Epistemology  -  An Overview

Topic I.  Introductory Discussion:   The Nature of Epistemology

Basic Types of Questions:  (1)  Questions of analysis;  (2)  Questions of justification.

Analysis:  (1)  Analysis of fundamental epistemological concepts;  (2)  Analysis of different types of statements - such as statements about physical objects, about unobservable entities, about minds and mental states, about the past, and about the future.

Basic Concepts Related to Analysis:  Translation, analytic truths, necessary conditions and sufficient conditions, logical supervenience, realist analyses versus reductionist analyses.

Justification:  (1)  The general issue of skepticism versus foundationalism versus coherentism;  (2)  The possibility, and the scope of, noninferential knowledge, or of noninferentially justified beliefs;  (3)  Inferential knowledge, or inferentially justified beliefs.

Basic Concepts and Distinctions Related to Epistemic Justification:   Knowledge, truth, correspondence, objective certainty versus subjective certainty, belief, degrees of belief, justified belief, evidence, probability, inference, deductive inference versus inductive inference, instantial generalization versus hypothetico-deductive method (or inference to the best explanation), inferential knowledge versus noninferential knowledge, inferred versus non-inferred belief, inferentially justified belief versus noninferentially justified belief.

The Relation between Analysis and Justification:  Reductionist versus realist analyses of various types of statements, and their relation to different responses to skeptical challenges.

Topic II.  The Analysis of the Concept of Knowledge

The Traditional Tripartite Analysis:  Knowledge is justified true belief.

Gettier's Counterexamples:  (1) Existential generalization, and the case of Smith, Jones, and the person who will get the job;  (2) Disjunction, and the case of Brown, Barcelona, and owning a Ford.

Responses to Gettier's Counterexamples:  (1)  Supplementation strategies;  (2)  A strengthening strategy.

Supplementation Strategies:  (1)  No false intermediate conclusions;  (2)  No undermining evidence;  (3)  Causal connections;  (4)  Inference to the best explanation;  (5)  Discrimination and counterfactuals;  (6)  Knowledge as tracking, and the closure condition for knowledge.

A Strengthening Strategy:  Rozeboom, knowledge, and complete certainty.  A skeptical outcome?  Ordinary 'knowledge' as an approximation to the ideal?

Crucial Test Cases for Analyses of the Concept of Knowledge:  (1)  Gettier-style cases;  (2)  Broken causal chain cases - e.g., the hologram example;  (3)  Cases with deviant causal connections - e.g., the modified hologram example;  (4)  Cases of undermining via potential evidence that one does not actually possess - e.g., Tom Grabit;       (5)  Non-discriminability cases - e.g., barns versus barn facades.

Some Possible Theses:  (1)  Knowledge = justified belief, plus the truth of all of the beliefs used in the inferences;  (2)  In determining whether a justified true belief is a case of knowledge, the truth of propositions that one does not believe may also be relevant;  (3)  The right sorts of causal connections are also crucial to whether a given justified true belief is a case of knowledge;  (4)  The truth-values of relevant counterfactual statements are also crucial to whether a given justified true belief is a case of knowledge.

Topic III.  Skepticism

The Scope of Skepticism:  (1)  Knowledge versus justified belief;  (2)  Certain knowledge versus knowledge in general;  (3)  Contingent propositions versus necessary propositions;  (4)  Inferentially justified beliefs versus noninferentially justified beliefs;  (5)  Global versus local.

A Basic Skeptical Pattern of Argument:  (1)  The beliefs in question cannot be noninferentially justified;  (2)  No deductive bridging of the gap from the evidence to the conclusion is possible;  (3)  No bridging via instantial generalization; (4)  Instantial generalization is the only legitimate type of inductive inference;  (5) Deduction and induction are the only legitimate types of inference;  (6)  Conclusion: the beliefs in question cannot be justified.

Targets of this Pattern of Skeptical Argument:  Beliefs about (1) macroscopic objects, (2) other minds, (3) the past, (4) laws of nature, and the future, and (5) submicroscopic objects.

Possible Responses to this Basic Skeptical Pattern of Argument:  (1)  Direct realism;  (2)  Reductionism;  (3)  Instantial induction without reductionism;  (4)  The explanatory theories approach:  hypothetico-deductive method.

Comments on these Responses to the Skeptical Argument:  (1)  Questions of justification and questions of analysis are interrelated;  (2)  Different responses may be appropriate to skeptical challenges in different areas.

Topic IV.  Theories of Justification:  Foundationalism Versus Coherentism

The Epistemic Regress Argument:  (1)  There are only four possibilities with regard to inferentially justified beliefs:  (i)  The regress of justification is a finite one, terminating in noninferentially justified beliefs;  (ii)  The regress of justification is finite, but it terminates, instead, in one or more beliefs that are not justified - either inferentially or noninferentially;  (iii)  Inferential justification proceeds in a circle, or in a more complex closed loops;  (iv)  The regress of justification is infinite, with no belief occurring more than once.  (2)  If possibilities (ii), (iii), or (iv) obtained, the belief in question would not be justified.  (3)  Hence the only way to avoid skepticism is possibility (i):  justification must terminate in beliefs that are noninferentially justified.

Foundationalism:  (1)  There can be noninferential knowledge, or at least noninferentially justified beliefs; (2)  All other knowledge is justified on the basis of noninferential knowledge, and all other justified beliefs are justified on the basis of noninferentially justified beliefs.  Classical foundationalism involves:  (a)  Indubitable and infallible starting points;  (b)  Deductive inference.  Moderate foundationalism differs in these respects:  (a)  Noninferential knowledge need not be indubitable, and noninferentially justified beliefs need not be infallible;  (b)  The relevant inferences need not be deductive.

Arguments for Foundationalism:  (1)  The epistemic regress argument;  (2) The argument concerning the possibility of evidentially isolated, justified beliefs.

Possible Characteristics of Noninferential Knowledge, or of Noninferentially Justified Beliefs:     (1)  Infallibility;  (2)  Objective certainty;  (3)  Subjective certainty;  (4)  Indubitability - logical or psychological;  (5)  Indefeasibility.

Coherentism:  Coherence theories of truth versus coherence theories of justification.  Coherence theories of truth versus correspondence theories of truth.  Different concepts of coherence:  (1)  Probability and relations of mutual support;  (2)  Explanatory interrelations.

A Standard Objection to a Coherence Theory of Truth:  The possibility of equally coherent, but mutually incompatible, sets of propositions.   The isomorphic, or mapping version, of this objection:  the generation of another set of propositions by a systematic interchange of individual concepts and predicate concepts.

Two Arguments Against Foundationalism, and in Support of  a Coherence Theories of Justification:  (1)  The doxastic ascent argument;  (2)  The question of whether the idea of the immediately given is ultimately coherent.

Possible Objections to Coherentism:  (1) Isn't it possible for there to be alternative, equally coherent, but mutually incompatible, sets of beliefs?  (2)  Is there a good reason for thinking that coherent beliefs are likely to be true?  (3)  Shouldn't observational beliefs be assigned a special, epistemic place?  4)  Direct acquaintance and understanding the meaning of semantically basic terms;  (5) Fumerton's objection that coherence Is too easily achieved:  (6)  Fumerton's objection that coherentism, combined with internalism, leads to an infinite regress;  (7)  Fumerton's objection that rational beliefs need not even be mutually consistent - the "Lottery Paradox" case;  (8)  Disagreements and the impossibility of "pooling evidence";  (9)  The possibility of evidentially isolated, justified beliefs.

Topic V.  Perceptual Knowledge and the External World

Three Main Alternatives:  (1)  Direct realism;  (2) Phenomenalism;  (3)  Indirect realism, or the representative theory of perception.

Four Varieties of Direct Realism:  (1)  'Pre-scientific' direct realism;  (2)  Armstrong's "perception as the mere acquisition of beliefs" form of direct realism;  (3)  Sellars's version of direct realism;  (4)  Searle's "experiences as also intentional states" version of direct realism.

Two Forms of Phenomenalism:  (1) Classical phenomenalism, and the reductionist analysis of statements about physical objects;  (2)  Instrumentalist phenomenalism, and the non-existence of physical objects.   (Stace)

Important Concepts and Distinctions:  Conscious versus unconscious inference; realist versus reductionist analyses of statements about physical objects; semantically or analytically basic terms and concepts; realist, reductionist, and instrumentalist interpretations of scientific theories; inference to the best explanation; counterfactuals, or subjunctive conditional statements, and "hypothetical experiences".

Some Central Issues Connected with Perceptual Knowledge:

(1)  Do experiences involve emergent properties?
(2)  Is talk about physical objects analyzable, or are at least some sentences about physical objects semantically basic and unanalyzable?
(3)  If all sentences about physical objects are analyzable, what is the correct analysis?
(4)  Does perception always involve the acquisition of beliefs about sense experiences?
(5)  If perception always involves the acquisition of beliefs about sense experiences, do the beliefs thus acquired, together with memory knowledge, suffice to justify the beliefs about physical objects that one comes to have as a result of perception?

Issue 1:  Do Experiences Involve Emergent Properties?

(1)  Thomas Nagel's "What It's Like to Be a Bat" Argument
(2)  Frank Jackson's "What Mary Doesn't Know" Argument
(3)  The Inverted Spectrum Argument
(4)  Armstrong's Indeterminacy Objection
(5)  Armstrong's Intransitivity Objection
(6)  The Epistemic Objection.

Issue 2:  Are Sentences About Physical Objects Analyzable?

(1)  The Ostensive Definability Requirement
(2)  The "Blind Man" Argument.

Issue 3:  If Sentences About Physical Objects Are Analyzable, What Is the Correct Analysis?

Armstrong's Objections to Phenomenalism:
(1) Unperceived objects as having only a "hypothetical existence";
(2)  A world with material objects, but no minds?
(3)  Determinate physical objects and indeterminate sense experiences;
(4)  Can phenomenalism explain the public nature of space and time?
(5)  The problem of qualitatively indistinguishable minds existing at the same time;
(6)  Can phenomenalism account for the unity of the mind?

Crucial Objections to Phenomenalism?
(1)  "Mindless World" Objections;
(2)  The "Truth-Makers for Counterfactuals" Objection;
(3)  The "Exceptionless Laws" Argument.

Issue 4:  Does Perception that Results in Perceptual Belief Always Involve the Acquisition of Beliefs About Sense Experiences?

(1)  The Peculiarity Intuition;
(2)  The Case of Abnormal Conditions of Observation.

Issue 5:  Are Beliefs about Physical Objects Inferentially Justified?

(1)  The "Retreat to More Modest Beliefs" Argument;
(2)  The "Justification and Internal States" Argument;
(3)  The Appeal to Hypothetico-Deductive Inference;
(4)  The "Naturalness of the Theory of Physical Objects" Argument.

Topic VI.  The Justification of Beliefs about Other Minds

Some Important Issues:

(1)  How can one justify beliefs about other minds and their mental states?
(2)  Can we have noninferentially justified beliefs about others minds?
(3)  If all or some of our beliefs about other minds are inferentially justified, what type of evidence is relevant?  Is it evidence concerning behavior, or evidence concerning internal constitution, or both?
(4)  How does one get from the evidence to the desired conclusion?
(5)  What is the scope of the mental - that is, what sorts of things enjoy mental states?  Non-human animals?  Possible extraterrestrials with a very different physiological makeup?  Super-computers?
(6)  What account is to be given of the very concept of a mind?  And what type of analysis is to be given of statements about different types of mental states?
(7)  Are there any significant divisions between types of mental states, in the sense that a very different type of account might have to be given for some types of mental states than others?
(8)  What is the "mark" of the mental?  That is to say, what is it that distinguishes states of affairs that are mental states from those that are not?  (Consciousness and intentionality as two important answers.)

Four Different Accounts of the Analysis of Mental Concepts:  (1) One anti-reductionist approach:  a "raw feel", or "qualia", or phenomenalistic account;  (2)  A second anti-reductionist approach:  intentionality as a defining property of mental states;  (3)  Analytical, or logical, behaviorism;  (4)  Functionalism, and the identification of mental states on the basis of their causal roles, rather than on the basis of their intrinsic natures.  The computer program analogy.

Intensional Language and Intentional States:  Intensional contexts versus extensional contexts;  the interchange of co-referential terms within extensional contexts as preserving truth-values; existential quantification, or "quantifying in", as permissible within extensional contexts; the relation of these two features to patterns of inference.

Consciousness and the Mental:  Is consciousness a mark of the mental?  Is it a sufficient condition of the mental?  Is it a necessary condition of the mental?

Intentionality and the Mental:  Is intentionality a mark of the mental?  Is it a sufficient condition of the mental?  Is it a necessary condition of the mental?  "That" clauses and two types of mental states.

Language, and the Question of the Source of Intentionality:  Is the intentionality of language more basic than the intentionality of the mental, or vice versa?   Is intentionality related to causal and/or dispositional properties?  The argument from purely physical systems - e.g., the case of the heat-seeking missile.

The Relation between the Problem of Other Minds, and the Analysis of Talk about Mental States:  Two theories that greatly simplify the problem:  (1)  Analytical behaviorism;  (2)  Functionalism.

Objections to Analytical Behaviorism:   (l) The inverted spectrum argument;  (2) The unconsciousness argument;  (3)  The understanding sensation terms argument.

Alternative Accounts of the Justification of our Beliefs about Other Minds:  (1)  The argument from analogy;  (2)  Psychological theory and the inference to the best explanation;  (3)  A combined approach;  (4)  A non-analogical argument based upon use of mentalistic language.

Some Crucial Issues:  (1)  Is evidence concerning one's own case crucial or not?  (2)  Is evidence about an individual's behavior, or output states, sufficient?  (3)  Is evidence about stimulation of an individual, about its input states, sufficient?  (4)  Is evidence about an individual's constitution, or internal makeup, crucial or not?

The Argument from Analogy:  Two types of laws that one might establish in one's own case:  (1) Laws concerning physical causes of mental states;  (2)  Laws concerning mental causes of behavior.  Generalizing from one's own case to that of other, relevantly similar bodies.

Objections to the Argument from Analogy:  (l)  The verifiability objection;  (2)  Strawson's objection;  (3)  The checkability objection;  (4)  The objection that the reasoning is inductively unsound;  (5)  The objection that the reasoning lends only very weak support to the conclusion;  (6)  The objection that, though the argument from analogy is in principle sound, it implies that justified beliefs about other minds presupposes detailed neurophysiological knowledge.

Psychological Theory and the Inference to the Best Explanation:  The irrelevance of evidence concerning one's own case;  the use of hypothetico-deductive method, or inference to the best explanation, to confirm hypotheses concerning the existence of other minds.

Possible Objections to the Inference to the Best Explanation Approach:  (1)  Machines and paralyzed persons;  (2): Epiphenomenalism and knowledge of other minds;  (3) An unjustifiably strong hypothesis.  (The third objection is the crucial one, and the thrust of it is that a functionalist interpretation of our everyday psychological theory results in an ontologically more modest theory, but one with equal explanatory power.)

A Combined Approach: Physiology and Behavior:  The key ideas here are:   (1)  One makes use of causal laws that run from the physical to the mental, and from the mental to the physical;  (2)  The sorts of input-output relations that one finds in one's own case are also found in the case of individuals with similar bodies;  (3)  Those input-output relations are explained, in one's own case, on the basis of causal laws that involve experiences, or states of consciousness;  (4)  It is extremely unlikely that precisely the same input-output relations would exist in the case of other bodies if they did not have the same basis.

An Argument Based upon the Use of Mentalistic Language:  This final type of argument turns upon facts of the following sorts:  (l)  Other organisms appear to use and understand mentalistic language;  (2) Other organisms appear to assert that they have states of consciousness.  (Compare Michael Scriven's article, "The Compleat Robot: A Prolegomena to Androidology".)  If this sort of argument works, it can be applied to entities that are physically very different from life forms found on earth - both extraterrestrials, and super-computers.

Topic VII.  The Justification of Beliefs about the Past

Some Distinctions:  Knowledge of the past versus memory knowledge; memory beliefs versus memory experiences; memories of experienced events versus memories of facts.

Some Preliminary Issues:  (1) Is all knowledge of the past either itself memory knowledge, or else based upon memory knowledge?  (2) Do memory experiences involve images?  (3) If memory experiences do involve images, is this epistemologically important?  (4) Are memory experiences epistemologically necessary, or are memory beliefs sufficient?  (5) Are apparent memories of experienced events epistemologically more significant than apparent memories of facts?  (6) Can the concept of the past be analyzed, and if so, how?

Alternative Accounts of the Justification of our Memory Beliefs:  (1) Direct realism;  (2) An a priori argument for the theses that memory must be generally reliable;  (3) An appeal to the specious present;  (4) The use of hypothetico-deductive reasoning on its own.

Direct Realism:  Two versions of direct realism with respect to the justification of memory beliefs:  (1) A memory image approach, paralleling Sellars's approach to perceptual knowledge;  (2) A non-phenomenological approach, paralleling Armstrong's approach to perceptual knowledge.

Comments on Direct Realism:  A reason for preferring the non-phenomenological version to the memory image version: the former does not provide a sufficient answer to skepticism.  Can any reason be offered for thinking that beliefs about the past can be noninferentially justified?  The failure of beliefs about the past to possess characteristics typically associated with noninferentially justified beliefs.

An A Priori Argument for the Reliability of Memory?  Is it logically possible that all of one's memories might be incorrect?  Shoemaker's formulation of the a priori argument, based upon a proposed criterion for when it is reasonable to regard a translation as correct.  Three criticisms of Shoemaker:  (1) It is important to distinguish between observation statements and theoretical statements, and this is relevant to the translation issue;  (2) Nonlinguistic behavior is often crucial in determining what beliefs to assign to a person;  (3)  Later linguistic behavior can also be relevant with regard to the ascription of memory beliefs.

An Appeal to the Specious Present:  Two formulations:  (1) A version using inductive generalization;  (2) A version, advanced by R. F. Harrod, involving an appeal to hypothetico-deductive method.

Possible Objections to Harrod's Argument:  (1)  The circularity objection: the concept of the specious present is analyzable, and it turns out to involve the concept of memory knowledge;  (2) Even if one experiences were instantaneous, and there were no specious present, beliefs about the past could still be justified;  (3)  If memory knowledge presupposes a specious present, then it presupposes memory experiences, and this means that one does not have a fully satisfactory answer to skepticism;  (4)  Harrod has not shown that the hypothesis that there is a past is the best explanation of the specious present.

A Hypothetico-Deductive Account of the Justification of Beliefs about the Past:  Beliefs about the past are justified via an inference to the best explanation of one's present beliefs, and other present states of affairs.  The superiority of the hypothesis that present beliefs were caused by past events over the hypothesis that the world just now popped into existence;  One objection that must be overcome: the hypothesis that the world has been around forever - or, at least, for a long time - cannot be shown to be superior to "Russell's hypothesis" that the world has existed for only five minutes.