The
epistemological realist believes that there's a single correct view
of, say, justification, a single kind of truth, a single correct
method and so on. However, Williams looks at what actually is going
on in science and realises that such a position on these terms is
both counter-productive and unworkable.
For
example, he doesn't think that there is such thing as the “unity of
science”: He writes that
“[t]here is no way now, and none in prospect, of integrating all the sciences, much less all of anyone’s everyday factual beliefs, into a single coherent system”.
This
would be to say that in science there is no single method common to
all disciplines. One such method, according to Williams, would be “a
finitely axiomatized theory with specified rules of inference”.
Though philosophers like Nagel believe that uniformity of methods and
epistemic rules are both possible and desirable in themselves.
According to Williams, his view that we have “our view of reality”
is either simpleminded or naively hopeful (or both). Instead we “have
not got a ‘view of reality’ but indefinitely many”. Indeed
Williams doesn’t even think that we have a “system” of beliefs
at all. This too is wishful thinking. Each individual, therefore, may
live and breathe within many systems, some of which may well be
mutually contradictory.
Williams
looks back in history to see if we can see examples of this desire to
systematise one’s beliefs into a coherent whole. He finds
Descartes, who “ties his pre-critical beliefs together…by tracing
them to ‘the senses’”. In other words, that’s what all his
pre-critical beliefs had in common – they were all tied to the
senses. He found a common factor in all his beliefs, no “matter how
topically heterogeneous, and no matter how unsystematic, his beliefs
[were]”.
In
a sense, so Williams thinks, Hume too attempted to “totalise” (to
use Jacques Derrida’s term) and systematise all our beliefs. Hume
achieved this by explaining the nature of human nature.
But this wasn’t topical integration, a la Descartes. The
common factor amongst all our beliefs, and all subject matters, is,
according to Hume, that they all “lie under the cognizance of men,
and are judged of by their powers and faculties”. So Hume
self-consciously put men, or their faculties, at the centre of the
epistemological enterprise. This meant that these human faculties
were subject “to the same underlying epistemological constraints,
rooted in our ‘powers and faculties’”. So if we have uniform
faculties, we may well have or developed uniform epistemological
devices, methods and constraints. (There's an almost Kantian tone to
this aspect of Hume.)
With
his conclusions about human nature, Hume did in a sense attempt to
unite the sciences.
In
order to unify the sciences he had to put them under the jurisdiction
of the most important science: “the science of man”.
Today
this may be called “psychology” or, at least, “philosophical
psychology”. The Humean enterprise, therefore, wanted to insure
that the science of man isn't dependent on any other science. It was
to become First Science, as it were.
Hume,
just like Descartes before him, attempted “a wholesale assessment
of our knowledge of both the physical and the moral world”. And,
again like Descartes, he couldn't take existing knowledge for
granted.
So,
strangely enough for an empiricist, there's a certain sense in which
Hume’s pursuits were a priori in that he couldn’t rely on
the findings of the other sciences or worldly knowledge generally. He
didn’t, therefore, attempt to naturalise epistemology in a Quinian
manner. On a more specific technical and empiricist level, Hume
believed that “experiential knowledge [was] in some very deep way
prior to knowledge of the world”.
Although
Hume’s almost a priori stance on the faculties of the human
mind, and also on the philosopher’s independence from the other
sciences and worldly knowledge, had a rationalistic flavour to it, he
gave his position a very empiricist twist. To him, it isn’t our
internal capacities that mattered, but our situation in the world.
Our
“epistemic position” changed when Hume arrived on the scene. The
axis of epistemology for Descartes is the autonomous person and his
mind. Now, for Hume, it was experientially acquired knowledge
regardless of our innate faculties or our innate reason.
These
systematising or totalising penchants of philosophers clearly have
their drawbacks. For Wittgenstein it was called “the craving for
generality”.
Now
generality is fine if there is generality; though what if that isn’t
the case?Williams sees Quine as a good example of an
anti-epistemological realist. He discusses Quine’s take on the
analytic/synthetic distinction.
Traditionally
empiricists divided sentences into the analytic and the synthetic.
Analytic sentences were true by virtue of their meanings alone.
Synthetic statements, on the other hand, were true by virtue of
matters of fact in the external world. Quine saw this position on
meaning as essentially atomistic; whereas his take on meaning is
essentially holistic. That is, single sentences or statements are not
self-standing atoms separated - or separable - from their surrounding
sentences. Each sentence is part of a network of other sentences and
therefore it gains its meaning (and truth?) from being part of that
surrounding network. This means that we can't neatly separate a
sentence’s meaning from it “empirical assumptions”. There's no
clear diving line between meaning and matters of fact.
This
“craving for generality” and craving for simplicity was what
Quine fought against. Though what is at the heart of epistemological
realism?
Williams
thinks that epistemological realism is very much like scientific
realism.
Take
the case of the analysis and classification of heat.
When
the scientist explores the nature of heart he looks for
“some underlying property, or structure of more elementary components, common to [all] hot things”.
He
thus tried to turn heat into a natural kind. For the
scientific realist,
“deep structural features of the elementary components of things determine the boundaries of natural, as opposed to merely nominal or conventional, kinds”.
The
epistemological realist attempts to do the same kind of thing with
knowledge itself and also the methods and means to acquire knowledge.
He thinks that “there must be underlying epistemological structures
or principles”.
Here
Williams emphasises an important terminological point.
This
example of realism “is not a position within epistemology…[but]
realism about the objects of epistemological inquiry”. In other
words, this is realism about epistemology, not realism within
epistemology. This essentially means that although a philosopher may
be an anti-realist within epistemology, he may be a realist,
or probably is, a realist towards or about epistemology
itself. More precisely, he may be anti-realist in that he thinks that
we can’t acquire knowledge of an objective, mind-independent
reality. However, he may still believe that there are “underlying
epistemological structure or principles” common to all
epistemological research.
The
epistemological realist
“thinks of knowledge in very much the way the scientific realist thinks of heat: beneath the surface diversity there is structural unity”.
This
leads him to believe that not “everything we call knowledge need be
knowledge properly so called”. His job is to generalise and
extrapolate. That is, to bring “together the genuine cases into a
coherent theoretical kind”. The right kind of justification, say,
becomes effectively a natural kind. Warrant too may be a natural
kind. And so on. Bundle all these things together and we get
knowledge as a whole as some type of natural kind. Though what if the
concrete world and the world of knowledge and epistemology aren’t
like that?We may just have “various practices of assessment,
perhaps sharing certain formal features”. Though that’s all we’ve
got. Williams writes:
“It doesn’t follow from this that the various items given a positive rating add up to anything like a natural kind.”
They
may not even be a “surveyable whole” or a “genuine totality
rather than a more or less loose aggregate”.
Williams
again refers to Quine’s critique of the analytic-synthetic
distinction.
Here
again, as in the case of knowledge or epistemology, the
epistemologist attempted to generalise and perhaps create two natural
kinds – the analytic and the synthetic. That is, there isn’t a
“fixed, objective division between a theory’s meaning postulates
and its empirical assumptions”.
Williams
comments on two other “natural kinds” – the external and the
internal.
Descartes
was the prime example of an internalist. Externalism, on the other
hand, has come to the fore in the 20th century. In traditional
epistemology “external” meant everything outside the mind
(including the body). So there was a radical division between
internal experiential knowledge and knowledge of the external world.
Though perhaps the internal and external, as traditionally seen, form
a single unit. Or, as Williams puts it, “the very idea that
knowledge has any fixed, context-independent structure” may be
radically misplaced. We cannot separate ourselves from the world. As
Wittgenstein put it in his Tractatus: “I am the world.”
Explanation or Deflation: Truth
Just
as Williams detects epistemologically realist views about
epistemology, so too does he detect it about truth.
Put
at its simplest, the problem is that many people see truth as a
thing, even if an abstract non-spatiotemporal thing.
Truth may not be a thing or an entity at all. And if this is the
case, we can't analyse truth or discover its true nature.
Williams
firstly tackles the deflationary view of true.
According
to this view, the ascription of truth just cancels the quotation
marks in this
“Snow
is white” is true iff snow is white.
will
become
Snow
is white is true iff snow is white.
The
first example refers a sentence to the world in which snow is white.
Therefore it may entail a property of correspondence. The second
example is simply an identity statement that does not entail
correspondence between two unlike things (say, a sentence and a
fact).
Why
can’t we just say
Snow is white.
without
having to say
“Snow is white” is true.
Does
the truth predicate “is true” serve any purpose? Not according to
the deflationist.
The
deflationist doesn’t think that true is a “theoretically
significant property”. Perhaps he doesn’t think it is a property
at all. All we have, instead, is the sentence
Snow
is white.
itself
and nothing more.
True
sentences are “merely a nominal kind”. That is, all true
statements don't share something, viz, the entity or property truth.
Williams
says that “there are endlessly many truths, [but] there is no such
thing as truth”. (Perhaps we should write here “Truth”
instead.)
Realists
about truth, on the other hand, believe that truth is a property or
even a thing. Therefore, like heat or a cat, it can be analysed and
correctly explicated. Truth is an “important property shared by all
true sentences”. The realist needn't say what truth is, exactly;
though he may offer these possibilities: “correspondence to fact,
incorporability in some ideally coherent system of judgements, or
goodness in the way of belief”. If one of these is the true way of
describing truth, then all true statement will, say, be incorporable
into an ideally coherent system (take your choice).
The
truth realist wants something very substantial. He wants something
shared by all true statements. He isn't interested in the “use of a
word” [‘truth’] or the “point of the concept [truth]”. More
to the point, “there is more to understanding truth than
appreciating the utility of the truth-predicate”.
So
let’s get away from metaphysics and back onto epistemology.
For
a long time many epistemologists agreed that knowledge was “justified
true belief” (even if they had problems with justification and
belief). Then along came Gettier’s demonstration that that analysis
of knowledge “fails to state a sufficient condition for knowledge”.
Perhaps this is because knowledge is not a thing or property that can
have a correct analysis in all situations, which isn't to say that
there is no such the thing as knowledge.
Williams
makes a distinction between
theories of knowledge
and
theories of the concept of knowledge
which
he also made about truth.
The
latter could be said to be about the word “knowledge” and how
it's used (or the concept or meaning behind the word).
A
theory of knowledge, on the other hand, is about the thing or
property knowledge. The former presupposes that there is
something above and beyond the words, concepts and usages!
Again,
Williams makes a connection with analysis in science:
“…we
might be inclined to suppose that just as in physics we study the
nature of heat, so in philosophy we study the nature of truth. But
once plausible deflationary views are on the table, the analogy
between truth [knowledge] and things like heat can no longer be
treated as unproblematic.”
Essentially
we hypostasise or reify truth and knowledge: we turn them into two -
even if abstract and non-spatiotemporal – things or
properties.
Just
as it we can offer a deflationary account of truth, so too can we can
do the same with knowledge (this is done much less often than with
truth).
This
is where Miachael Williams becomes very Wittgensteinian as well as
deflationary. He says that a deflationary account of the word ‘know’
may show “how the word is embedded in a teachable and useful
linguistic practice”. That is a meaning-is-use definition of
“know”: one that doesn’t suppose that being known to be true
“denotes a property that groups propositions into a theoretically
significant kind”. Williams says that nevertheless the word ‘know’
has utility value. (Perhaps we could say that it works!)
Williams
finishes off this section by referring again to Nagel’s realist
view of epistemology.
According
to Williams, Nagel’s phrase “our knowledge of the world”
implies various presuppositions because it assumes that there is a
“genuine totality” – it's a totalising statement. It also
assumes that “there are invariant epistemological constraints
underlying the shifting standards of everyday justification”. Nagel
sees the universal and general rather than the Wittgensteinian
particular.
Williams
refers to Wittgenstein’s position on knowledge.
At
first his description of Wittgenstein makes his position seem
anti-foundationalist and contextualist. He says that Wittgenstein
thought that “all justification takes place against a background of
judgments affirmed without special testing”. That is, the
background may determine what is foundational; therefore what is
foundational is not really foundational at all (in the strict sense).
Yet Williams says that Wittgenstein’s position is “formally
foundationalist”. In any case, the foundations aren’t taken in
isolation, as they have been traditionally.
*)
This systematising and totalising impulse can be seen in
foundationalism, according to Williams.
All
beliefs
“arrange themselves into broad, theoretically coherent classes according to certain natural relations of epistemological priority”.
That
is, beliefs fall into different kinds. The most important
beliefs, according to foundationalists, are prior to other beliefs
and more basic. They defend or justify themselves, as it were. They
are fundamental; though other non-basic beliefs are inferential.
Again,
Williams stresses the fact that foundationalists see different
beliefs as falling into different kinds. A particular kind of belief
will have “certain elements in their contents” and they will
stand in “natural epistemological relations and thus fall into
natural epistemological kinds”.
All
this, to Williams, is a little too neat and tidy – too precise.
It's too much the product of totalising and systematising minds.
Perhaps
it's the topics or subjects themselves that determine our
epistemological methods and perhaps our goals too. Perhaps it all
depends on the subject or topic we're studying. That is, is there “an
order of reasons [that operate independently] of all circumstances
and all collateral knowledge”? Does every subject have the same
methodology? Do even all the sciences follow, say, the
hypothetico-deductive method? Is this even a feasible wish?
According
to Williams:
“In both science and ordinary life, constraints on justification are many and various. Not merely that, they shift with context in ways that are probably impossible to reduce to rule. In part, they will have to do with specific content of whatever claim is at issue. But they will also be decisively influenced by the subject of inquiry to which the claim in question belongs (history, physics, ornithology, etc.). We call these topical or…disciplinary constraints.”
There
are no epistemic invariables – that is, rules, regulations and
methods applicable to all subjects.
Williams
gives a down to earth and commonsensical example of one of these
constraints.
Take
the subject history.
Does
the average, or any, historian “[e]ntertain rational doubts about
the age of the Earth”? Perhaps Williams, however, is wrong when he
says that historians don’t entertain “radical doubts [about] the
reliability of documentary evidence”. Perhaps he simply means that
they don’t entertain radical doubts about all documentary evidence.
If they were, say, Cartesian historians, they would hardly get
started.
Williams’s
position here is very Wittgensteinian. The Austrian philosopher also
said that there are things we cannot doubt if we are to doubt at all.
To put that in Williams's way:
“Disciplinary
constraints fix ranges of admissible questions [doubts].”
For
example, even the foundationalists must realise the type of tests we
employ “can shift with context”. Though, according to the
foundationalist, context must not be relevant “all the way down”.
There must be something invariable and pure that works as a core or
axis for our various contextualisations and relativities.
Williams
clarifies the contextualist position. He says, of propositions, that
“the
epistemic status of a given proposition is liable to shift with
situational, disciplinary, and other contextually variable factors…”
Williams
goes further than this. He says that without context “ a
proposition has no epistemic status whatsoever”. That is, there is
“no fact of the matter as to what kind of justification it either
admits or requires”. This seems perilously close to epistemological
relativism.
In
the last section, Williams reiterates his position on justificational
relativism or contextualism. He writes:
“An examination of ordinary practices of justification strongly suggests…[that they] are at least topic-relative, which is to say determined in part by the subject under discussion.”
This
isn't to say that “anything goes”. It's simply to say that
methods of justification aren't invariable.
One
recurring topic in Williams’s paper is the impossibility of global
scepticism. This impossibility has nothing to do with the usual
epistemological refutations of universal scepticism: it's a
Wittgensteinian/Humean statement on both the psychological and
logical impossibility of universal or absolute doubt.
Williams
firstly comments on Hume’s position on the psychological
impossibility of absolute doubt. Williams says that
“Hume’s offhand suggestion that only carelessness and inattention save us from a permanent, debilitating awareness of the truth of scepticism, hence from lapsing into a state of chronic, paralysing doubt”.
Williams
puts his own particular slant on Humean, as it were, commonsense
about scepticism. He says that it’s all about “exempting certain
propositions from doubt”. And it is this that “determines the
direction of inquiry”.
Williams
then quotes Wittgenstein to back up his position against universal
doubt. I will quote the passage from Wittgenstein's On Certainty
in full:
“It
may be…that all enquiry on our part is set so as to exempt certain
propositions from doubt, if they are ever formulated. They lie apart
from the route travelled by enquiry.”
It's
not just philosophical universal doubt that Williams is referring to;
but universal doubt in any discipline. Williams again refers to the
case of the historian. He says:
“…intruding
sceptical doubts about whether the Earth really existed a hundred
years (or five minutes) ago does not lead to a more careful way of
doing history: it changes the subject, from history to epistemology.”
The
subject itself partly determines the limits of one’s doubt. If one
does ask questions about the age of the earth, then one stops doing
history and starts doing epistemology.
The
impossibility of universal doubt or global scepticism, therefore, is
not just epistemological and psychological impossibility: it's also
logical (as Wittgenstein said). As Williams puts it:
“…some
doubts are logically excluded by forms of investigation that [we]
find significant, important, or perhaps just interesting.”
Williams
again refers to Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. And, again, I
will quote the Wittgenstein passage in full:
“The questions that we raise and our doubts depend on the fact that some propositions are exempt from doubt, are as it were like hinges on which those turn. That is to say, it belongs to the logic of our scientific investigations that certain things are indeed not doubted.…We just can’t investigate everything…If I want the door to turn, the hinges must stay put.”
As
well as there being a logical impossibility of universal doubt - it's
also pragmatically advisable not to doubt everything.
Williams
is more detailed about why some propositions, as Wittgenstein put it,
“are exempt from doubt”.
It's
a “matter of methodological necessity in connection with the
disciplinary constraints that determine the general directions
of…inquiry”. Williams put this point more simply and logically:
“Asking some questions logically precludes asking others.”
We
can't ask every question that can be asked. Even in our own
specialised discipline this will be the case. (Perhaps in our
sub-branch of that specialised discipline this too will be the case.)
There are innumerable possible questions.
Williams
also refers back to Hume again.
This
time he discusses his psychological approach to global scepticism.
A
Humean naturalist, according to Williams, “sees our everyday
inability to entertain radical doubts as showing that nature has
simply determined us to believe certain things” (e.g., other minds
and bodies, the perdurance of objects, cause and effect, etc.).
However, Williams says that it’s just as much a question of
methodology as it is of psychology. Again he says that “certain
exemptions will be logically required by the direction of inquiry”.
Williams goes on:
“In
particular contexts on inquiry, certain propositions stand fast as a
matter of methodological necessity.”
As
can be seen, “necessity” is a strong word here. However, to
offset accusations of “relativism” Williams has this to say on
the truth of these exempted propositions. He says that inquiry “will
[only] have knowledge is these [exempted] propositions are true,
which they need not always be”. So in Williams’s epistemological
scheme there is still room for truth!
Like
Putnam, Williams makes a distinction between a
a proposition’s epistemic status
and
a proposition’s truth (or falsehood).
Epistemic
status is “context-sensitive”. Though “[t]ruth, however, is
not”. More directly:
A
proposition is either true or not.
Is
this a reversion to realism and also a belief in the Principle of
Bivalence?Those who believe in warranted assertibility, for example,
may believe that a proposition is true “because it stands fast”.
A realist, on the other hand, may think that a proposition “stands
fast because it is true”. Williams, in contradistinction, believes
that “a proposition is neither true because it stands fast nor
stands fast because it is true”. Truth has indeed a special and
privileged status according to Williams.
Towards
the end of the paper Williams lets an epistemological realist speak
for himself. He quotes Clarke thus:
“Each
concept or the conceptual scheme must be divorceable intact from our
practices, from whatever constitutes the essential character of the
plain…[we] ascertain, when possible, whether items fulfil the
conditions legislated by concepts.”
The
above is a strong piece of metaphysical and epistemological realism.
It's also, Williams would no doubt argue, an epistemically realist
position towards epistemology (which is of course the main
tenor of Williams’s paper).
Williams
stresses the fact that concepts, conceptual schemes, epistemological
methods, etc. are determined by the nature of our practices – they
have no reality apart from our contingent practices. Clarke, on the
other hand, says that the aforementioned can be “[divorced] intact
from our practices”. There is a right and a wrong about our
concepts. The correct concepts match the world as it is in itself.
Incorrect concepts etc. distort the world’s true nature. Williams
too must believe in the falsity or truth of our concepts. However,
their truth or falsehood will be internally determined by what Clarke
calls our “practices”. Without practices there is nothing.
At
the end of the chapter, Williams sums up his general position thus:
“Contextualism
simply takes seriously and at face-value what seem to be the evident
facts of ordinary epistemic practices: that relevant evidence varies
with context, that content alone never determines epistemological
status…”
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