Analytic Epistemology Research Articles

Anschauliche Ausweisung als die phänomenologische Form epistemischer Rechtfertigung

Epistemic warrant for Husserl is closely tied to his phenomenological method and his main philosophical theme: intentionality. By investigating the lived experience of intentional givenness he elaborates what being a justificatory reason amounts to and thereby develops his specific conception of epistemic justification: intuitive fulfillment of a signitive intention which achieves evidence as the experienced, subjectively accessible presence of the “thing itself.” Terminologically, Husserl calls this Ausweisung (demonstration, intuitive showing or warrant). The intuitively fulfilled givenness of the intended, its self-givenness, is the ultimate reason for its epistemic justification. For Husserl a “space of reasons” is thus is tied to and made possible only by means of the fundamental accomplishment of intentionality: the conscious presence of the world itself which surpasses the classical epistemological division between inner and outer realm, mind and world. By following Husserl’s development from the Logical Investigations up to his phenomenological version of transcendental idealism, the role of epistemic justification qua demonstration of intuitive fulfillment (Ausweisung) will be spelled out according to the theses above. In the last part of the paper I will examine Husserl’s position with respect to discussions on justification in the Philosophy of Mind and analytic epistemology.

LA CONTROVERSIA ACTUAL SOBRE EL ESTATUTO CIENTÍFICO DE LAS CIENCIAS SOCIALES

<p>El artículo presenta una recensión colectiva –en términos comparativos– de cierto número de autores que se han ocupado recientemente del estatuto epistemológico de las ciencias sociales. Se trata de autores pertenecientes por un lado al ámbito anglófono –que son en su mayoría filósofos que cultivan la llamada filosofía de la ciencia–, y por otro lado al ámbito francés, –que son sociólogos que han desarrollado la epistemología de las ciencias sociales siguiendo la tradición de Canguilhem y Bachelard–. El artículo compara la epistemología externa, normativa y naturalista de los nuevos filósofos anglófonos de las ciencias sociales, con la epistemología interna, descriptiva, y analítica de la escuela francesa, señalando sus convergencias y sus diferencias.</p> <p> </p>

WINO Epistemology and the Shifting-Sands Problem

AbstractBy making plausible the Diversity Thesis (different people have systematically different and incompatible packages of epistemic intuitions), experimental epistemology raises the specter of the shifting-sands problem: the evidence base for epistemology contains systematic inconsistencies. In response to this problem, some philosophers deny the Diversity Thesis, while others flirt with denying the Evidence Thesis (in normal circumstances, the epistemic intuition that p is prima facie evidence that p is true). We propose to accept both theses. The trick to living with the shifting-sands problem is to expand epistemology's evidential base so as to include scientific evidence. This evidence can provide principled grounds on which to decide between incompatible intuitions. The idea of resolving inconsistencies in an evidential base by adding more independent lines of evidence is commonplace in science. And in philosophy, it is simply Wide Reflective Equilibrium. We contend that the idea that epistemology would depend crucially on scientific evidence seems radical because many traditional epistemologists practice reflective equilibrium that is WIN0, Wide In Name Only. We suggest five different lines of scientific evidence that can be, and have been, used in support of non-WINO epistemologica! theories.Contemporary epistemology gives a prominent role to intuitions about whether, in a certain situation, S knows that p or S is justified in believing that p. Most analytic epistemology proceeds on the assumption that intuitions are a source of evidence in philosophy, just as observations are a source of evidence in science. In normal circumstances, the intuition that p is prima facie evidence that p is true. Philosophers working under the banner of experimental epistemology bring the methods of science to bear on epistemologica! theorizing. Much of their work has involved investigating whether non-philosophers share philosophers' intuitions about philosophically important cases. This has raised considerable debate about the proper role of intuitions in philosophy. In general, analytic epistemologists are considerably more sanguine than experimental epistemologists about whether intuitions are an unproblematic source of evidence for philosophical theorizing.Our goal in this paper is to provide a framework for understanding the role of intuitions in epistemology that will do the apparently impossible: It will be acceptable, in principle at least, to most experimental epistemologists and to most analytic epistemologists who are critical of experimental philosophy. The paper will proceed as follows. In section 1, we introduce some evidence for the diversity thesis: Different people appear to have systematically different intuitions about cases that are crucial to epistemological theorizing. This raises the shifting-sands problem: How is epistemological theorizing supposed to proceed given this apparently inconsistent evidential base? The most natural approach to the problem is to try to narrow the evidential base-to eliminate many of these intuitions as irrelevant. In section 2, we propose to address the shifting-sands problem by expanding the base of evidence relevant to epistemological theorizing. This defangs the shifting-sands problem by adding nonintuitional evidence that can provide us with a principled way to decide which intuitions to reject and which, if any, to retain. This strategy is not radical. It is really nothing more than wide reflective equilibrium (WRE), which takes normative principles to be justified when they are brought into coherence with our particular judgments about cases and our best relevant background theories, including empirical theories. In section 3, we explore some ways in which scientific evidence has been fruitfully brought to bear on epistemological theorizing. Facts about cognitive ethology, and the social functions of epistemic categories, as well as various parts of cognitive science have all been used to construct epistemological theories that genuinely meet the standards of WRE. …

ABNORMALITY AND GETTIER SITUATIONS: AN EXPLANATORY PROPOSAL

AbstractAnalytic epistemologists reach regularly for favoured ‘intuitions’. And the anti‐luck intuition (as Duncan Pritchard calls it) is possibly one of the best‐entrenched epistemological intuitions at present, seemingly guiding standard reactions to Gettier situations. But why is that intuition true (if it is)? This paper argues that the anti‐luck intuition (like the ability intuition) rests upon something even more deeply explanatory – the normality intuition. And to recognise this is to understand better what most epistemologists want from a concept of knowledge. (It also helps to explain recent epistemological reactions to lottery cases.)1

Some Epistemological Considerations About Reasonable Proofs

Theories developed within the contemporary analytic epistemology, together with researches about reasonable doubt, are in my opinion suitable analysis instruments encouraging to interpret the trial in its different characterizations, without sacrificing however its possible merely technical aspects. One of the commonplaces pertaining to the Italian trial culture is the idea that process analysis is useful only if it is really technical and not at all philosophical. This concept arises from the misunderstood and misleading acceptance of the militant propensity to protect from “dangerous contaminations” the patent peculiarities of each branch of law, and from the fact that trial is generally considered as exclusive prerogative of processualists, excluding therefore every kind of alternative speculation about it. In other Countries it is not so, especially in the North-American culture, where since many years, thanks to the American epistemologist Laudan, trial analysis includes interdisciplinary expressions, reflections, analysis and interpretations categories, which allows to not fossilize the investigation into predetermined limits and to extend trial interpretation also to a philosophic reading. Well, by clearing these “prejudices pertaining to processualists” it is possible to undertake trial analysis with an alternative epistemological behaviour, and to bring in new analysis perspectives allowing catching the deep substrate of the trial, regardless of usual classifications. In my opinion, to really change the analysis scheme, to avoid merely technical disquisitions producing only commonplaces, we must start examining facts, cases; we must forget the tailor-made purviews adapted for the case in question; we must stop bombarding the hapless reader with the napalm of quotations and we must stop using all ours wits in mentioning articles. Than, simply talking about cases: to verify, in the open space of the case reading, up to which extent it is possible to search analysis schemes and perspectives. More: without taking the trouble of verifying whether what we are saying when working on a judgment is “philosophical” or “trial related”. To try rather to let emerge the thinking which is, so to say, deposited in every judgment, absolutely independently from its particular typology. To stop, finally, joining concepts as “trial and philosophy”, comparing independent and not communicating sectors, and to plunge into the analysis of the “real and actual” judgments, eliminating protective, prescriptive filters and para-academic conformities. To consider once and for all solved - or in any case not so exclusive - the matter concerning trial statute, i.e. a question evoking a tedious propensity to remain involved in problems previously defined as merely theoretical. To go, indeed, as deep as possible to the core of the trial operation, using every available analytic instrument.

Combating Anti Anti-Luck Epistemology

One thing nearly all epistemologists agree upon is that Gettier cases are decisive counterexamples to the tripartite analysis of knowledge; whatever else is true of knowledge, it is not merely belief that is both justified and true. They now agree that knowledge is not justified true belief because this is consistent with there being too much luck present in the cases, and that knowledge excludes such luck. This is to endorse what has become known as the ‘anti-luck platitude’. But what if generations of philosophers have been mistaken about this, blinded at least partially by a deeply entrenched professional bias? There has been another, albeit minority, response to Gettier: to deny that the cases are counterexamples at all. Stephen Hetherington, a principal and vocal proponent of this view, advances what he calls the ‘Knowing Luckily Proposal’. If Hetherington is correct, this would call for a major re-evaluation and re-orientation of post-Gettier analytic epistemology, since much of it assumes the anti-luck platitude both in elucidating the concept of knowledge, and in the application of such accounts to central philosophical problems. It is therefore imperative that the Knowing Luckily Proposal be considered and evaluated in detail. In this paper I critically assess the Knowing Luckily Proposal. I argue that while it draws our attention to certain important features of knowledge, ultimately it fails, and the anti-luck platitude emerges unscathed. Whatever else is true of knowledge, therefore, it is non-lucky true belief. For a proposition to count as knowledge, we cannot arrive at its truth accidentally or for the wrong reason.

Is Justification Knowledge?

Analytic epistemologists agree that, whatever else is true of epistemic justification, it is distinct from knowledge. However, if recent work by Jonathan Sutton is correct, this view is deeply mistaken, for according to Sutton justification is knowledge. That is, a subject is justified in believing that p iff he knows that p. Sutton further claims that there is no concept of epistemic justification distinct from knowledge. Since knowledge is factive, a consequence of Sutton's view is that there are no false justified beliefs. Following Sutton, I will begin by outlining kinds of beliefs that do not constitute knowledge but that seem to be justified. I will then be in a position to critically evaluate Sutton's arguments for his position that justification is knowledge, concluding that he fails to establish his bold thesis. In the course of so doing, I will defend the following rule of assertion: (The JBK-rule) One must: assert p only if one has justification to believe that one knows that p.

Naturalism and Intentionality: A Buddhist Epistemological Approach

In this paper I propose a naturalist account of the Buddhist epistemological discussion of svasaṁvitti (‘self-awareness’, ‘self-cognition’) following similar attempts in the domains of phenomenology and analytic epistemology. First, I examine the extent to which work in naturalized epistemology and phenomenology, particularly in the areas of perception and intentionality, could be profitably used in unpacking the implications of the Buddhist epistemological project. Second, I argue against a foundationalist reading of the causal account of perception offered by Dignāga and Dharmakīrti. Finally, I argue that it is possible to read Dignāga's (and following him Dharmakīrti's) treatment of svasamvitti as offering something like a phenomenological account of embodied self-awareness.

Strategic management process design e o pensamento sistêmico: a emergência de novas metodologias de design

It is possible to attain the systemic paradigm reasoning from a historical context of increasing complexification and limitations of the analytic thought in Modern Science, by understanding non-linear processing phenomena, which are not reducible to a few variables of atomized parts. This systemic reasoning paradigm can be achieved so as to facilitate reflective thinking about design today, with its multiple marketing interactions, its strategic functions within organizations, as well as with the need for processes and management directed by design and for design. Through a short overview of the methodologies based on the analytical epistemology, the present article attempts to draw some basic guiding lines for the development of a systemic methodology for strategic design. Key words: strategic design, design management, methodology, systemic reasoning.

Thought and World: the Hidden Necessities. By James Ross

Pp. xi, 235 , Notre Dame , Indiana , University of Notre Dame Press , 2008 , $28.00. In his 78th year James Ross crowns a distinguished career with a volume that fuses the experience of decades of work in analytic epistemology with the historical overview and graceful, at times pungent, expression that only reflection and wisdom can bring, and finally with the liveliness and excitement of a much younger man, to produce our best current defense of a realist position. Ross adopts a broadly Aristotelian orientation, but rather than announcing this at the outset, he moves in towards it ‘from the outside’, so to speak, showing that only if we know objects themselves, and not their representations or a distinct Platonic world of properties or ‘percepta’, can we explain the knowledge we have, both middle-range, animal specific (common sense) knowledge that is indefeasible, and knowledge of the ‘overflow conditions’, the ‘hidden necessities’, that form the depth and background of this mid-range knowledge and that science is always making more accessible. Much of the latter remains unknown for centuries, even millennia, and some of it may never be accessible; still, like ‘prime matter’ it is a necessary postulate to explain what we do know, and to account for the independence from the mind as well as the stability of the objects we successfully know. Only decades of experience could give Ross the insight, among the numerous reductive, genetic, and correlative projects that have populated, and continue to populate, analytic philosophy, into what needs to be explained in knowledge, and to relegate the latter projects to the scientific exploration of the ‘hidden necessities’ where they belong, rather than to epistemology proper. This is one of his most important points: the distinction between what needs to be accounted for, what should count as a paradigm of ‘explanation’ if we are to explain knowledge, and what can be turned over to science as a perhaps fruitful line for experimentation in a distinct field, such as physiological psychology. This locks Ross into the famous Aristotelian paradoxes which he is not shy of expressing, typically in novel and arresting vocabulary. The object ‘out there’ and the object that we know are the same, but they are not ‘identical’. Being known adds to the existence of an object (intentional existence), but does not change it. Mankind is abstractive (can ‘de-particularize’) from the start, prior to the acquisition of language; this capacity can make remote objects or real structures repeated throughout nature present to our minds. There is an irreducible immaterial aspect to understanding over its conditions. The object of perception is always vastly under-determined by sensation; it is imagination and memory that allow us constantly to ‘extrapolate’ wildly (but correctly), and which consequently are major contributors to ‘knowledge’. Even the emotions and the will affect knowledge (‘Feelings are the stage lighting of experience, always there and changing’, p. 171), and this explains our capacity for error, for false judgement, for ‘knowing’ what is not so. Imagining what is not so or what might not be so is essential for getting it right, but it also creates the possibility – opens the ‘room’– for getting it wrong. As Ross writes: ‘Because awareness of what might be so by itself does not compel commitment, judgment can go wrong if commitment is sufficiently motivated by habit, or by willing reliance, or by active desire, or negatively motivated by aversion, disgust, and the like’. (p. 168) The price for getting it right is the ability to get it wrong (animals cannot do this). Ross is a magician; he shows you how to ‘do things’ powerfully with words and restores your faith in philosophy as a crucial discipline for our time.

The Problem of the Inefficacy of Knowledge in Early Buddhist Soteriology

arly Buddhism has been described as a “gnostic soteriology”1 in that it sees the chief cause of life’s unsatisfactoriness to be ignorance of certain metaphysical truths, and that once this ignorance is eliminated through awareness of the true nature of reality, the suffering that is rooted in ignorance goes away with it. In what follows, I will describe a significant problem that early Buddhism faces, as does any gnostic soteriology, and propose a solution to the problem. This is a quasi-analytic study of early Buddhist epistemology in that it applies some of the standard ideas about knowledge that have guided analytic epistemology for some time to a specific problem that confronts the early Buddhist attempt to claim that knowing some truths about reality will transform us in some significant way. When speaking of “early Buddhism” in what follows, I intend those teachings contained in the Pali canon, which the Theravada tradition has sought to preserve. Historically Buddhism quickly moves away from the Theravada focus on nirvana and into the various schools of the “Great Vehicle” of the Mahayana Tradition. My characterization of Buddhism as a gnostic soteriology refers only to a form of Buddhism that may be limited to the earliest part of the movement and the conservative wing (Theravada) that has sought to preserve its earliest form ever since. I begin with a fuller explanation of what Buddhism as a gnostic soteriology implies, and the rather large problem that such a system faces. By definition, a soteriology is a system of thought that has as its goal the salvation or deliverance of its adherents. A soteriology is gnostic when it claims that the primary vehicle through which this salvation is accomplished is knowledge of some truth or set of truths. Thus in soteriological systems of the gnostic variety knowledge of some truth or truths is purported to have transforming power of some kind. The “truths” these systems enjoin their followers to know are diverse, but they often revolve around some metaphysical claims that run contrary to our commonsense views about reality.

Just the Right Thickness: A Defense of Second-Wave Virtue Epistemology

Do the central aims of epistemology, like those of moral philosophy, require that we designate some important place for those concepts located between the thin-normative and the non-normative? Put another way, does epistemology need ‘thick’ evaluative concepts? There are inveterate traditions in analytic epistemology which, having legitimized a certain way of viewing the nature and scope of epistemology's subject matter, give this question a negative verdict; further, they have carried with them a tacit commitment to what we argue to be an epistemic analogue of the reductionistic centralist thesis that Bernard Williams in our view successfully challenged in ethics. In this essay, we challenge these traditional dogmas and in doing so align ourselves with what has been recently called the ‘Value Turn’ in epistemology. From this perspective, we defend that, contrary to tradition, epistemology does need thick evaluative concepts. Further, the sort of theories that will be able to give thick evaluative concepts a deservedly central role in both belief and agent evaluation are those non-centralist projects that fall within what we call the second-wave of virtue epistemology. We recognize that, in breaking from centralism, there is a worry that a resulting anti-centralist theory will be reductionistic in the other direction- making the thick primary. We contend however that second-wave virtue epistemologies should be thought to provide the wave of the right thickness, and as such, constitute the most promising approaches within a field that has become increasingly more normative, diverse and expansive than was the traditional set of problems from which it emerged.

Not Actually Hume's Problem: On Induction and Knowing-How

Philosophers talk routinely of ‘Hume's problem of induction’. But the usual accompanying exegesis is mistaken in a way that has led epistemologists to conceive of ‘Hume's problem’ in needlessly narrow terms. They have overlooked a way of articulating the conceptual problem, along with a potential way of solving it. Indeed, they have overlooked Hume's own way. In explaining this, I will supplement Hume's insights by adapting Ryle's thinking on knowledge-how and knowledge-that. We will also see why Hume's ‘sceptical solution’ was a perfectly appropriate response to his ‘sceptical argument’ — rather than (as is often thought by analytic epistemologists) a merely descriptive response patently missing the normative sceptical point so strikingly formulated by Hume.

Expanding Epistemology: A Responsibilist Approach

The first section of this paper asks why we need, or what would motivate, a meaningful expansion of epistemology. It answers with three critical arguments found in the recent literature, which each purport to move us some distance beyond the preoccupations of ‘post-Gettier era’ analytic epistemology. These three—the ‘epistemic luck,’ ‘epistemic value’ and ‘epistemic reconciliation’ arguments associated with Duncan Pritchard, Jonathan Kvanvig, and Michael Williams, respectively—each carry this implication of needed expansion by functioning as forceful ‘internal critiques’ of the tradition. The second section of the paper asks what specific directions an expanded field of epistemology should take. While this is taken as an open question for debate, the expansion suggested here remains continuous with the analytic tradition, while also underlining the centrality of the acquired or ‘reflective’ intellectual virtues in meeting the burdens of the three arguments. Responsibilism, as here understood, is not a philosophical thesis so much as an orientation of commitment to clearing away philosophical assumptions that systematically obstruct recognition of the importance of empirically-informed research programs into the reflective virtues.

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Strategic Reliabilism and the Replacement Thesis in Epistemology

ABSTRACTIn their recent book, Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment, M. Bishop and J. D. Trout have challenged Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) in all its guises and have endorsed a version of the “replacement thesis”—proponents of which aim at replacing the standard questions of SAE with psychological questions. In this article I argue that Bishop and Trout offer an incomplete epistemology that, as formulated, cannot address many of the core issues that motivate interest in epistemological questions to begin with, and so is not a fit replacement.

Epistemic Subjectivism

ABSTRACTEpistemic subjectivism, as I am using the term, is a view in the same spirit as relativism, rooted in skepticism about the objectivity or universality of epistemic norms. I explore some ways that we might motivate subjectivism drawing from some common themes in analytic epistemology. Without diagnosing where the arguments go wrong, I argue that the resulting position is untenable.

On Mark McEvoy’s “Should Analytic Epistemology Be Replaced by Ameliorative Psychology?”

On Mark McEvoy’s “Should Analytic Epistemology Be Replaced by Ameliorative Psychology?”

Should Analytic Epistemology Be Replaced By Ameliorative Psychology?

Should Analytic Epistemology Be Replaced By Ameliorative Psychology?

Bertrand Russell's Naturalistic Epistemology

Bertrand Russell is widely considered to be one of the founders of analytic philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of science. Individuals have usually stressed his early philosophical contributions as seminal in this regards. But Russell also had another side–a naturalistic side–leading him towards a naturalistic epistemology and naturalistic philosophy of science of the type Quine later made famous. My goal is to provide an outline of Russell's naturalistic epistemology and the underlying philosophical motivations for such a move. After briefly presenting Russell's conception of the nature of philosophy, I sketch his theory of philosophical method, which is a version of the method of analysis. This provides the underpinnings for a discussion of his Naturalistic Epistemology, which led him to adopt a version of a behavioristic epistemology. Although Russell vacillated on the question of the adequacy of such an account, it provided a major element in his later philosophical views. I suggest that we must reevaluate our conception of the history of analytic philosophy and, in particular, our understanding of Russell's place in the history of 20th century philosophy.