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Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy Volume 5: Epistemology Introduction Richard Cobb-Stevens The history of epistemology has always been closely linked with the tradition of skepticism. Indeed, the earliest philosophical efforts to describe the nature and limits of our knowledge were largely motivated by the skeptical suggestion that things may not be as they appear to us. Every attempt to find an adequate response to these early doubts about the reliability of our knowledge met new and powerful skeptical criticisms which in turn engendered new attempts to justify the conviction that we are capable to achieving at least some degree of truth about ourselves and our world. (1) At a time when the latest swing of the pendulum has taken philosophy from excessive confidence in our cognitive powers to an equally excessive tendency to reduce of all truth claims to pleasing or powerful illusions, the essays collected in this volume offer some balanced and attractive alternatives to these extreme positions. Few of these essays may be categorized as representing in an unqualified or exclusive manner the standard contemporary positions such as foundationalism, coherentism, contextualism, internalism, and externalism. Hence I have preferred to group them loosely under five headings which blur somewhat the boundaries of these standard classifications. Papers in the first group (Bealer, BonJour, Casullo, Fumerton, Pendlebury) give priority to the "first person" perspective and therefore to various modes of intuition. Papers in the second group (Brewer, Broncano, Clarke, McLaughlin) give priority to the "third person" perspective and therefore to physical causality. Those in third group (DeRose, Goldman, Niiiniluto, Rockmore, Stepin) emphasize the cultural, historical, or social contexts of our knowledge. Those in the fourth group (Foley, Greco, Hookway, Stoehr, Zagzebski) call attention to the intellectual virtues requisite for the development of a balanced epistemology. Finally, papers in fifth group (Hirsch, Klein, Moser) emphasize that the most effective response to skepticism is to abandon absolutist claims in favor of a provisional rationality better suited to deal with epistemological issues. Although these papers present widely divergent positions and do so forcefully, they also generally acknowledge the strengths of opposing positions. Indeed, what is most striking about these essays is a common attitude of modesty and respect that might best be described as an attitude of "Aristotelian" moderation. There seems to be broad agreement that a sense of the mean between extremes is as necessary in intellectual inquiry as it is in practical affairs. This spirit is perhaps best captured by the concluding sentence of Paul Moser's essay in the present collection: "On both sides of the perennial skeptical dispute, then, sincere epistemic humility should be the order of the day." I. First Person Perspective Proponents of a first person perspective argue that our primary mode of access to what occurs in the achievement of human knowledge is the actual experience of knowing had by each of us whenever we register some fact or get the point of an argument. It is not enough to describe the behavior associated with that experience or even the linguistic articulations that express what is experienced. The philosopher must also attempt to deal somehow with the experience of knowing as such, i.e., the experience had by the knower in the instance of knowing. I take it that this is the point made by George Bealer when he argues that any coherent epistemology must accept intuitions, both intellectual intuitions and phenomenal experiences, as evidence. Of course, intuitions are not infallible. Determinate understanding of concepts must be founded in relevant intuitions. In order to clarify the notion of relevant intuitions Bealer argues for a "modal reliabilism" according to which "something counts as a basic source of evidence iff there is an appropriate modal tie between its deliverances and the truth." Laurence BonJour also adopts a resolutely internalist or first person perspective. He argues that the most fundamental epistemological issues must be resolved on the individual rather than on the communitarian level. On the individual level there are, he contends, discernible a priori connections which justify those truth claims that do not involve matters of direct experience. Although such a priori insights are genuine sources of justification, they nonetheless always remain fallible. Most errors in this domain are correctable by more careful and ordered consideration of the connections in question, but even if we had no systematic way of correcting such errors, this would not be a reason to abandon a source of information "without which all reasoning and criticism would be impossible." BonJour adds that he regards his argument as a reductio ad absurdum of contemporary materialist and naturalist accounts of epistemological justification. Richard Fumerton observes that it is unfortunate that philosophers have not been able to agree on some mutually acceptable account of experience or consciousness. He contends, however, that on any account the epistemology of experience requires at least one conscious state that is genuinely relational and to which we have unproblematic access. Our awareness of physical objects is through sense experience, but such experience does not include as a constituent the physical objects in question. We do however enjoy unproblematic access to sense data. Hence our direct awareness of sense experience is the only genuinely relational awareness that "includes within itself one of its relata." This awareness eliminates the specter of an infinite regress in the process of justification. To this argument one might object that the notion of sense data seems to a hybrid concept that conflates descriptive and explanatory motifs. If we limit ourselves to description of our experience, it seems that we are in fact simply not aware of sense data. We are aware of pained bodily parts and red things but not of pain or red tout court. Michael Pendlebury contends that the development of a sophisticated common sense realism requires an account of how perceptions become perceptual judgments "to the extent that they are imbedded in and engaged with the high level patterns of consciousness and reasoning characteristic of judgments." He rightly points out that whatever may be the relations between concepts in a conceptual system the applicability of concepts must be "anchored" in the nonconceptual aspects of perceptual experience. Human perceptions always blend conceptual and nonconceptual aspects. To the extent that they include conceptual aspects perceptions are raised into what Wilfred Sellars called "the space of reasons" and thus become perceptual judgments. Pendlebury develops a convincing account of how perceptual discriminations both found and merge with conceptual articulations. II. Third Person Perspective The authors in this second group are convinced that a third-person or externalist perspective approach is ultimately the most fruitful method for addressing epistemological problems, but they are also careful to acknowledge explicitly or tacitly the difficulties that this approach encounters when dealing with claims made from the first person perspective. For example, Bill Brewer addresses squarely the internalist objection to an externalist approach to epistemology, i.e., that it fails to account for the priority of a person's authoritative first-person knowledge about the contents of his or her beliefs. He argues that such beliefs when they are justified have contents determined by causal relations with the environment and that these causal relations provide the reasons for such beliefs. He also contends that these same causal relations are the ultimate source of the "epistemic skill" requisite for the deployment of the relevant determinate concepts, and he therefore concludes that there is no justification for an appeal to a "wholly non-empirical source of empirical knowledge." Fernando Broncano addresses a new kind of skepticism about rationality derived from experimental findings concerning the troubling prevalence of fallacious reasoning. He rejects the rationalistic response that logicians may legitimately regard such actual human limitations as irrelevant, noting that this dismissive attitude has the practical effect of blocking "a future road to a naturalized psychology, anthropology or social science." He acknowledges, however, that the strictly inductive methods of naturalist approaches to rationality yield conclusions that remain insufficiently universal. He concludes that the best we can hope for is a rationality based on a method of quality control guided by an "individual or collective virtue which, as Aristotle already knew, is based on the best adjustment to the circumstances." Commenting on an earlier work of BonJour, Albert Casullo contends that the same arguments that BonJour presents against empiricism may in fact be used against a priori rationalism. He agrees that no experience can justify a belief that goes beyond that experience, but contends that precisely for that reason a priori insight cannot take us beyond direct experiences because there is no such thing as an experience of a priori insight. He observes that it is instructive that rationalists cannot offer a non-metaphorical characterization of the alleged cognitive capacity referred to as a priori insight into universals. Perception requires causal contact with the object perceived but properties such as redness cannot stand in causal relationships. This argument, it seems to me, presupposes that the only legitimate account of knowledge is a causal account. Bonjour claims that we enjoy intuitive access to the content of a priori claims. If he is right, and my experience suggests that he is, then there is something inadequate about an exclusively causal account of knowledge. Murray Clarke calls attention to a conceptual confusion characteristic of criticisms of the naturalization project: the confusion of the evaluation from the third person perspective of already formed beliefs and the evaluation of rules for the direction of mind construed from a first person perspective. He argues that the first notion of justifiedness is necessary for knowledge while the second is necessary for the pursuit of inquiry. Brian McLaughlin develops the thesis that colors are both visual properties and physical properties of surfaces and volumes. On this interpretation, redness is not merely the disposition to look red; rather it is the basis for the disposition to look red. Indeed, "being the property that disposes things to look red suffices for being redness." McLaughlin concludes that even if the "hard problem" of visual consciousness, i.e. the location of the phenomenological character of color experiences, cannot be solved (although there is hope, he suggests, that they will eventually be located among the neural properties of the brain), it is nevertheless the case that colors can be located among the physical properties of the world. Since I have made some critical comments above about exclusive reliance on the third person perspective, I should like to add that the same criticism ought to be made of exclusive reliance on a first-person phenomenological account of knowledge. No contemporary philosophical problem is more long-standing, more pressing, and more apparently unsolvable than the problem of how to correlate phenomenological and neurological accounts of human cognition. The point of my criticism is this: although there is no way to encompass the complexity of this problem within the unity of a single methodology or a single discourse, it is possible to correlate different methodologies and discourses in a complementary and non-reductive manner. III. Cultural, Historical, and Social Contexts Recognition of the role played by context in human discourse raises varied and difficult problems for epistemology. The fullness of the sense (and therefore the truth-conditions) of many sentences is communicated only by the actual utterance in a specific context. It follows that interpretation of such sentences by individuals who do not share that context becomes problematic. Moreover, when we attempt to interpret sentences and especially entire texts composed by authors belonging to cultures or historical periods different from own, this problem is greatly magnified. Keith DeRose addresses objections to contextualism that tend to obfuscate the already complex problem of how context determines truth-conditions. For example, when more precise criteria for knowledge are introduced into a conversation or when the hearers of reported conversations have higher standards than the original participants, some authors have suggested that knowledge is gained or lost as the context changes. DeRose responds that contextualism does not render knowledge elusive in this manner. Knowledge does not simply disappear when epistemic standards change. Depending on the circumstances, there are lower and higher standards for what constitutes knowledge. The introduction of strict epistemological standards does not "rob" us of knowledge based on less demanding criteria. Alvin Goldman addresses a broader but not unrelated issue. Noting that traditional epistemology has been an excessively individualistic affair, he contends that the discipline would be greatly enriched by the development of a social epistemology. To preserve continuity with traditional epistemology, analysis of the social context should specify normative criteria for determining how truth conditions are determined by social structures. For example, analysis of the way in which social conditions influence scientific investigation and its communication should specify the extent to which "gatekeeper" rules and "speech-filtering" mechanisms, which impose limits on an unencumbered free marketplace of ideas, inhibit or promote the advance of science. Ilkka Niiniluoto observes that philosophers living in different historical periods have emphasized quite different modes of rationality. After distinguishing three types of rationality (cognitive rationality which equates knowledge with justified true beliefs, instrumental rationality which concerns the appropriate relationship between means and ends, and value rationality which concerns the appraisal of the goals of human action), Niiniluoto discusses how the question 'Is it rational to be rational' evokes different responses for each of these modes of rationality. Tom Rockmore echoes this emphasis on openness and moderation in his critique of the notion of ahistorical knowledge and defense of historical knowledge. After a helpful sketch of the history of the conception of knowledge as contextual and historical, he argues that what we mean by truth and knowledge in each discipline is dependent on what those working in that field think at any given time. He adds that such provisional knowledge is fully compatible with the idea of progress in truth. V. S. Stepin emphasizes the systematic character of historically developing forms of knowledge. At the end of the twentieth century, he contends, we are in search of a new world view that would correlate an evolving understanding of the scientific perspective of European culture with the world views of Eastern culture which had previously been rejected as unscientific. IV. Virtue Epistemology Aristotle calls attention to the contributions of the intellectual virtues of judgment and understanding to practical thinking. Judgment is insight or good sense regarding moral matters. It requires not only a sympathetic and tolerant spirit of friendship towards others, but also the intellectual perspicuity that comes with understanding. Understanding is a general knowledge of moral affairs, a knowledge that renders us capable of making sound judgments. To have practical wisdom therefore is to have the ability to make irreducibly particular ethical decisions with a sense of the mean between extremes, but it is also to enjoy the kind of insight into human affairs that comes from long experience in the practice of moral and intellectual virtue. Several essays in this collection suggest either explicitly or implicitly that the Aristotelian notions of intellectual and moral excellence (virtue) may serve as a reliable guide for the kind of moderation and judgment needed in the domain of epistemology. John Greco takes as his point of departure Hume's criticism of probable reasoning on the grounds that it always presumes the principle of regularity in nature. Greco suggests that the real lesson of Hume's argument is that "our evidence for unobserved cases is at most contingently reliable." He next observes that a weakness of the contemporary epistemological theory of generic reliabilism (the view that genuine knowledge and justified belief are dependent on reliable cognitive processes) is its failure to explain how individuals develop cognitive processes that "get things right." This lacuna may be filled, he argues, by introducing an emphasis on the reliability of the agent of knowledge, a theme first developed in Ernest Sosa's "virtue epistemology" which claims that the intellectual virtues of the knower are as important for knowledge as are the moral dispositions of the moral agent for moral action. The sensitivity to the reliability of evidence necessary for genuine knowledge occurs only when the agent of knowledge possesses the requisite intellectual virtues. Christopher Hookway points out that an analysis of the traits of "epistemic character" must include a study of the central role played by emotions, sentiments, and other affective states in the exercise of epistemic rationality. For example, in many cases an attitude of doubt may have a dual dimension, both intellectual and affective. Doubt about a proposition may be based both on a cool intellectual appraisal of the available evidence, but it may also be based simultaneously on an amorphous anxiety about the content and implications of the proposition. Attention to the affective dimension of epistemic belief, Hookway concludes, offers strong confirmation of the view that there are many points of analogy between epistemic rationality and the Aristotelian account of virtue. Kevin Stoehr also takes as his point of departure the Aristotelian sense of virtue as both intellectual and moral excellence, and also refers to the reciprocal harmony between moral and intellectual themes in the works of Kant. He then develops the thesis that Hegel's "holistic" approach to the value-laden presuppositions and goals of the theoretical enterprise governs his defense of circular reasoning. Linda Zagzebski contends that "process reliabilism" does not provide an adequate epistemological criterion for genuine knowledge because it does not explain the good of knowledge itself. A true belief produced by a reliable truth-producing process is no "better" than a belief produced by an unreliable process. We should therefore try to establish that the reliability of the process is good because truth itself is good. Zagzebski points out that Alvin Plantinga does attempt to identify "something valuable that is deeper than mere reliability." He argues that knowledge is warranted belief "produced by properly functioning faculties according to a design plan aimed at truth." According to Zagzebski, however, what is really valuable is something more intrinsic to the believer than such a design plan. A motive for finding the truth by reliable means, she concludes, is good for the same reason that "a motive to promote human well-being and to act in ways found to be reliable ways of promoting human well-being is a good thing." I take it that this is a reaffirmation of Aristotle's teleological interpretation of the good in terms of the order and perfection manifested in persons and in things that have achieved the fullness of their natures, of the forms that are their ends. V. Provisional Rationality Several papers focus not so much on the intellectual virtues requisite for epistemic reliability but on the kind of rationality requisite for an epistemology that has given up on the Cartesian goal of absolute certainty but does not want to settle for the merely negative positions of anti-foundationalism, relativism, or skepticism. Richard Foley, for example, criticizes the Cartesian notion that the role of epistemology "was nothing less than to be czar of the sciences and of intellectual inquiry in general." He argues that epistemology does have a foundational role in the sense that it ought to provide a general theory of rationality, but it need not and cannot provide rules for solving every new intellectual problem. To be rational, we need to have evidence that reduces the risks of error to an acceptable level, but what constitutes an acceptable level varies according to the seriousness of the issue and the urgency of the situation. Eli Hirsch asks the reader to imagine a language in which truths are expressed but in which there is no reference to stable objects. This exercise prepares the way for his main thesis that our ordinary "referential apparatus" is in fact quite vague. There is no neat set of criteria according to which common sense divides the matter in the world into objects. Hirsch concludes that we ought to give up on the absolutist project of a general semantic applicable to any language whatsoever. Indeed, we must accept the doctrine of conceptual relativism if we are "to accept our common sense ontological judgments at face value-to accept them for the humble, vague, messy, but strictly and objectively true judgments they are . . . ." Peter Klein takes his point of departure from a Pyrrhonian text which suggests that there are typically three forms of reasoning employed to justify beliefs: foundationalism, coherentism and infinitism. He then develops the thesis that only infinitism ("the view that adequate reasons for our beliefs are infinite and non-repeating") avoids the circular reasoning characteristic of coherentism and the arbitrariness characteristic of foundationalism. Infinitism holds that all of our justifications are provisional. There are always further questions that could be asked. As Klein puts it wryly: "The fun of reasoning is never exhausted." This does not mean that there can be no progress in truth. In fact, scientific practice thrives on the new questions generated by provisional answers. Paul Moser takes a different but related approach to the challenge of Pyrrhoniam skepticism. He considers the skeptical claim that non-skeptics invariably introduce question-begging warrants for their beliefs. Philosophers have traditionally called upon some epistemological warrant "such as science, common sense, intuition, explanatory coherence, social consensus, or utility of some sort." In every case, however, skeptics are able to discern some way in which the appeal to an authoritative warrant relies on a circular argument. After rejecting the standard response that the skeptical challenge is itself question-begging, Moser develops the thesis that "the best we can do is to invoke a kind of instrumental epistemic rationality that doesn't pretend to escape evidential circularity." He adds that skepticism cannot show that its "risk-averse strategy" provides a more effective way or avoiding error and it certainly cannot provide a way of advancing in truth. The modest tone of many of these essays reminds me of William James' hopeful but similarly modest remarks about the possibility of progress in truth. According to James, there is always a certain arbitrariness about an individual's decision about when to cease questioning, but we must eventually stop somewhere and take our rest in some reasonable conviction. The philosopher is committed, however, to the view that such moments are provisional resting places. Philosophy's role is ever to seek alternatives and to criticize comfortable conclusions. The pleasure of reasoning is never exhausted. Notes (1) See Richard H. Popkin, "Skepticism," in the Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: MacMillan, 1967), 7:460.
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