properly understood, “simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science” (1969, 82). Since the appearance of Quine’s seminal article, virtually every epistemologist, including the later Quine (1986, 664), has repudiated the idea that a normative discipline like epistemology could be reduced to a purely descriptive discipline like psychology. Working epistemologists no longer take Quine’s vision in “Epistemology Naturalized” seriously. In this paper, I will explain why I (...) think this is a mistake. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Stephen Stich published a number of works that criticized analytic epistemology and defended a pragmatic view of cognitive assessment (1985, 1988, 1990, 1993). In the past five years, Stich, Jonathan Weinberg and Shaun Nichols (henceforth, WNS) have put forward a number of empirically-based arguments criticizing epistemology in the analytic tradition (Weinberg, Nichols and Stich 2001; Nichols, Stich and Weinberg 2003). My thesis is that the most powerful features of Stich’s epistemological views vindicate Quine’s now moribund naturalism. I expect this thesis to be met with incredulity – not least from Stich, who has explicitly argued that the reductionist view standardly attributed to Quine is a non-starter (1993, 3-5).
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Epistemic responsibility involves at least two central ideas. To be epistemically responsible is to display the virtue epistemic internalists take to be central to justification. In normal circumstances and in the long run, epistemic responsibility is strongly positively correlated with reliability. Sections 1 and 2 review evidence showing that for a wide range of real-world problems, the most reliable, tractable reasoning strategies audaciously flout the internalist's epistemic virtues. In Section 3, I argue that these results force us to give up (...) either, our current conception of what it is to be epistemically responsible, or the responsibility-reliability connection. I will argue that we should relinquish. This is likely to reshape our epistemic practices. It will force us to alter our epistemic judgments about certain instances of reasoning, to endorse some counterintuitive epistemic prescriptions, and to rethink what it is for cognitive agents to be epistemically responsible. (shrink)

Normative apriorist philosophers of science build purely normative a priori reconstructions of science, whereas descriptive naturalists eliminate the normative elements of the philosophy of science in favor of purely descriptive endeavors. I hope to exhibit the virtues of an alternative approach that appreciates both the normative and the natural in the philosophy of science. ;Theory ladenness. Some philosophers claim that a plausible view about how our visual systems work either undermines or facilitates our ability to rationally adjudicate between competing theories (...) on the basis of a theory-neutral observation language. I argue that these psychological premises do not support the epistemological conclusions drawn. ;Scientific theories. I argue for a psychological plausibility constraint: An account of scientific theories should tell us how a theory is mentally represented. I tentatively advance an account that satisfies the constraint. Finally, I criticize the traditional view of theories and the semantic view of theories . ;Conceptual clarity. Philosophers often offer classical accounts of terms ; then others adduce alleged counterexamples. The success conditions on these accounts must include either preserving or revising the original term's extension. Given recent psychological theorizing, the probability that we can find an extension-preserving classical account of a term is very low. Furthermore, it provides no benefits over the empirical effort to find the non-classical conditions we actually use in applying our terms. If the aim of counterexample philosophy is to non-arbitrarily revise the extension of the original term, I argue that we should choose a particular account of a term on the basis of how it performs in our best available theory on the subject. ;Conclusion. I argue that normative apriorists unwittingly make defeasible empirical assumptions that, if false, would undermine their normative claims. Against descriptive naturalism I argue that the cost of ignoring normative issues is exorbitant. Finally, I defend a version of normative naturalism, a style of philosophy of science that is informed--but not engulfed--by empirical assumptions. (shrink)

Bishop and Trout here present a unique and provocative new approach to epistemology (the theory of human knowledge and reasoning). Their approach aims to liberate epistemology from the scholastic debates of standard analytic epistemology, and treat it as a branch of the philosophy of science. The approach is novel in its use of cost-benefit analysis to guide people facing real reasoning problems and in its framework for resolving normative disputes in psychology. Based on empirical data, Bishop and Trout show how (...) people can improve their reasoning by relying on Statistical Prediction Rules (SPRs). They then develop and articulate the positive core of the book. Their view, Strategic Reliabilism, claims that epistemic excellence consists in the efficient allocation of cognitive resources to reliable reasoning strategies, applied to significant problems. The last third of the book develops the implications of this view for standard analytic epistemology; for resolving normative disputes in psychology; and for offering practical, concrete advice on how this theory can improve real people's reasoning. This is a truly distinctive and controversial work that spans many disciplines and will speak to an unusually diverse group, including people in epistemology, philosophy of science, decision theory, cognitive and clinical psychology, and ethics and public policy. (shrink)

Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) names a contingently clustered class of methods and theses that have dominated English-speaking epistemology for about the past half-century. The major contemporary theories of SAE include versions of foundationalism (Chisholm 1981, Pollock 1974), coherentism (Bonjour 1985, Lehrer 1974), reliabilism (Dretske 1981, Goldman 1986) and contextualism (DeRose 1995, Lewis 1996). While proponents of SAE don’t agree about how to define naturalized epistemology, most agree that a thoroughgoing naturalism in epistemology can’t work. For the purposes of this paper, (...) we will suppose that a naturalistic theory of epistemology takes as its core, as its starting-point, an empirical theory. The standard argument against naturalistic approaches to epistemology is that empirical theories are essentially descriptive, while epistemology is essentially prescriptive, and a descriptive theory cannot yield normative, evaluative prescriptions. In short, naturalistic theories cannot overcome the is-ought divide. (shrink)