Showing papers in "Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement in 2009"

Knowledge, Understanding and Epistemic Value

Abstract: It is a widespread pre-theoretical intuition that knowledge is distinctively valuable. If this were not so, then it would be simply mysterious why knowledge has been the focus of so much of epistemological theorising, rather than some other epistemic standing like justified true belief. Given this fact, however, it is obviously important to a theory of knowledge that it is able to offer a good explanation of why we have this intuition. Indeed, some, such as Jonathan Kvanvig (2003) and Timothy Williamson (2000), have argued that if a theory of knowledge does not make it transparent why knowledge is distinctively valuable then this is a decisive strike against it. We do not need to go this far, however. What is important is just that a theory of knowledge is able to adequately account for this intuition. One very direct way of accounting for the intuition would be to offer a theory of knowledge which demonstrated why knowledge is distinctively valuable in the manner that we intuitively suppose. We will call proposals of this sort validatory, since they aim to validate our pre-theoretical intuitions about the value of knowledge. Positions of this sort have been offered by, for example, Linda Zagzebski (1996; 1999; 2003) and John Greco (2002; 2007; forthcominga), and we will consider one such proposal in this respect below. Notice, however, that one does not need to validate an intuition in order to account for it. One could instead put forward a theory of knowledge on which knowledge is not distinctively valuable, but which could explain why we might pre-theoretically think that knowledge is distinctively valuable. We will call proposals of this sort revisionist, since they revise our pre-theoretical intuitions about the value of knowledge. Mark Kaplan (1985), for example, famously argued that the moral of the post-Gettier literature was that it is not knowledge which is distinctively valuable but rather justified true belief – knowledge being justified true belief plus an anti-Gettier condition – but that since justified true belief usually sufficed for knowledge, the mistake was entirely natural. A second proposal

Social Epistemology: Theory and Applications

Abstract: Epistemology has had a strongly individualist orientation, at least since Descartes. Knowledge, for Descartes, starts with the fact of one’s own thinking and with oneself as subject of that thinking. Whatever else can be known, it must be known by inference from one’s own mental contents. Achieving such knowledge is an individual, rather than a collective, enterprise. Descartes’s successors largely followed this lead, so the history of epistemology, down to our own time, has been a predominantly individualist affair. There are scattered exceptions. A handful of historical epistemologists gave brief space to the question of knowing, or believing justifiably, based on the testimony of others. Testimony-based knowledge would be one step into a more social epistemology. Hume took it for granted that we regularly rely on the factual statements of others, and argued that it is reasonable to do so if we have adequate reasons for trusting the veracity of these sources. However, reasons for such trust, according to Hume, must rest on personal observations of people’s veracity or reliability. 1 Thomas Reid took a different view. He claimed that our natural attitude of trusting others is reasonable even if we know little if anything about others’ reliability. Testimony, at least sincere testimony, is always prima facie credible (Reid, 1970: 240 –241). Here we have two philosophers of the 18 th century both endorsing at least one element of what nowadays is called “social epistemology.” But these points did not much occupy either Hume’s or Reid’s corpus of philosophical writing; nor were 1 Hume wrote: “[T]here is no species of reasoning more common, more useful, and even necessary to human life, than that which is derived from the testimony of men, and the reports of eye-witnesses and spectators ... [O]ur assurance in any argument of this kind is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses.” (Hume 1972: 11)

Philosophy: A Contribution, not to Human Knowledge, but to Human Understanding

Abstract: Throughout its history philosophy has been thought to be a member of a community of intellectual disciplines united by their common pursuit of knowledge. It has sometimes been thought to be the queen of the sciences, at other times merely their under-labourer. But irrespective of its social status, it was held to be a participant in the quest for knowledge – a cognitive discipline.

The Value of Knowledge and The Test of Time

Abstract: The current literature on the value of knowledge is marred by two unwarranted presumptions, which together distort the debate and conceal what is perhaps the most basic value of knowledge, as distinct from mere true belief. These presumptions are the Synchronic Presumption, which confines philosophical attention to the present snapshot in time; and the Analytical Presumption, which has people look for the value of knowledge in some kind of warrant. Together these presumptions conceal that the value of knowledge might inhere not in a necessary condition, but simply in a property that most knowledge possesses; and, in particular, that it might inhere, as I argue it does, in a certain property of 'resilience': the tendency to survive misleading counter-evidence over time owing to the subject's being in a position to weight it against evidence already possessed.Article

What is Humane Philosophy and Why is it At Risk

Abstract: Let me begin with what may seem a very minor point, but one which I think reveals something about how many philosophers today conceive of their subject. During the past few decades, there has been an increasing tendency for references in philosophy books and articles to be formatted in the ‘author and date’ style (‘see Fodor (1996)’, ‘see Smith (2001)’.) A neat and economical reference system, you may think; and it certainly saves space, albeit inconveniencing readers by forcing them to flip back to the end of the chapter or book to find the title of the work being referred to. But what has made this system so popular among philosophers? A factor which I suspect exerts a strong subconscious attraction for many people is that it makes a philosophy article look very like a piece of scientific research. For if one asks where the ‘author-date’ system originated, the answer is clear: it comes from the science journals. And in that context, the choice of referencing system has a very definite rationale. In the progress-driven world of science, priority is everything, and it's vitally important for a career that a researcher is able to proclaim his work as breaking new ground. Bloggs (2005) developed a technique for cloning a certain virus; Coggs (2006) showed how certain bits of viral DNA could be spliced; and now Dobbs (2007) draws on both techniques to develop the building blocks of a new vaccine. The idea is that our knowledge-base is enhanced, month by month and year by year, in small incremental steps (perhaps with occasional major breakthroughs); and in the catalogue of advances, the date tagged to each name signals when progress was made, and by whom.

Listening to Clifford's Ghost

Abstract: The Clifford of my title is W. K. Clifford, who is perhaps best known as the exponent of a certain ethic of belief – an ethic of belief that he was probably the first to formulate explicitly and which no one has defended with greater eloquence or moral fervor. In the lecture called, appropriately enough, ‘The Ethics of Belief,’ Clifford summarized his ethic in a single, memorable sentence: ‘It is wrong always, everywhere, and for any one, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence’. It will be convenient for us to have a name for this ethical thesis. I will call it ‘ethical evidentialism’ – ‘evidentialism’ for short.

What is Knowledge

Abstract: What would a good answer to this question – call it (WK) – look like? What I’m going to call the standard analytic approach (SA) says that: (A) The way to answer WK is to analyse the concept of knowledge. (B) To analyse the concept of knowledge is to come up with noncircular necessary and sufficient conditions for someone to know that something is the case. Is the standard analytic approach to WK the right approach? If not, what would be a better way of doing things? These are the questions I’m going to tackle here. I want to look at some criticisms of SA and consider the prospects for a different, non-standard analytic approach (NA) to WK.

Philosophy and the Sciences After Kant

Abstract: On 11th October 2007, at the first international conference on Integrated History and Philosophy of Science (&HPS1) hosted by the Center for Philosophy of Science in Pittsburgh, Ernan McMullin (University of Notre Dame) portrayed a rather gloomy scenario concerning the current relationship between history and philosophy of science (HPS), on the one hand, and mainstream philosophy, on the other hand, as testified by a significant drop in the presence of HPS papers at various meetings of the American Philosophical Association (APA).

The Inward Turn

Abstract: Seeing is, or affords, a certain sort of awareness – visual – of one's surroundings. The obvious strategy for saying what one sees, or what would count as seeing something would be to ask what sort of sensitivity to one's surroundings – e.g. the pig before me – would so qualify. Alas, for more than three centuries – at least from Descartes to VE day – it was not so. Philosophers were moved by arguments, rarely stated which concluded that one could not, or never did, see what was before his eyes. So much for the obvious strategy. It occurred to almost no one to object that this could not be right. Frege did, but no one noticed. Austin, finally, did away with that conception of good faith in philosophy which had allowed such a thing to pass, and then with those arguments themselves. Until then, philosophy was deformed. Robbed of the obvious approach, a Drang set in to gaze inward, hoping to find what it really is to see in what enabled sensitivity to pigs, or in its byproducts. Gazing inward can be science, but often merely poses as it. It can be difficult to disentangle actual science (or at least empirical fact) from mere preconception pretending to its rigour. Most nowadays feel rid of the grip of those barriers to the obvious approach. But, as we shall see, many so feel wrongly. The Drang still misshapes their thought. I aim here to identify the Drang at work; thereby, I hope, to rid us of it.

Can Philosophy be a Rigorous Science

Abstract: It is difficult to imagine that a Royal Institute of Physics would organize an annual lecture series on the theme ‘conceptions of physics’. Similarly, it is quite improbable that a Royal Institute of Astronomy would even contemplate inviting speakers for a lecture series called ‘conceptions of astronomy’. What, then, is so special about philosophy that the theme of this lecture series does not appear to be altogether outlandish? Is it, perhaps, that philosophy is the reflective discipline par excellence , so that the very nature of philosophy is a topic that belongs to its domain of investigations? Or is there something more serious at issue? Let me first tell you how the question concerning the nature of philosophy arose for me as a young student, and how I tried to answer it, quite naively, by endorsing Edmund Husserl's programme of turning philosophy into a rigorous science. In a second section, I shall offer three diagnoses of the fact that all such attempts seem to have failed. Finally, I'd like to say a few words on my own research agenda in philosophy and on a public function of philosophers.

Belief, Reason & Logic*

Abstract: I aim to do four things in this paper: sketch a conception of belief, apply epistemic norms to it in an orthodox way, canvass a need for more norms than found in orthodoxy, and then check the relation between orthodox and new norms by looking at logic’s role within epistemic theory. A perspective will unfold on which the epistemology of “coarse” belief – also known as “full” or “binary” belief – springs from the epistemology of “fine” belief – also known as confidence. But the epistemology of fine belief will be shown to outstrip the epistemology of point-valued subjective probability. Clarifying the overall picture will lead to a critical discussion of a view recently defended by David Christensen.

The Doctor of Philosophy Will See You Now

Abstract: Papers about philosophy, as distinct from papers within it, are like homeopathic medicines – thin in content. We can only hope to provide some substance if we confine ourselves to some particular aspect. The aspect I have chosen to discuss is this. What hope should we have of finding from within this rather curious and academic subject of ours a help in the affairs of life? Could we expect a doctor of philosophy to give practical advice, rather like a medical doctor?

Plotinus: Charms and Countercharms

Abstract: For the last few years, thanks to the Leverhulme Trust, I've been largely absent from my department, working on the late antique philosopher Plotinus. To speak personally – it's been a difficult few years, since my youngest daughter has been afflicted with anorexia during this period, and my own bowel cancer was discovered, serendipitously, and removed, at the end of 2005. Since then I've had ample occasion to consider the importance – and the difficulty – of the practice of detachment, and also to worry about the moral some have drawn from Plotinian and similar philosophies, namely that the things of this world really do not matter much, and that we should withdraw ourselves from them. Maybe it is true, as Plotinus says, that ‘some troubles are profitable to the sufferers themselves, poverty and sickness for example’. But this is not an altogether helpful message for those afflicted by the bundle of disorders that lead to anorexia. It's difficult not to suspect, for example, that Simone Weil would have lived longer but for her Neo-Platonism. It has also been made obvious to me that we are (or at any rate, I am) much less in control of our own mental and emotional states even than I had thought before. None of this, of course, should have been any surprise: I have frequently pointed out – to myself and others – the importance of distinguishing between one's self and the states one finds oneself in, and the extreme difficulty of controlling the thoughts we say are ours (but which, by that very fact, reveal themselves as very far from ours). Any delusion that my knowledge of these facts is of itself enough to render me immune to them has been – at least for the moment – thoroughly debunked – though the facts themselves are such that this disillusionment, so to call it, is probably both temporary and almost entirely insincere!

Visions of Philosophy

Abstract: Characterizations of philosophy abound. It is ‘the queen of the sciences’, a grand and sweeping metaphysical endeavour; or, less regally, it is a sort of deep anthropology or ‘descriptive metaphysics’, uncovering the general presuppositions or conceptual schemes that lurk beneath our words and thoughts. A different set of images portray philosophy as a type of therapy, or as a spiritual exercise, a way of life to be followed, or even as a special branch of poetry or politics. Then there is a group of characterizations that include philosophy as linguistic analysis, as phenomenological description, as conceptual geography, or as genealogy in the sense proposed by Nietzsche and later taken up by Foucault.

Knowledge of counterfactuals

Abstract: In some sense that requires clarification, the antecedent of the indicative conditional (0I) supposes that my enemies actually tried to murder me, while the antecedent of the ‘subjunctive’ or ‘counterfactual’ conditional (0) supposes only that they tried to murder me in hypothetical circumstances without supposing those circumstances to be actual. I can easily know (0I) because I know that I am still alive. It is harder for me to know (0). Perhaps my enemies are clever and determined; my evidence may indicate that if they had tried, they would have succeeded. That I am still alive indicates that they did not try to murder me, not that they would have failed if they had tried. But (0) is not impossible to know. Perhaps, instead, I have bugged my enemies’ discussions, and know that the murder plan they have ready for me depends on a false assumption about my whereabouts. Yet knowledge of such counterfactuals is puzzling. We cannot observe things that might have happened but didn’t; nor can we observe their causes or effects. Knowledge of counterfactuals has a special significance for philosophy. For many philosophical claims concern whether something that does not occur nevertheless could have occurred: for instance, time without space. In the jargon, they concern metaphysical possibility, impossibility and necessity. Our knowledge of these matters, such as it is, has grown out of our knowledge of far more mundane counterfactual matters, such as (0). The aim of this essay is to sketch a picture of our ordinary knowledge of counterfactuals, and then to use it to raise a problem for the traditional philosophical dichotomy between a priori and a posteriori knowledge.1

Why is There Something Called Philosophy Rather than Nothing

Abstract: My title is intended to invoke at least two primary reference points or associations. The first, and most obvious, is a question that is very often assumed to be exemplary of the kind of bewildering puzzles that philosophers are distinctively preoccupied with – the question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’ The second is perhaps less easy to identify. A set of lectures delivered by Heidegger in the short period between his restoration to the academic life after the Second World War and his final retirement from it was published under the title ‘Wass Heisst Denken?’ Its English translation was given the title ‘What is Called Thinking?’; and if that title does not explicitly carry the same layers of significance evident in the German original, the concept of a ‘call’ at least keeps open the possibility of recovering many of them. For when Heidegger asks ‘what is called thinking?’, he means to imply, first, that not everything which gets called thinking really merits that honorific label; second, that it is therefore worth thinking about what form of human activity or passivity would really call for the use of that term; third, that this in turn will involve thinking about what, in our present and conceivable forms of inhabiting the world, really calls out for or provokes such a thoughtful response; and fourth (since he deliberately raises this question immediately upon his temporary re-inhabitation of a university post) that we will thereby find ourselves thinking about whether, and if so how and why, genuine thoughtfulness can find a home in the university, and thereby a place in the broader economy of a culture – whether anything recoverable from the venerable traditions of philosophy in the name of thinking might still be something for which any university, and any human cultural form, can see any call for.

How I Know I'm Not a Brain in a Vat

Abstract: [...] imagine that a human being (you can imagine this to be yourself) has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain (your brain) has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc; but really all the person (you) is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings.

Philosophy – Wisdom or Technique?

Abstract: Notice the key concepts: wonder, purification of emotion, piercing the blindness of activity, transcendent functions. There are echoes here of the Platonic doctrine of philosophy as the care of the soul, therapy, the turning of the soul from fantasy to reality. Education, says Plato (and not just philosophy), is the art of orientation, the shedding of the leaden weights which progressively weigh us down as we become more and more sunk in the material world and the world of desire, eating and similar pleasures and indulgences. All this is in the context of the Cave, and a form of vision which is to become able to bear ‘the sight of real being and reality at its most bright… which is a form of goodness’.

Metaphysical (Im)mortality and Philosophical Transcendence

Abstract: There is a lapidary saying owing to Etienne Gilson, that is often misquoted or adapted – with ‘metaphysics’ taking the place of ‘philosophy’ – and which is invariably reproduced in isolation. It is that ‘Philosophy always buries its undertakers’. Understanding this remark as Gilson intended it is relevant to the issues of the nature of philosophy, and of what conception of it may be most appropriate or fruitful for us to pursue. The question of the mortality or otherwise of philosophy in general, and of metaphysics in particular, is a significant one for ongoing intellectual enquiry, and it is also relevant to the current position of academic philosophy in Great Britain and in the English-speaking world.