Putting Reasons in their Place

Hilary Kornblith has criticised reasons-based approaches to epistemic justification on the basis of psychological research that shows that reflection is unreliable. Human beings, it seems, are not very good at identifying our own cognitive processes and the causes of our beliefs. In this article I defend a conception of reasons that takes those empirical findings into account and can avoid Kornblith’s objections. Reasons, according to this account, are not to be identified with the causes of our beliefs and are useful first and foremost in argumentation instead of reflection.

The Cognitive Philosophy of Reflection

Hilary Kornblith argues that many traditional philosophical accounts involve problematic views of reflection (understood as second-order mental states). According to Kornblith, reflection does not add reliability, which makes it unfit to underlie a separate form of knowledge. We show that a broader understanding of reflection, encompassing Type 2 processes, working memory, and episodic long-term memory, can provide philosophy with elucidating input that a restricted view misses. We further argue that reflection in fact often does add reliability, through generalizability, flexibility, and creativity that is helpful in newly encountered situations, even if the restricted sense of both reflection and knowledge is accepted. And so, a division of knowledge into one reflexive (animal) form and one reflective form remains a plausible, and possibly fruitful, option.

Reflection

Chapter 8 motivates accessibilism by appealing to William Alston’s hypothesis that the value of epistemic justification is tied to reflection, an activity that is the distinctive mark of persons who can be held responsible for their beliefs and actions. Section 8.1 argues that epistemic justification is what makes our beliefs stable under an idealized process of reflection. Section 8.2 uses this proposal in arguing for the JJ principle, which says that you have justification to believe a proposition if and only if you have justification to believe that you have justification to believe it. Sections 8.3–8.6 defend this proposal against a series of objections raised by Hilary Kornblith: the overintellectualization problem, the regress problem, the empirical problem, and the value problem. Section 8.7 concludes with some reflections on the debate between internalism and externalism about epistemic justification.

A pluralist account of knowledge as a natural kind

In an attempt to address some long-standing issues of epistemology, Hilary Kornblith proposes that knowledge is a natural kind the identification of which is the unique responsibility of one particular science: cognitive ethology. As Kornblith sees it, the natural kind thus picked out is knowledge as construed by reliabilism. Yet the claim that cognitive ethology has this special role has not convinced all critics. The present article argues that knowledge plays a causal and explanatory role within many of our more fruitful current theories, diverging from the reliabilist conception even in disciplines that are closely related to cognitive ethology, and thus still dealing with knowledge as a natural as opposed to a social phenomenon, where special attention will be given to cognitive neuroscience. However, rather than discarding the natural kind approach altogether, it is argued that many of Kornblith’s insights can in fact be preserved within a framework that is both naturalist and pluralist.

REASONS FOR REASONS

ABSTRACTHilary Kornblith explores the prospects for reasons eliminationism, the view that reasons ought not to be regarded as being of central importance in epistemology. I reply by conceding that reasons may not be necessary for knowledge, in at least some cases, but I argue that they are nevertheless vitally important in epistemology more broadly. Their importance stems from being necessary, not for knowledge but for us, given that we are social agents with practical concerns. In that sense, we have (social and practical) reasons for (having a practice of giving and receiving epistemic) reasons.

Aristotelian Intellectual Intuition, Basic Beliefs and Naturalistic Epistemology

I first argue that Aristotelian intellectual intuition (recognizing archai through epagoge and seeing their truth by recognizing their explanatory power through nous) generates basic beliefs which are not inferred — inductively or deductively — from other beliefs. Both involve synthetic intuitive insight. Epagoge grasps a connection and nous sees its general applicability. I next argue that such beliefs are properly basic by adapting an argument made by Hilary Kornblith. According to Kornblith, the world is objectively divided into natural kinds. We humans perceive the world divided into natural kinds. There is empirical evidence suggesting that we divide the world not only as it is objectively divided, but in making inductive inferences, that is, in inferring that an object will have certain properties on the basis of its having others. This grounds the reliability of (certain) inductive inferences. But the leading principles (in Peirce’s sense) of these inferences are basic beliefs generated through intellectual intuition. Hence intellectual intuition generates certain properly basic beliefs.