I hope I will be forgiven for abusing the term “skepticism” here — for what I have in mind is not a perfectly innocuous “claims require evidence” epistemic prudence, but rather Cartesian skepticism.
According to the Cartesian skeptic, one can be perfectly certain about one’s own mental contents and yet also be in total doubt about what really corresponds to those mental contents. Hence she needs an argument that will justify her belief that there is any external reality at all, and that at least some of her mental contents can correspond to it.
There are many responses to Cartesian skepticism, and here I want to pick up on one strand in the pragmatist tradition that, on my view, cuts deepest into what is wrong with Cartesian skepticism.
I think that one cannot talk, in any intelligible sense, about justification in the first place without also committing oneself to a belief in other minds with whom one shares a world. (Not that I like that way of putting it — “a belief in other minds” is a much too intellectualistic interpretation of the myriad ways in which we experience the sentience of nonhuman animals and the sentience-and-sapience of other human animals.)
I say this because justification is itself a social practice — and one that we ourselves are taught how to participate in. (In the contemporary jargon, I’m a social externalist about justification.) For what is justification? It is a normative assessment of the evidence and reasons for one’s claims. But that normative assessment necessarily involves other rational beings like ourselves.
Think of it this way (taking an example from Wittgenstein): suppose I’m waiting for a train, and I want to know if it will be on time. I could look up the schedule. But suppose further that instead of doing so, I imagine the schedule: I look up the time in my imagination. Why isn’t that the same thing as looking up the actual schedule?
The answer is that there’s no constraint on how I imagine the schedule. It could be whatever I want — or subconsciously desire — it to be. But without constraints, there are no norms or rules at all.
Justification is much the same: it is a normative assessment of evidence and reasoning according to rules or norms, and there are no private norms. (Though Wittgenstein doesn’t put it this way, he might say that the very idea of a “private norm” is a category mistake — a category mistake on which Cartesian skepticism and several hundred years of subsequent philosophy have depended.)
So whereas the Cartesian skeptic thinks that we need to justify our belief in the world and in other minds, I think that this makes no sense at all. We cannot justify our belief in other minds and in the world because there is no such thing as justification at all in the first place without also accepting (what is indeed a manifest reality to everyone who is not a schizophrenic or on a bad acid trip) that there are other sentient-and-sapient beings other than oneself with whom one shares a world.
.A further point to make (and the subject of my current article-in-progress) is that justification and truth require both sentience and sapience.
The clue I’m following is Davidson’s triangulation argument: suppose there are two creatures who are each responding sensorily to some object in a shared environment. How is an onlooker supposed to know which object they are both responding to? If both creatures can compare its own responses with the responses of the other creature, then each can determine whether or not they are cognizing the same object.
The point here is that two (or more) sentient creatures — intentional beings that can successfully navigate their environments — can each have a grasp of objectivity if and only if each creature can
(1) represent the similarities and differences between its own embodied perspective and an embodied perspective occupied by another creature and
(2) be motivated to minimize discrepancies and eliminate incompatibilities between its own action-guiding representations and its action-guiding representations of the other creature’s action-guiding representations, and in the process
(3) attain the metacognitive awareness whereby it can take its own embodied perspective as an embodied perspective, and thereby be aware that how it subjectively takes things to be is not (necessarily) how things really are.
This process is facilitated by a shared language that allows each creature to monitor how each is representing the other’s representations and revise its own representations when incompatibility between representations is discovered. The function of norms — of discourse and of conduct — is to motivate each creature to revise its representations when incompatibilities are discovered.
One important implication of this argument is that sentient creatures cannot distinguish between their own subjective orientation on things and how things really are. They lack an awareness of objectivity and an awareness of their own subjectivity. By contrast, sapient creatures are aware of both objectivity — how things really are, as distinct from how they are taken to be — and subjectivity — how things are taken to be, as distinct from how they really are.
This line of thought also explains why I have been adamant that objectivity does not require absoluteness: sapient creatures can be aware of the difference between how things are and how they are taken to be, and thus be aware that they might have false beliefs, even though no sapient creature can transcend the biological constraints of its form of sentience.
Would you say that your view requires that there exist at least two persons in order for knowledge to be justified?
IOW would a “Unitarian” deity like is found in Islam be justified in believing anything at all before he creates another “person” like himself?
peace
KN said
sapient creatures can be aware of the difference between how things are and how they are taken to be, and thus be aware that they might have false beliefs, even though no sapient creature can transcend the biological constraints of its form of sentience.
I say,
Can a sapient creature be aware of whether their beliefs are objectively rather than subjectively true or vice versa ?
peace
I’d say that there would need to be at least two sapient-and-sentient beings in order for it to be possible that either of them has justified true beliefs. Sentient animals do, of course, know things — but it’s not “JTB knowledge”, but something more primitive and harder to analyze.
I have no idea what to say about Islam. I know nothing of Islamic theology.
Yes — but only by comparing its beliefs with those of another sapient creature.
In the background here is the thought, based on our best contemporary cognitive science and some evolutionary theory, that sentient animals tend to have mostly accurate, affordance-detecting, action-guiding representations of those features of their environments that matter to the survival of the kind of animal it is.
The Cartesian skeptic’s worry that our conceptual and perceptual abilities might not be reliable finds no place here, and so neither do presuppositionalist responses to that skeptical worry.
Do know of any other belief system besides Christianity that would meet this criteria for knowledge necessarily and eternally from the beginning?
What about rabbinic Judaism?
How would the first creature know that both creatures weren’t in error in a similar fashion?
Are you assuming that at least one person (or a system/combination of persons) has beliefs that are objective?
peace
It seems that these sorts of representations would be subjective by definition in that they would conform to the perspective of “the kind of animal it is”
what am I missing?
peace
FMM, I will say this only once. I’m not interested in playing the “but how do you know?” game that you demand to play in every single thread that you hijack here.
What I’m interested in doing here has nothing to do with what anything that interests you. There is no basis for a mutually productive conversation between us.
Henceforth I’m putting you on ignore. Make of that what you will; I genuinely do not care.
I’m not playing any game at all. I am very interested in this OP. I find your take in this to be remarkably similar to my own. I would like to flesh out the differences and similarities in our positions.
I did not ask “how do you know?” and I promise not to do so to you in this thread. If that is your desire
I asked what I think are very pertinent clarifying questions about this fascinating topic.
I do hope you reconsider
peace
PS
I would hope that someone here would re-post my comments so that KN could see what my intentions are. Feel free to insert any dismissive mockery that you feel is appropriate 😉
Suppose you’re the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust. Can’t know anything anymore?
I would say that is correct
If you mean that you are the only person in the universe.
I think that “anymore” is bit ambiguous in that in that case I don’t think you ever knew anything
peace
Of course — because one’s own synaptic connections have already been shaped by the initiation into a shared language.
But if a human infant were the sole survivor of a nuclear holocaust, and if its material needs were somehow cared for while it learned how to navigate its environment in order to satisfy its own needs, the adult human being it would grow into would not have “JTB-style knowledge”. It would have a sophisticated body of know-how much the same as other sentient animals have.
There is a sense of “knowledge” in which my cats know things. But they cannot justify their beliefs, and I am not even sure if they have beliefs. They might have something more like what Gendler calls “aliefs“, which have no truth-value.
This seems to have it backwards.
You appear to be saying that one’s beliefs cannot be justified unless there are other people. But isn’t it really that it’s only when there are other people, that there might be a need to justify one’s beliefs.
fifthmonarchyman,
Ok, I’ll respond. But I reserve the right to put you on ignore if I feel that we’re arguing in a circle and not resolving anything.
I’m not really interested in whether this criteria can be met “necessarily and eternally from the beginning”. I’m interested in how it came about through naturalistic processes in one tiny twig of the evolutionary bush.
Also not my forte, alas.
Though both may have shared beliefs that are false, it won’t be the case that all of their beliefs, shared and individual, are all false.
This is because any sentient animal will tend to have mostly accurate, affordance-detecting, action-guiding representations of the features of its environment that comprise the niche occupied by animals of that kind. That’s not just true for humans; it’s true for owls, octopi, spiders, and leaches. There’s a claim here about how brains generally work. This gives me very primitive kind of “correspondence” baked into the cake by way of what cognitive science tells us sentient animals are generally like.
What “sapience” — esp. shared language – adds to this is the ability to filter out irrelevant perspectival discrepancies and to work towards mitigating relevant perspectival incompatibilities. So while there will be some cognitive errors and false beliefs, they cannot predominate.
I’m assuming as little as possible. I think that sapient animals will mostly have true and justified beliefs about the perceptible objects in their environment. Hunter-gatherers have genuine knowledge — true, justified beliefs — about where ripe tubers are to be found, how to recognize the trail of a deer, the difference between poisonous and safe berries, and so on. That’s objective knowledge — it’s true, justified beliefs about objects. They would lack objective knowledge about how to drive a car or about the size and history of the universe, but they do in fact have objective knowledge in a way that a chimpanzee simply does not — because although the chimpanzee can skilfully navigate her environment, she cannot compare what she takes to be true with what other chimpanzees take to be true. Each chimpanzee — in fact, on my view, each and every sentient animal — is a semantic and epistemic island. Language facilitates a fundamentally different kind of knowledge than what any merely sentient animal has.
What you’re missing is the distinction between “subjective” and “relative”. What any animal can perceive, classify, and respond to is relative to the cognitive capacities that are typical of that kind of animal, together with its individual life-history.
On my view, all animal cognition is relative — ours included. But what we have — seemingly alone among extant animals on this planet — is the ability to distinguish between how we take things to be and how they really are, which is to say that we can recognize that we might be in error. We can even inquire into whether our beliefs are objectively correct, though most of us don’t bother. And over thousands of years we have even developed better and better techniques of doing exactly that.
One should immediately wonder at the Cartesian view of the world and beware all that has followed from it. Perhaps the view it seeks to replace isn’t so bad after all.
That is fair. I do expect that in the end we will not resolve anything except a little clarification. But clarification can be a worthy goal.
I’ll take some time to think about your responses and get back to you
I don’t think so. It seems to me that I need to satisfy myself that my beliefs are not false.
I don’t feel the need to justify my beliefs to others as much as I need others to help me know that my beliefs are accurate.
The exception of course would be folks that are important to me that I have some sort of personal relationship with. I what to justify my beliefs to them.
Now that I think about it the relationship itself is a big part of what it is that forms the basis of my justification.
I know stuff if I’m in a personal relationship with others who know stuff.
peace
Without a community, it is unlikely that you would even have a concept of true or false.
Maybe for some meanings of justification, but clearly someone living alone without knowledge of other sapient beings would be interested in justification of beliefs to their own minds. It really matters if a type of plant is truly tasty, or if there really is water “over there.” It won’t do to keep going to a creek bed and never finding water, while if the water hole over there always has water that’s pretty good to know. You justify it by, you know, finding water there, and not in the other place.
Of course one could always argue that satisfying yourself sufficiently isn’t justification, but I don’t think that is of any great importance. Naturally it’s different to justify your claim to others using language and/or evidence, but it seems to me that satisfying oneself that it’s true (or useful, or some other measure) basically comes first anyway, and that convincing someone else at least partly follows and builds upon that. It’s hard to disentangle ourselves from our social context, to be sure, but to me it appears that there’s always going to be some kind of justification even among solitary animals, since some things work and others don’t, and you’d better be able to tell the difference and to give up what fails badly.
There are all sorts of ways to disagree, including by claiming that the solitary animal doesn’t have “belief” as such. Well, maybe not, but that’s pretty much the point anyway, that an animal that needs to know things about its environment is going to have to have some capability of verification regardless of its lack of “beliefs,” if we’re going that route. It’s about living knowingly in a complex world, not about the degree of social interaction that the animal might have. Social learning allows for much greater levels of knowledge, to be sure, but verification is going to matter to anything that learns, whether or not it is conscious of doing the verification.
Glen Davidson
Good point. I think you could be right on that one
peace
OK, I think understand the ground rules. I will do my best to limit myself to the perspective of your worldview as we discuss.
I am confident that everyone here knows that I feel that knowledge can’t arise ex nihilo on it’s own through naturalistic processes but instead I feel preexisting knowledge is disseminated among persons in a pedagogical context.
I will not labor that point in this thread again
instead I will be interested to see how you develop your own idea, I’m all ears.
peace
Can you elaborate on what you feel are the differences between these two concepts?
peace
It’s seems like you are describing a evolutionary process of selecting what succeeds and rejecting what fails.
Do you feel the universe itself can be said to know stuff since I assume you feel it employs a similar evolutionary process?
what about a computer running an evolutionary Algorithm?
peace
I think it is important.
Otherwise, what you have is trial and error learning.
Generally we engage the community because we do want (and value) feedback from others.
That’s important, certainly, but trial and error can lead to knowledge without the need for interaction with other people.
I’d like to know the connection between Cartesian skepticism and Hume’s Fork.
Yes, I acknowledged that it was important in that sense:
But whether it fits “justification” or is some other sort of verification seems not to be an important distinction to having any knowledge at all. JTB is what we have about the water “over there,” but even without a social context or any knowledge of other minds at all, an animal is still going to learn whether or not there is water “over there.”
Glen Davidson
Does Epistemic Angst arise from attempting to use epistemology as the foundation for knowledge?
Epistemic Angst: Radical Skepticism and the Groundlessness of Our Believing
Can you explain yourself a little bit please? Simply making an assertion is not particularly helpful.
How does this work in your view?
If your claim is true does a computer know stuff if it is running a trial and error program?
Does the universe know stuff assuming that Darwinism at it’s most overly basic can be seen as a system of trial and error?
If not why not?
peace
check this out
peace
Yep.
I’m clear that “true” and “false’ are concepts that only arise after a language-using community has evolved, but are impressed into the young human at so early a stage in learning the community’s language the most people can assume they’ve always been there. And once impressed, you could carry those concepts forward in your life even if all other humans vanished — although I think you’d drive yourself crazy trying to keep hold of what was “true”, in that post-apocalyptic world where there wasn’t any feedback from other persons. Cf Solitary Confinement Syndrome. [you, in general, that is]
Where the christians go wrong, of course, is in jumping from the child’s reality that “true” and “false” have always been part of their human upbringing to claiming that those concepts must be grounded in some external (supernatural) entity (god) to begin with.
One of my kids is on a Tom Hanks movie kick at the moment, so let’s consider his character in Castaway. He was on an island with no understanding of what was safe to eat and drink. He finds through trial and error that some plants are safe to eat and some are not. He learns that coconut milk is a laxative.
All he did was use feedback from reality. No other people required.
Another poster here pointed out that GAs are not searching, the people running the GAs are searching. Similarly, the people using computerized trial-and-error algorithms may gain knowledge from them.
I’m more optimistic about being able to model consciousness in silico than is Neil, but that’s a separate topic.
Some entities within the known universe have knowledge. Whether or not that means the universe has knowledge is a matter of definition.
I’m always confused by statements like this. Is it true because the skeptical community here at TSZ says it is true? If I say it is false does that mean I am not a member of the community?
When scientists make statements about reality these statements are only “true” for the scientific community but not for, say, the Amish community? We’ve gone from objectivity to subjectivity and undermined the entire scientific enterprise.
This is what happens when you play with Mother Truth.
Yes, well, people here say silly things all the time.
One of the characterics of science is that iPhones work in the hands of Christians, Muslims, Buddhists, atheists alike. No faith required.
Non-responsive. Whether some entities within the known universe have knowledge is a matter of definition. Why not answer the question?
A faith statement if there ever was one.
GlenDavidson,
I certainly agree that there’s an important kind of knowledge that sentient animals have, but I want to distinguish that from “JTB knowledge”.
Consider this example: a white-tailed deer has an affordance-detecting, action-guiding representation of where the maple trees are. (I apologize for the specificity of this example, but I’m from the Northeastern US, and that’s what I know best.) In that sense the deer knows where her food source is, and she can reliably find it. But suppose one year the trees aren’t there — they’ve been cut down, or were killed by a population explosion of tent caterpillars. She then has to update her predictive representations of her environment.
But does she understand herself to have been mistaken about where the food is? Have her representations been corrected, or just changed?
My thesis: it is only within the context of a linguistic community that it is even possible for any animal to recognize that it’s own representations of its environment can be mistaken, and it can do that only by virtue of being able to compare its representations of the environment with those of other animals.
A white-tailed deer can have action-guiding representations that fail to cohere with sensory information, but she cannot understand herself to be wrong or to be in error about objective reality. A normal mature human being can. In fact, this is an ability that comes about between the ages of four and six, when a child can pass the false-belief test.
That’s the difference I’m trying to understand.
If there’s no test for lack-of-belief there ought to be.
Kantian Naturalist,
It’s pretty hard to know if, say, rats realize that they are “right” or “wrong,” or in what manner they know it if they do. However, a rat in a maze seems to be making choices about which is the “right direction”: Rats and mazes
I don’t really know how to characterize it except as knowing that one direction is “right” and the other is “wrong” (or indeed, “right” this time, “wrong” next time, where they have learned to alternate), although I doubt that the rat has any sort of symbol like we do of “right” vs. the symbol of “wrong.” Maybe it “just clicks” or some such thing, but the upshot is that it essentially knows the “right way” vs. the “wrong way,” and can figure out that sometimes the “right” and the “wrong” alternate.
I guess one thing I never liked about too much philosophy (not Nietzsche, fortunately) is that the categories are taken to be so important, when I never saw why they should be. I know that the rat doesn’t think of “right” and “wrong” in the way that we do, but it does know that there is a “right direction” and a “wrong direction” nevertheless. That matters to me, and the more elaborate and sophisticated (ultimately, rather more useful) understanding that we have simply is doing more abstractly what the rat does without really recognizing what it is doing. It still knows the “right way” from the “wrong way,” it’s just never going to think about that fact and what it means or doesn’t mean.
Glen Davidson
By “subjective”, I mean what is true (or false) of how an embodied subject takes to be the case. “It looks hot out there” is a subjective statement because it refers to the subjective apprehension of how it looks to the person uttering that statement. By contrast, “it is hot out there” is an objective statement — it refers to the state of affairs independent of how anyone takes it to be the case.
In keeping with Kant, Peirce, and Davidson — and in contrast to the Cartesian attitude that has dominated philosophy — I am arguing that subjectivity and objectivity are co-constituted. To have a grasp of objectivity is to have a grasp of subjectivity, because one both are already at work in the very distinction between how things are and how one takes them to be. I take it to be the case that there’s a noisy leaf-blower outside my apartment, and that subjective taking is objectively correct if there really is one.
By contrast, “relative” contrasts with “absolute”; my perceptual and conceptual abilities are limited by the contingent evolutionary history of the species to which I belong, as well as by the contingent cultural history of the language I am using and by my own contingent personal life-history. Neither I nor any finite community of sapient animals that has persisted with a finite period of time has absolute knowledge. But we have objective knowledge nevertheless.
That’s one of the really important moves in pragmatism: that we must distinguish between objective and absolute, and thereby affirm that we can have objective knowledge while denying that we can have absolute knowledge.
GlenDavidson,
Indeed! But I shall emphasize again that at no point did I ever deny that rats or any other sentient animals can know things about their environments. I’m denying that it makes sense for us to say of them that their “beliefs” (if they have beliefs) are justified. It’s a different kind of knowledge, and one that we also have as well — it’s the kind of knowledge at work in driving, or doing the dishes.
But even here there’s a crucial difference. We sapient animals can be taught, in the direct exchange of high-level action-guiding representations, whereas other animals can only be trained, through painstaking reward-and-sanction that modifies their action-guiding, high-level representations through iterated trial and error.
Learning is widespread through sentient animals. Many animals can learn — even flatworms, if I recall correctly. And quite a few animals can be trained. But I’m interested in what is required for animal to be teachable.
I don’t think it is a different kind of knowledge, only a different, more abstract, way of dealing with that knowledge. We may know something without “belief” or “justification,” then be challenged and have to defend it as “belief” or have to “justify” it (which is often done via a rationalization rather than “true justification”), and we might have a “belief” that over time we don’t really care about any more and have it fade back into “background knowledge” (with maybe a vague recollection of what made it “important” once, so usually not a complete fade-out as belief, just to a considerable extent) or whatever you might call it. It’s treated differently, but I don’t see how it is really a different kind of knowledge.
I don’t know about all of these examples, but the tamarin seems to have been teaching, at least. Of course language highly facilitates teaching, but it doesn’t seem to be necessary for any sort of teaching whatsoever. I’m no Heidegger fan, but I always liked his statement that there is a greater difference between life with language than without it than there is between life and non-life. Not a truth per se (how could we even evaluate such a comparison?), but provocative, and one can see why he said it. But our brains didn’t change fundamentally with language (grew bigger, I should think, but without becoming categorically different, aside from a couple of areas devoted to language), and I don’t think that the fact that language is important to how we think (and teach) today should obscure the continuity with how our non-lingual ancestors thought.
Glen Davidson
I think there’s an important difference between making a pragmatic choice, and holding that a description is true.
All kinds of animals are able to make pragmatic choices. But do they form descriptions and do they hold some descriptions to be true or false? That’s where I see engagement in a community as being relevant.
I take it you mean right as in “correct” and wrong as in “incorrect” there?
So for you, once language is acquired you don’t need other people for justification while for FMM the prior acquisition of language wouldn’t help. (Perhaps due to my own failings, I don’t really understand precisely what is being claimed on this thread myself.)
I’d like to see a draft of your paper–maybe it’s clearer, but my sense from the foregoing is that it might not be ready for prime time yet.
Humans descend from a long line of social animals.
Quite so.
Glen Davidson
I’m claiming that initiation into a linguistic community is a necessary condition for the kind of epistemic activities and semantic contents that distinguish human cognition from the cognition of other kinds of animals.
I haven’t even started writing it yet — I’m still playing with the basic ideas.
So, ‘wolf boy’ thinks like a wolf?
Fixed that for you!
I would say there were two other people involved God and Wilson.
Hank’s character apparently did not knowingly communicate much with the former so he felt the need to invent the later in order to try and justify his beliefs.
This sort of thing seems to happen a lot in these situations.
I wonder what would have happened if he could not convince himself that Wilson was real?
check it out
very true thanks.
Would you say that in the case of the universe (like with the computer) the “entities” with knowledge are actually searching as “evolution” happens?
peace