Naturalistic Epistemology: A Symposium of Two Decades

386 Pages·1987·12.084 MB·English

by  Abner Shimony (auth.), Abner Shimony, Debra Nails (eds.)

NATURALISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY:
A SYMPOSIUM OF TWO DECADES
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
Editor
ROBERT S. COHEN, Boston University
Editorial Advisory Board
ADOLF GRUNBAUM, University of Pittsburgh
SYLVAN S. SCHWEBER, Brandeis University
JOHN J. STACHEL, Boston University
MARX W. WARTOFSKY, Baruch College oft he City University of
New York
VOLUME 100
NATURALISTIC
EPISTEMOLOGY
A Symposium oflwo Decades
Edited by
ABNER SHIMONY
Boston University
and
DEBRA NAILS
University of the Witwatersrand
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
A MEMBER OFTHE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS GROUP
DORDRECHT/BOSTON/LANCASTER/TOKYO
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Naturalistic epistemology.
(Boston studies in the philosopl\y of science; v. 100)
Bibliography: p.
Includes index.
1. Knowledge, Theory of. 2. Naturalism. I. Shimony, Abner.
II. Nails, Debra, 1950- . III. Series.
Q174.B67 Vol. 100 [BD161] 001' .01 s [121] 86--31600
ISBN-13: 978-94-010-8168-9 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-3735-2
DOT: 10.1007/978-94-009-3735-2
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland
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In all other countries, sold and distributed
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All Rights Reserved
© 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Sotlcover reprint ofthe hardcover I st edition 1987
No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABNER SHIMONY / Introduction 1
PART 1/ HISTORICAL FIGURES
JUDSON. WEBB / Immanuel Kant and the Greater Glory of
Geometry 17
Comment: ABNER SHIMONY 71
PETER SKAGEST AD / Peirce's Conception of Truth: A
Framework for Naturalistic Epistemology? 73
MILIC CAPEK / The Philosophical Significance of Piaget's
Researches on the Genesis of the Concept of Time 91
Comment: ABNER SHIMONY 112
Reply: MILIC CAPEK 115
THEODORA 1. KALIKOW / Konrad Lorenz as Evolutionary
Epistemologist: The Problem of Intentionality 119
WILLIAM A. ROTTSCHAEFER / Wilfrid Sellars on the
Nature of Thought 145
PART II / THE USE OF COGNITIVE PSYCHOLOGY
IN EPISTEMOLOGY
DONALD T. CAMPBELL / Neurological Embodiments of
Belief and the Gaps in the Fit of Phenomena to N oumena 165
JOHN HEFFNER / Causal Relations in Visual Perception 193
EDWARD S. REED / Why Ideas are Not in the Mind: An
Introduction to Ecological Epistemology 215
Comment: ABNER SHIMONY 230
LOUISE M. ANTONY / Naturalized Epistemology and the
Study of Language 235
v
vi TABLE OF CONTENTS
JOSEPH LEVINE I Quine on Psychology 259
Comment: ABNER SHIMONY 291
Comment: JOSEPH AGASSI 295
ABNER SHIMONY I Integral Epistemology 299
PART III / CRITICISMS OF NATURALISTIC
EPISTEMOLOGY
PAUL T. SAGAL I Naturalistic Epistemology and the Harakiri
of Philosophy 321
Comment: ABNER SHIMONY 333
Comment: JOSEPH AGASSI 337
JOSEPH AGASSI I Naturalistic Epistemology: The Case of
Abner Shimony 341
Comment: ABNER SHIMONY 352
MARX W. WARTOFSKY I Epistemology Historicized 357
Comment: ABNER SHIMONY 375
INDEX OF NAMES 379
ABNER SHIMONY
INTRODUCTION
1. AIMS OF THE INTRODUCTION
The systematic assessment of claims to knowledge is the central task of
epistemology. According to naturalistic epistemologists, this task cannot
be well performed unless proper attention is paid to the place of the
knowing subject in nature. All philosophers who can appropriately be
called 'naturalistic epistemologists' subscribe to two theses: (a) human
beings, including their cognitive faculties, are entities in nature, inter
acting with other entities studied by the natural sciences; and (b) the
results of natural scientific investigations of human beings, particularly
of biology and empirical psychology, are relevant and probably crucial
to the epistemological enterprise.
Naturalistic epistemologists differ in their explications of theses (a)
and (b) and also in their conceptions of the proper admixture of other
components needed for an adequate treatment of human knowledge -
e.g., linguistic analysis, logic, decision theory, and theory of value.
Those contributors to this volume who consider themselves to be
naturalistic epistemologists (the majority) differ greatly in these respects.
It is not my intention in this introduction to give a taxonomy of
naturalistic epistemologies. I intend only to provide an overview which
will stimulate a critical reading of the articles in the body of this
volume, by facilitating a recognition of the authors' assumptions,
emphases, and omissions.
My procedure will be to summarize four major objections which
have been raised against theses (a) and (b) and then to examine briefly
the ways in which the objections have been or could be answered. I
shall not abstain from indicating my own point of view but shall not
present it in detail (and the need to do so is mitigated by the inclusion
of my article later in the volume).
II. CRITICISMS OF NATURALISTIC EPISTEMOLOGY
1. Thesis (a) has been criticized for crudely conceiving nature as an
1
Abner Shimony and Debra Nails (eds.), Naturalistic Epistemology, 1-13.
© 1987 by D. Reidel Publishing Company.
2 ABNER SHIMONY
aggregate of entities, without recognizing that an entity may belong to
nature in some respects and not in others. Hegel, for example, regarded
nature as the domain of externality and spirit as the domain of
inwardness, and accordingly a human being belongs to nature in bodily
aspects but not spiritually. Other philosophers have interpreted all
natural phenomena physicalistically, and therefore thoughts and feelings
are outside nature, unless, of course, they too are construed physicalis
tically. Kant, by contrast, does not exclude all mental phenomena from
the domain of nature, and yet his conception of nature is incompatible
with thesis (a). "By nature ... taken substantivally is meant the sum of
appearances in so far as they stand, by virtue of an inner principle of
causality, in thoroughgoing interconnection" (Critique of Pure Reason
B446). Since causality, according to Kant, is a category imposed upon
experience by the Understanding, that faculty is the source of law
fulness in nature. A naturalistic account of the operation of the
Understanding would, accordingly, be a nonsensical inversion. Kant
acknowledges that there is an empirical self which falls within the
domain of experience, since it is represented to the inner sense, and it
can be investigated scientifically by empirical psychology (B158, B152).
But neither empirical psychology nor any other natural science yields
information about the transcendental self and its faculties, the Sensi
bility and the Understanding, which are the source of formal principles
of order in experience.
2. Thesis (b) has been criticized on the grounds that the findings of
the natural sciences concerning mental phenomena are relevant only to
descriptive epistemology, which studies the way in which thought
processes actually work. The essential part of the enterprise of
epistemology, however, is not descriptive but normative, prescribing the
thought processes which ought to be followed in order to make correct
inferences and in general to achieve knowledge. The failure to discrimi
nate normative from descriptive epistemology would be a conflation of
ought and is, which has been shown by meta-ethics to be a fundamental
error.
3. Thesis (b) has been criticized on the grounds that the knowledge
which the natural sciences provide concerning human beings is indirect
and inferential and is therefore not trustworthy unless scientific meth
odology has been justified. But scientific methodology is a part of
epistemology. Consequently, any program making essential use of the
INTRODUCTION 3
results of the natural sciences in epistemology, for the purpose of
assessing claims to knowledge, is blatantly circular. Fear of circularity is
the reason for the persistence of a long philosophical tradition, from
Descartes to Lorenzen, which accepts thesis (a) that human knowers
are natural entities but abstains from using the results of the natural
sciences in epistemological investigations. According to this tradition,
circularity can be avoided only by a stepwise construction, in which the
lowest level is in some sense directly founded (e.g., by the cogito
argument, or by the immediacy of sense data), and each successive
layer rests firmly upon its predecessors. The working out of the details
of this stepwise construction is the correct way to carry out the
enterprise of epistemology. (Of course, skepticism results if the same
architectural model of human knowledge is retained, but doubt is cast
upon the validity of some indispensable principle of stepwise construc
tion, for example, by Hume's criticism of induction.)
4. Thesis (b) has been criticized on the grounds that a naturalistic
study of human beings seriously underestimates the historical and
cultural character of human cognition. When human beings are studied
by the natural sciences, the emphasis is upon biologically heritable
traits. To be sure, among these traits is the capacity for culture, which
makes it possible for human beings to exhibit non-genetic transmittable
diversity. Acknowledging the biological basis of the capacity for culture,
however, does not justify subsuming the study of culture under the
natural sciences. If the genetic component in human knowledge is
relatively unimportant compared to the cultural component, then little
scope remains to naturalistic epistemology. The anatomical and physio
logical features of human beings, and even some of the primitive
elements of human mentality, may have remained almost unchanged
during the past one hundred thousand years, but the advanced aspects
of human mentality have been so radically transformed during the
historical epoch that the very concept of a fixed 'human nature' must be
rejected. Alternatively, if one wishes to retain the expression 'human
nature', one must treat it as a cultural variable. Different versions of this
argument against naturalistic epistemology and in favor of a historical
or cultural epistemology have been presented by many philosophers,
including Vico, Herder, Marx, Dilthey, and Mannheim. Habermas and
other members of the critical school have given related arguments for
the separation of epistemology from the natural sciences, though an
4 ABNER SHIMONY
important element in their position is the analysis of the normative
aspects of cognition, and to this extent their objections to naturalistic
epistemology overlap with the second objection above.
III. ANSWERS TO CRITICISMS
Objection 1
This objection is actually a cluster of different arguments against
treating the knowing subject as an entity in nature. I shall restrict my
attention to two members of the cluster. In particular, I shall not
attempt to survey answers to Hegel, since that would require an exten
sive metaphilosophical investigation of logic and language. Further
more, because of Hegel's insistence upon a historical analysis of spirit,
his contraposition of spirit to nature anticipates later historicist treat
ments of cognition, and these will be discussed below.
To the objection that the physical character of nature precludes the
classification of the knowing subject as a natural entity, one straight
forward answer is to accept a physicalist reduction of psychology. This
is the position of Quine, who is such a central figure that many students
are unaware of the possibility (and, in my opinion, desirability) of
disentangling naturalistic epistemology from a physicalist conception of
mind. It is, however, beyond the scope of this Introduction to review
the arguments for and against a physicalist philosophy of mind.
Another straightforward answer is to deny the physicalist charac
terization of nature and to postulate, as Whitehead does, that proto
mentality is exhibited throughout nature, even at the level of elementary
particles. Whitehead's proposal remains conjectural and programmatic,
however, not only because proto-mental traits have not been detected
in primitive physical systems, but because it is far from clear how they
could be detected.
A third answer is to accept the wealth of known correlations
between mental and physical phenomena, which are observed in ordi
nary life and confirmed by psychophysical and medical investigations,
as overwhelming evidence that the human subject is enmeshed causally
with the subject's own body and with other physical objects. These
objects act upon the subject so as to give rise to experiences, often in
predictable ways, and conversely the subject is somehow able to effect
changes in the configurations of physical objects, again often in