Under review, [Blind review copy 4/06]. Guy Axtell. All rights reserved.
THE PRESENT DILEMMA IN PHILOSOPHY
Abstract: In opening the Lowell Lectures of 1906 with “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy,” William James confounded his audience with the initial thesis that “The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of temperaments.” This paper revisits James’s thesis, using the latitude afforded by his title to describe a different dilemma than he was concerned with in his lecture. But it argues that pragmatism can indeed be applied to diagnose the apparently irreconcilable perspectives that give rise to this dilemma about knowledge and justification, and to suggest a philosophically advantageous “mediating way of thinking.”
1. Introduction
One century ago,
in the Lowell Lectures of 1906 delivered by William James at
The history of philosophy is to a great extent that of a certain clash of temperaments. Undignified as such a treatment may seem…[I shall] take account of this clash and explain a good many of the divergencies of philosophers by it.[1]
This essay revisits James’s thesis on its centennial, by considering something like “temperament,” as a contributory cause in philosophical conflict.[2] For James “Temperament is a factor in all philosophizing,” but each philosopher attempts to “sink” this fact by presenting so far as possible only impersonal reasons for their views. Yet temperament is sometimes easily recognizable, and at other times can be recognized through what “loads the evidence” for a particular thinker, leading them to present certain theoretical hypotheses as living or dead. We will interpret temperament broadly, as James seems to, as including intellectual attitudes that might be schooled into us by “imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our caste and set.”[3] James used his first lecture merely to introduce pragmatism as “a mediating way of thinking,” and we will revisit and update that theme as well, arguing that the pragmatist’s insistence upon the inter-dependence between knowledge and action, and consequent to this, their avoidance of a “spectator theory” of knowledge can help mediate what will be described as our present-day philosophical dilemma.
For Jamesian pragmatism is the method, not the substance of the paper. It is to debates in the theory of knowledge today that we will journey, and to the concern that we have come to a certain crossroads in this field of philosophy such that the “standard analysis” of knowledge (as justified true belief) has become impossible to uphold. Thus, the direct focus is on exposing and then mediating a particular difference of “tough” and “tender-minded” temperaments in recent debates in this subfield of philosophy. But besides showing how the debate can be illuminated by applying James’ thesis to it, I also hope to encourage and to challenge contemporary pragmatists to embrace their interests in the ongoing debates in analytic epistemology. For it has become routine in epistemology to construe the analysis of knowledge as conceptually independent of the concerns with activity of justifying one’s beliefs, and of the merit due to the agent herself for the modes of inquiry employed as she comes to acquire and maintain her beliefs. Of course, ten writers are likely to select ten different philosophical problems to characterize as our present dilemma, so that in choosing to write on this particular subfield of philosophy this writer can only, as James did, “beg you to regard my conduct as to a certain extent arbitrary.”
Let us begin with one question about which almost everyone has an opinion that has done work in epistemology since Edmund Gettier published “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” in 1963: the question of the theoretic compatibility of our “internalist” and “externalist” intuitions. It is the question that Sven Bernecker (2006) directly addresses in a recent issue of Philosophical Studies, in “Prospects for Philosophical Compatibilism.” Can internalism and externalism be “reconciled,” where this means to “combine satisfactorily internalist and externalist features in a single theory”? The question is large, and still vague, since we would at least still have to inquire what “satisfactorily” is to be taken to require, and what concepts (“knowledge,” “justification,” or both) the clashing intuitions should be taken to bear upon.
The authors taken to exemplify tough and tender-minded temperaments in response to our focus question needn’t be construed as especially idiosyncratic thinkers. But while we allow here for tough-minded, “conflict” responses to arise from both internalist and externalist perspectives in epistemology, my depiction of it focuses on just the dominant side today, and that figure who Barry Stroud refers to simply as the “scientific externalist.” Bernecker is such a thinker, one firmly seated in analytic epistemology and who views externalist reliabilism as part of a more general project of giving a naturalistic account of belief, with this project of naturalized epistemology in turn a ‘replacement’ for much of what has gone before. Hence Bernecker’s own argument will be the focus of Section 2, as we examine the reasons for his low estimation of epistemic compatibilism, and his resultant ‘tough-minded’ prescriptions for epistemology. These come out in his paper especially as recommendations made to Ernest Sosa, a leading proponent of virtue epistemology and the compatibilist position Bernecker rejects.
Section 3 discusses Richard Foley’s contrasting evaluation of the compatibilist thesis, and the ‘tender-minded’ proposal Foley conveniently also addresses to Sosa, the proposal (as his paper title announces) for “A Trial Separation Between the Theory of Knowledge and the Theory of Justified Belief” (2004). This proposal would have us sever the conceptual connections between justification and knowledge, effectively abandoning the justified true belief analysis. But Foley maintains that internalist intuitions can be saved rather than rejected outright as they are by Bernecker, saved insofar as we are able to relocate them to a different arena than our externalist intuitions operate in. After evaluating each proposal and exhibiting the tough and tender-minded philosophic motivations that lead to them, we re-introduce pragmatism in Sections 4 and 5 and the Jamesian desire to self-consistently allow oneself things ‘from both sides of the line.’ While we certainly won’t have dissolved or resolved the dilemma here described, the paper concludes with a challenge to contemporary analytic epistemologists, and another to contemporary pragmatists, which represent my own positive proposals for progress with respect to it.
2. Tough-minded Conflict
Sven Bernecker writes that the goal of his recent paper “Prospects of Epistemic Compatibilism” is “to challenge each of the available strategies of combining internalism and externalism” (7). To this end Bernecker outlines the various versions of epistemic compatibilism that he finds extant in the literature, raising objections to the arguments supporting each version before focusing on Ernest Sosa’s virtue epistemology as one of its best-developed and strongest defenses. By the end of his paper, having criticized Sosa as well, Bernecker codifies his view that the epistemological externalist cannot in good conscience include internalistic elements in his or her analysis of justification.
To really make peace between internalism and externalism one would have to find a single process or condition that simultaneously ensures that the target belief is likely to be true and that it fits together coherently with the person’s belief-system. In other words, what is needed is a process or condition which, by rendering beliefs subjectively accessible, makes them truth-conducive, and vice versa. Since I doubt that such a process bridging the subjective and the objective exists, I am sceptical about the prospects for reconciliation between internalism and externalism. (16)
A
conceptual connection between knowledge and personal justification would be
preserved by such a “single process or condition” but not otherwise. Bernecker
doubts that such a process “bridging” personal and objective (externalist, truth-linked)
justification exists to meet his requirement; he seemingly waxes Kierkegaardian
in ending his paper, “Ultimately we are faced with an epistemological choice. I
choose externalism” (16).
Bernecker clearly sees the two theories as rival accounts of the same epistemic concept, justification. The underling logic of Bernecker’s stance is a quite overt ‘Either/Or’; his pessimistic conclusion concerning a compatibilist stance he concedes would be philosophically advantageous if available, follows from his assumptions that 1) “whenever levels of knowledge and justification are stipulated, they must be construed along either internalist or externalist lines,” and 2) that therefore “any attempt to unite internalism and externalism in a single theory must count one as more basic than another” (16). That Bernecker overstates the burden of supporting epistemic compatibilism is indicated not just by the demand for a “single process or condition,” but by his still stronger demand that any “satisfactory” compatibilist account be one that convinces the litigants themselves: the only reconciliatory strategies that need to be taken seriously, he insists, are those that “stand a chance of convincing the litigants.” But since “internalists will refuse to countenance that justification has anything to do with reliability and externalists will oppose the idea that justification is a matter of the rationality of belief,” it seems highly implausible from the outset that this condition will be fulfilled whatever philosophical arguments may be at the compatibilist’s disposal.
Perhaps
we can gain some perspective on Bernecker’s response to the aporia about knowledge and personal
justification by considering what Robert Brandom says about the
“naturalistic temptation” and how it ties into externalist epistemology:
The
primary insights of externalist reliabilism lead to a ‘temptation’ to suppose
that the concept of reliability of belief-forming processes can simply replace
the concept of having good reasons for belief—that all the explanatory work for
which we have been accustomed to call upon the latter can be performed as well
or better by the former. (1998, 373)
Bernecker’s
stance is just such a replacement project for the traditional concern with
personal justification. To better illustrate why I also take it as an instance
of James’ thesis we will need to make apparent and compare other responses to
the same aporia. The outline of
various forms of epistemic compatibilism that Bernecker provides in his paper
is quite valuable as a starting point for this. But it would be useful to have taxonomy
broad enough to include Bernecker’s own ‘incompatibilist’ stance. To clarify
the range of available views, we might adapt the well-known taxonomy of “Enemies,”
“Strangers,” or “Partners” in any given debate. More formally, let’s describe
these as the “Conflict,” “
Given our new taxonomy, we can not only identify Bernecker’s incompatibilism
with a “Conflict” model, but also take notice of how the standard stipulative
definitions of internalism and externalism reinforces this one particular model.
For those definitions take internalism as the thesis that all of the factors
that justify a belief must be factors internal to the agent upon reflection,
while externalism is simply the denial of that thesis; hence they represent mutually
exclusive and exhaustive accounts of the same
epistemic concept. The use of these stipulative definitions isn’t particularly
troubling when authors argue explicitly for this, as Bernecker does. But it
becomes troubling when, as is all too common today, authors simply lean upon the stipulative definitions in
such a way that they deny the possibility of what Foley calls “more interesting
readings” of the debate, ignoring the fact that all three models of the
relationship between internalist and externalist interests in explanation are
well-represented in the literature.[5]
There is a lesson in this overdependence upon stipulative
definitions to do philosophical work, a lesson that ties back into James’s
inclusion under “temperament” of certain commitments that come with the “imitation
and partisanship,” that one may acquire from training in any profession field,
including philosophy. But the point is best made by Dewey rather than James:
Old ideas give way slowly; for they
are more than abstract logical forms and categories. They are habits,
predispositions, deeply engrained attitudes of aversion and preference.
Moreover, the conviction persists - though history has shown
it to be a hallucination - that all the questions that the human mind has asked
are questions that can be answered in terms of the alternatives that the
questions themselves present. But in fact intellectual progress usually occurs
through sheer abandonment of questions together with both of the alternatives
they assume - an abandonment that results from their decreasing vitality and
change of urgent interest.[6]
Looking in more detail at Bernecker’s defense of Conflict, he argues that a reliably truth-conduciveness process generating a belief is clearly necessary for that belief to be justified, yet little reason to think anything other consideration than those of such a third-personal sort is required to make the true belief an instance of knowledge. In his naturalized epistemology project, “knowledge has little or nothing to do with subjective justification; it is a matter of standing in the right relationships to the facts” (2). What remain central to the task are only ideal-observer perspectives upon physical processes. Bernecker holds that epistemologists must “evaluate from the point of view of a fully informed spectator” (1). Analysis of knowledge is taken as the central task of epistemology, in part because offering the sceptic a complete or exception-free definition of knowledge is viewed as a bulwark against radical skepticism.
In summary, what Bernecker recommends to Sosa and other epistemic compatibilists is to abandon their stance altogether and to embrace a thorough-going form of reliabilist externalism. Whatever bullet-biting it may later entail, one must make one’s choice between internalism and externalism, first and third person perspectives on epistemic evaluation, in a context where by his own admission the radical incommensurability between them makes knock-out refutation of one theory by the other impossible.
But as evidenced by the recent Ernest Sosa and his Critics volume (2004), the tough-minded proponents of scientific externalism are not the only ones dissatisfied with Sosa’s account. Let us further our inquiry by considering the proposal that Foley makes to Sosa in that volume, calling for a trial separation between the theories of knowledge and justification as “two very different projects.”
3. Tender-Minded
Richard Foley presents this diagnosis of the developments in the debates that led from the early discussion of the “Gettier problem” in the mid-sixties, to our present-day epistemological impasse:
Initially, reliabilism was part of a reaction against justification-driven accounts of knowledge, but an assumption drawn from the old epistemology tempted reliabilists to reconceive justification as well. The assumption is that by definition justification is that which has to be added to true belief to generate knowledge, with some fourth condition added to handle Gettier-style counter-examples. If knowledge is reliably produced true belief and if justification is by definition that which has to be added to true belief to get knowledge, then epistemic justification must also be a matter of one’s beliefs having been produced and sustained by reliable cognitive processes (2005, 314).
Foley thinks that internalists and externalists typically talk past one another, and that this is “the direct result of both sides accepting as the methodological assumption that the properties which make a belief justified are by definition such that when a true belief has those properties, it is a good candidate to be an instance of knowledge.” Foley calls this the “Unfortunate Assumption” (hereafter UA), and prescribes that Sosa should more fully extricated himself it. It is an assumption that he would clearly see as driving Bernecker’s Conflict stance, in whom it motivates the attempt to radically reconceive justification in externalist terms. Rejecting it undercuts that attempt, but also means that knowledge-possession does not require “personal justification.”
Foley argues that UA has the debilitating effect of placing the theory of justified belief in service to the theory of knowledge (314).[7] Analyses of knowledge premised upon UA are bound to fail, but a remedy is available: “to jettison [UA] and instead to develop an account of justification without feeling a need to smuggle into the account constraints aimed at forging a necessary link between epistemic justification and knowledge” (2004, 69). Foley thinks it is UA more than anything else that “prompts externalists and internalists to see themselves as providing rival accounts of epistemic justification” (61). Most of the literature, he says,
assumes that externalists and internalists are defending rival theories and that, hence, cannot both be right. An alternative and more interesting reading of the dispute, however, is that they are not, or at least need not be, competitors at all. Rather, they are principally concerned with different issues (60).
By not assenting to the Unfortunate Assumption Foley thinks we are enabled to take the stance that “there are different, equally legitimate projects for epistemologists to pursue but that these projects need to be distinguished.”[8] UA is disadvantageous to both the analysis of knowledge and the theory of rational belief, so that each, Foley argues, would be better off without it: “The assumption that epistemic justification, absent Gettier problems, turns true belief into knowledge inevitably distorts the project of trying to understand what is involved in having epistemically justified beliefs” (69). On the one side it introduces a need “to read back into the account of knowledge some duly externalized notion of justified belief” (2005, 315); this need is one clearly emphasized by Bernecker, though Foley views it as imaginary. On the other side it creates a gulf between the theory of justified belief thus re-construed and our everyday assessment of each other’s opinions, an assessment that focuses on personal epistemic responsibility and a conception of rationality closely tied to it.
I find validity in Foley’s rejection of the stipulative definitions of
internalism and externalism in favor of “more interesting readings” of the
debate, and in his diagnosis of self-described internalists and externalists competing
to meet demands that derive from shared false assumptions. Yet Foley’s positive
prescription, which we have encapsulated by calling it an
4. Epistemic Compatibilism in “Good
Intellectual Conscience”
The view of Sosa with which both authors take issue is the “mixed” view where for knowledge an agent must both be in appropriate relation to the external world and be in good internal order or well-motivated (285). The kinds of cognitive dispositions a person must manifest in order for her to become a reliable agent are not unconnected to the kind she manifests when thinking conscientiously, and hence issues of proper motivation remain important factors in a virtue epistemology.[10] Sosa wants not only to maintain the importance of personal justification for knowledge possession, but also to show through a study of the agent’s intellectual motivations, habits, and dispositions how in cases of knowledge, objective reliability is grounded in epistemically responsible action.
The Integrationist or “mixed” account asserts a strong kind of compatibilism, but only of some remainder of the old debate between internalists and externalists, this remainder being the relationship between epistemic reliability and personal epistemic responsibility. The Integrationist is one who holds that third personal concerns with reliability and first-personal perspectives on responsibility in belief acquisition and maintenance needn’t be taken as the basis of antithetical logics. Rather, these two kinds of concerns, while indeed distinct, nevertheless mutually re-enforce one another in self-reflective agents like ourselves. Foley’s criticisms of Sosa’s Integrationist stance as philosophically unstable is not altogether different than Bernecker’s, yet the recommendations they make to him could hardly be more different. These in fact suggest divergent conceptions of the future practice of epistemology. There are of course externalists who resist Bernecker’s thorough-going externalist account of justification and might find Foley’s account appealing. In a tough-minded crowd of externalists, the author has actually heard this strategy of allowing internalism to reign over the theory of justification as ‘throwing the dog his bone.’ But are these choices really one’s that we can expect philosophical logic in the short or long run to decide for us? Or is there instead an unmistakable air of academic ‘turf-war’ behind these alternative prescriptions and the arguments used to support them?
The trail of the human serpent, it seems to me, is well-apparent in what we have characterized respectively as the tough and tender-minded accounts of our epistemic predicament, and the alternative prescriptions we are given for dealing with it. Further emphasis on the rhetorical dimensions of their arguments might help to underline aspects of temperament (in James’ broad definition of it) otherwise obscured. What philosophical sense, for example, does it make for Bernecker to insist that any adequate defense of epistemic compatibilism be able to psychologically persuade the litigants? In what other polemical debate would we make such a stringent demand? Moreover, what Bernecker advises Sosa to do is to drop his compatibilist stance and accordingly to stop regarding “so-called reflective knowledge” as anything of special concern to the analysis of knowledge. This recommendation functions as an ultimate lowering of standards, wherein non-reflective, ‘animal’ knowledge becomes paradigmatic of what knowledge just is. Here the selectivity bias of externalists, who primarily concern themselves with perceptual and other forms of immediate sensory knowledge, arguably shows itself.
For Foley’s part, the rhetorical function of his separation strategy becomes clear when we notice that in his future vision of epistemology, the theory of justification/rationality is not only retained as a legitimate topic, but is predicted to eventually become the central topic of epistemology. After the trial separation, he predicts, we will still allow that epistemology has a foundational role to play, though no longer as the “guarantor of knowledge” that UA makes it; its foundational role “is the less flamboyant but nonetheless crucial one of providing a theoretical anchor for a general theory of rationality” (2001, 229). The separation strategy, it then seems, is not in fact stable as he initially presents it as being: Having moved (by the rejection of UA) from the theory of justification having its raison d’etre in serving the theory of knowledge to the idea of two very different but equally legitimate projects, we eventually come to see the theory of knowledge as in fact having little other value than in sub-serving the theory of justification/rationality. When we read this fine print, we learn that internalism ultimately triumphs through Foley’s concession and relocation strategy, as externalist analysis of knowledge first loses its point, and then returns to the fold.
If these points further indicate how temperamental influence is often concealed within the argumentative strategies even within highly analytic fields like epistemology, the positions advocated by our ambassadors of tough and tender-minded reasoning are nevertheless quite widespread in the literature. This in turn provides strong indication that we have arrived at a genuine cross-roads in epistemology. Our present dilemma as I have described it is not the aporia about knowledge and justification with which we began, but the seemingly inexorable choice between Conflict and Independence as the only options that respect the demand for philosophical consistency. It is a choice proceeding on assumption that the more robust form of epistemic compatibilism represented by the Integrative model is not a live option. The diagnosis we have applied sees the two proposals before us as alternative but equally severe measures, both appealing to the logical conscience as undermining what they concede would be a more philosophically desirable position.
We have treated Bernecker’s and Foley’s mutually antagonistic logics, and their radically different proposals to Sosa, as an instance of the Jamesian thesis of the clash of tough and tender-minded temperaments. But “most of us have a hankering for the good things on both sides of the line” (14). The advantages of conciliatory strategies, James held, are obvious enough, but once one gets beyond the casual intellectual interests of the “philosophical layman,” the demands of logical consistency and coherence make us “unwilling to mix a hodge-podge system”[11] This same concern about a hodge-podge admixture of internalist and externalist elements is just what Bernecker and Foley both ply upon in judging the Integrationist form of epistemic compatibilism implausible. If it appears we are driven by the force of argument to a philosophical dilemma, we must then grab one horn or the other, in acknowledgement that “we cannot preserve a good intellectual conscience so long as we keep mixing incompatibles from opposite sides of the line” (14).
In other recent papers (author 2006a & b, 2007) I have given my own compatibilist account more backbone, arguing that issues of epistemic responsibility shouldn’t be confused with demands for “internalist justification.” Both internalists and externalists have conceded this point[12], so that when I say that compatibilists like me are interested only in some remainder of the internalism/externalism debate, what is intended is that internalism is rejected, yet a concern with personal justification in terms of epistemic responsibility remains central to the account. Because personal justification in terms of epistemic responsibility remains necessary for the possession of reflective knowledge on the present account (along with a condition to meet the kind of epistemic luck at issue in Gettier-cases), this approach of “mixed theory” (a characterization John Greco gives to virtue epistemologies) maintains considerable connection to the standard JTB account of knowledge, whereas the proposals of Bernecker and Foley as we have seen, do not.
While I skipped over my obligation to provide a detailed argument to support the foregoing claims, it is because my focus here is on diagnosing the ongoing dialectic in contemporary debate over these issues. In particular, I hope to have shown how claims about the logical incompatibility of first and third-personal perspectives on epistemic evaluation are not above the academic turf wars, but often merely another weapon within it, and more revealing about how the evidence is “loaded” for particular authors—what makes a particular theoretical option ‘live’ or ‘dead’ for them—than about the demands of logic per se. So where do we go from here if we want to show that the compatibilist hypothesis has been too easily dismissed by our ambassadors of tough and tender-minded reasoning? Can we no longer hope to say something akin to what James (23) said, “I offer the oddly-named thing pragmatism as a philosophy that can satisfy both kinds of demand”? In the next section we pursue this possibility, suggesting that the dilemma we have posed really only arises under the sway of a “spectator theory” of knowledge, and concluding with challenges both to contemporary pragmatists and to analytic philosophers regarding what they can do to thwart the conditions that give rise to our present dilemma.
5. The Common Interest of Pragmatists and Virtue Epistemologists
Pragmatism as James conceived it is a methodology that respects the common person who has no very definite temperament but is “a mixture of opposite ingredients, each one present very moderately” (11). A first lesson we might hope to draw from our diagnosis of our present dilemma is that before we do whatever bullet-biting will be necessary with either of the two recommendations, we be sure that the assessment of Integrationist compatibilism as dead-in-the-water is actually sound. It is perhaps the beauty of pragmatic method that it sanctions philosophers in not giving up too easily on the pursuit of theoretical positions that are truly advantageous: think, for instance, of meliorism as a third option between optimism and pessimism, or of the pragmatist stance on the interconnectedness between knowledge and action, or again between theory and practice.
Secondly, while Foley locates the motivations for what we might call “eliminative” externalist accounts of justification in acceptance of UA, alternative explanations are available. We previously suggested one in Brandom’s description of the “naturalistic temptation,” which bears more upon the issue of epistemic normativity than on UA. If this does provide an alternative explanation, we might share Foley’s rejection of eliminative externalism while retaining the conceptual connection between personal justification and knowledge-possession that he would have us surrender.[13]
Thirdly, one might look to see whether pragmatist principles allow us to identify a different false assumption shared between internalists and externalists than the one Foley argues for. We might not be able to say directly what a pragmatist should hold about the relationship between subjective justification and knowledge-possession, but we can say that on pragmatist principles knowledge is necessarily connected with action, and that this provides a place to start. This brings us to discuss the manner in which the theory of knowledge, as a theory either of propositional contents or of states of mind, has become increasingly distanced as the ‘externalist turn’ in epistemology has taken hold, from issues regarding the agent’s motivations and actions while engaged in inquiry. This distancing of knowledge from action has been taken by some writers to be implied by the externalist turn in epistemology, so that knowledge is conceptually independent of the merit of the choices by which it is attained.[14] If reliable causation is what justifies belief and the having of reflectively good reasons isn’t directly pertinent to the possession of knowledge, then issues of motivation, of epistemic responsibility, etc. will also come to be seen as irrelevant to the task of analysis of (at least non-inferential) knowledge.
A
pragmatist perspective emphasizing the connections between knowledge and action
thus seems considerably closer to Sosa and the virtue epistemologists than to
either Foley’s internalism or Bernecker’s externalism.
In rejecting the “Spectator theories of knowledge,” pragmatists reject the claims of those who hold that we can fully separate our ability to attribute propositional knowledge to an agent from our ability to identify the intellectual dispositions and motivations that she manifests in acquiring and maintaining the belief which the proposition represents. So while the externalist turn in epistemology currently presents obstacles to the continued recognition of the conceptual relevance of active agency and “motivation” to knowledge possession, the pragmatists and what we called the “Integrationist” stance maintained by Sosa and other self-described virtue epistemologists, have a common interest in overcoming those obstacles. Both are deeply concerned with the complex ways in which factors of motivation and the quality of habits or methods of inquiry contribute to an agent’s success or reliability.
Yet pragmatists it seems to me have remained largely silent about the developments in recent decades that have driven apart analysis of knowledge as a passive state described third-personally from consideration of the self-reflective activities of active agents. James’ notion of pragmatism as a mediating methodology should mean that pragmatists don’t just talk among themselves, but carry that methodology into whatever academic fields in which such forced dichotomies fuel debate. Is the problem that pragmatists simply can’t make the argument for the conceptual relevance of actions to knowledge possession, or is it that they have grown somewhat complacent in conversing within their own circles while analytic epistemologists converse within theirs? I think whether pragmatists are aware of it or not, they have an essential interest in making the argument for the interconnection of knowledge and action, even if it militates against assumptions common in mainstream analytic epistemology. I therefore want to draw attention to those pragmatists who today do carry this effort onward, such as Sandra Rosenthal who recently re-iterates “pragmatism's radical rejection of the spectator theory of knowledge.” Writes Rosenthal,
“[P]ragmatism… rethinks the nature of foundations…and this rethinking incorporates the ontological grounding of diversity. This rethinking, which incorporates the essentially perspectival nature of experience and knowledge, goes hand in hand with pragmatism's radical rejection of the spectator theory of knowledge. All knowledge and experience are infused with interpretive aspects, funded with past experience. And all interpretation stems from a perspective, a point of view. Knowledge is not a copy of anything pregiven, but involves a creative organization of experience that directs the way we focus on experience and is tested by its workability in directing the ongoing course of future activities. In this way, experience and knowledge are at once experimental and perspectival in providing a workable organization of problematical or potentially problematical situations.[15]
For Rosenthal, many of the dichotomous “isms” in metaphysics and epistemology “are alternatives growing out of reflective frameworks that ignore the fundamental, creative, interactive unity at the heart of lived experience central to the spirit of pragmatic philosophy.”[16] It may be, as she says, that the language of philosophy tends to obscure this interactive unity, but the response of pragmatists should not be to ignore what goes on in mainstream analytic debate in these fields. The purported separation of knowledge from action perhaps instead indicates a somewhat confused understanding of conceptual analysis. This has indeed been argued recently, and it is worth pointing out at this time how some analytic epistemologists such as Adam Leite (2004; 2005), who are making just the kind of argument that one would think the pragmatists should be making. Leite writes,
The Spectatorial Conception regards the activity of
justifying as epistemologically irrelevant because
justifying is aimed at showing that one possesses a status which is fully
independent of this activity. This is incorrect. The basic point of the
activity of requesting and offering reasons in defense of beliefs is to provide
a setting within which entitlements to hold beliefs can be challenged,
defended, established, and shared. To develop a justification for one’s belief
is to attempt to establish or secure a positive normative status by basing
one’s belief upon adequate reasons (2005).
Externalists typically view beliefs as causal effects, such that to explicate their justification is simply to describe the nature of external processes by which the beliefs are produced. In this reconstructive context, and as an enabling methodological assumption of it, the desires and purposes of the person are regarded as irrelevant to the justification of belief; what is alone allowed relevance in the resulting, ‘filtered’ view of the belief’s justificatory status is whether the instanced processes of belief acquisition are one’s that on a probabilistic basis tend to match environmental states of affairs.[17]
Such an approach seems reflective of what we called the naturalistic temptation, and it seems incapable, in turn, of explaining the special significance of knowledge, a concern that goes all the way back to Plato’s Meno, where Socrates asks after the difference between knowledge and luckily true belief. Accounting for that difference seems impossible without retaining some sense of knowledge as an achievement; a Spectator theory of knowledge leaves little if any room for the attribution of epistemic credit to the agent for the truth of her beliefs. Perhaps Leite has these kinds of problems for reliabilist externalism in mind when he writes, “To enable epistemic evaluation of the person, basing relations must be attributable to the person and not merely to some reasoning-like process which takes place ‘in’ him or her” (emphasis original). While he doesn’t endorse either pragmatism or virtue epistemology as the upshot of this critique, there appear to be strong connections to the “agent-based” view of epistemic justification that Sosa and other virtue epistemologists hold, in contrast to the “belief-based” views associated with a Spectator theory. For according to Leite, the Spectatorial Conception runs into trouble by trying to force a fundamental bifurcation over our thinking about a person, where: “On the one side are the facts which determine basing relations, and on the other is the person’s overt deliberative and justificatory activity, and the latter does not ever directly determine the former.” But this bifurcation, Leite maintains, isn’t forced upon us by logic. I agree, and would relate it instead to the antipathies bred from emphases placed upon either “facts” or “principles,” respectively by those who reflect the philosophic temperaments James refers to as the tough and the tender-minded.[18] To quote James once again, “There arises thus a certain insincerity in our philosophic discussions: the potentest of all our premises is never mentioned.”
5. Conclusion: The Challenge of
Epistemological Axiology
In moving to conclusion I would like to issue challenges to contemporary philosophers with respect to what has here been described as our present dilemma. More specifically, I would like to pose one challenge to analytic epistemologists, and another to contemporary pragmatists. Analytic epistemology’s deep reticence about epistemic compatibilism, it strikes me, is due in part to its failure to meet what can be called the challenge of epistemological axiology.[19] A contemporary of James and Dewey, Wilbur Marshall Urban, wrote that “Many conflicts are not of the nature of logical contradiction but of metalogical opposition and it is a fatal error to turn an antithesis of values, whether practical or cognitive, into logical contradiction” (1949, 130). If the Jamesian thesis of temperament as a factor in all philosophizing seems too psychologistic to some readers despite our explicitly broad way of interpreting it, Urban’s passage may provide a more satisfactory way of putting my central concern about the current state of debate in the theory of knowledge.
If we have been correct in distinguishing “Conflict,” “Independence” and “Integration” models of the relationship between internalism and externalism each contending today for our allegiance, then that these distinct strategies and their ‘unneutral logics’ have largely escaped notice should indicate the need for greater attention to the metalogical and axiological aspects of the debate. Analyses of knowledge concern the conditions of genuine knowledge and therefore involve assumptions or postulates regarding ideals of knowledge—judgments which themselves are empirically and logically unsupported. These axiological postulates clash, but it does not at all follow that they are in ultimate contradiction. To determine whether they are really incompatible, or express merely an antithesis of values, we need first more attention to the explication of meanings. What concerns about the special significance of knowledge underlie each model? Do they evaluate primarily beliefs, or the agents who hold them? What conception of epistemology’s future, and of the relationship between scientific naturalism and traditional normative concerns with rationality and responsibility is embodied in each model?
Questions such as these provide a most powerful response to Bernecker’s over-strong demand that epistemic compatibilists prove the existence of “a single process or condition” that simultaneously ensures the truth-effective character of justification and the “transparency of reason.” For they imply that it is over the discovery of no such Cartesian process that the prospects for epistemic compatibilism rest: that we cannot simply ‘look to things’ and to disregard the explication of meanings in discourse. Our debate is, at a deeper level, over the very intelligibility of knowledge, and the necessary conditions of meaningful discourse about it.
In respect to contemporary pragmatism, we have suggested that the mutual
inter-dependence of knowledge and action in the pragmatist tradition may serve
as a resource for the preferred Integration model of Sosa and the virtue
epistemologists. But if our present dilemma in philosophy is the apparent
choice between Conflict and
There has been some movement to relate Jamesian and Deweyan conceptions of intellectual habit and character to the concerns of contemporary virtue epistemology (VE), but there remains a need and opportunity for considerable further work on their symmetries.[20] Pragmatism, Rosenthal says “charts a course into the future that winds its way between the self-defeating alternatives of a long philosophical tradition” (). But this, too, is how we have depicted the central thrust of epistemic compatibilism, whose defenders are today supporting the position that basing relations must be attributable to the person and not merely to some reasoning-like process which, in the fashion of spectator theory, takes place ‘in’ him or her.”
It is hoped that issuing a two-sided challenge—to analytic epistemologists the challenge of epistemological axiology, and to contemporary pragmatists the challenge of exploring and engaging their essential interest in the “compatibilist” stance maintained by the virtue epistemologists—will help to mediate “our present dilemma in philosophy” and sooth the tensions that give rise to it.
End
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NOTES
[1]. James 1975 [1907], 11. He continues, “Yet temperament is no conventionally recognized reason, so he urges impersonal reasons only for his conclusions. Yet his temperament really gives him a stronger bias than any of his more strictly objective premises. It loads the evidence for him one way or the other….”
[2]. James excused himself over and again to the audience that heard his first Lowell lecture, saying that he feared they would perceive him as seeking to persuade them of his thesis per fas aut nefas (‘by means fair or foul’), and that his characterizations of tough and tender-minded styles of philosophy might seem “simple and massive.” The same qualifications should certainly be extended here, since it is no part of my intension to psychologize individual authors or to ‘pigeon-hole’ their considered views. Yet it is also in the spirit of James to point out to one’s audience that “If philosophers can treat the life of the universe abstractly, they must not complain of an abstract treatment of the life of philosophy itself” (24).
[3]. James 1979 [1897], 18. In utilizing this passage from “The Will to Believe,” I show that I make no sharp distinction between our “willing nature” in this article, and “temperament” as treated in “The Present Dilemma in Philosophy.” When James spoke of our willing nature influencing the form of philosophy we come to accept, his thesis was not intended as a strictly psychological thesis, and I doubt that temperament should be treated this way either. Whatever it is that creates bias and “loads the evidence” for an individual, making certain theoretical options appear “live” or “dead” (18) may serve our present purpose.
[4]. The relationship of the three
models to the tough and tender-minded temperaments should not be
oversimplified. It is clear that the Conflict model can be invoked either on
the side of externalism as with Bernecker, or the side of internalism, and Sven
Bernecker has pointed out to me in correspondence that that the latter can
appear just as much ‘tough-minded’ thinkers as the former. So I do not intend
to say that all externalists are tough-minded, and all internalists
tender-minded. The proposals made to Sosa by Bernecker and Foley invoke different models of the relationship of
internalism and externalism, and temperament seems more naturally to attend
these divergent models than to map onto internalism and externalism directly. I
do not of course exempt my own and Sosa’s Integration model from the same
“diagnosis,” but invite it.
[5]. The use of
internalism and externalism as a kind of ultimate classification for individual
authors is a shared by Pritchard (2005, 2006b), who even fails to acknowledge
the shared compatiblist position of the virtue epistemologists, or the tougher
problem it presents for his critique of virtue epistemology.
[6]. Dewey 1970, 402.
[7]. This venture is one that he thinks is bound to fail whether one pursues it along internalist or externalist lines. For “if it is stipulated that the properties that make a belief rational must also be properties that turn true belief into a good candidate for knowledge, then an account of rational belief can be regarded as adequate only if it contributes to a successful account of knowledge” (2001, 214). Foley says that “Sosa is correct to sever half of the commonly assumed connection between the two, by conceding that epistemic justification is not a necessary condition of knowledge,” but that “the other half of the connection also needs to be severed. It is not a necessary condition of epistemic justification that it turns true beliefs into knowledge, absent Gettier problems” (2004, 69).
[8]. In this way we empower “an
alternative and more interesting reading of the dispute, [that] they are not,
or at least need not be, competitors at all,” (2004, 60-61). This clearly shows
Foley as a compatibilist of sorts, but of course Bernecker’s broad criticism of
compatibilism is already intended to head off the kind of Independence-oriented
variety Foley supports.
[9]. Note how it allows him to stay with his ‘own lights’ internalism about justification, including an account of self-trust over which there is little concern to square with objective concerns about reliability.
[10]. For Zagzebski, the emotional
dispositions are the motivational component of virtue, and the Aristotelian
claim that virtue is characterized by apt emotions holds in the intellectual
sphere as well. Sherman and White (2002, 39) view the emphasis on the emotions in Aristotle’s thought (and even
to some extent in Stoicism) as “a resource for contemporary virtue
epistemology.” Emotion is one aspect of motivaton, and important in both moral
and intellectual appraisal, since “full virtue of either sort is never just a
disposition or capacity, it is a way of ‘standing toward’ dispositions and
faculties that involve conscious shaping, regulation, and valuing as component
parts of living well.”
[11]. James 1975, 14. While the
tough-minded may still emphasize facts, and the tender-minded, principles, it
is still the case that “No one can live an hour without both facts and
principles, so it is a difference of emphasis; yet it breeds antipathies of the
most pungent character between those who lay the emphasis differently” (12).
[12]. Externalists such as Alvin Goldman
have pointed out that that the construal of internalism as a matter of the
subject’s “having good reasons” (by her own lights) for holding her belief is
blind to, and can even undermine proper attention to, the conscientiousness of
her efforts to secure the evidence that the internalist counts undiscerningly as
introspectively good reasons. Strongly re-enforcing this point, Lawrence
Bonjour, a noted internalist, argues explicitly that “being epistemically
responsible” is neither necessary nor sufficient “for internalist
justification” (2003, 175-176). Hilary Kornblith and James Montmarquet are
hence correct to view virtue responsibilism as consistent at best with only
specially qualified forms of internalism, and indeed my position in (author) 2007
is explicitly that of a “responsibilist externalism.” I accept UA and take
epistemic responsibility as being part of the answer to what makes
reliably-formed true beliefs good candidates for knowledge; but I reject the
claim that “internalist justification” is conceptually relevant to analysis of
knowledge. My differences with Foley are thus more nuanced than may at first
appear, as I find much of his critique insightful but hold onto UA because I find
a different sense of personal
justification still pertinent to knowledge possession.
[13]. In [author] 1996, I argued against (eliminative or) ‘definist naturalism’ and in favor of a ‘criterial naturalism’ that seems reflective of Dewey’s account. For criterialists, the continuity between philosophy and the special sciences is strong enough that natural facts are the grounds or criteria for the assignment of normative predicates (including thickly-described virtues and vices), though not necessarily strong enough to warrant the reductionist or definist claim that valuative predicates or properties reduce to or are exhaustively definable by natural facts. The definist position makes it impossible to affirm that reasons can be causes, and hence reinforces the notion that causal explanations ‘replace’ the work that “good reasons” have traditionally served in the theory of justification.
[14]. Belief and disbelief in a proposition, in contrast to acts of acceptance and rejection, appear to be psychological states over which we exhibit no control. Especially where perceptual and other non-reflective knowledge become paradigmatic of the entire range of human knowledge, one’s visual perception seems to compel acceptance, so that no voluntary/involuntary distinction parallels that between acceptance and belief. These considerations and the known asymmetries between acceptance and belief tend to drive the two theories apart, leading the knowledge relation to be conceived as being a strictly “objective” one that can be described as holding or failing to hold relative only to third-personal kinds of conditions. As but one example of the seduction of these views in epistemology today, Baron Reed asserts like Bernecker that Sosa’s aretaic (intellectual virtue) condition on knowledge is entirely beside the point, because “Knowledge is conceptually independent of the merit of the choices by which it is attained and may, in fact, be attained without being chosen, at all” (Reed 2001, 22). On this basis he divides analysis and knowledge from action and agency so sharply as to claim that “The most plausible analysis of knowledge will be in terms of factors over which we have no control” (23). This fits quite well Leite’s characterization of the Spectatorial view: "On this conception, one stands in a primarily theoretical or epistemic relation to the justificatory status of one's beliefs: positive justificatory status is something which one finds out about, not something which one brings about."
[15]. Sandra Rosenthal (2005), 107.
[16]. Ibid., 107. While some externalists
tend to emphasize ‘brute’ perceptual knowledge as paradigmatic of what
knowledge is, pragmatists, according to Thomas Baldwin find the contrast within
the empiricist tradition between passive perception and exercise of the active
will “overdone and lead[ing] to the mistakes of ‘the spectator theory of
knowledge’ which are to be corrected by giving due weight to the connections
between perception and agency” (2003, 188). Rosenthal finds that in both Dewey
and Peirce, “perception and the meaningful backdrop within which it occurs are
shot through with the intentional unity between knower and known” (1986, 12).
Sosa seems to agree insofar as he argues that reflective reason is always a
“silent partner” in our distinctively human
mode of knowledge, so that even if the vast majority of interaction with our
environment reflects what may be deemed ‘low-grade’ knowledge, it isn’t really
passive in ways that should have ever tempted us to assimilate it with
knowledge of a merely ‘brutish’ sort.
[17]. This being determined third-personally or independently of any “subjective” or first-personal consideration, we now seem to require only something like the well-known “thermometer model” of justification. This view was directly defended about non-inferential knowledge by D. M. Armstrong (1973) and has been influential over more recent externalist epistemology. For pragmatist criticism of the “thermometer model, see Clarke (1989, 36. Sherman and White note that “To focus on criteria of a good knower rather than on knowledge is to open the door to new kinds of consideration, relevant to what it means to be in a position to know” (2002, 42). For sharply opposed viewpoints on the merits of spectator theories of knowledge, see Kulp 1992, and Frisina, 2002.
[18]. From this we can see the self-defeating nature of the Spectatorial Conception of the basing relation, that it does not do the necessary work: “[I]t does not provide an adequate basis for epistemic evaluation of the person, at least not for the forms of evaluation which are my concern here—forms of evaluation connected with the notions of entitlement, responsibility and fair criticism of the person” (2004, 230). “The crucial question here concerns the appropriateness of treating a person as responsible for a certain condition and hence as an appropriate subject of normative evaluation and criticism on its account”. “The problem is not that [it] places basing relations outside the person’s voluntary control; basing relations, on any plausible view, can’t be modified simply at will. The problem is rather that according to the Spectatorial Conception, basing relations are never directly determined through the person’s explicit evaluation of reasons…So while the Spectatorial Conception needs basing relations in its account of justification, whatever it calls a “basing-relation” will not be a relation which is involved when a person holds a belief for a particular reason” (Leite 2005b).
[19]. Indeed while we celebrate James
thesis of 1907, it would be an oversight to omit mention that it was Urban’s
book Valuation, in 1909, that
introduced the terms “axiology” and “cognitive values” into English usage.
[20]. If one wants further evidence of these shared concerns, consider that it has quite often been Deweyans who have responded to the claims made by “situationist” theory in cognitive psychology which calls into question the efficacy of acquired character traits in human behavior. Thus if thinkers sympathetic to virtue epistemology like Leite have been arguing as one might think pragmatists should against the sway of the Spectator theory of knowledge, it has been Deweyan pragmatists who have taken us the fight against situationist theory that one would naturally think the virtue epistemologists should be engaging, but have not.