Pathways to Knowledge: Private and Public

364 Pages·2002·1.39 MB·English

by  Alvin I. Goldman

Goldman, Alvin I. Regents Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona Pathways
to Knowledge
Private and Public Publication date 2002 (this edition)
Print ISBN-10: 0-19-5138791
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-19513879-5
doi:10.1093/0195138791.001.0001

Abstract: Explores issues ranging from introspection to social
epistemology. “Internalism Exposed” pinpoints problems in the defense of internalism
as an approach to epistemic justification. “A Priori Warrant and Naturalistic
Epistemology” argues that naturalistic epistemology is compatible with a priori
warrant, and shows how scientific research supports an innate faculty of number
cognition that can generate arithmetic belief with a priori warrant. “The Unity of the
Epistemic Virtues” examines the prospects for a unifying account of distinct
epistemic values, such as justified belief and true belief. The next three papers
consider intuitions and introspection from an epistemological perspective. One paper
explains how intuitions can play the evidential role that philosophical practice assigns
to it. Two papers argue that introspection plays an unavoidable but legitimate role in
the science of consciousness despite being a “private” method. The final three
papers deal with aspects of social epistemology. One asks how novices can
justifiably choose among two or more competing experts. Another explores the
possibility of an epidemiology of knowledge, of which memetics is a prominent
example. The final paper provides a critical survey and guide to the diverse
approaches to social epistemology.
Keywords: a priori, consciousness, epistemology, experts, externalism, Alvin
Goldman, internalism, introspection, intuitions, justification, knowledge,
memetics, philosophy, social epistemology

Pathways to Knowledge
end p.i
end p.ii
Pathways to Knowledge Private and Public
2002
end p.iii
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Goldman, Alvin I., 1938-
Pathways to knowledge : private and public / Alvin I.
Goldman.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-19-5138791
1. Justification (Theory of knowledge) 2. Knowledge,
Sociology of. 3. Consciousness.
I. Title.
BD212 .G65 2002
121—dc21 2001046411
end p.iv
For Bill Alston Valued friend and fellow traveler down the
pathways of epistemology end p.v
end p.vi
Preface
From its beginnings epistemology has been concerned with two
questions about knowledge: "What is it?" and "How do you get
it?" Plato's answer to the first was that knowledge is true belief
that is securely "tied down." His answer to the second was that
knowledge is attainable by intellectual apprehension of the
Forms. Subsequent epistemology centered more on the
second question than the first, often quarreling over the
feasibility, legitimacy, or reliability of proposed methods for
gaining knowledge. Plato's theory of intellectual apprehension
is a good example of a controversial method. The organizing
theme of this collection of essays similarly centers around
candidate methods, or "pathways," to knowledge. What are the
available pathways, and which are the best ones, or acceptable
ones, to follow? The question is not restricted, however, to
knowledge. A close cousin of knowledge is warranted or
justified belief, and many epistemologists are as interested in
identifying proper pathways to justified belief as good pathways
to knowledge. That question gets at least equal attention in this
volume.
On the current epistemological scene the hottest debate about
justification is the internalism/externalism debate. Chapter 1
enters that fray with a sustained critique of internalism.
Externalism characteristically holds that beliefs acquire
justificational status if they are produced by methods with
certain "external" properties, properties that need not be known
—and perhaps need not be knowable, or at any rate "directly"
knowable—by the agent him-or herself. Internalism takes issue
with this claim about proper methods or pathways. It holds that
all justification-conferring properties ("justifiers," for short) must
be accessible to the agent. Chapter 1 examines the most
popular defense of internalism and finds it wanting.
end p.vii
Chapter 2 joins the recent renewal of interest in a priori warrant
or knowledge. Epistemologists of a "naturalistic" stripe have
commonly championed radical empiricism and heaped scorn
on anything smacking of traditional rationalism. So can a
naturalizing epistemologist like me countenance the a priori? Is
there a pathway to knowledge that yields certain, infallible, and
unrevisable results, as traditional accounts of the a priori
suggest? Chapter 2 defends the a priori from the standpoint of
moderate naturalism. It rejects the traditional characteristics of
the a priori just listed, but finds it plausible that there are
psychological routes to mathematical belief and logical
inference that are sound and distinctive enough to license a
separate subcategory of warrant. Tentative support for this
contention comes from empirical research in cognitive science,
the sort of work needed to identify the exact nature of these
"pathways." Reliable processes for arithmetic and logical
cognition may be part of our natural endowment.
Chapter 3 adopts the standpoint of virtue epistemology by
construing epistemic virtues as processes, methods, or
activities ("pathways") that promote or realize epistemic value.
A question therefore arises whether epistemic value is
fundamentally single or multiple. If it were single, then all
epistemic virtues would be united by their relationship to one
and the same value. At first blush, however, epistemic value
seems to be multiple. Don't we value both true belief and
justified belief? Aren't these distinct values? Even restricting
attention to truth and falsehood, isn't there a pair of values at
stake: getting true belief and avoiding false belief? So how
could epistemic "unitarianism" get off the ground? Despite
these challenges, chapter 3 argues that a pretty good case can
be made for epistemic unitarianism.
Parts II and III (chapters 4-9) explore the legitimacy and
significance of private and public pathways to knowledge. An
almost ubiquitous feature of analytic philosophy is its appeal to
intuitions, typically the philosopher's own intuitions. In almost
every branch of philosophy, choices between competing
theories rest substantially on whether the deliverances of these
theories comport or conflict with intuitions. But how can an
ostensibly subjective and private event like an intuition provide
a pathway to philosophical knowledge? Outside of philosophy,
educated people are often skeptical about the deliverances of
intuition. Why should things be different here? Given such
worries, one might expect to find a copious literature on the
epistemic credentials of intuition, or the epistemic propriety of
using intuition in the practice of philosophy. In fact, however,
the literature on this topic is relatively sparse. Chapter 4, written
with Joel Pust, tries to tackle the problem. Instead of urging the
abandonment of intuition as a dubious source of evidence, it
tries to show how to interpret philosophical theories as theories
about which intuition, properly construed, can provide
legitimate evidence.
Chapters 5 and 6 explore the legitimacy of another
controversial pathway to knowledge: introspection. In the
heyday of behaviorism and positivism, end p.viii
introspection was often regarded as the prototype of a private
process or method that should be forsworn, at least for
scientific purposes. It fails to satisfy the requirement that
scientific knowledge—and perhaps all knowledge—should be
based on public (intersubjective) data and public methods.
Psychologists and philosophers of science are still queasy at
the very mention of the word "introspection"; and many
philosophers of mind, working in the long shadows of
Wittgenstein and Ryle, favor functionalist accounts of mental
states that try to avoid or minimize the role of "privileged
access." There are two problems with the foregoing stricture
against introspection. First, something like it (perhaps "internal
monitoring") seems to be the way people normally determine
their own conscious states. Second, the scientific study of
consciousness currently enjoys not only renewed respectability
but dramatically increased importance. The question then
arises of how the scientific study of consciousness can
proceed, or how its epistemology can be reconstructed. Does it
rely—perhaps implicitly and indirectly—on introspective
methods, or can it do entirely without them? If it does rely on
introspection, is the use of such a private method legitimate?
Chapters 5 and 6 explore this fundamental epistemological
problem for the science of consciousness. I argue, first, that
introspection is indeed required in the science of
consciousness, because researchers must rely on the
introspective reports of their subjects, and this reliance is in turn
(tacitly) based on introspection of their own. Furthermore,
introspection is indeed a private method, in a relevant sense of
"private." Nonetheless, a private method can be a legitimate
pathway to knowledge. The constraint of publicity, as a
universal constraint on (scientific) method, should be rejected.
To say that publicity should be rejected as a universal
methodological constraint is not to say that public or social
methods of knowledge-acquisition are undesirable or
unimportant. That would be a strange thing to say, given the
massively social dimensions of knowledge. I made much of this
theme in my previous book Knowledge in a Social World
(Goldman 1999), and I return to it here in part III (chapters 7-9),
which is devoted to types of social pathways to knowledge and
justification.
The need for social routes to knowledge is dramatized in
modern life by the rampant specialization of knowledge.
Practical questions about daily life and public affairs cannot be
confidently or responsibly answered without appeal to experts
in one or another technical area of inquiry. How safe is the food
we eat, the medicines we take? What will be the consequences
of this or that use of the environment, of this or that energy
policy, of this or that method of teaching children to read?
These are familiar examples of the exploding number of
questions that cannot be reliably answered without appeal to
special expertise. No single person can possibly attain all the
relevant forms of expertise; each of us must rely on others. But
on whom, exactly, should we rely? Which experts, or alleged
experts, should be trusted? Unfortunately, end p.ix
so-called experts often disagree, and when they do, they
cannot all be right. Which one should the novice or layperson
trust? Upon hearing two rival experts offer conflicting
viewpoints, can the novice justifiably trust either one? How can
such justified belief be attained? After all, novices often
struggle to get even a bare comprehension of what experts are
saying. When they do understand them, how can they appraise
the relative merits of their esoteric arguments? This is, I
believe, a fundamental problem in social epistemology.
Perhaps it is a special case of the general epistemological
problem of testimony, but it is particularly acute when a novice
confronts conflicting expert testimony. This problem is
addressed in chapter 7.
Interest in social epistemology is not confined to philosophers.
Numerous disciplines investigate problems in the near
neighborhood of what philosophers call social epistemology.
Few of these extraphilosophical disciplines address the core
epistemic concepts of "justification" or "knowledge" (in the truth-
entailing sense) that preoccupy philosophers. Indeed, many
members of these disciplines assume the vacuity of these
concepts when construed in an "objectivist" fashion.
Nonetheless, these disciplines actively explore the processes
and mechanisms by which ideas and beliefs are socially
constructed and transmitted. In this sense, they take a lively
interest in one part of social epistemology's territory. Any
systematic social epistemology would like an instructive model
of how ideas and beliefs spread through society or culture. One
such model or approach is called "memetics." The general idea
is to import the Darwinian model of biological evolution into the
domain of culture. "Memes" are units of culture that supposedly
propagate along the same fundamental principles as "genes." A
related approach is the disease or epidemiological model:
ideas propagate like viruses through a population. In the case
of memes the mechanism of replication is said to be imitation.
In the disease model, transmission occurs by contagion. These
approaches have at least surface plausibility, though they
encounter many problems. To the extent that hearers trust the
speech of others, they emulate or inherit those speakers'
beliefs. Perhaps this is indeed like contagion. If this approach
has promise, it would seem relevant to social epistemology. But
could it really be relevant to the social pathways for knowledge,
where "knowledge" is understood as true belief? This is not
obvious. The possible usefulness of these models for social
epistemology is critically explored in chapter 8.
The final essay of the volume is a synoptic and (largely)
ecumenical treatment of alternative possible approaches to
social epistemology. Both Knowledge in a Social World and
chapter 8 treat social epistemology from a "veritistic"
perspective, inquiring into the social practices that are good
pathways to "knowledge" in the sense of true belief. Chapter 7
treats social epistemology from the perspective of justification
theory, inquiring into the ways that a novice might be justified in
accepting an expert's opinion. Both approaches extend
classical epistemology into the social domain without
abandoning end p.x
the traditional epistemological concern for truth and justification.
Not all writers on social epistemology, however, share this point
of view. As noted above, many explicitly reject the
presuppositions of traditional epistemology and construct social
accounts of (what they call) knowledge along very different
lines. It is worth tracing out these alternative conceptions, if
only to bring the similarities and contrasts with "traditional"
(objectivist) social epistemology into sharper relief.
Furthermore, there are many research techniques to use in
plying social epistemology, whether in traditional or
nontraditional forms. All of these permutations are worth
identifying, and that is the task undertaken in chapter 9.
As these prefatory comments indicate, I do not conceive of
knowledge as being attainable by just a single pathway, or even
a handful of pathways, but by a wide variety of sometimes
independent and sometimes interconnected pathways. The
upshot is that epistemology, by my lights, is not a narrow
subject but a highly rich and diversified subject, perhaps more
diversified than most treatments of it typically allow.
A.I.G.
Tucson, Arizona February 8, 2001
end p.xi