DOCSLIB.ORG

Social Epistemology and the Project of Mapping Science

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Social Epistemology and the Project of Mapping Science City University of New York (CUNY) CUNY Academic Works All Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects 9-2015 Social Epistemology and the Project of Mapping Science Kamili Posey Graduate Center, City University of New York How does access to this work benefit ou?y Let us know! More information about this work at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu/gc_etds/1097 Discover additional works at: https://academicworks.cuny.edu This work is made publicly available by the City University of New York (CUNY). Contact: [email protected] ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE PROJECT OF MAPPING SCIENCE BY KAMILI POSEY A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, The City University of New York. 2015 © 2015 KAMILI POSEY All Rights Reserved ii This manuscript has been read and accepted for the Graduate Faculty in Philosophy in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Nikolas Pappas ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ Date Chair of Examining Committee Iakovos Vasiliou ______________________________ ______________________________ ______________________________ Date Executive Officer Samir Chopra ______________________________________________ Linda Alcoff ______________________________________________ Robert Sinclair ______________________________________________ Supervisory Committee THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK iii ABSTRACT SOCIAL EPISTEMOLOGY AND THE PROJECT OF MAPPING SCIENCE BY KAMILI POSEY ADVISOR: SAMIR CHOPRA One area of debate in naturalized epistemology is how to best interpret the relationship between naturalism and traditional analytic epistemology. This is particularly the case for epistemologists who commit to methodological forms of naturalism: First, I contend that methodological naturalists must commit, at minimum, to the idea that the best methods of knowledge-production in science ought to determine the best methods of knowledge-production full stop. I also contend that the best methods of knowledge-production in science are determined by and performed within scientific communities. Thus a methodological naturalist, to minimally call herself such, ought to consider knowledge-production within “communities of inquirers” utilizing community-determined methods (truth-conducive or not) as the fundamental framework of the method of science. Second, I contend that “communities of inquirers,” more broadly, including the paradigmatic “scientific community,” ought to be the primary terrain of naturalized epistemologists committed to methodological naturalism. And, because of this, I claim that all naturalized epistemologists ought to be social epistemologists. I agree that this may seem undesirable: social epistemology, following Rorty (1979), has a history of focusing on groups, institutions, and collective doxastic agents in consensus-based models that are either non-veritistic or radically deflationist about truth and objectivity. This has led to the exclusion of social epistemology from the traditional canon of epistemology, and the rejection of Peirce’s (1877) “communities of inquirers” view as too entangled with social and political “noise” to be conducive to finding truth. But I think this is an unnecessary interpretation. I claim, following Goldman (1999), that social epistemology can be truth-directed or “veritistic” in practice – even if not in the way that Goldman iv (1999) imagines. Ultimately, I argue, inspired by the American pragmatists, and particularly Dewey and Peirce, we do not have to reject truth and objectivity in order to maintain a social account of knowledge-production. Lastly, I suggest that one benefit of this view of epistemology is that it relocates a crucial area of philosophical inquiry from within the walls of “academic philosophy” and situates it where it actually belongs – in the world. One benefit of doing this is that epistemologists can make meaningful use of emerging tools in information science to visualize and theorize the activities within various “communities of inquirers:” this includes such tools as large-scale data mining, scientific citation mapping, topic and/or cluster mapping, and data visualizations. v PREFACE “A philosopher is like a fly buzzing around in a fly bottle, according to Wittgenstein. A theory of the bottle, it doesn’t need. What it needs is to be shown the way out. Kant has an almost complete opposite metaphor. He imagines a dove resentful about air resistance; it could fly better, surely, if the air would just get out of the way. A lot of philosophy is these two metaphors battling it out. You are always trying to break free of something. This makes sense if you’re the bottled-up fly. But not if you’re the ungrateful dove. It can be very hard to tell.” -Stephen Yablo vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Title Page………………………………………………………………………………………………………i Copyright Page………………………………………………………………………………………………..ii Approval Page………………………………………………………………………………………………..iii Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………………………..iv-v Preface………………………………………………………………………………………………………..vi Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………………vi-ix List of Illustrations………………………………..…………………………………………………..………x 1. The Introduction 1.1. The Proposal…………………………........………………………………..……..………1 1.2. The Motivation………………………………………………………………………...….14 1.3. The Payoff………………………………………………………………………….….….16 1.4. The Methodology……………………………………………………………………..….17 1.5. Project Outline…………………………………………………………………….….….18 2. On Naturalism 2.1. Methodological Naturalism and the Scope of “Science”……………………………25 2.2. Methodological Naturalism and The Pragmatist Conception of Science…………………………………………………………………………………..35 2.3. Social Epistemology and a More Honest Naturalism……………………………….38 3. Arguments for Social Epistemology 3.1 Introduction……………………………………………………………………………...40 3.2 Radical Social Epistemology…………………………………..................................45 3.2.1 Against Radical Social Epistemology……………………………………….50 3.2.2 Can RSE Be Saved?................................................................................56 3.3 Consensus-Based Social Epistemology……………………………………………..63 3.3.1 Background……………………………………………….…………………...63 3.3.2 Rortyian Pragmatism………………………………….................................66 vii 3.3.3 Feminist Philosophy of Science and Feminist Epistemologies………………………………………………......................72 3.3.4 Solomon (2001) and Standpoint Epistemologies of Science.………………………………………………………………………73 3.3.5 Against (CSE)…….……………………………………………..…………..76 4. Veritistic Social Epistemology…………..…………………………………..…….…….........79 4.1 Goldman (1999) and the Social Epistemological Project……………..………….79 4.2 V-Values, Non-Epistemic Interests, and Questions of Interest……………….…84 4.3 Extrapolating from Testimony: Does Goldman (1999) Give Us a Bayesian Social Epistemology?...........................................................................................90 4.4.1 Goldman (1999) and the “Problem of Priors”………………………...….92 4.4.2 Replies: Kitcher (2002) and Fallis (2002)…………………………….…..95 4.4.3 Concluding Remarks…………………………………….…………………98 5. Veritistic Social Epistemology in a Pragmatist Framework………………………………..99 5.1 Pragmatism, Realism, and Convergence……………………………….…..…….99 5.2 Pragmatism and the Convergence Thesis: A Bayesian Approach..................101 5.2.1 Scoping Methods: A Subjectivist-Objectivist Approach.………………102 5.2.2 Dutch Books, Diachronic Coherence, and Revising the Reflection Principle……………………………………………………………...…….104 5.2.3 General Non-Partitioned Reflection……………………………….....…110 5.2.4 Scoping (GNR): Defeater Beliefs, Inert Beliefs, and “R-Reflection” …………………………………………………………………..……...….112 5.3 A Note on Bayesian Aggregation…………………………….…………………..113 5.4 Epistemic Disagreement and Epistemic Peers………....……………………...116 5.5 What’s Next?: Mapping The Epistemic Terrain…….….……………………….120 6. A Network-Level Epistemology: Representing Large-Scale Data…….….……………122 6.1 Systems-Oriented Social Epistemology and the Problem of Scale………….122 6.2 A Network-Level Epistemology…...…………………………….……………….125 viii 6.2.1 Scientific Citation Studies and Scientific Citation Mapping………...126 6.2.2 “Open” and “Closed” Network-Mapping for Social Epistemology …………………………………………………………………….……...129 6.2.3 Can “Closed” Systems Contribute to Knowledge?..........................134 6.2.4 Network-Mapping and Emerging and Waning Clusters…...............135 6.3 Representing Large-Scale Data: Concluding Remarks…………….……..…136 6.4 A Final Note on the “Social” Part of Social Epistemology………….......……137 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………..…………….139 Network Analysis Maps – Bibliographic Information……………………………...……148 ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1, Map of Scientific Paradigms………………………………………….…………………..139 Figure 2, The Structure of Science………………………………………………………………….140 Figure 3, Science-Related Wikipedian Activity…………………………………………………….141 x Chapter I The Introduction 1.1 The Proposal I assume that a good number of working philosophers subscribe to some variety of naturalism; even though it does come riddled with problems. Although I do not assume that most working philosophers subscribe to ontological naturalism, or that we need be dogmatic about what we mean by the “science” part of naturalism (See: Timothy Williamson’s 2011 NYTimes article, “What Is Naturalism?” for a good discussion of this).1 It could very well be that philosophy
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Presidential Address
    Empowering Philosophy Christia Mercer COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY Presidential Address delivered at the one hundred sixteenth Eastern Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association in Philadelphia, PA, on January 10, 2020. The main goal of my presidential address in January 2020 was to show that philosophy’s past offers a means to empower its present. I hoped to encourage colleagues to make the philosophy we teach and practice more inclusive (both textually and topically) and to adopt a more public- facing engagement with our discipline. As I add these introductory remarks to my January lecture, it is June 2020 and the need to empower philosophy has never seemed more urgent. We’ve witnessed both the tragic death of George Floyd and the popular uprising of a diverse group of Americans in response to the ongoing violence against Black lives. Many white Americans—and many philosophers—have begun to realize that their inattentiveness to matters of diversity and inclusivity must now be seen as more than mere negligence. Recent demonstrations frequently contain signs that make the point succinctly: “Silence is violence.” A central claim of my January lecture was that philosophy’s status quo is no longer tenable. Even before the pandemic slashed university budgets and staff, our employers were cutting philosophy programs, enrollments were shrinking, and jobs were increasingly hard to find. Despite energetic attempts on the part of many of our colleagues to promote a more inclusive approach to our research and teaching, the depressing truth remains:
    [Show full text]
  • The Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology
    THEOPENHANDBOOKOFFORMALEPISTEMOLOGY Richard Pettigrew &Jonathan Weisberg,Eds. THEOPENHANDBOOKOFFORMAL EPISTEMOLOGY Richard Pettigrew &Jonathan Weisberg,Eds. Published open access by PhilPapers, 2019 All entries copyright © their respective authors and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. LISTOFCONTRIBUTORS R. A. Briggs Stanford University Michael Caie University of Toronto Kenny Easwaran Texas A&M University Konstantin Genin University of Toronto Franz Huber University of Toronto Jason Konek University of Bristol Hanti Lin University of California, Davis Anna Mahtani London School of Economics Johanna Thoma London School of Economics Michael G. Titelbaum University of Wisconsin, Madison Sylvia Wenmackers Katholieke Universiteit Leuven iii For our teachers Overall, and ultimately, mathematical methods are necessary for philosophical progress. — Hannes Leitgeb There is no mathematical substitute for philosophy. — Saul Kripke PREFACE In formal epistemology, we use mathematical methods to explore the questions of epistemology and rational choice. What can we know? What should we believe and how strongly? How should we act based on our beliefs and values? We begin by modelling phenomena like knowledge, belief, and desire using mathematical machinery, just as a biologist might model the fluc- tuations of a pair of competing populations, or a physicist might model the turbulence of a fluid passing through a small aperture. Then, we ex- plore, discover, and justify the laws governing those phenomena, using the precision that mathematical machinery affords. For example, we might represent a person by the strengths of their beliefs, and we might measure these using real numbers, which we call credences. Having done this, we might ask what the norms are that govern that person when we represent them in that way.
    [Show full text]
  • Responding to Skepticism About Doxastic Agency
    Erkenn (2018) 83:627–645 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9906-2 ORIGINAL RESEARCH Responding to Skepticism About Doxastic Agency Miriam Schleifer McCormick1 Received: 16 April 2016 / Accepted: 9 May 2017 / Published online: 8 June 2017 Ó Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 Abstract My main aim is to argue that most conceptions of doxastic agency do not respond to the skeptic’s challenge. I begin by considering some reasons for thinking that we are not doxastic agents. I then turn to a discussion of those who try to make sense of doxastic agency by appeal to belief’s reasons-responsive nature. What they end up calling agency is not robust enough to satisfy the challenge posed by the skeptics. To satisfy the skeptic, one needs to make sense of the possibility of believing for nonevidential reasons. While this has been seen as an untenable view for both skeptics and anti-skeptics, I conclude by suggesting it is a position that has been too hastily dismissed. 1 Introduction In what sense or to what extent is agency exercised in the doxastic realm? Some argue that the kind of control we have over beliefs is sufficient for doxastic agency, while others argue that the nature of beliefs precludes agency being exercised in what we believe. But getting clear on the nature of these disagreements is difficult because the disputants do not always share a common notion of what is required for agency in general, and doxastic agency in particular. A skeptic about doxastic agency may agree with everything an anti-skeptic says but insist that none of what is proposed counts as real agency.
    [Show full text]
  • A Social Solution to the Puzzle of Doxastic Responsibility: a Two-Dimensional Account of Responsibility for Belief
    View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by PhilPapers Forthcoming in Synthese 1 A Social Solution to the Puzzle of Doxastic Responsibility: A Two-Dimensional Account of Responsibility for Belief Robert Carry Osborne (This is a final, pre-copyedit version of an article published in Synthese. The final authenticated version is available online at: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11229-020-02637-9) 1. Introduction There are various, well-known difficulties surrounding the notion of doxastic responsibility and the so-called ‘ethics of belief’. The “puzzle of doxastic responsibility,” as Miriam McCormick (2015) has recently called it, arises from the tension between some version of the following three claims, each intuitively plausible on its own, but together jointly inconsistent: (RESPONSIBLE) We sometimes rightly hold agents responsible for their doxastic attitudes. (CONTROL) Voluntary control over X is a prerequisite for responsibility for X. (NON-VOLUNTARY) Beliefs are not subject to the will, that is, we lack voluntary control over them.1 The puzzle, then, is why beliefs seem to be the kinds of things for which we can rightly be held responsible, and yet do not appear to be something over which we exercise direct (voluntary or intentional) control.2 A solution to the puzzle seems to require that we reject at least one of the three claims above. As a result, the puzzle has three general answers: (a) Reject (RESPONSIBLE) and thus deny that beliefs are the proper objects of normative assessment, and so deny that anyone 1 McHugh (2017) also discusses a version of the same puzzle, which he calls “the problem of epistemic responsibility,” though his version involves four claims, and depends explicitly on a comparison with the kind of control we have over our (bodily) actions.
    [Show full text]
  • The Epistemology of Racism and Community-Based
    THE EPISTEMOLOGY OF RACISM AND COMMUNITY-BASED ASSESSMENT PRACTICE By ASAO B. INOUE A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY Department of English May 2005 © Copyright by ASAO B. INOUE, 2005 All Rights Reserved © Copyright by ASAO B. INOUE, 2005 All Rights Reserved To the Faculty of Washington State University: The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of ASAO B. INOUE find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted. ___________________________________ Chair ___________________________________ ___________________________________ ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank Dr. Victor Villanueva, Dr. Rory Ong, and Dr. William Condon for their careful reading of earlier drafts of this dissertation. Additionally, I appreciate Dr. Peter Elbow’s gracious help and copious suggestions on an earlier version of chapter five, a version of which appeared in the journal Assessing Writing 10.1 (2005). Most of all, I thank kelly Inoue for supporting me, keeping my life in order, and making it possible for me to do the work required for this dissertation. iii iv THE EPISTEMOLGY OF RACISM AND COMMUNITY-BASED ASSESSMENT PRACTICE Abstract by Asao B. Inoue, Ph.D. Washington State University May 2005 Chair: Victor Villanueva, Jr. This is a discussion that theorizes the epistemology of racism and incorporates it into a critical writing pedagogy. It uses primarily a critical sophistic pedagogy, a set of community- based assessment practices, and a rhetoric of hard agreements, all theorized. This discussion draws primarily from three areas: (1) sophistic rhetorical and pedagogical theory, primarily discussions around nomos-physis, Protagoras’ man-measure doctrine and his antilogical heuristics for rhetorical invention; (2) cultural theory and theories surrounding the ideological and rhetorical construction of race, class, and power; and (3) composition theory, primarily assessment theory and critical pedagogical theory.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Epistemology
    Social Epistemology Franz Dietrich1 and Kai Spiekermann2 May 2019 Abstract Social epistemology studies knowledge in social contexts. Knowledge is ‘social’ when its holder communicates with or learns from others (Epistemology in groups), or when its holder is a group as a whole, literally or metaphorically (Epistemology of groups). Group knowledge can emerge explicitly, through aggregation procedures like voting, or implicitly, through institutions like deliberation or prediction markets. In the truth-tracking paradigm, group beliefs aim at truth, and group decisions at ‘correctness’ – in virtue of external facts that are empirical or normative, real or constructed, universal or relativistic, etc. Procedures and institutions are evaluated by epistemic performance: Are they truth-conducive? Do groups become ‘wiser’ than their members? We review several procedures and institutions, discussing epistemic successes and failures. Jury theorems provide formal arguments for epistemic success. Some jury theorems misleadingly conclude that ‘huge groups are infallible’ – an artefact of inappropriate premises. Others have defensible premises, and still conclude that groups outperform individuals, without being infallible. Social Epistemology is the branch of Epistemology which studies knowledge in social contexts. In this review, we first set the stage by introducing clarifications, distinctions, and applications (Section 1). We then discuss formal procedures (Section 2) and informal institutional arrangements (Section 3) which generate collective beliefs or decisions that ‘track the truth’, or instead lead to epistemic failures (Section 4). 1 Scope and problems of social epistemology 1.1 Epistemology in groups versus epistemology of groups A first distinction pertains to the knowledge holder, who is either a group member or the group as a whole.
    [Show full text]
  • Epistemology Formalized
    Philosophical Review Epistemology Formalized Sarah Moss University of Michigan As we often tell our undergraduates, epistemology is the study of knowl- edge. Given just this simple definition, ‘formal epistemology’ seems like a misnomer for the philosophical program inspired by Thomas Bayes and developed in the twentieth century by Ramsey (1926), de Finetti ([1937] 1993), Jeffrey (1983), and others. Bayesians articulate constraints on rational credences: synchronic constraints on what credences you may have, and diachronic constraints on how your credences must evolve. Like traditional epistemologists, Bayesians are concerned with norms governing your doxastic state. But in modeling your doxastic state, Bayes- ians do not represent what full beliefs you have.1 And so they do not have the resources to talk about which of those beliefs constitute knowledge. This paper develops a formal extension of traditional episte- mology for which ‘epistemology’ is not a misnomer.I accept the traditional claim that beliefs can constitute knowledge. But I argue for an apparently radical thesis about the doxastic states that Bayesians care about: some of these states can also constitute knowledge. For example, suppose you are playing an ordinary poker game, and you have just been dealt some mid- dling cards face down. Your justifiedly low credence that you have been Thanks to Dave Chalmers, Branden Fitelson, Allan Gibbard, John Hawthorne, Jim Joyce, Ted Sider, Jason Stanley, Seth Yalcin, and the Michigan Crop Circle for helpful comments, as well as audiences at the University of Pittsburgh, Princeton University, Rutgers Univer- sity, University of St Andrews, Syracuse University, Yale University, the 2011 Orange Beach Epistemology Workshop, and the 2011 Formal Epistemology Workshop.
    [Show full text]
  • Truth and Justification in Knowledge Representation ⋆
    Truth and Justification in Knowledge Representation ? Andrei Rodin1;2[0000−0002−3541−8867] and Serge Kovalyov3[0000−0001−5707−5730] 1 Institute of Philosophy RAS, 12/1 Goncharnaya Str., Moscow, 109240, Russian Federation 2 HSE, 20 Myasnitskaya Ulitsa, Moscow, 101000, Russian Federation [email protected] https://www.hse.ru/org/persons/218712080 3 ICS RAS, 65 Profsoyuznaya street, Moscow 117997, Russian Federation [email protected] https://www.ipu.ru/node/16660 Abstract. While the traditional philosophical epistemology stresses the importance of distinguishing knowledge from true beliefs, the formalisa- tion of this distinction with standard logical means turns out to be prob- lematic. In Knowledge Representation (KR) as a Computer Science disci- pline this crucial distinction is largely neglected. A practical consequence of this neglect is that the existing KR systems store and communicate knowledge that cannot be verified and justified by users of these systems without external means. Information obtained from such systems does not qualify as knowledge in the sense of philosophical epistemology. Recent advances in the research area at the crossroad of the compu- tational mathematical logic, formal epistemology and computer science open new perspectives for an effective computational realisation of jus- tificatory procedures in KR. After exposing the problem of justification in logic, epistemology and KR, we sketch a novel framework for rep- resenting knowledge along with relevant justificatory procedures, which is based on the Homotopy Type theory (HoTT). This formal framework supports representation of both propositional knowledge, aka knowledge- that, and non-propositional knowledge, aka knowledge-how or procedu- ral knowledge. The default proof-theoretic semantics of HoTT allows for combining the two sorts of represented knowledge at the formal level by interpreting all permissible constructions as justification terms (wit- nesses) of associated propositions.
    [Show full text]
  • Social Aspects of Scientific Knowledge
    1 Social Aspects of Scientific Knowledge Ilkka Niiniluoto ABSTRACT. From its inception in 1987 social epistemology has been divided into analytic (ASE) and critical (CSE) approaches, represented by Alvin I. Goldman and Steve Fuller, respectively. In this paper, the agendas and some basic ideas of ASE and CSE are compared and assessed by bringing into the discussion also other participants of the debates on the social aspects of scientific knowledge – among them Raimo Tuomela, Philip Kitcher and Helen Longino. The six topics to be analyzed include individual and collective epistemic agents; the notion of scientific community; realism and constructivism; truth-seeking communities; epistemic and social values; science, experts, and democracy. KEYWORDS. democracy, epistemic values, experts, scientific community, scientific realism, social epistemology, truth-seeking, Introduction: Analytic and Critical Social Epistemology Social epistemology studies knowledge from a social point of view. As a complement to empirical studies, such as the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of science, social epistemology aims to provide a normative philosophical account of knowledge as a collective achievement. Even though the term dates from the 1950s, the work in this field started in 1987 with a special issue of Synthese, edited by Frederick Schmitt, and the new journal Social Epistemology – A Journal of Knowledge, Culture, and Policy, founded by Steve Fuller. In the next year Fuller published a monograph with the title Social Epistemology. Alvin I. Goldman, who published in the 1987 Synthese issue an article on “Social Epistemics”, developed his reliabilist epistemology in the direction of social practices in his Knowledge in a Social World (1999).
    [Show full text]
  • Social Epistemology: Theory and Applications
    1 2 Social Epistemology: Theory and 3 Applications 4 5 6 ALVIN I. GOLDMAN 7 8 9 1. Mainstream Epistemology and Social Epistemology 10 11 Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least 12 since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of 13 one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. 14 Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from 15 one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individ- 16 ual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors largely 17 followed this lead, so the history of epistemology, down to our own 18 time, has been a predominantly individualist affair. 19 There are scattered exceptions. A handful of historical epistemolo- 20 gists gave brief space to the question of knowing, or believing justifi- 21 ably, based on the testimony of others. Testimony-based knowledge 22 would be one step into a more social epistemology. Hume took it for 23 granted that we regularly rely on the factual statements of others, and 24 argued that it is reasonable to do so if we have adequate reasons for 25 trusting the veracity of these sources. However, reasons for such 26 trust, according to Hume, must rest on personal observations of 1 27 people’s veracity or reliability. Thomas Reid took a different view. 28 He claimed that our natural attitude of trusting others is reasonable 29 even if we know little if anything about others’ reliability. 30 Testimony, at least sincere testimony, is always prima facie credible th 31 (Reid, 1970: 240–241).
    [Show full text]
  • I Am Going to Deal with the Foundations of First Philosophy in Its Entirety
    FOUNDATIONALISM & THE STRUCTURE OF EPISTEMIC WARRANT I am going to deal with the foundations of First Philosophy in its entirety. —Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy The basics of foundationalism Foundationalism is the classic view regarding the nature of warranted belief acceptance, non-acceptance and the suspending of judgement. It has been advocated by such historically significant philosophers as Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hume, Reid, and Kant as well as such significant contemporaries as A.J. Ayer, C.I. Lewis and Roderick Chisholm. It has been the subject of serious philosophical attacks by such prominent philosophers as Donald Davidson, Keith Lehrer, Laurence Bonjour and Richard Rorty.1 What is foundationalism, however? Given that foundationalism is a theory about the nature of epistemic warrant, it should be clear that it is a normative theory—i.e., it tells us when we are warranted, reasonable, or permitted to assent, not assent or suspend judgment regarding a proposition. How does it differ from the internalist and externalist views of epistemic warrant we have been discussing? Most importantly, it tells us about the structure of epistemically warranted doxastic attitudes. That is, it tells us how our epistemically warranted doxastic attitudes are related to each other. Put differently, it tells us that every member of a cognitive being’s set of doxastic attitudes is organized and formally related in very important ways. What is that organization and formal relation? According to the foundationalist, genuine (propositional) knowledge and epistemically warranted belief has a two-tier structure: some instances of our knowledge and epistemically warranted belief are foundational and every other instance is non-foundational.
    [Show full text]
  • Questions for Uniqueness (3408 Words)
    1 Questions for Uniqueness (3408 words) Abstract: In this paper, I argue that the so-called Uniqueness Thesis, or Uniqueness, is untenable because we cannot conceive of epistemic rationality as free of any practical components. Uniqueness states that given the same body of evidence, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude taken towards any proposition. Some authors, on the other hand, argue that it is rationally permissible to hold differing doxastic attitudes; call that view Permissivism. First, I provide a precise formulation for Uniqueness and evaluate some of the arguments for and against it. I show that many extant arguments against Uniqueness are question-begging and why these arguments fail. Finally, I offer a better argument against Uniqueness. My argument brings out that rational belief is not determined solely by evidence but also by the questions that guide one’s inquiry. 1. Introduction Given the same body of evidence, is it rational to possess differing doxastic attitudes towards a certain proposition? Some authors argue that it is permissible; call that Permissivism. Others oppose this view and argue for the so-called Uniqueness Thesis, or Uniqueness, which states that for agents with the same body of total evidence, there is at most one rational doxastic attitude taken towards any proposition. What I argue is that Uniqueness is untenable because we cannot conceive of epistemic rationality as free of any practical components. Although arguments have been provided for and against Uniqueness based on practical grounds, these arguments treat doxastic attitudes similarly with bodily actions. The practical component that I discuss here, on the other hand, is restricted to knowledge, i.e., how one inquires.
    [Show full text]