Abstract
This paper addresses the meta-epistemological dispute over the basis of epistemic evaluation from the standpoint of meliorative epistemology. Meliorative epistemology aims at guiding our epistemic practice to better results, and it comprises two levels of epistemic evaluation. At the social level (meliorative social epistemology) appropriate experts conduct evaluation for the community, so that epistemic evaluation is externalist since each epistemic subject in the community need not have access to the basis of the experts’ evaluation. While at the personal level (meliorative personal epistemology) epistemic evaluation is internalist since each member of the community must evaluate the reliability of the (apparent) experts from the first-person perspective. I argue that evaluation at the social level should be the primary focus of meliorative epistemology since meliorative personal epistemology does not provide informative epistemic norms. It is then pointed out that epistemic evaluation at the social level can be considered internalist in the extended sense (social internalism) in that every component of the evaluation needs to be recognized by some members of the community at some points. As a result, some familiar problems of internalist epistemology, such as regress and circularity of epistemic support, carry over to meliorative social epistemology.
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Notes
This view is often called “mentalism”. See Conee and Feldman (2001) for a defense of mentalism, and Pollock and Cruz (1999) for a variant of mentalism. Bergmann (2006, Chap. 3) argues against mentalism both as an interpretation of internalism and as a view on its own. See also Alston (1986) on the kinds of mental states—knowledge, justified beliefs, or beliefs—that are relevant to epistemic evaluation.
Conee and Feldman (2001) defend this type of internalism.
Fumerton (1995, Chap. 3) defends this type of internalism.
Frequently cited thought experiments in support of internalism about epistemic justification are BonJour’s (1980, 1985, Chap. 3) clairvoyance case, where (intuitively) the subject is not justified in holding the belief but (simplistic) externalism suggests otherwise, and Cohen’s (1984) new evil demon case, where (intuitively) the subject is justified in holding the belief but (simplistic) externalism suggests otherwise. Meanwhile even ardent defenders of internalism concede that our pre-theoretical concept of knowledge contains externalist components—but they downplay the role of knowledge in epistemology (Nagel 1986, Chap. 5; BonJour 1985, Chap. 1; Pollock and Cruz 1999, Chap. 1) and focus their attention on the concept of epistemic justification. Externalists, on the other hand, frequently argue that internalism about epistemic justification leads to radical skepticism that is (intuitively) incorrect.
The term “meliorative” is due to Kitcher (1992, p. 64), who uses it in contrast with “analytic.” Descartes (1628/1985, p. 9) gives a classic expression of meliorative epistemology: “The aim of our studies should be to direct the mind with a view to forming true and sound judgments about whatever comes before it.” Recent advocates of meliorative internalism include Nagel (1986, Chap. 5), Pollock and Cruz (1999, Chap. 1), and Stevenson (1999).
The version of meliorative epistemology assumed here is therefore “veritistic” to use Goldman’s (1999) term. Not all epistemologists share the veritistic conception of epistemic practice. A major alternative is predictive success, i.e. epistemic practice should aim at increasing predictive success and avoiding predictive failure. Those who favor this alternative can replace reference to the veritistic goal throughout this paper with the predictive goal. This will not affect the substance of my discussion since the focus of this paper is the meta-epistemological dispute over the restrictions on the basis of epistemic evaluation, and not specific strategies to achieve the epistemic goal. That belongs to normative epistemology. There is also the view (e.g. Zagzebski 2003) that truth is not the only characteristic that has intrinsic epistemic value. This may be so, but I set aside auxiliary epistemic values in this paper, assuming that truth (or predictive success) is the central aim of our epistemic practice.
It might be suggested that the epistemic status of belief in a proposition—such as epistemic justification—is determined by the objective facts, while it is the evaluation of the epistemic status, based on accessible conditions, that guides our epistemic practice. Those who wish to distinguish the epistemic status and the evaluation of the epistemic status (cf. Alston 1980) should read my discussion in this paper to be about the evaluation of the epistemic status, and not about the epistemic status.
Feldman (1995) raises the Euthyphro objection to “expertism” and more generally to authoritarian epistemology. The main point of his objection is the relation between expertise and rationality. Feldman rejects the idea that some practice is rational because the expert endorses it. The proper order is that the expert endorses it because it is rational. So, one cannot define rationality by the expert’s endorsement. This objection does not apply to the present view, which is not an attempt to define rationality. My only point is that experts with more resources tend to make better judgments on the subject of their expertise. Some may want the justification of this view and raise the question of circularity. The issue of circularity must be addressed at some point, but not here in the meta-epistemological discussion. Those who are concerned about circularity could, for now, take any empirical points made in this chapter to be plausible empirical hypotheses.
The “community” here refers to the epistemic community. People who refuse to share their knowledge with others are not members of our epistemic community even if they live among us. People who make their knowledge available to us by some means of communication are members of our epistemic community even if they live in a different continent and we may never see them in person.
The term “non-experts” here refers to epistemic non-experts. Direct beneficiaries of epistemic guidelines are often experts in other fields. For example, detectives, journalists, etc. can learn from the epistemic experts about various biases and fallacies to guard against. It is possible in some contexts for the epistemic experts to influence the non-expert’s epistemic practice without the epistemic subject’s consent. In an extreme case the epistemic experts may put a stubborn epistemic subject under hypnosis to change her epistemic practice. There are more realistic cases as well. For example, it has been noted that the occurrence of some common fallacies of probabilistic reasoning is reduced when the problem is posed differently (Gigerenzer 1991). So, in order to improve the non-expert’s epistemic performance the epistemic experts may simply re-formulate the problem for the non-expert, instead of providing guidelines for avoiding fallacies. I will set aside these kinds of influence in this paper and focus on the more conventional influence through the dissemination of epistemic guidelines.
It is sometimes pointed out (e.g. Alston 1988) that we form most of our beliefs automatically in response to perceptual and testimonial input without conscious deliberation. This may appear to make epistemic guidelines largely irrelevant, but it is not necessary for the guidelines to be relevant that we consciously think of them at the time of belief-formation. We may accept epistemic guidelines upon conscious deliberation and dispose ourselves to automatically form beliefs in the future in accordance with the guidelines.
Thus Descartes writes that his aim in writing Discourse is “not to teach the method which everyone must follow in order to direct his reason correctly, but only to reveal how I have tried to direct my own.” (Descartes 1637/1985, p. 112) Presumably, each reader is expected to figure out the method of directing her reason for herself.
Alston (1986, p. 192) calls a factor that is relevant to the epistemic evaluation either positively or negatively “an epistemizer”, while calling a factor that is positively relevant to the epistemic evaluation “a justifier”. My point here, explained in Alston’s terms, is that the internalist restriction in meliorative personal epistemology applies to epstemizers in general, and not only to justifiers.
Some people may find it counterintuitive that a less attentive reasoner is more likely to be in good epistemic standing, but that is only because we usually evaluate people’s beliefs from the third-person perspective, and not from the first-person perspective. Having a counterintuitive consequence is not a problem in meliorative epistemology anyway because, as explained in Sect. 1, it is not an objective of meliorative epistemology to accommodate our intuitions about epistemic evaluation.
Goldman (1980, Section IV) describes a path of internalism that leads to epistemic relativism.
This may require that the expert or the educator communicates with some members of the community initially in such a way that her testimony would not be acceptable by the community guideline on acceptable testimony, if that is the only way to influence their epistemic practice.
Some people may suggest that an analogous reasoning leads to the view that the epistemic subject should adopt epistemic guidelines that are as a matter of fact correct, even if they are not obtainable from the evidence and reasoning currently available to the experts in the community. That would serve as our regulative ideal. Meliorative epistemology can be considered an effort to get closer to this ideal. However, there is no way of actually achieving this ideal if nobody in the community can tell what the correct guidelines are. Meliorative social epistemology only pursues the achievable goal of formulating and disseminating epistemic guidelines based on the best epistemic resource available to the community.
This is only a necessary condition. It is required further that the relevant evidence and reasoning must be communicated properly among the members of the community, and that all the elements must be put together in a structurally sound way.
Indeed some meliorative social epistemologists, who are externalists in the traditional sense, take up the structural problems of epistemic support. For example, Goldman (1999, Section 3.3) defends Bayesian coherentism as a (qualified) solution to the problem of circularity.
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Acknowledgments
An early version of this paper was presented at the Pacific Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association in San Francisco in April 2007. I would like to thank the commentators Baron Reed and James Beebe, and other participants of the session for valuable comments. I would also like to thank Harold Brown, Chang-Seong Hong, Glenn Rawson and anonymous referees of Erkenntnis for valuable comments on early versions of the paper.
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Shogenji, T. Internalism and Externalism in Meliorative Epistemology. Erkenn 76, 59–72 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9323-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9323-x