User:Dominic Mayers/sandbox/Historical context

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The new paragraph on Descartes

Some arguments used in the contemporary externalist/internalist debate in philosophy of mind refer to the relation between mind and body that Descartes introduced in the early modern period. Descartes' answers to epistemological questions are not so easily related to contemporary justificatory views in naturalized epistemology and in the epistemological counterpart of this debate in particular, but both debates have been related and constitute together a fundamental part of contemporary epistemology and of key contemporary epistemological concepts such as virtue epistemology. Descartes is well known for his dualism, but he is mostly known for his skeptical approach. He used this approach, not to deny that the objects of sensory experiences follow precise laws that can be known, but to gain certainty in the mind side, in the cogito, and he used this as a platform to get to other truths. In that respect,  Descartes was influenced by Plato. However, Descartes argued for a different kind of dualism. The new aspect of Cartesian dualism, with no counterpart in Plato's dualism, is the existence of a real physical world behind the sensory experiences with its own laws and a real mental substance behind our mental experiences and a causal relation between these two worlds. The part of this view, which says that "the external world is real but known to us only indirectly, is called indirect realism. In that sense, Descartes was the father of modern realism and, for realists, of modern philosophy as well. Descartes's interactionism (interaction between the physical reality and the substance of the mind) was abandoned in the nineteenth century because of the growing popularity of philosophical mechanism. Realism itself was not abandoned, only the coexistence of an independent substance behind the mind was abandoned.

Explaining the scope

The scope is "epistemology" one would say and the article presents all view points and only gives more weight to the mainstream view point, but we still should not claim in Wikipedia's voice that any view point presented is mainstream, because in philosophy "meanstream" is a very relative concept, relative to cultures and academic circles. There is no need to claim that. It is sufficient to name the key journals and authors that present the view. Usually, it will be easy to find other journals and known authors that present a different views and the reader can judge for himself.

The important is that the reader has the different views that lead to different scopes, even views that are not considered mainstream, because these help the reader to put the scope in context.

After a lecture of Floridi's The renaissance of epistemology and other sources, it becomes clear that a key factor is the notion of naturalism and its connection with the role of science. Floridi mentions also the rejection of idealism, but there would be no rejection of idealism, if it was not for the role of science and, nowadays, the role of science is seen by many under the name of naturalism. It's not in itself an explanation for any scope, because "naturalism" is seen in different ways depending on the view point. The scope can be explained as a kind of naturalism. The task is to explain which kind.

Another point that becomes obvious after trying to explain the scope in terms of the "renaissance" of epistemology that occurred after the analytic turn is that it is perfectly fine to consider only views that unfolded after the analytic turn, but one must accept that perhaps the most important of these recent views, as far as the scope is concerned, are recent views about past philosophies. Somehow, when contemporary philosophers discuss the scope of epistemology they often do so by referring to ancient philosophies.

Knowledge and belief being of distinct kinds

One point that is controversial in the sources regarding past philosophies is whether knowledge has always been considered a kind of belief. Understanding this controversy requires an understanding of what is meant by "kind of belief". Naïvely, one would say a belief that p is simply a state that would be knowledge that p except for a missing epistemic warrant, but that is cyclic reasoning, because it assumes that knowledge is a belief together with the missing warrant (given that the belief is true). So, what is a belief in the statement "knowledge is not a kind of belief (not even a belief with an extra warrant)": what is the restriction on knowledge in that statement? Perhaps, a "belief that p" (even with an extra warrant) cannot be the knowledge that p because it misses a real connection with the real state of knowledge that p. In this perspective, knowledge is something that exists on its own as a reality internal to the individual, perhaps in the form of expectations or predispositions, but not necessarily as propositional knowledge. A belief that p, no matter what is the extra warrant, cannot be the knowledge that p, because the knowledge that p is something different that can become propositional knowledge by some learning or recollection process that is not the same thing as adding a separate warrant to a belief that p. In this view, an ascent to p can occur without a recollection of p and in that case, there is only a belief that p, not knowledge that p. The notion that there are different kinds of relations between a subject S and a fact associated with a proposition p is not surprising. For example, consider a situation in which a tiger is there and the proposition p is "a tiger is there". The subject can dream that the tiger is there just like it is the case in reality or the subject might actually see the tiger. These are different kinds of states in the following sense that adding an epistemic warrant to the dream would not make it the actual experience of the tiger. In the same way, beliefs and knowledge are different kinds of states and adding an epistemic warrant to a belief cannot make it a knowledge. This does not mean that one cannot pass from one state to the other, but the process is not an epistemic process. Unlike in the case of a dream, having a belief that p might actually help in the process toward knowing that p, but that does not mean that the process is entirely epistemological.

The purpose of the definition of knowledge

A point that is mentioned in different ways by philosophers such as Pierre Wagner is that "philosophers are distinguished and opposed not only by the answers they provide but also and perhaps even above all by the way in which they raise certain problems rather than others." Many approaches to knowledge accept as non problematic that knowledge does not always need justification. In fact, many approaches to knowledge accept that knowledge can even be false. For example, in the early 20th century, Delaney says, American realists proposed a model of perceptual knowledge to make sure that it could be erroneous. The problem situation that they faced is how to explain that our knowledge of the external world is some times erroneous, even possibly illusory. Somehow, a group of professional epistemologists in the late 20th century and still today confront the opposite problem situation in which it is important that knowledge is true and not only through epistemological luck. It would be interesting to understand more precisely what is this problem situation, but it is difficult. This specific form of contemporary epistemology asks the question how knowledge can satisfy this absence of epistemic luck and be immune to Gettier-like problems, but it is criticised for not properly linking the question to the history of philosophy and its traditional questions that have arisen in terms of practical concerns in other fields of inquiry.

Realism, truth, and certainty

Christian Piller discusses the view of Brentano on truth. This is an example of an empiricist that rejected the correspondence theory of truth.

Mainly for epistemological reasons, Brentano came to reject a correspondence theory of correctness. We could not find out whether a judgement is correct if, in order to do so, we had to compare our beliefs with facts in themselves and see whether they correspond to each other. But Brentano did not embrace a coherence theory of truth either. He thinks that as an empiricist he has to provide an account of correctness that is based on our experiences. In some cases, he holds, we can experience the correctness of our own judgement. If I am thinking of something, I know with certainty that I am thinking of something. In this sense, judgements of inner perception are immediately ‘evident’. If I judge with evidence, Brentano argues, then I experience myself as judging correctly. On the basis of this notion of evidence, Brentano introduces the wider notion of truth. A judgement concerning some object O is true if an evident judger of O – God, for example – would accept O.

Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann in the entry Idealism of the Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy write:

Within modern philosophy there are sometimes taken to be two fundamental conceptions of idealism:

1. something mental (the mind, spirit, reason, will) is the ultimate foundation of all reality, or even exhaustive of reality, and
2. although the existence of something independent of the mind is conceded, everything that we can know about this mind-independent “reality” is held to be so permeated by the creative, formative, or constructive activities of the mind (of some kind or other) that all claims to knowledge must be considered, in some sense, to be a form of self-knowledge.

Idealism in sense (1) has been called “metaphysical” or “ontological idealism”, while idealism in sense (2) has been called “formal” or “epistemological idealism”. The modern paradigm of idealism in sense (1) might be considered to be George Berkeley’s “immaterialism”, according to which all that exists are ideas and the minds, less than divine or divine, that have them. (Berkeley himself did not use the term “idealism”.)

— Paul Guyer and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, Idealism in SEP

Both kinds of idealism accept "external observations" that follows the laws of nature that science discover, but they attribute different sources to these laws. The first kind of idealism says the source can only be entirely internal, because there is no external reality. The second kind says the laws depend on both the internal and the external, but what we know is never the external reality alone. Once the laws are fixed, there is no way to distinguish between these two forms of idealism. However, the kind of laws that are searched by science might depend on the kind of idealism that is adopted. The argument against the first kind of idealism is why are the laws the same as if there was an external reality. The reply is that an individual body is a convenient concept within the laws to explain the individual life, but the individual life is not within any object or body. The body is created by the laws and the life is never detached from these laws: a body is only a convenience concept in the expression of the laws. A concept cannot do anything real to real life. Often idealism is seen as synonymous with dogmatism or a belief in certainty, but a fallibilist idealism is possible. In the following passage of Elizabeth Millan, "anti-realist" could be replaced with "anti-empiricist" and "not real" with "not obtained from real experiences".

All too often idealism is indiscriminately associated with an anti-realist position, according to which the “ideal” of idealism refers to that which is “not real.” This sort of “not real” idealism, however, does not hold for all of those thinkers who can be classified as idealists. It was Berkeley, whose famous esse est percipi view of reality essentially promulgated a view of idealism as world-eclipsing, a view vehemently attacked by G. E. Moore in his famous “refutation” of idealism. Yet critics of idealism continue to believe that Moore effectively refuted idealism tout court, including, of course, Fichte’s idealism. In what follows, I argue that interpreting Fichte’s idealism as a subject-centered view of reality with nothing much to tell us about the external world is seriously mistaken. Indeed, I shall highlight the realist strands of Fichte’s thought by revisiting his influence on the development of phenomenology.

These two forms of idealism do not say they are fallible, but being based on our sensory experiences they are as fallible as any realistic theory of knowledge. James O. Bennett in 1982 argues that fallibilism is not compatible with knowledge as Justified true belief.

In the first section, I explore “the logic of fallibilism” as it bears on the conception of “criteria of truth.” In the second section, I examine an attempt to render Peirce’s doctrine of fallibilism consistent with the view that knowledge is justified true belief and the assertion that we are justified in making claims of the sort, “I know that p.” In the final section, I argue that we are not, in fact, justified in making such claims. We may indicate the precise nature of our cognitive situation more accurately, and the logic of fallibilism requires that we should.

But nowadays, fallibilism is seen as compatible with knowledge as justified true belief.

A very brief word on that problem is in order here. It has become the epistemological challenge of defining knowledge precisely, so as to understand all actual or possible cases of knowledge — where one of the project’s guiding assumptions has been that it is possible for instances of knowledge to involve justification which supplies only fallible support. In other words, the project has striven to find a precise analysis of what the Fallible Knowledge Thesis would deem to be fallible knowledge; and, unfortunately, the Gettier Problem is generally thought by epistemologists still to be awaiting a definitive solution. Such a solution would determine wholly and exactly how fallible a particular justified true belief can be, and in what specific ways it can be fallible, without that justified true belief failing to be knowledge. In the meantime (while awaiting that sort of solution), epistemologists incline towards accepting the Justified-True-Belief Analysis — represented here in the Fallible Knowledge Thesis — as being at least approximately correct. Certainly in practice, most epistemologists treat the analysis as being correct enough — so that it functions well as giving us a concept of knowledge that is adequate to whatever demands we would place upon a concept of knowledge within most of the contexts where we need a concept of knowledge at all. Such epistemologists take the difficulties that have been encountered in the attempts to ascertain exactly how a fallibly justified true belief can manage to be knowledge as being difficulties of mere (and maybe less important) detail, not ones of insuperable and vital principle.

— Stephen Hetherington, Fallibilism in IEP

Charity Henderson adds:

There is widespread support for the idea that it is possible for one to have justification for a proposition – even justification of knowledge-level strength – and yet believe falsely. Call this thesis JF. JF is commonly taken to be a presupposition of the Gettier problem. Some further insist that JF is a constraint on a satisfactory solution to the Gettier problem. Putative responses to the problem that do not respect this constraint, it is said, run the risk of avoiding rather than solving the problem.

Michael Williams makes an important distinction between the "philosophical skeptics" that say we can use what is not knowledge in a practical manner and the "radical skeptics" that say we are not entitle to use any thing as if it was knowledge.

While most philosophers have taken knowledge to be true belief that is appropriately justified, they have agreed that not just any degree of justification, however slight, is sufficient for knowledge. Indeed, it is widely accepted today that even strong justifications can sometimes fail to yield knowledge. 5 If this is right, there are two ways of denying the possibility of knowledge. One way is to concede that we are often justified in believing this or that while denying that our justifications ever yield knowledge, properly so-called. Another, and much stronger skeptical thesis, is that we never even get to the point of justified belief, never mind whether our justifications are sufficient for knowledge, in some more restricted sense. This stronger thesis is radical skepticism.

It is particularly important to bear this distinction in mind because of the long philosophical tradition that connects knowledge with some kind of certainty.

— Michael Williams

Instead of modifying the conception of what is knowledge to encompass what is used as knowledge, Williams says that the practical fallibilists are philosophical skeptics who reject the possibility of knowledge, but they do that only because the definition of knowledge requires an appropriate anti-Gettier warrant that does not exist, especially not in the case of the universal laws of nature that are most likely false, false in the following sense that they will be contradicted by more accurate laws in the future. The philosophical skeptics accept the existence of knowledge when defined differently without a required anti-Gettier warrant. Practical fallibilists do not say that they reject the possibility of knowledge. They instead say that knowledge can be false and yet useful in practice, just as we know it is the case for Newton's law of gravitation. In other words, practical fallibilists do not see themselves as skeptical, but only realistic about knowledge. They see that the skeptical argument applies to the requirement for a warrant that must be added to a belief to make it knowledge. They accept that the best evidence would still allow for the possibility that the knowledge is false and they also accept that the requirement for a warrant leads to infinite regress. Therefore, it is not clear what the following passage means:

[...] philosophical skepticism is such a strong form of skepticism that it is far from clear that anyone could act on it.

— Michael Williams

On the contrary, the philosophical skeptics did act on the skeptical argument by not adopting the requirement for an external warrant (to be added to a belief).

Also, Williams relies on a distinction between truth and certainty. This distinction makes sense when one has a theory of truth that is independent from a method of justification. Such a definition is provided when we have a language, axioms and rules of deduction, but the axioms and the rules of deductions are a part of the criterion of truth. That does not provide a criterion of truth for the axioms and the rules of deduction themselves. Someone might say that the correspondence theory of truth does not require the axioms and the rules of deduction, but that correspondence theory of truth would never come with any kind of epistemic warrant, because the basis of the criterion, the "real" external world, is not available to any epistemic criterion or warrant. If we accept a direct connection of knowledge with the external object, then it provides an ontological explanation and this was used by Brentano and many others. This explanation is rejected by many as being useless epistemologically, but it is only useless if an epistemic warrant is necessary: it is cyclic reasoning. With an independent theory of truth, certainty can be distinct from truth by being defined in terms of justification, but this independent criterion of truth does not exist for the foundation and so it does not exist. This is indirectly discussed by J. Blackmore, R. Itagaki and S. Tanaka in footnote 13 of Husserl VS. Jerusalem in Ernst Mach's Vienna 1895-1930.

Examples of how sources discuss the scope

Neutrality requires that editors take some distance over the way sources describe their view. For example, if a source says that it covers all of epistemology, the editors cannot make Wikipedia says that this is the case in its own voice. It would be neutral that a Wikipedia article says that the source claims to cover all of epistemology. However, it might not be that interesting from the point of view of epistemology to express that neutral fact, because it is more a fact about the source than a fact about epistemology. The subtle point being made here is that the way a Wikipedia article describes its scope does not have to be verifiable and, in fact, should ideally not be verifiable, because, as just explained, the editors must take some distance over the way sources describe their view: we do not want to follow sources that claim that all epistemology is only this or that. We can use the same scope as in some sources or create our own scope, but in all cases, it must be done in a neutral manner, i.e, by attributing the main views and all pertinent related views to their sources, not by presenting them as truths. An editor might say that the scope is simply "epistemology", but the scope attributed to "epistemology" depends on the metaphysical view adopted. It would be unrealistic and not natural to try to present epistemology from all possible metaphysical views. Sources do not do that. Sources in English usually adopt the mainstream metaphysical view adopted in English speaking countries. That does not mean we should present this view as the truth. In fact, it is hard to evaluate how mainstream a supposedly mainstream view is. Therefore, it is safer from a neutrality point of view to situate this mainstream view in its context. Besides, this approach will also be more instructive for the readers.

The original purpose of looking at the way sources present their scope was to try to locate what could be that mainstream perspective in English countries and situate it in its larger context. This failed. The first examples presented do not refer to past philosophies, because it was mistakenly thought, at first, that it was better to ignore past philosophies, but that is not the main reason why the approach failed. It failed, because as explained above, it is necessary to take a distance over the way sources describe their view. Nevertheless, these examples are presented. Hopefully other sources will discuss them and present them in a larger context.

Audi's Epistemology: A contemporary introduction to the theory of knowledge

The preface of the first edition of Audi (2005) conceives epistemology "as the theory of knowledge and justification". A study of justification can proceed in many ways. Audi makes the scope more precise and says :

There is [...] much discussion of the topics in the philosophy of mind that are crucial for epistemology, for instance the phenomenology of perception, the nature of belief, the role of imagery in memory and introspection, the variety of mental properties figuring in self-knowledge, the nature of inference, and the structure of a person’s system of beliefs.

This together with the following passage clearly sets the stage

[...] the ordering of chapters is intended to encourage understanding epistemology before discussing it in large-scale terms, for instance before considering what sort of epistemological theory, say normativist or naturalistic, best accounts for knowledge. My strategy is, in part, to discuss myriad cases of justification and knowledge before approaching analyses of what they are, or the skeptical case against our having them.

Clearly, we see the scope is intended to be consistent with a form of naturalism in which knowledge is a belief that requires justification. A study of justification could proceed differently and consider a view in which "justification" is nothing more than a pragmatical satisfaction with the practical aspect of that knowledge, a satisfaction that constitutes the bridge between the propositional side of knowledge and the "reality", which is more than what is expressed at the propositional level. This satisfaction implies that the proposition is part of a web of propositions that are also connected with that "reality" and is more than just a guess work as in the example of the way to Larissa given by Plato in the Meno dialog. This satisfaction, therefore, cannot be brought at the propositional level without creating the infinite regress that it pragmatically resolves otherwise. The book does not take this view seriously. Its section The pragmatic theory of truth does not analyse this satisfaction as if it was a satisfaction with the techne, practical or meaningful side of the knowledge. It analyses it as a satisfaction with particular outcomes of that knowledge and rejects it on the basis that it does not provide a proper analysis of knowledge as expected in the naturalistic view that is adopted by the book.

Barnett's Introduction to Philosophy: Epistemology

This is a simple case. Barnett (2021) starts with the premise that knowledge is justified true belief :

In Chapter 1, Brian C. Barnett addresses the What-Is-It Question, beginning with Plato’s view that knowledge is “justified true belief” (to phrase it in standard modern terms). [...] Epistemic justification receives special attention in epistemology, in part because it is the component of knowledge unique to the field. In contrast, truth and belief are topics shared by other philosophical domains (truth in the philosophy of language and logic, and belief in the philosophy of mind).

Sven Bernecker and Duncan Pritchard's The Routledge companion to Epistemology

Bernecker & Pritchard (2011) has no global introduction to epistemology and simply mentions in the preface :

Accordingly, while this volume has been designed to offer the reader a sense of the history of epistemology and of those topics which have always been a constant fixture of epistemological discussion (such as the problem of skepticism), at the same time we have also ensured that it provides an overview of the main cutting-edge issues in the contemporary literature too (such as the problem of disagreement, or experimental epistemology). The result is more than 75 articles, organized within 10 sub-topics and all written by experts in the relevant field, which comprehensively explore both familiar and new topics in epistemology.

This does not limit much the scope. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the three first chapters are "Truth", "Belief" and "Epistemic justification".

Bonjour's Epistemology

Bonjour (2010) never truly defines the scope of the book, but the first chapters clearly shows a view of knowledge as justified true belief and variations on it. In chapter 1, Bonjour discusses ordinary experiences of things that we think we know, thus setting the stage for knowledge to be a kind of belief. Chapter 2 is a review of Descartes approach. In chapter 3, it says :

Having examined Descartes’s epistemological view as a kind of prologue, we will now turn to a more detailed consideration of a variety of more specific epistemological issues, focusing mainly on those that naturally arise out of his discussion.

Next, after only two paragraphs, Bonjour concludes that

[...] for a person S to know some proposition P at some time t, the following three conditions must be satisfied (with the subscripts indicating that these are the conditions of the Cartesian conception of knowledge):

1_C. S must believe or accept P at t without any doubt.

2_C. P must be true.

3_C. S must have at t a reason or justification that guarantees that P is true.

Variations on this definition are given in the books, but they they are based on the same basic view of knowledge. The response to the pragmatic approach in chapter 12 shows that Bonjour comes back to the basic view that knowledge is belief in need of justification:

In fact, there is a very serious difficulty with the view just described, one that in my judgment extends to the whole pragmatic approach, albeit one that pragmatists have mostly ignored. The pragmatic view that we are considering holds that a belief is justified if adopting and acting on it leads to success in practice. But that the belief genuinely leads to such success is of course itself a claim about what happens in the external world and not by any means a simple one.

The counter argument in this passage misses the point that the idea of pragmatism is that satisfaction is a primary experience that does not need justification. Of course, if that metaphysical perspective in which satisfaction is primary and does not require justification is rejected, then pragmatism is useless to avoid an infinite regress. But, this is not enough to say that there is a definitive restriction of the scope to that view. It will be useful to see how the book covers other key aspects such as naturalism versus anti-naturalism, internalism versus externalism, foundationalism versus coherentism, the problem of the criterion and skepticism in general.

Conee and Feldman's Epistemology in Borchert

The Conee & Feldman (1996) encyclopedia article is also quite straightforward regarding the scope:

What follows is an overview of contemporary developments in epistemology. [...] The traditional analysis of knowledge is that it is a combination of three conditions: truth, belief, and justification. The idea is that for someone to have factual knowledge, what is known has to be a fact and thus true; the person has to regard it as true, that is, believe it; and the person must have an adequate basis for believing it—that is, have sufficient justification for believing it. These conditions yield knowledge defined as a sufficiently justified true belief.

Avrum Stroll Epistemology in Britannica

This encyclopedia article does not focus on the problem of justification and therefore has a different scope than the WP article Epistemology. Instead, it presents concepts, often pairs of opposite concepts: mental versus non-mental knowledge, occasional and dispositional knowledge, a priori and a posteriori knowledge, necessary and contingent propositions, analytic and synthetic propositions, tautological and significant propositions, logical and factual propositions, description and justification, knowledge and certainty. The specific notion of necessary a posteriori propositions is discussed. The article also discusses the origins of knowledge, while presenting yet other distinctions : innate and acquired knowledge, rationalism and empiricism. The nature of knowledge is discussed, the notion of a priori knowledge and Plato's view of knowledge as recollection is presented, but without any explicit link with the problem of justification. The last section is about Skepticism.

The article starts with two skeptical questions  : can we trust what our senses suggest about an external world and how do we know the world is the same in one mind as in other minds. These questions could have been used to suggest an idealistic solution to the problem of justification such as the existence of some inter-subjective a priori knowledge that is shared by the different minds. But the article sets the stage clearly and, in a way that is a bit at odd with the section on the origin of knowledge, says instead that the faculty of reason of the mind is as fallible as its sensory experiences. Following that introduction, Stroll says that

an examination of the ways in which words are used can yield insight into the nature of the concepts associated with them.

This is used to introduce a distinction between knowing-how and knowing that. After that, the article is more about knowing that, i.e., about propositional knowledge. Knowing-how is more related to the ontological or metaphysical nature of knowledge. The article says that the metaphysical or ontological interpretation of propositional knowledge is out of its scope in the following phrase :

Although the arguments for and against the various candidates [for the nature of the known proposition p] are beyond the scope of this article, two points should be noted here.

and makes the two following claims :

First, the issue is closely related to the problem of universals—i.e., the problem of whether qualities or properties, such as redness, are abstract objects, mental concepts, or simply names. Second, it is agreed by all sides that one cannot have “knowledge that” of something that is not true. A necessary condition of “A knows that p,” therefore, is p.

The problem of universals is indeed an important part of the basic question regarding the ontological nature of knowledge, but not much is being said by pointing that out. Karl Popper and, more recently, John Turri, would disagree with the last sentence. The article presents concepts and pairs of concepts, but does not discuss related fundamental issues of justification or reasons why it would not be needed. For example, in the following passage, knowledge is not a mental state, but is nevertheless something that belongs to an individual subject, not some idealistic a priori ideas or forms or some evolutionary expectations or dispositions.

Beginning in the 20th century, many philosophers rejected the notion that knowledge is a mental state. Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), for example, said in On Certainty, published posthumously in 1969, that “ ‘Knowledge’ and certainty belong to different categories. They are not two mental states like, say, surmising and being sure.” [...] Such philosophers then observe that it is possible to know that something is the case without being aware that one knows it.

A possible exception is the concept of certainty as presented by Moore, say Stroll, as follows: something is only certain if it is known by a subject, but that is not sufficient. Moreover, something can be certain without all subjects knowing it. This suggests that, maybe, certainty in Moore's view is not something owned by an individual, but certainty is not knowledge anyway. Similarly, a priori, analytic, tautological and logical knowledge are normally inter-subjective notions. However, a priori knowledge is not presented as a possible solution to the problem of justification: by definition one has the knowledge a priori without the need for a process of justification, only a process of recollection or of learning, which is different from a process of justification, is needed. The section on the origin of knowledge can also be seen as another exception, because it discusses the nature of knowledge in terms of innate versus acquired knowledge and rationalism versus empiricism, but, again, the link with the problem of justification is not discussed. The key point is that the problem of justification is not the subject of this article. It is only briefly mentioned that descriptions and justification are two sorts of epistemological task. Stroll says

The normative approach quickly takes one into the central domains of epistemology, raising questions such as: “Is knowledge identical with justified true belief?,” “Is the difference between knowledge and belief merely a matter of probability?,” and “What is justification?”

But the article does not discuss these questions.

David A. Truncellito's Epistemology in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The scope of the encyclopedia article of Truncellito is easily seen from its table of contents. The section Kinds of knowledge distinguishes between propositional knowledge and other kinds of knowledge, knowing-how, acquaintance knowledge, etc. and says that "In what follows, we will be concerned only with propositional knowledge" and, within that kind of knowledge, distinguishes between a priori and a posteriori knowledge as well as between individual and collective knowledge. The notion of collective knowledge is said to be the subject of social epistemology, which is not covered in the article. The second section is about the nature of propositional knowledge and presents it as justified true belief : its three first subsections are about belief, truth and justification respectively. Its last subsection is about the Gettier problem. The third section is about justification and discusses the usual oppositions internalism versus externalism and foundationalism versus coherentism. The fourth and last subsection before the conclusion is about the origin of knowledge and skepticism. Personal note : it's interesting that skepticism is at the end as a part of the "Extent of human knowledge", because the original purpose of skepticism is not to restrict the extent of human knowledge, but to remove limitations that we have about human knowledge and is not the end, but the beginning of an enquiry about what that knowledge can be.

Matthias Steup's Epistemology in Stanford Encyclopedia of philosophy

Steup (2005) limits its scope from the start as follows.

Defined narrowly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified belief. As the study of knowledge, epistemology is concerned with the following questions: What are the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge? What are its sources? What is its structure, and what are its limits? As the study of justified belief, epistemology aims to answer questions such as: How we are to understand the concept of justification? What makes justified beliefs justified? Is justification internal or external to one's own mind? Understood more broadly, epistemology is about issues having to do with the creation and dissemination of knowledge in particular areas of inquiry. This article will provide a systematic overview of the problems that the questions above raise and focus in some depth on issues relating to the structure and the limits of knowledge and justification.

John Greco's Introduction to the Blackwell Guide to Epistemology

Greco's introduction defines the scope of the book in terms of three main questions:

Epistemology, or the theory of knowledge, is driven by two main questions: "What is knowledge?" and "What can we know?" If we think we can know something, as nearly everyone does, then a third main question arises: "How do we know what we do know?"

The emphasis is on the use of questions, not answers:

If we define epistemology in terms of its central questions then it is apparent that some recent objections to epistemology miss their mark. This is because the objections trade on implausible understandings of what epistemology is. For example, various objections caricature epistemology as (a) the quest for certainty, (b) the attempt to find absolute foundations, (c) the attempt to legitimate other disciplines, such as science, and (d) the project of refuting skepticism.

Hopefully, we will obtain more precisions about the approach taken to discuss the questions, i.e., about its scope, when we consider the summary of the 17 chapters of the book.

Summary of Michael Williams on Skepticism

Greco describes Williams's response to skepticism as follows:

Rather, adequate grounds for a given belief about the world will be determined by context, and will almost always include other beliefs about the world that are not challenged in that present context. In this way, the epistemologist is no longer faced with the impossible task of showing how knowledge of the world can be derived from knowledge of experience alone. That task seemed necessary so long as we assumed epistemic realism. But once that assumption is exposed, Williams argues, neither skeptical arguments nor traditional ways of responding to them seem compelling.

It remains to see how William explains that we have the appropriate beliefs in a given context. Popper too emphasized the importance of the context, which contains unchallenged assumptions for the time being and he spoke of evolutionary expectations and predispositions as a part of that context. But, see the position of Williams on the distinction between radical skepticism and philosophical skepticism.

Summary of Paul K. Moser on Realism, Objectivity, and Skepticism

Greco describes Moser's view on Realism, Objectivity, and Skepticism as follows:

Moser also considers and rejects "pragmatic" responses to the skeptical challenge, including the view that we ought to ban questions about objectivity as useless. He concludes the essay by drawing some consequences from the discussion. If moderate realism cannot be given non-questionbegging support, it follows that human reasoning is limited in an important way, and that an appropriate humility about human reasoning is warranted.

It will be interesting what concept of pragmatism is considered by Moser, because I have the impression that some forms of pragmatism do avoid the skeptical challenge.

Summary of Linda Zagzebski on What Is Knowledge?

In Greco's summary, Zagzebski explains that the Gettier problem cannot be avoided unless the justification or normative component of knowledge entails truth and that, consequently, she defines a notion of intellectual virtue that, by definition, does just that.

Accordingly, Zagzebski has proposed a definition of knowledge in which the normative component of knowledge guarantees truth. It will be remembered that this is exactly what she promised. She ends by looking at some objections, and by raising some questions for future consideration.

It seems an easy solution to the Gettier problem, but the notion of intellectual virtue must have been criticized as being some kind of metaphysical super power.

Summary of Laurence BonJour on The Dialectic of Foundationalism and Coherentism

To help understand Bonjour's view on the foundationalism/coherentism debate, which comes next, a parenthesis must be open about the internalism/externalism debate, because Bonjour makes reference to it.

A parenthesis on the internalism/externalism debate

In particular, one must consider the possibility that the internal/external division, which is adopted in both internalism and externalism, might be understood in a way that brings a very incomplete description of knowledge. This internal/external division is abstractly seen in terms of a theory of correspondence: the propositional knowledge, which is considered internal, is said to be true if and only if it corresponds to the external reality. From a naturalist point of view, this linguistic view of knowledge is incomplete. It is misleading to consider that the personal experience of knowledge is well represented as the proposition p. In the sentence "S knows that p", "knows that p" corresponds to something in the reality, something that can interact with the rest of reality. I don't think what is being said here is controversial. In other words, I doubt any epistemologist makes the mistake to identify the formal proposition p to the complete true nature of knowledge that p. The mistake occurs when one insists that an epistemic justification can be provided in terms of an extra warrant added to the proposition p alone, because this hardly what is going on in the brain. Contextualism addresses the issue by representing the actual complete knowledge as p together with a context C, which is a set of propositions. However, this only displaces the original problem with p toward an equivalent problem with K = p + C: how do we justify K? The hope of philosophers such as Lakatos was that we could define a conjectural initial K that includes an inductive principle that allows K to grow given additional basic observations, but no satisfactory conjectural inductive principle was found. So, the question how do we justify every new K remains.

In what follows, p is considered, but what is said applies to K as well. What is often implicit in the internal/external division is that p (or K) is a complete description of the internal knowledge in the following sense that we can explain its connection with reality using other propositions that could eventually be explained using cognitive science. That is speculation. Speculations are fine—in the scientific method, they are called conjectures, but we should judge all possible speculations for their explanatory value. It is speculation because the other physical aspects of that experience of knowledge are actually a part of the "internal" experience of the subject. They are not only a part of the external thing that is experienced. It is speculation to say that one can use propositional knowledge, some K' greater than K, to fully describe the actual physical experience that is conveniently represented by the proposition p (or K), especially if it is assumed that the propositional link between this "internal" propositional knowledge K' and reality comes from contemporary cognitive science. The correspondence theory of truth correctly expresses the view that the knowledge p is not the external reality, but something that is false if it does not correspond to a part of that reality and is true otherwise. This includes the understanding that the true nature of knowledge that p is only a part of the totality of knowledge about reality, but even though this true nature of knowledge that p is accepted as limited, that does not mean that p itself describes the totality of that limited true nature of knowledge that p.

This is weirdly related to the notion of primary versus secondary knowledge of Ayers and Antognazza: the existence of secondary knowledge suggests that there are aspects in the true nature of knowledge that p that are not expressed in p. It is also related to Ryle's view that know-how cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge, but the point goes in the opposite direction here and uses a very broad notion of know-how: there is a kind of know-how within the true nature of know-that. It is more related to how Russell used the notion of knowledge by acquaintance: for Russell knowledge by acquaintance was the part of the nature of propositional knowledge that made the connection with reality, a point that is not often mentioned. Here, it is further said that every aspect of propositional knowledge not only symbols of things, but also symbols for relations, etc. require acquaintance that cannot be fully described by propositions. It is the opposite of intellectualism about know-how: it is a non-intellectualism about propositional knowledge. It might be related to knowledge-what of Peter Gärdenfors 1 & Andreas Stephens. It might be what Hanna explains, but using a different terminology. It may be Pavese's point when he asks in the entry Knowledge-how in SEP "is knowledge-how an altogether distinct kind of knowledge, different from knowledge-that?" It seems related to Williams's contextualist theory of knowledge and justification that was mentioned above. It is also related to Stanley and Williamson's point when they write: "Knowing how to imagine red and knowing how to recognize red are both examples of knowledge-that." However, Cathrine V. Felix and Andreas Stephens seem to have an anti-thesis: knowledge that would be located in the frontal cortex, but not knowledge-how.

Laurence Bonjour's view

After this parenthesis, Bonjour's view is presented. To do.

Other examples

Many other examples could be provided, including examples that refer to past philosophies. They must be considered. However, it is important to consider other sources that put this into context.

Contemporary epistemology can be attributed

Some of the subsections below are criticisms of contemporary epistemology. These criticisms imply that contemporary epistemology can be attributed: what is criticized is the work of professional epistemologists that shared a common background that made sustained communication among them possible. The purpose is not to criticize, but to associate contemporary epistemology to a group. An apology of contemporary epistemology directed toward such a group would have played the same purpose.

Pascal Engel responding to criticism

Analytic epistemology is thriving. Many people, however, think that it has gone wrong. They judge that it has become a new scholastics, narrow- minded, obsessed by a small set of problems, most of them examined through repetitive examples, thought experiments and paradoxes, such as the Gettier cases, stories about fake barns, bank cases, brains in vats and evil demons, or the lottery paradox. [...] The Gettier problem is the favorite of what has been called the “« S knows that P » gang”.

— Pascal Engel, Is there really something wrong with contemporary epistemology?

It should be noted, however, that Engel considered criticisms from Philip Kitcher, but Kitcher criticized very specific aspects. He criticized the lack of considerations for the history of science, which is especially needed to link questions to their sources. Kitcher also defends the position that history is needed to respond to an extreme instrumentalism: the skeptical conclusion that, with equal title to truth, justification, and knowledge, there could have been rival sequences of claims about nature that would have offered incompatible pictures of our world. He also says that history is useful to understand how we came to accept logical axioms as evident. Apparently, they were not always evident.

The birthday of Chisholm

Nathan Ballantyne describes professional epistemology:

In 1986, a group of epistemologists met at Brown University to celebrate the seventieth birthday of a renowned practitioner of their craft, Roderick Chisholm (1916-1999). [...] One speaker joked that if a bomb had been dropped on the building where the group had met, the profession of epistemology in America would cease to exist. Professional epistemology has only ever been a relatively slight thing. Even today [in 2019], all of the professional epistemologists would probably fit into the grand ballroom at a corporate conference hotel.

Floridi on analytic philosophy becoming a scholastic movement

In 1996, in Scepticism and the Foundation of Epistemology, Floridi expresses the view that analytic philosophy had become a scholastic movement.

Still on the side of everyday experience, post-Gettier analytic epistemology has dealt at length with the definition of knowledge; while the question of the justification of knowledge, whether ordinary or scientific, has largely come under discussion in the debate between foundationalism and coherentism. [...] I agree with many of its critics that analytic philosophy has become a scholastic movement. It persists as "normal science"—a sort of logical empiricism without explicit foundations, apart from its classic inheritance—but what its revolutionary impact was meant to achieve is now very much a matter of history.

In 2011, in The Philosophy of Information, he explains in details what he means by "scholasticism" in professional philosophy.

Criticisms that might help for the scope

Husserl points to the seed of the problem

According to Husserl, the philosophies of Descartes and Kant presupposed a gap between the aspiring knower and what is known, one that made claims to knowledge of the external world dubious and in need of justification.

— Avrum Stroll, Epistemology in Encyclopedia Britannica Online

It was not seen as a problem by Kant or Descartes, because they considered that reason would fill the gap, but the lack of certainty and the possibility of epistemic luck was found to be a serious problem. There is no solution to this problem unless one adopts a different metaphysical perspective with no builtin gap. Husserl decided that we must reject the gap as being pure speculation. It might seem for some philosophers that this corresponds to rejecting reality, but there is no rejection of any reality in Husserl's philosophy. On the contrary, Husserl placed knowledge within reality and the process of knowledge was reality experienced by individuals and open to study by sciences in the usual manner—not with a new kind of science. It's simply a more natural perspective on the existing science, a perspective that refuses to postulate a gap that can only creates philosophical problems. Stroll continues :

... the most fundamental science, should be free of presuppositions. Thus, [Husserl] held that it is illegitimate to assume that there is a problem about our knowledge of the external world prior to conducting a completely presuppositionless investigation of the matter.

— Avrum Stroll, Epistemology in Encyclopedia Britannica Online

Absence of semantic in Floridi's philosophy of information

Floridi in The Philosophy of Information (2011) wrote:

The essential message of the book is quite simple. Semantic information is well-formed, meaningful, and truthful data; knowledge is relevant semantic information properly accounted for; humans are the only known semantic engines and conscious inforgs (informational organisms) in the universe who can develop a growing knowledge of reality; and reality is the totality of information (notice the crucial absence of ‘semantic’).

Interestingly, two pages later, Floridi adds:

The mind does not wish to acquire information for its own sake. It needs information to defend itself from reality and survive. So information is not about representing the world: it is rather a means to model it in such a way as to make sense of it and withstand its impact.

In the first passage, just as in Stroll's account of Husserl, Floridi understood the problem of the gap created by a separate semantic provided by an external reality, so he wrote "reality is the totality of information (notice the crucial absence of ‘semantic’)." Of course, Floridi knows that structured data can never in itself be the reality, even if we consider the totality of it. The data miss an important dynamical aspect : it is an inert reality, not the complete reality with its dynamic. Perhaps, Floridi has in mind some autonomy of the data in the same way as Popper saw some autonomy in the third world, but that autonomy is limited to deductive logic, because, otherwise, some metaphysical dynamic out of science is attributed to the data.

In the second passage, he is concerned by this dynamical reality that is separated from structured data. Husserl's approach does not have the same issue, because Husserl was interested in knowledge, knowledge that is reality. The price to pay, which maybe Husserl did not acknowledge, is that this knowledge is not perfectly owned by a man, not an ordinary man anyway. However, the ordinary man is not necessarily completely estranged from it. It is something that truly exists on its own and can be progressively recollected and learned. Unlike what Floridi correctly wrote in the case of information, real knowledge is something that the mind wish to acquire for its own sake, because there is truly no gap, no external reality to worry about, with that knowledge, if we can perfectly get it. True knowledge in that perspective might only be an ideal, but if we can still get closer and closer to it, then it's a practical concept. This was Popper's view. He admitted that we don't have true knowledge and that true knowledge was only an idealistic goal.

Popper's philosophy regarding the nature of objective knowledge requires a form of dialectic to explain its progress. Popper compares scientific knowledge to a building with its foundation going deep into a swamp. In this analogy, the foundation can go deeper into the swamp when needed, but this dialectical process cannot be explained within the building. This dialectical process plays the role of the recollection process in Plato: the knowledge is somehow there in the swamp and is recollected by the dialectical process. It is what Einstein called the creative process of science that does not follow a fixed path. Perhaps, Floridi has something similar in mind.

The influence of Quine's naturalism on analytic philosophy

Arran Gare wrote a paper, a manifesto, that proposes a new kind of naturalism, a "speculative naturalism". What interest me first here is how Gare describes the influence of Quine's naturalism on analytic philosophy. As a side note, Gare sees interesting oppositions:

While the two opposing poles of philosophy, analytic versus speculative and naturalist versus Idealist, are not identical, in recent decades there has been a strong tendency to assume that they coincide.

Usually, idealism is opposed to realism, not to naturalism. Also, it is the first time I see the opposition analytic versus speculative. It is true that naturalism is often opposed to speculative and that there is no reason for that: after all, speculations are simply conjectures and there is nothing more natural than conjectures in science. Anyway, Gare says

In USA the tradition of critical analysis, or analytic philosophy has vigorously upheld naturalism, equated with scientism, the view that the methods of mainstream science can be extended to explain every aspect of reality. Philosophy that is not analytic and naturalist tends to be labelled ‘continental philosophy’, with the usually tacit assumption that ‘continental’ philosophers (many of them in Anglophone countries) are claiming to uphold intuitions or forms of enquiry and reasoning that transcend any naturalistic explanation, and in doing so, are upholding some form of Idealism.

I suspect that "transcend any naturalistic explanation" means that there is no associated technology. In ancient Greek philosophy, this violates the rule that episteme should always be associated with techne. However, it is not so obvious that idealism violates that rule. In fact, Plato is the primary example of an idealist and he would not violate that rule. Anyway, that does not invalidate the view point that Quine's naturalism strongly influenced analytic philosophy. Gare continues:

For the leading US philosopher of the mid-twentieth century, W.V. Quine, philosophy was seen as differing from science only in degree of generality. Quine claimed that the core of philosophy is logic, and wrote of this: ‘Logic, like any science, has as its business the pursuit of truth. What is true are certain statements; and the pursuit of truth is the endeavor to sort out the true statements from the others, which are false.’ What naturalism really meant for Quine and his followers was ‘scientism’, the identification of all worthwhile knowledge with the knowledge gained by scientists. Quine defended the naturalization of epistemology, by which he meant that scientific knowledge itself could be treated as an object of scientific investigation. Quine and his disciples embraced behaviourism, epiphenomenalism or some other form of reductionist theory of mind in accordance with what they took to be respectable from a scientific point of view. [... Quine and his followers] dominated the direction of American philosophy. Their agenda was exemplified in the work of Philip Kitcher who attempted to explain naturalistically mathematics and its development, of Jaegwon Kim who continued to develop and defend a naturalized epistemology, and along with this, defended a form of epiphenomenalism, and of Quine’s student Daniel Dennett who embraced and defended Darwinian evolutionary theory, including the ideas of Richard Dawkins, and promoted a computational model of the mind and brain.

There is nothing offensive here. Even the "computational model of the mind and brain" is also not an issue. That computational model is not known (assuming it even exists), because that would provide a known inductive mechanism for the growth of knowledge in our minds, a mechanism that is not known. To put it in another way, there are perhaps laws of nature that fix the behaviour of our brains and minds, but we don't know them and postulating their existence is not a big epistemological constraint. In particular, it is not opposed to an evolutionary theory that includes innate predispositions and expectations or to a theory of recollection of a priori knowledge. In order to explicitly oppose an evolutionary theory or a theory of recollection of knowledge, one would have to speculate about these laws of nature. Perhaps, some philosophers did speculate while claiming that these speculations were reasonable assumptions, but they don't seem reasonable to me, if they open the door to scepticism regarding the possibility of knowledge.

Virtue epistemology against the mainstream approach

John Turri and Ernest Sosa says that

the central focus of epistemological inquiry [in virtue epistemology], are cognitive agents and communities, along with the fundamental powers, traits, and habits that constitute their intellect. This contrasts with the mainstream approach in the analytic philosophy of the later 20th century, which focuses on individual beliefs and inferences instead of individuals and their cognitive character.

However, a focus on the quality of the knower or subject suggests but does not imply that the kind of knowledge that is considered is ontological. If knowledge is not ontological, it cannot be a goal in itself and this creates a difficulty when evaluating the epistemic virtue of the knower without an infinite regress. Therefore, for virtue epistemology to be testable, the kind of knowledge considered must be ontological, something that is part of reality and possibly valuable in itself and thus can be its own warrant.

A related point regarding the nature of analytic philosophy and the rejection of idealism

To explain the scope, it is useful to understand the origin of analytic philosophy, because, after all, epistemology renaissance occurred after the analytic turn. It was in fact a part of the analytic turn. Besides the fact that it corresponds to the emergence of the logic of quantifiers and other important advances in logic in general, what is often said is that it was a rebellion against idealism, British and also German idealism. One might hope to see an important metaphysical position in that rejection. So, it is useful to see exactly what idealist position was rejected. As the next passage shows, this rejection was not a fundamental metaphysical position:

However, Russell’s account of his own reasons for departing from idealism is instructive. Key to idealism, argues Russell, is the doctrine of ‘internal relations’: that ‘every relation between two terms expresses, primarily, intrinsic properties of the two terms and, in ultimate analysis, a property of the whole of which the two compose’ (Russell 1959, p. 42). Russell accepts that this is plausible for some relations, such as love, but argues against generalizing it to all. In particular it cannot apply to asymmetrical relations as are common in mathematics. Accordingly, Russell replaces it with the doctrine of ‘external relations’ allowing for contingent relations between objects (Griffin, this volume; Candlish 2007, ch. 6).

The following also suggests that it is hard to pin point a metaphysical position in analytic philosophy:

The Analytic school continued in later stages through Oxford ordinary language philosophy and the Harvard of Quine and Putnam. It’s fair to say that it no longer exists, any more than other distinctive modernist schools of philosophy of the first half or so of the twentieth century any longer exist. [...] In contrast, ‘analytic philosophy’, as people use it now, is a very vague term. It is best characterized not by distinctive themes or methods but rather by institutions and to some extent by style.

— John Skorupski, Analytic Philosophy, The Analytic School, And British Philosophy in Michael Beany, The History Of Analytic Philosophy.

This one too suggests the same thing:

While there is no single, unified, and universally accepted set of doctrines that defines “analytic philosophy,” Scott Soames points out that “there are certain underlying themes or tendencies that characterize it,” the most important of which has something to do with “the way philosophy is done.” Soames maintains that analytic philosophers are committed to “the ideals of clarity, rigor, and argumentation.”

— John Ian K. Boongaling, Dissolving the Gettier Problem: Beyond Analysis

But there is a metaphysical position in Russell's philosophy:

Our only contact with the world, in Russell’s view, is through a direct and immediate cognitive relation, which he calls ‘acquaintance’. This is an idea which assumes very great importance in his thought.

— Peter Hylton, Ideas of a logically perfect language in analytic philosophy in Michael Beany, The History Of Analytic Philosophy.

There seems to be an agreement that, not surprisingly, Analytic philosophy is, characterized by the use of analysis (though this is incomplete, because this did not start in the 20th century:

During much of the twentieth century, it was widely held that analytic philosophy was in the business of finding analyses. We shall address the question of just what counts as an ‘analysis’ in a moment. For now, it is enough to note that the project of finding a correct analysis was often pursued by way of presenting putative sets of necessary and sufficient conditions for something. Analyses so expressed could then be criticized by identifying putative counterexamples, whether actual or merely possible. The canonical history of epistemology has it that, prior to 1963, it was widely assumed that the correct analysis of knowledge was the view now known as the ‘standard’ analysis, or the ‘JTB’ analysis (for ‘Justified True Belief ’).

— Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa and C. S. I. Jenkins, On Putting Knowledge ‘First’ in J. Adam Carter, Emma C. Gordon, and Benjamin W. Jarvis, Knowledge First: Approaches in Epistemology and Mind.

The following says that at the time of the analytic school (not to be confused with the analytic philosophy era, in which we still are), at the least in the case of Frege, the attention was not on the analysis of knowledge and the issue of justification, but on issue regarding meaning and understanding.

Broadly speaking, Frege’s significance for epistemology is twofold. On the one hand, the revolution that he inaugurated inevitably assigns a less central role to epistemological considerations than that typically assigned to them in post-Cartesian philosophy. As Dummett has emphasized, one of the hallmarks of post-Fregean, “analytic” philosophy is that questions concerning the nature of our knowledge or the justification of our beliefs are displaced from the centre of the philosophical stage by questions concerning meaning and understanding (see Dummett, 1973, pp. 665–70). For Frege and those who follow him, in other words, one must first ask how it is possible even to mean, or say, or grasp the thought that p; and only when an adequate answer to this fundamental question has been formulated is one justified in turning to such intrinsically subsidiary questions as whether we genuinely know that p, whether our belief that p is justified, and so forth.

— David Bell, Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925) in Jonathan Dancy, Ernest Sosa, and Matthias Steup, A Companion to Epistemology

David Deutsch's dependence of justification on physics

David Deutsch in Beginning of Infinity presents an argument against the notion that a valid warrant for knowledge can be a physical process that does not work in a traditional epistemological manner such as a classical deduction. The argument, which he next rejects, goes, he says, something like this :

Admittedly, under suitable laws of physics we would be able to compute non-Turing-computable functions, but that would not be computation. We would be able to establish the truth or falsity of Turing-undecidable propositions, but that ‘establishing’ would not be proving, because then our knowledge of whether the proposition was true or false would for ever depend on our knowledge of what the laws of physics are. If we discovered one day that the real laws of physics were different, we might have to change our minds about the proof too, and its conclusion. And so it would not be a real proof: real proof is independent of physics.

Deutsch explains that, on the contrary, "if we decided that our own memory was faulty about which steps we had checked in a proof, then we would be forced to change our opinion about whether we had proved something or not. It would be no different if we changed our minds about what the laws of physics made the computer [or a brain] do."

Berkeley's non-solipsistic idealism

Because idealism is opposed to realism (in the sense of the philosophical idea that the world is external and independent of the mind), one often considers that idealism is a form solipsism (in the sense of the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist). However, there are forms of idealism that are not solipsistic. Bennett cites Berkeley's explanation of why idealism is needed:

[Materialism] is the very root of scepticism; for so long as men thought that real things subsisted without the mind, and that their knowledge was only so far forth real as it was conformable to real things, it follows they could not be certain that they had any real knowledge at all. For how can it be known that the things which are perceived are conformable to those which are not perceived or exist without the mind? (PHK 86; see also 87)

— Berkeley

Bennett adds that, for Berkeley, this does not imply solipsism:

Someone who believes in nothing but himself and his own ideas need have no doubts about any of his existential beliefs. But that is the non-scepticism of the solipsist, which is not interesting.

— Bennett

Bennett cites Berkeley expressing his way to reject solipsism:

When in broad daylight I open my eyes, it is not in my power to choose whether I shall see or no, or to determine what particular objects shall present themselves to my view; and so likewise as to the hearing and other senses, the ideas imprinted on them are not creatures of my will. There is therefore some other will or spirit that produces them. (PHK 29)

— Berkeley

Bennett mentions that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. Berkeley was a religious person. It's very tempting for a religious person to see evidence in the current problematic for the existence of an independent "will or spirit". There is no need for any of that: the laws of nature suffice. The objective is very modest here, way more modest than finding evidence for an independent will or spirit or for anything whatsoever (except for knowledge, but evidence for knowledge can only be knowledge itself). It is sufficient to realize that no model for the creation of knowledge is a priori imposed upon us and, therefore, if a given type of models leads to skepticism about knowledge, it makes sense to reject it. In addition, given that Popper's evolutionary view on knowledge with its biological predispositions and expectations is naturalistic and quite reasonable and does not suffer from skeptic attacks, it is reasonable to adopt it. It is not really a scientific theory in the Popperian sense, because it is too vague to be refutable, but Popper would say that it is a good metaphysical conjecture that may lead to a fruitful research program.

Popper and others against justification

The case of Popper is interesting, because he still was a realist. His solution was to say that we have no truth, except maybe by luck, that is we have no justified truth, but yet we have knowledge (of a different kind than justified true belief) that comes from expectations and predispositions and also that knowledge could be pragmatically accepted because of its practical value. In a way, there is no contradiction with Berkeley's argument that idealism is needed, because Popper's evolutionary view on knowledge is a kind of idealism, an idealism in which the a priori knowledge that controls sensory experiences and is the source of new propositional knowledge is the laws of nature together with the biology that occurred through a long sequence of evolutionary accidents. Popper said that it cannot and does not need to be justified no more than accidents need to be justified. There are others such as Alvin Goldman who said that justifications are not required for knowledge, but later said that he meant only that epistemic justifications are not required and also Timothy Williamson who adopted a view in which knowledge is first and unanalysable.

The American realism of the early 20th century

Cornelius Delaney describes how the American idealism that had been proposed by Josiah Royce in the late 19th century was criticized in the early 20th century by fellow Americans. The criticism first take the form of a direct realism, the "new realism", that even rejected the need for mental states in the description of knowledge, including sensory experiences. Delaney writes

This New Realism as a version of direct realism had as its primary conceptual obstacle ‘the facts of relativity’, that is, error, illusion, perceptual variation, and valuation. This was soon replaced by a "critical realism" that accepted the need for mental states [...] The Critical Realists took perception as the paradigmatic case of knowing and distinguished three ingredients in the act of perception, namely, (1) the perceiver, (2) the datum or character-complex present to the perceiver, and (3) the independent object perceived. To avoid the slippery slope to Lockean representationalism and then idealism, they underscored the fact that this datum or character-complex was not itself directly known but was rather the means by which the independent physical object was known. The ‘vehicle of knowledge’ was distinct from the object of knowledge without being an impediment to the latter’s being directly known.

The critical realists were divided about the nature of the intermediary mental state, but Delaney adds

[...] they agreed that this intermediary in knowledge was not something we directly knew and from which we then inferred to the characteristics of independent objects. Thus they avoided Lockean representationalism while providing logical space for illusion and error.

They did not suppose that the object was directly known to argue that there was no possibility of errors. On the contrary, the notion of mental states as an intermediary between the knower and the object that is directly known would not have been used if it was not for the need to explain errors.

Andrej Démuth on the pro and con of empiric-realism

Andrej Démuth discussed the pro and con of empiric-realism:

The Aristotelian-Thomistic theory of knowledge (thanks to the principle of similar with similar) claims that we get to know reality more or less the way that it is. This is why this approach is called empiric-realistic. The key thesis of this approach is a belief that truth is the correspondence of object and intellect (veritas est adequatiorei et intellectus). Knowledge is true when our intellectual opinions and conclusions correspond with outer reality (quadrate with reality). This is why we talk about the correspondence theory of truth. The degree of correspondence of things and our opinions of things has to be adequate despite the two transformations (adequacy). We consider true only knowledge which expresses a real state adequately precisely. This is the basis of the second name of this theory of truth – the adequate theory of truth.

Conclusion: the Aristotelian-Thomistic realistic theory of knowledge represents one of the most wide spread interpretations of the essence and mechanisms of knowledge (Aristotelism, Thomas Aquinas and Thomism, Neo-Thomism – Joseph Maréchal, analytic thinkers– Nicholas Rescher, etc.). The strength of this approach is that it includes elements of causal theory and it stresses the rational and intellectual nature of knowledge. It presumes that people are able to perceive reality as it is and that a true conclusion expresses reality, which is, independent of us, adequately accurate.

The problem of this concept is the fact that we cannot know how reality is. The proposed theory of knowledge assumes that reality is independent from us and it exists beyond our perceptions. It is obvious that we are not able to get beyond this boundary in any different way than the one offered by our perceptions. Realists believe that sensory representations and their intellectual perceptions do not deform perceived reality in an essential way, and that our perception of the world is more or less adequate. Therefore, knowledge is a reflection of the real world. The question is how to find out whether our opinions about the world really correspond with the world. To prove it we would need to know what the world is really like (God’s eye view). Another problem is the fundamental passivity of Aristotelian knowledge. Constructivists point out that the world is not imprinting itself onto us; instead we create it by our own knowledge as an intellectual world. They also point out the fictive nature of the reflection of reality (R. Rorty).

Andrej Démuth on the Pragmatic Approach to Knowledge

Andrej Démuth discusses also pragmatism:

An essential feature of the pragmatic approach to knowledge is a resignation from knowing reality itself. The subject of our examination is solely experience; pragmatics assume that it is determined by the effect of external entities independent from us, however, they consider the examination of these entities independently from our consciousness as impossible. Therefore, the subject of our knowledge is experience which contains sensory material and conceptual schemes, our beliefs, desires, habits, a whole sum of opinions. This is the reason why some neo-pragmatics such as Richard Rorty claimed that our mind does not create a copy of the world and it does not try to mirror it; instead, it creates the world itself, the world of experience and its interpretation – which is the only space in which knowledge exists.

The scope and relations with allied disciplines

Many sources, including encyclopedia of philosophy edited by academic institutions or traditional publishers as well as books on epistemology from well known contributors in the field say that epistemology study knowledge that is a kind of belief: a belief that is about a true proposition and that must also come with a justification. This analysis of knowledge in three parts, a belief, its truth and its justification, is often called the traditional analysis of knowledge. Putting this view within its philosophical and historical context will help the readers to understand the scope of the article.

Ledger Wood, in the entry Epistemology for the Dictionary of Philosophy, wrote "the scope of epistemology may be indicated by considering its relations to the allied disciplines." Floridi mentions that, besides a continued "emancipation from idealism", the renaissance of epistemology "was also prompted by major advances in mathematics, logic, and physics which engendered new methodological concerns." Metaphysical or ontological views, such as idealism versus realism, and new sciences such as cognitive science are particularly important. To explain the article's scope, we consider the related disciplines and ontological views in that transition or later, including how the contemporary philosophers view these relations in ancient philosophies.

Views on ancient philosophies are contemporary views

Epistemology is often discussed in terms of the view of ancient philosophers who wrote before the concept of epistemology has been created. For example, Quinton considers that "Plato’s dualistic ontology—a real world of eternal Forms contrasted with a less real world of changing sensible particulars—rests on epistemological foundations." Crumley II 2016 says that, in the treatise of Aristotle called Metaphysics, "not entirely coincidentally, we find metaphysics and epistemology in close proximity." To suggest that the concept of epistemology existed way before the term was coined, Martinich & Stroll 2005 mentions that "almost every major historical philosopher has considered questions about what people know and how they know it," but Moss 2021 mentions that this is valid in as much as Plato’s epistêmê and doxa can be respectively identified with knowledge and belief as defined in contemporary epistemology.

Continental Philosophy on ancient Greek philosophy

In this case, we have a contemporary view on the past continental philosophy about the ancient Greek philosophy. This kind of situation are common in philosophy and it is important not to hide it. Richard Wolin in the entry Continental Philosophy in Britannica speaks about Nietzsche and presents his view on ancient Greek philosophy. But before considering Nietzche's view on ancient philosophies, let us consider Wolin's view on Nietzche. Through Wolin, Nietzche clearly expresses his view that human knowledge is nothing more than what mankind can communicate through language in which a word "is the copy in sound of a nerve stimulus." The naturalistic angle of Nietzche is also noted by other American philosophers such as Richard Schacht. Now, here is Nietzche's view on Greek's philosophy, as described by Wolin:

Despite his questioning of traditional philosophical concepts such as truth, Nietzsche remained committed to the goals of serious philosophical inquiry. Indeed, his prodigious philosophical musings are informed by two precepts handed down by Socrates: (1) the unexamined life is not worth living; and (2) virtue is a kind of knowledge (that is, being virtuous consists of knowing what virtue is in general and what the virtues are in particular). Although Nietzsche emphatically rejected Plato’s theory of Ideas, according to which all earthly objects are merely imperfect copies of abstract, celestial Forms, he remained convinced that wisdom, and therefore possession of the truth, was the key to human flourishing. [...] The same impassioned concern for the welfare of the soul that one finds in Socrates and Plato one also discovers in Nietzsche. [...] Nietzsche’s philosophy was motivated at every turn by Aristotle’s distinction between mere life and the “good life”—a life lived in accordance with virtue.

A contemporary view on ancient Greek philosophy

The following view is from a Ph.D. student Sattar Tahmasebi:

... removing the duality and creating unity has been the fundamental problem for majority of philosophers including Hegel. Before Hegel, many philosophers in the West focused on this subject, among others Plato, Aristotle and Kant. Plato and Aristotle, accepted the matter as an eternal and underivative origin, in spite of believing to "ideas" and "form" respectively as a real aspect of universe, therefore, they accepted a kind of dualism in their systems.

A view of Aristotle's secularism

Philosophers mention that Aristotle accepted the existence of the eternal soul, believed in the eternity of the world, etc. It is tempting to assume that Aristotle was a religious person of his time. Segev explains that religions as expressed in "festivals, sacrifices, libations, prayers, hymns, and statues in honor of the gods, as well as temples and altars operated by priests, civic and Panhellenic cults, divination, and oracles, were routine" in Aristotle's time. Gods existed in Aristotle's philosophy. However, for Segev, they were a secular versions of the Gods of religions. Aristotle's Gods had nothing to do with the Gods of religions, who were like humans, but eternal.

A contemporary view on Maimonides's view on Plato

Actually, I am not going to present Maimonides's view on Plato. It will enough to mention that Kenneth Seeskin points out that Mainonides's might not have read much of Plato's work directly:

Although arabic translations of Plato’s Timaeus were circulating in some form or other by the ninth century, it is unclear how much of the dialogue Maimonides knew. The best guess is that he did not have a full text or line-by-line commentary and may have relied on paraphrases or secondary sources.

The point being that, unless one is interested in Maimonides's view, the view of Maimonides might not be the best view to present to help readers understand Plato.

Bertrand Russell on Plato

Unlike Maimonides, Russell had an easy access to Plato's and Aristotle's work. In his book History of Western Philosophy, Russell does not idealize Plato:

It has always been correct to praise Plato, but not to understand him. This is the common fate of great men. My object is the opposite. I wish to understand him, but to treat him with as little reverence as if he were a contemporary English or American advocate of totalitarianism.

Russell's book has an entire section on Plato's Utopia. In that spirit, critical of Plato, he says

Plato’s philosophy rests on the distinction between reality and appearance, which was first set forth by Parmenides.

It is still in this context, critical of Plato, that he writes after presenting some of his arguments:

Thus we arrive at the conclusion that opinion is of the world presented to the senses, whereas knowledge is of a super-sensible eternal world; for instance, opinion is concerned with particular beautiful things, but knowledge is concerned with beauty in itself. [...] particular things are not real.

He continues his description of Plato's philosophy:

First, the world of the intellect is distinguished from the world of the senses; then intellect and sense-perception are in turn each divided into two kinds. The two kinds of sense-perception need not concern us; the two kinds of intellect are called, respectively, ‘reason’ and ‘understanding’. Of these, reason is the higher kind; it is concerned with pure ideas, and its method is dialectic. Understanding is the kind of intellect that is used in mathematics; it is inferior to reason in that it uses hypotheses which it cannot test.

His critical approach is seen in this conclusion:

Plato’s doctrine of ideas contains a number of obvious errors. But in spite of these it marks a very important advance in philosophy, since it is the first theory to emphasize the problem of universals, which, in varying forms, has persisted to the present day.

Russell's view on Aristotle

Interestingly, Russell criticises Aristotle for having a view on Forms or ideas that is not so different from Plato's view:

The view that forms are substances, which exist independently of the matter in which they are exemplified, seems to expose Aristotle to his own arguments against Platonic ideas. A form is intended by him to be something quite different from a universal, but it has many of the same characteristics. Form is, we are told, more real than matter; this is reminiscent of the sole reality of the ideas. The change that Aristotle makes in Plato’s metaphysic is, it would seem, less than he represents it as being.

Menn in Borchert on Aristotle

Stephen Menn says that Aristotle rejected Plato's theory of Forms, but replaced it by its own First Philosophy:

Plato thinks that dialectic, by allowing us to arrive at definitions, gives us a scientific knowledge of eternal Forms existing apart from the sensible world. Aristotle, who has participated in the same dialectical practice as Plato, thinks this claim about its status is spurious. Dialectic is not scientific knowledge of eternal separate Forms, since there are no such Forms. [...] Aristotle agrees with Plato that the highest wisdom, the knowledge most intrinsically worth knowing, must be a science of things existing eternally apart from matter, and ultimately of the Good. But neither dialectic nor physics is such a wisdom (nor is mathematics, which is not about separately existing objects, but about ordinary objects hypothetically idealized), and so Aristotle announces, beyond dialectic and physics, a new discipline of “first philosophy” (what commentators of Aristotle since antiquity have called “metaphysics”), which will provide the theoretical wisdom that he thinks both Plato and the pre-Socratics have failed to deliver. [...] Among the philosophers, Socrates thinks that virtue (consisting in some kind of knowledge) is necessary and sufficient for happiness, and Plato talks about the Form of the Good or about the One. Aristotle creates an aporia by using these views against each other and raising objections against each, in order to motivate his own account of happiness, and the conceptual distinction on which it is based, as a solution to the aporia. [...] Aristotle applies the same method of setting out competing beliefs and arguments, resolving the aporia through a distinction, and showing how justice can be done to all sides, to resolve Socrates’ paradoxical argument that incontinence is impossible: I can do something wrong if I have hexis-knowledge that this type of action is wrong, but not if I am applying the hexis and have energeia-knowledge that this particular action is wrong. [...] Aristotle also tries to show what is right in the Socratic and Platonic conclusions that virtue and happiness consist in knowledge, perhaps knowledge of a transcendent Good. The work or task or function (ergon) of a human being is rational activity, and a virtue is a condition that disposes to such activity. But there are two kinds of virtues: “intellectual virtues,” or virtues of the rational soul, and “moral virtues,” conditions of an irrational part of the soul, according to which it is disposed to act as reason would require.

Kuhn on Aristotle cosmogony

Kuhn in The Copernican Revolution wrote:

According to Aristotle, the underside of the sphere of the moon divides the universe into two totally disparate regions, filled with different sorts of matter and subject to different laws. The terrestrial region in which man lives is the region of variety and change, birth and death, generation and corruption. The celestial region is, in contrast, eternal and changeless. Only aether, of all the elements, is pure and incorruptible.

Irwin on Aristotle's first principles

Nor does the politician simply give advice on ways to protect the constitution from change. If he did that, he might advise oligarchs to demoralize the poor, or democrats to eliminate the rich by judicial murder, or tyrants to divide and discourage the people more thoroughly. Aristotle rejects these popular, and (for all he says) sometimes effective, devices for maintaining a regime (1309b18–1310a2).42 Instead he recommends the cultivation of the virtues that are contrary to its distinctive vices (1319b37–1320a4). He advises deviant states not merely on ways to achieve stability, but on ways to achieve justice.

Form in Britannica

The article Form in Britannica says: .

For practical purposes, Aristotle was the first to distinguish between matter (hypokeimenon or hyle) and form (eidos or morphe). He rejected the abstract Platonic notion of form and argued that every sensible object consists of both matter and form, neither of which can exist without the other. For Aristotle, matter was the undifferentiated primal element; it is that from which things develop rather than a thing in itself.

Aristotle in Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

In order to stop an infinite regress of premises, Aristotle postulates that for an inference to count as demonstrative, one must know its indemonstrable premises (AnPo.73a16–20). Thus, demonstrative science depends on the view that all teaching and learning proceed from already present knowledge (AnPo.72b5–20). [...] Upon learning to speak, the child already possesses the concept “mother” but does not grasp the conditions of its correct application. [...] Aristotle sees to say an inductive inference is sound when what is true in each case is also true of the class under which the cases fall (AnPr.68b15–29). [...] However, Aristotle does not think that knowledge of universals is pieced together from knowledge of particulars but rather he thinks that induction is what allows one to actualize knowledge by grasping how the particular case falls under the universal (AnPr.67a31–b5). [...] Since experience is what gives the principles of each science (AnPr.46a17–27), logic can only be employed at a later stage to demonstrate conclusions from these starting points. This is why logic, though it is employed in all branches of philosophy, is not a part of philosophy. Rather, in the Aristotelian tradition, logic is an instrument for the philosopher, just as a hammer and anvil are instruments for the blacksmith (Ierodiakonou 1998).

Also

A further debate, concerning realism (the doctrine that universals are real) and nominalism (the doctrine that universals exist “in name” only) continued for centuries. Although they disagreed in their interpretations, prominent scholastics like Bacon, Buridan, Ockham, Scotus, and Aquinas, tended to accept Aristotelian doctrines on authority, often referring to Aristotle simply as “The Philosopher.”

Guy Axtell on Virtue Epistemology and Aristotle

Guy Axtell in Recent Work on Virtue Epistemology wrote:

There are of course also those who think any second-order or meta-belief requirement for justification must be resisted on pain of launching an infinite regress. But KIP argues strenuously against that view. I would suggest Sosa’s requirement might be regarded as the epistemic correlate of the first of Aristotle’s three requirements for actions from virtue (at NE 1105a29ff), the requirement of a “recognitional” capacity. This requirement, according to Aristotle, is necessary for the reflective agent’s being “in the right state” --properly attuned to his environment or properly affected by it.'’ Audi (1995) and Sherman (1989) provide insightful analyses on Aristotle’s conditions on action from virtue.

Brian Carr on Plato and Aristotle

Brian Carr in Metaphysics: An Introduction wrote:

Plato took properties to have a very exalted kind of existence, to be in fact the most real things in the universe: in contrast, particulars inhabited a shadowy, unreal world of appearance. [...] the theory is trying to explain possession by many things of a common property by introducing something else which possesses that property too. His own way of putting his reservations about this was to say that it leads to an infinite regress. [...] Plato's difficulties here were seen by Aristotle as a direct consequence of treating properties as themselves particulars, and standing in relation to properties in just the same way as particulars do. [...] His own resolution of the difficulties was to place properties wholly and squarely in the world of particulars themselves, taking their existence to be totally dependent on that of particulars. There is no such thing as Circularity Itself, only particular things which are circular. The property is found in the particulars which instantiate it, and not somewhere else. [...] This is not nominalism, however, since it does not deny the existence of properties altogether: it rather provides an account of their existence, and added to the thesis that particulars are not said of anything else, quite a good one.

Gregory W. Dawes in SEP on Ancient and Medieval Empiricism

Gregory W. Dawes in the entry Ancient and Medieval Empiricism of SEP wrote:

But the problems of empiricism did not go away. Even one of the empiricist’s favorite ideas—the “covering law” account of scientific explanation—assumes we can arrive at true generalizations, propositions that apply to all members of a particular class. But for those who take Ockham’s nominalism to its logical conclusion, a law of nature can be nothing more than a contingently true proposition. Since the similarities that fix class membership have no metaphysical grounding, not being based on a shared nature, we cannot know the truth of the law by any kind of rational insight.

Raymond D. Bradley on Infinite regress argument in Audi

He wrote:

As Passmore has observed (in Philosophical Reasoning) there is an important sense of ‘explain’ in which it is impossible to explain predication. We cannot explain x’s and y’s possession of the common property F by saying that they are called by the same name (nominalism) or fall under the same concept (conceptualism) any more than we can by saying that they are related to the same form (Platonic realism), since each of these is itself a property that x and y are supposed to have in common.

Further reading

• Reilly, G.C. (2003). "Epistemology". New Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 5 (2 ed.). Gale.
• Le Roy Finch, Henry (2005). "Epistemology". Encyclopedia of Religion. Vol. 4 (2 ed.). Thomson Gale.
• Marshall, Gordon (2014). "Epistemology". In Scott, John (ed.). Dictionary of Sociology (4 ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Murray, Paul D. (2003). "Epistemology". In van Huyssteen, J. Wentzel Vrede (ed.). Encyclopedia of Science and Religion. Macmillan Reference USA.
• Hatfield, Gary (2004). "Epistemology". In Dewald, Jonathan (ed.). Europe 1450 TO 1789 : Encyclopedia of the Early Modern World. Charles Scribner’s Sons.
• Faubion, James D. (2008). "Epistemology". International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. 2 (2 ed.). Macmillan Reference USA.
• Cipolla, Costantino; Giarelli, Guido (2000). "Epistemology". Encyclopedia of Sociology (2 ed.). Macmillan Reference USA.
• Cath, Yuri (2015). "Revisionary intellectualism and Gettier". Philosophical Studies. 172 (1): 7–27. doi:10.1007/s11098-013-0263-y. ISSN 0031-8116. S2CID 254940483.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
• Pavese, Carlotta (2022). "Knowledge How". In Zalta, Edward N. (ed.). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2022 ed.).
• Hornsby, Jennifer (2012-01-06). "Ryle's Knowing-How, and Knowing How to Act". In Bengson, John; Moffett, Marc A. (eds.). Knowing How : Essays on Knowledge, Mind, and Action. Oxford University Press. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195389364.001.0001. ISBN 978-0-19-538936-4.