McEvoy was referring to the 'given' and 'sense datum': both 'given' and
'datum' may be aequi-vocal, if you wish, or co-extensive, since
Anglo-Saxon
(however philosophicalese) 'given' seems to be a translation of 'datum'.
Is there a Griceian given? Why shouldn't there?
It is said that, Central European, rather than Oxonian, analytic
philosophy
in the first half of this century focused on the relation between science
and experience.
Controversies extended beyond the philosophy of science, and shook
philosophy to its foundations, affecting every part of the discipline:
from
aesthetics and philosophy of religion to metaphysics and epistemology.
The issue of how experience relates to thought and language had two
components.
First, how does it relate to meaning?
Second, how does it relate to knowledge?
Controversy raged over the empiricist criterion of meaningfulness, which
set the positivists against all others but brought them together as their
emblem.
On the second issue, by contrast, they were divided.
What is the epistemological bearing of experience on scientific knowledge?
On this question Otto Neurath and Moritz Schlick had a famous controversy.
According to Neurath, our ship of knowledge must be rebuilt at sea, and
only its coherence really matters.
This Schlick rejected, however, as "an astounding error."
Schlick saw coherentism as adrift, and insisted on experiential moorings.
This controversy, though hardly novel with the Vienna Circle, much
exercised them, and soon involved Rudolf Carnap and Carl Hempel and,
eventually,
Hans Reichenbach.
With these it crossed the Atlantic, and with Popper the Channel.
In the second half of the century it has been a central issue in
epistemology, where it has attracted Quine, Sellars, Chisholm, Davidson,
Rescher,
Rorty, and many others -- including Grice.
It is this second issue that we may want to explore.
What is the epistemological bearing of sensory experience on our
knowledge?
The idea of epistemically foundational status appears already in Carnap's
The Unity of Science, where a "protocol" statement is defined as a
"direct record of a scientist's experience."
A "primitive" protocol is then said to be one that excludes "all
statements
obtained indirectly by induction or otherwise."
In the middle decades of our century, the doctrine of foundationalism
took
a radical form, a throwback to Cartesian epistemology.
Schlick, for example, required indubitable and incorrigible foundations.
Soon thereafter , C.I. Lewis also adopted that requirement, thus recanting
his earlier "conceptualistic pragmatism."
Many others also adopted a radical foundationalism of certainty.
"This doctrine," says Nicholas Rescher, "insists on the ultimate primacy
of
absolutely certain, indefeasible, crystalline truths, totally beyond any
possibility of invalidation."
But Rescher himself rejects the quest for absolute foundations as
"quixotic."
Eventually a more moderate foundationalism is suggested by Hempel, who
writes:
"When an experiential sentence is accepted 'on the basis of experiential
evidence', it is indeed not accepted arbitrarily."
"But to describe the evidence in question would simply mean to repeat the
experiential statement itself."
"Hence, in the context of cognitive justification, the sentence functions
in the manner of a primitive sentence."
If put in terms of beliefs rather than sentences, Hempel's point appears
thus:
(H) Beliefs held on the basis of direct experiential evidence are not
arbitrary.
Yet to state the evidence for such a belief is just to voice the belief.
Hence, in the context of cognitive justification, these beliefs function
as
primitive or basic.
Chisholm credits Hempel for this insight, and makes it central to his own
epistemology.
Chisholm defends a form of foundationalism that admits apprehensions of
the
given at the foundation of empirical knowledge, and conceives of that
foundation in line with Hempel's insight H.
Among the foundations defended by Chisholm, early and late, are sensory
foundations-or apprehensions of the given-as well as knowledge of one's
own
beliefs and other propositional attitudes, which are also said to satisfy
Hempel's conditions for being primitive or basic.
Such foundationalism was attacked famously by Wilfrid Sellars, another
philosopher influenced by German philosophy, from Kant (that Hegel was
quoting)
and Hegel through Carnap and logical positivism.
Two main issues divided Sellars from Chisholm and fueled their long and
widely followed controversy.
Their disagreement involved, first, the relation of thought, or
intentionality, to language, and, second, the relation of experience to
empirical
knowledge.
On this second issue they thus continued the controversy of their
predecessors from Central Europe: Neurath, Schlick, Carnap, and Hempel.
Sellars seems right in saying that Hempel's thesis points to inferences
of
the form:
(a) It is a fact that a is F;
So, it is reasonable (for me) to believe that a is F.
But his objection is now that any such argument as a will do its job only
if the premise has authority, only if it is something which it is
reasonable
to believe.
According to Sellars, this leads from a to the following alternative
argument schema:
(b) It is reasonable to believe it to be a fact that a is F; So, it is
reasonable to believe that a is F.
And this is of course, just as Sellars says, "obviously unilluminating."
That, again, is Sellars's critique.
But the sort of problem he raises is not unique to his critique.
A main theme of Richard Rorty's attack on foundationalism is the alleged
"confusion of causation with justification" that he attributes to Locke
and
others.
Donald Davidson also adds his voice:
As Rorty has put it, "nothing counts as justification unless by reference
to what we already accept, and there is no way to get outside our beliefs
and our language so as to find some test other than coherence." About
this I
am, as you see, in agreement with Rorty.
Just how damaging is that line of objection against experiential
foundations?
Doesn't it beg the question against Hempel's insight H?
The insight, recall, is that certain beliefs have authority simply in
virtue of being true.
It is their truth that makes them reasonable.
The believer thus becomes reasonable (or at least non-arbitrary) in so
believing, simply because of the truth of his specific belief (which is of
course not to say that any true belief would be equally reasonable since
true).
Therefore the believer does not need to employ any such reasoning as a or
b.
The believer does not need to adduce reasons in order to be reasonable in
such a belief.
That is indeed what makes it a foundationally justified (or reasonable)
belief, according to Hempel.
Inferential backing is here not needed.
Truth alone is sufficient (given the belief's content).
Hempel's insight hence appears to survive the sort of objection urged by
Sellars, Rorty, and Davidson.
But does it yield an acceptable foundationalism, as Chisholm believes?
More specifically, does it adequately explain how it is that experience
bears on knowledge?
Shall we say that experientially given facts justify beliefs directly,
merely through their truth?
Shall we say, for example, that the mere fact that I have a headache
suffices to justify my belief that I do?
What is the alternative to such foundationalism concerning how one is
justified in believing that p?
Circular or regressive reasoning will not adequately explain how that
belief is justified.
How could the belief that p derive its justification entirely from such
reasoning?
There is much to be said about this.
So let me just gesture towards the problems involved by asking how, in
either a pure regress or a pure circle, justification ever enters in the
first
place.
Inferential reasoning serves to transfer justification but this
presupposes
that justification is already there in the premises of the reasoning, and
that is precisely what neither the pure circle nor the pure regress is
able
to explain.
A full explanation of how one's belief that p gets to be justified must
apparently take us back to ultimate premises that do not get all their
justification from further premises yet.
Must there not be ultimate premises that somehow get some of their
justification by means other than reasoning from further premises?
If not, it is hard to see how justification ever appropriately enters the
line of reasoning (regressive or circular) that leads to one's being
eventually justified in believing that p.
That sketches an argument in favoir of the appeal to foundations.
But note well the highly determinable character of these foundations.
All we have a right to suppose about our foundational beliefs, on the
basis
of our elimination of the circle and the regress, is that they are
justified noninferentially.
Any more determinate and positive thesis would require further defense. In
particular, we are in no position to conclude that the foundation must be
constituted by direct apprehensions of the experiential given.
We have been considering how sensory experience bears on our empirical
knowledge and justification.
And we have found two opposing positions.
On one side are Neurath, Sellars, Rorty, and Davidson, among others.
According to this side, experience bears causally on our beliefs, but it
is
a serious mistake to confuse such causation with justification.
Experience bears at most causally on our beliefs about external reality,
even on our simplest perceptual beliefs. We do not infer such perceptual
beliefs from beliefs about our sensory experience, nor is the
justification for
such beliefs a matter of their coherence with appropriate beliefs about
our experience.
On the other side are Schlick, Hempel, C.I. Lewis, and Chisholm, among
others.
For these it is an "astounding error" to suppose that the mere coherence
of
a self-enclosed body of beliefs might suffice to confer justification on
its members.
And it is hard to see what, other than sensory experience, could serve to
supplement coherence appropriately so as to explain empirical
justification.
Accordingly, they prefer rather to postulate beliefs about such
experience,
the takings or apprehensions of the given, through inference from which,
or by coherence with which, one must attain one's empirical
justification.
But this side notoriously fails to find foundations contentful enough to
found our rich knowledge of an external world.
As so often in philosophy, this controversy leaves middle ground
untouched.
Our coherentists and foundationalists share an assumption:
(A) Experience can bear epistemically on the justification of belief only
by presenting itself to the believer in such a way that the believer
directly and noninferentially believes it to be present, and can then use
this
belief as a premise from which to reach conclusions about the world
beyond
experience.
We can go beyond the traditional controversy by rejecting assumption A.
Experience can bear epistemically on the justification of a perceptual
belief by appropriately causing that belief.
Thus, while viewing a snowball in sunlight I may have visual experience as
if I saw something white and round, which may prompt the corresponding
perceptual belief. In that case it will be an important part of what makes
my
perceptual belief epistemically justified and indeed of what makes it a
perceptual belief hat it is caused by such experience.
But does that serve to provide foundational justification for perceptual
beliefs?
Take a perceptual belief prompted appropriately by a corresponding
experience.
Take a belief that this is white and round, one prompted by visual
experience of a sunlit snowball in plain view.
Is that perceptual belief foundationally justified simply in virtue of its
causal aetiology?
When Sellars inveighs against the myth of the given, he targets not only
the radical version of the myth involving direct apprehensions of given
experience.
He objects also to the more moderate version that postulates foundational
knowledge through perception.
Indeed the key passage that encapsulates his opposition to a foundational
epistemology targets not a foundation of introspective direct apprehension
but a foundation of perception.
Here we may avoid issues about the nature of thought and its relation to
language and society.
So we will take the liberty of transmuting Sellars's argument into one
pertaining directly to belief, justification, and knowledge, leaving aside
whether to understand these in terms of moves in a language game governed
by
social rules.
We am not denying that our main epistemic concepts are to be understood
thus in terms of language and society.
We are simply not joining Sellars in affirming it.
Thus one's preference for the transmuted argument that does not prejudge
these issues.
So transmuted, here then is the Sellarsian refutation of the epistemology
of foundations:
We have seen that to constitute knowledge, an observational belief must
not only have a certain epistemic status; this epistemic status must in
some
sense be recognized by the person whose belief it is.
And this is a steep hurdle indeed.
For if the positive epistemic status of the observational belief that this
is green lies in the fact that the existence of green items appropriately
related to the perceiver can be inferred from the occurrence of such
observational beliefs, it follows that only a person who is able to draw
this
inference, and therefore has not only the concept green, but also the
concept
of an observational belief that this is green and indeed the concept of
certain conditions of perception, those which would correctly be called
'standard conditions and could be in a position to believe
observationally that
this is green in recognition of its epistemic status.
In arguing thus, Sellars is of course rejecting externalist reliabilism.
It is not enough that an observational belief manifest a tendency to
believe that one faces a green object "if and only if a green object is
being
looked at in standard conditions."
This may give the belief a certain minimal epistemic status.
But if the belief is to constitute real knowledge then "this epistemic
status must in some sense be recognized by the person whose belief it is."
And this is the hurdle that Sellars regards as "steep indeed."
It is this hurdle that in his eyes dooms foundationalism.
If the hurdle is steep for the foundationalist, however, it seems no less
steep for anyone else.
How could anyone avoid the threatening circle or regress?
How could one acquire the required knowledge about which conditions are
standard, and the knowledge that those conditions are present, without
already
enjoying a lot of the observational knowledge the possibility of which is
under explanation?
Here now is Sellars's proposed solution (transmuted):
All the view we are defending requires is that no belief by S now that
this is green is to count as observational knowledge unless it is also
correct
to say of S that he now knows the appropriate fact of the form X is a
reliable symptom of Y, namely that the observational belief that this is
green
is a reliable indicator of the presence of green objects in standard
conditions of perception.
And while the correctness of this statement about Jones requires that
Jones
could now cite prior particular facts as evidence for the idea that such
belief is a reliable indicator, it requires only that it is correct to
say
that Jones now knows, thus remembers, that these particular facts did
obtain.
It does not require that it be correct to say that at the time these facts
did obtain he then knew them to obtain.
And the regress disappears.
By this stage Sellars had highlighted inadequacies not only of
traditional
givenist foundationalism, but also of a more recent externalist
reliabilism a neat trick since, at the time he wrote, such reliabilism had
not yet
appeared in print.
Nevertheless, Sellars's positive proposal is problematic.
In the first place, how realistic is it to suppose that at the later time
one remembers that the particular facts in question did obtain?
Think of any perceptual knowledge that you can attribute to yourself now.
Think, perhaps, of your knowledge that you are perceiving a rectangular
sheet of paper with a certain pattern of marks on it. Is it realistic to
suppose that, in believing perceptually that before you there lies such a
sheet,
you are relying on recollected incidents in which you succesfully
perceived thus?
And there is a further problem.
Our later access to earlier observational reactions is an exercise of
memory.
But memory itself seems to require, no less than perception, some
meta-awareness of its reliability when exercised in circumstances of the
sort in
which it is now exercised.
And if there was a problem of regress attaching to the exercise of
perception there would seem to be an equally disturbing problem of regress
attaching to the exercise of memory.
Perhaps the response would be that just as earlier proto- perceptions can
become data supportive of generalizations about our perceptual
reliability,
generalizations that underlie later perceptual knowledge; so, similarly,
earlier proto-memories can become data supportive of generalizations
about
our memorial reliability, generalizations that underlie later memorial
knowledge.
Perhaps, but this raises even more poignantly an objection akin to that
raised earlier about perceptual knowledge: namely, that we cannot
plausibly be
said to remember particular earlier exercises of memory constitutive of a
data bank which can later support our underwriting generalizations.
For a better solution we must go back, ironically, to a philosopher long
miscast as the archetypal foundationalist and givenist.
It is, we suggest, in Cartesian epistemology that we find a way beyond our
regress or circle.
In the barest sketch, here is how we see Descartes's epistemological
project.
First he meditates along, with the kind of epistemic justification and
even
"certainty" that might be found in an atheist mathematician's reasonings,
one deprived of a world view within which the universe may be seen as
epistemically propitious.
Descartes's reasoning at that stage can be evaluated, of course, just as
can an atheist mathematician's reasoning.
After all, atheist mathematicians will differ in the worth of their
mathematical reasonings.
Absent an appropriate world view, however, no such reasoning can rise
above
the level of cognitio.
If we persist in such reasoning, nevertheless, eventually enough pieces
may
come together into a view of ourselves and our place in the universe that
is sufficiently comprehensive and coherent to raise us above the level of
mere cognitio and into the realm of higher, reflective, enlightened
knowledge, or scientia. There is in none of that any circle that vitiates
the
project.
Ancient skepticism, as represented by Pyrrhonism, and modern skepticism,
as presented by Descartes, have been regarded as radically different.
How plausibly?
Descartes does raise a certain skeptical problem that is limited by
comparison with the radical skepticism of the ancients: namely, the
problem of
the external world.
But this is by no means the only skepticism of interest to Descartes.
It is obvious in the Meditations that his concerns are much broader, as
when he wonders how he can know the truth even when he adds three and two
or
when he considers how many are the sides of a square.
It is precisely the radical skepticism of the ancients that mainly
concerns
Descartes (and not only Hegel, who is emphatic on the point).
Moreover, this skepticism is best seen in the light of the epistemic
problematic found already in Aristotle's Posterior Analytics,where it is
given a
foundationalist resolution, and, more famously, in the five modes of
Agrippa.
To the latter incarnation of that problematic the Stoics, in kinship with
Aristotle, offer a foundationalist response.
Where Aristotle appeals to rational intuition as a way to found scientific
knowledge, the Stoics appeal to natural, animal perception as a way to
found ordinary and empirical knowledge.
The Pyrrhonists find such externalism unacceptable because it dignifies
mere "groping in the dark" with the title of knowledge.
The Pyrrhonists highlight enlightened knowledge, which must be acquired
and
sustained in awareness of one's epistemic doings.
Only this is "knowledge" worthy of the title.
Sadly, they would prefer in their own practice to suspend judgment in
specific case after specific case, with few if any exceptions, partly
because
they reject blind foundations. In their view, moreover, any attempt to
move
beyond foundations only misleads us into circles or regresses, viciously
either way.
Descartes's response is balanced and sensitive to this Pyrrhonian
dialectic.
It grants the truth in foundationalism by allowing room for an
inference-independent epistemic state of cognitio.
Intuition gives us foundational cognitio, as suggested by Aristotle, and
such unreflective knowledge is open even to the atheist mathematician.
There is however a higher state of knowledge, reflective knowledge.
Attaining such knowledge requires a view of ourselves of our beliefs, our
faculties, and our situation in the light of which we can see the sources
of
our beliefs as reliable enough (and indeed as perfectly reliable if the
scientia desired is absolute and perfect).
It is important to recognize, in assessing this Cartesian strategy, that
while we do need to underwrite, at the later stage, the reliability of our
faculties, what enables us to do so is the appropriate use of those very
faculties in yielding a perspective from which reality may be seen as
epistemically propitious.
But we need not restrict ourselves to the use of rational intuition and
deduction as the only faculties of any use in that endeavor.
Descartes himself surely needed memory as well.
And memory, by definition, operates over time.
It is not a present-time-slice faculty.
Nor, indeed, is deduction itself such a faculty, except where the whole
proof can be seen in a flash.
So memory, as a cognitio-level mechanism can join cognitio-level intuition
and perception in yielding the pieces that, once present with sufficient
comprehensiveness and coherence, can boost us to the level of reflective
scientia able to underwrite all such faculties.
This means that we need not later exhume from memory any particular cases
of reliable perception or reliable memory in order to support inductively
the generalizations about the reliability of our faculties.
It is enough that such generalizations be present because of the combined
operation of past perception and memory (and, perhaps, a gradual
"induction"
over time, and/or appropriate innate principles).
If through suchcognitio-level cognitive processing enough of a coherent
and
comprehensive picture comes together, such a picture can still underwrite
the continued use of those very faculties, now with reflective assurance,
and now at the level of enlightened scientia.
We have gone beyond the mythology of THE GRICEIAN GIVEN, first by
rejecting
the assumption that experience can bear on the epistemic justification of
our beliefs only by providing premises yielding knowledge of a world
external to experience.
Here is a better way to think of the epistemic efficacy of experience.
Visual experience as if this is white and round may cause belief that this
is white and round in the absence of any special reason for caution.
That can yield perceptual knowledge that this is white and round, with no
need to postulate any inference from one's experience to what lies beyond.
Maybe there are such inferences, lightning inferences unconsciously or
subconsciously yielding our perceptual beliefs as conclusions.
But we need not enter that issue. It is enough that experience cause
belief
in some appropriate, standard way.
Whether it does so via a lightning, unconscious inference we can leave
open.
Whether it does so or not, it may still endow the perceptual belief with
appropriate epistemic status to constitute perceptual knowledge.
Nevertheless, a mere thermometer reaction to one's environment cannot
constitute real knowledge, regardless of whether that reaction is causally
mediated by experience. It is not enough that one respond to seeing white
and
round objects in good light with a "belief" or "proto- belief" that there
is
something white and round.
Suppose one asks oneself "Do I know that this is white and round?" or "Am
I
justified in taking this to be white and round?" and has to answer
"Definitely not" or even "Who knows?
Maybe I do know, maybe I don't; maybe I'm justified, maybe I'm not."
In that case one automatically falls short, one has attained only some
lesser epistemic status, and not any "real, or enlightened, or reflective"
knowledge.
The latter requires some awareness of the status of one's belief, some
ability to answer that one does know or that one is epistemically
justified,
and some ability to defend this through the reliability of one's relevant
faculties when used in the relevant circumstances. But this leads to a
threat
of circle or regress, a main problematic, perhaps the main problematic of
epistemology.
Surprisingly, already in Descartes himself, in the founder of modern
epistemology, we find a way beyond that problematic.
Rescher proposes to replace such foundations with "presumptions" accepted
prima facie and subject to refutation. And he goes on to distinguish the
rationality of practice from the rationality of theory, and to argue that
the
former permits a "...presumption in favor of established methods...[that]
tilts the burden of proof in this context against a sceptical opponent".
Rescher has developed this idea into an important version of pragmatism,
but
one that differs in kind from those I take up here.
Carnap had spoken already in 1936 of the "confrontation of a statement
with
observation," and had proposed "acceptance rules" for such confrontation:
"If no foreign language or introduction of new terms is involved, the
rules
are trivial.
For example: 'If one is hungry, the statement "I am hungry" may be
accepted'" (From "Truth and Confirmation," in Readings in Philosophical
Analysis,
ed. Herbert Feigl and W.S. Sellars (Appleton, 1949), p. 125. These claims
appeared first in "Warheit und BewŠhrung," Actes du congres
internationale
de philosophie scientifique, Vol. 4 (Paris, 1936).
In "The Theory of Knowledge," Chisholm cites Hempel's work, and also an
earlier paper by C.J. Ducasse, "Propositions, Truth, and the Ultimate
Criterion of Truth," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 1.
Sellars's "Epistemic Principles," in his lecture series, "The Structure
of
Knowledge," in H.N. Castaneda, ed.,Action, Knowledge, and Reality
(Indianapolis: Bobbs Merrill).
A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge," in Kant oder Hegel?, ed.
Dieter
Henrich (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1983), reprinted in Ernest LePore, Truth
and Interpretation (Oxford: Blackwell).
Sellars added the following footnote: "My thought was that one can have
direct (non-inferential) knowledge of a past fact which one did not or
even
(as in the case envisaged) could not conceptualize at the time it was
present."
Among the pieces that need to come together in order to raise the belief
that p above the level of cognitio, to the level of scientia, may well be
found appropriate cognitio that one enjoys cognitio that p.
It may be objected that comprehensiveness and coherence are matters of
degree while it is very hard to see how to draw a line above which lie the
degrees of comprehensiveness and coherence that suffice for knowledge,
though
it was also suggested that we might do better by appealing to practical
considerations and not just to comprehensiveness and coherence.
However:
(a) it is not clear how appeal to practical considerations will really
help
with the problem of drawing a line.
Moreover:
(b) compare a concept like that of being tall.
That is presumably to be defined in some such way as this: being
sufficiently taller than the average.
Presumably someone just infinitesimally taller than the average is not
tall.
One has to be taller than the average by some margin, one has to be
"sufficiently" taller than the average.
But how do we define that margin?
Is there, even in principle, some way to capture our actual concept of
tallness by means of some such definition?
There seems no way.
Yet we do surely have and use a concept of tallness, do we not?
Why can't we view epistemic justification similarly in terms of
"sufficient" comprehensiveness and coherence?
Sextus invokes similes that illuminate our issue, such as the following:
"Let us imagine that some people are looking for gold in a dark room full
of treasures. None of them will be persuaded that he has hit upon the gold
even if he has in fact hit upon it. In the same way, the crowd of
philosophers has come into the world, as into a vast house, in search of
truth. But
it is reasonable that the man who grasps the truth should doubt whether
he
has been successful." (Against the Mathematicians).
The combination of coherence and comprehensiveness comports with a concept
of epistemic justification that is "internal."
But it remains to be seen just where to draw the relevant boundaries:
At the skin?
At the boundaries of the "mind"?
At the present- time-slice?
At the boundaries of the subject's lifetime?
Using some combination of the above?
If so, which? And why?
And why do we and should we care whether people are thus "internally"
justified?
Some answers would rest on a subject-centered conception of epistemic
justification as intellectual virtue, and on the importance to a social
species
of keeping track of the epistemic aptitude or ineptitude of oneself and
one's fellows, especially where it is possible to exercise some measure
of
control, however indirect.
Many others since Descartes have groped for a similar way: from Hegel
through Sellars.
Much work on epistemic circularity has also appeared of late, even if
Grice
never thought circularity a problem!
Cheers,
Speranza
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