Kant’s view of mathematical knowledge is often regarded as having been refuted by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, and curved space, but these geometries are ‘locally Euclidean; (e.g., a curved region looks flatter and flatter the smaller it gets), and Kant could have made the more modest claim that any single field of vision is, a priori, a locally Euclidean space.
At any rate, the modern branch of mathematics as topology, developed by the famous mathematician Henri Poincaré, can be regarded as that part of geometry for which the Kantian thesis remains a viable option.
Poincaré (1907) was a Kantian in arithmetic as well, for him the law of ‘mathematical induction’ was the essence of arithmetic: Any property ‘P’ of zero which is ‘hereditary’ (i.e., it holds of n + 1 whenever it holds for ‘n’) holds of every natural number. This principle is justified by noting that if ‘P’ holds of zero then it holds of 1, so by modus ponens, it actually holds of 1. By continual use of modus ponens, meaning that the common shorthand for ‘modus ponendo ponens’, is the rule of inference entitling us to ;pass from ‘p’ p ➞ q, to q. This is the kind of self-knowledge of which Kant spoke: Poincaré held, inspired by Kant, that it cannot be reduced to ‘logic’, on the contrary, mathematical induction is a principle about what logic can do. Poincaré knew of Frége and Russell’s efforts (as part of their ‘logicism’) to convert the principle of mathematical induction to a logical definition: (Roughly) ‘n’ is a natural number jus t if it is subject to the law of induction. But he regarded this definition as circular.
In the 1920's, of the present century, two outstanding - logicians -Hilbert and Brouwer - argued for competing versions of Kantianism: ‘Formalism’ and ‘intuitionism’. Both men accepted that the ultimate content of mathematics is intuition. And that classical mathematics goes beyond the merely intuitive, for example, in its acquiescence in infinite totalities, and therefore does not give knowledge. But where Brouwer (1913) advocated replacing classical mathematics by a new kind of mathematics (which he and hi s followers proceeded to develop), Hilbert (1926) took the conservative approach of justifying the so-called ‘ideal’ proofs of classical mechanics as instruments of discovery.
John Stuart Mill (1843) is the most outstanding empiricist to adopt the radical stance that mathematics is a branch, not of logic, but of physics. The relative certainty - and applicability – that attaches to mathematics results from the great range of empirical confirmation that mathematics enjoys. For geometry, of course, the position is widely accepted today, but it is more difficult to see how one could regard arithmetic as empirical. For example, what would be empirical evidence for 1234 x 1234 = 1,522,756? Certainly nothing that would justify our actual conviction concerning this product. Recently, some authors, most notably Philip Kitcher (1983), have attempted to refurbish this position by arguing that the axioms of arithmetic can be given an empirical interpretation and supported by evidence.
Even so, the logicist argues that mathematics is just a branch of logic, or, more generally, and more traditionally, ‘analytic truth’. Though this is not an empiricist interpretation of mathematics, it is congenial to empiricism, since it appears to give a non-metaphysical account of mathematical knowledge. Empiricists have assumed that once it is proved that ‘mathematics is logic’ the problem of mathematical knowledge no longer arises, since there is no philosophical problem about logical knowledge. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that it was Leibniz who firs t conjectured, and had a metaphysical picture of logical knowledge, as being ‘true in all possible worlds’. Nor was Frége, who invented modern logic, in part, to prove that mathematics is nothing but logic (and thus founded the modern logicist school), an empiricist. Conversely, the common belief that Hume’s view of mathematics as the study of ‘relations among ideas’ prefigured modern logicist is actually due to Kant’s influence. For Kant (in the Prolegomena) characterized Hume’s theory as ‘accounting to’ the claim that mathematics is ‘analytic’, a quite doubtful characterization, in the light of Hume’s explicit declaration (Treatise I,ii,4) that such propositions as‘The shortest distance between two points is a straight line’ are not true by ‘definition’, perhaps a better translation of Hume’s doctrine into Kantian language would be: Mathematics is synthetic, a priori. This does not mean that Kant and Hume had the same philosophy of mathematics, though, because their theories of the a priori, i.e., their theories of necessary truth, were quite different.
Nonetheless, twentieth-century empiricists like the later Russell, Carnap, Ayer and Hempel saw logicism as an appropriated doctrine. They, unlike Leibniz, saw logical validity as a matter of linguistic rules, the rules governing words like ‘all’, ‘and’, and ‘not’: Knowledge of these was considered free of metaphysics, it was ‘positivism in its adherence to the doctrine that science is the only form of knowledge and that there is nothing in the universe beyond what can in principle be scientifically known. The general project of the positivistic theory of knowledge is to exhibit the structure content, and basis of human knowledge in accordance with these empirical principles. Since science is regarded as the repository of all genuine human knowledge, the structure, or, as it was called, the ‘logic’ of science. The problem with this ‘logicism’, as it has come down to be called, was a technical one: No logician was ever able to reduce mathematics to a system of ‘logic’ which could plausibly be called ‘analytic’, e.g., classical mathematics can be reduced as an ‘analytic’ science.
A neglected virtue of logicism, as, perhaps, is that it solves - or dissolves - some of the problems of mathematical applicability. Logicism shows that all mathematical science can be represented in set theory. Thus, the only relation between physical objects and mathematical objects we need recognize is that physical object can be members of sets, sets, if we believe in sets at all, we have no further problem of seeing how physical objects can be members of sets, so some, but not all (Steiner, 1989) of the problems concerning mathematical applicability disappear. This virtue of logicism does not depend on or upon our recognizing set theory as ‘logic’.
In ‘pragmatist’ theories of mathematical knowledge, the indispensability of mathematics in other knowledge especially in physical sciences, is converted into justification of mathematical ‘commitment’. The only justification of mathematical assertions is that we can’t help ourselves, if we wan t to achieve the goals of science and everyday life. While this might be regarded as weak confirmation indeed (and certainty no explanation of the ‘obviousness’ of mathematics, as Parsons has pointed out), pragmatists argue that mathematics is in the same boat as every scientific theory. In this sense, their argument is similar on the ‘good company’ argument of Kant.
Quine (e.g., 1960, 1970, and many other writings), who has made this pragmatist-Kantian argument famous (though Quine’s predecessors at Harvard, C.I. Lewis, already preached a synthesis of Kantianism and pragmatism in Mind and the World Order), adds as Deweyite ‘naturalistic’ element, ultimately what justifies mathematics and every justified theory is its usefulness in predicting ‘surface irritations’. What is striking about Quine’s philosophy of mathematics, however, is that it is explicitly Platonist in its ontology (though not, of course, in its epistemology). Quine agrees with Frége that modern mathematics is heavily ‘committed’ to abstract objects - and disagrees with Wittgenstein and the British ‘ordinary’ language’ school. Who regard the ‘commitment’ as to the commitments of a politician which nobody takes seriously.
For Quine, again, commitment to abstract objects is justified on pragmatic grounds: We have no choice if we want to do science. However, by combining Platonism and naturalism, Quine seems to make it impossible to give a theory of mathematical discovery. His reasoning can give, at best, a post fact pragmatist justification for mathematics once it has been discovered. For Quine has no place, in his philosophy, for ‘mathematical intuition’ either in the Kantian sense of the Platonic sense. Thus, Quine’s picture of mathematical discovery is that of a senseless procedure that accidentally gets post facto justification.
Conventionalism is the view that mathematical theorems are ‘true by convention’: In that, there are two principal ways in which words or signs are given meaning, ‘by ostension’ and ‘by convention’.
In meaning by ostension words or signs of a language assigned entities as their meaning, e.g., mental entities such as ideas, experiences, concepts or non-mental entities such as concrete things, classes, functions, universals. Generally speaking, the entities assigned are so chosen that it will make sense to ask ‘Is ‘s’ true (of the world)?’ For sentences ‘s’ in the language at issue, as when, for example, in ‘Julie’s ring is gold’. ‘Cynthia’s ring’ is assigned Julie’s ring, and ‘is gold’ is assigned a function from each and every thing in the world to True or False, according as that which is gold or not. Solely for our convinces as positioned here, let us call this sort of truth O-Truth.
In meaning by convention words or signs of a language have meaning by virtue of more or less explicit rules for the use of the words or signs in relation to one another. The meaning of a word in this sense will not lie in an entity assigned to it, but will lie wholly in its rule-governed use with respect to other words or signs. Generally speaking, but not always, it is supposed that the language has a logical or logic-like syntax and that the rules for the use of the word or sign are rules for logical or logic-like operations, e.g., those generating formal-logical ‘deductions’ from given sentences of formulas. Then, for given such rules for a language, meaning for words are instituted ‘by convention’ by specifying a subject ‘X’ of the sentence or formulas in the language. Relative to the given rules, the meaning of the signs in the sentences or formulas in the set ‘X’ are implicitly defined. In that, complex expressions either reporting or instituting equivalence among verbal or symbolic expressions, if fact definitions are either explicit or implicit.
A definition that institutes explains ho w an expression will be used henceforth. A definition that reports explains how an expression has been used. An explicit definition explains, by means of words given in use, how an expression given in mention has been or will be used as in use or mention. An implicit definition explains how an expression has been or will be used by using it, usually in conjunction with the use and explicit. Symbols introduced in technical writings of other expressions.
Dictionary definitions are reportive and usually institutive and explicit. When a word is learned in the context of its use, that context in effect provides a reportive, implicit definition. Formal, axiomatic systems, in which the meaning of each expression is gathered from its formal-logical relationship with the other expressions provide institutive, implicit definitions.
Such that the given rules, meanings of the signs in the sentence or formulas in the set ‘X’ are implicitly defined definitions through ‘X’ and the rules. An Example: Language relation signs χ, y, 0, 1, 2, = as a binary relation sign, + as a binary operation sign. The formulas will all be of the form _+_ =, or _+_, or _=_+_ where we distribute χ, y, 0, 1, 2 in all possible ways over the _’s. The rules are:
(1) Wherever ‘χ’ occurs, you may substitute 0, 1, or 2.
(2) If W = Z occurs, you may substituted Z for W wherever W occurs in the position _= or =_.
Here are the formulas ‘X’ that, together with the rules, implicitly define the signs χ, y, 0, 1, 2, +, =: χ + 0 = χ, χ + y = y + χ. So what, for example, does ‘0' mean? It means, among other things, that χ + 0 = χ, 0 + 0 = 0, 1 + 0 = 1,2, + 0 + χ = χ, 0 + 1 = 1, . . . Prominent proponents of more or less modernized versions of th e axiomatic method, e.g., Pascal, Nicod (1893-1924), and Tarski (1901-83), emphasizing the critical and regulatory function of the axiomatic method, explicitly open the possibility that axiomatization of an existent, pre-axiomation of propositions, concepts and argumentations that has previously be accepted. As, too, the earliest extant axiomatic text is based on an axiomatization of geometry due to Euclid (fl. 300 Bc), which itself was based on earlier no-longer-extant texts. Archimedes (287-212 Bc) was one of the earliest of a succession of post-Euclidean geometers, including Hilbert, Oswald, Veblen (1880-1960), and Tarski, to propose modifications of axiomatization of classical geometry.
Since the subset of formulas or sentences ‘X’ which are settled on do implicitly define the words or signs composing them, it is said that they are true by convention - since the ‘X’ determining the meaning of the words or signs composing them, we could say that they are true by virtue of the meaning of words or signs composing them. It is also usually said that formulas or sentence s derived from ‘X’ by exercise of the given rules for the uses of signs are also true by convention here, then, let us call this sort of truth C-truth.
We have formal-logical syntaxes rich enough to enable us to formal-logically regiment the languages of the sciences. At least for the thus regimented languages of the natural sciences, we would expect most of the words occurring in a scientific theory to have two components of meaning, one determined by ostension, the other by convention. Thus, some of the sentences (statements, propositions, theorems, etc.) of such a theory may be O-true, some O-false, however, on some views, some of the words or signs composing the language of our scientific theory may not have ostensive meaning, e.g., this is sometimes held of the peculiarly logical words such as ‘not’, ‘or’, ‘all’ and sometimes it is also held of mathematical words, and also of ‘theoretical terms’ rather than ‘observational terms’ when it is thought that sense-experience is the only source of O-meaning and that we need expressions in scientific theory (theoretical terms) that cannot be given such an observational meaning.
Since sentences whose words have C-meaning but no O-meaning might logically imply sentences whose terms do have an O-meaning (as when only observational terms are given an O-meaning), and since, say, the implicit and explicit definitions in a theory may be variously chosen so that sentences are true by convention on one choice, but not on another, and, yet the same sentences have O-truth under either choice, and since it is not inconceivable that some subject matters, such as logic and even mathematics may be only a matter of C-truth, there is much philosophical difficulty in the exact characteristic of C-truth, and the relation between them.
It is, nonetheless, that Rule-following is an intentional activity of the sort that may be involved in using words, moving chess-pieces, adopting local custom and thinking straight. It is the activity of intentionality conforming or trying to conform to the rules relevant in such areas. The problem of rule-following is that of explaining how such activity is possible. rule-following requires the agent to identify something - a rule - that prescribes what to do in an indefinitely large and varied range of situations and then to try to remain faithful to the prescription of that rule. It is difficult to see what sort of thing, access, could serve this indefinitely prescriptive function. the problem of rule-following is to resolve that difficultly.
The problem derives from the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein, 1953, 1956) although it had attracted considerable attention in the first phase of Wittgenstein’s influence, it tended to be eclipsed by issues associated with the private language argument. It was only in th e 1970's and 1980's that it came to the fore as a problem in its own right. This was due in particular to the work of Robert Fogelin (1987), Saul Kripke (1982) and Crispin Wright (1980), and can also be seen of (Holzman and Leich, 1981: Wright, 1984).
There has been a variety of approaches canvassed to the solution of the rule-following problem. The possible solution would include ones that take rules as platonic entities and that ascribe to us an ability to get in tune with those entities: To main-line them, as it were. But most approaches attempt to solve the problem within a naturalistic framework that precludes the positing of such non-routine abilities. They try to show that naturalists are not forced to iconoclastic position described in Kripke (1982) - the co-called sceptical solution - according to which rule-following is an illusion, as there is simply nothing of the kind going on. But the concern, if at present, that it is not with the different possible solutions to the problem (Boghossian, 1989 and Pettit, 1990). p concern is rather with the characterization of the problem of rule-following, such concerns by dealing of the problem of rule-following may be characterized with three distinct question, such as they are, of a pursuing concern by dealing, in turn with three distinct and particularly independent, that (1) What are rules? And (2) What is it to follow rules? And (3) What is the problem with the notion of following rules?
The problem of rule-following are two conditions that must be fulfilled by any rule, if the rule is to be capable of being followed. It must meet the objective condition of being or fixed a normative constraint that applies in an indefinite variety of cases, and it must meet the subjective condition of engaging appropriately with our intentional project: Of being something to which a creature like us can try to conform. The problem of rule-following is how anything can meet both sorts of conditions at once.
Nonetheless, the subjective condition breaks down into at least three distinct sub-conditions, and it seems only proper that the first sub-condition is that the rule the measure of the problem on hand be determinable, or identifiable by a finite subject, in particular that it must be determinable or independently of any to conform, when there must be something presented to it to which it can address its efforts. And if the subject is to be in a position to try to conform in any instance, then the rule to which it is to try and conform must be presented independently of how the rule applies in that instance. Allow that the rules partly identified as requiring such and such an option in this situation, and it makes no sense to think of the subject trying to be faithful to it in that situation.
The second sub-condition that a rule must satisfy if it is to engage with the intentional projects of a creature like one of us that it should not only be identifiable as a target of conformity for a finite subject, it should also be capable of instructing the subject, so to speak, on what it requires in the different instances where the rule must be directly readable, in the sense that the finite subject can tell straight off what it seems to require - this is the case with basic rules - or can tell what it requires by the application of rules whose apparent requirements it can ultimately tell straight off: This is the case with non-basic rules. Unless a finite subject can read off the requirements of a rule in this way, then it is not in a position to try to conform.
Still, the sub-condition complements the second, in that the second says that a rule must be readable by a finite subject, the third says that it can only be fallibly readable. No matter how directly the rule speaks to the subject, no matter how quickly the subject can tell what the rule seems to require, that fact alone cannot provide an epistemic guarantee that it has got the requirement of the rule right. The subject must not be an infallible authority, in at least one sense of that phrase. It may be in a position to know what a rule requires in a given situation. It may even be in a position to know that it will get the rule right in that situation. Whether these claims are allowed will depend on how precisely the limits of knowledge are drawn. But no matter how knowledge is understood, the subject cannot be in a position to rule out altogether the possibility that it might get a rule wrong: The subject cannot know it for a fact that error is impossible in its reading of a rule. Otherwise it would make no sense for us to think of the subject as trying to get the rule right.
Nonetheless, to return to th e problem of rule following, the challenge is to identify some thing that can simultaneously satisfy the objective condition of being a normative constraint that is relevant in an indefinite variety of situations and the subjective conditions of being independently identifiable, directly readable and fallibly readable. There are two ways in which we might think of meeting the challenge: By taking something which we know to satisfy the objective condition and then showing how it can also satisfy the subjective constraint, or by taking something which certainly satisfies the subjective constraint and then showing how it can also satisfy the objective condition. But both paths look to be blocked and that is the essence of the rule-following problem. In setting out the problem as did for Saul Kripke (1982) of adopting roughly to the same presentation as that in Pettit (1990).
To accept and comprehend the entities which we know to satisfy the objective condition. The extension and the rule-in-intension. The rule-in-extension is not capable of satisfying the subjective condition, because it is liable to be an infinitely large set. There is no way that I could get in touch appropriately with such an infinite object. there is no way that I could get in touch with the infinite possible worlds - say, the extension associate d with boxes or triangles or games - as I try to be faithful to the appropriate rule in descriptive classification. And, to take the sort of rule discussed by Kripke, there is no way I could get in touch with the rule-in-extension associated with the plus-function: The rule determining what number is the referent of ‘χ + y’, for any two numbers ‘χ’ and ‘y’. ‘The infinitely many cases of the table are not in my mind for my future self to consult’ (Kripke, 1982).
Moving from the entities which can clearly satisfy the objective condition on a rule to entities that look more likely to be able to satisfy the objective conditions, the question, is whether such entities can be objective satisfactory: Whether they can serve as normative constraints over two main candidates for entities of this kind: First, actual or possible examples of the application of the rule in question, such as examples of a property or examples of addition: And secondly. Introspectible states of consciousness, as for instance a suitable idea or feeling. But there is an objection that apples to all such candidates, so Kriple argues, and indeed to any finite object that is proposed for the role in question. The objection, and this is clearly derived from Wittgensteinian materials, is that no finite object can unambiguously identify a constraint that is normative over an indefinite variety of cases. Consider a series of examples of addition: 1 + 1 = 2, 1+ 2 = 3, 2 = 4, and the like. Or consider any set of examples of boxes of triangles or games. For all that any such finite object can determine the right way to go with a novel case remains open. Plus, as we understand it, forces us to say that 68 + 57 = 125 but the examples given do nothing to identify the plus-rule as distinct from, say, the quus-rule, where this says that the answer in the case of 68 and 57 is 5. In a triangle, as we understand it, forces us to say that a square page, diagonally folded is a triangle but the examples given, if they do not include this case, will be consistent with the folded pages not being a triangle: Perhaps, the rule illustrated, outlaws triangles or perhaps it outlaws paper triangles or perhaps it outlaws triangles made by folding. The fact is that any infinite set of examples, mathematical or otherwise, can be extrapolated in an infinite number of ways: Equivalently, any finite set of examples instantiates an infinite number of rules.
The upshot of these considerations is that rules do not appear to be the sorts of things that our finite minds can identify as items to follow: Or, looking at the matter from the other way round, that among the items that our finite minds can suitably identify there appears to be nothing that could put us in touch with rules. Rule-following is a mysterious activity. It is central to human life and thought but its very possibility is philosophically problematic.
The rule-following problem is an important challenge for philosophers, in particular for philosopher s of a naturalistic bent. What in the world - what in the natural world - dies rule-following involve? Perhaps the only widely agreed point is that it certainly involves the development of an extrapolative disposition, a disposition generated by some examples to apply the rule after a certain pattern in new cases. But such a disposition is not enough on its own to constitute rule-following. While it provides a mechanism for prompting response it does not provide something which might tell us how to go on in new instances, something from which we might intentionally take our guidance (Kripke, 1982).
Perhaps the best hope of a naturalistic solution is not to try to reduce rule-following to the operation of such a disposition but to give an account , using the disposition, of how a subject can identify a rule to follow. Under a subject can identify a rule to follow. Under the account favoured by the present of issues that prove warrantable. For example, the extrapolative disposition serve a second role and beyond that of prompting responses in new cases: It enables certain applications to exemplify the rule and present it as sometime that the subject can try to follow, although the applications given as examples will instantiate an indefinite number of rules, as well noted , the extrapolative disposition may ensure that they exemplify only one (Pettit, 1990 and 1992). Future discussions will probably centre on such attempts to make naturalistic sense of the rule-following phenomenon.
The boundaries of the notion of ostensive definition are vague, but rather specifying what counts as being notarized in a word. An ostensive definition is an explanation of the meaning of a word, such like other forms of explanation of word-meaning, an ostensive definition function as a rule or standard of correctness for the application of a word. Understanding an ostensive definition involves grasping the ‘method of projection’ from the sample to what it represents or from the ostensive gesture accompanying the definition to the application of the word. Thus, in the case of defining a length by reference to a measuring rod, one must grasp the method of laying the measuring rod alongside objects to determine their length before one can be said to grasp the use of the definiendum. Ostensive definitions fulfil a crucial role both in explaining word meaning and in justifying or criticizing the application of the word (e.g., ‘Those curtains are not ultramarine -this ➚ colour is ultramarine [as, pointing to the colour chart] and the curtains are not this colour. An ostensive definition does not give evidential grounds for the application of a word ‘W’, but rather specifies what counts as being ‘W’.
Whether something functions as a sample (or paradigm) for the correct application of a word is not a matter of its essential nature, but of human choice and convention. Being a sample is a role conferred upon an object momentarily, temporarily or relatively permanently by us - it is a use in which we put the object. Thus we can use the curtains within this particular and peculiar place of our occupying station point or our spatial position within space and time. A sample represents that of which it is a sample, and hence must be typical of its kind. It can characteristically be copied or reproduced and has associated with it a method of comparison. It is noteworthy that one and the same object may function now as a sample in an explanation of meaning or evaluating of correct application of meaning or an item described as having the defined property. But these roles are exclusive in as much as what functions as an achieved average or norm for description cannot simultaneously be falling under that normative means. Qua sample the object belongs to the means of representation and is properly conceived as belonging to grammar in an extended sense of the term. Wherefore, the Standard Metre bar cannot be said to be (or not to be) one metre long. Furthermore, one and the same object may be used as a defining sample for more than one expression. Thus, a black patch on a colour chart may serve both to explain what ‘black’ means and as part of an explanation of what ‘darker than’ means.
Although the expression ‘ostensive definition’ is modern philosophical jargon (W.E. Johnson, Logic 1921) the idea of ostensive definition is venerable. It is a fundamental constituent of what Wittgenstein called ‘Augustine’s picture of language’ in which it is conceived as the fundamental mechanism whereby language is ‘connected with reality’. The mainstream philosophical tradition has represented language as having a hierarchical structure, its expressions being either ‘definable’ or ‘indefinable’, the former constituting a network of lexically definable terms, the latter of simple, unanalysable expressions that link language with reality and the inject ‘content’ into the network. Ostensive definitions thus constitute the ‘foundations’ of language and the terminal point of philosophical analysis, correlating primitive terms with entities which are their meaning. On this conception, ostensive definition is privileged: It is final and unambiguous settling all aspects of word use - the grammar of the definiendum being conceived to flow the nature of the entity with which the indefinable expression is associated. In classical empiricism definable stand for complex ideas, as indefinables for simple ideas that are ‘given’ in experience. Accordingly, the ‘given’ is mental in nature, the linking mechanism is private ‘mental’ ostensive definition, and the basic samples, stored in the mind, are ideas which are essentially epistemologically private and unshared (cf. Locke, Essay II, XI,9).
Wittgenstein, who wrote more extensively on ostensive definition than any other philosopher, held this picture of language to be profoundly misleading. Far from samples being ‘entities in reality’ to which indefinables are linked by ostensive definition, they themselves belong to the means of representation. In that sense, there is no ‘link between language and reality, for explanations of meaning, including ostensive definitions, remain within language. Ostensive definitions are not privileged but are as misinterpreted as any other form of explanation. The objects pointed at are not ‘samples’ that constitute the ultimate metaphysical constituents of reality, but samples with a distinctive use in our language-games. They are not the meaning of words, but instruments of our means of representation. The grammar of a word ostensively defined does not flow from the essential nature of the object pointed at, but is constituted by all the rules for the use of words, of which ostensive definition is but one. It is a confusion to suppose that expressions must be explained exclusively either by analytic definition (definables) or by ostension (indefinables), for many expressions can be explained in both ways, and there are many other licit forms of explanation of meaning. The idea of ‘private’ or ‘mental’ ostensive definition is wholly misconceived, for there can be no such thing as a rule for the use of a word which cannot logically be understood or followed by more than one person, there can be no such thing as a logically private sample nor any such thing as a mental sample.
Apart from these negative lessons, a correct conception of ostensive definition by reference to samples resolves the venerable puzzles of the alleged synthetic priority of colour exclusion (e.g., that nothing can be simultaneously red and green all over) and of the nature of the necessity of such apparently metaphysical propositions as ‘black is darker than white’. Such ‘necessary truths’ are indeed not derivable from explicit definitions and the laws of logic alone (i.e., are not analytic) but nor are they descriptions of the essential nature of objects in reality. They are rules for the use of colour words, exhibited in our practices of explaining and applying words defined by reference to samples. What we employ by reference to samples. What also employ as a sample of red we do not also employ as a sample of red we do not also employ as a sample of green: And a sample of black can, in conjunction with a sample of white, also be used to explain what ‘darker than’ means. What appear to be metaphysical propositions about essential natures are but the shadows cast by grammar.
The expression ‘the private language argument’ is sometime s used broadly to refer to a battery of arguments in Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations §§ 243-315 which are concerned with the concepts of, and relations between, the mental and its behavioural manifestations (the inner and the outer) self-knowledge and knowledge of others’ mental states, avowals of experiences and descriptions of experience. It is sometimes used narrowly to refer to a single chain of argument in which Wittgenstein demonstrates the incoherence of the idea that sensation-names and names of experiences are given meaning by association with a mental ‘object’ (e.g., the word ‘pain’ by association with the sensation of pain) or by mental (private) ostensive definition in which a mental ‘entity’ supposedly functions as a sample (e.g., a mental image stored in memory, is conceived as providing a paradigm for the application of the name).
A ‘private language’ is not a private code, which could be cracked by another person, nor a language spoken by only one person, which could be taught to others, but rather a putative language, the individual words of which refer to what can (apparently) be known only by the speaker, i.e., to his immediate private sensations, or Empiricist jargon, to the ‘ideas’ in his mind. It has been a presupposition of the mainstream of modern philosophy, empiricist,
a rationalist and Kantian alike, of representational idealism no less than of pure idealism, and of contemporary cognitive representationism that the languages we all speak are such private languages, that the foundations of language no less than the foundations of knowledge lie private expedience. To undermine this picture with all its complex ramifications is the purpose of Wittgenstein’s private language argument.
Even so, foundationalism can be attacked both in its commitment to immediate justification and its claim that all mediately justified beliefs ultimately depend on the former. Though, in can be thought, that it is the latter that is the position’;s weakest point, most of the pivotal criticisms has been directed to the former. Much of this criticism has been directed against some particular form of immediate justification, ignoring the possibility of other forms. Thus, much ant-foundationalist artillery has been directed at the ‘myth of the given’: In and of itself, the myth of the given lies on or upon the theses as (1) Classical empiricism (foundationalism) maintain our belief in the commonsense, objective world of physical objects is ultimately justified only by way that world presents itself in sense experience. As thesis (2) it also typically maintains that sense experience (a) is not part of that world and (b) is not a form of conceptual cognition like thinking or believing. Thesis (3) Form (1) and (2a) classical empiricism concludes that our knowledge of the physical world is inferred from sense experience. Thesis (4): Such inferences derive knowledge from knowledge, sense experience itself must be a form of knowledge, Theses (1)-(4) collectively are the doctrine of the given. Each thesis taken individually is plausible, however, Sellars argues that (2b) and (4) are incompatible if, as he thinks, knowledge is a kind of conceptual cognition, concluding that the doctrine of the given is false, he maintains that classical empiricism is a myth.
In that way, much anti-foundationalism has been directed at the ‘myth of the given’, as the idea that facts or things `given`to consciousness in a preconceptual, pre-judgmental mode, and that beliefs can be justified on that basis (Sellars, 1963). The most prominent general argument against immediate justification is level ascent argument, according to which whatever is taken to immediately justify can only do so if the subject is justified in supposing that the putative justifier has what it takes to do so. Hence, since the justification of the original belief depends on the justification of the higher level belief just specified, the justification is not immediate after all (BonJour, 1985).Perhaps, we lack adequate support for any higher level requirement for justification, and if it were imposed we would be launched on an infinite regress, for a similar
requirement would hold equally for the higher level belief that the original justifier was efficacious.
Additionally, the advancement of raising or the status of being raised in the initial account for which ‘foundationalism’ is viewed as concerning the structure of the system of justified beliefs possessed by a given individual. Such a system is divided into ‘foundation’ and ‘superstructure’, so related that beliefs in the latter depend on the former for their justification but not vice-versa. However, the view is sometimes stated in terms of the structure of knowledge than of justified belief, or perhaps, some further condition, one may think of knowledge as exhibiting foundationalist structure by virtue of the justified belief it involves, such that if its justification is of so, as the sort, e.g., If it is justified by being based on experience or if it is ‘self-justified’. Thus my belief that you look listless may not be based on anything else, I am justified in believing but just on the way you look to me. and my belief that 2 + 3 = 5 may be justified not because I infer it from something else I justifiably believe, but simply because it seems obviously true to me.
In these terms we can put the thesis of foundationalism by saying that all mediately justified beliefs owe their justification ultimately to immediately justified beliefs, that, nonetheless, to obtain a more detailed idea of what this amounts to it would be fruitful to consider the most important of arguments for foundationalism, the regress argument.
Basically, whereby a strategy given rise to a vicious regress if whatever problem it was designed to solve remains as much in need of the same treatment after its use as before. Thus a definition is (usually) viciously regressive if the term to be defined recurs in the definition. The definition ‘χ is good = χ’ is something we think is good but faces the question of what the word ‘good’ is doing on the right hand side of the equation: What are we said to think about
‘χ’? Reapplications gives ‘χ is good = χ’ is something we think is something we think is . . ,. And the procedure continues for ever, yielding an infinite regress. A benign regress is a regress which involves no such failure. It is true that ‘p = ’, it is true that it is true. . . that ‘p’ without any worrisome change of content of what is said. There is frequently room for dispute about whether regresses are benign or vicious since the issue will hinge on whether it is necessary to reapply the procedure. The ‘cosmological argument is an attempt to find a stopping point for what is otherwise seen as being an infinite regress.
Even so, there are various ways of distinguishing types of fundamentalist epistemology, Plantinga (1983) has put forward an influential conception of ‘classical foundationalism’, specified in terms of limitations on the foundations. He construes this as a disjunction of ancient and medieval foundationalism, which takes foundations to comprise what is self-evident and evident to the senses, and ‘modern foundationalism’ that replaces evident to the senses with incorrigible, which in practice was taken to apply only to beliefs about one’s present states of consciousness. Plantinga himself developed this notion in the context of arguing that items outside this territory, in particular certain beliefs about God, could also be immediately justified. A popular recent distinction is between what is variously called ‘strong’ or ‘extreme’ foundationalism and ‘moderate’ , modest or minimal foundationalism, with the distinction depending on whether various epistemic immunities are required of foundations. Finally, having distinguished ‘simple’ and ‘iterative’ foundationalism (Alston, 1989, I) depending on whether it is required of a foundation only that it be immediately justified, or whether it is also required that the higher level belief that the former belief is immediately justified is itself immediately justified.
Foundationalism can be attacked both in its commitment immediate justification and in its claim that all mediately justified beliefs ultimately depend on the former. Though, it is the latter that is the position’s weakest point, most of the critical fire has been directed to the former. Much of this criticism has been directed against some particular form of immediate justification, ignoring the possibility of other forms. Thus, much anti-foundationalist artillery has been directed at the ‘myth of the given’, the idea that facts or things are ‘given’, the idea that fact or things are ‘given’ to consciousness in a perceptual, pre-judgmental mode, and that belief can be justified on that basis (Sellars, 1963) the most prominent general argument against immediate justification is ‘level ascent’ argument, according to which a belief can only do so if the subject is justified in supposing that the putative justifier has what it takes to do so. Hence, since the justification of the original belief depends on the justification of the higher level belief just specified is not immediate after all (BonJour, 1985). In point, my view may lack adequate support for any such higher level requirement for justification, and if it were imposed that we would be launched on an infinite regress: For a similar requirement would hold equally for the higher level belief that the original justifier was efficacious.
The private language argument, is that the idea that the language each of us speaks is essentially private, that learning a language is a matter of associating words with, or ostensively defining words by reference to, subjective experiences (that ‘given’), and that communication is a matter of stimulating a pattern of associations in the mind of the hearer qualitatively identical, with that in mind of the speaker is linked with multiple mutually supporting misconceptions about language, experiences and their identity, the mental and its relation to behaviour, self-knowledge and knowledge of the states of mind of others.
1. The idea that there can be such a thing as a private language is one manifestation of a tacit commitment to what Wittgenstein called ‘Augustine’s picture of language’- a pre-theoretical picture according to which the essential function of words is to name items in reality, that the link between word and world is effected by ostensive definition, and that the essential function of sentences is to describe a stat e of affairs. Applied to the mental, this preconception yields the following picture: One knows what a psychological predicate such as ‘pain’ means if one knows, is acquainted with, what it stands for - a sensation with, what it stands for - a sensation one has. The word ‘pain’ is linked to the sensation it names by way of private ostensive definition, which is effected by concentrating (the subjective analogue of pointing) on the sensation and undertaking to use the word of that sensation. First-person present tense psychological utterances, such as ‘I have a pain’ are conceived to be descriptions which the speaker, as it were, reads off the facts which are privately accessible to him.
2. Experiences are conceived to be privately owned and inalienable - no one else can have my pain, but at best only a pain that is qualitatively, but not numerically, identical with mine. They only are also thought to be epistemically private - only I really know that what I have is a pain, others can at best only believe or surmise that I am in pain.
3. Avowals of experience are expressions of self-knowledge. When I have an experience, e.g., a pain, I am conscious or aware of what I have by introspection (conceived as a faculty of inner sense). Consequently, I have direct or immediate knowledge of my subjective experience. since no one else can have what I have, or peer into my mind, my access is privileged. I know, and am certain, that I have it, for I cannot doubt that this, which I now have, is a pain.
4. One cannot gain introspect I’ve access to the experience of others, so one can obtain only indirect knowledge or belief about them. They are hidden behind the observable behaviour, inaccessible to direct observation and inferred either analogically or as cause from effect. Such is the intended belief in the existence and nature of other minds. The argument from analogy admits the possibility that an object. For which of accessorial differences than ourselves, as mindless automata, but claim that we, nonetheless, have sufficient reason for supposing this not to be the case. There is more evidence that they are not mindless automata than that the are. Peirce called hypothesis
The inducing of the inference may derive of a conclusion by reasoning, however, the obtainable is reached by inference for which the form of the best explanation, provides an important alternative to both deduction and enumerative induction. When one presents such an inference in ordinary discourse it often seems to have the following form:
1. O is the case.
2. If E had been the case O is what we would expect
Therefore there is a high probability that:
3. E was the case.
Nonetheless, this is the argument of ‘abduction’ from which Peirce called ‘hypothesis’, for example, let us consider that we might upon coming across some footprints on the beach, reason to the conclusion that a person walked along the beach recently by noting that if a person had walked along the beach we would expect to find such footprints.
5. The observable behaviour from which we thus infer consists of bare bodily movements caused by inner mental events. The outer (behaviour) is not logically connected with the inner or mental capacities, hence the mental is essentially private, known strictusernsu, only to its owner, and the private and subjective is better known than the public.
The resultant picture leads first to ‘scepticism’ then, ineluctably to ‘solipsism’. Since pretence and deceit are always logically possible, one can never be sure whether another person is really having the experience he behaviourally appears to be having. But worse, if a given psychological predicate means ‘this’ (which I have, and no one else could logically have - since experience is inalienable), then it is unintelligible that there should be any other subjects of experience. Similar scepticism about communication is unavoidable: If the defining samples of the primitive terms of a language are private, then I cannot be sure that what you mean by ‘red’ or ‘pain’, is not qualitatively identical with what I mean by ‘green’ or ‘pleasure’. And nothing can stop us from concluding that all languages are private and strictly mutually unintelligible.
Philosophers had always been aware of the problematic nature of knowledge of other minds and of mutual intelligibility of speech on their favoured picture. It is a manifestation of Wittgenstein’s genius to have launched his attack at the point which seemed incontestable - namely, not whether I can know of the experiences of others, but whether I can know of my own, not whether I can understand the `private language`of another in attempted communication, but whether I can understand my own allegedly private language.
It is easy to construe ‘You can’t have my pain’ to mean that two people cannot have the same pain, i.e., the numerically identical pain, but only similar (qualitatively identical) pains. From this it seems to follow that no one else can really know that I am in pain or what I really mean by ‘pain’. This is mistaken: The distinction between numerical and qualitative identity which applies to substances has no application to sensations or experience. One is inclined to think that since, e.g., your headache is in your head and mine is in my head, difference in location by Leibniz’s law, implies numerical difference. This is confused, since for two people to have the same pain in ths same place just is for them to have a pain of such-and-such phenomenal characteristics in corresponding parts of their bodies. But one might waive this, and point out that Siamese twins might each suffer pain at the point of juncture: Now it might be argue d that for all that A’s pain is his pain, and B’s pain is distinct - for it belongs to him. This is muddled, for the subject of a pain is not a distinguishing mark of the pain, any more that an object is a distinguishing characteristic of its colour. the criteria of pain include phenomenal characteristics, intensity and location. If these tally between two people, then they do have the same pain.
The fundamental doctrines of epistemic privacy, privileged access and immediacy (‘direct’ knowledge of one’s own states of mind) are distortions of various grammatical propositions, yet there is no such thing as my knowing, my doubting or wondering, my not bring certain whether I am, e.g., in pain, and no such thing as my having behavioural grounds or evidence for being in pain, as there is no such thing as my misrecognizing and misidentifying my pains. But the grammatical exclusion of doubt does not make room for certainty - rather, it excludes it likewise, as the exclusion of ignorance precludes the intelligibility of knowledge. The grammatical exclusion of behavioural grounds for self-ascription of experience’ does not imply that there are directly observable (introspectible) inner grounds which are akin to perception. It implies that avowals of experience are not self-ascriptions parallel to other-ascriptions, but groundless expressions of the inner - as a groan is a groundless expression of pain. The exclusion of error, misrecognition and misidentification does not ensure infallible knowledge, recognition and identification - rather it precludes any such thing. Hence, Wittgenstein insisted, ‘I know I am in pain (or a joke) or it is philosophers’ nonsense. It is erroneous to think that we know how things are with us inwardly by the faculty of ‘introspection’. The avowal ‘I have a pain’ is typically an expression of pain - a learnt extension that is not based on a self-examination which parallels the investigation of the world around us, it is only marginally liable to error and in certain cases is an artificial expression of the intention replacing a natural one, e.g., a raised fist. So that the avowal prepares the way for a naturalistic, rather than an intellectual answer to scepticism about other minds. It is a criterion for others to ascribe pain to the speaker in a description ‘He has a pain’, but it is not itself a description(though it may be a report).
Description typically goes with observing, scrutinizing, examining and investigating: It characteristically involves perceptual competence exercised in various observational conditions, recognition and identification, skill and accuracy of representation (and ways of improving these by closer scrutiny, improved observational conditions, consulting others), the possibility of error (and ways of correcting it), and grounds of judgement . But in the tense psychological utterances (manifesting of avowals of the inner) no perception or perceptual skill is involved, there are no observational conditions, there is neither recondition nor misrecognition, identifications or misidentifications, no checking by closer scrutiny, no consulting others or discovering from evidence how things are with oneself. One does not ‘read off from the ‘inner facts how things are with one and render a description of them in words for the benefit of others. And much the same goes for one‘s sense-impressions, desires, thoughts and intentions - although there are also great differences at present. The articulate expression of the inner is not as such a manifestation of self-knowledge, but it is true a rich inner life is the prerogative of language-users. A dog expects its master to return next week, for its behavioural repertoire is too impoverished. Nothing it can now do will count as a criterion for now expecting or wanting something to happen next week, or for feeling remorse over what it did last week, such feelings and desire presuppose the mastery of linguistic expressive behaviour.
The classical picture of our knowledge of ‘other minds’ similarly rests on a wide range of misconceptions. It presupposes that psychological predicates are given meaning by private ostensive definition, and hence that other-ascription of experience involves attributing to others [THIS] (which one now has), on the basis of analogy or ‘inference to the best explanation’. But private ostensive definition is a contradiction in adjecto, and to say that since I know what it is for me to be in pain, therefore to be in pain is akin to thinking that since I know what it is to be 5 o’clock here in this context, I must know what it is to be 5 o’clock by the Sun. This is incoherent. It must first be determined what counts as being in pain, i.e., what justifies that employment of this expression. The first-person tense use is typically a manifestation of the inner, parallel to and in the simplest case a partial substitute for prelinguistic expressive behaviour. The utterance and non-linguistic behaviour alike constitute logical criteria for third-person ascriptions. More generally, third-person psychological propositions are justifiably asserted on the basis of appropriate behaviour (including avowals) in appropriate circumstances. These are not inductive evidence discovered by non-inductive identification on the relata and observation of regular correlation, but are logical (grammatical) grounds: This is what is called ‘a cry of pain, ‘a scream of agony’, and so forth. An avowal of experience and an avowal of the identity of a current experience with an antecedent one finds no rest on or upon its criteria, but such avowals together with other forms of expressive behaviour in appropriate circumstances constitute criteria, and criteria of sameness and difference, for the experiences of other people. But it is important to correct misconceptions of human behaviour, for what is called ‘behaviour’, what we observe when we observe our fellow men, is not ‘bare bodily movements, but - laughing with joy, wincing in pain, smiling in amusement, and so forth. The joy, pain, or amusement are not accompanied ‘bare bodily movements’ - as it we hidden behind the behaviour, i.e., in the ,mind. They are not hidden, but manifest, they do not accompany the behaviour (as thunder accompanies lightening) but infuse it, they are not behind the behaviour (as the movement of a clock is behind the dial) but visible in it.
To be sure, contrary to ‘behaviourism’ pain is not the same as pain-behaviour and joy is distinct from joyful behaviour. For one can be in pain and not show it, and feel joyful without manifesting it. But to feel pain or joy and not show it is not to hide anything. One hides one’s feelings when one deliberately suppresses them (as one hides one’s thoughts by keeping one’s diary under lock and key, not merely by thinking and not expressing one’s thoughts). When one avows a headache, expresses one’s pleasure or says one thinks it cannot be said that the utterances are mere words and that the inner is hidden. Talk of the inner is a metaphor, and one must beware of looking for an inside behind that which in this metaphor is the inside.
We do often know when others are, e.g., in pain, and can be as certain of it as of ‘2 + 2 = 4'. One cannot say of someone screaming in agony after an accident, ‘Maybe he is not really in pain’. One sees the pain on his face, sees that he is suffering. Such knowledge is not indirect, for there is no more direct way of knowing that a person is in pain: He does not know ‘directly’, since he cannot be said to know that he is in pain. Rather, he is in pain and says so.
The psychological immediacy that characterizes so must of our perceptual knowledge - even (sometimes) the most indirect and derived forms of it - does not mean that learning is not required to know in this way. One isn’t born with (may, in fact, never develop) the ability to recognize daffodils, muskrats and angry companions. It is only after a long experience that one is able visually to identify such thing. Beginners may do something corresponding to inference: They recognize relevant features of trees, birds and flowers, features they already know how to perceptually identify, and then infer (conclude), on the basis of what they see, and under the guidance of more expert observers, that it’s a Maple or an Oak tree, a finch or a geranium. But the experts (and we are all experts on many aspects of our familiar surroundings) do not typically go through such a process. The expert just sees that its an Oak or a Maple tree, a finch or geranium. The perceptual knowledge of the expert is still dependent, of course, since even an expert can’t see what kind of flower or tree it is if he can’t first see its colour and shape, but it is to say that the expert has developed identificatory skills that no longer require the sort of conscious inferential processes that characterize a beginner’s efforts.
It is, nonetheless, that it can be misleading to say that one infers that some one is in pain from his behaviour, although one might infer from the fact that someone has arthritis, that he has pains in his joints. Of course, I may justify saying that I knew he was in pain on the ground and that I saw him writing in agony (as the portrayal that exists of the inner and exterior mode conditional elements of pain), however, it would be misleading to represent this as inferring that he was in pain from his mere behaviour and absurd to say, ‘I say only his behaviour and inferred that he was in pain.’
It is true that pretence is possible and that our judgement can be proven as being fallible and defeasible. But it is not always possible. It is unintelligible too suppose that an infant pretends, for pretence has to be learnt. Nor is it possible in all circumstances, e.g., when someone falls into flames. Rather, there are circumstance-dependent criteria for pretence, no less than for that which is pretended. Hence, the possibility of pretence is no more a ground for scepticism about other minds than the possibility of illusion is a ground for scepticism about the existence of objects.
The argument from illusion is usually intended to establish that certain familiar facts about illusion disprove the theory of perception called naïve or direct realism. There are, however, many different versions of the argument which must be distinguished carefully. Some of these distinctions centre on the content of the premises (the nature of the appeal to illusion): Others centre on the interpretation of the condition (the kind of direct realism under attack). There are ,however, difficulties with this viewing of sense-data, as we some times directly perceive physical objects and their properties, we do not always perceive physical objects by perceiving something else, e.g., a sense-datum. There are difficulties with this formulation of the view. For one thing a great many philosophers who are not direct realists would admit that it is a mistake to describe people as actually perceiving something other than a physical object. At least many of the philosophers who objected to direct realism would prefer to express what they were objecting to in terms of a technical (and philosophical controversial) concept such as ‘acquaintance’. Using with this way: In veridical experience we are directly acquainted with parts, e.g., surface’s, or constituents of physical objects.
The expression knowledge acquaintance’ are the distinction that is between knowing things and knowing about things, that we know things experiencing them and knowledge of acquaintance (Russell charged the preposition to -by-) is epistemically prior to and has a relatively higher degree of epistemic justification than knowledge epistemic justification than knowledge about things, indeed, sensation has the more greater value of trueness or freedom from mistake.
A thought (using that term broadly, to mean any mental state) constituting knowledge of acquaintance with a thing is more or less causally proximate to sensations caused by that thing, a thought constituting knowledge about the thing is more or less distant causally, being separated from the thing and experience of it by processes of attention and inference. At the limit, if a thought is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is maximally of the acquaintance type, it is the first mental state occurring in a perceptual causal chain or originating in the object to which the thought refers, i.e., it is a sensation. The things presented to us in sensation and of which we have knowledge of acquaintance include ordinary objects in the external world, such as the Sun.
Because one can interpret the reflation of acquaintance or awareness as one that is not epistemic, i.e., not a kind of propositional knowledge. It is important to distinguish the views read as ontological theses from a view one might call epistemological direct realism: In non-inferentially justified in believing a proposition asserting the existence of a physical object.
Even so, participants in the discourse necessarily point the existence of distinctive items, believing and asserting things about them: The utterances fail to come off, as an understanding of them reveals, if there are no such entities. The entities posited are distinct in the sense that, for all that participant are in a position to know, the entities need not be identical with, or otherwise replaceable by, entities independently posited. Although realists about any discourse agree that it posits such entities, they may differ about what sorts of things are involved. Berkeley differs from the rest of us about what common sense posits and, less dramatically, colour realists differ about the nature of colours, mental realists about the status of psychological statuses, modal realists about the locus of possibility, and moral realists about the place of value.
It needs to be said of what truths are sufficiently substantive to be relevant to the thesis, the realist says that error and ignorance are possible with regard to the substantive propositions in any area of discourse. So which of the propositions, if any, are non-substantive? It can be answered that if a proposition is such that just to count as a proper participant in the discourse in question, just on the count as for someone who understands what is going on, you must accept the proposition or you must reject it, then it is non-substantive: Otherwise, it is substantive. By many accounts, there are truths in every area of discourse whose acceptance or whose rejection is criterial for counting as a proper participant there in must accept them - they are so obviously true - or you must reject them – they are so obviously false - if you are going to be held as someone who genuinely asserts and believes things in the discourse, as someone who understands enough not to be seen as a mere mother of words. If a realist accepts such an account, then he will naturally deny that error and ignorance are possible for proper participants of the discourse with such of a position. But that denial will naturally deny that error and that of ignorance will not come of any faltering in his realist commitment: It will merely give expression to his view of what proper participation in the discourse presupposes. The realist will have to regard it as a non-substantive proposition of a discourse that there are the entities of a discourse, since by the descriptivist thesis, participants necessarily posit such items and by the objectivist thesis that they cannot be wrong to do so. Otherwise he can be uncommitted: He may or may not acknowledge further non-substantive propositions. If further non-substantive propositions are countenanced, they will presumably be the platitudes and the howlers whose acceptance and rejection, respectfully, are generally taken to reveal little more than an understanding of an area of discourse: These will overlap with there traditional analytic truths and falsehoods but the two categories may be co-terminus.
The realist about any area of discourse asserts three theses, setting himself against three different kinds of opponents. Marking his opposition to reductionalist, instrumentalist and so forth, he asserts that the discourse introduces distinctive posits, this is the descriptivist thesis. Marking his opposition to error theorists and idealist, he holds that the objects posited exist and are independent of people`s disposition to assert and believe things about them: This is the objectivist thesis, an finally, taking his stand against the many varieties of anthropocentric, he maintains the cosmocentric thesis that participants of what may be in error or ignorance with regard to or all substantive propositions in the discourse.
To this point, traditional epistemology has made several explanations for, first, it is argued that there are new variants of ‘foundationalism’ and that one of these might turn out to be right. Second, ‘coherentists’ argue that they can explain how knowledge claims can be ultimately justified without invoking foundationalism of any sort. Third, it is argued that there is more to traditional epistemology that providing a foundation for knowledge. For example, epistemologists have been interested in analysing the concept of knowledge, developing theories of evidence and justification and justifying non-demonstrative rules of inference. The pursuit of these projects might be warranted even if the traditional foundational problem cannot be solved. The alleged failure to solve that problem, however, is not the only reason cited by naturalists. Both in epistemology and in its sister discipline, the philosophy of science, there have been complaints about the lack of interesting, positive results. A related reason is that traditional epistemology has relied too heavily, it is argued, on a priori claims. Some naturalists argue that either there is no a priori knowledge at all or that there is no such knowledge of non-uluations result in the stirring of information, however, that by substituting psychological questions for epistemological ones, we are not naturalizing epistemology, we are simply changing the subject-trivial propositions. To get firm, interesting positive results, as opposed merely to finding more and more counter-triviality, an epistemologist must, it is argued, appeal to empirical results of psychology and other sciences. Naturalists disagree among themselves, however, about the nature of this appeal.
One naturalist view, associated with Quine (1985), is that we should replace traditional epistemological questions with questions answerable by empirical studies in psychology. For example, he suggests that the traditional question about the foundations of knowledge be replaced by one about how sensory stimulation result in the storing of information. Some philosophers are likely to reply, however, that by substituting psychological questions for epistemological ones, we are not naturalizing epistemology, we are simply changing the subject.
Another view is that we should abandon a priori arguments altogether and restrict ourselves to appeals to empirical evidence in answering epistemological questions. The key issue is itself partly empirical, is whether any interesting results will (could) emerge from this approach. A more modest view is that epistemologists should continue to use a priori arguments as before, but where possible, to appeal to empirical results as well. A possible example concerns the dispute between some experimental psychologists and their opponents about the epistemological value of clinical case studies. Some argue that data from case studies generally have only heuristic, rather than evidential value, although they may occasionally refute some psychological theory. To confirm causal hypotheses, it is argued, however, that we generally need experimental evidence than evidence from case studies.
Other psychologists, however, contend that case studies can often confirm as well as disconfirm causal hypotheses. An epistemologist, in commenting on this dispute, might appeal partly to abstract, a priori considerations about the nature of evidence and confirmation, but might also have to appeal to empirical data about the presence or absence of competing, plausible alternatives to the hypotheses being tested. For example, it might turn out that in certain areas in psychology, case studies can be confirmatory, because the hypotheses being tested often have no plausible competitors in other areas, experimentation may generally be needed to adjudicate between plausible rivals.
Whether empirical data from psychology are likely to be helpful in resolving issues within epistemology itself is still controversial, nevertheless, recent work in epistemology does indicate a greater willingness among epistemologists: Even among those not describing themselves as ‘naturalists’, to at least consider empirical data from psychology to be relevant to their concerns.
Reasons as distinct from causes are motivated by a desire to separate the rational from that of the natural order. Historically, it probably traces back at least to Aristotle’s similar (but not identical) distinction between final and efficient causes. Recently, the contrast has been drawn primarily in the domain of actions and, secondarily, elsewhere.
Many who have insisted on distinguishing reason from causes but have failed to distinguish two kinds of reason. Consider my reason for sending a letter by express mail. Asked why I did so, I might say I wanted to get it there in a day, or simply: To get there in a day. Strictly, the reason is expressed by ‘to get it there in a day’. But what this expresses is my reason only because I am suitably motivated: I am in a reason state, as of wanting to get the letter there in a day. It is reason states - especially wants beliefs and intention - and not reasons strictly so called, that are candidates for causes. The latter are abstract contents of propositional attitudes, the former are psychological elements that play motivational roles.
If reason states can motivate, however, why (apart from confusing them with reason proper) deny that they are causes? For one thing, they are not events, at least in the usual sense entailing change: They are dispositional states (contrasting them with occurrence),but does not imply that they admit of dispositional analysis. It has also seemed to those who deny that reasons are causes that the former justify as well as reasons, whereas the role of causes is at most to explain: Another claim is that the relation between reasons (it is meant of reason states are often cited explicitly) and the actions they explain is non-contingent, whereas the relation of causes to their effects is contingent. The ‘logical connection argument’ proceeds from this claim to the conclusion that reasons are not causes.
There arguments are inconclusive . First- even if causes are events, sustaining causation may explain, as where the (state of) standing of a broken table is explained by the (condition of) support of stacked boards replacing its missing legs. Second- the ‘because’ in ‘I sent it by express because I wanted to get it there in a day’ is in some sense causal - indeed, where it is not so taken, this purported explanation would at best be construed as only rationalized, rather than justifying my action. And third- if any non-contingent connection can be established between, say, my wanting something and the action it explains, there are close causal analogues, such as the connection between bringing a magnet to iron filings and their gravitating to it: This is, after all, a definitive’ connection, expressing part of what it is to be magnetic, yet the magnet causes the filings to move.
There is, then, a clear distinction between reasons proper and causes, and even between reason states and event causes, but the distinction cannot be used to show that the relation between reasons and the actions they justify is in no way causal. Precisely parallel points hold in the epistemic domain (and for all the propositional attitudes, since they all similarly admit of justification, and explanation, by reasons). Suppose my reason for believing that you received my letter today is that I sent it by express yesterday. My reason, strictly speaking, is that I sent it by express yesterday: My reason state is my believing this. Arguably, my reason justifies the further proposition I believe for which it is my reason, and my reason state - my evidence belief - both explains and justifies my belief that you received the letter today. I can say that what justifies that belief is (the fact) that I sent the letter by express yesterday, but this statement expresses my believing that evidence proposition, and if I do not believe it, then my belief that you received the letter is not justified: It is not justified by the mere truth of the proposition (and can be justified even if that proposition is false).
Similarly, there are, for belief as for action, at least five main kinds of reasons (1) normative reasons, reasons (objective grounds) there are to believe (say, to believe that there is a greenhouse effect): (2)Person-relative normative reasons, reasons for (say) me to believe: (3) Subjective reasons, reasons I have to believe: (4) Explanatory reasons, reasons why I believe, and (5) motivating reasons, reasons for which I believe. Tenets (1) and (2) are propositions and thus not serious candidates to be causal factors. The states corresponding to tenet (3) may or may not be causal elements. Reasons why, case (4), are always (sustaining) explainers, though not necessarily even prima facie justifiers, since a belief can be causally sustained by factors with no evidential value. Motivating reasons are both explanatory and posses whatever minimal prima facie justificatory power (if any) a reason must have to be a basis of belief.
Current discussion of the reason-causes issue has shifted from the question whether reason states can causally explain to the perhaps, deeper questions whether they can justify without so explaining, and what kind of causal chain non-waywardly connects reason states with actions and beliefs they do explain. Reliabilists tend to take a belief as justified by a reason only if it is held at least in part for that reason, in a sense implying, but not entailed by, being causally based on this, perhaps thinking we lack internal assess to the relevant causal connections. But internalists need not deny it, particularly if they require only internal access to what justifies - say, the reason state - and not to the (perhaps quite complex) relations it bears to the belief it justifies, by virtue of which it does so. Many questions also remain concerning the very nature of causation, reasonhood, explanation and justification.
The interesting thesis that counts as a causation theory of justification (in the meaning of ‘causal theories’ intended here) is the following: As brief is justified just in case it was produced by a type of process that is ‘globally’ reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs - which can be defined (to a good enough approximation) as the proposition of the beliefs, it produces (or would produce were it used as much as opportunity allows) that are true - is sufficiently great. Where ’rationalism’ is a multiply ambiguous term whose meaning varies greatly according to the context. The commonality running through its various uses seems to be that the philosopher classified as a rationalist gives undue weight to reason at the expense of something else as mind: In religion, that may be revelation or faith, in politics, traditional: In morals, feeling or sentiment and in epistemology, experience, and so forth. This apparent commonality is deceptive, however, since reason tends to bear differences in meanings in the differences to context, referring meanings in the different context , referring to a faculty of a priori knowledge in epistemology, but being construed much more broadly in religion, morals or politics. The term generally seems to carry a negative connotation: It is one philosophers typical apply to those with whom they disagree, not to themselves. So understood, rationalism is an exercise in extravagant optimism, as might be argued either by considering the mutually inconsistent (and often bizarre) metaphysical systems the rationalists advocated, or by noting the crucial role argument from experience and the development of the sciences.
This proposal will be adequately specified when we are told, as of, (1) how much of the causal history of a belief counts as part of the process that produced it, (2) which of the many types to which the process belongs is the type for purposes of assessing its reliability, and (3) relative to what world or worlds is the reliability of the process type to be assessed (the actual world, the closest worlds containing the case being considered, or something else?)
1. The leading proponents of a reliabilists account of justification is found of Goldman (1979, 1986) in taking the relevant belief producing causes internal to the believer. So, for instance, when recently I believed that the telephone was ringing the process that produced the belief, or purposes of assessing reliability, includes just the causal chain of neural events and other concurrent brain states of which the production of the belief depended: It does not include any events in th e telephone, or the sound waves travelling between it and my ears, or any earlier decisions I made that were responsible for my being within hearing distance of the telephone at that time. It does seem intuitively plausible that the facts on which the justification of a belief depends, should the restrictions to internal ones proximate to the belief. Why? Goldman doesn’t tell us. One answer that some philosophers might give is that it is because a belief’s being justified at a given time can depend only on facts directly accessible to the believer’s awareness at that time (for, if a believer ought to hold only beliefs that are justified, she can tell at any given time what beliefs would then be justified for her.) Also, on this way that it is neither necessary nor sufficient by itself for internalism that the justified factors literally be internal mental states of the person in question. Not necessary, because on at least some views, e.g., a direct realist view of perception, something other than a mental state of the believer can be cognitively accessible: Not sufficient, because there are views according to which at least some mental states need not be actual or even possible as objects of cognitive awareness. But this cannot be Goldman’s answer because he wishes to include in the relevant process neural events that are not directly accessible to consciousness.
2. Once the reliabilists has told us how to delimit the process producing a belief, he needs to tell us which of the many types to which it belongs is the relevant type. Consider, for example, the process that produces your current belief that you see a book before you. One very broad type to which that process belongs would be specified by ‘coming to a belief as to something one perceive’s as a result of activation of the nerve endings in one’s retina. A still narrower type would be given by inserting in the last specification a description of a particular pattern of otherwise the result of activation of the nerve endings in some of one’s sense-organs’. A still narrower type to would be given to inserting the last specification a description of a particular pattern of activation of the retinas’ receptor cells. Which of these or other types to which the token process belongs is for determining whether the type of process that produces your belief is reliable?
If we select a type that is too broad, we will classify as having the same degree of justification various beliefs that intuitively seem to have different degrees of justification. Thus the broadest type we specified for your belief that you see a book before you applies also to perceptual beliefs where the object seen is far away and seen only briefly through fog, and intuitively the latter sort of belief is less justified. On the other hand, if we are allowed to select a type that is as narrow as we please, then we make it out that an obviously unjustified but true belief is produced by a reliable type of process. For example, suppose I see a blurred shape through the fog far off in a field and unjustifiedly, but correctly believe that it is a sheep. If we include enough details about my retinal image in specifying the type of the visual process that produced that belief, we can specify a type that is likely to have only that one instance and is therefore 100 per cent reliable. Goldman conjectures (1986) that the relevant process type is ‘the narrowest type that is causally operative in producing the belief token in question’. Presumably, a feature of the process producing it just in case some alternative feature is such that, had the process had that feature instead, it would not have led to that belief. (We need to say ‘some’ here rather that and oak or maple tree the particular ‘oakish’ shape of my retinal images is closely causally operative in producing my belief that I see a tree even though there are alternative shapes, for example, the ‘sprucish’ or ‘mapled’ ones, that would have produced the same belief.
The view that a belief acquires Favourable epistemic status by having some kind of reliable linkage to the truth. Variations of this view have been advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The first formulation of a reliability account of knowing appeared in a note by F.P. Ramsy (1931), who said that a belief is knowledge if it is true, certain and obtained by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ just in case it is not at all accidental that ‘S’ is right about its being the case that ‘p’. And D.M. Armstrong (1973) drew an analogy between a thermometer that reliably indicates the temperature and a belief that reliably indicates the truth, Armstrong said that a non-inferential belief qualifies as knowledge if the belief has properties that are nomically sufficient for its truth, i.e., guarantee its truth by or worked through by the laws of nature.
Among reliabilists theories of justification (as opposes to knowledge) there are two main varieties: Reliable indicator theories and reliable process theories. In their simplest forms, the reliable indicator theory says that a belief is justified in case it is based on reasons that are reliable indicators of the truth (Swain, 1981), and the reliable process theory says that a belief is justified in case it is produced by cognitive processes that are generally reliable (Goldman, 1979 and Talbott. 1990).
The reliable process theory is grounded on two main points, first, the justificational status of a belief depends on the psychological processes that cause (or causally sustain) it, not simply on the logical status of the proposition, or its evidential relation to other propositions. Even a tautology can be believed unjustifiably if one arrives at that belief through inappropriate psychological processes. Similarly, a detective might have a body of evidence supporting the hypothesis that Jones is guilty. But if the detective fails to put the pieces of evidence together, and instead, believes in Jones’s quilt only because of his unsavoury appearance, the detective’s belief is unjustified. The critical determinants of justificational status, then, are psychological processes, i.e., belief-forming or belief-preserving processes such as perception, memory, reasoning, guessing or introspecting. Process reliabilism is a species of causal theory.
3. Should the justification of a belief in a hypothetical, non-actual example turn on the reliability of the belief-producing process in the possible world of the example? That leads to the implausible result that in a world run by a Cartesian demon - a powerful being who causes the other inhabitants of the world to have rich and coherent sets of perceptual and memory impressions that are all illusory - the perceptual and memory beliefs of the other inhabitants are all unjustified, for they are produced by processes that are , in that world, quite unreliable. If we say instead that it is the reliability of the processes in th actual world that matter s, we get the equally undesirable result that if the actual world is a demon world then or perceptual and memory beliefs are all unjustified.
Goldman’s solution (1986) is that the reliability of the process types is to be gauged by their performance in ‘normal’ worlds, that is, worlds consistent with ‘our general beliefs about the world . . . about the sorts of objects, events and changes that occurs in it’, this gives the intuitively right results for the problem cases just considered, but it implies an implausible relatively regard justification. If there are people whose general beliefs about the world are very different from mine, then there may, on this account, be beliefs that I can correctly regard as justified (ones produced by processes that are reliable in what I take to be normal worlds), but that they can correctly regard as not justified.
However, these questions about the specifics are dealt with, there are reasons for questioning the basic idea that the criterion for a belief’s being justified is its being produced by a reliable process.
Doubt about the sufficiency of the reliabilists criterion is prompted by a sort of example that Goldman himself uses for another purpose. Suppose that being in brain-state B always causes one to believe that one is in brain-stare B, here the reliability of the belief-producing process is perfect. But ‘we can readily imagine circumstances in which a person goes into brain-state B, therefore has the belief in question, though this belief is by no means justified’ (Goldman, 1979). Doubt about the necessity of the condition arises from the possibility that one might know that one has strong justification for a certain belief and yet that knowledge is not what actually prompts one to believe. For example, he might be well aware that, having read the weather bureau’s forecast that it will be much hotter tomorrow. I have ample reason to be confident that it will be hotter tomorrow, but I irrationally refuse to believe it until my Aunt Hattie tells be that she feels in her joints that it will be hotter tomorrow. Here what prompts me to believe does not justify my belief, but my belief is nevertheless, justified by my knowledge of the weather bureau’s prediction and of its evidential force: I can cite it to refute any suggestion that I ought not to be holding the belief. Indeed, given my justification and that there’s nothing intoward about the weather bureau’s prediction, my belief, if be, can be counted knowledge. This sort of example raises doubt whether any caudal condition is necessary for either justification or knowledge.
William P. Alston (1921-) has contributed to epistemology on many topics: The analysis of justification and knowledge, the foundationalism-coherentism and internalism-externalism controversies, epistemic principles, religious epistemology, perception and numerous others. His early papers on ‘Foundationalism’ distinguished levels of justification and thereby showed that even if one is not second-order belief that one is justified in believing ‘p’, one may be directly justified in believing ‘p’, since foundationalists as such need not require second-order justification regarding basic beliefs, this distinction undercuts much criticism against foundationalism in all forms. In distinguishing many grades of privileged access. Alston also showed that neither foundationalists nor other epistemologists must regard infallibility or some version of Cartesian certainty as the only alternative to coherentism in accounting for the varieties of justification.
Yet, coherence theories of belief are concerned with the content of beliefs. To consider a belief you now have, the belief that you are reading a page in a book, so what makes that belief the belief that it is? What makes it the belief that you are reading a page in a book rather than the belief that you have a foreigned physical object in your garden. Perception has an influence on belief, as you respond to sensory stimuli by believing that you are reading a page in a book rather in the believing that you have a foreigned physical object in your garden. Perception and action undermine the content of belief, however, the same stimuli may produce various beliefs and various beliefs may produce the same action. The role that gives the belief the content it has is the role it plays in a network of relations to other beliefs, the role in inference and implication, for example, I infer different things from believing that I am reading a page in a book than from any other belief, just as I infer that belief from any other belief, just as I infer that belief from different things than I infer other beliefs from.
The input of perceptions and the output of action supplement the central role of the systematic relations the belief has to other beliefs, but it is the systematic relations that give the belief the specific content it has, they are the fundamental source of the content, as they are the fundamental source of beliefs. That is how coherence comes in. A belief has the content that it does because of the way in which it coheres within a system of beliefs (Rosenberg, 1988). We might distinguish weak coherence theories of the content of beliefs from strong coherence theories. Weak coherence theories affirm that coherence is one determinant of the content of belief. Strong coherence theories of content of belief affirm that coherence is the content of belief affirm that coherence is the sole determinant of the content belief.
When we turn from belief to justification, we confront a similar group of coherence theories. What makes one belief justified and another not, such that if the answer is in the way it coheres with the background system of beliefs. Again, there is a distinction between weak and strong theories of coherence. Weak theories tell us that the way in which a belief coheres with a background system of beliefs is one determinant of justification, other typical determinants being perception, memory and intuition. Strong theories, by contrast, tell us that justification is solely a matter of how a belief coheres with a system of beliefs. There is, however, another distinction that cuts across the distinction of justification. It is the distinction between positive and negative coherence theories (Pollock, 1986). A positive coherence theory tells us that if a belief coheres with a background system of belief, then the belief is justified. A negative coherence theory tells us that if a belief fails to cohere with a background system of beliefs, then the belief is not justified. We might put this by saying that, according to positive coherence theory, coherence has the power to produce justification, while according to a negative coherence theory, coherence has only the power to nullify justification.
A strong coherence theory of justification is a combination of a positive and a negative theory which tells us that a belief is justified in and only of it coheres with a background system of beliefs.
To illustrate the foregoing of a furthering example, as ascertaining coherence theories of justification and knowledge have most often been rejected as being unable to deal with perceptual knowledge (Audi, 1988 and Pollock, 1986), and therefore, it will be most appropriate to consider a perceptual example which will serve as a kind of crucial test. Suppose that a person, call her Julie, works with scientific instrument that has a gauge for measuring the temperature of liquid in a container. The gauge is marked in degrees. She looks at the gauge and sees that the reading is 105 degrees. What is she justified in believing and why, such that she, for an example, justified in believing that the liquid in the container is 105 degrees. Clearly, that depends on her background beliefs. A weak coherence theorist might argue that, though her belief that she sees the shaping as 105 which is immediately justified ss direct sensory evidence without appeal ti a background system, the belief that the liquid in the container is 105 degrees results from coherence with a background system of beliefs affirming that the shape 105 is a reading of 105 degrees on a gauge that measures the temperature of the liquid in the container. This sort of weak coherence combines coherence with direct perceptual evidence, the foundation of justification, to account for justification of our beliefs.
A strong coherence theory would go beyond the claim of the weak coherence theory to affirm that the justification of all beliefs, including the belief that one sees the shape 105, or even the more cautious belief that one sees a shape, results from coherence with a background system. One may argue for this strong coherence theory in number of different ways. One line of argument would be appeal to the coherence theory of the content of belief. If the content of the perceptual belief results from the relations of the belief to other beliefs in a system of beliefs, the perceptual beliefs also result from the relations of the belief to other beliefs in the system. One may, however, argue for the strong coherence theory without assuming the coherence theory of the content of beliefs. It may be that some beliefs have the contents that they do atmistically but that our justification for believing them is the result of coherence. Consider the very cautious belief that I see a shape. How could the justification for that belief be the result of coherence with a background system of beliefs. What might the background system tell us that would justify that belief, as our background system contains a simple and primal theory about our relationship to the world. To come to the specific point at issue, we believe that we can tell a shape when we see one, that we are trustworthy about such simple matters as whether we see a shape before us or not. We may, with experience, come to believe that sometimes we think we see a shape before us when there is nothing there at all, when we see an after-image, for example, and so we are not perfect, not beyond deception, yet we are trustworthy for the most part. Moreover, when Julie sees the shape 105, she believes that the circumstances are not those that are deceptive about whether see sees that shape. The light is good, the numeral shapes are large and readily discernable, and so forth. These are beliefs that Julie has that tell her that her belief that see sees a shape is justified. Her belief that she sees a shape is justified because of the way it is supported by her other beliefs. It coheres with those beliefs, and so she is justified.
There are various ways of understanding the nature of this support or coherence. One way is to view Julie as inferring that her belief is true from the other beliefs. The inference might be construed as an inference to the best explanation (Harman, 1973: Goldman, 1988 and Lycan, 1988). Given her background beliefs, the best explanation Julie has for the existence of her belief that she sees a shape is that she does see a shape. Thus, we might think of coherence as in inference to the best explanation as based on a background system of beliefs. Since we are not aware of such inherences for the most part, the inference must be interpreted as unconscious inferences, as information processing based on or accessing the background system, one might object to such an account on the grounds that not all justified inference is explanatory and, consequently, be led to a more general account of coherence as successful (BonJour. 1985, and Lehrer, 1990). The belief that one sees a shape competes with the claim that one is deceived, and other sceptical objections. The background system of belief informs one that is trustworthy and enables one to meet the objection. A belief coheres with a background system just in case it enables one to meet the sceptical objections and in that way justifies one in the belief. This is a standard strong coherence theory of justification (Lehrer, 1900).
It is easy to illustrate the relationship between positive and negative coherence theories in terms of th e standard coherence theory. If some objection to a belief cannot be met in terms of the background system of beliefs of a person, then the person is not justified in that belief. So, to return to Julie, suppose that she has been told that a gauge is malfunctioning, and suppose that when she sees the reading of 105, she also sees that the red light is on. Imagine, finally, that this is the first time the red light has been on, and, after years of working with the gauge, Julie, who has always placed her trust in the gauge, believes that the gauge tells her, that the liquid in the container is at 105 degrees, her belief that the liquid in the container is at 105 degrees is not a justified belief because it fails to cohere with her background belief that the gauge is malfunctioning. Thus, the negative coherence theory tells us that she is not justified in her belief about the temperature of the contents in the container. By contrast, when the red light is not illuminated and the background system of Julie tells us that under such conditions that gauge is a trustworthy indicator of the temperature of the liquid in the container, then she is justified. The positive coherence theory tells us that she is justified in her belief because her belief coheres with her background system.
After-all, that such by an illustration of coherence theories of justification have a common feature, namely, that they are what are called internalistic theories of justification, wherefore, as with justification and knowledge, the traditional view of content has been strongly internalist in character. Such is the general view, that one might be described as of internalism and externalism (Swain, 1981 and Alston, 1989), holds that epistemic justification requires that there be a justificatory fact or that is cognitively accessible to the believer in question (though it need not be actually grasped), thus ruling out, e.g., a pure reliabilism. At the same time, however, though it must be objectively true that belief for which a factor is available are likely to be true, this further fact need not be in any way grasped or cognitively accessible to the believer. In effect, of two premisses needed to be in any way grasped or cognitively accessible to the believer, are, nonetheless, that the internalalist will respond that this hybrid view is of no help at all in meaning the objection that the belief is not held in the rational, responsible way that justification intuitively seems to require, for the believer in question, lacking one crucial premise that his belief is likely to be true.
The coherence theories of justification is illustrated in features common to ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’, exhibiting characteristic theories affirming that coherence is a matter of internal relations among beliefs and that justification is a matter of coherence. If, then, justification is solely a matter of internal relations between beliefs, we are left with the possibility that internal relations might fail to correspond with any external reality. How, one might object, can a completely internal subjective notion of justification bridge the gap between mere true belief, which might be no more than a lucky guess, and knowledge, which must be grounded in some connection between internal subjective conditions and external objective realities?
The answer is that it cannot and that something more than justified true belief is required for knowledge. This result has, however, been established quite apart from considerations of coherence theories of justification. What is required may be put by saying, that the justification, one has must be undefeated by errors in the background system of belief. a justification is undefeated by errors just in case any correction of such errors in the background system of belief and would sustain the justification of the belief on the basis of the corrected system. So knowledge, on this sort of positive coherence theory, is true that coheres with the background belief system and corrected versions of that system. In short, knowledge is true belief plus justification resulting from coherences and undefeated by error (Lehrer, 1990). The connection between internal subjective conditions of belief and external objective realities results from the required correctness of our beliefs about the relations between those conditions and realities. In the example of Julie, she believes that her internal subjective conditions of sensory experience and perceptual belief are connected with the external objective reality of the temperature of the liquid in the container in a trustworthy manner. This background belief that the temperature of the liquid in the container is 105 degrees, and the correctness of that background belief is essential to the justification remaining undefeated. So our background system of beliefs contains a simple theory about our relation to the external world which justifies certain of our beliefs that cohere with that system. Such justification to convert to knowledge, that theory must be sufficiently free from error so that the coherence is sustained in connected versions of our background system of beliefs. The correctness of the simple background theory provides the correctness between internal conditions and external realities.
The coherence theory of truth arises naturally out of a problem raised by the coherence theory of justification. The problem is that anyone seeking to determine whether she has knowledge is confined to the search for coherence among her beliefs. The sensory experiences she has are mute until they are represented in the form of some perceptual belief. Beliefs are the engine that pulls the train of justification, but what assurance do we have that justification is based on true beliefs? What justification do we have that any of our justifications are undefeated? The fear that we might have none, that our beliefs might be the artifact of some deceptive demon or scientist, leads to the quest to reduce truth to some form, perhaps an idealized form of justification (Rescher, 1973 and Rosenberg, 1980). That would close the threatening sceptical gap between justification and truth. Suppose that a belief is if it is ideally justified for some person. For such a person there would be no gap between justification and truth or between justification and undefeated justifications. Truth would be coherence with some ideal background system of beliefs, perhaps one expressing a consensus among belief systems or some convergence toward consensus. Such a view is theoretically attractive for the reduction it promises, but it appears open to profound objections. One is that there is a consensus that we can all be wrong about, at least some matters, for example, about the origins of the universe. If there is a consensus that we can all be wrong about something, then the consensual belief system rejects the equation of truth with consensus. Consequently, the equation of truth with coherence with a consensual belief system is itself incoherent.
Coherence theories of the content of our beliefs and the justification of our beliefs themselves cohere with our background systems but coherence theories of truth do not. Defender of coherentism must accept the logical ‘gap’ between justified belief and truth, but she may believe that her capacities suffice to close the gap to yield knowledge. That view is, at any rate, a coherent one.
It is, nevertheless, extraordinarily difficult to state in a general way the conditions under which a body of evidence provides evidential support for a belief. The mere existence of a logical or probabilistic connection between the evidence and the belief is not sufficient for evidential support. If it were adequate, then all the distant and unseen necessary or probabilistic consequences of one’s justified beliefs would themselves be justified. Since that is clearly unacceptable, one might say instead, that if evidence ℯ provides epistemic support for proposition ‘p’ for person ‘S’, then ℯ must entail or make probable ‘p’ and ‘S’ must ‘grasp’ the connection between ℯ and ‘p’. This reply seems to over-intellectualize the situation, since people seem not to grasp such matters routinely, and it invites a troublesome regress if requiring this ‘grasp’ of the evidential connection amounts to requiring the justified belief that ℯ supports ‘p’. There is no generally accepted view about what is necessary or sufficient for epistemic support.
A further question about evidence concerns exactly what it is to have something as evidence. Stored somewhere in one’s memory are an enormous number of facts, many of these facts may near some proposition ‘p’, that one believes. While considering ‘p’ one may think of only some of these stored facts, if prompted in one way, one might recall some of these facts, and if prompted in other ways, one might recall other facts. Some of them may be accessible only with complex and detailed prompting. But which of these facts are part of the evidence one has and are relevant to the assessment of the epistemic merit of the current belief? A highly restrictive view would limit the evidence to what one actually has currently in mind. A highly literal view would include as part of one’s evidence everything stored in one’s mind. This renders justified some beliefs that seem, from an intuitive viewpoint, quite unreasonable. There is no clearly acceptable way to carve out a theory positioned between these two extremes (Feldman, 1988).
Nonetheless, a different set of questions about evidence concerns the connection between evidence and epistemic. Evidentialism holds that questions about epistemic justification turn entirely upon matters pertaining to evidence. Rival views hold that other sorts of matters play a central role in determining which beliefs are justified. For example, Kornblith (1983) argues that a belief is epistemically justified only if the believer has gone about gathering evidence for it, it is epistemically responsible, Goldman (19860.
Following Aristotle (1941, Bk VI, chI), we may distinguish of two broadly different sorts of intellectual virtue`. There are those qualities of wisdom and good judgement which are conductive to a happy, or moral, or successful life, and there are those qualities of character which are conducive, we think, to the discovery of truth (and the avoidance of error), The latter corresponds to the epistemic virtues in contemporary epistemology.
The progress of science, we would like to think, leads us not only closer to the truth, but to discover ever better means of accomplishing this end but does this mean that we are becoming ever more epistemologically virtuous - or is there a difference between the progress of knowledge and the improvement of epistemic character. Relatedly, there is this sceptical problem. Suppose that the world were so vastly different from the way it is presently conceived that the very characteristic we take to be truth-conducive actually are leading us deeper and deeper into error: Suppose, too, that certain seemingly very simple-minded attitudes and procedures are actually more truth-conducive than these other altitudes. Would the apparent fool, then be the epistemically virtuous inquirer. Or must we somehow relativize what counts as an epistemic virtue roughly to the way the world appears to be. Finally, even leaving aside these sceptical worries, there is a question of whether truth and the avoidance of error are a complex characterization of the ends of intellectual life - or, must we add some reference, say, to the power and scope of our truths.
However, if the world is radically different from the way it appears, to the point that apparent epistemic vices are actually truth-conducive, presumably this should not make us retrospectively term such vices as virtues, even if they are and have been truth-inducive. The proper solution to this difficulty, I would suggest, is simply to make the epistemic virtues qualities which a truth-desiring person would want to have. For even if, unbeknown to us, some wild sceptical possibility is realized, this would not affect our desires (it being, again, unknown). Such a characterisation. Is, moreover, would seem to fit the virtues on our catalogue. Almost by definition, the truth-desiring person would want to be epistemically conscientious, and, again, what seem to be the conditions pertaining to human life and knowledge, the truth-desiring person will also want to have the previously cited virtues of impartiality and intellectual courage.
Another area of concern is whether we are responsible for having, or not having, appropriate epistemic virtues. As following Aristotle, let us concede that we are only responsible for our bad (or good) epistemic habits insofar as these have resulted from our past actions. But this, does not necessarily make our responsibility for exemplifying particular virtues (or vices) on particular occasions indirect - derivative from our responsibilities for action. For if we become habit it is usually careless (as Aristotle suggests) by doing careless things, it is just as true that we are responsible (culpable) for doing careless things to the extent that we can be faulted, of those occasions, for being careless.
While, gathering evidence, for it is an epistemically responsible manner. Goldman (1986) defends reliabilism which, like some other reliabilism which like some other casual theories of justification, implies that having supporting evidence is neither necessary nor sufficient for justification, since on standard understandings of reliabilism, a belief can be caused in a reliable way even though the believer does not have anything that could plausibly be regarded as good evidence for it. The debate on these matters to notice that defenders of evidentialism’s rival, such as Goldman (1986), often go to some lengths to adjust their theories so that they share the straightforward implications of evidentialism. They do not defend the implications of the simple versions of their
theories.
Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), an American philosopher of science and language and made pioneering investigations into the logic of relations, and of the truth functions, and independently discovered the quantifiers slightly later than Frége, however, Pierces`scientific outlook and oppositions to rationalism coexists with admiration for John Duns Scotus (c.1266-1308), and a scholastic approach to problems of reality and ontology. Even so, being a founding father of American pragmatism, for which the meaning of a concept is to be sought of its application. The epistemology of pragmatism is typically anti-Cartesian, fallibistic, naturalistic, in some version it is also realistic, on others not.
In his Collected Papers (1905), his original suggestion to the problem of giving an accurate brief characterization of the philosophical tendencies known as `pragmatism`is far from trivial. It is hard enough to specify what important philosophical ideas were shared by Peirce and James, the founders of pragmatism, hardly yet to find a characterisation that would also comfortably accommodate Dewey, Schiller and Mead: Nearly impossible to extend it to include more recent neo-pragmatists and sympathizers Lewis, Quine, Sellars, Putnam, Apel, Rorty, Rescher,. And son forth. There is a large element of truth in Schiller`s observation, that there are so many pragmatisms as pragmatists.
In pragmatism theories of mathematical knowledge, the indispensability of mathematics in all other knowledge, especially in the physical sciences, is converted into a justification of ‘mathematical commitment’. The only justification of mathematical assertion is that we can’t help ourselves, if we want to achieve the goals of science and everyday life. While this might be regarded as weak confirmation indeed (and certainly no explanation of the ‘obviousness’ of mathematics, as Parsons has pointed out), pragmatics, argue that mathematics is in the same boat as every scientific theory. In this sense, their argument is similar to the ‘good company’ argument of Kant.
Moreover, it is rather, to my mind, within the most enduringly interesting epistemological contribution are to be found: For example, Mead’s theory of the social construction of the self, inspired by Peirce’s critique of the intuitive self-consciousness assumed by Descartes: Lewis - somewhat nominalistic - ‘pragmatic a priori’, itself an inspiration for Quine’s call for ‘a more thorough-going pragmatism (Quine, 1953). Ramsey’s behaviouristic approach to belief, and Quine’s, also to meaning (Quine cites
Dewey, meaning is . . . primarily a property of behaviour (Quine, 1969) Dewey (1925) Quine’s association of natural kinds induction and evolutionary epistemology: Reichenbach’s pragmatic vindication of induction: Hanson’s defence of the idea of an abductive logic of scientific discovery. Sellars’ appeal to the notion of explanatory coherence, Harman’s to inference to the best explanation and Putnam’s explorations of conceptions of truth intermediate between metaphysical realism and relativism. Apel’s of consensual theories and their relation to the social dimension of inquiry: Rescher’s investigations of criteria of success and improvement of cognitive methods. Jardine’s of scientific progress, and many more.
Unifying this rich but, it must be admitted, formidably diverse profusion of philosophical ideas in what one might call the ongoing project of reformist pragmatism: The aspiration to find a middle ground between dogmatism and scepticism. A conception of truth accessible enough to be realistically aspired to, yet objective enough to be worthy of the name: An articulation of the interplay between the world’s contribution to knowledge, and ours. This is the essential spirit of reformist pragmatism, succinctly summed up by James’ . . ,. ‘We give up the doctrine of objectives certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself’ (1897). So conceived, the tradition of reformist pragmatism still flourishes and, though very far as yet from the ‘catholic consent’ Peirce saw as the end of inquiry, it is, indeed, ‘instinct with life’.
Such that it is, epistemological relativism may be defined as the view that knowledge (and/or truth) is relative - to time, to place, to society, to culture, to historical epoch, to conceptual scheme or framework, or to personal training or conviction - so that what counts as knowledge depends upon the value of one or more of these variables. If knowledge and truth are relative in this way, this will be because different cultures, societies, and so forth. Accept different sets of background principles and standards of evaluations for knowledge-claims, and there is no neutral way of choosing between these alterative sets of standards. So the relativist’s basic claim is that the truth and rational justifiability of knowledge-claims are relative to the standards used in evaluating such claims (Siegel, 1987).
The doctrine of relativism is usually traced to Protagoras, who is portrayed in Plato’s ‘Theaetetus’, as holding that ‘man is the measure of all things’ (‘homo mensura’), and that any given thing ‘is to me such as it appears to you’ (152a). Plato’s Socrates characterizes Protagorean relativism as consisting in the view that ‘what seems true to anyone is true for him to who it seems so’ (‘Theaetetus’, 170a). This view is a form of relativism in our sense, since for Protagoras there is no standard higher than the individual with reference to which claims to truth and knowledge can be adjudicated. But relativism as defined is more general that Protagorean relativism, for it places the source of relativism at the level of standards rather than at the level of personal opinion or perception, and as such aptly characterizes more recent versions of relativism justified, false unwarranted.
Opponents of relativism have made many criticisms of the doctrine: By far the most fundamental is the charge that relativism is self-referentially incoherent, in that defending the doctrine require’s one to give it up. There are several versions of the incoherence charge. The most powerful (Siegel, 1987) is that relativism precludes the possibility of determining the truth, warrant or epistemic merit of contentious claims and doctrines - including itself - since according to relativism no claim or doctrine can fail any test of epistemic adequacy or be judged unjustified, false or unwarranted. take Protagorean relativism as an example, if ‘what seems true [or warranted] to anyone is true [or warranted] for him to whom it seems so, then no claim can fail any test of epistemic adequacy or be judged unjustified or false. But if there is no possibility that a claim or doctrine can fail a test of epistemic adequacy or rightness, then the distinction between adequacy and inadequacy, rightness or wrongness is given up. If rightness and wrongness are undermined. But if this is so, then relativism itself cannot be right. The assertion and defence of relativism requires one to presuppose neutral standards. Thus the doctrine of relativism cannot be coherently defended - it can be defended only by being given up. Relativism is thus impotent to defend itself, and fails to this fundamental reflexive difficulty (Siegel, 1987).
A further difficulty worth noting is that concerning the notion of relative truth. Many versions of relativism rely on such a notion, but it is very difficult to make sense of it. An assertion that a proposition is ‘true for me’ (or ‘true for members of my culture’) is more readily understood as a claim about what I (or members of my culture) believe, than it is as a claim ascribing to that proposition some peculiar form of truth. Moreover, even if this notion could be made sense of, it would still fail to the incoherence argument (Siegel, 1987).
Despite these ancient and powerful responses to relativism, the last several decades have witnessed a resurgence of the doctrine. This is at least in part due to the difficulty of formulating a defensible conception of non-relativism. Many relativists argue for relativism on the grounds that any non-relativistic alternative will require repugnant epistemological commitments, e.g., to certainty, privileged frameworks, or dogmatism. The challenge to opponents of relativism is to develop a non-relativistic epistemology as for being an (‘absolutism’) which includes an acceptable account of rationality and rational justification, which is fallibilistic and non-diagnostic, which rejects any notion of a privileged framework in which knowledge-claims must be couched, and which is self-referentially coherent (Siegel, 1987). Roderick Chisholm, advocates particularism as the correct response, as his view, which has also become known as critical cognitivism, may be summarized as follows. Criteria for the application of epistemic concepts are expressed by epistemic concepts are expressed by epistemic principles. The antecedent of such a principle states the non-normative ground which the epistemic status ascribed by th e consequential supervence ©ƒ Chisholm, 1957 and 1982) an example is the following:
If `S`is appeared to F-ly, then `S`is justified in believing that there is an `F`in front of `S`.
According to this principle, a criterion for justification believing that there is something red in front of me is `bring appeared to redly`. Chisholm considers various principles of this kind, accepting or rejecting them depending on whether or not they fit what he identifies, without using any criterion, as the instances of justified belief. However, as the result of using this method, he rejects the principle as being too broad, and Hume`s empirical criterion (which, unlike the criteria Chisholm tries to formulate, states a necessary conditionals.
If S is justified in believing that there is an F in front of S, then S`s belief is deducible from S`s sense-experience.
As too narrow. ©ƒ. Chisholm, 1982 and 1977).
Contemporary versions of relativism occur in a wide variety of philosophical contexts and enjoy an equally wide variety of philosophical pedigees. Chief among them are versions of relativism spawned by Wittgensteinian considerations concerning language use, conceptual schemes or frameworks, and forms of life (Wilson, 1970 and Wittgenstein): Proponents of the strong programme in the sociology of knowledge (Barnes, Bloor in Hollis and Lukes, 1982) a variety of quite different positions which might be ground together under the heading of contemporary neo-pragmatism (e.g., Rorty, 1979, 1982 and Goodman, 1978: Putnam, 1981), and, perhaps, most surprisingly, recent works in philosophy of science (Kuhn, 1970 and Feyerabend, 1975). These and other contemporary versions of relativism make clear that the doctrine is a live and well, and is subject of intense philosophical debate, as philosophers sympathetic to relativism attempt to develop versions of the doctrine which are immune to the standards criticisms. Of course, philosophers who are unsympathetic to the doctrine continue to press traditional and more recently developed objections to it . The current scene is one in which interest in relativism remains high.
Subjectivity, that is to say, is that of any philosophical view that attempts to understand in a subjective manner what at fist glance would seem to be a class of judgements that are objectively either true or false -i.e., true or false independently of what we believe, want, or hope. There are two ways of being a subjectivist. In the first way , one can say that the judgements in question, despite first appearances, are really judgements about our own attitudes, beliefs, emotions, and so forth. In the second way, one can deny that the judgements are true or false at all, arguing instead that they are disguised commands or expressions of our attitudes. In ethics, for example, a subjective view of the second sort is that moral judgements are simply expressions of our positive and negative attitudes. This is emotivism. Prescriptivism is also a subjective view of the second sort: It is the view that moral judgements are really commands - to say ‘χ’ is good, is to say, details aside, ‘Do χ’. Views that make morality ultimately a matter of conventions (or what we most people agree to) can also be construed as subjective theories, albeit of the first type. Subjectivism is not limited to ethics, however, according to a subjective view of epistemic rationality, the standards of rational belief are the standards that the individual (or perhaps, most members in the individual’s community) would approve of insofar as they are interested in believing those propositions that are true and not believing those propositions that are false. Similarly, phenomenalists can be regarded as proposing a subjective account of material object statements, since according to them, such statements are best understood as complex statements about the course of our experiences.
There are several sorts of subjectivity to be distinguished, if subjectivity is attributed to a concept, considered as a way of thinking of some object or property. It would be much too undiscriminating to say that a concept is subjective if particular mental states are mentioned in the correct account of mastery of the concept. For instance , if the late Wittgenstein is right , the mental state of finding it natural to go on one way rather than another has to be mentioned in the account of mastery of and concept. All concepts would then be counted as subjective, as we can distinguish several more discriminating criteria. First, a concept it can be called subjective if an account of its mastery requires the thinker to be capable of having certain kinds of experience, or at least what is like to have such experiences. Variants on the criterion can be obtained by substituting other specific psychological states in place of experience. If we confine ourselves to the criterion which does mention experience, then concepts of experience themselves plausibly meet the condition. What have traditionally been classified as concepts of secondary qualities - such as red, tastes, bitter, warm - have also been argued to meet this criterion. The criterion does, though shape concepts, the relatively observational shape concept as square and regular diamond picks out exactly, the same shape properties, but differ in which perceptual experience are mentioned in accounts of their mastery - different symmetries are perceived when something is seen as a diamond from when it is seen as a square. This example shows that for the fact that a concept is subjective in this sense , nothing follows about the subjectivity of the properties it picks out. Few philosophers would now count shape properties, as opposed to concepts thereof, as subjective.
Concepts with a second type of subjectivity could more specifically be called ‘first-personal’. A concept is first-personal if, in an account of its mastery , the application of the concept to objects other than the thinker is related to the condition under which the thinker is willing to apply the concept to himself. Though there is considerable disagreement on how the account should be formulated, many theories of the concept of belief treat it as first-personal in this sense. For example, this is true of any account which says that a thinker understands a ‘third-personal’ attribution, ‘He believes that so-and-so’, by understanding that it holds, very roughly that if the third person in question is in circumstances in which the thinker would himself (first-person) judge that so-and-so. It is equally true of accounts which in one way or another say that the third-person attribution is understood as meaning that the other person is in some state which stands in some specific sameness relations to the state which causes it, the thinker to be willing to judge, ‘I believe that so-and-so’ is that of the given refers the immediate apprehension of the contents of sense experience, expressed in the first-person, since it lacks the usual causal chain involved in perceiving real qualities of physical objects, and in an epistemic sense, since judgements expressing it are justified independently of all other beliefs and evidence.
The subjectivity of indexical concepts , such as, I, here, now and, that (perceptually presented) and man, has been widely noted. The last of these is subjective in the sense of the first criterion, from which of these are all subjective in that the possibility of a subject’s using any one of them t think about an object at a given time depends upon his relations to that particular object then. Indexicals’ are thus particularly well suited to expressing a particular point of view of view on the world of object s, a point of view available only to those who stand in the right relations to the objects in question.
A property, as opposed to a concept, is subjective if an object’s possession of the property is in part a matter of the actual or possible mental states of subjects standing in specific relations to the object. Colour properties, secondary qualities in general, moral properties, the property of propositions of being necessary or contingent, and the property of actions and mental states of being intelligible, have all been discussed as serious contenders for subjectivity in this sense. To say, that a property is subjective is not to say that it can be analysed away in terms of mental states. The mental states in terms of which subjectivists have aimed to elucidate, say, the property of being red or the property of being kind have included the mental states of experiencing something as red, and judging something to be kind, respectfully. These attitudes embed reference to the original properties themselves - or at least to concepts thereof - in a way which makes eliminative analysis problematic. The same plausibly applies to a subjectivist treatment of intelligibility: At which point, the mental state would have to be that of finding something intelligible. Even without any commitment to eliminative analysis, though, the subjectivist`s claim remains substantial. The subjectivist`s claim needs extensive consideration for each of the diverse areas of mention. In the case of colours, part of the task of the subjectivist who makes his claim is to argue against those would identify the property of being red with a physical reflectance property, or with some more complex vector or physical properties.
Suppose that for an object to have a certain property is for subject s standing in a certain relation to it, and in that is to be for easily decided arithmetic propositions and in that mental state, judge the object to have the property, their judgement will be true. Some subjectivists have been tempted to work this point into a criterion of a property’s being subjective. There is, however, an issue for which is not definitional. Prima facie, it seems that we can make sense of this possibility: That though in certain circumstances, a subject’s judgement about whether an object has a property are guaranteed to be correct, it is no his judgement (in those circumstances) or anything else about his or others’ mental state’s which makes the judgement correct. To many philosophers, this will seem to be the actual situation for easily decided arithmetic propositions such as 3 + 3 = 6. If this is correct, the subjectivist will have to make essential use of some such asymmetrical notions as ‘what makes a proposition true’, or ‘that in virtue of which a proposition is true’. Conditionals or equivalence alone, no even a priori ones, will not capture the subjectivist character of the position.
Finally, subjectivity has been attributed to modes of understanding. Elaborating a mode of understanding can in large part, be seen as elaboration of the conditions of mastery of mental concepts. For instance, those who believe that some form of the imagination is involved in understanding third-person ascriptions of experiences will want to write this into the account of mastery of those attributions. Nonetheless, some of those who attribute subjectivity to modes of understanding include in their conception the claim that some or all mental states are themselves subjective. This can be a claim about the mental properties themselves, rather than concepts thereof, but it is no charitable to interpret it as the assertion that mental properties involve mental properties. Rather, using the distinction we already have, it can be read as the conjunction of these two propositions: That concepts of mental states are subjective is one of the sense given attributes, from which by concepts are thus subjective. Such a position need be opposed to philosophical materialism. Since it can allow for some version of this materialism for mental states. It would, however,
rule out identities between mental and physical events.
In all that has been said, or has become, it is, nonetheless, the view of human nature that emerges the subfield as taken to epistemic virtue to be central to understanding justification or knowledge or both. An epistemic virtue is a personal quality conducive to the discovery of truth, the avoidance of error, or some other intellectually valuable goal. Following Aristotle, we should distinguish these virtues from such qualitites as wisdom or good judgement, which are the intellectual basis of practical - but not necessary intellectual - success.
The importance, and to an extent, the very definition of this notion depends, however, on larger issues of epistemology. For those who favour a naturalist conception of knowledge, say, as a belief formed in a ‘reliable’ way, there is reason to call any truth-conducive quality or property working cognitive mechanism an epistemic virtue. There is no particular reason to limit the epistemic virtues to recognizable personal qualities: A high mathematical aptitude may count as an epistemic virtue, for those who favour a more ‘normative’ conception of knowledge, the corresponding notion of an epistemic virtue (or vice) will be narrower, it will be tried to personal qualities (like impartially or carelessness) whose exercise one would associate with an ethics of belief.
In short, the central idea of virtue epistemology is that justification and knowledge arise from the proper functioning of our intellectual virtue or faculties in an appropriated environment. This idea is captured in the following criterion for justified belief:
(J) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ if and only if S’s believing that ‘p’ is the result of S’s intellectual virtues or faculties functioning in an appropriated environment.
The explanation in which of serving to explain as clearly conveying or manifesting for that which of something that makes an explanation for such as, ‘What is an intellectual virtue or faculty? A virtue or faculty in general is a power or ability or competence of obtainably achieving some result .
An intellectual virtue or faculty, in the sense intented, is a power or ability or competence to arrive at truths in a particular field, and to avoid believing falsehoods in that field. Explanations for which is an example of human intellectual virtues are right, hearing, introspection, memory, deduction and induction. More exactly:
(V) A mechanism ‘M’ for generating and/or maintaining beliefs is an intellectual virtue if and only if ‘M’ is a competency to believe true propositions and avoid believing false propositions within a field of propositions ‘F’, when one is in a set of circumstances ‘C’.
It is required that we specify a particular field of propositions for ‘M’, since a given cognitive mechanism will be a competence for believing some kinds of truths but not others. The faculty of sight, for example, allows us to determine the colours of objects, but not the sounds which they make. It is also required that we specify a set of circumstances for ‘M’, since a given cognitive mechanism will be a competence in some circumstances, but no others. For example, the faculty of sight allows us to determine colours in a well lighten room, but not in a dark cave.
According to this formulation of ‘what makes a cognitive mechanism an intellectual virtue’, is that it is reliable in generating true beliefs rather than false beliefs in the relevant field and in the relevant circumstances. It is correct to say, therefore, that virtue epistemology is a kind of ‘reliabilism’. Whereas, generic reliabilism maintains that justified belief is belief which results from a reliable cognitive process, virtue epistemology makes a restriction on the kind of process which is allowed. Namely, the cognitive processes which are important for justification and knowledge are those which have their basis in an intellectual virtue.
Finally, the idea is that a cognitive mechanism might be reliable in some environments but not in others. Consider an example from Alvin Plantinga, who explains that cats are investable to human beings, moreover, Alfa Centaurian cats emit a type of radiation which causes humans to form the beliefs that there is a dog barking nearby. Suppose, now, that you are transported to this Alfa Centaurian planet, a cat walks by, and you form the belief that there is a dog barking nearby. Surely you are not justified in believing this, however, the problem is not with your intellectual faculties, but with your immediate encompassing environment. Although your faculties of perception are reliable on Earth, they are unreliable on the Alfa Centaurian planet, which is an inappropriate environment for those faculties.
The central idea of virtue epistemology, as expressed in (J), has a high degree of initial plausibility. By making the idea of faculty reliability central, virtue epistemology explains nicely why beliefs caused by perception and memory are often justified, while beliefs caused by wishful thinking and superstitions are not. Secondly, the theory gives us a basis for answering certain kinds of scepticism. Specifically, we may agree that if we were brains in a vat, or victims of a Cartesian demon, then we would not have knowledge even if those rare cases where our beliefs turned out true. But virtue epistemology explains that what is important for knowledge is that our faculties are, in fact reliable of an environment that we inhabitantly contend with our daily ritualized patterns and behavioural conduct. And so, we do have knowledge so long as we are, in fact, not victims of a Cartesian demon, or brains in a vat. Finally . Plantinga agues that virtue epistemology deals well with Gettier problems. The idea is that Gettier problems give us cases of justified belief which are ‘true by accident’. Virtue epistemology, as Plantinga argues, helps us to understand what it means for a belief to be true by accident, what it means for a belief to be true by accident, and also provides a basis for saying why such cases are not knowledge. Beliefs are true by accident when they are caused by otherwise reliable faculties functioning in an inappropriate environment. Plantinga develops this line of reasoning in [Plantinga, 1988].
But, although virtue epistemology has good initial plausibility, it faces some substantial objections. Below is an attempt of two objections, pointing where virtue epistemology have tried to address them. The first objection which virtue epistemology faces is a version of the generality problem. We may understand the problem more clearly if we consider the following criterion for justified belief, which results from our explication of (J).
(J’) ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ if and only if
(1) ‘S’ believes that ‘p’, and,
(2) There is a field ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’ such that,
(χ) the proposition that ‘p’ is in ‘F’
(y) ‘S’ is in ‘C’ with respect to the proposition that ‘p’, and,
(z) If ‘S’ were in ‘C’ with respect to a proposition in ‘F’, then ‘S’ would very likely believe correctly with regard to that proposition.
The problem arises in how we are to select an appropriate ‘F’ and ‘C’. For given any true belief that ‘p’. We can always come up with a field ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’, that there are ‘basic’ beliefs, which acquire justification without dependance on reference. Reliabilism might rationalise this by indicating that the basic beliefs are formed by reliable non-inferential precesses. In that, we do not want to say that all of S’s true beliefs are justified for ‘S’. And of course, there is an analogous problem in the other direction of generality. For given any belief that ‘p’ we can always specify a field of propositions ‘F’ and a set of circumstances ‘C’, such that ’p’ is in ‘F’, ‘S’ is in ‘C’, and ‘S’ is not reliable with respect to propositions in ‘F’ in ‘C’.
In these considerations show that virtue epistemology must say more about the selection of relevant fields and sets of circumstances. Plantinga addresses the generality problem by introducing the concept of a design plan for our intellectual faculties. Relevant specifications for fields and sets of circumstances are determined by this plan. One might object that this approach requires the problematic assumption of a Designer of the design plan, but Plantinga disagrees on two counts: He does not think that the assumption is needed, or that it would be problematic (Plantinga 1987 and 1988). Ernest Sosa addresses the generality problem by introducing the concept of an epistemic perspective in order to have reflective knowledge, ‘S’ must have a true grasp of the reliability of her faculties, this grasp itself provided by a ‘faculty of faculties’. Relevant specifications of an ‘F’ and ‘C’ are determined by this perspective. Alternatively, Sosa has suggested that relevant specifications are determined by the purposes of the epistemic community. The idea is that fields and sets of circumstances are determined by their place in useful generalizations about epistemic agents and their abilities to act as reliable information-sharers (these strategies are developed by Soda, in Sosa, 1988a, 1988b and 1991).
The second objection which virtue epistemology faces is that (J) and (J’) are too strong. It is possible for ‘S’ to be justified in believing that ‘p’, even when S’s intellectual faculties are largely unreliable. Suppose, for example, that Ruth is the victim of a Cartesian deceiver. Despite her best efforts, therefore, almost none of Ruth’s beliefs about the world around her are true. It is clear that in this case Ruth’s faculties of perception are almost wholly unreliable. But we would not want to say that none of Ruth’s perceptual beliefs are justified. If Ruth believes that there is a tree in her yard, and she bases this belief on the usual tree-like experience, then it seems that she is justified as we would be regarding a similar belief.
Sosa addresses the current problem by arguing that justification is relative to an environment ‘E’. Accordingly, ‘S’ is justified in believing that ‘p’ relative to ‘E’ if and only if S’s faculties would be reliable in ‘E’. Note that on this account, ‘S’ need not actually be in ‘E’ in order for ‘S’ to be justified in believing some proposition relative to ‘E’. This allows Sosa to conclude that Ruth is justified in her perceptual beliefs relative to our environment, although she is not justified in those beliefs relative to the environment she is actually in (Sosa, 1991).
According to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belied, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case. Others think this entailment thesis can be rendered more accurately if we substitute for belief some closely related attitude, for instance, several philosophers would prefer to say that knowledge entails psychological certainty (Prichard, 1950: Ayer, 1956) or conviction (Lehrer, 1974) or acceptance (Lehrer, 1089). Nonetheless, these arguments are arguments against all versions of the thesis that knowledge requires having a belief-like attitude toward the known. These arguments are given by philosophers who think that knowledge and belief (or a facsimile) are mutually incompatible (the incompatibility thesis), or by ones who say that knowledge does not entail belief, or vice versa, so that each may exist without the other, but the two may coexist (the separability thesis).
The incompatibility thesis is sometimes traced to Plato in view of his claim that knowledge is infallible while belief or opinion is fallible (Republic 476-9). But this claim would not support the thesis. Belief might be a component of an infallible form of knowledge in spite of the fallibility of belief. Perhaps knowledge for the fallibility involve some factor that compensates for fallibility of belief.
A. Duncan-Jones (1938, cf, also Vendler, 1978) cites linguistic evidence to back up the incompatibility thesis. He notes that people often say ‘I don’t believe she is guilty, I know she is’ and the like, which suggests that belief rules our knowledge, however, as Lehrer (1974) indicates, that the aforesaid exclamation is only a more emphatic way of saying ‘I don’t just believe she is guilty, I know she is’ where ‘just’ makes it especially clear that the speaker is signalling that she has something more salient than mere belief, not that she has something inconsistent with belief, namely knowledge. Compare: ‘You didn’t hurt him, you killed him’.
H.A. Prichard (1966) offers a defence of the incompatibility thesis which hinges on the equation of knowledge with certainty (both infallibility and psychological certitude) and the assumption that when we believe in the truth of a claim we are not certain about its truth. Given that belief always involves uncertainty while knowledge never does, believing something rules out the possibility of knowing it. Unfortunately, however, Prichard gives us no good reason to grant that states of belief are never ones involving confidence. Conscious beliefs clearly involve some level of confidence: To suggest that we cease to believe things about which we are completely confident is bizarre.
A.D. Woozley (1953) defends a version of the separability thesis. Woozley`s version which deals with psychological certainty rather than belief per se, is that knowledge can exist in the absence of confidence about the item known, although knowledge might also be accompanied b y confidence as well. Woozley remarks that the test of whether I know something is ;what I can do, where what I can do may include answering questions;. On the basis of this remark he suggests that even when people are unsure of the truth of a claim, they might know that the claim is true. We unhesitatingly attribute knowledge to people who give correct responses on examinations even if those people show no confidence in their answers. Woozley acknowledges, however, that it would be odd for those who lack confidence to claim knowledge. It would be peculiar to say: I am unsure whether my answer is true, still I know it is correct. But this tension Woozley explains using a distinction between conditions under which we are justified in making a claim which we are justified in making a claim (such as a claim to know something), and conditions under which the claim we make is true. While I know such and such might be true even if I am unsure whether such and such holds, nonetheless, it would be inappropriate for me to claim that I know that such and such unless I were sure of the truth of my claim.
Colin Radford (1966) extends Woozley’s defence of the separability thesis. In Radford’s view, not only is knowledge compatible with the lack of certainty, it is also compatible with a complex lack of belief. He argues by example: In one example, Jean has forgotten that he learned some English history years prior and yet he is able to give several correct responses to questions such as ‘When did the Battle of Hastings occur? Since he forgot that he took history, he considers his correct responses to be no more than guesses. Thus, when he says the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 he would deny having the belief that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. A fortiori he would deny being sure (or having the right to sure) that 1066 was the correct date. Radford would, nonetheless, insist that Jean knows when the Battle occurred. Radford admits that it would be inappropriate for Jean to say that he knew when the Battle of Hastings occurred, but like Woozley, attributes the impropriety to a fact about when it is and is and is not appropriate to claim knowledge. When we claim knowledge we ought, at least to believe that we have the knowledge we claim, or else our behaviour is ‘intentionally misleading’.
Those who agree with Radford’s defence of the separability thesis will probably think of belief as an inner state that can be detected through introspection. That Jean lacks beliefs about English history is plausible on this Cartesian picture, since Jean does not find himself with any beliefs about English history when he seeks them out. One might criticize Radford, however, by rejecting the Cartesian view of belief, for one could argue that some beliefs are thoroughly unconscious, for example, Or one could adopt a behaviourist conception of belief, such as Alexander Bain’s (1859), according to which having beliefs is a matter of the way people are supposed to behave (and hasn’t Radford already adopted a behaviourist conception of knowledge?). Since Jean gives the correct response when queried, a form of verbal behaviour, a behaviourist would be tempted to credit him with the belief that the Battle of Hastings occurred in 1066.
D.M. Armstrong (1073) takes a different take against Radford. Jean does know that the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066. Armstrong will grant Radford this point as, in fact, Armstrong suggests that Jean believes that 1066 is not the date the Battle of Hastings occurred, for Armstrong equates the belief that such and such is just possible but not more than just possible with the belief that such and such is not the case. However, Armstrong insists, Jean also believes that the Battle occurred in 1066. After all, had Jean been mistaught that the Battle occurred in 1060, and had he had forgotten being ‘taught’ this and subsequently ‘guessed’ that it took place in 1060, we would surely describe the situation as one in which Jean`s false belief about the Battle became unconscious over time but persisted as a memory trace that was causally responsible for his guess. Out of consistency, we must describe Radford`s original case as one in which Jean`s true belief became unconscious but persisted long enough to cause his guess. Thus while Jean consciously believes that the Battle did no occur in 1066, unconsciously he does believe it occurred in 1066. So, after all, Radford does not have a counterexample to the claim that knowledge entails belief. Armstrong`s response to Radford was to reject Radford`s claim that the examinee lacked the relevant belief about English history. Another response is to argue that the examinee lacks the knowledge Radford attributes to him (cf. Sorensen, 1982). If Armstrong is correct in suggesting that Jean believes both that 1066 is that it is not the date of the Battle of Hastings, one might deny Jean knowledge on the grounds that people who believe that denial of what they believe cannot be said to know the truth of their belief. Another strategy might be to liken the examinee case to examples of ignorance as given in recent attacks on externalist accounts of knowledge would tend not to favour this strategy: Consider the following case developed by BonJour (1985): For no apparent reason, Samantha believes that she is clairvoyant. again for no apparent reason, she one day comes to believe that the Primer of Canada is in Toronto, Ontario, even though she has every reason to believe that the Prime Minister of Canada is in Ottawa, the capital of Canada. In fact, Samantha is a completely reliable clairvoyant, and she has arrived at her belief about the wherabouts of the Prime Minister through the power of her clairvoyance. Yet, surely, Samantha`s belief is completely irrational. She is not justified in thinking what she does. If so, then she does not know where the Premier is. But Radfords examinee is a little different. even if Jean lacks the belief which Radford denies him. Radford does not have an example of knowledge that is unattended with belief. Suppose that Jeans memory had been sufficiently powerful too produce the relevant belief. As Radford says, Jean has every reason to suppose that his response is mere guesswork, and so he has every reason to consider his belief false. His belief would be an irrational one, and hence one about whose truths Jean would be ignorant.
It is, however, a collection of considerations and reasoning that instill and sustain the conviction that some proposed theories - the theories proven - is not only true, but could not possibly be false. As propositional knowledge is the type of knowing whose instances are labelled by means of a phrase expressing some proposition. Theories of propositional knowledge differ over whether the proposition that ‘h’ is involved in a more intimate fashion, such as serving as a way of picking out a propositional attitude required for knowing (e.g., believing that ‘h’, accepting that ‘h’ or being sure that ‘h’). According, to most epistemologists, knowledge entails belief, so that I cannot know that such and such is the case unless I believe that such and such in the case. In at least, issues surrounding certainty are inextricably connected with those concerning scepticism. For many sceptics have traditionally held that knowledge requires certainty, and, of course, they claim that certain knowledge is not possible. Yet, in part, in order to avoid scepticism, the anti-sceptics have generally held that knowledge does not (Lehrer, 1974 and Dewey, 1960). However, knowledge does require certainty but, against the sceptics, that certainty is possible (Moore, 1959, and Klein, 1981, 1990). The task is to provide a characterization of certainty which would be acceptable to both the sceptic and the anti-sceptic. For such an agreement is a condition of an interesting debate between them.
Traditionally, belief has been epistemologically interesting, if in its propositional guise: It seems clear that certainty is a property that can be ascribed to either a person or a belie f. we can say that a proposition `p`is certain. The two uses can be connected by saying that `S`has the right to be certain by saying that `S`has the right to be certain just in case `p`is sufficiently warranted (Ayer, 1956), whereas, most philosophers who have taken the to sense that which a proposition is said to be certain, the important move to be investigated by epistemology. In that of defining certainty it is crucial to note that the term has not a absolute and relative sense. Now. some philosophers, notably that of Unger (1975), have argued that the absolute is the only sense, and that the relative sense, and that the relative sense is only apparent. On this definition propositions about physical objects (objects occurring space) cannot be certain. However, that characterization of certainty should be reject precisely because it makes the question of the existence of absolute certainty empirical propositions uninterestingly. For it concedes to the sceptic the impossibility of certainty about physical objects too easily (Asyer, 1956 and Moore, 1959). Thus this approach would not be acceptable to the anti-sceptic.
For instance, the tripartite analysis of propositional knowledge, sometimes called the traditional or standard analysis. Treats propositional knowledge as consisting in having a justified true belief that ‘h’ - a sentence expressing an attitude saying as taken to express the associated proposition, . . . the tripartite definition of knowledge states that propositional knowledge, i.e., knowing that ‘p’ has three individually necessary and jointly deferent conditions: Justification, truth and belief. The belief condition requires that anyone knows that ‘p’ believes that ‘p’. Truth condition requires that any known proposition be true. And the justification condition requires that all known proposition be adequately justified, warranted or evidentially supported.
Although most theories of propositional knowledge purport to analyse it, philosophers disagree about the goal of a philosophical analysis, nonetheless, theories of propositional knowledge may differ over whether they aim to cover all species of propositional knowledge and, if they do not have this goal, over whether they aim to reveal any unifying link between the so species that they investigate, e.g., empirical knowledge, and other species of knowing.
Very many accounts of propositional knowledge have been inspired by the quest to add a fourth condition to the tripartite analysis, that is to say, of justification, truth and belief. In so as to avoid Gettier-type counterexamples to it, and by the resulting need to deal with more counterexamples provoked by these new analyses (Shope, 1983) Keith Lehrer (1965) or ordinated a Gettier-type example that has been a fertile source of important variants. It is the case of Mr Nogot, who is in one’s office and has provided some evidence, ℯ, in response to all of which one forms a justified belief that Mr Nogot is in the office and owns a Ford, thanks to which one arrives at the justified belief that ‘h1. Someone in the office owns a Ford’. In the example, ℯ consists of such things as Mr Nogot’s presently showing one a certificate of Ford ownership while claiming to own a Ford and having been reliable in the past. Yet, Mr Nogot has just been shamming, and the only reason that it is true that h, is because, unbeknown to oneself, a different person in the office owns a Ford.
Variants on this example efforts to analyse species of propositional knowledge. For instance, Alan Goldman (1088) has proposed that when one has empirical knowledge that ‘h’, then the state of affairs (call it ‘h*’) expressed by the proposition that ‘h’ figures prominently in an explanation of the occurrence of those‘s believing that ‘h’ where explanation is taken to involve one of a variety of probability relations concerning ‘h*’ and the belief state. But this account runs foul of a variant on the Nogot case akin to one that Lehrer (1979) has described. In Lehrer’s variant, Mr Nogot has manifested a compulsion to trick people into justifiably believing truths yet falling short of knowledge by means of concocting Gettierized evidence for those truths. If we make the trickster’s neurosis highly specific to the type of information contained in the proposition that ‘h’, we obtain a variant satisfying Goldman’s requirement that the occurrence of ‘h*’ significantly raises the probability of one’s believing that ‘h’. (Lehrer himself, 1990) has criticized Goldman by questioning whether, when one has ordinary perceptual knowledge that an object is present, the presence of the object is what explains one’s believing it to be present.
In grappling with Gettier-type examples, some analyses proscribe specific relations between falsehoods and the evidence or grounds that justify one’s believing. A simple restriction of this type requires that one’s reasoning to the belief that ‘h’ does not crucially depend on or upon any falsity to lemmata (such as the validity as used to demonstrate a principle proposition that Mr Nogot in the office and owns a Ford). However, Gettier-type example’s have been constructed where one does not reason through any false belief (e.g., a variant of the Nogot case where one arrived as in believing that h1 of basing it upon as true existential generalisations of one’s evidence: There is some one in the office who has provided evidence ℯ. Is responsible to similar cases, as in Sosa (1991) has proposed that for propositional knowledge the basis for the justification of one’s belief that ‘h’ must not involve one’s being justified in believing or in presupposing any falsehood, even if one’s reasoning to the belief does not employ that falsehood as a lemmata. Alternatively. Roderick Chisholm (1989) requires that if there is something that makes the proposition that ‘h-evident’, for one and makes something else that is false evident for one, then the proposition that ‘h’ is implied by a conjunction of propositions, each of which is evident for one and is such that something that makes it evident for one makes no falsehood evident for one (Shope, 1983 also Sosa and Chisholm). Other types of analyses are concerned with the role of falsehoods within the justification of the proposition that ‘h’ versus the justification of one believing that ‘h’). Such as theory may require that one’s evidence bearing on this justification not already require that no falsehoods are involved at specific place’s in a special explanatory structure relating to the justification of the proposition that ‘h’ (Shope, 1983).
A frequently pursued line of research concerning a possibility of a fourth condition of knowing seeks what is called a ‘defeasibility analysis’ of propositional knowledge. Early versions characterized defeasibility by means of subjunctive conditionals of the form, If ‘A’ were the case then ‘B’ would be the case. But more recently the label has been applied to conditions about evidential or justificational relations that are not themselves characterized in terms of conditionals. Once, again, the early versions of defeasibility theories advanced conditionals where ‘A’ is a hypothetical situation concerning one’s acquisition of a specified sort of epistemic status for specified propositions (e.g., one’s acquiring justified belief in some further evidence or truths) and ‘B’ concerns, for instance, the continued justified status of the proposition that ‘h’ or of one’s believing that ‘h’.
A unifying thread connecting the conditional and non-conditional approaches to defeasibility may lie in the facts that are incorporated by: (1) What is a reason for being in propositional attitude is in part a consideration, instances of the thought of which have the power to affect relevant processes of propositional attitude formation: (2) Philosophers have often hoped to analyse power ascriptions by means of conditional statements: And (3) arguments portraying evidential or justificational relations and abstraction or justificational relations are abstractions from those processes of propositional attitude maintenance and formulation that manifest rationality. So even when some circumstance ‘R’ is a reason for believing or accepting that ‘h’, some other circumstance ‘K’, may prevent an occasion from being present for a rational manifestation of the relevant power of the thought of ‘R’ and it will not be a good argument to base a conclusion that ‘h’ on the premise that ‘R’ and ‘K’ obtain. Whether ‘K’ does play this interfering, ‘defeating’ role will depend upon the total relevant situation.
Accordingly, one of the most sophisticated defeasibility accounts, which has been proposed by John Pollock (1986), requires that in order to know that ‘h’ one must believe that ‘h’ on the basis of an argument whose force is not defeated in the aforementioned way, given the total set of circumstances described by all truths. Moore specifically, Pollock defines defeat as a situation where (1) one believes that ‘p’ and it is logically possible for one to become justified in believing that ‘h’ by believing that ‘p’, and (2) one actually has a further set of beliefs ‘S’ logically consistent with the proposition that ‘h’, such that it is not logically possible for one to become justified in believing that ‘h’ by believing it on the basis of holding that ‘h’ by believing it is the basis of holding the set of beliefs which is the union of ‘S’ with the belief that ‘p’ (Pollock, 1986). Furthermore, Pollock requires for propositional knowledge that the rational presumption in favour of one’s believing that ‘h’ created by one’s believing that ‘p’ is undefeated by the set of all truths, including considerations that one does not actually believe. Pollock offers no definition of what this requirement means. But he may intend roughly the following, as it where, that ‘T’ is the set of all propositions: (I) One believes that ‘p’ and it is logically possible for one to become justified in believing that ‘h’ by believing that ‘p’, and (II) there are logically possible situations in which one becomes justified in believing that ‘p’ and the beliefs in ‘T’ include the proposition that Mr Nogot does not own a Ford, but lacks knowledge because condition (II) is not satisfied.
But given such an interpretation, Pollock’s account illustrates the fact that defeasibility theories typically have difficulty dealing with introspective knowledge of one’s own beliefs. Suppose that some proposition, say, that ƒ is false, but does not realize this and holds the belief that ƒ. Condition (II) has no coherent application to one’s introspective knowledge that ‘h’: ‘I believe that ƒ’. At least , this is so if one ‘s reason for believing that ‘h’, includes the presence of the very condition of which one is aware, i.e., one’s believing that ƒ. It is incoherent to suppose that one retain s the latter reason yet also believes the truth that not-ƒ. This objection can be avoided, but at the cost of adopting what is a controversial view about introspective knowledge that ‘h’, namely, the view that one ‘s belief that ‘h’ is in such cases mediated by some mental state of intervening between the mental state of which there is introspective knowledge and the belief that ‘h’, so that is the mediating state rather than the introspected state that is included in one’s reason for believing that ‘h’. In order to avoid adopting this controversial view, Paul Moser (1089) has proposed a disjunctive analysis of propositional knowledge requiring that either one satisfies a defeasibility condition rather like Pollock’s or else one believes that ‘h’ by introspection. However, Moser leaves obscure exactly why beliefs arrived at by introspection count as knowledge.
There are some prominent general proposals in circulation, one sort of proposal modification or that of the defeasibility analysis, which requires that the justification appropriated to knowledge be ‘undefeated’, in the general sense that some appropriate subjunctive conditional concerning genuine defeaters of justification be that it is true of justification. One straightforward defeasibility condition, for instance, requires of Smith’s knowing that ‘p’ that there be no true proposition ‘q’, such that if ‘q ‘ became justified for Smith, ‘p’ would no longer be justified for Smith (Lehrer; Paxson and Swain, also in Pappas and Swain, 1978). A different prominent modification requires that the actual justifications for a true belief qualifying as knowledge not depend in a specific way on any falsehood (Armstrong, 1973). The details proposed to elaborate such approaches have met with considerable controversy. Nonetheless, that of propositional knowledge requires justified true belief that is sustained by the collective totality of truths, as found in ‘Knowledge and Evidence‘ that this approach handles not only of Gettier-style standards as applied thereof, but various other problems as well.
Early versions of defeasibility theories had difficulty allowing for the existence of evidence that is ‘merely misleading’, as in the case where one does know that ‘h3’: ‘Tom Grabit stole a book from the library’, thanks to having seen him steal it, yet where, unbeknown to oneself, ‘Tom’s mother, out of dementia has testified that Tom was far away from the library at the time of theft. Ones justified believing that she gave the testimony would destroy one`s justification for believing that h3, if added by itself to ones present evidence.
At least some defeasibility theories cannot deal with the knowledge one has while dying, that h4: In this life there is no time at which I believe that d, whereas the proposition that d expresses the details regarding some erudite manner, e.g., the maximum number of blades of grass ever simultaneously growing on th earth. When it just so happens that it is true that ‘d’, defeasibility analysis typically considers the addition to ones dying thoughts of a belief that ‘d’, in such a away as to improperly true out actual knowledge, that h4.
A quite different approach to knowledge and one able to deal with some Gettier-type cases, involves developing some type of causal theory of propositional knowledge. Some causal theories of knowledge have it that a true belief that ’p’ is knowledge just in case it has the right sort of causal connection to the fact that ‘p’ is applied only to cases where the fact that ‘p’ is a sort that can enter into causal relations: This seems to exclude mathematical and other necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization: And proponents of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual knowledge of particular facts about the subject’s environment.
For example, Armstrong (1973) proposed that a belief of the form ‘This (perceived) object is ‘F’ is (non-inferential) know ledge if and only if the be lie f is a completely reliable sigh that the perceived object is ‘F’: That is, the fact that the object is ‘F’ contributed to causing the belief and its doing do depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictate that, for any subject ‘χ’ and perceived object ‘y’, if ‘χ’ has those properties and believes that ‘y’ is ‘F’, then ‘y’ is ‘F’. Dretske. (1981) offers a rather similar account, in terms of the beliefs being caused by signals received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is F.
This sort of condition fails, however, to be sufficient fo r non-inferential perceptual knowledge because it is compatible with the beliefs being unjustified, and an unjustified belief cannot be knowledge. For example, suppose that your mechanisms for colour perception are working well, but you have been give good reason to think otherwise, to think, that yellow things look faded to you and faded things look differently to you and different thinks look to flow of emptiness. If you fail to heed these reasons you have for thinking that your colour perception is awry and believe of a thing that looks or gives to some sorted appearance of emptiness, that to you that it is basked in yellow, your belief will fail to be justified and will therefore fail to be knowledge, even though it is caused by the things being a faded yellow in such a way as to be a completely reliable sign (or to carry the information ) that the thing is an overflowing emptiness.
Goldman suggests of a furthering example:
Suppose Sam spots Judy across the street and correctly believes it is Judy. If it were Judy’s twin sister. Trudy, he would mistake her for Judy. Does Sam know that it is Judy? As long as there is a serious possibility that the person across the street might have been Trudy rather than Judy . . . we would deny that Sam knows (Goldman, 1986).
The reason that there was a ‘serious possibility’ that it might have been the other twin, as seen by Sam. This suggest s the following criterion of relevance: An alterative situation, where the same belief is produced in the same way but is false, is relevant just in case at some point before the actual belief was caused the chance of that situation’s having come about, instead of the actual situation was too high: It was too much a matter of luck that it didn’t come about.
This would mean that the proposed criterion of knowledge is that, of a justified belief that `p` is knowledge that in case there is no alternative non-p situations, in which the subject is similarly caused to believe that p, and which is such that at some point in the actual world was a serious chance that situation might occur in stead of the actual one.
However, that example shows that the `local reliability of the belief-producing process, on the serious chance explication of what makes an alternative relevant, is not sufficient to make a justified true belief knowledge. another example will show that it is also not necessary. Suppose I am justified in believing the truth that Toronto had defeated Western in their basketball game last night by hearing it so reported by a radio newscaster, and there is nothing at all untoward in the way the newscaster came to say what he did. But suppose further, that at the same time, unknown to me, on the other local station a newscaster reads from mistyped copy and says that Western had defeated Toronto. Since I pretty much randomly chose which local station to listen to, the probability that I would end up with a similarly caused but false belief about the outcome of the Toronto-Western game was about one-half, a serious chance. Nonetheless, these examples make it seem likely that, if there is a criterion for what makes an alterative situation relevant that will save Goldmans claim about local reliability and knowledge, it will not be simple.
The interesting thesis counts as a causal the0ory of justification (in meaning of causal theory) is that of a belief is justified just in case it was produced by a type of process that is globally reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs - which can be defined (to a good enough approximation) as the proportion of the belief it produces (or would produce were it used as much as opportunity allows) that are true - is sufficiently great. The reliable process theory is grounded on two main points. First, the justificational status of a belief depends on the psychological processes that cause (or causally) it, not simply on the logical status of the proposition, or its evidential relations to other propositions. Even a tautology can be believed unjustifiably if one arrives at that belief through inappropriate psychological processes. Similarly, a detective might have a bod y of evidence supporting the hypotheses that Jones is guilty. But if the detective fails to put the pieces of evidence together, and instead believes in Jones guilt only because of his unsavoury appearance, the detectives belief is unjustified, as the critical determinants of justificational status, is then, the psychological processes, i.e., belief-forming or belief-preserving processes such as perception, memory, reasoning, guessing or introspecting. All of which are to included of its processes of which are reliabilistic to a species of causal theory, that such theories require that one or another specified relations holds that can be characterized by mention of some aspect of causation concerning ones belief that ‘h’ (or ones acceptance of the proposition that ‘h’).
However, reason’s specifically dealt with are reasons for questioning the basic idea that the criterion for a belief being justified is its being produced by a reliable process. There is, nonetheless, the doubt about the sufficiency of the reliability criterion, that is prompted by a sort of example that Goldman himself uses for another purpose. Suppose that being in brain-state B, always causes one to believe that one is in brain-state B. Yet, the reliability of the belief-producing process is perfect. But ‘we can readily imagine circumstances in which a person goes into brain-state B, and, therefore, has the belief in question, though this belief is by no means justified’ (Goldman, 1979). Doubt about the necessity of the condition arises from the possibility that one might of having one a strong justification for a certain belief and yet that knowledge is not what actually prompts one to believe. For example, I might be well aware that having read the weather bureau’s forecast that it will be much hotter tomorrow. I have ample reason to be confident in that it will be hotter tomorrow, but I irrationally refuse to believe it until, my Aunt Hattie tells me that she feels in her joints that it will be hotter tomorrow. Nonetheless, what prompts me to believe is not to justify my belief, but my belief is nevertheless, justified by my knowledge of the weather bureau`s prediction and of its evidential force: I can cite it to refute any suggestion that I ought not to be holding the belief. Indeed, give my justification and that there`s nothing untoward about the weather bureau`s prediction, my belief, can be counted knowledge. This sort of example raises doubt whether any causal condition, be it a reliable process of something else, is necessary for justification or that of knowledge.
Such theories require that one or another specified relation holds that can be characterized by mention of some aspect of causation concerning one’s belief that ‘h’ (or ones acceptance of the proposition that ‘h’) and its relation to states of affairs h*, e.g., h* causes the belief, h* and the belief have a common cause. such simple versions of a causal theory are able to deal with the original Nogot case, since it involves no such causal relationships, but cannot explain why there is ignorance in the variations where Nogot is a neurotic trickster. Moreover, Fred Dretske and Berent Enç (1984) have pointed out that sometimes one knows of ‘χ’ that it is φ thanks to recognizing a feature ‘φness’. Without endorsing a causal theory themselves, they suggest that it would need to be elaborated so as to allow that one’s belief that ‘χ’ has φ and has been caused by a factor whose correlation with the presence of ‘φness’ has caused in oneself (e.g., by evolutionary adaption in one’s ancestors) the disposition that one manifests in acquiring the belief in response to the correlation factor. Not only does this strain the unity of a causal theory by complicating it, but no causal theory without other shortcomings has been able to cover instances of a priori knowledge.
Causal theories of propositional knowledge differ over whether they deviate from the tripartite analysis by dropping the requirement that one’s believing (accepting) that ‘h’ be justified. The same variations occurs regarding reliability theories. Variations that belief acquires favourable epistemic linkage to the truth, this view in having advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The reliable process theory is grounded of two points. The justificational status of a belief depends on the psychological processes that cause (or causally sustain) it, not simply on the logical status of the proposition, or its evidential relation to other propositions. The critical determinants of justificational status, then, are psychological processes such as perception and so forth. Clearly not all psychological processes are justification-conferring, in that of saying, what distinguishes justificational processes from the rest, according to reliabalism. ‘Good’ processes are ones whose belief output have a high ratio of truths: ‘Bad’ processes are those with a few truth ratio’s. Where a belief’s justificational status is a function of the truths ratio of the type of process or series of processes, that are causally responsible for it. Such a belief may result from an extended history of mental processes, this form of reliabilism is sometime called historical reliability.
In some versions, the reliability is required to be ‘global’ insofar as it must concern a nomological (probabilistic) relationship of states of type θ to the acquisition of true belief about a wider range of issues than merely whether or not ‘h’. There is also controversy about how to delineate the limits of what constitutes a type of relevant personal state of characteristics. (For instance, in a case where Mr Nogot has not been shamming and one does know thereby that someone in the office owns a Ford, does θ concern a way of forming beliefs about Ford owners in the office, or something broader, such as a way of forming beliefs about the properties of persons spatially close to one, or instead something narrower, such as a way of forming beliefs about Ford owners in offices partly upon the basis of their relevant testimony).
One important variety of reliability theory is a conclusive reasons account, which includes a requirement that one`s reasons for believing that `h` be such that in ones circumstances, if h*: Or, e.g., one would not believe that ‘h’. roughly, the latter is demanded by theories that treat a Knower as tracking the truth, theories which include the further demand that, roughly, if it were the case that ‘h’, the one would believe that ‘h’. A version of the tracking theory has been defended by Robert Nozick (1981)., who adds that if what he calls a ‘method’, has been used to arrive at the belief that ‘h’, then the antecedent clauses of two conditionals that characterize tracking will need to include the hypothesis that one would employ the very same method.
But unless more conditions are added to Nozick’s analysis (1938-2002), it will be too weak to explain why one lacks knowledge in a version of the last variant tricky Mr Nogot, these cases as aforementioned. Where we add the following details: (1) Mr Nogot’s compulsion is not easily changed: (2) While in the office, Mr Nogot has no other easy trick of the relevant type to play on: And (3) one arrives at one’s belief that ‘h’, and by reasoning through a false belief but by basing the belief that ‘h’, upon a true existential generalization of one’s evidence.
Robert Nozick’s analysis is too strong to permit anyone ever to know that ‘h5': Some of my beliefs about beliefs might be otherwise, e.g., I might have rejected one of them. If I know that ‘h5', the satisfaction of the antecedent of one’s of Nozick’s conditionals would involve its being false, that ‘h5'. Thereby thwarting satisfaction of the consequent’s requirement that I not then believe that ‘h5'. For the belief that ‘h5' is itself one of my beliefs about beliefs (Shope, 1984).
Some philosophers think that the category of knowing for which true, justified believing (accepting) is a requirement constitutes only a species of propositional knowledge construed as an even broader category. They have proposed various examples of propositional knowledge that do not satisfy the belief and/or justification conditions or the tripartite analysis of propositional knowledge in terms of capacities or abilities. For instance, Alan R. White (1982) treats propositional knowledge as merely the ability to provide a correct answer to a possible question. However, White may be equating ‘producing’ knowledge in the sense of producing ‘the correct answer to a possible question’ with ‘displaying’ knowledge in the sense of manifesting knowledge (cf. White, 1982). The latter can be done even by very young children and some nonhuman animals independently of there being asked questions, understanding questions or recognizing answers to questions. Indeed, an example that has been proposed as an instance of knowing that ‘h’ without believing or accepting that ‘h’ can be modified so as to illustrate this point. The example concerns an imaginary person who has no special training or information about horses or racing, but who in an experiment persistently and correctly picks the winner of upcoming horseraces. If the example is modified so that the hypothetical ‘seer’ never picks winners, but only muses over whether those horses might win, or only reports picturing their winning, this behaviour should be as of a candidate for the person’s manifesting knowledge that the behaviour of picking it as a winner.
These considerations expose limitations in Edward Craig’s analysis (1990) of the concept of a person’s being a satisfactory informant in relation to an inquirer who wants to find out whether or not ‘h’. Craig realizes that counterexamples to his analysis appear to be constituted by Knowers who are too recalcitrant to inform the inquirer, or too incapacitated to inform, or too discredited to be worthy of considering (as with the boy who cried `Wolf`). Craig admits that this might make preferable some alternative view of knowledge as a difference that helps to explain the presence which offers a recursive definition that concerns one`s having the power to proceed in a way representing the state of affairs h*, and the capacity to have the thought of h* be causally involved in one`s proceeding in this way. When combined with a suitable analysis of representing, this theory of propositional knowledge can be unified with a structurally similar analysis of knowing how to do something.
The definition of knowledge states that propositional knowledge, i.e., has three individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions: Justification, truth and belief. In short prepositional knowledge is justified true belief. The belief condition requires that anyone who knows that ‘p’ believes that ‘p’. The truth condition requires that any known proposition be true. and the justification condition requires that any known proposition be adequately supported, this definition has come to be called ‘th e standard analysis’ of knowledge and has received a serious challenge from Edmund Gettier’s counterexamples in 1963, when in that year Edmund Gettier published two counterexamples to this implication of the standard analysis. In essence, they are:
(A) Smith and Jones have applied for the same job. Smith is justified in believing that (1) Jones will get the job, and that (2) Jones has ten coins in his pocket, on the basis of (1) and (2) Smith infers, and thus is justified in believing that (3) the person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket. As it turns out, Smith himself will get the job, and he also happens to have ten coins in his pocket. So, although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition (3) Smith does not know (3).
(B) Smith is justified in believing that false proposition that (1) Smith infers, and thus is justified in believing, that (2) either Jones owns a Ford or Brown in otherwise elsewhere. As it turns out, Brown is in Toronto Ontario, and so, (2) Is true. So although Smith is justified in believing the true proposition (2) Smith does not know (2).
Gettier’s counterexamples are thus cases where one has justified true belief that ‘p’, but the problem of finding a modification of, or on alternative to, the standard justified-true belief analysis of knowledge that avoids counterexamples like Gettier’s. Some philosophers have suggested that Gettier style counterexamples are defective owing to their reliance on the ,false principle that false propositions can justify one’s belief in other propositions. But there are examples much like Gettier’s that do not depend on this allegedly false principle. As Keith Lehrer and Richard Feldman explain:
Suppose Smith knows that following proposition, ‘m’: Jones, whom Smith has no reason to distrust now. Has told Smith that ‘p’ only because of a state of hypnosis Jones is in, and that ‘p’ is true only because, unknown to himself, Jones has won a Ford in a lottery, since entering the state of hypnosis. And suppose further that Smith deduces from its existential generalization, ‘q’: There is someone whom Smith has always found to be reliable, and whom Smith has no reason to distrust now, who has told Smith, his office mate that ‘q’, since he has correctly deduced ‘q’ from m, which he also knows. But suppose also that on the basis of his knowledge that ‘q’, Smith believes that ‘r’, someone in the office owns a Ford. Under these conditions, Smith has justified true belief that ‘r’, knows his evidence for ‘r’, but does not know that ‘r’.
Gettier-style examples of this sort have proven especially difficult for attempts to analyse the concept of propositional knowledge.
The history of attempted solutions to the Gettier problem is complex and open-ended: It has not produced consensus on any solution. Many philosophers hold, in light of Gettier-style examples, that propositional knowledge requires yet another condition, beyond the justification, truth and belief conditions. Although no particularities enjoy widespread endorsement, there are some prominent general proposals in circulation. One sort of proposal modification, the so-called defeasibility analysis, requiring that the justification appropriate that knowledge be ‘undefeated’ in the general sense that some appropriate subjunctive conditional concerning genuine defeater’s of justification be true of that justification. One straightforward defeasibility condition, for instance, requires Smith’s knowing that ‘p’ that there be no true proposition ‘q’, such that if ‘q’ became justified for Smith, ‘p’ would no longer be justified for Smith (Lehrer and Paxon and by Swain in Pappas and Swain, 1978). A different prominent modification requires that the actual justification for a true belief qualifying as knowledge not depend in a specified way on any falsehood (Armstrong, 1973). The detail proposed to elaborate such approached have met with considerable controversy.
One proposed solution to the Gettier problem relies on the condition of evidential truth-sustenance, more specifically, for a person ‘S’ to have knowledge that ‘p’ on justifying evidence ℯ, ℯ must be truth sustained in the sense: For every true proposition ‘t’ that, when conjoined with ℯ, undermines S’s justification for ‘p’ on ℯ, there is a true proposition, ‘t’ that, when conjoined with ‘ℯ & t’, restores the justification of ‘p’ for ‘S’ in a way that ‘S’ is actually justified in believing that ‘p’. The gist of such, is that propositional knowledge requires justified true belief that is sustained by ‘t’ the collective totality of truths. This has been argued in ‘Knowledge and Evidence’ that this approach handles not only such as the Gettier-style examples as aforementioned, but various others as well.
Three features of such an approach is held yet for another solution. First, it avoids a subjunctive conditional in its stabling condition, and so escapes some difficult problems facing the use of such a conditional in an analysis of knowledge. Second, it allows for non-deductive justifying evidence as a component of propositional knowledge. An adequate condition on an analysis of knowledge is that it not restricted justifying evidence to relations of deductive support. Third, its proposed solution is sufficiently flexible to handle cases describable as follows:
Smith has a justified true belief that ‘p’, but there is a true proposition, ‘t’ which undermines Smith’s justification for ‘p’ when conjoined with it, and which is such that it is either physically or humanly impossible for Smith to be justified in believing that ‘t’.
Examples represented are to suggest that we should countenance varying strengths in notions of propositional knowledge. These strengths are determined by accessibility qualifications on the set of relevant knowledge, precluding underminers. A very demanding concept of knowledge assumes that it need only be logically possible for a Knower to believe a knowledge-precluding underminers. Less demanding concepts assume that it must be physically or humanly possible for a Knower to believe knowledge-precluding underminers. But even such less demanding concepts of knowledge need to rely on a notion of truth-sustaining evidence if they are to survive a threatening range of Gettier-style examples. Given to the solution, the needed conditions for a notion of knowledge is not a function simply of the evidence a Knower actually possesses.
The highly controversial aftermath of Gettier’s original counterexamples has left some philosophers doubtful of the real philosophical significance of the Gettier problem. Such doubt, however, seems misplaced. One fundamental branch of epistemology seeks understanding of the nature of propositional knowledge. And our understanding exactly what propositional knowledge is essentially involves our having a Gettier-resistant analysis of such knowledge. If our analysis is not Gettier-resistant, we will lack an exact understanding of what propositional knowledge is. It is epistemologically important, therefore, to have a defensible solution to the Gettier problem, however, demanding such a solution is.
The notion of evidence figures prominently in several epistemological issues. A good way to raise the central philosophical question about evidence is in the context of rhetorical discourse as held in theory by epistemic justification known as ‘evidentialism’. Evidentialism, suggested by Chisholm (1977) and defended explicitly in Feldman and Comee (1985), holds that a belief is epistemically justified for a person if and only if the person’s evidence supports that belief. Working out the details of this view requires resolving several questions about the concept of evidence, including (1) What sorts of things can be evidence? (2) Under what conditions does a body of evidence support a particular proposition of belief? (3) What is it for someone to have something as evidence? Of course, these questions retain their interest whatever the merits of evidentialism.
The concept of evidence appeal to in evidentialism, generally differs from the related concept of evidence used in the law. In the law, or, at least in informal discourse of the law, evidence includes physical objects and events. Weapons and footprints, for example, are ordinarily said to be evidence. In philosophical discussions, evidence is generally taken to be either internal states such as beliefs, or believed propositions themselves. The belief (or proposition) that a weapon of a certain type was used might be evidence for one person`s guilt.
A crucial question about the nature of evidence is whether evidence is limited to other beliefs (or believed propositions) or whether it includes other mental states such as perceptual experience. Various reasons have been advanced for thinking that only beliefs can be evidence, one being that the evidence for a belief confers justification or the belief, but only something that is itself justified can confer justification on any thing else , and only beliefs (or other doxastic states) can be justified (BonJour, 1983 and Sosa, 1974, 1980) argues that non-doxastic states, such as experience, can also count as evidence. On this view, some beliefs are basic, in the sense that they are justified by experience rather than by other beliefs. Sosa argues that the experiences which justify basic beliefs need not be justified themselves. Van Cleve (1985), adopting a point made by Sosa (1980): Contend that only states that are themselves justified could ‘transmit’ justification, but non-justified states might ‘generate’ justification. Both Sosa and van Cleve claim that since justification supervenes on non-epistemic properties, there must be some non-epistemic states that are sufficient for, and thus generate justification.
However, the view is sometimes stated in terms of the structure of knowledge rather than of justified belief, that if knowledge is true justified belief (plus some further condition), one may think of knowledge as exhibiting a foundationalist structure by virtue of the justified belief it involves. In any event , the doctrine is concerned primarily with justified belief, though the need to speak of knowledge instead from time to time , to say that a belief is mediately justified is to say that it is justified by some appropriate relation to other justified beliefs that provide adequate support for it. Alternatively, by being based on adequate reasons, thus if my reason for supposing that you are depressed is that you look listless, speak in an unaccustomedly flat tone of voice, exhibited in, and so forth. Then my belief that you are depressed is justified, if at all, belief that you look listless, speak in a flat tone of voice . . . according to the infinite regress argument for which of every justified belief could be justified belief, there would have to be an infinite regress of justification: Because there can be no such regress, there must be justified beliefs that are not justified by appeal to some further justified belief. But if knowledge of a premise always required knowledge of some further proposition, it would be argued that in order to know the premise we would have to know each proposition in an infinite regress of propositions. Since this is impossible, there must be some propositions that are known, but not by demonstration from further propositions: There must be basic, non-demonstrable knowledge which grounds the rest of our knowledge.
Holding that experiences count as evidence adds complexity to an already difficult set of questions about the evidential support relations. The new questions are about exactly what makes it the case that an experiential state count as evidence for one’s belief (or proposition) rather than another. It is easy to be fooled by superficial linguistic facts that seem to link certain experiences to certain beliefs. It may seem clear that the fact that something looks blue to ‘S’ justifies ‘S’ in believing that the thing is blue (absent any counts are evidence). More generally, if a thing looks ‘F ‘ provided ‘S’, then ‘S’ does not have in believing that it is ‘F’ to ‘S’, then ‘S’ does not have any evidence that it is against its being ‘F’ (Cleve, 1985 and Moser, 1985). This may seem right, but the formation masks complexities. To say that some thing ‘appear blue’ is to a person to say, throughly, that it induces a certain sort of internal state in the person . To say that it is blue is to say that it has certain physical properties of some sort. It appears as pending further analysis is of colour words, that these propositions are only contingently related and that our inclination to think it obvious that one justifies the other result from the accident that the word ‘blue‘ appears in the sentence used to express both propositions. This temptation would be eliminated if we describe the internal appearance state in some other terminological placement. (Why think that the fact that an object appears in that the fact it has an object appearance in the manner, as justifies the belief that the object is blue).
What is more, if one says that the experience of seeing a blue object normally justifies one in believing that one sees something blue, then it is hard to see how one can avoid saying that the experience of seeing a 23-sided object normally justifies one in believing that one sees something 23-sided. But this condition is implausible: Not all experiences typically justify the corresponding proposition about the experienced object (Sosa, 1988).
To this, one might reply that to those of us who are not equipped to ‘pick-up’ on 23-sidedness, 23-sided things don’t appear 23-sided, whereas blue things typically do appear blue to us. So, the cases are disanalogous. This reply raises questions about the nature of appearances. Imagine a person who was designed to sense 23-sidedness. It seems possible that the visual image that such a person has when looking at a 23-sided object would be the same as the one a normal person would have when looking the 23-sided objects. However, the reply holds that the 23-sided object appears differently to these two individuals. While there is a difference in their abilities to extract information from a visual array, it is difficult to understand what makes their appearances different.
In addition to the questions about how experiential states provide evidential support, there are many traditional epistemological issues which can be framed as questions about the nature or extension of the evidential support relation. Traditional debates about our knowledge of the external knowledge based on induction are largely questions about the adequacy of our evidence for external world propositions, propositions about other minds, and of inductive evidence generally.
It is extraordinarily difficult to state in a general way the conditions under which a body of evidence provides evidential support for a belief. The mere existence of a logical or probabilistic connection between the evidence and the belief is not sufficient for evidential support. If it were adequate, then all the distant and unseen necessary or probabilistic consequences of one’s justified beliefs would themselves be justified. Since that is clearly unacceptable, one might say instead that if evidence ℯ provides epistemic support for proposition ‘p’; For person ‘S’, then ℯ must entail or make probable ‘p’ and S, must grasp the connection between ℯ and p. this reply sees to over-intellectualize the in situation since people seem not to grasp such matters routinely, and it invites a troublesome regress if required this grasp of the evidential connection amounts to requiring that justified belief that ℯ supports p. There is no generally accepted view about what is necessary or sufficient for epistemic support.
A further question about evidence concerns exactly what it is to have something as evidence. Stored somewhere in one’s memory are an enormous number of facts. Many of these facts may bear on some proposition ‘p’, that one believes. While considering ‘p’, one may think of only some of these stored facts. If prompted in one might one might recall some facts, and if prompted on other ways, one might recall other facts. Some of them may be accessible only with complex and detailed prompting. But which of these facts are part of the evidence that one has and are relevant to the assessment of the epistemic merit of the current belief? A highly restrictive view would limit the evidence to what one actually has currently in mind. A highly liberal view would include as part of one’s evidence everything stored in one’s mind. This renders justified some beliefs that seem, from an intuitive viewpoint, quite unreasonable. There is no clearly acceptable way to carve out a theory positioned between these two extremes (Feldman, 1988).
A different set of questions about evidence concerns the connection between evidence and epistemic justification. Evidentialism holds that questions about epistemic justification turn entirely upon matters pertaining to evidence. Rival views hold that other sorts of matters play a central role in determining which beliefs are justified. For example, Kornblith (1983) argues that a belief is epistemically justified only if the believer has gone about gathering evidence for it in an epistemically responsible manner which, like some other causal theories of justification, implies that having supporting evidence is neither necessary nor sufficient for justification, since on standard understandings of reliabilism a belief can be caused in a reliable way even though the believer does not have anything that could plausibly be regarded as good evidence for it. The debate on these matters is surely not settled, but it is instructive to notice that defenders of evidentialism and as their rivals, such as Goldman (1986), often go to some lengths to adjust the theories so that they share the straightforward implications of evidentialism. They do not defend the implications of the simple versions of their theories.
The notion of truth occurs with remarkable frequency in our reflections on language, thought and action. We are inclined to suppose, for example, that truth is the proper aim of scientific inquiry, that true beliefs help us to achieve our goals, that to understand a sentence is to know which circumstance would make it true, that reliable preservation of truth as one argues from premise to a conclusion is the mark of valid reasoning, that moral pronouncements should not be regarded as objectively true, and so forth. In order to assess the plausibility of such theses, and in order to refine them and to explain why they hold (in if they do), we require some view of what truth is - a theory that would account for its properties s and its relations to other matters. Thus, there can be little prospect of understanding our most important faculties in the absence of a good theory of truth.
Such a thing, however, has been notoriously elusive. The ancient idea that truth is some sort of `correspondence` with reality has still never been articulated satisfactorily: The nature of the alleged correspondence and the alleged reality remain objectionably obscure. Yet the familiar alternative suggests - that true beliefs are those that are mutually coherent, or pragmatically useful, or verifiable in suitable conditions - have each been confronted with persuasive counterexamples. A twentieth-century departure from these traditional analyses as the view that truth is not a property at all - that the syntactic form of the predicate, is true, distorts its real semantic character, which is not to describe propositions but to endorse them. But this radical approach is also faced with difficulties that suggest, somewhat counterintuitively, that truth cannot have the vital theoretical role in semantics, epistemology and else-where that we are naturally inclined to give it. Thus, the truth threatens to remain one of the most enigmatic of notions: An explicit account of it can appear to be essential yet beyond our reach. However, recent work provides some grounds for optimism.
The belief that snow is white owes its truth to a certain feature of the external world: Namely, to the fact that snow is white. Similarly, the belief Dogs bark is true because of the fact that Dogs bark. This sort of trivial observation leads to what is perhaps the most natural and popular account of truth, the correspondence theory , according to which a belief (statement, sentence, proposition, and so forth) is true just in case there exists a fac t corresponding to it (Wittgenstein, 1922 and Austin, 1950). This thesis is unexceptionable in itself. However, if it is to provide as rigorous, substantial and complete theory of truth - if it is to be more than merely a picturesque way of asserting all equivalences to the form.
The belief that p is true ↔ p
Then it must be supplemented with accounts of what facts are, and that it is for a belief to correspond to a fact, and these are the problems on which the correspondence theory of truth has founded. For one thing, it is far from clear that any significant gain in understanding is achieved by reducing ‘the belief that snow is white is true’ that ‘the fact that snow is white exists’: For these expressions seem equally resistant to analysis and to close in meaning for one to provide an illuminating account of the other. In addition, the general relationship that holds in particular between the belief that snow is white and the fact that Dogs bark, and so on, is very hard to identify. The best attempt to date is Wittgenstein’s (1922) so-called ‘picture theory’, whereby, an elementary proposition is a configuration of terms, an atomic fact is a configuration of simple objects, an atomic fact corresponds to an elementary proposition (and makes it true) when their configurations are identical and when the terms in the proposition refer to the similarly-placed objects in fact, and the truth value of each complex proposition is entailed by the truth values of the elementary ones. However, even if this account is correct as far as it goes, it would need to be completely with plausible theories of ‘logical configuration’, ‘elementary proposition’, ‘reference’, and ‘entailment’, none of which is easy to come by.
A central characteristic of truth - one that any adequate theory must explain - is that when a proposition satisfies its ‘condition of proof (or verification)’ then it is regarded as true. To the extent that the property of corresponding with reality is mysterious, we are going to find it impossible to see why what we take to verify a proposition should indicate the possession of that property. Therefore a tempting alternative to the correspondence theory - an alternative which eschews obscure, metaphysical concepts and which explain quite straightforwardly why verifiabiity implies truth - is implied to identify truth with verifiability (Peirce, 1932). This idea can take on various forms. One version involves the further assumptions that verifiability is ‘holistic’ -,i.e., that a belief is justified (i.e., verified) when it is par t of an entire system of beliefs that is consistent and ‘harmonious’ (Bradley, 1914 and Hempel, 1935). This is known as the coherence theory of truth. Another version involves the assumption that there is, associated with each proposition, some specific procedure for finding out whether one should believe it or not. On this account to say that a proposition is true is to say that it would be verified by the appropriate procedure (Dummett, 1978 and Putman, 1931): In the context of mathematics this amounts to the identification of truth with provability.
The attraction of the verificationist account of truth are that it is refreshingly clear compared with the correspondence theory, and that it succeeds in connecting truth with verification. The trouble is that the bond it postulates between these notions is implausibly strong. And, truly, take verification to indicate truth. But also we recognize the possibility that a proposition may be false in spite of there being impeccable reasons to believe, and that a proposition may be true even though we aren’t able to discover that it is: Verifiability and truth are no doubt highly correlated, but surely not the same thing.
Yet, another well-known account of truth is known as ‘pragmatism’ (James, 1909 and Papineau, 1987). As we have just seen, the verificationist selects a prominent property of truth and considers it to be the essence of truth. Similarly, the pragmatist focuses on another important characteristic - namely, that true belie are a good basis for action - and takes this to belief very nature of truth. True assumptions are said to be, by definition, those which provoke action with desirable results. Again, we have an account with a single attractive explanatory feature, but, agin, the central objection is that the relationship it postulates between truth and its alleged analysans - in this case, utility - is implausibly close. Granted true beliefs tend to foster success, but it happens regularly that actions based on true beliefs lead to disaster, while false assumptions, by pure chance, produce wonderful results.
One of the few uncontroversial facts about truth is that the proposition that snow is white, the proposition that lying is wrong is true if and only if lying is wrong and so forth. Traditional theories acknowledge this fact but regard it as insufficient and, as we have seen, inflate it with some further principle of the form, ‘χ’ is true if and only if ‘χ’ has property ‘p’ (such as corresponding to reality , verifiability, or being suitable as a basis for action), which is supposed to specify what truth is. Some radical alternatives to the traditional theories result from denying the need for any such further specifications (Ramsey, 1927: Strawson, 1950 and Quine, 1990). For example, one might suppose that the basic theory of truth contains nothing more than equivalences to the form. ‘The proposition that ‘p’ is true if and only if ‘p’ (Horwich. 1990).
This sort of proposal is best presented in conjunction with an account of the raison d’etre of our notion of truth: Namely, That it enables us to express attitudes toward those propositions we can designate but not explicitly formulate. Suppose, for example, you are told that Einstein’s last words expressed a claim about physics, an area in which you think he was very reliable. Suppose that, unknown to you, his claim was the proposition that quantum mechanics is wrong. What conclusion can you draw. Exactly which proposition becomes the appropriate object of your belief. Surely not that quantum mechanics is wrong, because you are not aware that, that is what he said. What is needed is something equivalent to the infinite conjunction.
If what Einstein said was that E = mc, then E = mc, and if what he said was that quantum mechanics is wrong . . . and so forth
That is, a proposition ‘K’ with the following properties: That from ‘K’ and any further premise of the form. Einstein claim was the proposition that ‘P’ you can infer ‘p’, whatever it is. Now suppose as the deflationist says, that our understanding of the truth predicate consists in the stipulative decision to accept any instance of the schema. The proposition that ‘p’ is true if and only if ‘p’. then your problem is solved. For if ‘K’ is the proposition. Einstein’s claim is true, it will have precisely the inferential power that is needed. From it and Einstein claim is the proposition that quantum mechanics is wrong. You can use Leibniz law to infer that the proposition that quantum mechanics is wrong is true, which, given the relevant axiom of the deflationary theory, allows you to derive that Quantum mechanics is wrong. This one point in favour of the deflationary theory is that it squares with a plausible story about the function of our notion of truth: Its axioms explain that function without the need for any further analysis of what truth is.
Not all variant s of deflationism have this virtu e. according to the redundancy/performative theory of truth, the pair of sentences, The proposition that ‘p’ is true, and plain ‘p’ have exactly the same meaning and express the sam e statement as one another, so it is a syntactic illusion to think that is true, attributes any sort of property to a proposition (Ramsey, 1927 and Strawson, 1950). But in that case it becomes hard to explain why we are entitled to infer that The proposition that quantum mechanics is wrong is true, from Einstein’s claim is th e proposition that quantum mechanics is wrong ans Einstein’s claim is true. For if truth is not a property, then we can no longer account for the inference by invoking the law that if ‘χ’ is identical with ‘y’ then any property of ‘χ’ is a property of ‘y’, and vice versa. Thus, the redundancy/performative theory, by identifying rather than merely correlating the contents of ‘The proposition that ‘p’ is true and ‘p’ precludes the prospect of a good explanation of one of truth’s most significant and useful characteristics. So, it is better to restrict our claim to the weak equivalence schema: The proposition that ‘p’ is true if and only if ‘p’.
Support for deflationism depends upon the possibility of showing that its axioms - instances of the equivalence schema - unsupplemented by any further analysis, will suffice to explain all the central facts about truth: For example, that the verification of a proposition indicates its truth, and that true beliefs have a practical value. The first of these facts follows trivially from the deflationary axiom: For given or a priori knowledge of the equivalence of ‘p’ and ‘The proposition that ‘p’ is true, any reason to believe that ‘p’ becomes an equally good reason to believe that the proposition that ‘p’ is true. The second fact also be explained in terms of the deflationary axioms, but not quite so easily. Consider, to begin with, beliefs of the form,
(B) If I perform act À`, then my desires will be fulfilled
Notice that the psychological role of such a belief is, roughly to cause the performance of À`, in other words, given that I do have belief (B), then typically:
I will perform act A
And notice also that when the belief is true then, given the deflationary axioms, the performance of A will in fact lead to the fulfilment of one`s desire, i.e.,
If (B) is true, then if I perform A,
my desires will be fulfilled
Therefore:
If (B) is true, then my desires will be fulfilled
So, it is quite reasonable to value the truth of beliefs of that form. But such beliefs are derived by inference from other beliefs and can be expected to be true if those other beliefs are true. So, it is reasonable to value the truth of any belief that might be used in such an inference.
To the extent that such deflationary accounts can be given of all the facts involving truth, then the explanatory demands on a theory of truth will be met by the collection of all statements like, The proposition that snow is white is true if and only if snow is white, and the sense that some deep analysis of truth is needed will be undermined.
However, there are several strongly felt objections to deflationism. One reason for dissatisfaction is that the theory has an infinite number of axioms, and therefore cannot be completely written down. it can be described (as the theory whose axioms are the propositions of the form `p`, if and only if it is true that p), but not explicitly formulated. This alleged defect has led some philosophers to develop theories which show, first, how the truth of any proposition derives from the referential properties of its constituents and second, how the referential properties of primitive constituents are determined (Tarski, 1943 and Davidson, 1969). Nonetheless, it remains controversial to assume that all propositions - including belief attributions, laws of nature and counterfactual conditionals - depends for their truth values on what their constituents refer to. Moreover, there is no immediate prospect of a decent, finite theory of reference,. So it is far from clear that the infinite list-like character of deflationism can be avoided.
Another source of dissatisfaction with this theory is that certain instances of the equivalence schema are clearly false. Consider:
(a) THE PROPOSITION EXPRESSED BY THE SENTENCE
IN CAPITAL LETTERS IS NOT TRUE.
Substituting this into the schema one gets a version of the Liar paradox specifically
(b) The proposition that the proposition expressed by the sentence in capital letters is not true if and only if the proposition expressed be the sentence in capital letters is not true.
From which a contradiction is easily derivable. (Given (b), the supposition that (a) is true implies that (a) is not true and the supposition that it is not true implies that it is.) Consequently, not every instance of the equivalence schema can be included in the theory of truth, but it is no simple matter to specify the ones to be excluded (Kripke, 1975). Of course, deflationism is far from alone in having to confront this problem.
A third objection to the version of the deflationary theory, as presented concerns its reliance on propositions as the basic vehicles of truth. It is widely felt that the notion of proposition is defective and that it should not be employed in semantics. If this point of view is accepted then the natural deflationary reaction is to attempt a reformulation that would appeal only to sentences, for example:
‘p’ is true if and only if p
But this so-called ‘disquotational theory of truth’ (Quine, 1990) comes to grief over indexicals, demonstrative and other terms whose referents vary with the context of use. It is not the case, for example, that every instance of ‘I am hungry’ is true and only if I am hungry. And there is no simple way of modifying the disquotational schema to accommodate this problem. A possible way out of these difficulties is to resist the critique of propositions. Such entities may well exhibit an unwelcome degree of indeterminacy, and may well dely reduction to familiar items. However, they do offer a plausible account of belief (as relations to propositions) and, in ordinary language at least, they are indeed taken to be the primary bearers of truth. Traditionally, belief has been of epistemological interest in its propositional guise: ‘S’ believes that ‘p’, where ‘p’ is a proposition toward which an agent ‘S’ exhibits an attitude of acceptance. Not all belief are of this sort, such that, if I trust what you say. I believe you. And someone may believe in the Prime Minister or the Primer of Ontario, or in a free-market economy, or in God. It is sometimes supposed that all belief is ‘reducible’ to propositional belief, as a belief-that. Thus, my believing you might be thought a matter of my believing, perhaps, that what you say is true, and your belief in a free-market or in God, a matter of your believing that=free-market economies are desirable or that God exists. It is doubtful, however, that non-propositional believing can in every case, be reduced in this way. Debate on this point has tended to focus on an apparent distinction between belief-that and belief-in, and the application of this distinction to believe in God (Swinburne, 1981). Some philosophers have followed Aquinas (Summa Theologiae) in supposing that to believe in God is simply to believe that certain truths hold: That God exists, that he is benevolent, and so forth. Others (Hick, 1957) argue that belief-in is a distinctive attitude one that includes essentially an element of trust. More commonly, belief-in has been taken to involve a combination of propositional beliefs together with some further attitude.
It is commonly supposed that problems about the nature of truth are intimately bound up with questions as to the accessibility and autonomy of facts in various domains: Questions about whether the facts can be known, and whether they can exist independently of our capacity to discover them (Dummett, 1978 and Putnam, 1981). One might reason, for example, that if ‘T’ is true means nothing more than ’T’, will be verified, then certain forms of scepticism (specifically, those that doubt the correctness of our methods of verification) will be precluded, and that the facts will have been revealed as dependent on human practices. Alternatively, it might be said that if truth were an inexplicable, primitive non-epistemic property, then the fact that it is true would be completely independent of us. Moreover, we could, in that case, have no reason to assume that the proposition we believe actually have this property: So scepticism could be unavoidable. In a similar vein, it might be thought that a special (and perhaps undesirable) feature of the deflationary approach is that truth is derived of any such metaphysical or epistemological implications.
On close scrutiny, however, it is far from clear that there exists any account of truth with consequences regarding the accessibility or autonomy of non-semantic matters. For although an account of truth may be expected to have such implications for facts of the form ‘T’ is true: It cannot be assumed without further argument that the same conclusions will apply to the fact ‘T’. For it cannot be assumed that ‘T’ and ‘T’ is true are equivalent to none another given the account of truth that is being employed. Of course, if truth is defined in the way that the deflationist proposes, then the equivalence holds by definition. But if truth is defined by reference to some metaphysical or epistemological characteristic, then the equivalence schema is thrown into doubt pending some demonstration that the truth predicate, in some sense assumed, will satisfy it in so far as there are thoughts to be epistemological problems hanging over ‘T’ that do not threaten ‘T’, is true, it will be difficult to give the needed demonstration. Similarly, if truth is defined that the fact, ‘T’ is felt to be more or less independent of human practices than the fact that ‘T’ is true. Then, again, it is unclear that the equivalence schema will hold. It would seem, therefore, that the attempt to base epistemological or metaphysical conclusions on a theory of truth must fail because in any such attempt the equivalence schema will be simultaneously relied on and undermined.
Our dialectic awareness or the consciousness of self-realization and undivided wholeness, as marked by realization, perception or knowledge and often something not generally realized, perceived or known, e.g., aware of our own inner weakness, as these central features of our lives that is notoriously difficult to characterize. You experience going on in the world, and turning inward (introspecting), your experiencing, objects of awareness that can be external or internal. Pressing your finger on the edge of a table, you can be aware of the table’s edge, and aware of the feeling of presence (though perhaps and simultaneously).
Philosophers from Locke to Nagel have insisted that our experiences have distinctive qualities: There is ‘something’ it is like, to have them. It would seem important then, to distinguish qualities of objects of which you are aware from qualities of your awareness. Suppose you are aware of a round red tomato. The tomato, but not your awareness that it is round and red. What then are the qualities of your awareness? Here we encounter a deep puzzle that divides theorists into the rigidity and sternfull of camps.
Some materialist, like Dennett, insist that awareness lacks the qualities we attribute to experience are really those of experienced objects. This opens the way to a dismissed of phenomenal qualities (qualia), qualities that seem to have no place in the material world; others regard such qualities such as qualities as parentally genuine, preferring to dismiss any theory unable to accommodate them. Convinced that the qualities of awareness are ineliminable and irreducible to respectable material properties, some philosophers following Frank Jackson, contend they are epiphenomental: Real, but causally inefficarlous. Still others, including Seale, point to what they regard as a fundamental distinction between the intrinsically subjective as characterized of awareness and the objective, for which of the public character or material objects, but deny that this yields epiphenomenlism.
Introspection, as derived from the Latin, intro (within) and specere (to look), defines introspection by whose attention the mind gives to itself or to its own operation and occurrence. I can know that there is as fat hairy spider in my bath, by looking there and seeing it. But how do I know that I am seeing it rather than smelling it, or that my attitude to it is one of disgust rather than delight? One answer is, by a subsequent introspective act of ‘looking within’ and attending to the psychological state - my seeing the spider. Introspection, therefore, is a mental occurrence, which has as its object some other psychological state like perceiving, desiring, willing, feeling, and do forth. In being a distinct awareness episode it is different from a more general self-consciousness which characterizes all or some of our mental history.
The awareness generated by an introspective act can have varying degrees of complexity. It might be a simple knowledge of (mental) things - such as a particular perception-episode: Or, it might be the more complex knowledge of truth about one’s own mind. In this latter full-blown judgmental form, introspection is usually the self-ascription of psychological properties and, when linguistically expressed, results in statements like, ‘I am watching the spider’ or ‘I am repulsed’.
In psychology this deliberate inward look becomes a scientific method when it is directed towards answering questions of theoretical importance for the advancement of our systematic knowledge of the laws and condition of mental processes (Stout, 1938). In philosophy, introspection (sometimes also called ‘reflection’) remains simply ‘that notice which the Mind takes of its own Operations’ (Locke, 1690) and has been used to serve of some important functions:
1. Methodological: Thought experiments are a powerful tool in philosophical investigation. The Ontological Argument, for example, asks us to try to think of the most Perfect Being as lacking existence and Berkeley`s Master Argument challenges us to conceive of an unseen tree. Conceptual results are then drawn from our failure or success. For such experiments to work, we must not only have (or fail to have) the relevant conceptions but also know that we have (or fail to have) them -presumably by introspection.
2. Metaphysical: A metaphysics of mind needs to take cognizance of introspection. One can argue for `ghostly` mental entities, for ‘qualia’, for sense-data by claiming introspective awareness of them. First-person psychological reports can have special consequences for the nature of persons and personal identity: Hume for example, was content to reject the notion of a soul-substance because he failed to find such a thing by looking within. Moreover, some philosophers argue for the existence of additional perspectival facts - the fact of, what it is like to be the person I am, or, to have an experience of such-and-such (Nagel, 1974). Introspection as our access to such facts becomes important when we construct a complete metaphysics of the world.
3. Epistemological: Surprisingly, the most important use made of introspection has been in accounting for our knowledge of the outside world. According to a foundationalist theory of justification an empirical belief is either basic and self-justifying or is justified in relation to basic beliefs. Basic beliefs therefore, constitute the rock-bottom of all justification and knowledge. Now introspective awareness is said to have a unique epistemological status: We are said to achieve the best possible epistemological position and consequently, introspective beliefs become prime candidates for basic beliefs and thereby constitute the foundation of all justification.
The traditional theory of introspection, is an explanation of this capacity of our looking within constructed from a Descartes-Locke and Kant perspective. It develops as an epistemological corollary to a metaphysical dualism. The world of Matter is known through external and outer sense-perception. So cognitive access to Mind must be based on a parallel process of introspection which, though . . . not Sense, as having nothing to do with external Objects, yet (it) is very like it, and might properly enough be called, internal Sense (Locke, 1690). However, having mind as object is not sufficient to make a way of knowing inner in the relevant sense, because mental facts can be grasped through sources rather than introspection. The point is rather that an inner perception provides a kind of access to the mental not obtained otherwise - it is a look within from within. Stripped of metaphor this indicates the epistemological features as having:
(1) Only I can introspect my mind.
(2) I can introspect only my mind.
(3) Introspective awareness is superior to any other knowledge of contingent facts that I or others might have.
Tenets (1) and (2) are grounded in the Cartesian idea of privacy of the mental. Normally, a single object can be perceptually or inferentially grasped by many subjects, just as the same subject can perceive and infer different things. The epistemic peculiarity of introspection is that it is exclusive - it gives knowledge only of the mental history of the subject introspecting.
Tenet (3) of the traditional theory is grounded in the Cartesian idea of privileged access. The epistemic superiority of introspection lies in its being an infallible source of knowledge. First-person psychological statements which are its typical results cannot be mistaken. This claim is sometimes supported by an imaginability test, i.e., the impossibility of imagining that ‘I believe that I am in pain’ while at the same time imaging evidence that ‘I am not in pain’. An apparent counterexample to this infallibility claim would be the introspective judgement, ‘I am perceiving a dead friend’, when I am really hallucinating. This is taken care of by reformulating such introspective reports as, ‘I seem to be perceiving a dead friend’. The importance of such privileged access is that introspection becomes a way of knowing immune from the pitfalls of other sources of cognition. The basic symmetry between first and third person psychological statements can be traced to their being generated (respectively) by introspective and non-introspective methods.
The traditional theory of introspection, therefore, can be encapsulated in four major theses (1) Perceptual Model Thesis, (2) Distinct At Thesis, (3) Privacy Thesis, and (4) Privileged Access Thesis.
An important qualification needs to be made regarding tenets (1) and (2), as aforementioned. Introspection, so far, has been defined as yielding the knowledge of the subject’s own mind or mental history. The broadening terms as mental history , or my mind, however, tend to gloss over an important controversy centring on the actual mental items revealed in introspection. The debate has in itself a greater significance than just generating a list: If we find uncontroversial psychological entities not amenable to introspection or dubiously mental items that are uncontroversially introspected, then it would be clear that introspectibility is either not a necessary or not a sufficient criterion of the mental. Some of the philosophically interesting putative objects of introspection are:
1. Psychological and mental states are introspected, it is doubtful if all such states can be known in this manner. There are many types of mental states and it is not clear that all of them are introspectible or introspectible in the same way: A dispositional psychological state is a possible exception.
2. Self or I, as of a mediated introspection it is generally supposed to reveal not only psychological states but also the subject or seat of there states. Some ( as in Hume) however, confess to a failure to discover a Self over and above its states by looking within. The issue hinges on whether, in becoming aware of my experience, I am also not aware of them as my-experiences and whether the latter awareness is possible without an introspective awareness of the Self.
3. Bodily sensations like aches, itches, and so forth. Reports like, ‘I am dizzy’, ‘I have a sinking feeling in my stomach’, are sometimes said to be known introspectively, to hold them to be bona fide introspections we would need either to construe bodily sensations as mental or to allow an introspective awareness of some physical states.
4. Time and temporal determination for this is part of Kant’s idiosyncratic theory of inner sense. Our faculty of Sensibility is exercised either as ‘outer sense’ or as ‘inner sense’. The intuitive aspect or Form of outer sense is Space and Time and that of inner sense is Time. This means that while all objects of outer sense are represented as spatial, all inner perceptions are proceeded as temporal. But more interestingly, even our ascription of temporal succession to events in the world is dependent on and derived from the (introspected) successiveness of our inner perceptions.
A broadly Wittgensteinian approach of an awakening awareness questions the idea of an inward look picking out mental phenomena not accessible from a third-person perspective. The argument has many versions. On one version, there would be a tension between our private and privileged accessibilities to introspective awareness which cannot be mistaken as Ryle (1949) has a stronger objection to a logically self-defeating awareness and suggests a way out by such terms as ‘retrospection’, virtually abandons the model of introspection. Again, we cannot in the same breath say that introspection is a distinct mental operation and that it is a logically infallible way of knowing. If pain and the awareness are distinct existence, then the logical possibility of awareness of pain without pain is still present (Armstrong, 1966) and the doctrine of infallibility falls. There is thus a tension between the accessibility between the thesis of an action and or its approachability.
We can think of instances of introspection yielding mistaken belief. We have been known to misidentify our mental states and we can think of cases where a physiologist says that the brain state responsible for particular mental state has not occurred even though my introspective report is that I am in that state, and so it seems better to weaken the claim that introspective reports are infallible. But any substantial weakening of this idea that introspection is a different kind of knowing.
However, the rejection of one or more of its constitutive tenets, by denying dualism, physicalists about the mind abolish the metaphysical foundations of standard views: But even dualists can account for introspective awareness in different ways. In concerning a few features to some of these options are alternatively mentioned:
1. Self-scrutiny need not be perceptual, as my awareness of an object Ο changes the status of Ο. It now acquires the property of being an object of awareness. On the basis of this or the fact that the object is seen by me. I infer that I am aware of Ο. Such an inferential model of awareness is suggested by the Bhatta Mimamsa school of Indian epistemology (Matilal, 1986). This view of introspection does not construe t ass a direct awareness of mental operation to refer to the theories where the emphasis of directedness itself leads to a non-perceptual or at least, a non-observational account of introspection.
2. Reflexive models of epistemic accessibility to our minds need not involve a separate attentive act. Part of the meaning of a conscious state is that I know that I am in that state, when I am in that state. Consciousness is conceived as a ‘phosphorescence’ attached to some mental occurrence and in no need of a subsequent illumination to reveal itself. Of course, if introspection models as a distinct act then reflexive models are really accounts of first-person access that make no appeal to introspection.
3. The physicalists’ denial of metaphysically private mental facts naturally suggests that ‘looking within’ is not merely the perception but is perception. For Ryle, mental states are ‘iffy’ behavioural facts which, in principle, are equally accessible to everything in the same way. One‘s own self-awareness therefore is, in effect, no different in type from anyone else’s observations about one’s mind.
A more interesting move is for the physicalists to retain the truism that I am sad in a very different way from that in which I know you to be sad. This directedness or non-inferential nature of self-knowledge can be preserved in some physicalists theories of introspection. For instance, Armstrong’s identification of mental stats with causes of bodily behaviour and of the latter with brain states, makes introspection the process of acquiring information about such inner physical causes. But since introspection is itself a mental state, it is a process in the brain as well, and since its grasp of the relevant causal information is direct, it becomes a process in which the brain scans itself.
Alternatively, a broadly ‘functionalist’ view of mental states suggests of a machine-analogue of th e introspective situation: A machine table with the instruction -Print: ‘I am in state ‘A’‘ when in state ‘A’ results in the output ‘I am in stat e ‘A’, when state ‘A’ occasions to occurs. Similarly, if we define mental states and events functionality, we can say that introspection occurs when an occurrence of a mental state ‘M’ directly results in the awareness of ‘M’. Accountably , this way of emphasizing directness yields a non-perceptual and non-observational model of introspection, the machine in printing ‘I am in state ‘A’, does so (when it is not making a ‘verbal mistake’) just because it is in state ‘A’. There is no computational information or process of ascertaining involved. The latter through a sequence of states.
This casts new light on the discussion, in that, the legitimate question: How do I know that I am seeing a spider? Was interpreted as a demand for the faculty or information processing mechanism whereby I come to acquire this knowledge. Peculiarities of first-person psychological awareness and reports were carried over as peculiarities of this mechanism. However, the question need not demand the search for a method of knowing but rather for an explanation of the special epistemic feature s of first-person psychological statements. On this reading, the problem of introspection (as a way of knowing) dissolves but the problem of explaining ‘introspective’ or first-person authority remains.
Leibniz’s term for inner awareness or self-consciousness, in contrast with ‘perception’ or outer awareness which extend beyond a level or normal servicing of a supporting introduction would be that of ‘apperception’. He held, in opposition to Descartes, that adult humans can have experiences of which they are unaware: Experiences of which they are unaware, experiences which may affect what they do, but which are not brought to self-consciousness. Indeed, there are creatures, such as animals and babies which completely lack the ability to reflect on their experiences, and to become aware of them. The unity of a subject’s experience, which stem from them as experiences of theirs, which stem from his capacity to recognize all his experiences as his, was dubbed by Kant as the ‘transcendental’, which of a unity is an apperception. This apprehension of unity is transcendental, rather than empirical, because it is presupposed in experience and cannot be derived from. Kant used the need for this unity as the basis of his afforded attempt into the refutation of scepticism about the external world. He regarded that my experiences could only be united in one’s self-consciousness if, at least some of them were experiences of a law-governed world of objects in space. Other experiences are those that of a necessary condition of inner awareness.
At the expense of a qualifying mind, the expression ‘self-consciousness’ can mean different things. In the sense (1) ‘consciousness of self’ it refers to the awareness a subject (of experiencing) has of itself, i.e., of the typical referent of the pronoun ‘I’. It is not merely a grasp of the entity that happens to be myself. The philosophical issues given as at present revolve around how such awareness is generated and what its logical structure is. Alternatively, self-consciousness can be (2) ‘Experiences of the items in one’s consciousness or the contents of a mindful state excising consciousness, like sensations, thoughts, feeling, and so forth. This leaves open the possibility of such awareness being a result of the special faculty of introspection, however, there is a use of self-consciousness that refers to the ‘self- intimation’ of every conscious state and in this sense it means (3) The ‘ability’ of a conscious state to become an object to itself. The philosophical problem, at which point is to cash out in epistemic and metaphysical forms, the metaphor or ‘phosphorescence’ that is generally used to capture the reflexivity of consciousness.
The prevalent commonality that normally concede in the way one knows something about oneself is significantly different from the way one know the same sort of thing about someone else. Knowledge of one’s own current mental states is ordinarily not grounded on information about behaviours and physical circumstances. Knowledge of one’s actions, and of such facts as that one is sitting or standing, is usually ‘without observation’ or, at any rate, not based on the sorts of observations that ground one’s knowledge of the actions and posture of others. One’s perceptual knowledge of one’s situation in the world, e.g., that one is facing a tree, differ markedly from the perceptual knowledge that others have of the same facts, since it usually doesn’t involve perceiving oneself. And one’s memory knowledge of one’s own past is normally very different from one‘s memory knowledge of the past of others: One remembers one’s thoughts, feelings, perceptions and actions from the inside, in a way that does not depend on the use of any criterion of personal identity to identify a remembered self as oneself.
Although, in many cases one could speak of a ‘special’ first-person access, it is the access people have to their own mental states that has attracted the most attention. Some philosophers, e.g., Ryle (1949), have denied that there is a fundamental difference between first-person and third-person knowledge of mental states. Others, most notably Wittgenstein (1953), have maintained that where the difference seems most pronounced, e.g., in the case of pain ascriptions the first -person ‘avowals’ are not really expressions of knowledge as all, however, according to Wittgenstein, an avowal of an intention is not based on a self-examination which parallels the investigation of the world around us: It is only marginally liable to error, and in certain cases as an artificial expression of the intention replacing a natural one (e.g., a raised fist). Nonetheless, this makes it possible to explain how we can learn and communicate with, mentalisic language, which were things that remained mysterious when intentions, feelings, and the such, were treated as given objects.
In that such views are manifestations of the twentieth-century reaction against Cartesian views about self-knowledge that are often associated with the claim that there are radical first-person and third-person asymmetries. These include the views that the mind is transparent to itself, that mental states are ‘self-intimating’, that first-person ascriptions of mental states are infallible, and that self-knowledge of mental states serves as the foundation for the rest of our empirical knowledge. Thus it is sometimes taken to characterize the structure of ‘our knowledge’ or ‘scientific knowledge’, rather than the structure of the cognitive system of an individual subject.
Nevertheless, such views have been undermined by the work of Freud, with the postulation of a realm of unconscious wishes, intentions, and so forth, by work in cognitive psychology which shows most of the information processing in the mind to be unconscious mind And which shows many sorts of introspective reports to be unreliable (Nisbett and Wilson, 1977) and by philosophical criticisms of foundationalist accounts who reject these Cartesian claims would agree that the reasons for their rejection are not reasons for denying that there is first-person knowledge of mental states that differ importantly from third-person knowledge of the same phenomena.
One question about such knowledge is whether it is appropriately thought of as observational, e.g., as grounded in a kind of perception that could be called ‘inner sense’. Modern defenders of the view that such observational (e.g., D.M, Armstrong, 1968) take perceiving something to be a matter of being so related to it that its having certain properties is apt to give rise to the non-inferential belief that there is something that has them. On this conception, it seems plausible to say, that one perceives mental states and events occurring in one’s own mind, in virtue of an internal mechanism by which mental states give rise to true beliefs about themselves, but cannot perceive those occurring in the minds of others and that it is in this that one’s special access to one’s mind consists.
Some who agree with such a reliable internal mechanistic view of introspective awareness would object to describing such knowledge as perceptual. In paradigm cases of perceptions, e.g., vision, the casual connection between the object perceived and the perceiver’s belief about it is mediated by a state of the perceiver, a ‘sense-experience’ and which the subject can be aware of (in bring aware of the look or feel of a thing). There seem to be no such intermediaries between our sensations, thoughts, beliefs, and so forth, and our beliefs about them, and this seems a reason for denying that our awareness of them is perceived.
A different objection questions the idea, implicit in the perceptual model, that there is only a contingent connection between having mental states and being aware of them (just as there is only a contingent connection between there being trees and mountains and there being perceptual awareness of them). It makes doubtful sense too suppose that there are creatures that have pain without having any capacity whatever to be aware of their pains. And a consideration of the explanatory role of self-knowledge, suggests that for many kinds of mental states the very capacity to have and conceive of such states involves immediate person-person access’ to the existence of these states in onself. To mention thus, one instance, that if being a subject of belief and desires involve as being at least minimally rational, and if rational recision of one’s belief-desire system is the light of new experiences, that require some knowledge of what one’s current beliefs and desires are, then being a subject of such states requires the capacity to be aware of them. While we should reject any intimation thesis strong enough to rule out the possibility of self-deception, or to deny mental states to minimals and infants, it is far from obvious that the nature of mental states is distinct from their introspective accessibility as the observational model implies (Shoemaker.1988).
Lichtenberg denied that Descartes had a right to say that, ‘I am thinking: Therefore? I exist: Claiming that he was only entitled in that ‘I am Thinking’. And Hume (1739) famously denied that when one introspects one finds any item over and above one’s individual perceptions, that could be one’s individual perceptions, that could be the self or subject that ‘has’ them. Such denials have led some (Including Hume) to deny that there is any such self or subject, and have led others to wonder how we can have knowledge of such a thing or refer to it with ‘I’. Arguably, such denials lose their force if we abandon the observational model self-knowledge: What is disturbing is the idea that we perceive ‘by an inner sense’ perceptions, thoughts, and so forth, but do not perceive anything that could be their subject. Of course, if perceiving something to construe merely as being so related to it as to acquire, in a reliable way , rue beliefs about it, then our enabling capacities for self-knowledge involves our being able to perceive both individual mental events or states and the self (Person) who has them (Shoemaker, 1986).
The peculiarities of self-knowledge are, in any case, closed tied to the peculiarities of self-reference. If the amnesiac Joe Jones discovers that Joe Jones is the culprit without realizing that he himself is Joe Jones, this will not be a case of self-knowledge in the sense that concerns us, seen though it is a case in which the person who is the Knower himself. We are concerned with cases in which someone knows that he himself, or she herself, is so and so. lf, it is that so and so, where this is knowledge the Knower would express by saying, ‘I am so and so’ (Castaneda, 1968). One feature of first-person reference is that in no way depends on the availability of individuating descriptions one can refer to oneself with ‘I’ am without knowing of any descriptions that could be used to fix its reference. A related feature of ‘I’-judgements is their immunity to error thorough misidentification differs from that which characterizes judgements having demonstratives such as ‘this’ as subject: Where both ‘I am F’ and ‘This is F” are immune to such error, the memory judgement ‘I was F’ preserves the immunity while the memory judgement ‘This was F’ does not (for a qualification of this (Shoemaker, 1986). This is related to the fact, already mentioned that first-person memory judgements typically do not need to be grounded on any criterion of identity.
It is precisely where ‘I’-judgements are known in distinctively fist-personal ways that they have this immunity to error through misidentification. And ‘I’-judgements that do not have this immunity (e.g., ‘I’ am bleeding’, if inferred from the blood on this floor) always have among their grounds some that do (e.g., ‘I’ see blood, or ‘There in blood near me’): It is arguable that part of what gives first-person content to belief and other mental states is their relation to distinctively first-person ways of knowing, and that without such ‘special success’ there could be no first-person reference at all (Evans,1982). (But another important feature of “I”-judgements is their intimate relation to action: The amnesiac Joe Jones will not be moved to action by learning that Joe Jones is in danger, but will be if he learns in addition that he is Joe Jones and so that he himself is in danger(Perry, 1979).
A stronger and more controversial claim is that the special access persons have to themselves enters into the very identity conditions for the sorts of things persons are. Many have argued, in following Locke, that memory access is part of what determines the temporal boundaries of persons. A major determinant of the spatial boundaries of persons, i.e., of what counts as part of a persons body, is the extent of direct voluntary control, and this is intimately tied to the special epistemic access persons have to their own voluntary actions. And a familiar Kantian idea is that unity of consciousness different stares belonging to the same conscious subject - in some way involves consciousness. Or the possibility of consciousness, of this unity.
It seems, that, even so, that the Theologian Bishop of Hippo in North Africa, for which Augustine (354-430) builds his epistemology around an account of our curtailing certainty of some knowledge of necessary truth. His paradigm of this sort of truth include basic mathematical and logical truths such as 7 + 3 = 10 and ‘there is one world or it is not the case that there is one world (De libero arbitrio II, 8.8.3), but also propositions about value and morality (‘what is incorruptible is better than what is corruptible’, ‘we should live justly’: De libero arbitrio, . . . And have our existence in some knowledgeable distinction of certainty. Augustine argues that it follows from the nature of the paradigms objects of knowledge that truth is perceptible only by the mind or reason, and not by sense perception: Since all objects of the senses are contingent and mutable we cannot have knowledge through sense perception. He develops his notion of direct acquaintance in terms of the metaphor of light and vision. Just as our seeing material objects depends on their being illuminated by the light of the sun. Our intellectual vision of intelligible objects depend on their illumination by intelligible light truth itself. Augustine identified truth itself with God, who is himself necessary, immutable and eternal, and hence, maintains that our knowledge of truth rests on divine illumination.
Augustine distinguishes between beliefs grounded in this sort of intellectual vision and beliefs justified in other ways, and when a belief is grounded in this way we can be said to have understanding (intellectus) the justification associated with understanding differs from that which is associated with mere belief, not only in degree but also in kind. Understanding of a proposition requires evidence that is internally acquainted to the proposition, so that one possesses the reason for the truth of the proposition. Other sort of evidence, for example, testimony, - can provide justification but are only externally related to the proposition they support. One can be said to know (in a broad sense) a theorem of geometry, for example, when one believes it on the testimony of a geometer, but one can be said to understand the theorem only when one affordingly grasps its truth. Augustine holds that a vast number of our beliefs, - for example, all those about events and places we have not ourselves experienced and about other people’s beliefs and attitudes - rests, on the testimony of others and despite the fact that beliefs based on testimony lack the paradigm sort of justification provided by intellectual vision, we are, but, nonetheless, epistemically justified in holding many beliefs of this sort.
But, still, theoretical knowledge or understanding, as identified with the grasp of Platonic Ideas, as the structure or essence of a thing as contrasted with its matter, is that, however, this notion of ‘Forms’ as essences has obvious similarities with the Platonic view. They became the ‘substantial forms’ of scholasticism, and were accepted until the seventeenth century. Nonetheless, Kant saw form as the a priori aspect of experience. We are presented with phenomenological ‘matter’, which has no meaning until the mind imposes some form upon it.
The standardized conception of meaning as truth-conditions need not and should not be advanced as bing in itself a complex account of meaning, for instance, one who understands a language must have some idea of the range of speech acts conventionally performed by the various types of sentences in the language, and must have some idea of the significance of various kinds of speech act. The claim of the theorist of truth-conditions should rather be targeted on the notion of content: If two indicative sentences differ in what they strictly and literally say, then this difference is fully accounted for by the difference in their truth-conditions. It is this claim, and its attendant problems, which are concerned in the meaning of a complex expression as a functional explanation. Scientists have often been inclined to offer functional explanations of such phenomena as explanatory features that one that explains the presence and persistence of the feature in terms of the ongoing working of social systems as a whole. It might be held that functional explanation is a part of the whole called by us the universe, a part limited in time and space, as experiences in thought and feelings as something separate from the rest - a kind of optical illusion of conceptual content. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. Nobody is able to achieve this completely, but striving for such is obtainably achieving, in itself, a part of the liberation and a foundation for inner security.
That being said, that most theories of explanation is the idea that explanation depends on general laws governing the phenomena in question. We may explain some complex social phenomenon as the aggregate result of the actions of a large number of individual agents with a hypothesized act of goals within a structured environment of choice. As biologists explain species traits in terms of their contribution to reproductive activities, and sociology sometimes explain social traits in terms of their contribution to ‘social’ fitness. However, the analogy is misleading, because there is a general mechanism establishing functionality in the biological realm that is not present in the social realm. This is the mechanism of natural selection, through which a species arrives at a set of traits that are locally optimal. There is no analogous process at work in the social realm, however, so it is groundless to suppose that social traits exist because of their beneficial consequence for the good of society as a whole (or important subsystem within society). So functional explanations of social phenomena must be buttressed by specific accounts of the causal processes that underlie the postulated functional relationships.
Wittgenstein himself introduces the term ‘criterion’ to convey that the connection is not merely that one or other kind of behaviour is caused by one or other kind of mental state. Rather there is (also) a conceptual connection. Behavioural circumstances are the ‘criteria’ rather than merely the effects or ‘symptoms’ of mentality. This idea of a ‘criterial’ connection has been much discussed in the philosophical literature. The most interesting recent discussions may be found in McDowell (1983) and Wright (1984): Wright takes the notion of criterion to support an ‘anti-realist’ view of the meaning of sentences attributing mental states to others. The view replaces the ‘realist’ idea that the meaning of such sentences are given by the condition in which they are true. The most influential idea in the theory of meaning is the thesis that the meaning of an indicative sentence is given by its truth-conditions. On this conception, to understand a sentence is to know its truth-conditions. The conception was first clearly formulated by Frége, and was developed in a distinctive way by the early Wittgenstein, and is a leading idea of Davidson. The conception has remained so central that those who offer opposing theories characteristically define their position by reference to it.
The conception of meaning as truth-conditions need not and should not be advanced as being in itself a complex account of meaning. For instance, one who understands a language must have some idea of the range of speech acts conventionally performed by the various types of sentences in the language, and must have some idea of the language and must have some idea of the significance of various kinds of speech act. The claim of the theorist of truth-conditions should rather be targeted on the notion of what they strictly and literally say, then this difference is fully accounted for by the differences in their truth-conditions. The idea that they are given by conditions which warrant their assertion, i.e., given by their criteria. The truth-conditions for these sentences are undetected by the person making the attribution, since the mental states being attributed (pain, to say) are not themselves directly available to this experience in a way that they are to the subject of the attribution. Thus, it cannot be knowledge or the truth-conditions which underlies the linguistic competence with these sentences as the realist claims. What underlies this competence rather, is knowledge of the criteria in th e subjects behaviour is without the purview of the attributive attributor’s experience. Wright, following Wittgenstein, claims that there is a conceptual rather than a contingent link between the behaviour of the subject and the mental state because it is not on the basis of an inference (based on an empirical theory) that one goes from an observation of the behaviour to an attribution of the mental states. But Wright following a widely held interpretation of Wittgenstein, also claims that the criteria are defeasible. That is, it is possible that the criteria should be fulfilled but that the attribution of the relevant mental state turn out to be false.
According to Dilthey, Aristotle’s category of acting and suffering is rooted in prescientific experience, which is then explicated as the category of efficacy or influence (Wirkung) in the human sciences and as the category of cause (Ursache) in the natural sciences. Our understanding of influence in the human sciences is less removed from the full reality of life than are the causal explanations arrived at in the natural sciences. To this extent the human sciences can claim a priority over the natural sciences, whereas we have direct access to the real elements of the historical world (psychological human beings) the elements of the natural world are merely hypothetical entities such as atoms. The natural sciences deal with outer experiences while the human sciences are based on inner experience.
Whereas the natural sciences aim at ever broader generalizations, the human sciences place equal weight on understanding individuality, Dilthy regarded individuals as points of intersections of the social and cultural system in which they participated. Any psychological contribution to understanding human life must be interacted into more public frameworks. Although universal laws of history are rejected particularly human sciences can establish uniformities limited to specific social and cultural systems. Nonetheless, probabilistic or statistical laws are thought to yield statistical explanations of individuals of a recent, yet, detailing of the statistical model have been a matter of much controversy. It is sometimes claimed that although explanations whether in ordinary life or in the sciences, seldom conform fully to the covering law model, the model, nevertheless, represents an ideal that all explanations must strive to attain the covering law model, though influential, it is not universally accepted. Even though human actions are often explained by being rationalized, -i.e., by citing the agents beliefs and desires (and other intentional mental states such as emotions, hopes, and expressions) that constitute a reason for doing what was done. You opened the window because you wanted some fresh air and believed that by opening the window you could secure this result. It has been a controversial issue whether such rationalizing explanations are casual, i.e., whether they invoke beliefs and desires as a cause of the action. Another issue is whether these ‘rationalizing’ explanations must conform to the covering law and if so, what laws might underscore of such explanations.
These considerations answer in the most general terms, that is ‘to explain’ or to make clear, to make plain, or to provide an understanding. Definitions of this sort are philosophically unhelpful, for the terms used in the definiens are no less problematic than the term to be defined.
One common type of explanation occurs when deliberate human actions are explained in terms of conscious purposes: Why did you go to the pharmacy yesterday: Because I had a headache and needed to get some aspirin, it is radically assumed that aspirin is an appropriate medication for headaches and that going to the pharmacy would be an efficient way of getting some. Such explanations are, of course, teleological, inferring, as they do, to goals - if the pharmacy happened to be closed for shelf stocking, the aspirin would not have been obtained there, but that would not invalidate the explanation. Some philosophers would say that the antecedent desire to achieve the end and is what does the explaining, others might say that the explaining is done by the nature of the goal and the fact that the action, promoted the chances of realizing it (e.g.,Taylor, 1964 ). In any case it should not be automatically assumed that such explanations are causal. Philosophers differ considering on whether these explanations are to be framed in terms of cause or reasons. The distinction between reasons and causes is motivation, in good part by a desire to separate the rational from the natural order. Historically, it probably traces back, at least to Aristotle’s similar (but not identical) distinction between final and efficient causes. Recently, the contrast has been drawn primarily to the domain of actions and, secondarily elsewhere.
If reason states can motivate, however, why (apart from confusing them with reason proper) deny that they are causes. For one thing, they are not events, at least in the usual sense entailing change: They are dispositional states (this contrasts them with occurrences, but does not imply that they admit of dispositional analysis). It has also seemed to those who deny that reasons are causes that the former justify as well as explain the actions for which they are reasons, whereas the role of causes is at most to explain. Another claim is that the relation between reasons (and about reason states are often cited explicitly) and the actions they explain of a non-contingent, whereas the relation of causes to their effects is contingent. The logical connection argument proceeds from this claim to the conclusion that reasons are not causes.
There is, then, a clear distinction between reasons proper and causes, and even between reason states and event causes: But the distinction cannot be used to show that the relation between reasons and the actions they justify is in no way causal. Precisely, parallel points hold in the epistemic domain (and indeed for all the propositional attitudes, since they all similarly admit of justifications, and explanation by reasons). Suppose my reason for believing that you received my letter today, is that I sent it by express yesterday. My reason strictly speaking, is that I sent it by express just the other day, my reason state in my believing this is arguably, my reason justifies the further proposition I believe for which it is my reason, and my reason state - my evidence belief - both explains and justifies my belief that you received the letter today. I can say that what justifies that belief is (the fact) I sent the letter by express yesterday, but the statement expresses my believing that evidence proposition, and indeed, if I do not believe it, my belief that you received the letter is not justified, it is not justified by the mere truth in the proposition (and can be justified even if that proposition is false).
However, a unification approach to explanation has been developed by Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher (Kitcher, in Kitcher and Salmon, 1989). The basic idea is that we understand our world more adequately to the extent that we can reduce the number of independent assumptions we must introduce to account for what goes on in it. Accordingly, we understand phenomena to the degree that we can fit them into a general world picture or Weltanschauung. In order to serve in scientific explanations, the world picture must be scientifically well founded.
In contrast to the foregoing views - which stress such factors as logical relations, laws of nature and causality - a number of philosophers (e.g., Achinstein, 1983 and van Fraasen, 1980) have urged that explanation, and not scientific explanations, can be analysed entirely in pragmatic terms.
During the past half-century much philosophical attention has been focussed on explanation in science and in history, considerable controversy has surrounded the question of whether historical explanation must be scientific, or whether history requires explanations of different types. Many diverse views have been articulated: The foregoing brief survey does not exhaust the variety (Salmon, 1990).
In everyday life we encounter many types of explanation, which appear not to raise philosophical difficulties, in addition to those already discussed. Prior to take-off a flight attendant explains how to use the safety equipment on th e aeroplane. In a museum the guide explains the significance of a famous painter. A mathematics teacher explains a geometrical proof to a bewildered student. A newspaper story explains how a prisoner escaped. Additional examples come easily to mind. The main point is to remember the great variety of context in which explanations are sought and given.
Another item of importance to epistemology is the widely held notion that non-demonstrative inference can be characterized as inference to the best explanation. Given the variety of views on the nature of explanation, this popular slogan can hardly provide a useful philosophical analysis.
Holding to this particular point and within this peculiarly occupied station of space, it is not unusually to find it said that, an inference is a (perhaps very complex) act of thought by virtue of which act (1) I pass from a set of one or more propositions or statements to a proposition or statement and (2) It appears that the later is true if the former is or are. This psychological characterization has occurred widely in the literature under more or less variations.
It is natural to desire a better characterization of inference, but attempts to do so by constructing a fuller psychological explanation fail to comprehend the grounds on which inferences will be objectively valid - a point elaborated made by Gottlob Frége. And attempts to better understand the nature of inference through the device of the representation of inference by formal-logical calculations or derivations (1) leaves us puzzled about the relation of formal-logical derivations to the informal inferences they are supposed to represent , and (2) leaves us worried about the sense of such formal derivations. Are these derivations inferences? And are n’t informal inferences needed in order to apply the rules governing the constructions of formal derivations (inferring that this operation is an application of that formal rule?)
Coming up with a good and adequate characterization of inference - and even working out what would count as a good and adequate characterization, is that, here - is a hard by no means nearly solved psychological problem. Therefore the process of drawing a conclusion from premises or assumptions, or, loosely, the conclusion so drawn. An argument can be merely a number of statements of which one is designated the conclusion and the rest are designated premises in whether the premises imply the conclusion is thus independent of any one ‘s actual beliefs in either of them. Beliefs, however , is essential to inference. Inferences occurs only if someone, owing to believing the premises, begins to believe the conclusion or continues to believe the conclusion with greater confidence than before . Because inference requires a subject who has beliefs, some requirements of (an ideally) acceptable inference do not apply to abstractive arguments: One must believe that the premises support the conclusion, neither of these beliefs may be based on one‘s prior belief in the conclusion. Where, W.E. Johnson called these the epistemic conditions of inference. In ‘reductio ad absurdum’ argument that deduces a self-contradiction from certain premises, not all steps of the argument will correspond to steps of inference, no one deliberately infers a contradiction. What one infers, in such an argument, is the certain premises are consistent.
Acceptable inferences can fall short of being ideally acceptable according to the requirements set forth. Relevant beliefs are sometimes indefinite, infant’s and children infer, spite having no grasp of the sophisticated notion of support. One function of idealization is to set standards for that which fall short. It is possible to judge how nearly inexplicit, automatic, unreflective, less-than-ideal inferences met ideal requirements.
In ordinary speech ‘infer’ often functions as a synonym of ‘imply’, as in ‘The new tax law infers that we have to calculate the value of our shrubbery’. Careful philosophical writing avoid this usage. Implication is, and inference is not, a relation between statements.
Valid deductive inference corresponds to a valid deductive argument: It is logically impossible for all the premises to be true when the conclusion is false. That is, the conjunction of all the premises and the negation of the conclusion is inconsistent. Whatever a conjunction is inconsistent , there is a valid argument for the negation of any conjunct from the conjuncts. (Relevance, logic imposes restrictions on validity to avoid this.) Whenever one argument is deductively valid, so is another argument that goes in a different direction. (1) ‘Stacy left her slippers in the kitchen’, implies of (2) ‘Stacy had some slippers’.Should one acquainted with Stacy and the kitchen infer of (1) and (2) from (1), or infer not-(1) from not-(2), or make neither inference ? Formal logic tells us about implication and deductive validity, but it cannot tell us when or what to infer. Reasonable inference depend on comparative degrees of reasonable belief.
An inference in which every premise and every step is beyond question is a demonstrative inference. (Similarly, reasoning for which this condition holds is demonstrative reasoning.) Just as what is beyond question can very from one situation to that of another, so can what counts as demonstrative. The term presumably derives from Aristotle’s ‘Posterior Analysis’. Understanding Aristotle’s views on demonstration requires understanding his general scheme for classifying inferences.
Not all inferences, are deductive. In an inductive inference, one infers from an observed combination of characteristics to some similar unobserved combinations.
‘Reasoning’ like painting and frosting, and many other words, has a process-product-ambiguity. Reasoning can be a process that occurs in time or it can be a result or product. To a letter to the editor can both contain reasoning and be the result of reasoning. It is often unclear whether a word such as ‘statistical’ that modifies the words ‘inference’ or ‘reasoning’, applies primarily to stages in the process or to the content of the product.
One view, attractive for its simplicity is that the stages of the process of reasoning correspond closely to the parts of the product. Examples that confirm this view are scarce as testing alternatives, discarding and reviving, revising and transposing, and so forth, are as common to the process of reasoning as to other creative activities. A product seldom reflects the exact history of its production.
In ‘An Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy’, J.S. Mill says that reasoning is a source from which we derive new truths. This is a useful saying so long as we remember that not all reasoning is inference.
Inferential knowledge, is a kind of ‘indirect’ knowledge, namely knowledge based on or resulting from inference. Assuming that knowledge is at least true. Justified belief, inference knowledge is constituted knowledge by a belief that is justified because it is inferred from certain other beliefs. The knowledge that 7 equals 7 seems non-inferential. We do not infer from anything that 7 equals 7 - it is obvious and self-evident. The knowledge that 7 is the cube root of 343, in contrast, seems inferential. We cannot know this without inferring it from something else, such as the result obtained when multiplying 7 times 7 times 7.
Two sots of inferential relations may be distinguished. ‘I inferred that someone died because the flag is at half-mast’ may be true because yesterday I acquired the belief about the flag, which caused me to acquire the further belief that someone died. ‘I inferentially believe that someone died because the flag is at half-mast’ may be true, because I retain the belief that someone died and it remains based in my belief about the flag. My belief that someone died is thus either episodically or structurally inferential. The episodic process is an occurrent, causal relation among belief acquisitions. The structural beliefs, and need not be occurrent (some reserved reference for the episodic relation), an inferential belief acquire on the basis that may later belief is held on a different basis as when I forgot I saw a flag at half-mast, but continue to believe someone died because of news reports.
That, ‘How do you know?’ and ‘Prove it?’ Always seem pertinent suggests that all knowledge is inferential, a version of the coherence theory. The well-known regress argument seems to show, however, that not all knowledge can be inferential, which is a version of foundationalism. For if ‘S’ knows something inferentially, ‘S’ must infer it correctly from premises ‘S’ known to be true. The question whether those premises are also known inferentially begins either an infinite regress of inferences (which is humanly impossible) or a circle of justification (which could not constitute good reasoning).
Which source’s of knowledge are non-inferential remains an issue that an apple is red, e.g., our knowledge is based in some manner on the way the apple looks: ‘By the way it looks’. This answer seems correct, moreover, only if an inference from the way the apple looks to its being red would be warranted. Nevertheless, perceptual beliefs are formed so automatically that talk of inference seem inappropriate In addition, inference, as a process whereby beliefs are acquired as a result of holding other beliefs may be distinguished from inference as a state in which one belief is sustained on the basis of others. Knowledge, that is, inferential in one way, need not be inferential in the other.
It is justly held, of many who claim from the legitimate forms of non-deductive reasoning that provides an important alternative to both deduction and enumerative induction that inference to the best explanation in, be that, it is only through reasoning to the best explanation that one can justify belie about explanations that one can justify belief about the external world , the past , theoretical entities in science, and even the future. Consider belief about the external world and assume that we know what we do about the external world through or knowledge of subjective and fleeting sensations. It seems obvious that we cannot deduce any truth about the existence of physical objects from truths describing the character of our sensations. But neither can we observe a correlation between sensations and something other than sensations since by hypotheses of our sensations, are nonetheless, that we may be able to posit physical objects as the best explanation for the character and order our sensations. In the same way as, various hypotheses about the past might best explain present memory, theoretical postulates in physics, might best explain phenomena in the macro-world: And it is even possible that our access to the future is through universal laws that are formulated to explain past observations. But what exactly is the form of an inference. But what exactly is the form of an independence to the best explanation.
When one presents such an inference in ordinary discourse it often seems to have the following form:
1. Ο is the cas e.
2. If ‘E’ had been the case Ο is what we would expect
Therefor e th ere is a high probability that
3. ’E’ was the case.
This is the argument form that Charles Sangers Peirce (1839-1914) called hypotheses or ‘abduction’. To consider a very simple example, we might upon coming across some footprints on a sandy beach and, reason to the conclusion that a person walked along the sandy beach, recently by noting that if a person had walked along the beach one would expect to find just such footprints.
But is abduction a legitimate form of reasoning? Obviously, if the conditional in 2 above is read as a material conditional such arguments would be hopelessly bad, since the proposition that ‘E’ materially implies Ο is entailed by Ο, there would always be an infinite number of competing inference to the best explanation and none of them would seem to lend even prima facie support to its conclusion. The conditionals we employ in ordinary discourse, however, are seldom, if ever, material conditionals. Indeed, the vast majority of ‘if. . . ., then . . . Statements do not seem to be truth-functionally complex. Rather, they seem to assert a connection of some sort between the states of affairs preferred to, in the antecedent (after ‘if’) and in the consequent (after the ‘then’). Perhaps, the argument form has more plausibility if the conditional is read in this more natural way. But consider an alternative - footprints explanation.
1. There are footprints on the beach.
2. If cows wearing boots had walked along the beach recently one would expect to find such footprints.
Therefore, there is a high probability that ,
3. Cows wearing boots walked along the beach recently.
This inference has precisely the same form as the earlier to the conclusion that people walked along the beach recently and premisses are just as true, but we would no doubt regard both the conclusion and the inference as simply silly. If we are to distinguish between legitimate and illegitimate reasoning to the best explanation it would seem that we need a more sophisticated model of the argument form. It would seem that in reasoning to the best explanation we need a criteria choosing between alternative explanations, it is important that these criteria not be implicit premises which will convert our argument into an inductive argument. Thus, for example, if the reason we conclude that people rather than cows walked along th e beach is only that we are implicitly relying on the premises that footprints of this sorts are usually produced by people, then it is tempting to suppose that our inferences to the best explanation was really a disguised indicative inference of the form.
1. Most footprints are produced by people.
2. Here are footprints
Therefore in all probability
3. These footprints were produced by people.
If we follow the suggestion, made above, we might construe the form of reasoning to the best explanation. However:
1. Ο (a description of some phenomenon)
2. Of the set of available and competing explanations (E1, E2 . . .,En) capable of explaining Ο, E1, is the best, according to the correct criteria for choosing among potential explanations.
Therefore in all probability
3 E1.
One cannot help but notice, that there is a crucial ambiguity in the concept of the best explanation. It might be true of an explanation E1, that it has the best chance of being correct without it being probable that E1 is correct. If I have two tickets in the lottery and the hundred of other people each have one ticket, I am the person who has the best chance of winning, but it would be complete ly irrational to conclude on that basis that I am likely to win. It is much more likely that one of the other people will win than I will win. To conclude that a given explanation is actually likely to be correct, that I must hold that it is more likely that it is true than the disjunction of all other possible explanations is correct. And, since, on many models of potential explanations satisfying the formal requirements of adequate explanation is unlimited this will be no small feat.
Explanations are also sometimes take to be more plausible, as the more explanatory ‘power’ they have. This power is usually defined in term of the number of things or more likely, the number of kinds of things the theory can explain. Thus Newtonian mechanics was so attractive, the argument goes partly because of the range of the phenomena the theory could explain.
The familiarity of an explanation in terms of its resemblance to an already accepted kind of explanation, is also sometimes cited as a reason for preferring that explanation to less similar kinds of explanation. So, if one provokes a kind of evolutionary explanation for the disappearance of one organ in a creature, one should look more favourably for the disappearance of another organ.
The aforesaid mention of only being of three examples of criteria one might use in choosing among alterative explanations. But evaluating the claim that inference to the best explanation , is that it is true in that of its legitimate and independent argument of Form. One must explore the question of whether it is a contingent fact that at least in most of phenomena that satisfy a given criterion, simplicity, for example, are more likely to be correct. while it might be nice (for scientist’s and writers of textbooks) if the universe were structured in n such a way that simple, powerful and familiar explanations were usually the correct explanation. It is difficult as to avoid the explanation that if this is true it would be an empirical fact about our universe, discovering that simplicity to the best or possibility of its being the best of explanations, is an independent source of information about the world? Why should we not conclude that it would be more perspicuous to represent the reasoning this way?
1. most phenomena have the simplest, most powerful, familiar explanations available.
2. Here is an observed phenomenon, and E1 is the simplest, most powerful, familiar explanation available
Therefore, in all probability.
3. This is to be explained by E1.
But, the aforesaid mention is simply an instance of familiar inductive reasoning having derived of a conclusion by reasoning the answer was obtained by inference, such that determination arrives at by reasoning., and could be wrong if it is an inference based on insufficient or incomplete evidence, as, perhaps, it could have been based on the suspicions would on such simplicity from which is sustained by the questions that one in the group was a stranger in the vicinity. Nonetheless, initially we were confused but soon enough we fully understood. Is that, of an intuitive cognition that I’ve awakened in aflame of the burning sparks of ambers of fire.
The positional connection from which is associated with ‘intuition’ from which a non-inferential knowledge or grasp as of a propositional concept or entity, that is not based to perception, memory, or introspection, also the capacity in virtue of which such cognition is possible. A person might know that 1 + 1 = 2 intuitively, e.g., not on the basis of inferring it from other propositions. And one might know intuitively, of what yellow is, i.e., might understand the concept even though ‘yellow’ is not definable. or one might have an intuitive awareness of God or some other entity. Certain mystics hold that there can be intuitive or immediate apprehension of God. Ethical intuitionist’s holds both that we can have intuitive knowledge of certain moral concepts that are indefinable, and that certain propositions, such as that pleasure is intrinsically good, are knowable through intuition. Self-evident propositions are those that can be seen (non-inferentially) to be true once one fully understands them. It is often held that all and only self-evident propositions are knowable, through intuition, which is indefinable with a certain kind of intellectual or rational insight intuitive knowledge of moral or other philosophical propositions or concepts has been grammatically possessed by competent users of a language, such language by competent users of a language. Such language users can know immediately whether certain sentences are grammatical or not without recourse to any conscious reasoning.
Deduction is commonly distinguished from the term used for any premises of reasoning that takes use from empirical premises in empirical conclusions, yet supported by the premise, that is not deductively entailed by them, deduction arguments are therefore kinds of applicative arguments and therefore entailed by them. Nonetheless, inductive arguments are therefore kinds of an application argument, in which something as beyond the content or the premise is inferred as probable or supporting them. Induction is, however, commonly distinguished from literary arguments to theoretical explanations which share in this applicatory character. Nonetheless, the displacing phraseology brings an outdistanced characterization as described to the kinds of induction.
Once, again, deduction is characterized of a finite sequence of sentences whose last sentence is a conclusion of the sequence (the one said to be the deduced),and which is such that each sentence in the sequence is an ‘axiom’ or a premise or follows from preceding sentences in the sequence by a rule of inference. The very same sequence of sentences might be a deduction relative to one such system but not relative to another.
The concept of deduction is generalization of the concept of proof. A proof is finite sequence of sentences each of which is an axiom or follows from preceding sentences in the sequence by a rule of inference. the last sentence in the sequence is a theorem, given that the system of axioms and rules of inference are effectively specifiable, there is an effective procedure for determining whenever a finite sequence of sentences is given, whether it is a proof relative to that sentence. The notion of theorem is not in general effective (decidable). For there may be no method by which we can always find a proof of a given sentence or determine that none exists.
The concepts of deduction and consequence are distinct, the first is a syntactical and secondly, is semantical. It was a discovery that, relative to the axioms and rules of inference of classical logic, a sentence ‘S’ is deducible from a set of sentences ‘K’ provided an important consequence of this discovery. It is trivial that sentence ‘S’ is deducible from ‘K’ just in case ‘S’ is deducible from some finite subset of ‘K’, just in case ‘S’ is a consequence of some finite subset of ‘K’. This compactness property had to be shown.
A system of natural deduction is axiomless. Proofs of theorems within a system are generally easier with natural deduction. Proofs of theorems about a system such as the results mentioned are generally easier if the system has axioms.
In a secondary sense, ‘deduction’ refers to an inference in which a speaker claims the conclusion follows necessarily from the premises. Its proof is a collection of considerations and reasonings that instill and sustain the conviction that some proposed theorem - the theorem proved - is not only true, but could not possibly be false.
The word ‘belief’ is commonly used to designate both a particular sort of psychological state, a state believing and a particular intentional content or proposition believed. Reasons fo belief exhibit an analogous duality. A proposition, ‘p’, might be said to provide a normative reason to believe a proposition ‘q’, for instance, when ‘p’ bear some appropriate warranting relation to ‘q’. And ‘p’ might afford a perfectly good reason to believe ‘q’, even though no one, as a matter of fact, believes either ‘p’ or ‘q’. In contrast, ‘p’ is a reason that I have for believing ‘q’, if I believe ‘p’ and ‘p’ counts as a reason to believe ‘q’. Undoubtedly I have reason to believe countless propositions that I shall never as it happens, come top believe. Suppose, however, that ‘p’ is a reason for which I believe ‘q’. In that case I must believe that both ‘p’ and ‘q’, as ‘p’ must be a reason to believe ‘q’ - or at any rate, I must regard it as such, for which it may be that I must, in addition, believe ‘q’ at least in part, because I believe ‘p’.
Reasons in these senses are inevitably epistemic, they turn on considerations of evidence, truth-conduciveness, and the like, but not all reasons for belief are of this sort. An explanatory reason, a reason why I believe ‘p’ may simply be an explanation for my having or coming to have this belief. Perhaps I believe ‘p’ because I was brainwashed or struck on the head, or because I have strong non-epistemic motives for this belief. I might of course, hold that belief on basis of unexceptionable epistemic grounds. When this is so, my believing ‘p’ may both warrant and explain my believing ‘p’. Reflections of this sort can lead to questions concerning the overall or ‘all-things-considered’ reasonableness of a given belief. Some philosophers (e.g., Clifford) argue that a belief’s reasonableness depends exclusively on its epistemic standing: My believing ‘p’ is reasonable for me, where belief is concerned with epistemic reasons that is overriding. Others, siding with James, have focussed on the role of belief in our psychological economy, arguing that the reasonableness of my holding a given belief can be affected by a variety of non-epistemic considerations. Suppose I have some evidence that ‘p’ is false, but I stand to benefit in a significant way from coming to believe ‘p’. If that is so, and if the practical advantages of my holding ‘p’ considerably outweigh the practical disadvantages, it might seem obvious that my holding ‘p’ is reasonable for me in some all-embracing sense.
Intuition and deduction, are generally given to a sharp distinguish whereby one has intuition knowledge that ‘p’ when:
1. One knows that ‘p’
2. One’s knowledge that ‘p’ is immediate, and
3. One’s knowledge that ‘p’ is not of any instance of the operation of any of the five senses (so that knowledge of the nature of one’s own experience is not intuitive.)
On this account neither mediated nor sensory knowledge is intuitive knowledge. Some philosophers, however, want to allow sensory knowledge to count as intuitive: To do this, emit clause (3) as mentioned above.
The two principal families of examples of mediated (e.g., not immediate) knowledge that have interested philosophers are, knowledge through representation and knowledge by inference. Knowledge by representation occurs when the thing known is not what one appeals to as a basis for claiming to know it, as when one appeals to sensory phenomena as a basis for knowledge of the world (and the world is known to be a sense-phenomena construct) or as when one appeals to words as a source of knowing the world (as when one claims that a proposition is true of the world solely by virtue of the meaning of the words expressing it).
There are other idioms that are used to mark out the differences between non-intuitional and intuitional ways of knowing, such as knowing indirectly and knowing directly, or knowing in the absence of the thing known, it is sometimes useful to speak of the object of knowledge being intuitively given, meaning that we can know things about it without mediation. The justification of a claim to knowledge by appeal to its object being intuitively given is surely as good for as could be. What could be a better basis for a claim to knowledge than the object of knowledge itself, in as given just as it is?
We might say that deductive inference is a mode of achieving conditional knowledge. One infers a proposition ‘p’ from one or more propositions p1, . . . pn, . . . called the premises of the inference, ‘p’, and ‘p’ being called the conclusion of the inference. Most generally, to validly infer ‘p’ from premises p1, . . . pn, . . . is to think or reason one’s way to ‘p’ from those premises in such a way that one can see that, if the premises are known (and so true) then the conclusion is thereby known.
One of the fundamental problems of philosophy, overlapping epistemology and the philosophy of logic, is that if giving criteria for when a deductive inference is valid, criteria for when an inference does or can continue knowledge or truth. These are in fact, two very different proposals for solutions to this problem, one that has slowly come into fashion during the early part of this century, and another that has been much out of fashion, but is gaining in admirers. The former, which develops out of the tradition of Aristotelians syllogistic, holds that all valid deductive inferences can be analysed and paraphrased as follows:
The sentences occurring in the deduction are aptly paraphrased by sentences with explicit, interpreted logical syntax, which in the main consists of expressions for logical operations, e.g., predication, negation, conjunction, disjunction, quantification, abstraction, . . . and do forth.
The validity of the inference made from sentences in that syntax to sentences in that syntax, as this is entirely a function of the signs fo logical operations expressed in the syntax.
In particular, it is principally the meaning of the signs for logical operations that justly taking considered rules of inference as valid. (Koslow, 1991),for example, is such a justification as given by Frége, one of the great developers of this view of the nature of the proper criteria for valid deductive inference. Someone who in fact, in the late nineteenth century, gave us an interpreted logical syntax (and so a formal deductive logic) far, greater and more powerful than had been available through the tradition of Aristotlean syllogistic:
A ➞ B is meant to be a proposition that is false when ‘A’ is true and ‘B’ is false: Otherwise it is true (Frége, 1964): Paraphrased variables restricted to the True, and False.
The following is a valid rule of inference, as ‘A’ and A ➞ B, for if ‘B’ were false, since ‘A’ is true. A ➞ B would be false, but it is supposed to be true (Frége, 1964).
Frége believed that th e principal virtue of such formal-syntactic reconstructions of inferences - as validity moving on the basis of the meanings of the signs for the logical operations alone - was that it eliminated dependence on intuition and let one see exactly on what our inferences depended. e.g.,
We divide all truths that require justification into two kinds, those for which the proof can be carried out purely by means of logic and those for which it must be supported by facts of experience.
. . . Now, when I came to consider the question to which of these two kinds the judgements of arithmetic belong. I first had to ascertain how far one could proceed in arithmetic by means of inferences alone, with the sole support of those laws of thought that transcended all particulars . . . To prevent anything intuitively (Anschauliches) from penetrating unnoticed. I had to bend every effort to keep the chain of inferences free from gaps (Frége, 1975).
In the literature most ready to hand, the alternative view was suppose by Descartes and elaborated by John Locke, who maintained that inferences move best and most soundly when based on intuition.
Syllogism serves our Reason (in that it shows) the connexion of the Proofs(i.e., the connexion between premises and conclusion), in any one instance and no more, but in this, it is of no great use, since the Mind can perceive such connexion where it really is, as easily, and, perhaps, better without [Syllogism].
If we observe the Acts of our own Minds, we shall find, that we reason best and clearest, when we only observe the connexion of the [ideas], without reducing our Thoughts to any Rule of Syllogism (Locke, 1975).
What is it that one is intuiting? Ideas, or meaning, and relationships among them. Ideas or meaning are taken to be directly given: The difference being marked by Locke, is between (a) Inferring Socrates is mortal from the premisses that All men are mortal and Socrates is a man by appealing to the formal-logical rule. All ‘A’ are ‘B’, ‘C’ is an ‘A’, therefore ‘C’ is ‘B’, which is supposed to be done without any appeal to the intuitive meanings of ‘All and is’ and (b) Seeing that Socrates is moral follows from All men are mortal and Socrates is a man, by virtue of understanding (the meaning of) those informal sentences without any appeal to the formal-logical rule. Locke is also making the point that inferences made on the basis of such an understanding of meaning, are better, and more fundamental than inferences made on the basis of an appeal to a formal-logical schema. Locke would certainly maintain that such informal, intuitive inferences made on the basis of understanding the meaning sentences of formal inferences than formal-logical inference serve as a check on intuitive inference.
Such distrust of formal logical inference or greater trust in intuitive inference has been promoted in recent times by Henri Poincaré and Brouwer (Detlefsen, 1991).
We might say that for Frége, too, logical inferences moved by virtue of intuition or meaning, the meaning of the sign for logical inference, for we have seen how Frége appealed in such meanings in order to justify formal-logical rules of inference. Of course, once the formal-logical rules are so justified, Frége is quite content to appeal in them in the construction of deduction, not returning each time to the intuited meaning of the logical signs. What is now in Frége is the conviction that inferences that proceed wholly on the basis of the logical signs for logical operations, are complete with respect to logical implication - that if ‘B’ logically follows from ‘A’, then we should in principle be able to deduce ‘B’ from ‘A’ by rules which mention only logical operations and not, e.g., the concrete meaning of predicated expressions. In the relevant propositions, there is a deep issue which is destined to become the principal issue in the philosophy and epistemology of logical theory. That through what extent in what measure does intuition of the non-logical content of propositions (i.e., contents other than the meaning of the signs for logical operations) rightly sustain inference?
This is the issue that really concerned Brouwer and Poincaré (Detlefsen, 1991). But consider Katz (1988) argued that Descartes’ cogito, is a sound inference made on the basis of intuitions or meaning and is inable of being articulated or paraphrased as formal-syntactic reasoning after the now ubiquitously deployed method of Frége depending - (as described) - on logical operations alone. But one does not really need to reach for of other examples. Virtually, all inferences set out in mathematical or most obvious proceed on the basis of intuitively given meaning content rather than appeal in formal-logical rules, but it is easy to find examples of such proofs that clearly do not depend on the meaning beliefs for logical operations, but rather on the non-logical content of the mathematical proposition.
The following presentation, by mathematical knowledge is first the prototypical paradigm in the presentment of mathematical paradox.
Mathematics is, historically, perhaps the earliest science, as for many thinkers mathematical knowledge, by virtue of its seeming absolute certainty, has served as an ideal or paradigm for all the sciences. For example, the mathematical method was extended by rationalistic scenists like Galileo and Descartes to the realm of what we today call physics. Even if we do not go so far as to regard physics as the ‘mathematics of motion’, mathematical knowledge seems to be indispensable for modern scientific knowledge - the mathematically illiterate cannot read the papers of Dirac, Einstein or Feynman. We can say, therefore, that mathematics is at least continuous with scientific knowledge.
Yet mathematics seems continuous also with metaphysics, mathematics seems not to deal with nature - its subject matter could be variously described as ‘ideal’ or ‘abstract’. Figures the triangle and spheres, and so forth, are ideal - they are perfectly shaped and have no breadth. They seem to be the limit of some infinite process unattainable in the actual world. Numbers, on the other hand, are idealizations of any actual objects. Furthermore, the very certainty of mathematical knowledge seems to set it apart from empirical knowledge. Kant put the matter polemically in his ‘good company’ argument: One cannot reject metaphysics without rejecting mathematics. This argument, of course, was intended as an ‘ad hominem’ argument against the empiricist (like David Hume) who, being pro-science, would never reject mathematics.
Latter-day ‘naturalists’ are also subject to Kant’s ‘good company’ argument. As formulated by Paul Benacrraf, this argument goes for the naturalist, who takes seriously the finding of modern science, knowledge is a causal interaction between Knower and environment. (The causal interaction involved may be seen as an energy transfer between an individual Knower and his environment, or - as in ‘evolutionary epistemology - a process of natural selection that shape and entire species.) But mathematical objects do not participate in casual interactions. Hence mathematical knowledge is impossible, unless we drop naturalism. (It is interesting that something like this argument already occurs in Plato’s -Sophist-, at §248: If knowing is to be acting on something, it follows that what is known must be acted upon by it, and so on, this showing, reality when it is being so acted upon - and that, we say, cannot happen to the changeless.)
We can, therefore, sum up the paradox of mathematical knowledge as follows: Without mathematical knowledge, there is no scientific knowledge - yet the epistemology (‘naturalism’) suggested by scientific knowledge seems to make mathematical knowledge impossible, it is, nonetheless, that we shall continue of the various strategies to deal with the paradox of mathematical knowledge.
There is a non-causal relationship between the soul, or mind, of humanity, and the world of mathematics. The naturalist epistemology is inadequate, (this need not involve rejection of ‘naturalism’, . . . Of course, this idea is the basis of Plato’s entire metaphysics, but mathematicians have felt the same way, G.H. Hardy (1929) and Roger Penrose (1989), for example, speak of a ‘seeing’, that a mathematical proposition is true, proof being necessary only to persuade others. In our century the great logician Gödel (1948) endorsed the view that there is some other connection between ourselves and reality than sense perception, and that this ‘mathematical intuition’ can account for mathematical knowledge. In fact Gödel’s discoveries in logic have been used to support the realist position. Gödel’s theorem has been interpreted as showing that, for any serious system of mathematical axioms, the mathematicians can know a mathematical truth, that does not follow rom those axioms: Realists argue that the only way this could be true is by mathematical intuition. This argument can be resisted, however, since it presupposes what is doubtful, that we know that the axioms of mathematics are jointly consistent (The unprovable truth, call it ‘G’, says, roughly, ‘I am not provable’ but if the axioms are inconsistent, then everything is provable, so ‘G’ is false.) Granted, one could argue that we know that the axioms of mathematics are consistent because we intuit their truth - true axioms are preforce consistent, but the appeal to Gödel’s theorem then becomes superfluous and circular.
Though ‘Platonist’ realism in a sense accounts for mathematical knowledge, it postulates such a gulf between both the ontology and the epistemology of science and that of mathematics that realism is often said to make the applicability of mathematics in natural science into an inexplicable mystery.
Recently, therefore, some writers have attempted a broader realist position based on ‘structuralism’: Mathematics is about structures, not objects. Benacerraf (1965) already suggested such a position in ‘What Numbers Could Not Be’, but such writers as Michael Resnik (1982) and Penelope Maddy (1980) have developed the position, which can be seen as an ‘Aristotelian’ attempt to reconcile the naturalist epistemology with an attenuated mathematical realism. There is a mathematical intuition, but it is not a separate faculty from empirical sense perception. This idea is supported also by the work of the influential American philosopher of mathematics, Charles Parsons (1979-80), and by that of the present author (Steiner, 1975). Its propositions claim to make the applicability of mathematic of the empirical world intelligible.
The Kantian strategies exemplify that mathematical knowledge is a necessary condition of empirical knowledge. Kant himself argued that the laws of mathematics are actually constraints on our perception of space and time. In knowing mathematics, then, we know only the laws of our own perception. Physical space in itself, for all we know, may not obey the laws of Euclidean geometry and arithmetic, but the world as perceived by us must. As mathematics is objective - or ‘intersubjective’ - on the sense that it holds good of all perceptions of the whole human race, past, present and the future. For this reason, also, there is no problem with the applicability of mathematics in empirical science - or so the Kantian’s claim.
Kant’s view of mathematical knowledge is often regarded as having been refute d by the discovery of non-Euclidean geometry, and curved spaces, but these geometries are ‘logically Euclidean’ (i.e., a curved region looks flatter and flatter the smaller it gets), and Kant could have made the more modest claim that any single field of vision is, a priori, a logically Euclidean space.
At any rate, the modern branch of mathematics known as topology, developed by the famous mathematician Henri Poincaré, can be regarded as the part of geometry for which the Kantian thesis remains a viable option.
Poincaré (1907) was a Kantian in arithmetic as well, for him, the law of mathematical induction Was the essence of arithmetical property ‘P’ of zero which is ‘hereditary‘ (i.e., it holds of n + 1 wherever it holds for ‘n’) holds of every natural number. This principle is justified by noting that if ‘P’ holds of zero, then it holds of 1, so by ‘modus ponens’, it actually holds of 1. By continual use of ‘modus ponens’ and hereditariness, we know that we can eventually ‘arrive at’ any number ‘n’ and show that ‘P’ holds of ‘n’. This is the kind of self-knowledge of which Kant spoke, although Poincaré held, inspired by Kant, that it cannot be reduced to ‘logic’: On the contrary, mathematical induction is a principle about what logic can do. Poincaré knew of Frége’s and Russell’s efforts (as part of their ‘logicism’), to convert the principle of mathematical induction to logical definition: (roughly) ‘n’ is a natural number just of it is subject to the law of induction, but he regarded this definition as being circular.
In the 1920`of the present century, two outstanding logicians -Hilbert and Brouwer- argued for competing versions of Kantianism: Formalism`and intuitionism. Both men accepted that the ultimate content of mathematics is intuition, and that classical mathematics goes beyond the merely intuitive) for example, in its acquiescence in infinite totalities), and therefore, does not give to knowledge. But where Brouwer (1913) advocated replacing classical mathematics by a new kind of mathematics (which he and his followers proceeded to develop), Hilbert (1926) took the conservative approach of justifying the so-called, ideal proofs of classical mechanics as instruments of discovery.
John Stuart Mill (1843) is the most outstanding of empiricist to adopt the radical stance that mathematics is a branch, not of logic, but of physics. The relative certainty - logic - and applicability - that attaches to mathematical results from the great range of empirical confirmation that mathematics enjoys. For geometry, of course, the position is widely accepted today, but it is more difficult to see how one could regard arithmetic as empirical, for example, what would be en empirical evidence for. 1234 x 1234 = 1,522,750? Certainly nothing that would justify our actual conviction concerning this product. Recently some authors, most notably Philip Kitcher (1983), have attempted to refurbish this position by arguing that the axiom of arithmetical applicability can be given an empirical interpretation and supposed by evidence.
A logicist strategy argues that mathematics is just a branch of logic, or, more generally, and traditionally more analytic-truth, though this is not an empiricism interpretation of mathematics,. Since it appears to give a non-metaphysical account of mathematical knowledge. Empiricist have assumed that since it is proved that mathematics is logic, the problem of mathematical knowledge no longer arises, since there is no philosophical problem about logical knowledge. Nevertheless, it should be remembered that it was Leibniz who first conjectured, and tried to prove mathematics is logic - but he had a metaphysical picture of logical knowledge, as being true in all possible worlds. Nor was Frége, who invented modern logic, in part, to prove that mathematics is nothing but logic (and thus founded the modern logicist school), an empiricist. Conversely, the common belief that Hume’s view of mathematics as the study of relations among idea’s, prefigure as modern logicism is actually due to Kant‘s influence. For Kant (in the Prolegomena) characterized Hume’s theory as ‘amounting to’ the claim that mathematics is ‘analytic’, a quite doubtful characterization in the light of Hume’s explicit declaration (Treatise I,ii,4) that such propositions, as ‘The shortest distance between two points is a straight line’ are not true by ‘definition’. Perhaps a better translation of Hume’s doctrine into Kantian language would be: Mathematics is synthetic a priori, this does not mean that Kant and Hume had the same philosophy of mathematics, though, because their theories of the a priori, e.g., their theories of necessary truth were quite different.
Nevertheless, knowledge as a set of ideas are the twentieth- century empiricalists, like the later Russell, Carnap, Ayer, and Hempel saw logicism as an appropriate doctrine. They, unlike that of Leibniz, saw logical validity as a matter of linguistic rules, the rules governing words like ‘all’, ‘and’, and ‘not‘: Knowledge of these was considered to be free of metaphysics. However, the complete answer would involve a solution to the problem of induction, as to explain how any part or present experience makes warranted for being of reason. It was the ‘positivism’ who’s adherence to the doctrine that science is the only form of knowledge and that there is nothing in the universe beyond what can in principle be scientifically known. It was logical, in its independence on developments in ‘logic’ and mathematics in the early year’s, if this century which were taken to reveal how a priori knowledge of necessary truths, is compatible with a thorough-going empiricism. It had to be cognitively meaningful of and only if it can be verified or falsified. A sentence is said to be cognitively meaningful if and only if it can be verified of falsified in experiences, however, this is not meant to require that the sentence be conclusively verifiable or that the sentence is false. Since universal scientific laws or hypotheses (which are suppose to pass the test) are not logically deducibly from any amount of actually observed evidence .
Since science is regarded as the repository of all genuine knowledge, this become the task of exhibiting the structure of, as it has been so-called, the ‘logic’ of science the theory of knowledge, thus becomes the philosophy of science.. It has three major tasks: (1) To analyse the meaning of the statements of science exclusively in terms of thus, and becomes the philosophy of science terms that it has meaning of the statant of science, exclusively in and of observations for experience, in principle analysably to human beings: (2) To concerning observations or experience serve certain observant ions or experiences serve to confirm a given statement in the sense of making it more warranted or reasonable. To show how non-empiricism or a priori knowledge, if the necessary truths of logic and mathematics is possible, even of fact which can be intelligibly thoroughgoing hypothesis, seem known as in empirically verifiable or falsified.
A neglected virtue of ‘logicism’, is that it solves - or dissolves some of the problems of mathematical applicability, logicism shows that all mathematical science can be represented in set theory, thus the only relation between physical objects and mathematical objects we only need recognize is that physical objects can be members of sets (sets being mathematical objects). Presumably, if we believe in sets at all, we have no further problem of seeing how physical objects can be members of sets, son some (but not all) (Steiner, 1989) of the problems concerning mathematical applicability disappear. This virtue of logicism does not depend on or upon our recognizing set theory as ‘logic’.
In pragmatist theories of mathematical knowledge, the indispensability of mathematics in all other knowledge, especially in physical sciences, is converted into justification of mathematical ‘commitments’. The only justification of mathematical assertions is that we cannot help ourselves, if we want to achieve the goals of science and everyday life. While this might be regarded as weak confirmation indeed (and certain no explanation of the ‘obviousness’ of mathematics, as Parsons has pointed out), pragmatists argue that mathematics is in the same boat as every scientific theory. in this sense, their argument is similar to the ‘good company’ argument of Kant.
Quine (e.g., 1960, 1970)who has made this pragmatist-Kantian argument famous (though Quine’s predecessor at Harvard, C.I. Lewis already preached a syntheses of Kantianism and pragmatism in ‘Mind and the World Order), adds a Deweyite ‘Naturalistic’ element: Ultimately what justifies mathematics and every justified theory in its usefulness in predicting ‘surface irritations’. What is striking about Quine’s philosophy of mathematics, however, is that it is explicitly Platonist in its ontology (though not, of course, in its epistemology). Quine agrees with Frége that modern mathematics is heavily ‘committed’ to abstract objects - and disagrees with Wittgenstein and the British ‘ordinary language’ school, who regarded the ‘commitment’ as a manner of speaking , similar , if you will, to the commitment of a politician which nobody takes seriously.
For Quine, again, commitment to abstract objects is justified on pragmatic grounds: We have no choice if we want to do science, however, by combining Platonism, pragmatism and naturalism. Quine seems to make it impossible to give a theory of mathematical discovery. His reasoning can give, at best, a post facto pragmatist justification for mathematics once it has been discovered. For Quine has no place, in his philosophy, for ‘mathematical intuition’ either in the Kantian sense of th e Platonic sense. Thus, Quine’s picture of mathematical discovery is that of a senseless procedure that accidentally get s post facto justification.
Finding to the applicable approach that ‘solves’ the paradox, is by denying the very existence of mathematical knowledge. According to these approaches, mathematical theorems do not express ‘truths’, hence there is nothing to ‘know;. Mathematics can play its role in science and daily life without being ‘true’.
According to ‘instrumentalism’, mathematics is a tool for making inferences in other fields, but is not itself a science. Perhaps, the simplest and most radical form of this view is ‘fictionalism’. The fictionalist argues that, in principal, one could do without mathematics - even in science but mathematics allows the scientist the use of compact, elegant proofs, of what otherwise would be cumbersome deduction. A recent science of this position is by Hartry Field (1980). Field argues that one can rewrite physical theories, without any reference to ‘mathematical objects’, and then prove that adding mathematical axioms does not increase the deductive power of the rewritten theory. He actually shows how one might get rid of mathematical objects in a particular theory, namely classical gravitation, and how , by what amounts to a consistency proof, one shows that adding mathematics produces a ‘conservative extension’ of this ‘nominalistic’ theory of gravitation. Field claims explicitly, as a virtue of his fictionalism, that it eliminates the puzzles concerning mathematical applicability, since we have no longer to worry about the alleged gulf between the subject matter of mathematics and that of the natural sciences.
However, Field’s thesis is controversial, instead of ‘mathematical objects, Field’s version of gravitation takes points in ‘space-time as real enmities, and some argue that this is out of the frying pan and into the fire. Others protest that there are physical theories that are not space-time theories at all, like quantum mechanics. Some argue that the consistency proof will raise the ghosts of ‘meta-language’. And there are technical objections based on the use by Field’s ‘higher-order’ logic in his version of gravity.
Conventionalism is the view that mathematical theorems are ‘true by convention’, generally speaking, (but not always) it is supposed that the language has a logical or logic-like syntax and that the rules for logical or logic-like operations (e.g., those generalizing formal-logical `deductions of such rules for as language, meaning for words are instituted by convention, by specifying a subset `X`of the sentence or formulas in the language. Relative to the given rules the meaning of the signs in the sentence or formulas in the set `X` and the rules such that complex expressions either re=porting instituting equivalence among verbal nor symbolic expressions, in form, defer-verbal or symbolic definitions that report and explain how expressions that have been used. Formal axiomatic systems in which the meaning of each expression is gathered from its formal-logical relations with the other expressions provoked instituting, implicit definition.
Relative to the given rules, the meaning of the signs in the sentences or formulas in the set ‘X’ and implicitly defined to be a necessary truth are ones necessary truths are ones which must be true, or whose opposite is impossible. Contingent truths are those that are not necessary and whose opposite is therefore possible. Similar problems face the suggestion that necessary truths are the ones we know with certainty. We lack a criterion for which certainty, there are necessary truths we don’t know, and (barring dubious arguments for scepticism) it is reasonable to suppose that we know some contingent truths with certainty. However, axiomatic systems in which the meaning of each expression is accumulatively placed as its formal-logical relationships with the other expressions, provide institutionally implicit definitions.
By definition, through ‘X’ are implicitly defined and though the rules. Such signs as that: Language consists of signs as a binary relation signs to χ, y, 0, 1, 2 = as a binary relation, + as binary operation design. The rules will all be of the form: _+_=-,or _+_=_+_, or _=_+_ where we distinguish χ, y, 1, 2, in all possible ways over th e _’s. The rules are:
1. Whenever χ occurs, you may substitute 0, 1, or 2.
2. If W = Z occurs, you may substituted by Z for W whenever W occurs in the position _= or =_.
Here are the formulas χ that, together with the rules, implicitly define the signs χ, y, 0, 1, 2, +, =; χ + 0 = χ + y = y + χ. So what, for example, does 0 mean? It means, among other things, that χ + 0 = χ, 0 + 0 + 0. 1 + 0 =1, 2 + 0 = 2, 0 + χ = χ, 0 + 1 =1. This makes the theory rather more tractable since , in a sense, all the truths are contained in those few. In a theory so organized, the few truths from which all others are deductively inferred are called axioms. So axiomatic theories, like algebraic and differential equations which are means of representing physical processes and mathematical structures, could be made objects of mathematical investigation.
It is, nonetheless, for which Poincaré argued, for example, that the difference between Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry is not a factual, but only a conventional difference. That is, we can adopt either Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry according to convenience, since geometry according to convenience since geometry is the study of measurements, and measuring instruments are subject to the forces of nature. For example, we can explain the failure of signs of triangles to sum to 180 degrees either by postulating ‘deforming’ forces, or by another way of saying that there is no such thing as ‘knowledge’ in geometry, unless ‘knowledge’ that such-and-such are the consequences of our convention is meant. Poincaré does not extend in general, his general point of view in topology (and arithmetic, as we have seen is not conventionalism, but Kantian.
Thus, for example, Poincaré position implies that whether a surface is flat or parabolic is a matter of convention, but that the surface is of two dimensions is no conventional at all, no conceivable force could alter our ‘rulers’ in such a way to cause a two-dimensional. Though this position is Kantian, in that Poincaré gives a biological explanation for our perception of dimension, particularly why we perceive the world in three dimensions and not more.
The late Wittgenstein (1956-1976) is often regarded as a conventionalist, though a much more thoroughgoing one than Poincaré, since Wittgenstein makes no distinction between geometry and other branches of mathematics, including arithmetic. And it is true that Wittgenstein often refers to mathematical theorems as conventions.
1.Wittgenstein does not say that mathematical theories follow from’ convention. On the contrary, for Wittgenstein, each step in a mathematical proof is a new convention, not just the axioms (as for Poincaré). Convention, for Wittgenstein, do not ‘bind’ anybody.
2.This apparent anarchical element in Wittgenstein’s position, however, can mislead. When Wittgenstein speaks of a theorem as a convention, he does not mean that there is a genuine option to ignore the proof and accept the negation of the theorem. All mathematical conventions, for Wittgenstein, presuppose empirical regularities which, in his words, are then ‘hardened’ into rules. That is, what happens most of the time is regarded as the norm, and deviations are to be explained as mistakes, perturbations, and so forth. Empirical regularities connected with measuring are ‘hardened’ into theorems of geometry, while regularities in counting are hardened into theorems of arithmetic and number theory.
3.Wittgenstein does side with the conventionalist in one sense, however, in that he regards it as very misleading to speak of mathematical knowledge. To say that someone knows the Pythagoreans Theorem is, for Wittgenstein, like saying that someone knows that 12 inches is equal to 1 foot. But there is a tendency for us to regard mathematical knowledge, rather, as like empirical knowledge, a tendency which leads either to empiricist or Platonist theories of mathematics, both of which Wittgenstein rejected.
But still, for our considerations, that call for or justify action may be subjective or objective. A subjective reason is a consideration an agent understands to support a course of action whether or not it actually dies, an objective reason is one that does support a course of action, regardless of whether the agent realizes it. What are cited as reason may be matters either of fact or of value, but when facts area cared values are also relevant. Thus the fact that cigarette smoke contains nicotine is a reason for not smoking only because nicotine has undesirable effects. The most important evaluative reasons are normative reasons -,i.e., for considerations having ethical force becomes obligatory reasons when in conjunction with normative considerations they give rise to an obligation. Thus in view of the obligation to help the needy the fact that others are hungry is an obligating reason to see they are fed.
Reasons action enters practical thinking as the contents of belief, desires and other mental states. But not all the reasons that one has need motivate the corresponding behaviour. Thus I recognize an obligation to pay taxes, yet do so only for fear of punishment, if so, then only my fear of punishment, and, if so, then only my fear is an explaining reason for my action. An overriding reason is one that takes precedence over all others. It is often claimed that moral reasons override all others objectively, and may speak of an all-things-considered reason - one that after due consideration is taken as finally determinative of what shall be done.
Of the standard theoretical account of ‘realism’, takes beliefs to be genuine states causally implicated in behaviour. Others deflate the standard version, imagining that beliefs (and other propositional attitudes) possess only an attenuated kind of reality. Quine (1960 §45), for instance, links the ascription of attitudes to the translation of utterances. Just as, for Quine, there is no translation-independent fact if the manner as to what a given sentence means, there is no non-contextual fact of the matter as to what a given agent believes. Beliefs, like meaning is indeterminate, Donald Davidson (1984) echoes the sentiment. We can concoct distinct but equally apt. schemes of belief ascriptions for any agent. These schemes will depend partly on us, the ascribers, since they hinge on correlations between an agent’s utte198rance and sentences in our language, it makes no sense, then to talk of beliefs or meaning independently of a particular linguistic context.
A different anti-realism tack is taken by Daniel Dennett (1987) who defends an ‘instrumentalist’ conception of belief. We have a practical interest in regarding certain ‘systems’ - people, animals, machines, even committee - as rational as registering on the whole, what is true and as reasoning in accord with appropriate norms. In so doing, we take up the ‘intentional stance’. We are, as a result, in a position to make sense of and within limits, to predict the behaviour of the system in question. The practical success on this enterprise, however, does not depend on its yielding true descriptions of states and going-on-inside agent.
It is but a brief step from anti-realism to out-and-out scepticism about belief. Stephen Stich (1083), Patrican Churchland (1981) have argued that the concept of belief belongs to an out-moulded ‘folk psychology’. Folk psychology provides a theory of intelligent behaviour. Beliefs are among the theoretical entities postulated by the theory. Were we to abandon this theory, we would thereby ‘culminate’ its postulated entities. Beliefs would go the way of caloric phlogiston and the ether, theoretical terms dropped from our inventory of constituents of the world when theories to which they figured were replaced by better theories. Eliminativism is contend that recent advances in psychology and neuroscience suggest that folk psychology is, even now, being eclipsed by better theories, and that, in consequence it is reasonable to deny the existence of belief.
Critics respond that this claim is self-defeating, if eliminativism were right, then, by their own light, it would be impossible to believe what theory say through, of corse, it would be equally impossible to believe it false. The criticism misses the target. A proposition may be true but pragmatically unstable. I cannot coherently claim always to lie, yet, for all that, I may always lie. As things stand, eliminativist’s are obliged to articulate their position using concepts that have their home in the folk theory, they attack. Presumably a concepts that would enable the point to be made without involving reference to belief.
Eliminativism has not been widely embraced. It is not clear that the theoretical advances touted by eliminativist’s would eradicate belief. Psychology might replace the concept of belief with something finer grained, belief could turn to designate a range of states, Were that to happen, however, we might regard it as a discovery about the deeper character if belief, not its elimination. And were neuroscience to abandon reference to beliefs, we should have no more reason to doubt their existence, than we have reason to doubt the reality of trees, rocks, and solid surfaces because such things are ignored by basic physics.
That being said, coherence in epistemology lends of a structure of knowledge or justified beliefs representing knowledge are known or justified in virtue of their relations to other beliefs specifically in virtue of belonging to a coherent system of beliefs. Assuming that the orthodox account of knowledge is correct, at least in maintaining that justified true belief is necessary for knowledge. We can identify two kinds of coherence theories of knowledge: Those that are coherentists’ merely in virtue of incorporating a coherence theory of justification and those that are doubly coherentist because they account for both justification and truth in terms of coherence. What follows will focus on coherence theories of justification.
Historically, coherentism is the most significant alternative to foundationalism. The latter holds that some beliefs, basic of foundational beliefs, are justified apart from their relations to other beliefs, while in other beliefs derive their justification from that of foundational belief. Foundationalism portrays justification as having a structure like that of a building, with certain beliefs serving as the foundation and all other beliefs supported by them. Coherentism rejects this image and pictures justification as having the structure of a raft - justified belief is like the planks that make up a raft, mutually support one another. This picture of the coherence theory is due to the positivist, Otto Neurath. Among the postivist, Hempel shares Neurath’s sympathy for coherentism. Other defender’s of coherentism from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were idealist’s, e.g., Bradley, Bosan-quet and Brand Blanshard (idealists often held the sort of double coherence theory mentioned earlier.
The contrast between foundationalism and coherentism is commonly developed in terms of regress argument. If we are asked what justifies one of our beliefs, we characteristically answer by citing other beliefs that supports it, e.g., logically or probabilistically if we are asked about this second belief, we are likely to cite a third, fourth or even a fifth, belief and so forth. There are three shapes such an evidential chain might have, it could go on forever, it could eventually end in some belief, or it could loop back upon itself, i.e., eventually higher up, on the chain. Assuming that infinite chains are not really possible,. We are left with a choice between chains that end and circular chains. According to foundationalists, chains must eventually end with a foundational belief is justified, in the beginning of the chain is to be justified, coherentists are then portrayed as holding than circular chains can yield justified belief.
This portrayal is, in a way, correct, but it is also misleading since it suggests that the disagreement between coherentism and foundationalism is best understood as concerning only the structure of evidential chains. Talk of evidential chains in which beliefs that are further down on the chain are responsible for beliefs that are higher up naturally suggests that the idea that just as real chains naturally suggest the idea that just as real naturally suggests the idea that just as real chains are responsible for beliefs that are further down on the chain are responsible for beliefs that are higher up naturally suggests the idea that just as real chains transfer forces, evidentialism sounds like real possibilities. Foundational beliefs already have justification, and evidential chain serves to pass the justification, and evidential chains serve to pass the justification along to other beliefs. But coherentism seems to be a nonstarter for no belief in the chain is justified to begin with, there is nothing to pass along. Altering the metaphor, we might say that coherrentism seems about as likely to succeed as a bucket brigade that does not end at a well, about belief that are justified for not in simply sound moves around in a circle.
The coherence seeks to dispel this appearance by pointing out that the primary function of evidential chains is not to transfer epistemic status, such as justification, from belief to belief. Indeed, beliefs are not the primary locus of justification. Rather, it is the whole systems of belief of justification or not in the primary sense: Individual beliefs are justified in virtue of their in an appropriately, structured system of beliefs. Accordingly, what the coherentist claims is that the appropriate sorts of evidential chains which will be circular - indeed, will likely contain numerous circles - constitute justified systems of belief. The individual belief within a system are themselves justified in virtue of their place in the entire system and not because this status is passed on to them from beliefs further down some evidential chain from beliefs further down some evidential chain in which they figure. One can, therefore, view coherentism with considerable accuracy as a version of foundationalism that holds all beliefs to b e fundamental. From this perspective the difference between coherentism and traditional foundationalism has to do with what accounts for the epistemic status of foundational beliefs, with traditional foundationalism holding that such beliefs can be justified in various ways, e.g., by perception or reason, while coherentism insists that the only way such beliefs can be justified is by being the only way such beliefs can be justified by being a member of an appropriately structured system of beliefs.
One outstanding problem the coherentist faces is to specify exactly what constitutes a coherent system of beliefs. Coherence clearly must involve much more than mere absence of mutually contradictory beliefs. One way in which beliefs can be logically consistent is by concerning completely unrelated matters, but such a consistent system of beliefs would not embody the sort of mutual support that constitutes the core idea of coherentism. Moreover, one might question whether logic consistency is even necessary for coherence, e.g., on the basis of the preface paradox. Similar points can be made regarding efforts to begin an account of coherence with the idea that beliefs and degrees of belief must correspond to the probability calculus. So although it is difficult to avoid thinking that such formal features as logical and probabilistic consistency are significantly involved in coherence, it is not clear exactly how they are involved. An account of coherence can be drawn more directly from the following intuitive idea: A coherent system of belief is one in which each belief is epistemically supported by the others, where various types of epistemic support are recognized, e.g., deductive or inductive arguments, or inference to the best explanation. There are, however, at least two problems this suggestion does not address. First, since very small sets of beliefs can be mutually supporting the coherentist needs to say something about the scope a system of beliefs must have to exhibit the sort of coherence required for justification. Second, given the possibility of small sets of mutually supportive beliefs, it is apparently possible to build a system of very broad scope out of small sets of mutually supportive beliefs by mere conjunction, i.e., without forgoing any significant support relations among them. Yet, since he interrelatedness of all truths does not seem discoverable by analysing the concept of justification, the coherentist cannot rule out epistemically isolated subsystems of belief entirely. So the coherentist must say what sorts of isolated subsystems of belief are compatible with coherence.
The difficulties involved in specifying a more precise concept of coherence should not be pressed too vigoursly against the coherentist. For one thing, foundationalists have been forced to grant coherence a significant role within their accounts of justification, so no dialectical advantage can be gained by pressing them. Moreover, only a little reflection is needed to see that nearly all the difficulties involved in specifying coherence are manifestations within a specific context of quite general philosophical problems concerning such matters as induction, explanation, theory choice, problems that are faced by logicians, philosophers of science, and epistemologists quite generally, regardless of whether they are set coordinates on coherrentism.
Coherentism faces a number of serious objections, since according to coherrentism justification is determined solely by the relations among beliefs, it does not seem to be capable of taking us outside the circle of our beliefs, this fact, gives rise to complacents with external reality, e.g., through perceptions and that it can neither guarantee nor given to claim that it is likely that coherent systems of belief will make contact with such reality or contain true beliefs. And with coherent systems of belief will make contact with such reality or contain true beliefs. And while it is widely granted that justified false beliefs are possible, it is just as widely accepted that there is an important connection between justification and truth, which justification that rules out accounts according to which justification is not truth-conducive. These abstraction formulated in complacents can be more vivid in the case of the former, by imagining a person with a coherent system of beliefs that becomes frozen, and fails to change in the face of ongoing sensory experience: And in the case of the latter, by pointing out that barring and unexpected account of coherence, it seems that a wide variety of coherent systems of belief are possible systems that are largely disjoint or even incompatible.
The most prominent recent externalist views have been versions of ‘reliabilism’, whose main requirement for justification is roughly that the belief be produced in a way other or through a process that makes it objectively likely that the belief is true (Goldman, 1986). What makes such a view externalist is the absence of any requirement that the person for whom the belief is justified having any sort of cognitive access to the relation of reliability in question. Lacking such access, such a person will in general, have no reason for thinking that the belief is true or likely to be true, but will, on such an account, is, nonetheless, be epistemically justified in accepting it. Thus such a view arguably marks a major break from the modern epistemological tradition, stemming from Descartes, which identifies epistemic justification with having a reason, perhaps even a conclusive reason for thinking that the belief is true. And epistemologists working within tradition is likely to feel that the externalist, rather than concept of epistemic justification With which the traditional epistemologist is concerned, has simply changed the subject.
With that, if an account implies that the standards of rational belief are those that would be endorsed or presupposed by the individual, then the account, yet, again, can be plausibly regarded as a subjective one, provided that there is nothing else in the account to guarantee that adhering to these standards is a reliable way to acquire true beliefs. And if an account of epistemic rationality implies that by being rational, individuals are assured of being reliable (or least more reliable than they would if they were irrational), then the account is not a subjective one.
Thus, reliabilist accounts of rational belief are paradigmatically objective. Classical foundationalist accounts are also objective. What about coherentist account? It can be tempting to think they are best classified as subjective, since what it is rational for us to believe, according to coherentists, is in large part a function of what we happen to believe. But any account of rational belief will allow for subjective inputs of experience or beliefs or whatever. The crucial question is whether the standards that relate these inputs to rational belief are objective or subjective, and in the case of coherentism the standards are typically explicated in a thoroughly objective manner. Coherentist ordinarily insist that if my beliefs are to be coherent and hence rational, they must at a minimum be consistent. It does not matter whether I think that inconsistency is always and everywhere to be avoided, and it does not matter whether I avoided, and it does not matter whether I would think this were it reflective. Likewise, it does not matter whether the individual or group or the human community at large think this or whether their intellectual practice presuppose this. According to coherentists, inconsistency implies incoherence, and it is always irrational for us to be incoherent, regardless of or our own subjective standards.
The view that knowledge and epistemic (knowledge-relevant) justification have a two-tier structure: Some instances of knowledge and justification are non-inferential. Or foundational, and all other instances thereof, are inferential, or non-foundational, in that they derive ultimately from foundational knowledge or justification. This structural view originates in Aristotle’s ‘Posterior Analysis’ (at least regarding knowledge), receive’s an extreme formulation in Descartes’s ‘Mediation’, and flourishes with varying details, in the works of such twentieth-century philosophers as Russell, C.L. Lewis, and Chisholm’s nature of non-inferential, or foundational knowledge and justification, and (b) the specific explanation of how foundational knowledge and justification can be transmitted to non-foundational beliefs. Foundationalism allows for differences on these projects, since it is essentially a view about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification.
The questions whether knowledge has foundations is essentially the question whether the sort of justification pertinent to knowledge has a two-tier structure. Some philosophers have construed the former question as asking whether knowledge depends on beliefs that are certain in some sense (e.g., indubitable or infallible). This construal bears, however, on only one species of foundationalism, radical foundationalism. Such foundationalism, represented primarily by Descartes, requires that foundational beliefs be certain and able to guarantee the certainty of the non-foundational beliefs they support. Radical foundationalism is currently unpopular for two main reasons. First, very few, if at any, of our perceptual beliefs are certain (i.e., indubitable) and second. Those of our belief that might be candidates for certainty (e.g., the belief that I am thinking lack sufficient substance to guarantee the certainty of our rich, highly inferential knowledge of the external world (e.g., our knowledge of physics, chemistry and biology.)
Contemporary foundationalism typically endorse modest foundationalism, the view that non-inferentially justified, foundational beliefs need not possess or provide certainty and need not deductively support justified non-foundational beliefs. Foundational beliefs (or statements) are often called ‘basic beliefs, or statements, but the precise understanding of ‘basic’ is controversial among foundationalist. As foundationalists agree, however, in that general understanding of non-inferentially justified foundational beliefs as beliefs whose justification does not derive from other beliefs, although they leave open whether the causal basis of foundational beliefs includes other beliefs. (Epistemic justification comes in degrees, but for simplification we can restrict issues to justification sufficient for satisfaction of the justification condition to what it takes or a belief to have of what it takes to show that a belief has by justification, omitting issues of what it takes to show that a belief has it.)
Three prominent account s of non-inferential justification are available to modest to fundamentalist: (1) Self-justification, (2) Justification by non-belief, non-propositional experiences, and (3) Justification by a non-justification (including at one time, John Curt Ducasse (1881-1969) and Milton Roderick Chisholm (1916-99) contend that foundational beliefs can justify themselves, with no evidential support elsewhere. Proponents of foundational justification by non-belief experiences cast out literal self-justification they hold, following C.I. Lewis (1883-1964) that foundational perceptual beliefs can be justified by non-belief sensory or perceptual experiences (e.g., seeming to see a dictionary) that make true are best explained by or otherwise support these beliefs (e.g., that belief that there is, or at least appears to be, a dictionary here) proponents of foundational justification by reliable origins find the basis of non-inferential justification in belief-forming process, make true or true are best explained by a foundational belief.
Despite disagreements over the basis of foundational justification, modest founationalists typically agree that foundational justification is characterized, or defeasibility, i.e., can be defeated undermined or overridden by a certain sort of expansion of one’s evidence or justified beliefs. For instance, your belief that there is a blue dictionary before you - could lose its justification (e.g., the justification from your current perceptual experience) that you make true, are best explained by or otherwise support, this beliefs (e.g., the belief that there is, or at acquiring new evidence that there is a blue light shining on the dictionary before you. Foundational justification, therefore, can vary over time if accompanied by relevant changes in one’s perceptual evidence, it does not follow, however, that foundational justification positively depends, i.e., based on grounds for denying that there are defeaters. The relevant dependence can be regarded as negative, in that there need only be an absence of genuine defeaters. Critics of foundationalism sometimes neglect that latter distinctions regarding an epistemic dependence.
The second big task for foundationalists is to explain how justification transmits from foundational belief to inferentially justified, non-foundational beliefs. Radically that makes true, are best explained by or otherwise support, this belief for (e.g., the belief that there is, or as foundationalists such transmission, on entailment relations that guarantee the truth or the certainty of non-foundational beliefs, modest foundationalists are more flexible, allowing for merely probabilistic inference connections that transmit justification. For instance, a modest foundationalist can appeal to explanation inferential connections, as when a foundational belief (e.g., I seem to feel wet) is best explained for a person by a particular physical-object belief (e.g., the belief by a particular physical-object (e.g., the belief that the air conditioner over-head is leaking on me). Various other forms of probabilistic inference are available to modest foundationalists, and nothing in principle requires that they restrict foundational beliefs to what one ‘seems’ to sense or to perceive.
The traditional motivation for foundationalism comes largely from an eliminative regress argument, outlined in Aristotle’s, Posterior Analysis. The argument, in shortest form, is that foundationalism is a correct account of the structure of justification, since the alternative accounts all fail. Inferential justification is justification wherein one belief that, B1, is justified on the basis of another belief, B2. How, if at all, is B2, the supporting belief, itself justified? Obviously Aristotle suggests, we cannot have a circle at this point, where B2 is justified by B1. Nor can we show the chain of support to extend endlessly with no ultimate basis for justification. We cannot, moreover, allow B2 to remain unjustified, lest it takes what it takes to support B1. If this is right, the structure of justification does not involve circles, endless regress, or unjustified starters-beliefs. That is, this structure is evidently foundationalists. This is, in skeletal form, the regress argument for foundationalism appropriate interests, and due attention to scepticism about justification, this argument poses a serious challenge to non-foundationalists account of the structure of epistemic justification, such as epistemic coherrentism. More significantly, foundationalism will then show forth as one of the most compelling accounts of the structures of knowledge and justification. This explains, at least in part, why foundationalism has been very preeminent historically and is still widely held in contemporary epistemology.
What makes a belief justified and what makes a true belief knowledge? It is natural to think that whether a belief deserves one of these appraisals depending on what caused the subject to have the belief. In recent decades a number of epistemologists pursed this plausible idea with varying degrees of measure in so, that some proposals are gainfully to employed a causal criteria fo knowledge and then at one for justifications.
Some causal theories of knowledge have it that it has the right sort of criterion can be applied only to cases where the fact that ‘p’ is a sort that can enter into causal relations: This seems to exclude mathematics and other necessary facts and perhaps any fact expressed by a universal generalization: And proponent s of this sort of criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual knowledge of particular facts about the subject’s environment that make true, are best explained by or otherwise that it is limited to perceptual knowledge of particular facts about the subject’s surroundings.
For example, Armstrong (1973) proposed that a belief of the form ‘This (perceived) object is ‘F’, is (non-inferential) knowledge if and only if the belief is a completely reliable sign that the perceived object is ‘F’: That is, the fact that the object is ‘F’ contributed to causing the belief and its doing so depended on properties of the believer such that the laws of nature dictate that, for any subject ‘χ’ and perceived object ‘y’ if ‘χ’ has those properties and believes that ‘y’ is ‘F’, then ‘y’ is ‘F’. Dretske (1981) offers a rather similar account in terms of the belief‘s being caused by a signal received by the perceiver that carries the information that the object is ‘F’.
This sort of condition fails, however, to be sufficient for non-inferential perceptual knowledge because it is compatible with the belief’s being unjustified, and an unjustified belief cannot be knowledge. For example, suppose that your mechanisms for colour perception are working well, but you have been given good reason to think otherwise, to think, say, that things look tinted to you and look coloured to things coloured. If you fail to heed these reasons you have for thinking that your colour perception is awry and believe of a thing that looks coloured and tinted to you that it is to your belief, and fail to be justified and will therefore fail to be knowledge, even though it is caused by thing’s being tinted and coloured, such as to be a completely reliable sign (or to carry the information) that the thing is both tinted and coloured at the same time.
One can hold, or keep at a distance as to cause to or miss an objective by or as if by turning aside this sort of counterexample by simply adding to the causal condition the requirement that the belief be justified. But this enriched condition would still be insufficient. Suppose, for example, that in an experiment you are given a drug that in nearly all people, but not in you, as it happens, causes the aforesaid aberration in colour perception. The experimenter tells you that you’ve taken such a drug you but says, ‘No, wait a minute, the drug you took was just a placebo. But suppose further that this last thing the experimenter tells you is false. Her telling you this gives you justification for believing of a thing that looks tinted and is coloured to you that it is the case in being tinted and coloured at the same within the same temporal space and time (the context of position or placement in the here and now) in that, in fact, this justification that is unknown to you (that the experimenter’s statement was false) makes it the case that your true belief is not knowledge can though it satisfies Armstrong’s causal condition.
Goldman requires the global reliability of the belief-producing process for the justification of a belief: He requires also for knowledge because justification is required for knowledge. His idea is that a justified true belief is knowledge if the type of process that produced it would not have produced it within such but a relevant counterfactual situation in which it is false.
The theory of relevant alternatives can be viewed as the attempt to accommodate two opposing strands in our thinking about knowledge. On one interpretation, this means that the justifications or evidence one must have in order to know a proposition ‘p’ must be sufficient to delaminate all the alternatives to ‘p’ (where an alternative to a proposition ‘p’ is a proposition incompatible with ‘p’). That is, one’s justification or evidence for ‘p’ must be sufficient for one to know that every alternative to ‘p’ is false. This element of our thinking about knowledge is exploited by sceptical arguments. These arguments call our attention to alternatives that our evidence can not eliminate. for example, (Dretske, 1970) when we are at the zoo, we might claim to know that we see a zebra on the basis of certain visual evidence, yet having the resemblance to zebra-like appearance, the sceptic inquires how we that we are not seeing a cleverly disguised mule. While we do have some evidence against the likelihood of such a deception, intuitively it is not strong enough for us to know that we are not so deceived. By pointing out alternatives of this nature that we cannot eliminate, as well as others with more general applications981 (dreams, hallucinations, and so forth) the sceptic appears to show that this requirement that our evidences eliminate every alternative from, if ever satisfied. Nonetheless, there are forms of all possible perceptions, and there are categories through which we make judgements about all possible experiences. Whether these correspond to a world beyond experience, we can not know, but we can analyse what we can be sure of about possible experience. Hence, we can have some kind of knowledge, but not knowledge of things-in-themselves.
The alterative account of knowledge can be motivated by noting that other concepts exhibit the same logical structure. Two examples of this are the concept ‘flat’ and the concept ‘empty’ (Dretske, 1981). Both appear only if it does not contain anything and a surface is flat only if it does not have any bumps. However, the absolute character of these concepts is relative to a standard. Un the case of flat, there is a standard for what counts as a bump and in the case of empty, there is a standard for what counts as a thing. We would not deny that a table is flat because a microscope reveals irregularities in its surface structure. We would not deny that irregularity of its surface, nor would we deny that a warehouse is empty because it contains particles of dust. To be flat is to be free of any relevant bumps. To be empty is to be devoid of all relevant alternatives theory, that says that to know of a proposition is to have evidence that eliminate all relevant alternatives.
At this point, Descartes appeared to have created a greater scepticism than that of Montaigne: With rising doubt about the prevailing intellectual tradition, his efforts set forth a general scepticism, not just against scholasticism or Renaissance naturalism, but against the possibility of there being any system of ideas that could not be cast in doubt.
Aristotle`s Posterior Analytic, aiming to show that knowledge and epistemic justification have described by epistemic foundationalism, lending itself to such as justification. As a causal theory of justification is intended of a belief and is justified just in case it was produced by a type of process to produce true beliefs - which can be defined (to a good enough approximation) as the proposition of the beliefs it produces (or, would produce were it used as much as opportunity allows) that are true - is sufficiently great.
As, once, again, some philosophers (Dretske, 1970) have argued that the relevant alternative theory of knowledge entails the falsity of the principle that the set of known (by ‘S’) propositions is closed under known (by ‘S’) entailment although others have disputed this (Stine, 1976 and Colen, 1988). This affirms the following conditional - (the closure principle)
If S Knows p and S knows that p entails q
then S knows q.
According to the theory of relevant alternatives, we can know a proposition ‘p’, without knowing that some (non-relevant) alternative to ‘p’ is false. But since an alternative ‘h’ to ‘p’ is incompatible with ‘p’, then ‘p’ will trivially entail ‘not-h’ so it will be possible to know some proposition without knowing in another proposition trivially entailed by it.
For example, we can know that we see a zebra without knowing that it is not the case that we see a cleverly disguised mule (on the assumption that ‘we see a cleverly disguised mule’ is not a relevant alternative). This will involve a violation consequence of the theory because the closure principle seems to many to be quite intuitive. In fact, we can view sceptical arguments as employing the closure principle as a premiss, along with the premiss that we do not know that the alternatives raised by the sceptic are false. From these two premisses, it follows (on the assumption that we see that the propositions we believe entail the falsity of sceptical alternatives) that we do not know the propositions we believe. For example, it follows from the closure principle and the fact that we do not know that we do not see a cleverly disguised mule, that we do not know that we see a zebra. We can view the relevant alternatives theory as relying to the sceptic arguments by denying the closure principle.
What makes an alternative situation relevant, for which a situational relevance that Goldman does not try to formulate a criterion of relevance, but in giving examples of what he takes to be relevant alternative situations he makes remarks that suggest one. Suppose, he says, that a parent takes a child’s temperature with the one thermometer that the parent selected at random from several lying in the medicine cabinet: Only one of the particular thermometers was chosen, and was in good-enough and in working order: It correctly shows the child’s temperature to be normal but if it had been abnormal, then of the other of thermometers would have erroneously shown it to be normal. The parent‘s actual true belief is caused by a globally reliable process but, Goldman says (1986), because it was ‘just luck’ that the parent happened to select a good working thermometer ‘we would not say that the parent knows that the child’s temperature is normal’. Goldman gives another example:
Suppose Sam spots Judy across the street and correctly believes that it is Judy. If it were Judy’s twin sister, Trudy, he would mistaken her for Judy? As long as there is a serious possibility, that the person across the street might have been Trudy rather than Judy . . . we would deny that Sam knows.
Goldman suggests that the reason for denying knowledge in the thermometer example, is that it was ‘just luck’ that the parent did not pick a non-operative thermometer and in the twins example, the reason is that there was ‘a serious possibility’ that it might have been the other twin -Trudy- that Sam saw. This suggests a criterion in fashion of relevance: An alternative situation, where the same belief is produced in the same way but is false, yet, is relevant just in case at some point before the actual belief was caused the change of that situation’s having come about instead of the actual situation was too high, it was too much a matter of luck that it didn’t come about.
This would mean that the proposed criterion of knowledge is such, that a justified true belief that ‘p’ is knowledge just in case there is no alternative ‘non-p’ situation in which the subject is similarly caused to believe that ‘p’ and which is such that at some point the actual world there was a serious chance that situation might occur instead of the actual one.
This avoids the sorts of counterexamples we gave for the causal criteria we made mention of earlier, but it vulnerable to ones of a different sort. Suppose you stand on the mainland looking over the water at an island, on which are several structures that look (from at least some point of view) as would appear as barns. You happen to be looking at one of these that is in fact a barn and your belief to that effect is justified, given how it looks to you and the fact that you have no reason to think otherwise. But, suppose, that the great majority of the barn-looking structures on the island are not really barns at all, but fakes. Finally, suppose all of the island’s fake barns are obscured by trees and that circumstances made it very unlikely that you would have got to a viewpoint not on the mainland. Yet, it seems, your justified belief that you are looking at a barn is not knowledge, despite the fact there would have developed alternative situations where you are similarly caused to have a fake belief that you are looking at a barn.
That example shows that the ‘local reliability’ of the belief-producing process, on the ’serious chance’ explication of what makes alternative relevant, is not sufficient to make a justified true belief knowledge. Another example will show that it is also not necessary. Suppose I am justified in believing the truth that Varsity defeated the Golden Hawks in their basketball game last night by hearing it so reported by a radio newscaster, and there is nothing at all untoward in the way the newscasters time, came to say what he did. But suppose further that at the same time, unknown to
me, on the other hand station a newscaster reads from a mistyped copy and says that the Golden Hawks defeated Varsity. Since I pretty much randomly choice which local station to listen to, the probability that I would end up with a similarly caused but false belief about the outcome of the Golden Hawks-Varsity game was about one-half, a serious chance. Yet, surely I know the outcome of the game on the basis of hearing the non-defective newscast as well as I ever know such a thing in such a basis.
These examples make it seem likely that, if there is a criterion for what makes an alternative situation relevant that will save Goldman‘s claim about local reliability and knowledge, it will not be simple.
The position or attitude that determine how something is seen, presented, or evaluated, that from this viewpoint the picture looks of being one that has acquired special skills in or the knowledge and mastery about something favourably construed in the epistemic status for having some kind of reliable linkage to the truth. F.P. Ramsey (1931), who said that a belief is knowledge if it is true, certain and obtained by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S’ knows that ’p’ just in case it is not at all accidental that ‘S’ is right about its being the case ‘p’. D.M. Armstrong (1973) relatively drew an analogy between a thermometer that reliably indicated the temperature and a belief that reliability of a non-inferential belief has properties that are nomically sufficient for its truth, i.e., guaranteed its truth through laws of nature.
Closely allied to the nomic sufficiency account is the counterfactual or subjunctive account of knowledge, primarily du e F.I. Dretske (1971, 1981), A.I. Goldman (1976-1980) and R. Nozick (1981). The core of this approach is that S’s belief that ‘p’ qualities as knowledge just in case ‘S’ believes ‘p’ because of reasons that would not obtain unless ‘p’ were true, or because of a process or method that would believe in ‘p’ were not true. For example, ‘S’ would not have his current reasons for believing there is a telephone before him, or would not come to believe this in the way he does, unless there were a telephone before him. Thus, there is a counterfactual reliable guarantor of the belief’s being true, a variant of the counterfactual approach says, that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ only if there were is no ‘relevant’ situation in which ‘p’ is false but ‘S’ would still believe that ‘p’. In which an attempt to accommodate of our thinking about knowledge is first by that of an absolute concept of knowledge. On this interpretation or evidence one must have in order to know a proposition ‘p’ must be sufficient to eliminate all the alternatives to ‘p’ (where an alternative to a proposition to a proposition ‘p’ is a proposition incompatible with ‘p’). This is, one’s justification or evidence for ‘p’ must be sufficient for one to know that every alternative to ‘p’ is false. The element of our thinking about the relevant alternative account can be motivate d by noting that other concepts exhibit the same logical structure. Two examples of this are the concept ‘flat’ and the concept ‘empty’ (Dretske, 1981). Both appear to be absolute concepts - a space is empty only if it does not contain anything and its sustaining surface is flat, only if it does not have any obstacles or bulging protrusions. However, the absolute character of these concepts is relative for what counts as a protrusion or bump that in the case of empty there is a standard for what counts as a thing, or stands in virtue as being an attribute.
This conclusion conflicts with another strand of our thinking about knowledge, by that we know of many things. Thus, there is a tension in our ordinary thinking about knowledge - if ever a belief that knowledge is, in the sense of an absolute concept and instances of that concept.
Nonetheless, there would seem to be two options for removing this tension, especially, the theory of relevant alternatives which can be viewed as an attempt to provide a more satisfactory response to this tension in our thinking about knowledge. It attempts to characterize knowledge in a way that preserves both our belief that knowledge is an absolute concept and our belief that we have knowledge.
Some philosophers (Dretske, 1970) have argued that the relevant alternatives theory of knowledge entails the falsity of the principle that the set of known (by ‘S’) propositions is closed under known (by ‘S’) entailment, although others have disputed this (Stine, 1976 and Cohen, 1988). This principle affirming the closure principle as such that:
If ‘S’ knows ‘p’ sand ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ entails ‘q’
then ‘S’ knows ‘q’.
According to the theory of relevant alternatives, we can know a proposition ‘P’, without knowing that some (non-relevant) alternative to ‘p’ is false. but since an alterative ‘h’ to ‘p’ is incompatible with ‘p’ then ‘p will trivially entail ‘not-h’. So it will be possible to know some proposition without knowing another proposition trivially entailed by it.
The view that a belief acquires favourable epistemic status by having some kind of reliable linkage to the truth. Variations of this view have been advanced for both knowledge and justified belief. The first formulation of a reliability account of knowing appeared in a note by F.P. Ramsey (1931), who said that a belief is knowledge if it is true, certain and obtained by a reliable process. P. Unger (1968) suggested that ‘S’ knows that ‘p’ just in case it is not at all accidental that ‘S’ is right about its being the case that ‘p’. D.M. Armstrong (1973) drew an analogy between a thermometer that reliably indicates the temperature and a belief that indicates the temperature and a belief that reliably indicates the truth. Armstrong said that a non-inferential belief qualifies as knowledge if the belief has properties that are nomically sufficient for its truth, i.e., guarantee its truth that abide to the laws of nature.
Closely allied to the nomic sufficiency account is the counterfactual or subjective account of knowledge, primarily due to F.I. Dretske (1971, 1981), A.I. Goldman (1976, 1986) and R. Nozick (1981). The core of this approach is that S’s belief that ‘p’ qualifies as knowledge just in case ‘S’ believes ‘p’ because of reasons that would not obtain unless ‘p’ were or because of a process or method that would not yield belief in ‘p’ if ‘p’ were not true. For example, ‘S’ would not have his current reason for believing there is a telephone before him, or would not come to believe this in the way he does, unless there were a telephone before him. Thus, there is a counterfactual reliable guarantor of the beliefs being true. A variant of the counterfactual approach says that `S` knows that `p` only if which `p` is false but `S` knows that only if there is no `relevant alterative`situation in which `p` is false but `S` would still believe that which `p` is false but `S` still believes that `p`.
Reliabilism is standardly classified as ‘externalist’ theory because it invokes some truth-linked factor, and truth is ‘external’ to the believer. Virtually all theories of knowledge, of course, share an externalist component in requiring truth as a condition for knowing. Reliabilism goes further, however, in trying to capture additional conditions for knowledge by means of a nomic, counterfactual or other such ‘external’ relation between belief and truth.
Among reliabilist theories of justification (as opposed to knowledge) there are two main varieties: Reliable indicator theories and reliable process theories. In their simplest forms, the reliable indicator theory says that a belief is justified in case it is based on reasons that are reliable indicators of the truth (Swain, 1981), and the reliable process theory says that a belief is justified in case it is produced by cognitive processes that are generally reliable (Goldman, 1979 and Talbot, 1990).
The reliable process theory is grounded on two main point. First, the justificational status of a belief depends of the psychological processes that cause (or causally sustain) it, not simply on the logical status of the proposition, or its evidential relation to other propositions. Even a tautology can be believed unjustifiably if one arrives at that belief through inappropriate psychological processes. Similarly, a detective might have a body of evidence supporting the hypothesis that Jones is guilty. But if the detective fails to put the pieces of evidence together, and instead believes in Jones’s guilt only because of his unsavoury appearance, the detective’s belief is unjustified. The critical determinants of justificational status, then, are psychological processes, i.e., belief-forming or belief-preserving processes such as perception, memory, reasoning, guessing, or introspecting. Process reliabilism is a species of causal theory: Such as a belief if justified in case it was produced by a type of process that is ‘globally’ reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs - which can be defined (too a good enough approximation) as the proportion of the beliefs it produces (it would produce, were it used as much as opportunity allows) that are true - is sufficiently great. The causation in question, however, is ‘beneath the structural surfaces’, in this respect process reliabilism is not externalist, since it focuses on inner processes.
The reliability process theory is causally grounded on or upon two crucial and important points. First, the justification status of a belief depends on or upon the psychological process that cause (or causally sustain) it, not simply on the logical status of the proposition, or its evidential relation to other propositions. Even a tautology can be believed unjustifiably if one arrives at that belief through inappropriate psychological processes. Similarly, a detective might have a body of evidence supporting the hypothesis that Jones is guilty. But if the detective fails to place of the symmetric sequence of ordering, that by putting the pieces of evidence together, and instead believes in Jones`s guilt only because if his unsavoury appearance, the detective`s belief is unjustified. The critical determinants of justificational status, then, are psychological processes, i.e., belief-forming or belief-preserving processes such as perception, memory, reasoning, guessing or introspection. Process reliabilism is a species of causal theory, such in the knowledge that having a true belief that `p`is knowledge, that in case it has the right sort of causal connection to the fact that `p`. Such a criterion can be applied only to cases where the fact that `p` is a sort that can enter into causal relations: This seems to exclude mathematics and other necessary facts and perhaps any fact expresses by a universal generalization: Proponents of this sort if criterion have usually supposed that it is limited to perceptual knowledge of particular facts about the subjects environment. Where a belief is justified just in case it was produced by a type of process that is globally reliable, that is, its propensity to produce true beliefs - which can be defined (to a good enough approximation) as the proportion of the beliefs it produces (or would produce) that are true - is sufficiently great - as the view that a belief acquires favourable epistemic status by having one kind of reliable linkage to the truth.
Yet, are, the scandalous rumours and undertones about or abroad the tattling rumour about the death of epistemology. Death notices appeared in such works as ‘Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature’ (1979) by Richard Rorty and Williams’s ‘Groundless Belief’ (1977). Of late the rumours seem to have died down, but whether they will prove to have been exaggerated remains to be seen.
Arguments for the death of epistemology typically pass through three stages. At the first stage, the critic characterizes the task of epistemology by identifying the distinctive sorts of questions it deals with. At the second stage, he tries to isolate the theoretical ideas that make those questions possible. Finally, he tries to undermine those ideas in question are less than compelling, there is no pressing need to solve the problems they give rise to. Thus, the death-of-epistemology the theorists holds that there is no barrier of, say, demonology or judicial astrology. These disciplines, are centre on questions that were once taken very seriously indeed, but as their presuppositions came to seem dubious, debating their problems came to seem pointless. Furthermore, some theorists hold that philosophy, as a distinctive, professionalized activity, revolves essentially around about the death of epistemology is apt to evolve into speculation about the death of philosophy generally.
Clearly, the death-of-epistemology theorist must hold that there is nothing special about philosophical problems. This is where philosophers who see little sense in talk of the death of epistemology disagree. For them, philosophical problems, including epistemological problems, are distinctive in that they are ‘natural’ o r ‘intuitive’: That is to say, they can be posed and understood taking for granted little or nothing in the way of contentious, theoretical ideas. Thus, unlike problems belonging to the particular sciences, they bare ‘perennial’ problems that could occur to more or less anyone, anything and anywhere, But are the standard problems of epistemology really ‘intuitive’ as all that? Or if they indeed come to seem so commonsensical, is this only because commonsense is a repository fo r ancient theory? These are the sorts of question that underlie speculation about epistemology’s possible demise.
Because it resolves round questions like this, the death-of-epistemology movement is distinguished by its interest in what we may call ‘theoretical diagnosis;, bring to light the theoretical background to philosophical problems so as to argue that they cannot survive detachment from it. This explains the movement’s interest in historical-explanatory accounts of the emergence of philosophical problems. If certain problems can be shown not to be perennial, rather, to have emerged at definite points in time, this strongly suggestive of their dependence on some particular theoretical outlook: And, if an account of that outlook makes intelligible the subsequent development of the discipline centred on those problems, that is evidence for its correctness. Still, the goal of theoretical diagnosis is to establish logical dependence, not just historical correlation. Although not just historical correlation. So, although historical investigation into the roots and development of epistemology can provide valuable clues to the ideas that inform its problems, history cannot substitute for problem-analysis.
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