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But there is no doubt that my own views on this are, in quite a number of ways, very different from those of Quine.
I think that when I first suggested the idea that knowledge should be viewed as a natural kind, many people thought this was just crazy.
By putting the first-person point of view in a naturalistic perspective, I believe that we may genuinely come to understand it for the first time.
When reflection is thereby demystified, I believe that the temptation to view human knowledge as different in kind from animal knowledge is undermined.
In my view, since the case can be made that knowledge too is a natural kind, the role of pretheoretical intuitions is similarly diminished in epistemology.
My own reasons for favouring talk of natural kinds is just that I believe the best accounts of the success of scientific theories presupposes the existence of natural kinds.
I was often asked how one could even make sense of this. Isn't the category of knowledge something that we project upon the world, rather than something that we discover in it?
What I hankered for was an account of knowledge which would do far more than get our intuitions about cases right; I wanted a kind of account which would somehow be explanatory.
Here, there is simply no substitute for the kind of work that experimental psychologists do, work which shows some mechanisms to be quite reliable, and others to be quite unreliable.
There is a worry that many have expressed that, on the naturalistic way of approaching philosophical questions, philosophy will somehow be co-opted by science. I'm not much worried about this.
I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
The kinds of claims I make about knowledge are thus meant to be illustrative of a general argumentative strategy which might well bear fruit in areas of philosophy which I have not thus far explored.
The idea that we should check on our unreflective belief acquisition sounds great, but we need to know whether the processes of reflection which we put to work serves to improve our reliability or not.
Here, as in so many other cases, however, it turns out that a very commonsensical idea looks far less attractive when one examines some of the experimental work which is not available to us from the armchair.
I am quite wedded to the view that epistemologists should concern themselves with knowledge rather than our concept of knowledge. The analogy I like to draw here is with our understanding of (other) natural kinds.
The role of empirical work in informing our philosophical theories, as I see it, is not that it gives us a better view of our folk concepts, but that it gives us a better view of knowledge, and the mind, and so on.
Bealer has a number of reasons for thinking that a naturalistic epistemology is self-undermining. Let me focus on one of these. (I've tried to take on all of them in the first chapter of Knowledge and Its Place in Nature.)
I do think that it is legitimate to talk of goals and functions in nature, and that these things can be made sense of in naturalistic terms. There is nothing at all contrary to naturalism in the idea of goal-directed systems.
When we recognise that reflective processes are no more outside the causal net than unreflective processes, and that they are bound by similar constraints, we may come to understand the nature of reflection for the first time.
What we need to do, however, is figure out what our best available theories of the mind suggest about epistemological issues, while we recognise that we may need to change our views on these questions as new evidence comes in.
No one would suggest that we can adequately investigate what makes something an acid, or what makes something aluminum, by bringing our pretheoretical intuitions about these things into reflective equilibrium by way of armchair theorising.
I do agree with Stich that a quick move from our evolutionary origins to the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms is not legitimate. As I see it, the case for the reliability or unreliability of various cognitive mechanisms lies elsewhere.
If one's interest is not in some global question about the possibility of knowledge, but about some particular mechanism or inferential tendency, this fact about our evolutionary origin is of no use at all in addressing questions about reliability.
I believe, that empirically informed approaches to the question have issued in more illuminating answers than the old armchair approaches. But I think that it would be a terrible mistake to give up on addressing normative questions in epistemology.
The various processes of belief acquisition which are native to a species include ones which may allow for the reliable pick-up of information, which, in turn, allows individual members of the species to successfully negotiate their environment and satisfy their various desires.
I largely defer to the cognitive ethologists. I believe that the arguments that they make on this score are extremely persuasive. More than this, I do think as well that a priori objections by philosophers to successful research programs in the sciences have a very bad track record.
No one worries terribly much about who the questions belong to, or whether a given contribution is really philosophy or, instead, properly nothing but science. Perhaps another way to put this is that, although I think that knowledge is a natural kind, I don't think that philosophy is.
So I do, of course, reject much that is central not only to the psychology of Descartes and Kant, but to their epistemology as well. No doubt, the best available theories of today will look primitive in comparison with what we are in a position to understand hundreds of years from now.
Epistemologists should be concerned with knowledge and justification and so on, not our concepts of them; philosophers of mind should be concerned with various features of our mental life and the large-scale structure of the mind, not our concepts of mind, or consciousness, or anything else
Rather, although belief may be adequate for explaining the behavior of individual animals - an animal which believes that p will behave no differently from an animal which knows that p - talk of knowledge is necessary once one begins to look at explaining the cognitive capacities of a species.
For one thing, I think that there are questions which philosophers raise which, although science bears on them, are not typically the central focus of those who work in the sciences. At the same time, I don't have a view of philosophy which marks it out as different in kind from scientific work
What I argue is that talk of knowledge plays an important role in theories within cognitive ethology. The idea is this. First, one sees cognitive ethologists arguing that we need to attribute propositional attitudes to some animals in order to explain the sophistication of their cognitive achievements.
When I first began studying philosophy, a good deal of what went on in analytic epistemology was focused on addressing the Gettier problem. At first, I became quite caught up in it, and the kind of analytical ingenuity required for the work appealed to me. After a while, however, I started to lose interest.
I don't know whether I can say that having a career in philosophy has turned out as I imagined, since in many ways I had little idea of what such a life would be like. But philosophy is still tremendously exciting to me, and the opportunity to think, and talk, and write about these issues has been wonderful.
If we want to make sense of the possibility of successful inductive inference, and if we want to explain the possibility of laws of nature, we will need to appeal to something like natural kinds. This is, to be sure, a metaphysical commitment, but it is a metaphysical commitment that is implicit in science, as I see it.
Externalists reject any such view. I think that the idea that we can tell, simply by way of reflection, whether our beliefs are justified, is deeply commonsensical. More than that, the idea that responsible epistemic agents ought to reflect on their beliefs, and hold them only if they somehow pass muster, is utterly natural.
I do think that an understanding of contemporary work in the cognitive sciences has a profound effect on how one views the workings of the mind. It doesn't work the way we pretheoretically think it does. Such an understanding, of course, should have a large effect on one's views in philosophy of mind, but also in epistemology.
It started becoming clear to me how one might have views about the nature of mind and of knowledge which are empirically informed. This way of thinking about philosophical theorizing makes sense of how philosophy might be a legitimate intellectual activity, in a way that a good deal of the armchair philosophy, I believe, cannot.
I am concerned about epistemic normativity, and I don't think that it is just a hangover from a priori and armchair approaches. Some ways of forming beliefs are better than others, and epistemologists of all stripes, I believe, have a legitimate interest in addressing the issue of what makes some of these ways better than others.
The worry that unreflective belief acquisition may be unreliable, after all, applies equally to reflective belief acquisition: it too may be unreliable. To my mind, the plausibility of internalist views about justification is dramatically decreased when one becomes vividly aware of what introspection and reflection actually achieve.
It's not just that there is a cooperative spirit of investigation there, where we all recognise that we are engaged in a common project of inquiry. It's also that the philosophers are well-versed in the relevant empirical data, and the scientists are well-versed in the more abstract issues which are typically the central focus of philosophical work.
In my view, philosophers have shown a great deal more respect for the first-person point of view than it deserves. There's a lot of empirical work on the various psychological mechanisms by way of which the first-person point of view is produced, and, when we understand this, I believe, we can stop romanticising and mythologising the first-person perspective.
Chemists in earlier centuries were quite interested in the nature of acids. They had no interest in analysing their concept of acid. After all, they knew that their understanding of acids was at a fairly primitive level, and what they wanted to do was understand something about the world better - the nature of acidity - not something about their own concepts.
When I think about discussions at the Society for Philosophy and Psychology, a group which includes not only philosophers and psychologists, but also computer scientists and linguists, it is noteworthy that one can't always tell just from the content of particular contributions from the audience, whether a given questioner is a philosopher or an empirical scientist.
Ethologists thus have an interest in looking at these capacities for the reliable acquisition of belief, and it is not surprising that they have a name for the true beliefs which are the typical product of these reliable capacities. They call them items of knowledge. So I argue that talk of knowledge may thereby be seen to be embedded within a successful empirical theory.
The great philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries did not think that epistemological questions floated free of questions about how the mind works. Those philosophers took a stand on all sorts of questions which nowadays we would classify as questions of psychology, and their views about psychological questions shaped their views about epistemology, as well they should have.
The fact that we have been able to develop a successful science, which issues in ever more accurate predictions and broader explanations, is the real ground for confidence that we are in a position to gain knowledge of the world around us. At the same time, one might ask how it is that the cognitive equipment we have came about, and here, no doubt, our evolutionary origins are relevant.
I am certainly open to the idea that this might be used to explain other philosophical categories besides knowledge. I have some real sympathy with the work of those moral realists who have tried to give naturalistic accounts of human flourishing, and who offer accounts of right action in such terms. (I suppose this is more evidence that I really do have deep affinities with Aristotle!)
Internalist approaches to epistemology, I believe, have a great deal of intuitive appeal. Internalists believe that the features in virtue of which a belief is justified must somehow be internal to the agent. On some views, this amounts to the claim that these features must be accessible to introspection and armchair reflection. On others, it amounts only to the claim that they must be mental features.
Talk of belief in these animals is not some kind of anthropomorphism. We simply cannot explain the kinds of problem solving and behavioral sophistication some species exhibit without supposing that they have genuine beliefs. But once these ethologists finish making the case for animal belief, they quickly move to talk of animal knowledge as well. What I argue is that this is not a mere façon de parler.