Internal and External Objects of Cognition

Detailed analysis is conducted of the different constructions in which ‘know’, ‘believe’, ‘see’, and cognate verbs appear in ordinary or natural language, of their functions and of the relations and differences between them: e.g. noun-clauses of the form ‘that P’ serve different purposes after each of these classes of verb, partly reflected in the proposition–fact distinction—although ‘facts’ are ontologically unsuited to be what it is in the world we know. Some relevant views of Timothy Williamson (e.g. ‘e=k’) are discussed. The emphasis in current epistemology on the ‘know/see that P’ construction is criticized—no construction, and no use of the term ‘evidence’, is philosophically best, since it is no accident that we have them all. The philosophical task is to understand how they work together—the footprints in language of our cognitive relation to reality, manifestations of what knowledge, belief, and perception are.

Perception and Primary Knowledge

A phenomenological analysis of perceptual experience, conducted with an eye on experimental psychology, addresses a series of questions. What is phenomenology? What makes perception of one’s environment as one’s environment? Does the phenomenal integration of the senses give decisive reason for ‘direct realism’? Do we perceive causal relations, or only infer them? Are we perceptually aware of acting? Are we perceptually aware of the causality of perception itself, and if so, in some cases or in all? It is argued that perceiving is not only direct cognitive contact with reality, but that the perceptual relation is itself an object of perceptual awareness. Accordingly, conscious perceptual knowledge comes with knowledge that and of how one has it. Other forms of knowledge (e.g. a priori knowledge) are analogous. A distinction is drawn between primary and secondary knowledge, such that that there could be no secondary knowledge without some primary knowledge.

Conclusions

The aim of this book has been to give an account of what knowledge is that does justice to the insights embodied in the traditional exclusive distinction of kind between knowledge and belief. According to that long-accepted doctrine, as expounded and explained in Chapter 1...

Conceptualism and Perceptual Knowledge

Brief accounts of the motivation and form of some pre-Kantian conceptualist theories and of Kant’s transcendental idealism lead into discussion of the source of the conceptualist assumptions of much twentieth-century analytic philosophy. The arguments of a currently leading exponent, John McDowell, are critically examined, and his emphatic endorsement of two main conclusions of Chapter II are noted—that perception is direct cognitive contact with the world, and that perceptual knowledge is perspicuously so to the subject. But according to the phenomenological analysis in Chapter II these features are intrinsic to the content of preconceptual perceptual awareness, whereas McDowell sees concepts, coming only with language, as a necessary means to the former, and assigns the latter, in effect, to reason and the capacity for second-order reflection. Epistemological and logico–linguistic considerations relating to the identity, individuation and classification of material things present a further, arguably decisive challenge to conceptualist theory.

Scepticism and Externalism

Like Descartes, many analytic epistemologists employ sceptical argument ‘methodologically’, affording undue respect to its illusory force in order to present their own theory as the way to avoid its conclusion. Like ‘fallibilism’ and ‘contextualism’, epistemological ‘externalism’ (or ‘reliabilism’) is commonly thus supported. Well-known argument by Fred Dretske is selected for critical examination, which leads into the assessment of externalist notions of defeasibility. Certain fundamental presuppositions of these externalist arguments are identified and questioned. The problem of how our belief that our cognitive faculties are reliable can be justified without circularity, and Ernest Sosa’s answer to it, are considered, and another, less intellectualist answer given. A final section turns to McDowell’s ‘internalist’ response to scepticism, broached in Chapter III, and his version of ‘disjunctivism’, a doctrine assessed as making a valid point misleadingly presented as semantic analysis. McDowell’s oddly quasi-externalist conception of defeasibility and justification is also assessed.

Scepticism, Certainty, and Defeasibility

In a first analysis, the ‘Cartesian’ argument denying the possibility of perceptual knowledge is compared with acceptable and unacceptable arguments that occur in non-philosophical contexts. Its illusory force is attributed to similarities to the former, its invalidity to differences partly shared with the latter. A variety of possible moves in defence of scepticism are then critically considered. Discussion of a confusion between infallibility and certainty leads into the topic of probability and a critique of two related responses to scepticism, ‘fallibilism’ and ‘contextualism’, that discard the intuitive link between knowledge and objective certainty. The argument calls on the notion of ‘defeasibility’, a term imported from jurisprudence into epistemology (where it is seriously ambiguous—see Chapter 6). Its relation to the notion of burden of proof and to argumentation theory is explained, and a particular sense is accordingly proposed in which ascriptions of knowledge may be both certain and ‘defeasible’.

Knowledge and Belief from Plato to Locke

This essential historical introduction to the main themes of the book starts with a close, sympathetic, and significantly novel analysis (with reference to associated arguments) of a famous argument in Plato’s Republic in which Plato draws a distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, and between their objects. It is then demonstrated that the distinction, broadly so understood, remained a dominant force, in one form or another, in all non-sceptical branches of the European philosophical tradition, including empiricism (not least, Locke’s), until the eighteenth century (the epistemology of the Stoics and of Aquinas being particularly striking examples). It is argued that there is much to learn from this history (so different from the myth of a ‘traditional analysis’ of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’), and specific features of the traditional distinction are identified as deserving the further, sympathetic consideration given, in effect, in later chapters.