Two Dogmas of Naturalized Epistemology

Two Dogmas of Naturalized Epistemology Mariam THALOS’

Abstract This essay is not concerned exclusively with procedure. In addition to developing and promoting an alternative methodology, I will also be utilizing it to defend, systematically, an unfashion- able proposition nowadays. This is the proposition that the question of how a particular judgment, on a particular occasion, is to be justified, is independent of the question of how that judgment comes to be formedby the individual who forms it. This thesis, which I shall call j-independence, is deplored in certain (self-styled as ‘naturalized’) schools of epistemology. Its denial is one of the two dogmas of t h ~ s essay’s title. The other dogma is the metaphysical one on which it rests, which I shall call personalism.

A standard procedure in epistemology nowadays is as follows. A theory treating some epistemological subject is formulated, then tested by application to carefully crafted cases, which I shall refer to as exhibits. The exhibits are used to elicit judgments, which I shall refer to as intuitions, as to whether knowledge (or justification, or whatever happens to be in question) is in evidence. Argu- ments are then adduced to the effect that the theory displayed explains the judgments elicited by the exhibits, and that it does so better than certain prominent competitors. Or, arguments are instead adduced to the effect that the theory gives incorrect pronouncements or fallacious explanations of the judgments elicited by the exhibits. The carefully crafted exhibits, according to this style of procedure, bring out certain facts about knowledge, grasped by intuition, which cry out for systematic explanation, and which are either successfully or unsuc- cessfully treated by the theory to which attention is drawn.

This style of investigating epistemological subjects, evocative as it might be of the hypothetico-deductive scientific method - if we cast the judgments elicited by the exhibit cases in the role of empirical observations - has certain

* State University of New York at Buffalo Thanks to Barry Smith and Peter Hare for copious comments on numerous earlier

drafts.

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limitations. First, it is unsystematic. But more importantly, it obscures certain fundamental disagreements over metaphysical issues which bear on epistemological questions, thus making these metaphysical issues impossible to treat. As I will endeavor to show, epistemology is a discipline that can be conducted from any number of metaphysical positions, all opposed to each other, and with no neutral positions among them to choose from. However the standard procedure described in the previous paragraph does not acknowledge the existence of a dimension of inquiry in which treatment of purely metaphysical issues will be made.

A more suitable methodology for epistemology, which I will both develop and follow in this essay, will handle metaphysical matters first, and only after- wards advance to epistemological questions proper. This procedure is more systematic, and, as we will see, serves to structure discussion of foundational questions in epistemology, as well as to organize the options themselves amongst which the epistemologist gets to choose.

1. Two Conceptions of Epistemic Appraisal

David Hume wrote: “The sweetest and most inoffensive path of life leads through the avenues of science and learning; and whoever can either remove any obstructions in this way or open up any new prospect ought so far to be esteemed a benefactor to mankind.” This sentiment - characteristic of aris- tocratic sensibilities as it might be - nonetheless suggests that the paths of knowledge are public passageways. So obstructions to the building up of a body of knowledge are practical problems of collective life, with which any person of sufficient means and public spirit should be concerned. But if the increase of knowledge is a civic duty - or at least a civil service - then perhaps the study of knowledge is the study of the objects of a community enterprise, assembled and preserved by citizens acting, not with personal aims for personal gain, but rather as faithful public officers. The conception that pursuit of knowledge is a community rather than individual enterprise prevailed among pioneers of empiricism - modernity’s public-spirited boosters of science - from the time of Locke and Hume to the 1950’s, since which time a

Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding, I, 20. This vision of knowledge is a part of what Philip Kitcher calls ‘Legend’ The Advance-

ment of Science, New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), according to which: “For explanations of the successes [of science towards the goal of truth], we need look no further than the exemplary intellectual and moral qualities of the heroes of Legend, the great contributors to the great advances. Legend celebrates scientists, as well as science” (p. 3).

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chorus of critics has risen up to challenge the authority that scientific institu- tions have come increasingly to enjoy. My first task will be to contrast the proposition that epistemic appraisal is a community undertaking - which still finds its friends among members of the philosophy of science community, although their company has shrunk - with one of its contraries which predomi- nates in the analytic epistemology literature.

The proposition that pursuit of knowledge is, fundamentally, a collective or communal enterprise, rests on a metaphysical thesis about the objects of epistemic appraisal. I shall call it impersonalism. It is the thesis that epistemic appraisal is concerned fundamentally with abstract objects - namely, forms of reasoning - and the various logical properties that commend them, rather than with individuals and those factors, in their special circumstances, which lead them towards intellectual achievement. Contraries of the proposition that knowledge is a communal enterprise also rest on metaphysical theses about the objects of epistemic appraisal - theses that, as I shall argue, are opposed to impersonalism. The most prominent among these in contemporary epistemology is what I will be calling personalism - the first and foremost dogma of this essay’s title - the thesis that epistemic appraisal deals fundamentally with concrete rather than abstract objects; specifically, that epistemic appraisal is directed fundamentally at acts or states of judgment and belief, to each of which belongs a set of special circumstances as well as a set of spatiotemporal boundaries. My first aim in this essay is to argue that the question about objects of epistemic appraisal - which, as I will show, is essentially the question: “which of potential evaluative enterprises takes priority in epistemology?” - must be answered before any dispute acknowledged in epistemology nowadays can be fruitfully advanced.

Personalism is nowadays almost universally embraced in the analytic epistemology branch of epistemology - the branch which draws prominent attention to the question: “When is a subject S entitled to believe that P?” Ac- cording to personalism the objects of epistemic evaluation are concrete rather than abstract: they are acts or states which are achieved by individuals with the capacity for holding opinion. I shall use the terms judgment and beliefto refer to these articles of personal property, which possess propositional structure, by meuns of which individuals manage to express or hold opinion. The terms will therefore refer to objects occurring in the natural world which are, as it happens, directed at propositions, rather than the propositions themselves or (at an even greater remove) the inference patterns which ordered sets of propositions may fall under. The presupposition of personalism is that it is propositional attitudes, fundamentally, which require epistemological evaluation; and if anybody has to answer for a propositional attitude, it will of course be

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the private individual, as such, in or by whom the attitude is either formed or performed. Personalism, then, is the view that the chief subject matter of epistemology is belief, and that each belief is answered for privately, by the believer to whom it belongs. Personalism comes to us through Descartes, who - for knowledge’s sake - recommended an intellectual strategy that could be conducted entirely from a first-person perspective, and would therefore not require the summoning of high authorities. Ironically, as it turns out, God and his perfections nonetheless figure as central players in the plot of the Meditu- tions.

The second strand of thought in epistemology, which I have proposed calling impersonalism, and which is exemplified in the passage from Hume quoted above, comes to us - in what is by no means a coincidence - in company with the hypothesis that \ contingent propositions are founded on observation alone. In the same spirit as it insists on observation - which is a public form of evidence - as the sole ground of knowledge, this strand of epistemology proposes that it is the community, as such, rather than the individual, which answers for opinion. So it comes as no surprise that impersonalism takes the objects of epistemic evaluation to be abstruct rather than concrete entities - forms of reasoning or, if you prefer, inference forms or schemas - under which fall the specific pieces of reasoning brought forward for community evaluation. The objects of epistemic evaluation, according to impersonalism, are not acts or states, which are in a certain sense personal property as they can be truly said to belong in their entirety to the lives of those individuals who perform or suffer them. Rather, the objects of epistemic appraisal are genera, abstracta: they are the very inference forms - us such - under which one may pass, from premises stating general principles or matters of observation, to conclusions. For the primary job of epistemology, according to impersonalism, is to make recommendations that can be relied upon to produce knowledge, no matter what happens to be the specifics they get applied to. Thus according to impersonalism, the fundamental job of epistemology is to rank forms of inference as to truth preservation, independently of the circumstances in which they might find application.

Not surprisingly then, the impersonalist approach is exemplified most frequently in literature on scientific confirmation. There the most visible examples of these objects of epistemic appraisal are various (very often controversial) proposals for inductive reasoning and general scientific methodology, such as those to which Hume drew withering attention. (And contrasts are often made between these forms of reasoning and the unchallenged forms of deductive reasoning.) Toy examples of inductive reasoning these days, more often than not involve ravens (Premise 1 Observed raven 1 is black; Premise 2

Tko Dogmas of Naturalized Epistemology 115

Observed raven 2 is black; ... ; Therefore Conclusion, All ravens are black). Less artificial examples are Bayesian forms of reasoning, which proceed by systematically assigning probabilities to nontautological propositions, such as (for example) the proposition that all ravens are black, using a specified body of observations as the ground for these probability assignments.

Now a critic of impersonalism might, at this very early stage of things, be tempted to lodge the complaint that the enterprise of examining inference forms does not even deserve the name of epistemology, much less the privi- lege of vying for prime office space in the epistemologist‘s priorities. For the impersonalist’s proposed fundamental-appraisal-bearing objects - inference forms - belong in reality to the logician’s preserve, while epistemology must deal with belief as such. Even the typical Bayesian statement: “Evidence E makes proposition P more probable than proposition Q” is not about which of P or Q one ought to accept - which is, according to the criticism, is what epistemology is fundamentally about. It’s simply a factual proposition about the metaphysics of likelihood, not a normative statement of any kind. I reply that this is too quick. For according to some impersonalists anyway, the metaphysics of likelihood is the fundament on which rest certain important epistemological directives, as surely as the metaphysics of unconditional truth preservation is the fundament on which rest the directives of deductive logic. Thus in tendering this criticism, the personalist would merely be insisting on the prefemd tradition in dealing with epistemological matters, not offering an argument against a competitor.

Impersonalism and personalism differ on the fundamental objects of epistemic evaluation. Thus it might be supposed that, logically speaking, any impersonalistic theory is compatible with any personalistic one, since two such theories will concern themselves with different objects, and since we shall have to have separate theories which evaluate these heterogenous objects in any case. Hence it might be supposed that the branch of philosophy which deals with the epistemology of science can be independent of that branch which handles evaluation of belief states. This, as I shall show, is not correct. The epistemology of science is not the independent preserve of the philos- opher of science, any more than the epistemology of the individual believer is the independent preserve of the analytic epistemologist. This point shall be our point of departure, and for it we shall have to conduct an inquiry in metaphysics.

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2. A Metaphysical Question

Treatment of the question of justification is, to be sure, an exercise in epistemology. Even so the investigator cannot avoid treating certain metaphysical subjects in the process. Aristotle is extraordinarily illuminating on these procedural matters. In the Metaphysics (XI,3; V,lO), Aristotle inquires whether the term ‘healthy’ (for example) is used always with the same sense, or with several. Upon determining that it is used in more than one sense, he turns to the question: which of its usages is the fundamental or independent, such that all others are derived, in one way or another, from this primary one? In other words, he is seeking an answer to the question: what are the objects of which ‘healthy’ is attributed in the proprietary sense? This investigation concerns metaphysics because it concerns the types of application of the conception, and - more importantly - because it inquires concerning the depend- encerelations among different types of applications of the conception. It concerns which type of application is chief, and which subordinate.

The epistemologist cannot avoid treating this (metaphysical) dependence question concerning the chief concept of epistemic evaluation - the concept of justification. However this question has throughout history been treated in anything but an explicit fashion, and perhaps this is the root of certain errors, misunderstandings and arguments at cross purpose. I propose exposing treatment of this question to the light of philosophical analysis, as all results in epistemology depend on the answer to this question.

At times we wish to concern ourselves with the question whether some opinion is justifiable on grounds of available evidence, with no concern whatever for those individuals or authorities, whether they exist or not, that sub- scribe to it. At other times we wish to concern ourselves with the question whether a certain individual is justified in holding a particular opinion. In the former case, the object of evaluation is an inference or inference form, from certain evidence as grounds to the opinion under examination; in the latter case, the object of evaluation is a judgment or a judging subject. To which object type does epistemic evaluation belong in the proprietary sense - that is to say, fundamentally, or independently?

We cannot reply that it belongs primarily to both unless we are prepared to embrace the view that the evaluations with which the two questions are concerned are independent of each other. In other words, we cannot reply that epistemic evaluation belongs to each type of object in the proprietary sense unless we are committed to the view that epistemic evaluations of judgments and individuals on the one hand, and epistemic evaluations of forms of reasoning on the other, are different and furthermore independent species of


evaluation, which have in common only that each is a species of evaluation, which stand together under the same ontological taxon with the likes of moral evaluation. And we cannot, as earnest epistemologists, embrace the view that evaluation of forms of reasoning has in common with evaluation of individual judgments only that each enterprise involves some form of evaluation, for then we shall be unable to answer the question: in virtue of what common feature do the two enterprises deserve to be called 'epistemological'? Perhaps we are willing to settle for "family resemblance," as an answer to this question. I reply that this is settling for far too little, on behalf of an enterprise in systematics.

Hence we cannot embrace both personalism and impersonalism. A personalistic theory is incompatible with an impersonalistic one.

3. Some Implicit Answers

The question of fundamental application transcends the regulative questions of epistemology, since it is a question of metaphysics. But a decision on this question must be made - either by explicit argument or implicit presupposition - before any regulative theory can be put forward. For it must be determined whether the objects we are evaluating currently - whether they are individuals or forms of inference - will receive evaluation derivatively or fundamentally. So in order to put forward a regulative theory, we need to know what we have to do first. For example, impersonalism demands that the evaluation of a judgment be derived from evaluations of forms of reasoning; likewise that evaluation of a string of judgments be derived from evaluations of the forms of reasoning of which the string may be an instance. The evaluation due to concrete judgment is secondary, dependent or derived. Epistemic evaluation, therefore, is a two-part process, the fundamental or independent component being that which treats the forms of reasoning, and the secondary or dependent component being that which treats judgments. Impersonalism thus demands that we complete evaluation of inference forms before we can embark upon the task of evaluating judgments or beliefs proper.

Personalism, by contrast, is the view on which evaluation of judgments is made directly, without the benefit of intermediate bearers of epistemic evaluation. But personalism is also, by necessity, a view according to which epistemic evaluation is a two-part process, since it must reject the proposition that forms of reasoning and judgments are both evaluated independently. However it differs from impersonalism in that it takes evaluation of judgments as the independent part, and evaluation of abstract entities as the dependent part. Alvin Goldman, for example, writes, "although epistemology is interested in inference, it is not (primarily) interested in inferences construed as

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argument forms. Rather, it is interested in inferences as processes of belief formation or belief revision, as sequences of psychological states. . . . It is fully appropriate, then, for epistemology to inquire into cognitive architecture, to assess its strengths and weaknesses. At a minimum this is a job for primary epistemology.” Thus an impersonalist must begin the epistemological enterprise by evaluating subjects.

Personalism is routinely presupposed when the chief epistemological question is framed as: “When is a subject S entitled to believe that P?” Subjects, by contrast with forms of reasoning, are susceptible to prejudices and proclivities - possibly reprehensible ones - which exert influence on judgment. These influences may be referred to politely as “prior opinions”, “preconditions”, “ulterior motives”, “natural limitations” or “cultural legacies.” Likewise judgments can be the outcomes of poor or prejudicial intellectual habits. All forms of influence - precisely because they are forms of influence - may stand in need of one type of regulation or another, particularly if they are to achieve the objectives, actual or prescribed, in pursuit of which they are exerted. According to personalism, regulation of (many of) these heterogenous influences is the chief subject of epistemology.

On the personalist conception, it is appropriate - at least it makes sense - to inquire concerning the fundamental bearers of epistemic evaluation whether they have the capacity, or belong to individuals with the capacity, to act on the recommendations of epistemology. This question is either nonsen- sical or irrelevant on an impersonalist approach, since the fundamental objects of evaluation are not agents of any kind.

To say that personalism and impersonalism are incompatible is not to say they have not been combined. On the contrary, the temptation to treat, now of subjects and their judgments, now of forms of reasoning, as if we can move seamlessly and without obstruction between these two types of evaluation, is almost irresistible. Even so they are incompatible.

Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986) 4-5; emphasis added.

William James catalogues these in a rather fine way. These factors will include “fear and hope, prejudice and passion, imitation and partisanship, the circumpressure of our case and set” and “all those influences, born of the intellectual climate, that makes hypotheses possible or impossible for us, alive or dead (“The Will to Believe”, Library of America Edition, 462).

Bayesian philosophers are good examples of those who succumb to this temptation. The personalism is manifested in presentation of Dutch Book arguments (B. Skyrms, “Dynamic Co- herence and Probability Kinematics,” Philosophy of Science54 (1987), 1-20, and P. Teller, “Con- ditionalization and Observation,” Synthese26 (1973) 218-258 and “Conditionalization, Observa- tion, and Change of Preference,” in W. Harper and C. A. Hooker, eds., Foundations of Probability Theory, Statistical Inference and Statistical Theories of Science, Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1976, are

(Fortsetzung S. 119)


4. A Second Distinction

Before metaphysical questions can be given full consideration, we must bring to attention another distinction, to avoid confounding it with the distinction between personalism and impersonalism. Let ‘internalism’ refer to the view according to which epistemic evaluation of a particular judgment rests entirely on propositions believed by the subject whose judgment it happens to be. This is a strong version of the internalist doctrine, for it requires both that the grounds for justification lie entirely within the body of epistemically relevant materials (judgments plus nonpropositional materials bound to sensory organs) present in a particular judgment maker’s corpus, and also that this individual believe the proposition that the judgment in question rests on the relevant grounds. In this essay I am neither trying to capture a common- sensical view about what it means for a judgment maker to be justified from his own perspective or “by his own lights”, nor even choosing a representative formulation from a class of views that exhibit a family resemblance. I am simply selecting a view that will be recognizable as a - rather strong - specimen of internalism, for contrast’s sake. My purpose in framing the distinction as I have is to argue that this strong internalism cannot be tolerated, and that there are very important consequences of this fact. For the reasons why this internalism cannot be tolerated, will help us to recognize that personalism itself must not be tolerated either. And this will mandate return to the days of pre- naturalized epistemology. Therefore let readers who are suspicious of similar taxonomiess withhold judgment until such time as this one has played the role for which it has been cast.

Internalist evaluation is, by definition, evaluation of judgments or acts of judgment, for it is the view that the features on which epistemological evaluation of a certain judgment depends, must be internal to the mind of the individual to whom it belongs, and hence that this individual may call these features (hence all potentially justifying features) to mind, thereby being in a PO-

(Fortsetzung von S. 118) worthy examples), while impersonalism is manifested in defenses of certain inference of (his- torical) scientists. Earman, Bayes or Bust Cambridge: MIT Press, (1992)), presents a broad

ter in “Knowledge in an Age of Individual Economy: A Prolegomenon to Epistemology,” Journal of Philosophical Research, 24 (1999), 169- 191.

I discuss usage of this term in my “Knowledge in an Age of Individual Economy: A Prolegomenon to Epistemology,” op. cit., fn 7 .

* For example W. Alston, “Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology,” Philosophi- cal Topics XIV( 1986) 179-221, and S. Haack, Evidence and Inquiry (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1993), passim.

Since my internalism is strong, many of those views whose friends and originators would catagorize as internalist, would come out externalist by my definition.

view of Bayesian arguments combining bo L styles of approach. See my discussion of this mat-

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sition to conduct epistemological evaluations from a first-person perspective. (It does not make sense to frame this as a question about inference forms as such, since we can make no sense of the idea that something is either ‘internal’ or ‘external’ to an inference.) Let ‘externalism’ refer to the doctrine that internalism is false. Externalism and internalism are therefore mutually exclusive.

The contrast between internalism and externalism, as here defined, is perhaps best drawn as follows. An individual capable of judgment can, for purposes of epistemology, be modeled by a sequence of epistemic corpora. Each corpus in such a sequence comprises epistemically relevant materials - propositional attitudes plus nonpropositional material bound to sense organs - possessed by the individual in question, at a particular time. The individual‘s epistemic corpus at any one moment in time may differ from the corpus at another moment. Internalism is the view that none whatever of the features or facts which commend a particular judgment epistemologically at a particular time may lie outside these corpora. In particular, no feature of the world or of the individual (whether physical, psychological, semantic, logical or what have you) which is not itselfknown to or otherwise acknowledged by the individual in question, can play a role, however small, in justifymg any of that individual‘s judgments. Externalism, by contrast, is the view that internalist re- strictions on what may play a role in justlfylng judgment are simply too strict. lo

Both internalism and externalism concern evaluation of judgments; neither concerns evaluation of inference forms. Likewise neither doctrine remarks on the nature of the dependence relations between evaluations of forms of reasoning on the one hand, and evaluations of judgment on the other. Hence we cannot say that internalism and externalism are both personalistic doctrines. That issue can be settled only if we could make remarks, on behalf of either internalism or externalism, which would place them on the map as to whether evaluations of judgments are fundamental or derived (dependent or independent). One thing we can say, however, is that impersonalism is, by definition, a species of externalism, since it proclaims that an evalu-

lo A. Goldman, “The Internalist Conception of Justification,” Midwest Studies in Phil- osophy V , P. French, et. al., eds., (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), makes the &tinction between “theoretical” evaluation of a belief and that evaluation appropriate to pra& guidance of action (pp. 28ff.). He does not put this distinction to use for any philosophical purpose. J. Dancy, “Externalism for Internalists,” in Rationality in Epistemology, E. Vil- lanueva, ed., (Atascadero: Ridgeview Publishing, 1992), also shows sensitivity to the distinction, but again does not employ the distinction in an important way. K. Kim, “Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology,” American Philosophical Quarterly 30 (1993), 303-316, has an interesting discussion of the classification of accounts of agent justification under the labels “externdim” and “internalism”; his catalog indicates that these labels are neither transparent nor uniformly applied.


ation of judgment is based on evaluations of inference forms, whether or not the judging subject acknowledges these forms of inference at all, let alone has some opinion as to whether they are commendable, and in what degree. Hence any deficits of externalism, defined as the denial of a very strong internalism, will be deficits of impersonalism as well.

The first important result of this inquiry, then, is that the classes which the terms ‘internalism’ and ‘externalism’ divide between - however strongly we read internalism - are not the classes which ‘personalism’ and ‘impersonalism’ divide between. The latter division is made according to the objects - the fundamental bearers - of epistemic evaluation, whereas the former division is made according to the basis of judgment evaluation. Personalism and internalism do not, therefore, come to the same thing. And the second important result of this inquiry is that impersonalism is a species of externalism, when the contrasting internalism is construed very strongly.

5. Against Personalism

The best way to characterize forms of reasoning (inference patterns) is by list- ing some instances. So here are three: (1) modus ponens: p and ifp then q are both true, hence qis true as well; (2) Bayesian patterns of adjustments to prior probability assignments on the basis of new evidence via conditionalization rules based on Bayes’ Theorem; l1 (3) I wish p, therefore p. Forms of reasoning are repeatable and highly abstract. Their concrete instances are strings of judgment. The instances are brought into being by what I will call processes of judgment formation. These are the mechanical, physiological, psychological or other means of implementing inference patterns. (Examples are mechanical and physiological implementations of theorem-proving procedures, mechanical implementations of Bayesian or other statistical procedures, as well as psychological streams of wishful thinking, modes of brainwashing, habits of adopting beliefs expressed by others, and so on.) Processes are either naturally occurring or human-engineered concrete structures of events, dur- ing which what are produced, are merely instances of inference patterns, and never the patterns themselves.

We may think of judgment strings as having two components or aspects. The first aspect of a string of judgments shall be the (sequenced) set of propositions expressed by the members of the string. This aspect is itself an instance of at least one (and typically a very large number of) forms of reasoning. The second aspect of a string of judgments, by contrast, is the process

l1 For a discussion of these see J. Earman, op. cit.

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which produces it or brings it about. Each of these two aspects answers a different dimension of the question: what makes a judgment string what it is?

The question ‘What makes X what it is?’ leads Aristotle to a four-dimen- sional analysis of cause (with the term ‘cause’ used synonymously with the term ‘explanation’). Aristotelian procedure has been of good service in this inquiry so far, so I will continue borrowing good ideas from Aristotle as proves convenient, as it does here. I shall refer to the processes by which a certain judgment arises or of which it is a product as the efficient causes of that judgment. l2 And I will refer to the proposition expressed by it as its formalcause. l3

Similarly for a string of judgments, the process which brings it about shall be its efficient cause, and the sequence of propositions expressed by the string is its formal cause. And of course the formal causes - the sequenced sets of propositions - have their formal causes: these, at last, are the forms of reasoning. Finally, I will speak of the truth or truths expressed by a judgment or judgment string as its final cause; truths are parts of reality which propositions rep- resent.

This taxonomy can put us in touch with a number of interesting epistemological questions, while at the same time structuring and prompting questions concerning their relations, as follows: how does an answer to one question depend on answers to the others? I will focus on only two such questions in this essay. The first of these I will call the justifcation question; it concerns the formal cause of a judgment or judgment string. The justification question as concerns strings of judgment is the question whether (and how) the final item in a judgment string is justified in relation to the string consisting of its predecessors. The justification question as concerns single judgments is the question whether (and how) a certain judgment Jis justified in relation to a certain subset of the judgment holder’s epistemic corpus. That subset of the corpus will be called the ground of the judgment, just as the string of predecessors to a final judgment in a certain string forms the latter’s ground.

The second question with which I will be concerned is the origination question. It is the question of how an individual’s judgments are systematically correlated with and influenced by properties of the sociophysical system in which the judgment owner is a part and by psychophysiological materials out of which that individual fashions judgment. Errors of judgment are perhaps, but not necessarily, of especial interest. An account of judgment maintenance

l2 Sometimes the efficient cause cannot be separated from the material cause, which concerns itself with the substances out of which judgments are formed. I will not be concerned with distinguishing the two types of cause, and will use the term efficient cause to cover both where necessary.

l3 Cf. Metaphysics V, ch 2.


and propagation is today a species of empirical study - a study of the coming into being and passing away of these natural entities called judgments - conducted by a large number of cognitive science specialists. The origination question clearly concerns the efficient causes of judgment.

Reliabilism, to single out a clear and prominent view, draws attention to the fact that judgments are brought into being by certain processes and main- tained by others, thus to the undeniable fact that judgments stand in important and predictable natural relations to features of the environments in which they spring up. Focusing primarily on the origination dimension of the question ‘What makes a judgment what it is?’ - on the question that concerns the efficient cause - reliabilism shifts the spotlight of attention away from the justification dimension of the ‘What makes a judgment what it is?’ question. The characters of reliabilism’s epistemological theater - which are incidents of judgment formation - come together in a drama that is played out on the stage of an event framework, in which the occurrence of a certain event is the natural antecedent to the occurrence of certain others. Reliabilism subsequently puts forward the very monumental proposal that this drama of predictable (hence reliable) processes can stand behind the epistemological evaluation due to a judgment. Reliabilism, in other words, puts forward the proposition that the origination question cannot be the dependent of the two questions, but must instead be the independent question. l4 And some authors - not all of them reliabilists - go so far as to affirm the proposition (sometimes attributed to Quine and acknowledged by him) that the origination question either displaces or replaces the justification question in epistemo-

The origination question is uncontroversially an empirical one. It requires systematic examination of a number of contingent matters of fact, among them the following: wherefore some types of judgment strings, and not others, come to be and pass away within certain populations of judgment makers

logy.

l4 A. Goldman, prominent architect of contemporary reliabilism, writes, “My account of justified belief will feature some of the same [ reliability-centered ingredients” (Epistemology

meaning of the term ‘justified‘ (in its epistemic use) is fixed by certam things we presume about the world, whether we are right or not. Specifically, beliefs are deemedjustified when (roughly) they are caused by processes that are reliable in the world as it is presumed to be” (ibid., p. 108). And also: “Instead of conceiving of [principles governing justification of judgments] as specifying mere cognitive-state transitions, we must conceive of them as specifying cognitive processes, where by ‘process’ we mean a determinate kind of causal chain. This is the sort of thing that logic, by its nature, cannot provide, but precisely the sort of thing naturally sought from psycho- logy. . . The only moral I wish to draw is the need for a constraint on an acceptable criterion of rightness: no criterion will be plausible unless the rules it authorizes are permission rules for specific (types of) cognitive processes” (ibid, p. 85, emphasis in original).

and Cognition, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986, p. A 4). And: “I suggest that the

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under certain types of conditions?; wherefore some strings of judgment, and not others, are conducive to the survival of the judgment maker?; wherefore some strings of judgment, but not others, are acceptable to an entire community of judgment framers? Reliabilism adheres to the proposition that the answer to the justification question is contingent, depending as it does on the answer to the (contingent) origination question. This is, what I will refer to as j-dependence (or J-independence, or J-Independence, as I do not intend the name to be case-sensitive), according to which the justification question is dependent upon the origination question. Thus it is the proposition that the justification question must be answered by answering first the origination question - that the former has no answer until the latter has an answer. (On some formulations of naturalized epistemology, this is essentially what ‘naturalized epistemology’ comes to. 15) J-dependence is of course opposed to j-independence, according to which the justification question is independent of the origination question. My ultimate aim in this essay is to argue for j-independence, via argument for impersonalism. For without argument for impersonalism, the case for j-independence has all the advantages of theft over honest toil.

First, however, let us formulate personalism and impersonalism using the Aristotelian taxonomy. Impersonalism is the proposition that the primary objects of epistemic evaluation are the formal causes of judgment, while the epistemic evaluation of everything else - including efficient causes - is secondary. Personalism, by contrast, is the proposition that the primary objects of epistemic evaluation are the efficient causes of judgment and/or the judging individuals that suffer them, while the epistemic evaluation of formal causes (which pertain also to reliability) is secondary. The distinction between inter- nerlism and externalism is not characterizable using our improvised Aristote- lian taxonomy - further proof that the difference between externalism and internalism does not come to the same thing as the difference between personalism and impersonalism.

My argument for impersonalism shall be indirect. For it shall be an argument against its competitors. First, I will put forward an argument against internalism - the competing genus of evaluations. Then I will put forward an argument against the personalist species of the externalist genus.

Is AS J. Kim (“What is ‘Naturalized Epistemology’?” Philosophical Perspectives and Epirtemology, J. Tomberlin, ed., Atascadero CA: Ridgeview Publishing, 1988, 381-405) might put it, the answer to the validation question supervenes on the answer to the origination question.

Two Dogmas of Naturalized Epistemology

6. Against Internalism

125

To insist that judgment be evaluated internalistically is to insist that no proposition whatever, or anything else for that matter, which lies outside the epistemic corpus to which the judgment in question belongs, may contribute to making that judgment commendable. Suppose I believe pfor good reasons, ifp then q, also for good reasons, and finally q. But the last, let us say, is a result of wishful thinking on my part; I do not believe q on the basis of any other propositions I believe, save that the state of affairs it represents are pleasant. If I were to come to believe q, on the basis of the other two propositions here named and which I also believe, I might in that instance be justified. But since, by hypothesis, I do not, internalism (as here defined) will insist that my judgment favoring q is unjustified. For according to this internalism, I cannot be commended in my judgment to the effect that q unless my corpus contains a judgment to the effect that q is true on the basis of the other two judgments. For it is not, according to internalism, the combination - as such - of propositions p and ifp then q which renders a judgment that q is true justified, but rather the combination plus something else - a belief to the effect that a certain argument form, instanced in the present case, is worthy of being relied upon. And it is precisely this attention to this certain argument form which, by hypothesis, my case is lacking. My failure to call internal attention to the fact that a certain string of judgments of mine is an instance of a reliable form of reasoning, is (according to strong internalism) grounds for the unjustifiability of the last in the judgment string, because it is evidence for the unreliability of the process by which I come to adhere to the proposition at which it is directed. This is almost (but not quite) paradoxical. And it is most definitely incorrect.

When it comes to deductive forms of reasoning, there are, to be sure, competing ideas - both attractive in their own ways. Given any two propositions, where one is a logical consequence of the other, we may be inclined to view that a subject who believes both can be justified in believing the one solely in virtue of believing the other, without holding a correct opinion on the logical relation between the two. Or we may insist that a subject who believes both will be justified in the one only via holding to it for the reason that it follows from the other (if said subject has no other grounds). But even this stronger re- quirement may not be strong enough for the tastes of some. Consider a subject who knows that either p or not-p follows from q, but is not in possession of a deduction for either p or not-p with q as premise. (This situation is common- place in mathematics, for example.) Suppose the subject goes ahead and believes p, citing q as reason for doing so. And suppose that just as a matter of

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fact p does follow logically from q. Is this subject justified in believing p? Does the subject have knowledge? The usual answer is No.

According to the impersonalist view described in the preceding section, a subject will be commended in a string of judgments to the extent that that string conforms to a reliable form of reasoning, even if the subject (like most judgment makers) has no opinions remotely concerned with the reliability of forms of reasoning. Impersonalism is therefore even more softhearted than the position according to which the subject we have been considering, who believes both pand q but has no grounds for a justified belief in their precise logical relation, can be justified in believing the one solely in virtue of believing the other. For the impersonalism of the previous section is so softhearted it commends this subject’s judgment, even if this individual offers the following reason for q (the consequence): that it would be nice if q were true. Someone is sure to complain that this is a deplorable conclusion for an epistemologist to stand seriously and with full knowledge behind. Those who travel epistemological byways through exchanging carefully crafted cases will undoubtedly feel the urge to stop reading at this point. I entreat them to bear with me a bit longer while I plead the preferability of this conclusion to its contraries. I will urge that we be charitable to subjects, however harsh we must be with forms of reasoning. This charity will, in the final reckoning, save us from the far more serious perils of internalism. Here is why.

7. Epistemic Merits vs Market Value

Return to the case in which I believe p, ifp then q and finally q, but the last out of wishful thinking. If I grasp modus ponens, I will myself be in a position to evalute the commendability of believing q in relation to the other two propositions I believe. This capability, if I exercise it, gives me - as an individual - something of the makings of an intellectual. But is the exercise of such a capability required for justification? The strong internalist answers yes, for according to strong internalism, self-evaluation is the objective of epistemological inquiry. However the possession of a capability does not, for obvious reasons, entail its exercise. Of course somethingwill be amiss if I do not put a capability in my possession to use where doing so would be approved, or at least per- mitted, by logic - provided of course that exercise of the capability does not itself bear an inordinate cost. But is failure on my part to exercise this particular capability an epistemic failing? Some might respond yes, since I will miss out on believing truths, and receiving (practical) benefits conferred thereby. These respondents presuppose that epistemological imperatives are a species


of practical imperative. However even if this presupposition is correct, l6 con- siderations of true belief and benefits conferred thereby are irrelevant in the case now under consideration, since I do not miss out on any such benefits. I do, after all, believe q. So those who embrace internalism as here defined, insisting that my judgment in favor of q is unjustified, must be committed to the existence of epistemological imperatives that are not at the same time practical imperatives. (I confess that I myself am sympathetic with this opinion, so do not urge we abandon strong internalism solely for the reason that it does not conceive of epistemological imperatives as a species of practical imperative. My complaint of internalism will instead be that it misapprehends the objective and nature of epistemological evaluation.)

Internalism takes self-evaluation to be the hallmark of epistemology, so is committed to the proposition that the epistemic evaluation due to a judgment is dependent on the judgment owner’s having evaluated the judgment in question on epistemic grounds, and that the self-evaluator is commendable precisely to the extent of having conducted that evaluation correctly. Internalism, then, supposes that exercise of a capability for evaluating a judgment, as to epistemic merits, by the individual contemplating it (in the period prior to its adoption or thereabouts), contributes ontologically to the magnitude of epistemic commendation due to that judgment. Is this simply an expression of the slogan that an unexamined judgment is not worth having, which is to many as obviously true as it is to others obviously false? No.

Consider the following schema:

(Schema V) A judgment maker’s capacity for evaluating a given judgment J as to <...> merits, itself contributes to the <...> merits of J.

Schema V expresses an ontological dependence relation between the merits of a judgment along some dimension of evaluation, and a judgment maker’s capability to evaluate that merit. (The internalist who presupposes that a justified judgment is one whose framer makes a correct evaluation of this judgment as to epistemic merit, presupposes something stronger than Schema V. But Schema V is already strong enough to cause trouble, so I will attend no further to the stronger presupposition.) Strong internalism has as one of its consequences the proposition that results when the ‘< ...>’ of Schema V is replaced with ‘epistemic’. This proposition, as I will argue, is false. Hence strong internalism must be rejected.

l6 I believe it is not, and have argued for this in “Knowledge in an Age of Individual Economy,” op. cit.

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A judgment maker’s capability for evaluating the magnitude of a particular attribute or merit cannot simply be supposed to make an ontological contribution to the magnitude itself of that attribute or merit. For it is not in general true that a judgment maker’s capability for assessing the magnitude of some attribute of a judgment contributes ontologically to that attribute. We have a clear counterexample in the case when the attribute in question is truth: a judgment maker’s capacity to assess a given judgment (for example, that snow is white) as to truth makes no contribution, in general, to the truth of that judgment. Thus any proposal conforming to Schema V deserves very close scrutiny.

A tolerably clear example of an attribute which is such that its magnitude depends - at least partly - on estimations of its magnitude by members of a relevant community, is the desirubizity of a commodity. One species or measure of desirability is fair market value (in a market economy). The fair market value of a certain commodity is the price potential buyers would be willing to pay for it under the prevailing conditions of supply and demand. Fair market value is defined by the most theoretical and highly regulated of appraisal fields - the field of real estate appraisal - as follows:

The most probable price, as of a specified date, in cash, or in terms equivalent to cash, or in other precisely revealed terms[,] for which the specified property rights should sell after reasonable exposure in a competitive market under all conditions requisite to a fair sale, with the buyer and seller each acting prudently, knowledgeably, and for self-interest, and assuming that neither is under undue duress.

Thus market value is at least in part a direct result of estimations of value or utility by potential buyers and sellers. (In a market economy, determinations of market value of a particular commodity are typically made by comparisons of what buyers have in fact paid for the commodity under similar circumstances.)

Is epistemic commendability like desirability or fair market value? Or is it more like truth? This is a difficult and potentially controversial question. One

l7 American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, The Appraisal of Real Estate, 9th ed. (Chicago: American Institute of Real Estate Appraisers, 1987), 19. Many of the legal defini- tions of market value are based on the following: “The highest price estimated in terms of money that the land would bring if exposed for sale in the open market, with reasonable time allowed in which to find a purchaser, buying with knowledge of all the uses and purposes to which it was adapted and for which it was capable of being used” [ Sacuramento Southern R. R. v Heilbron 156 Cal. 408, .lo4 P. 979 (1909)].


thing we can say without controversy: fair market value depends on there being at least two, and possibly even a community, of market evaluators - it depends, in other words, on there being a market of exchange for the commodity in question. Does epistemic commendability similarly depend on there being a relevant “market” for epistemic goods - namely, judgments?

A market value is an exchange value. It is an estimation of the magnitude of something in terms of something else. That something else (the currency) is presumably, but not necessarily, something which is itself a certain type of standard which helps us measure the value of many things against each other. And this something else might itself be possessed of an exchange rate in terms of other currencies. The exchange value of an article or good involves comparisons between types and instances of available goods under specific conditions of supply and demand, in a market situation in which many goods can be exchanged. We say of an article to which an exchange value can be assigned that it is fungible.

Is epistemic commendability like fungibility? No. The reason is that epistemic commendability is not an exchange value. Epistemic value is not con- vertible into a currency by which one can acquire something else. It does not, in other words, involve comparisons between types and instances of available goods in any type of market. To see this, we need only notice that it makes sense to inquire concerning a Zone judgment maker, and even one victimized by an evil demon, whether that individual is justified in making certain judgments. The fact that such an evaluation can be made shows that epistemic evaluation is not comparative in the sense required of market evaluations. What does this show? Precisely that epistemic evaluation cannot be dependent on any judgment maker’s capacity to give estimations of epistemic merit - and thus that a certain instance of Schema V is false.

It may help here to look at the other side, and ask why capability to judge value might have bearing on value. It might have bearing where the value in question has no exchanger-indifferent reference point, and hence requires the existence of exchangers. An article possesses a certain exchange value because certain individuals can use it - given the existence of a market for that item - to exchange for goods that are actually desired by these other individuals. But if nothing is actually desired because no evaluations are or can be made, then no good is possessed of exchange value.

We might put this point a bit differently, saying that there is a difference between the activity of justifymg one’s judgment to others and the state of being justified in one’s judgment. No others enter into the latter, because it is abso- lute and not comparative. And it is this latter state which epistemology con-

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cerns itself with. Thus, much to no one’s surprise, epistemic value is much more like truth than it is like money.

Epistemic evaluation is nothing like market evaluation in the respects we have examined, for it does not depend on there being a community of judgment makers who evaluate judgments in one way or another. And where judgment framers do exist, they may in fact care nothing for justification or truth - or anything at all, for that matter - and still their judgments will be possessed of epistemic merit. So if certain judgment framers do place a premium on the advantages which certain judgments may confer, this placement of premium cannot be relevant to the marks which the judgments deserve from an epistemological theory. So none of the judgment framer’s evaluations - and, a fortiori none of the judgment framer’s capabilities for evaluation - have anything to do with the epistemic commendability of the judgments in question. Since this conclusion is incompatible with (strong) internalism, (strong) internalism is false.

8. The Case Against Personalism

Having presented a case against internalism, I now offer an argument against personalistic externalism. Thus impersonalism alone will remain standing. My argument shall be that personalism makes impossible the important

epistemological project of evaluating inference patterns in a systematic and coherent fashion. But the evaluation of inference patterns is an enterprise that epistemologists may neither abandon nor put at risk, even if they are not concerned with epistemology of science. Hence, since personalism has this deplorable, catastrophic consequence which will be felt most strongly by the scientific enterprise, impersonalism must be preferred. Here is the argument.

Suppose we embrace personalism, and affirm that the primary object of epistemic evaluation is either a judgment or a judgment framer, in other words one of the efficient causes of judgment. As personalists, we also affirm the proposition that forms of reasoning receive epistemic evaluation, but do so derivatively only, on the basis of the evaluations conferred upon the primary objects of evaluation. How shall we, subsequently, go about assigning merit to inference patterns - modzaponens, say, of which the concreta we have evaluated may be instances - on the basis of evaluations made to judgments?

A certain S believes a certain proposition p, that ifp then q, and (finally) q. This may happen in any number of way, for any number of familiar psychological processes (efficient causes) by which humans arrive at judgments may give rise to instances of three propositions which conform to the modus po-


nens pattern. S may employ any one of these to arrive at q. She could, for instance, do either of the following: (1) implement a mechanical proof algo- rithm that conforms to modusponens, or (2) ignore that she believes pand ifp then q, imagine q, find it pleasing and opt to believe it. In either case her judgment sequence is an instance of modusponens. If she were to implement process (1) her judgment - and secondarily modus ponens - would receive one (presumably high) epistemic rating; if the latter, her judgment - and subsequently modus ponens - would receive another (presumably inferior and therefore incompatible) rating. Thus the rating system for patterns, based on evaluations of individual judgments, cannot help but be a collection of con- tradictions.

Only a consistent rating for inference patterns is acceptable. It follows that judgments must be rated as to epistemic merit independently of how judgments are evaluated. Evaluation of forms of reasoning must precede, rather than follow, evaluations of other objects of epistemic appraisal. This is impersonalism.

To see more clearly the rationale behind this argument, perhaps it helps to look at the analogous situation in deductive logic. Consider a sequence of three proposition, the first two being premises, the last a conclusion: Socrates is a man; if Socrates is a man then he is mortal; and Socrates is mortal. This is an instance of a valid form of argument, namely modus ponens: p, ifp then q, therefore q. It is also an instance of forms of argument that are not valid (hence logicians have not seen fit to call attention to them by name), for example: p, q, therefore r - which we might as well call r-introduction. The fact that our original sequence of propositions is an instance of r-introduction has no bearing whatever on its validity. But the fact that it is an instance of (valid) modus ponens has everything to do with its validity. What’s more important, the proposition sequence involving Socrates is valid because modus ponens is, while the reverse is false.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the validity of modus ponens and r-introduction were dependent on the validity of their instances, but that the validity of instances were non-mediately evaluatable; this is the logician’s version of personalism. Now the Socrates argument is an instance of both forms. And let us suppose it receives high marks for validity. Consider the marks r-introduction will receive. It receives high marks from the Socrates argument. But it will receive inferior marks from the following argument, among many others: roses are red, violets are blue, therefore Socrates is mortal. So the marks received by r-introduction are inconsistent. How can we derive a consistent rating for argument forms from a set of ratings as inconsistent as this?

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One possible reply is that forms of reasoning can be evaluated indirectly as follows. We can see that invalid forms of reasoning will receive inconsistent marks. So we will simply eliminate all forms of reasoning with inconsistent marks as invalid, and declare the rest valid. This reply, however, underesti- mates the difficulties of epistemological ratings of nondeductive inference patterns - which are really the most important for these purposes since we are concerned with empirical, contingent knowlege. Not every instance of a “good inductive inference will be a successful one - its conclusion may be false even when its premises are true. So not every instance of a reliable inductive inference pattern will receive positive marks. The evaluation of nondeductive forms of reasoning therefore requires looking at how successfuly are their instances in groups. (This is a point which I will defend at greater length in the next section.) But this looking at how successful are groups of instances, is inconsistent with evaluating instances independently of patterns.

The point, put simply, is that evaluation of a form of reasoning cannot be dependent on evaluation of its instances because the instances are always instances of more than one form. And the instance must receive the evaluation due to the most reliable form of which it is an instance - not an evaluation of some average of all the evaluations. This requires that evaluations of forms of reasoning precede evaluations of instances. This is no more true of evaluation as to logical validity than it is of epistemic appraisal. l8

9. Impersonalism Defended

Some personalists - namely reliabilists - have bothered to offer arguments against the position I have been calling impersonalism. These arguments come in two types. The first - most frequently pressed by Goldman - employs the method of counterexamples. l9 Cases are put forward in which in-

l8 In an effort to discredit traditional epistemology, which (according to him) is in part the view that a person has a justified judgment in a particular proposition “just in case that proposition appears on the list of propositions that person believes, and either it requires no argument, or a good argument can be given for it which takes as premises certain other propositions on the list”, H. Kornblith (“Beyond Foundationalism and the CoherenceTheory,” in Kornblith, ed., Naturalizing Epistemology, Cambridge: MlT Press, 1985; 115-127) considers a case just like the wishful thinking case I use in the text. KornMith, however, will insist that the subject in my case is unjustified in believing q, precisely because that individual fails to believe it on the basis of mbdusponens. For, an individual is justified in believing that q, according to Kornblith, only if the judgment in q depends in a cuusulway on the that individual‘s judgments of p and ifp then q. But this insistence is puzzling. For what does having a belief q which is causally dependent on certain other beliefs, have to do with holding a belief q on the busis ofthose other beliefs?

l9 Op. cit., passim, but especially 83fE.


dividuals form sequences of (true) beliefs through serendipitous but poor reasoning processes, such that these sequences conform to some deductively valid form of reasoning. Since these cases are, by their presenter’s hypothesis, cases in which the individual featured in them is not justified, the displace- ment or replacement thesis is urged, and with it personalism. I have argued we should not be so hasty in accepting the hypothesis that the individuals featured in cases such as these are unjustified in their judgments, and given reasons.

The second type of argument is stressed by Gilbert Harman. *O It is that reliable forms of reasoning cannot establish justification. For it is known that drawing conclusions by valid forms of inference will promote true belief only if prior-held beliefs are true. But forms of reasoning do nothing to help with judging the truth of prior-held beliefs, as an epistemological process must. So an individual who believes p, upon learning that pentails q, may be morejusti- fied in rejecting p than adopting q. Modus ponens, by itself, simply licenses adoption of q wherever p is presupposed.

This is a more serious challenge. Answering it requires drawing attention to the fact that not all forms of reasoning are deductive schemas of inference - therefore drawing attention to the richness and variety of the forms of epistemological life. Forms of reasoning also encompass scientific processes of hypothesis evaluation. These are very complex algorithms for evaluating of hypotheses as to truth and plausibility. The claim that inference patterns can offer no assistance with judging truth of propositions is therefore incorrect. For inference is no more identical with deductive logic than justified belief is identical with true belief.

10. The Case for J-independence

J-independence - the thesis that the justification question is independent of the origination question in the sense that former can be answered without the latter also being answered - is neither identical nor equivalent to impersonalism. But as I will argue now, it is a consequence of impersonalism.

Suppose a certain S adds judgment J to corpus C, which does not already logically imply J. Epistemic evaluation of Jmight reasonably be expected to have something to do with logical and ontological relations between the proposition expressed by Jand those expressed by judgments assembled in C, as well as to relations among all these propositions and the truth about the actual

*O Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 157.

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world. And since the latter relations are contingent - since, that is to say, many of the truths about the world are contingent - the epistemic evaluation of Jmight be thought to involve scientific inquiry, and in particular inquiry concerning how judgments actually arise, whether impersonalism is true or not. In other words, the fact that forms of inference are the primary objects of epistemic evaluation does not all by itself settle the question whether this evaluation of inference forms should not call on the results of scientific inquiry concerning how judgments are actually formed. So the fact that impersonalism has defeated its competitors does not automatically settle the question of j -independence.

An answer to the origination question will conform to the following schema:

(Schema G) Subjects S, in all their efforts - personal and professional - to comprehend the rapid continuous flow of events, are as much influenced by < .. . > as by attentions to “good” forms of reasoning. Conse- quently <...> exerts as much pressure on personal judgment as on professional judgment made in the service of scientific inquiry. As a result c..) infects the judgments of practically the entire community.

In this schema ‘L.. >’ is a placeholder for names of processes controlling the transmission and evolution of intrasubjective judgment; I am imagining it will bring to attention certain highly influential (possibly even ineluctable) social, psychological or other forces that impact judgment formation, which are counteracted only by conscious and concerted effort. 21 A proposal conforming to Schema G will furnish an account also of intersubjective mechanisms responsible for shared true beliefs as well as those that result in systematic error since (if true) the correct instance of the schema explains the propagation of true and false opinion alike. 22

21 Psychological research of the last several decades has led to the claim that procedures commonly used in arriving at probability judgments are counternormative - even “irrational”. See A. Tversky and D. Kahneman, “Extensional versus Intuitive Reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment,” Psychological Review, 90 (1983): 293-315, and a number of the essays, particularly “Subjective Probability: A Judgment of Representativeness,” in D. Kahneman, P. Slovic, and A. Tversky, eds., Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). Also R. Nisbett and L. Ross, Human Zn- 5 erence: Strategies and Shortcomings of Social Judgment (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Pren-

tice-Hall, 1980). However Nisbett and Ross, “Judgmental Heuristics and Knowledge Struc- tures,” in H. Kornblith, ed., Naturalizing Epistemology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985) 189- 216, lists heuristics or inference strategies that can be successful under certain (rather predomi- nant) conditions. But cf. L. Cosmides and J. Tooby, “Are Humans Good Intuitive Statisticians after all?” Cognition 58 (1996 , 1-73.

strong program in philosophy of science. The social causes of truthful beliefs are as much subject to investigation as those that issue in error-ridden beliefs.

22 Schema G thus satis 2 es some reasonable requirements laid out by promoters of the

’ h o Dogmas of Naturalized Epistemology 135

Since impersonalism is true, the justification question is concerned with formulation of the “good” (“scientific”) reasoning appropriate to community assessment of propositions as to truth. Where contingent matters are concerned, the rules of good reasoning concern how to pass from the observed to the unobserved. This, of course, is Hume’s problem of induction. As stan- dardly illustrated in philosophy of science literature, this is the problem of fit- ting a continuous curve to a finite number of data points. Now one reason that may be put forward for j-dependence is that, in advance of knowledge of how judgment is actually formed, it cannot be known how wide is the gap between an observation and its logical consequences on the one hand, and that body of propositions consisting of those which not follow deductively on the other. In other words, the “empirical distance” between observed and unobserved is a contingent matter, since it is just possible, logically speaking, that there is in practice no such thing as the unobservable. So an answer to the justification question will call on scientific investigation of this matter. For example, the breadth of the gap between the hypothesis ‘All ravens are black’ and observation that ravens A, B and C are black, cannot be determined before we recognize that the enumerated ravens do not exhaust the class (raven) about which the hypothesis projects; further, that enumeration fails to exhaust the relevant class in a particular way, namely by falling considerably short of the denumer- able infinity of ravens that might - for all we know - be the actual referent of the hypothesis. Which further empirical matters are relevant to the justification question? This is a comprehensive debate.23 However since the j-dependence issue is concerned only with dependence relations between the justification question and the origination question, I will concern myself here only with whether an answer to the justification question should be affected by correct instances of Schema G. I will argue that every candidate answer one might care to advance on the justification question is compatible with every instance of Schema G. This is j-independence.

My argument is quite simple. First I assert that epistemic evaluation, as argued above, belongs in the first instance to inference patterns (forms of reasoning). Thus the primary objects of epistemic evaluation are items in relation to which origination questions do not even arise. It does not make sense to ask: how does a form of reasoning come into being? For forms of reasoning are not concrete entities. But if origination questions do not arise in proper evaluations of the primary objects of epistemic appraisal, they cannot arise in

23 There are, for example, concerns about whether we must know something about the error mechanisms at play in data-gathering. The independence for which I argue leaves issues of error completely untouched.

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evaluations of secondary objects of appraisal either, else evaluation of these secondary objects of appraisal will not be a secondary exercise after all. For if evaluation of the so-called secondary objects were to call on grounds which are irrelevant in evaluation of the so-called primary objects, the evaluation of so-called secondary objects would not be derivative, which it must be if the evaluations are to be dependent in the sense we care about here. Thus every hypothesis conforming to Schema G is consistent with the correct answer to the justification question. The formal cause question is independent of the efficient cause question. 24

J-independence is by no means a novel view. Where it is put forward, however, this is usually without argument, and the burden of proof is made to rest on the shoulders of its opponents. I have undertaken to shoulder the burden, on behalf of the adherents of j-independence. I hope successfully. 25

Appendix

In the large body of literature on the subject, there are two standard criticisms of reliabilism, which purport to be criticisms of the genus externalism, as well as of the species reliabilism. 26 In the main body of this essay I argued that impersonalism is a species of externalism. Here I will argue that impersonalism is nevertheless invulnerable to the two standard criticism. Thus critics of reliabilism are in error to suppose all externalist theories are subject to these two criticisms.

The first problem is known as the new evil demon problem. It is not exactly the problem envisioned by Descartes, but a relative. I am invited to consider the possibility that a molecule-for-molecule duplicate of myself in another possible world is given sensory inputs just like mine by an evil demon; I am further invited to imagine that my doppleganger also duplicates my reasoning patterns, so that the development of her thought parallels mine insofar as

24 I shall not say that the argument here presented constitutes a refutation of naturalized epistemology, for there are many and bewildering species of this class of theory. But some specie-s of naturalized epistemology will certainly be vulnerable to my argument.

25 The best place to look for a defense of j-dependence is Michael Friedman’s essay ”Truth and Confirmation” Journal ofphilosophy 71 (1979 ,5-19. In my essay “The Common Need for Classical Epistemological Foundations,” Monist 3 7 (1994) 531-553, I argue that his argument does not support j-dependence.

26 These are documented in Sosa, “The Coherence of virtue and the virtue of coherence”, Knowledge in Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). The first is first presented by Keith Lehrer and Stewart Cohen “Justification, Truth and Coherence,” Synthese 55 1983), 191-207, and the second is developed by Laurence Bonjour, “Externalist

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980) 53-74. Theories of B mpirical Knowledge,” Midwest Studies in Phifosophy P. French, et. af., eds.


these can be evaluated from the standpoint of what is present to the mind. Thus my doppleganger is living the exact same life, experience for experience. The difference, of course, is that her beliefs are false for the most part, while mine are for the most part true. And all careful efforts on her part - efforts Descartes himself might have envied - have done nothing but sink her more and more deeply into systematic error. But is she any more blameworthy, from the point of view of epistemology, than I am? Surely not, for surely the two of us are to be commended in the same degree.

The second problem is, in a sense, the converse of the first. Sosa has given it the (rather clumsy) title of the metuincoherenceproblem. This problem postulates a situation in which a belief is generated by a physiological capacity that does not lead to erroneous judgment, but which is such that when evaluated from the point of view of the subject is not reliable. (The evil demon problem, by contrast, postulates a situation in which the subject is, by her own lights, blameless but nevertheless following procedures that produce nothing but systematic error.) The metaincoherence problem supposes that a judgment (for instance that the President is in New York) may be derived from a reliable process (perhaps clairvoyance) but nevertheless be appraised by the subject as lacking in merit, by reason of evidence also available to the subject.

My doppleganger, it is felt, is to be commended in her efforts no less than I am, but the clairvoyant of the metaincoherence case is not to be commended for the belief that the President is in New York. And these appraisals, especially when taken together, are thought to bode very badly for any externalist theory, since if these appraisals are correct, then epistemic evaluation must be made from the point of view of the subject (hence, ‘internalistally’). I shall argue that these appraisals are correct, but that they do not bode at all badly for impersonalism, which is a species of externalism. In fact, impersonalism will explain the correctness of these appraisals, and so has nothing for which to apologize.

My doppleganger is systematically in error. I am not. On the impersonalist conception, I am commended in my epistemic achievements to the extent that my strings of judgment conform to reliable forms of reasoning. But my doppleganger’s string of judgments are just like my own; she is also to be commended on exactly the same grounds, and hence attains exactly the same epistemic achievements as myself.

For the second case, suppose that a certain S possesses the capability of clairvoyance - whatever that might come to. Suppose also that a judgment to the effect that the President is in New York City is given rise to in S’s corpus through that capability. Suppose, finally, that S is also in possession of evidence strongly suggesting that no such capability exists. Are we to award com-

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mendation to her judgment in the President’s whereabouts, simply because (as we are supposing) judgments generated in a similar manner are not likely to lead to error? No. But how can an impersonalist explain this fact as well as my doppleganger’s commendability?

S comes to believe that the President is in New York City. Impersonalism inquires: Does S hold certain propositions which, when put together with the proposition concerning the President’s current whereabouts, conform to a reliable reliable form of inference? The answer, by hypothesis, is no. (Whereas the answer in my doppleganger’s case is yes.) Thereupon impersonalism rec- ommends withholding commendation, or awarding discommendation instead to s, since her evidence does not support a presidential presence in New York. (While it might very well be to S’s survival advantage to believe the truth that the President is in New York City - if, in fact, he is - and while promoting this advantage might very well be S’s goal, it is nonetheless a mistake to suppose that S believes as she does on grounds that an epistemological theory is committed to promoting.)

In conclusion, impersonalism is well able to explain the correctness of appraisals in the cases brought forward as problematic for eirternalist theories. It does so by means of the following: it is not the case that we evaluate agents in- ternally (as has been the suggested conclusion drawn from these two cases); rather, we evaluate judgments in a derivative fashion.

Dialectica Vol. 53, No 2 (1999)

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Two Dogmas of Naturalized Epistemology