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.
I’m not sure language is even a meaningful concept when there is only one person in the universe.
peace
I have to second that.
Is it claiming that Patrick’s version of “skepticism” is a joke? I thought Descartes set out to produce an argument against the skeptics. It would appear he failed.
Perhaps I just need to re-read the OP to find out what a “Cartesian Skeptic” is actually skeptical of.
http://www.smashinglists.com/10-feral-human-children-raised-by-animals/
I’ve repeatedly stated that Patrick and those of his ilk are faux skeptics. For some reason the author of the OP has decided to give Patrick and his “skeptical” cohorts a pass. Why on earth does this site deserve to be called “The Skeptical Zone?”
What exactly are people here “skeptical” of?
According to Wikipedia:
It’s obvious to me at least that Patrick’s statements exclude him from philosophical skepticism. So he’s a methodological skeptic. A Cartesian skeptic.
From the OP:
What is the difference? Why is Patrick’s “skepticism” immune from the critique of the OP?
Patrick and his ilk believe that knowledge is possible, so in that sense they are not in fact skeptics. But why ought anyone accept Patrick’s version of what makes knowledge possible?
How does Patrick, in his skepticism, manage to “sort out” true claims from false claims?
Empiricism? Really?
Sounds like that ought to be right up the alley of “Patrick skepticism.”
Given that skepticism is no longer possible, what ought to become of “The Skeptical Zone”?
Patrick doubts his parents. Patrick doubts his teachers. Patrick doubts everyone else. Patrick doubts himself. Skeptical Patrick.
Stopped beating your wife yet Mung?
Sure, you are only asking questions. Just like me.
Mung,
Evolutionary theory, among other things. You think it was named only for one kind of contributor?
Everyone here is from Missouri.
You seem to be equivocating between the ordinary and philosophical/epistemological usages of the word “skepticism”.
I understand this OP to be about general skepticism in epistemology.
KN:
FWIW, in my view you’ve got it right in your OP (and the points you make are perfectly clear to me). I mostly agree with you.
But I’ve been wondering…
The large body of research into “theory of mind” obviously has direct bearing upon your thesis, and indeed you mentioned a classic demonstration of the full unfolding of theory of mind in children that is evident when they acquire the ability understand that others’ behavior may be governed by false belief. You rightly point out that this is an ability that unfolds developmentally, typically at or after four years of age.
Of course there are many fascinating and difficult questions concerning how our ancestors made the transition from operant learning and behavioral “knowing” to the deployment of language and a fully articulated theory of mind and belief, including false belief. That said, I think there is ample evidence that the developmental emergence of TOM in children reflects the unfurling in each child of fundamental human competencies that have deep evolutionary origins – unfolding that provides clues to that prior evolutionary history.
So, while I don’t find the “last man after nuclear war” and “Cast Away” examples relevant (because in each of these instances the individual had prior exposure to the social environments requisite to learning the distinctions you describe), an evolutionary view of TOM unfurling developmentally in children suggests that each human being is born with elements of TOM competency that originated not in individual social experience, but rather in evolutionary events. We each are born with evolutionary endowments that include the ability to utilize the affordances that guide our understanding of others – e.g. following others’ gaze, entering into episodes of joint attention (crucial to language acquisition), grasping that others may have intentions, etc. Which is to say that prior to having ANY social experiences individual human beings are evolutionarily primed to quickly acquire an understanding of other persons and their private experience, the subjective/objective distinction, TOM and so forth. All of us, then, have been shaped by human sociality not only by direct social experiences, but to some extent by the fundamental sociality of human evolution. Even absent the first, the second may be operative to some degree – although likely in an incomplete or functionally unfulfilled manner.
So, perhaps even an individual who lived an entire life in isolation might possess proto-notions of others and their experiences and beliefs as these competencies reach out for their target, even if they never are expressed in an environment in which other persons are present, and therefore never fulfill their Millikanesque proper function.
I’m also unclear on how the various points in the article are linked.
I understand the first part to be about knowledge. Assuming both JTB and that only members of linguistic communities can hold beliefs, it follows that knowledge can only be possessed by members of a linguistic community. You then say that the justification component depends on the believers in that community obeying certain norms which can only be fulfilled by interacting with others in the community.
On that understanding, I’d wonder:
– Is any believer in the community justified in claiming a certain piece of knowledge, or only believers who have participated in its justification practices? Is testimony in some form going to be covered by such norms?
– Can I know there is a computer in front of me without someone else in the room to discuss it with?
– Did Einstein know GR when he formulated it, or did he not know it until it was the scientific consensus?
The second part of the post seems to be about objectivity and how it depends only on certain practices by members of linguistic communities, and not eg at least partly on ontology.
The relation to Cartesian skepticism is this, I think: A Cartesian skeptic wants an objective account of knowledge of the external world given only their individual mental states, but you are saying such a demand makes no sense as objectivity and knowledge each require a linguistic community, ie they both require an external world of some type as a precondition.
In any event, on the topic of skepticism Andy Clark has a new paper that touches on PP and skepticism, although it is mainly about how to accomodate the extended mind in PP (and part of his continuing philosophical debate with Hohwy). So it is looking at the issue from the perspective of the individual embodied agent.
Busting out: Predictive brains, embodied minds, and the puzzle of the evidentiary veil
ETA: Jennifer Nagel blogged recently on a different approach to knowledge and belief. It starts with the psychologist’s concept that knowledge is separate from and in some sense precedes belief. Here is the last post; you can work backwards to the first from links in it.
This is what I don’t understand. First, I think this “belief” would have to be unconscious unless the putative skeptic were just lying. I take it KN doesn’t mean belief there–he just means there must BE other people for there to be skeptics–whether anybody believes in them or not.
Relatedly, suppose the skeptic doesn’t “talk about” justification (whether intelligibly or unintelligibly): she’s what some here would call “aworldistic” in the sense that she simply fails to believe in_____ (where the blank may be filled in with whatever you like, e.g., the past, other minds, the external world). If such a person passes as a “skeptic” (as, presumably Patrick would hold), surely this person doesn’t have to talk about justification. So we need to know what this skeptic DOES believe not only what she DOESN’T.
As a general matter, it’s important to remember this argument isn’t an argument that there must be other minds, it’s an argument that if somebody believes (or says) something, she must have learned things from other people. But I’d think the skeptic would be likely to insist on doubting whether she came to her present mental state in the manner you are insisting upon.
There’s a long (endless really) paper in a recent APA journal that consists of a discussion among two people who find a vat with brains in it. It’s relevant to this, but…it’s an endless go round.
Like I always say these discussions will always boil down to the question of other minds.
I tend to think that there is something in us that is primed for communion and that even if other persons did not exist we would need to imagine them in order to function epistemologically. If we could not convince ourselves that other minds exist the result would be insanity.
Theologians might call this the God shaped hole that is present in the soul.
peace
can I get an amen
It seems that he at the very least needs to provide some justification for his claims
peace
This is the topic I hope that KN will explore.
How we move from being trained to being taught.
I for one don’t see a step by step process that can get you from there to here
peace
Or committing oneself to a belief in “other voices” in one’s head. For some, that’s quite enough, even if they believe that the other voices actually are other people. Which maybe is the point after all, people do populate their world in the absence of other people, and they’re wrong–at least I think they’re wrong. If they’re just voices and visions in my head that I assume are people who are inventing people out of (projected) voices in their heads, it could be that I’m the one in the mental ward.
How would I know? I can come up with a few counters, like that reality seems to have a lot more information/detail than do hallucinations, etc., but I’m pretty much assuming what I want to in that case, namely, that hallucinations are not the reality and perception is, and about all I’m really doing is noting how the two are different (which wasn’t actually in question).
It’s true that justification of belief does seem to relate to “others” socially, it’s just not clear these “others” necessarily exist as really truly other minds. They could be voices, they could be other parts of my mind (I generally consider voices to be that, but don’t want to limit it necessarily to only voices), they simply could be imaginings. As a god, perhaps I am lonely, hence I people my mental world with some other minds, and I and those “other minds” kick around a few ideas. Fine, keeps me occupied, but that’s just how I’m passing my time.
The issue of necessarily justifying belief in a “social context” does not solve the problem of others’ existence, for we may very well believe that other minds exist without those other minds actually existing. At least that seems to be the case in our experience.
Glen Davidson
Right
In order for us to know anything other minds must exist but given “skeptical” presuppositions we have no justification for believing that other minds exist.
quite the conundrum
Yet you’ve stated that you (provisionally) accept that chimpanzees and human beings share a common ancestor. Which essentially commits you to the notion that there was such a transition.
How do you envision that occurring?
I don’t want to “hijack” this thread. I promised KN that I would try as much as possible to stick with his presuppositions here. I’m excited to see what he comes up with in this regard.
The only thing I will tell you is that I think my understanding would be consistent with the one recorded in the Bible.
peace
I think it’s important to point out that given “skeptical” presuppositions and what we know about physics. It is very likely that each of us (if we exist) is alone in our thoughts and there are no other minds that we have access to.
quote:
The paradox states that if one considers the probability of our current situation as self-aware entities embedded in an organized environment, versus the probability of stand-alone self-aware entities existing in a featureless thermodynamic “soup”, then the latter should be vastly more probable than the former.
end quote:
from here
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boltzmann_brain
check it out
peace
I hadn’t even considered that! But you’re right — that does follow from other claims I’m committed to, and it makes perfect sense. Thank you very much!
My main concern here would be in how we might speculatively, imaginatively describe the actual behaviors in which these maturationally stunted functions are expressed. Perhaps our hypothetical orphan would naturally attribute intentions to other living things, if he or she encountered any.
Yes, that’s right. Justification is a norm-governed social practice. My beliefs are justified to the extent that I’ve obeyed the appropriate norms for justifying beliefs of that kind — formal deducibiity in the case of purely a priori beliefs, consideration of sensory evidence in the case of observational beliefs, and in the majority of cases, consultation of experts.
I have not thought too much about testimony but clearly I should. I think that there going to be degrees of justification and also degrees of specificity.
Suppose I say “the universe is about 13 billion years old”. Someone says, “how do you know that?” I say, “it was reported by a science journalist as a discovery made by cosmologists.” In the majority of cases that’s sufficient. Not being a cosmologist, I cannot go any further in justifying that belief at the first order. I would have to go second-order and explain why I tend to recognize the epistemic authority of cosmologists and science journalists, unless I wanted to read the original publication in which this calculation appeared.
Nevertheless I am justified in my generic belief, even if (not being a cosmologist) I cannot justify a more specific version of this belief.
You can know that there’s a computer in front of you if you have been taught the relevant linguistic norms for using the word “computer”.
Here too I think there are degrees of justification. Einstein was justified in hypothesizing GR because it solved some recalcitrant problems by proposing a new constitutive a priori framework for defining what counts as “space” and “time.” However, Eddington’s observation of light deflection significantly increased the verification of the theory, and as a result, the scientific community became rationally entitled to accept GR (even though dissenters remained).
Of course it does depend on ontology as well. I wasn’t focused on that part of the problem in the OP. My most recent speculations about ontology are here. Briefly, the world must have a minimal degree of determinable structure in order for there to be determinate judgments about what that structure is.
Yes. The Cartesian skeptic wants a deductively valid argument against solipsism, not realizing that any argument already presupposes that solipsism is false.
Thank you for that! I just downloaded it!
I look forward to reading that as well!
I haven’t looked at that, but the view that knowledge is primary and belief secondary is not new. It was the position of Oxfordians Cook-Wilson and Ewing back at the turn of the 20th Century and has been pushed more recently by Timothy Williamson and Jonathan Sutton. (Sutton used to frequent a now deceased internet music forum I at which I was also a regular).
Descartes did not invent philosophical skepticism. That honor falls to Pyrrho, though most of what we know about Pyrrho is due to Sextus Empiricus. (I am ignoring here Buddhist and Islamic arguments for skepticism, since I do not know enough about them.)
It is true that Descartes set out to refute skepticism. Whether he succeeded or not has been hotly debated in the 375 years since the Meditations was published. Within the framework of the Meditations, the refutation of skepticism depends entirely on the deductively valid proof of the existence of God in the Third Meditation. This proof — if one reads very closely — turns out to depend on some problematic intuitions about the concept of infinity, and accordingly on the idea that we can “understand” infinity but not “comprehend” it. In explication of that distinction, Descartes offers only a metaphor, which is less than helpful.
In any event, the version of skepticism that Descartes sets out to refute is not that of Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, or even his older contemporaneous countryman Montaigne. It is very much an invention of Descartes’s own. Prior to Descartes, no one in the Western tradition conceived of the possibility that one could be indubitably certain of one’s own mental contents while also being in total doubt about the existence of an external world to which those contents might (or might not) correspond.
Since I’m only talking here about what’s deeply flawed in Cartesian skepticism, the point I’m pressing doesn’t affect the versions of skepticism maintained by Sextus Empiricus, Montaigne, Hume, or (for that matter) Peter Unger.
The flaw in Cartesian skepticism can be thought of this way: it is not itself an argument for the Cartesian picture of mind, but implicitly presupposes that very picture. Cartesian skepticism only makes sense in light of that picture of the mind. And it is that picture of the mind that I am arguing against.
In fact, it is probably generally true that epistemology relies on philosophy of mind just as much as philosophy of mind relies on epistemology.
Yes, she references Willliamson at the start. Don’t remember whether she mentions the others.
Or nonliving things like mountains and rivers and soccer balls named Wilson.
Or perhaps the universe as a whole
The question I have is would these naturally occurring attributions be enough to justify our orphans knowledge?
I would say only if the intention she saw was real and not imagined
peace
Fair enough. But my thought was that one can hold that objective statements are possible in a domain without making any commitment to ontology in that domain:
– in math, by being a nominalist
– in meta-ethics, by adopting approaches such as Putnam’s or Kitcher’s
– in science, by adopting constructing empiricism for one’s attitude to non-observables
I’m not saying these positions are correct, only that they are philosophically respectable and hence show that one can separate commitments to any ontology from commitments to objectivity.
Oh, the ironing.
Wilson was an invention of Hanks’ character. There is no evidence supporting the existence of any god or gods, so the rational position is that such are not worthy of consideration.
He didn’t need Wilson or any other fictitious entity in order to determine what was good to eat and drink. Feedback from reality was sufficient.
I don’t understand this question.
I have an ilk? Cool!
I think that provisional knowledge is possible, but that we need to be willing to revise what we “know” in light of new information.
Yes, really. The same way you do in every aspect of your life except when it comes to your religious beliefs.
You’re starting to get it!
It seems that your first sentence I’ve quoted is contradicted by the second clause of the second. That is “Justification is a norm-governed social practice.” is not consistent with “consideration of sensory evidence in the case of observational beliefs”.
I argue that it is possible to justify beliefs, thereby gaining (provisional) knowledge, by evaluating those beliefs against objective, empirical evidence. For example:
– I believe this is edible.
– I eat it.
– I get sick.
– My belief is demonstrated to be unjustified.
No social norms required.
BruceS,
Yes, you’re right — those are perfectly respectable options in all of those domains. I thought you were asking me for what I thought ontology was, in a way that would be consistent with my account of objectivity.
I simply don’t know what to say about mathematics, because Platonic realism about numbers has utterly fatal objections, but fictionalism and conventionalism don’t seem right, either. I do lean strongly towards ethical realism and scientific realism, but with me realism is always a pragmatic realism — X counts as real if we have some causally efficacious, counterfactual-supporting embodied coping strategy towards X.
Here we get at a very difficult issue: can one be justified if one is unable to say what the justification is?
Reliabilists think that the answer is yes; as long as the belief is the product of a reliable causal process, it doesn’t matter if one can introspectively assess that process or give any reasons for one’s belief.
I don’t think that can be right — though reliabilism is not entirely wrong — because I would balk at severing the idea of justification from the idea of being able to give a reason for one’s belief.
In the case described above, one does indeed learn that the seemingly-edible food is poisonous, and therefore one knows how to avoid it in the future. But for that to be a justified belief, one would have to know how to present that evidence as reasons to another animal that can in turn appreciate those as reasons. Even an exquisitely sophisticated cognitive agent such a chimpanzee cannot engage in that kind of behavior. And that’s what I mean by saying that justification is a social practice, even in the case of ordinary empirical knowledge.
Put otherwise, I’m saying that the ordinary empirical knowledge of sentient animals is qualitatively different from the ordinary empirical knowledge of sapient animals. The hard part is to give a naturalistic explanation to this qualitative difference.
Why? If one can identify the reasons to oneself, why is another animal needed? Is this just your specific definition for “justified” in the context of this discussion?
Mathematical knowledge is almost entirely “knowing how.” Ontology doesn’t actually matter.
If ontology mattered, and if mathematical entities are platonic, then mathematics could not possibly be useful in physics unless physics is itself all about the same platonic entities.
My preference for fictionalism is because I see mathematics as exploring relations between entities, where the nature of those entities does not actually matter. So I see mathematical entities as stand-ins for whatever it is where we want to apply our mathematical knowledge of relations.
The actual presence of.another sapient animal is not required for any specific episode of justification, but a process of interacting with other sapient animals is required in order to learn how to justify beliefs, including how to justify beliefs to oneself.
Neil Rickert,
You’re certainly right that knowing how to construct a valid theorem (or whatever mathematicians do — I don’t actually know) is a matter of “knowing how”, and that ontology doesn’t matter to mathematical practice.
Likewise, empirical science is largely a matter of knowing how to design and execute experiments that yield useful and interpretable data, or conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses in the field. It makes no difference to biochemists and marine ecologists whether constructive empiricism or scientific realism is the best account of what they are doing.
But just because philosophical debates in the epistemology and metaphysics of science do not matter to practicing scientists, it doesn’t follow that they don’t matter at all.
That’s all right. Theoretical and experimental physicists have the same arguments.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Molyneux%27s_problem
In your view, in what way philosophical debates matter?
Interesting claim. It does seem to hinge on the definitions of “sapient”, “justify”, and “belief”. Particularly “justify”.
Assuming we agreed on those definitions, I’m not sure how to falsify it, even in principle. We’ve got crows visiting every morning and they seem to learn how to get into the cat food pretty quickly. That seems to be a form of knowledge.
The squirrels are morons.
Since I’m offering a philosophical account based on empirical results, rather than a scientific theory, I’m not too sure how important falsifiability is.
In any event, I’ve been making abundantly clear (I thought) that sentient animals have all of the following: concepts, intentionality, normativity, and knowledge. Some of them — great apes in particular, almost certainly some cetaceans — can make inferences.
What they cannot do, on my account, is compare inferences; hence they cannot correct each other’s inferences in order to improve their collective and individual cognitive grasp of objective reality. In that crucially important sense they cannot justify their beliefs; they cannot offer reasons for why their subjective take on objective reality is a reliable guide to how objective reality is, since they cannot even draw a distinction between how things seem to one and how things really are.
This cognitive achievement of rationality, which humans arrive at between ages five and seven in the course of normal maturation, is beyond the capacities of corvids, cetaceans, and great apes — even if they far outstrip us in many other sensory and cognitive abilities.
I have no problem with any of that, KN–but I don’t see why it entails that solipsism must be false–unless it’s question-begging.
FWIW, the chairman of my thesis committee has published several papers on that problem–as well as a chapter in his most recent book.
can I get a ell yea!!!!!!!
I would only quibble about the use of the term objective here. For reasons you know.
The rest of it is very very close to my understanding. It’s the comparison that gives justification. At least two persons are necessary for comparison
The difficulty IMO is in having a accurate standard with which to compare inferences.
peace
I think they matter in all sorts of ways! For example, they can affect public perception of science, they can play a role in whether or not there is a perceived conflict between science and religion, they can affect how we assess the ways in which capitalism and democracy promote and inhibit human flourishing, environmental policies, and so on. As public intellectuals, philosophers can play a significant role in culture and politics.