Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses (Elements of Philosophy)

Epistemology

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Perhaps you can now see why beliefs are different than truth statements. When you believe something, you hold that or accept that a statement or proposition is true.

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If the seed of knowledge is belief, what turns belief into knowledge? There are dozens of competing theories of justification. You might be justified in believing that the sun is roughly 93 million miles from the earth much differently than you would be justified in believing God exists or that you have a minor back pain. Even so, justification is a critical element in any theory of knowledge and is the focus of many a philosophical thought. Regarding this latter category, a small paper written by a philosopher named Edmund Gettier really kicked off a brouhaha that made philosophers doubt that JTB was sufficient for knowledge.

You might notice that the description above puts the focus of knowing on the individual. Philosophers talk of individual persons being justified and not the ideas or concepts themselves being justified.

This means that what may count as knowledge for you may not count as knowledge for me. Suppose you study economics and you learn principles in the field to some depth.

Based on what you learn, you come to believe that psychological attitudes have just as much of a role to play in economic flourishing or deprivation as the political environment that creates economic policy. You and I may have very different beliefs about economics and our beliefs might be justified in very different ways. What you know may not be something I know even though we have the same evidence and arguments in front of us. So the subjective nature of knowledge partly is based on the idea that beliefs are things that individuals have and those beliefs are justified or not justified.

When you think about it, that makes sense. Truth is universal. Philosopher Rene Descartes pronounced day-cart was one of them. When he was a young man, he was taught a bunch of stuff by his parents, teachers, priests and other authorities. As he came of age, he, like many of us, started to discover that much of what he was taught either was false or was highly questionable. While many of us get that, deal with it, and move on, Descartes was deeply troubled by this.

One day, he decided to tackle the problem. He hid himself away in a cabin and attempted to doubt everything of which he could not be certain. For most of us these are pretty stable items but Descartes found that it was rather easy to doubt their truth. The biggest problem is that sometimes the senses can be deceptive. Next he looked at mathematics. If certainly is to be found, it must be here. He reasoned that the outcome of mathematical formulas and theorems hold both in dreams and in waking so at the very least, it fares better than the senses.

But he developed an argument from which he could not spare math. Descartes found there was no way to rule out this possibility. Unfortunately, this left Descartes with no where to turn. He found that he could be skeptical about everything and was unable to find a certain foundation for knowledge. But then he hit upon something that changed modern epistemology. In order to doubt it, he would have to think. If he was thinking then he must be a thinking thing and so he found that it was impossible to doubt that he was a thinking being. This seemingly small but significant truth led to his most famous contribution to Western thought: cogito ergo sum I think, therefore I am.

Some mistakenly think that Descartes was implying with this idea that he thinks himself into existence. He was making a claim about knowledge. Really what Descartes was saying is: I think, therefore I know that I am. Postmodern epistemology is a growing area of study and is relatively new on the scene compared with definitions that have come out of the analytic tradition in philosophy. Generally, though, it means taking a specific, skeptical attitude towards certainty, and a subjective view of belief and knowledge.

Postmodernists see truth as much more fluid than classical or modernist epistemologists.

Using the terms we learned above, they reject the idea that we can ever be fully justified in holding that our beliefs line up with the way the world actually is. We can't know that we know. In order to have certainty, postmodernists claim, we would need to be able to "stand outside" our own beliefs and look at our beliefs and the world without any mental lenses or perspective. It's similar to wondering what it would be like to watch ourselves meeting someone for the first time?

We can't do it.

Epistemology: Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses

We can watch the event of the meeting on a video but the experience of meeting can only be had by us. We have that experience only from "inside" our minds and bodies. Since its not possible to stand outside our minds, all the parts that make up our minds influence our view on what is true. Our intellectual and social background, our biases, our moods, our genetics, other beliefs we have, our likes and dislikes, our passions we can put all these under the label of our "cognitive structure" all influence how we perceive what is true about the world.

Further, say the postmodernists, it's not possible to set aside these influences or lenses. We can reduce the intensity here and there and come to recognize biases and adjust for them for sure. But it's not possible to completely shed all our lenses which color our view of things and so it's not possible to be certain that we're getting at some truth "out there. Many have called out what seems to be a problem with the postmodernist approach.

Notice that as soon as a postmodernist makes a claim about the truth and knowledge they seem to be making a truth statement! If all beliefs are seen through a lens, how do we know the postmodernists beliefs are "correct?

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We have to change our perspective to understand the claims. To be sure, Postmodernists do tend to act like the rest of us when it comes to interacting with the world. They drive cars, fly in airplanes, make computer programs, and write books. But how is this possible if they take such a fluid view of knowledge?

Postmodernists don't eschew truth in general. They reject the idea that any one person's beliefs about it can be certain.

Classic Problems and Contemporary Responses, Second Edition

Rather, they claim that truth emerges through community agreement. Suppose scientists are attempting to determine whether the planet is warming and that humans are the cause. This is a complex question and a postmodernist might say that if the majority of scientists agree that the earth is warming and that humans are the cause, then that's true. Notice that the criteria for "truth" is that scientists agree. To use the taxonomy above, this would be the "justification condition. When you think about it, a lot of what we would call "facts" are determined in just this way.

For many years, scientists believed in a substance called "phlogiston. Phlogiston was believed to have negative weight, that's why things got lighter when they burned. That theory has since been rejected and replace by more sophisticated views involving oxygen and oxidation. So, was the phlogiston theory true? The modernist would claim it wasn't because it has since been shown to be false. It's false now and was false then even though scientists believed it was true. Beliefs about phlogiston didn't line up with the way the world really is, so it was false.

But the postmodernist might say that phlogiston theory was true for the scientists that believed it. We now have other theories that are true. But phlogiston theory was no less true then than oxygen theory is now.

Epistemology

Further, they might add, how do we know that oxygen theory is really the truth? Oxygen theory might be supplanted some day as well but that doesn't make it any less true today. As you might expect, philosophers are not the only ones interested in how knowledge works. Psychologists, social scientists, cognitive scientists and neuroscientists have been interested in this topic as well and, with the growth of the field of artificial intelligence, even computer scientists have gotten into the game.

Many thinkers are interested how belief formation itself is involved our perception of what we think we know. Put another way, we may form a belief that something is true but the way our minds formed that belief has a big impact on why we think we know it. The science is uncovering that, in many cases, the process of forming the belief went wrong somewhere and our minds have actually tricked us into believing its true.

These mental tricks may be based on good evolutionary principles: they are or at least were at some point in our past conducive to survival. But we may not be aware of this trickery and be entirely convinced that we formed the belief in the right way and so have knowledge. Put more simply, mental biases cause us to form false beliefs about ourselves and the world. The Classical Problems of Epistemology Chapter 5 2. Descarte's Epistemology Chapter 6 3. The Concept of Knowledge Chapter 7 4.

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