THE FAILURE OF NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY
Against Faith-Based Theories of Knowledge
Naturalized epistemology is the view that only the description of natural conditions grounds knowledge, and that the traditional investigation of the meaning, nature, and limits of human knowledge by seeking out distinct a priori epistemic conditions must be eliminated. Or, to put it another way, a naturalized epistemology is one that effectively collapses epistemology into empirical psychology.
Those initially sympathetic to naturalism have tried to make the case that this is an extreme representation, or a "straw man" version of naturalism, which does not in fact reflect naturalist thought. I'd urge them to consider some words from naturalized epistemology's foremost proponents:
"The old epistemology aspired to contain, in a sense, natural science; it would construct it somehow from sense data. Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology." (Quine, Epistemology Naturalized)
"After psychology nothing is left over for epistemology. Epistemology is to psychology as alchemy to chemistry." (Bradie, Evolutionary Epistemology as Naturalized Epistemology)
Let's consider Quine's position. He argues that evolution has enabled human beings to construct true beliefs based on sense stimuli. That, for him, is epistemology. Assuming a certain faith in our biology, we can say the "truth-making" capacity of human judgment is therefore nothing more than an adaptive endowment, and "epistemology" in light of this view is merely the scientific process of discovering, by means of natural science, how that ability is possible, and what natural processes cause it.
But Quine's "faith-based" epistemology is both crude and highly problematic. In the first place, the faith in biology is contentious. It's quite speculative to equate adaptive beliefs with true beliefs. Indeed, this was the mistake for which Kant criticized Locke and Hume, and it was the mistake for which Husserl criticized Mill and Lipps. More importantly, however, it ignores the question of how our knowledge is justified. Since this question lies at the core of what epistemology is, by ignoring this question in favor of a natural description of the origin of our beliefs Quine is changing the subject. Even if Quine could describe how beliefs are caused, this is something quite different from showing by what right we are entitled to assert that those beliefs are true. By custom or by conditioning I may be in possession of any number of beliefs, but I can never show why a proposition holds true universally and necessarily by means of an appeal to custom and conditioning. Quine can't justify necessary and universal beliefs without first presupposing a standard of truth outside of biology, otherwise there are no grounds upon which to say that the beliefs caused by biological processes are true ones. At worst it is circular, and at best it makes a crucial appeal to the very sense of epistemology Quine claims to have surpassed. Thirdly, and perhaps most obviously, by conflating epistemology with empirical science Quine's naturalized theory would make it impossible to question science's capacity to produce knowledge in the first place, the limits of that knowledge, or its fundamental nature, without again engaging in the same "old" type of epistemology it was supposed to replace.
For a more contemporary attempt to naturalize epistemology, we might look at the efforts made by Alvin Goldman, who sought to reform Quine's position by providing it with a more robust causal theory of justification in his paper A Causal Theory of Knowing, giving us what we now call "reliabilism". Reliabilism argues that there are certain cognitive processes that, given true input-beliefs, reliably produce true output-beliefs, and that we can justify our beliefs by restricting them to the products of these reliable processes.
But this is highly problematic. How does one determine whether or not the "input-beliefs", as he puts it, are true in the first place? The answer is that we must already believe as an article of faith, in the first place, that they are true. How do we explain how some processes "reliably" produce truth while others do not? Faced with this question, Goldman admitted that "such an explanation must refer to our beliefs about reliability, not to the actual facts." Another word for this might be "faith". Goldman concedes that by his own account, our criterion for truth relies not on objectively reliable processes but simply a faith placed on other prior beliefs about the way we think.
His theory improves upon but does not escape the circularity of Quine's stab at naturalized epistemology; both must in the end appeal to the tradition of epistemology the naturalists have sought to distance themselves from in an attempt, in some ways, to purge philosophy from itself.
(x-posted to philosophy)
Naturalized epistemology is the view that only the description of natural conditions grounds knowledge, and that the traditional investigation of the meaning, nature, and limits of human knowledge by seeking out distinct a priori epistemic conditions must be eliminated. Or, to put it another way, a naturalized epistemology is one that effectively collapses epistemology into empirical psychology.
Those initially sympathetic to naturalism have tried to make the case that this is an extreme representation, or a "straw man" version of naturalism, which does not in fact reflect naturalist thought. I'd urge them to consider some words from naturalized epistemology's foremost proponents:
"The old epistemology aspired to contain, in a sense, natural science; it would construct it somehow from sense data. Epistemology in its new setting, conversely, is contained in natural science, as a chapter of psychology." (Quine, Epistemology Naturalized)
"After psychology nothing is left over for epistemology. Epistemology is to psychology as alchemy to chemistry." (Bradie, Evolutionary Epistemology as Naturalized Epistemology)
Let's consider Quine's position. He argues that evolution has enabled human beings to construct true beliefs based on sense stimuli. That, for him, is epistemology. Assuming a certain faith in our biology, we can say the "truth-making" capacity of human judgment is therefore nothing more than an adaptive endowment, and "epistemology" in light of this view is merely the scientific process of discovering, by means of natural science, how that ability is possible, and what natural processes cause it.
But Quine's "faith-based" epistemology is both crude and highly problematic. In the first place, the faith in biology is contentious. It's quite speculative to equate adaptive beliefs with true beliefs. Indeed, this was the mistake for which Kant criticized Locke and Hume, and it was the mistake for which Husserl criticized Mill and Lipps. More importantly, however, it ignores the question of how our knowledge is justified. Since this question lies at the core of what epistemology is, by ignoring this question in favor of a natural description of the origin of our beliefs Quine is changing the subject. Even if Quine could describe how beliefs are caused, this is something quite different from showing by what right we are entitled to assert that those beliefs are true. By custom or by conditioning I may be in possession of any number of beliefs, but I can never show why a proposition holds true universally and necessarily by means of an appeal to custom and conditioning. Quine can't justify necessary and universal beliefs without first presupposing a standard of truth outside of biology, otherwise there are no grounds upon which to say that the beliefs caused by biological processes are true ones. At worst it is circular, and at best it makes a crucial appeal to the very sense of epistemology Quine claims to have surpassed. Thirdly, and perhaps most obviously, by conflating epistemology with empirical science Quine's naturalized theory would make it impossible to question science's capacity to produce knowledge in the first place, the limits of that knowledge, or its fundamental nature, without again engaging in the same "old" type of epistemology it was supposed to replace.
For a more contemporary attempt to naturalize epistemology, we might look at the efforts made by Alvin Goldman, who sought to reform Quine's position by providing it with a more robust causal theory of justification in his paper A Causal Theory of Knowing, giving us what we now call "reliabilism". Reliabilism argues that there are certain cognitive processes that, given true input-beliefs, reliably produce true output-beliefs, and that we can justify our beliefs by restricting them to the products of these reliable processes.
But this is highly problematic. How does one determine whether or not the "input-beliefs", as he puts it, are true in the first place? The answer is that we must already believe as an article of faith, in the first place, that they are true. How do we explain how some processes "reliably" produce truth while others do not? Faced with this question, Goldman admitted that "such an explanation must refer to our beliefs about reliability, not to the actual facts." Another word for this might be "faith". Goldman concedes that by his own account, our criterion for truth relies not on objectively reliable processes but simply a faith placed on other prior beliefs about the way we think.
His theory improves upon but does not escape the circularity of Quine's stab at naturalized epistemology; both must in the end appeal to the tradition of epistemology the naturalists have sought to distance themselves from in an attempt, in some ways, to purge philosophy from itself.
(x-posted to philosophy)