epistemology
philosophy
Introduction
the study of the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. The term is derived from the Greek epistēmē (“knowledge”) and logos (“reason”), and accordingly the field is sometimes referred to as the theory of knowledge. Epistemology has a long history, beginning with the ancient Greeks and continuing to the present. Along with metaphysics, logic, and ethics, it is one of the four main branches of philosophy, and nearly every great philosopher has contributed to it.
The nature of epistemology
Epistemology as a discipline
Why should there be a discipline such as epistemology? Aristotle (384–322 BC) provided the answer when he said that philosophy begins in a kind of wonder or puzzlement. Nearly all human beings wish to comprehend the world they live in, and many of them construct theories of various kinds to help them make sense of it. Because many aspects of the world defy easy explanation, however, most people are likely to cease their efforts at some point and to content themselves with whatever degree of understanding they have managed to achieve.
Unlike most people, philosophers are captivated—some would say obsessed—by the idea of understanding the world in the most general terms possible. Accordingly, they attempt to construct theories that are synoptic, descriptively accurate, explanatorily powerful, and in all other respects rationally defensible. In doing so, they carry the process of inquiry further than other people tend to do, and this is what is meant by saying that they develop a philosophy about these matters.
Like most people, epistemologists often begin their speculations with the assumption that they have a great deal of knowledge. As they reflect upon what they presumably know, however, they discover that it is much less secure than they realized, and indeed they come to think that many of what had been their firmest beliefs are dubious or even false. Such doubts arise from certain anomalies in our experience of the world. Although several of these anomalies are discussed below in the section on the history of epistemology, two in particular will be described in detail here in order to illustrate how they call into question our common claims to knowledge about the world.
Two epistemological problems
Knowledge of the external world
Most people have noticed that vision can play tricks. A straight stick submerged in water looks bent, though it is not; railroad tracks seem to converge in the distance, but they do not; and a page of English-language print reflected in a mirror cannot be read from left to right, though in all other circumstances it can. Each of these phenomena is misleading in some way. Anyone who believes that the stick is bent, that the railroad tracks converge, and so on is mistaken about how the world really is.Although these anomalies may seem simple and unproblematic at first, deeper consideration of them shows that just the opposite is true. How does one know that the stick is not really bent and that the tracks do not really converge? Suppose one says that one knows that the stick is not really bent because, when it is removed from the water, one can see that it is straight. But does seeing a straight stick out of water provide a good reason for thinking that, when it is in water, it is not bent? Suppose one says that the tracks do not really converge because the train passes over them at the point where they seem to converge. But how does one know that the wheels on the train do not converge at that point also? What justifies our preferring some of these beliefs to others, especially when all of them are based upon what is seen? What one sees is that the stick in water is bent and that the stick out of water is straight. Why then is the stick declared really to be straight? Why in effect is priority given to one perception over another?
One possible answer is to say that vision is not sufficient to give knowledge of how things are. Vision needs to be “corrected” with information derived from the other senses. Suppose then that a person asserts that his reason for believing that the stick in water is straight is that, when the stick is in water, he can feel with his hands that it is straight. But what justifies him in believing that his sense of touch is more reliable than his vision? After all, touch gives rise to misperceptions just as vision does. For example, if a person chills one hand and warms the other and then puts both in a tub of lukewarm water, the water will feel warm to the cold hand and cold to the warm hand. Thus, the difficulty cannot be resolved by appealing to input from the other senses.
Another possible response would begin by granting that none of the senses is guaranteed to present things as they really are. The belief that the stick is really straight, therefore, must be justified on the basis of some other form of awareness, perhaps reason. But why should reason be accepted as infallible? It is often used imperfectly, as when one forgets, miscalculates, or jumps to conclusions. Moreover, why should one trust reason if its conclusions run counter to those derived from sensation, considering that sense experience is obviously the basis of much of what is known about the world?
Clearly, there is a network of difficulties here, and one will have to think hard in order to arrive at a compelling defense of the apparently simple claim that the stick is truly straight. A person who accepts this challenge will, in effect, be addressing the larger philosophical problem of our knowledge of the external world. That problem consists of two issues: how one can know whether there is a reality that exists independently of sense experience, given that sense experience is ultimately the only evidence one has for the existence of anything, and how one can know what anything is really like, given that different kinds of sensory evidence often conflict with each other.
The other-minds (other minds, problem of) problem
Suppose a surgeon tells a patient who is about to undergo a knee operation that when he wakes up he will feel a sharp pain. When the patient wakes up, the surgeon hears him groaning and contorting his face in certain ways. Although we are naturally inclined to say that the surgeon knows what the patient is feeling, there is a sense in which he does not know, because he is not feeling that kind of pain himself. Unless he has undergone such an operation in the past, he cannot know what his patient feels. Indeed, the situation is more complicated than this, for even if the surgeon has undergone such an operation, he cannot know that what he felt after his operation is the same sort of sensation as what his patient is feeling now. Because each person's sensations are in a sense “private,” for all the surgeon knows, what he understands as pain and what the patient understands as pain could be very different. (Similar remarks apply to our use of colour terms. For all a person knows, the colour sensation he associates with “green” could be very different from the sensations other people associate with that term. This possibility is known as the problem of the inverted spectrum.)
It follows from this analysis that each human being is inevitably and even in principle prevented from having knowledge of the minds of other human beings. Despite the widely held conviction that in principle there is nothing in the world of fact that cannot be known through scientific investigation, the other-minds problem shows to the contrary that an entire domain of human experience is resistant to any sort of external inquiry. Thus, there can never be a science of the human mind.
Issues in epistemology
The nature of knowledge
As indicated above, one of the basic questions of epistemology concerns the nature of knowledge. Philosophers normally treat this question as a conceptual one—i.e., as an inquiry into a certain concept or idea. The question raises a perplexing methodological issue: namely, how does one go about investigating concepts?
It is frequently assumed, though the matter is controversial, that one can determine what knowledge is by considering what the word “knowledge” means. Although concepts are not the same as words, words—i.e., languages—are the medium in which concepts are displayed. Hence, examination of the ways in which words are used can yield insight into the nature of the concepts associated with them.
An investigation of the concept of knowledge, then, would begin by studying uses of “knowledge” and cognate expressions in everyday language. Expressions such as “know him,” “know that,” “know how,” “know where,” “know why,” and “know whether,” for example, have been explored in detail, especially since the beginning of the 20th century. As Gilbert Ryle (Ryle, Gilbert) (1900–76) has pointed out, there are important differences between “know that” and “know how.” The latter expression is normally used to refer to a kind of skill or ability, such as knowing how to swim. One can have such knowledge without being able to explain to other people what it is that one knows in such a case—that is, without being able to convey the same skill. The expression “know what” is similar to “know how” in this respect, insofar as one can know what a clarinet sounds like without being able to say what one knows—at least not succinctly. “Know that,” in contrast, seems to denote the possession of specific pieces of information, and the person who has knowledge of this sort generally can convey it to others. Knowing that the Concordat of Worms was signed in the year 1122 is an example of this sort of knowledge. Ryle argued that, given these differences, some cases of knowing how cannot be reduced to cases of knowing that, and, accordingly, the kinds of knowledge expressed by these phrases are independent of each other.
For the most part, epistemology from the ancient Greeks to the present has focused on “knowing that.” This sort of knowledge, often referred to as propositional knowledge, raises a number of peculiar epistemological problems, among which is the much-debated issue of what kind of thing one knows when one knows that something is the case. In other words, in sentences of the form “A knows that p”—where “A” is the name of some person and “p” is a sentential clause, such as “snow is white”—what sort of entity does “p” refer to? The list of candidates has included beliefs, propositions, statements, sentences, and utterances of sentences. Although the arguments for and against the various candidates are beyond the scope of this article, two points should be noted here: first, the issue is closely related to the problem of universals—i.e., the problem of whether qualities or properties, such as redness, are abstract objects, mental concepts, or simply names. Second, it is agreed by all sides that one cannot have “knowledge that” of that which is not true. A necessary condition of “A knows that p,” therefore, is p.
Five distinctions
Mental and nonmental conceptions of knowledge
Some philosophers have held that knowledge is a state of mind—i.e., a special kind of awareness of things. According to Plato (428/27–348/47 BC), for example, knowing is a mental state akin to, but different from, believing. Contemporary versions of this theory assert that knowing is one member of a group of mental states that can be arranged in a series according to increasing certitude. At one end of the series would be guessing and conjecturing, for example, which possess the least amount of certitude; in the middle would be thinking, believing, and feeling sure; and at the end would be knowing, the most certain of all these states. Knowledge, in all views of this type, is a form of consciousness, and accordingly it is common for proponents of such views to hold that, if A knows that p, A must be conscious of what he knows. That is, if A knows that p, A knows that he knows that p.
In the 20th century, many philosophers rejected the notion that knowledge is a mental state. Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein, Ludwig) (1889–1951), for example, said in On Certainty, published posthumously in 1969, that “‘Knowledge' and certainty belong to different categories. They are not two mental states like, say surmising and being sure.” Philosophers who deny that knowledge is a mental state typically point out that it is characteristic of mental states like doubting, being in pain, and having an opinion that a person who is in such a state is aware that he is in it. They then observe that it is possible to know that something is the case without being aware that one knows it. A good example is found in Plato's Meno, where Socrates (c. 470–399 BC) elicits from a slave boy geometrical knowledge that the boy was not aware he had. They conclude that it is a mistake to assimilate cases of knowing to cases of doubting, being in pain, and the like.
But if knowing is not a mental state, what is it? Some philosophers have held that knowing cannot be described as a single thing, such as a state of consciousness. Instead, they claim that one can ascribe knowledge to someone, or to oneself, only when certain complex conditions are satisfied, among them certain behavioral conditions. For example, if a person always gives the right answers to questions about a certain topic under test conditions, one would be entitled, on this view, to say that he has knowledge of that topic. Because knowing is tied to the capacity to behave in certain ways, knowledge is not a mental state, though mental states may be involved in the exercise of the capacity that constitutes knowledge.
A well-known example of such a view was advanced by J.L. Austin (Austin, John Langshaw) (1911–60) in his 1946 paper "Other Minds." Austin claimed that, when one says “I know,” one is not describing a mental state; in fact, one is not “describing” anything at all. Instead, one is indicating that one is in a position to assert that such and such is the case (one has the proper credentials and reasons) in circumstances where it is necessary to resolve a doubt. When these conditions are satisfied—when one is, in fact, in a position to assert that such and such is the case—one can correctly be said to know.
Occasional and dispositional knowledge
A distinction closely related to the previous one is that between “occurrent” and “dispositional” knowledge. Occurrent knowledge is knowledge of which one is currently aware. If one is working on a problem and suddenly sees the solution, for example, one can be said to have occurrent knowledge of it, because “seeing” the solution involves being aware of or attending to it. In contrast, dispositional knowledge, as the term suggests, is a disposition, or a propensity, to behave in certain ways in certain conditions. Although Smith may not now be thinking of his home address, he certainly knows it in the sense that, if one were to ask him what it is, he could provide it. Thus, one can have knowledge of things of which one is not aware at a given moment.
A priori and a posteriori knowledge
Since at least the 17th century, a sharp distinction has been drawn between a priori knowledge and a posteriori knowledge. The distinction plays an especially important role in the work of David Hume (Hume, David) (1711–76) and Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel) (1724–1804).
The distinction is easily illustrated by means of examples. Assume that the sentence “All Model T Fords are black” is true and compare it to the true sentence “All husbands are married.” How would one come to know that these sentences are true? In the case of the second sentence, the answer is that one knows that it is true by understanding the meanings of the words it contains. Because “husband” means “married male,” it is true by definition that all husbands are married. This kind of knowledge is a priori in the sense that one need not engage in any factual or empirical inquiry in order to obtain it.
In contrast, just such an investigation is necessary in order to know whether the first sentence is true. Unlike the second sentence, simply understanding the words is not enough. Knowledge of this kind is a posteriori in the sense that it can be obtained only through certain kinds of experience.
The differences between sentences that express a priori knowledge and those that express a posteriori knowledge are sometimes described in terms of four additional distinctions: necessary versus contingent, analytic versus synthetic, tautological versus significant, and logical versus factual. These distinctions are normally spoken of as applying to “propositions,” which may be thought of as the contents, or meanings, of sentences that can be either true or false. For example, the English sentence “Snow is white” and the German sentence “Schnee ist weiß” have the same meaning, which is the proposition “Snow is white.”
Necessary and contingent propositions
A proposition is said to be necessary if it holds (is true) in all logically possible circumstances or conditions. “All husbands are married” is such a proposition. There are no possible or conceivable conditions in which this proposition is not true (on the assumption, of course, that the words “husband” and “married” are taken to mean what they ordinarily mean). In contrast, “All Model T Fords are black” holds in some circumstances (those actually obtaining, which is why the proposition is true), but it is easy to imagine circumstances in which it would not be true. To say, therefore, that a proposition is contingent is to say that it is true in some but not in all possible circumstances. Many necessary propositions, such as “All husbands are married,” are a priori—though it has been argued that some are not (see below Necessary a posteriori propositions (epistemology))—and most contingent propositions are a posteriori.
Analytic (analytic proposition) and synthetic propositions
A proposition is said to be analytic if the meaning of the predicate term is contained in the meaning of the subject term. Thus, “All husbands are married” is analytic because part of the meaning of the term “husband” is being married. A proposition is said to be synthetic if this is not so. “All Model T Fords are black” is synthetic, since “black” is not included in the meaning of “Model T Ford.” Some analytic propositions are a priori, and most synthetic propositions are a posteriori. These distinctions (analytic-synthetic distinction) were used by Kant to ask one of the most important questions in the history of epistemology, namely, whether a priori synthetic judgments are possible (see below Modern philosophy: Immanuel Kant (epistemology)).
Tautological (tautology) and significant propositions
A proposition is said to be tautological if its constituent terms repeat themselves or if they can be reduced to terms that do, so that the proposition is of the form “a = a” (“a is identical to a”). Such propositions convey no information about the world, and accordingly they are said to be trivial, or empty of cognitive import. A proposition is said to be significant if its constituent terms are such that the proposition does provide new information about the world.
The distinction between tautological and significant propositions figures importantly in the history of the philosophy of religion. In the so-called ontological argument for the existence of God, St. Anselm of Canterbury (Anselm of Canterbury, Saint) (1033/34–1109) attempted to derive the significant conclusion that God exists from the tautological premise that God is the only perfect being together with the premise that no being can be perfect unless it exists. As Hume and Kant pointed out, however, it is fallacious to derive a proposition with existential import from a tautology, and it is now generally agreed that, from a tautology alone, it is impossible to derive any significant proposition. Tautological propositions are generally a priori, necessary, and analytic, and significant propositions are generally a posteriori, contingent, and synthetic.
Logical and factual propositions
A logical proposition is any proposition that can be reduced by replacement of its constituent terms to a proposition expressing a logical truth—e.g., to a proposition such as “If p and q, then p.” The proposition “All husbands are married,” for example, is logically equivalent to the proposition “If something is married and it is male, then it is married.” In contrast, the semantic and syntactic features of factual propositions make it impossible to reduce them to logical truths. Logical propositions are often a priori, always necessary, and typically analytic. Factual propositions are generally a posteriori, contingent, and synthetic.
Necessary a posteriori propositions
The distinctions reviewed above have been explored extensively in contemporary philosophy. In one such study, Naming and Necessity (1972), Saul Kripke (Kripke, Saul) argued that, contrary to traditional assumptions, not all necessary propositions are known a priori; some are knowable only a posteriori. According to Kripke, the view that all necessary propositions are a priori relies on a conflation of the concepts of necessity and analyticity. Because all analytic propositions are both a priori and necessary, most philosophers have assumed without much reflection that all necessary propositions are a priori. But this is a mistake, argues Kripke. His point is usually illustrated by means of a type of proposition known as an “identity” statement—i.e., a statement of the form “a = a.” Thus, consider the true identity statements “Venus is Venus” and “The morning star is the evening star.” Whereas “Venus is Venus” is knowable a priori, “The morning star 【i.e., Venus】 is the evening star 【i.e., Venus】” is not. It cannot be known merely through reflection, prior to any experience. In fact, the statement was not known until the ancient Babylonians discovered, through astronomical observation, that the heavenly body observed in the morning is the same as the heavenly body observed in the evening. Hence “The morning star is the evening star” is a posteriori. But it is also necessary, because, like “Venus is Venus,” it says only that a particular object, Venus, is identical to itself, and it is impossible to imagine circumstances in which Venus is not the same as Venus. Other types of proposition that are both necessary and a posteriori, according to Kripke, are statements of material origin, such as “This table is made of (a particular piece of) wood,” and statements of natural-kind essence, such as “Water is H2O.” It is important to note that Kripke's arguments, though influential, have not been universally accepted, and the existence of necessary a posteriori propositions continues to be a much-disputed issue.
Description and justification
Throughout its very long history, epistemology has pursued two different sorts of task: description and justification. The two tasks of description and justification are not inconsistent, and indeed they are often closely connected in the writings of contemporary philosophers.
In its descriptive task, epistemology aims to depict accurately certain features of the world, including the contents of the human mind, and to determine what kinds of mental content, if any, ought to count as knowledge. An example of a descriptive epistemological system is the Phenomenology of Edmund Husserl (Husserl, Edmund) (1859–1938). Husserl's aim was to give an exact description of the phenomenon of intentionality, or the feature of conscious mental states by virtue of which they are always “about,” or “directed toward,” some object. In his posthumously published masterpiece Philosophical Investigations (1953), Wittgenstein states that “explanation must be replaced by description,” and much of his later work was devoted to carrying out that task. Other examples of descriptive epistemology can be found in the work of G.E. Moore (1873–1958), H.H. Price (1899–1984), and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), each of whom considered whether there are ways of apprehending the world that do not depend on any form of inference and, if so, what this apprehension consists of see below Contemporary philosophy: Perception and knowledge (epistemology)). Closely related to this work were attempts by various philosophers, including Moritz Schlick (1882–1936), Otto Neurath (1882–1945), and A.J. Ayer (1910–89), to identify “protocol sentences (protocol sentence)”—i.e., statements that describe what is immediately given in experience without inference.
Epistemology has a second justificatory, or normative, function. Philosophers concerned with this function ask themselves what kinds of belief (if any) can be rationally justified. The question has normative import since it asks, in effect, what one ought ideally to believe. (In this respect, epistemology parallels ethics, which asks normative questions about how one ought ideally to act.) The normative approach quickly takes one into the central domains of epistemology, raising questions such as: “Is knowledge identical with justified true belief?,” “Is the difference between knowledge and belief merely a matter of probability?,” and “What is justification?”
Knowledge and certainty
Philosophers have disagreed sharply about the complex relationship between the concepts of knowledge and certainty. Are they the same? If not, how do they differ? Is it possible for someone to know that p without being certain that p, or to be certain that p without knowing that p?
In his 1941 paper "Certainty," Moore (Moore, G E) observed that the word “certain” is commonly used in four main types of idiom: “I feel certain that,” “I am certain that,” “I know for certain that,” and “It is certain that.” He pointed out that there is at least one use of “I know for certain that p” and “It is certain that p” on which neither of these sentences can be true unless p is true. A sentence such as “I knew for certain that he would come but he didn't,” for example, is self-contradictory, whereas “I felt certain he would come but he didn't” is not. On the basis of considerations like these, Moore contended that “a thing can't be certain unless it is known.” It is this fact that distinguishes the concept of certainty from that of truth: a thing that nobody knows may well be true, but it cannot possibly be certain. Moore concludes that a necessary condition for the truth of “It is certain that p” is that somebody should know that p. Moore is therefore among the philosophers who answer in the negative the question of whether it is possible for someone to be certain that p without knowing that p.
Moore also argued that to say “A knows that p is true” cannot be a sufficient condition for “It is certain that p.” If it were, it would follow that, in any case in which at least one person did know that p is true, it would always be false for anyone to say “It is not certain that p”; but clearly this is not so. If a person says that it is not certain that Smith is still alive, he is not thereby committing himself to the statement that nobody knows that Smith is still alive. Moore is thus among the philosophers who would answer in the affirmative the question of whether it is possible for a person to know that p without being certain that p. Other philosophers have disagreed, arguing that, if the person's knowledge that p is occurrent rather than merely dispositional, it implies certainty that p.
The most radical position on these matters is the one taken by Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein, Ludwig) in On Certainty. Wittgenstein holds that knowledge is radically different from certitude and that neither concept entails the other. It is thus possible to be in a state of knowledge without being certain and to be certain without having knowledge. For him, certainty is to be identified not with apprehension, or “seeing,” but with a kind of acting. A proposition is certain, in other words, when its truth (and the truth of many related propositions) is presupposed in the various social activities of a community. As he says: “Giving grounds, justifying the evidence comes to an end—but the end is not certain propositions striking us immediately as true—i.e., it is not a kind of seeing on our part; it is our acting which lies at the bottom of the language game.”
The origins of knowledge
Philosophers wish to know not only what knowledge is but also how it arises. This desire is motivated in part by the assumption that an investigation into the origins of knowledge can shed light on its nature. Accordingly, such investigations have been one of the major themes of epistemology from the time of the ancient Greeks to the present. Plato's Republic contains one of the earliest systematic arguments to show that sense experience cannot be a source of knowledge. The argument begins with the assertion that ordinary persons have a clear grasp of certain concepts—e.g., the concept of equality. In other words, people know what it means to say that a and b are equal, no matter what a and b are. But where does such knowledge come from? Consider the claim that two pieces of wood are of equal length. A close visual inspection would show them to differ slightly, and the more detailed the inspection, the more disparity one would notice. It follows that visual experience cannot be the source of the concept of equality. Plato applies this line of reasoning to all five senses and concludes that such knowledge cannot originate in sense experience. As in the Meno, discussed above, Plato concludes that such knowledge is “recollected” by the soul from an earlier existence.
It is highly significant that Plato should use mathematical (mathematics) (specifically, geometrical) examples to show that knowledge does not originate in sense experience; indeed, it is a sign of his perspicacity. As the subsequent history of philosophy reveals, mathematics provides the strongest case for Plato's view. Mathematical entities—e.g., perfect triangles, disembodied surfaces and edges, lines without thickness, and extensionless points—are abstractions, none of which exists in the physical world apprehended by the senses. Our knowledge of such entities, it is argued, must therefore come from some other source.
Innate (innate idea) and acquired knowledge
The problem of the origins of knowledge has engendered two historically important kinds of debate. One of them concerns the question of whether knowledge is innate—i.e., present in the mind, in some sense, from birth—or acquired through experience. This matter has been important not only in philosophy but also, since the mid-20th century, in linguistics and psychology. The American linguist Noam Chomsky (Chomsky, Noam), for example, has argued that the ability of young (developmentally normal) children to acquire any human language on the basis of invariably incomplete and even incorrect data is proof of the existence of innate linguistic structures. In contrast, the experimental psychologist B.F. Skinner (Skinner, B.F.) (1904–90), a leading figure in the movement known as behaviourism, tried to show that all knowledge, including linguistic knowledge, is the product of learning through environmental conditioning by means of processes of reinforcement and reward. There also have been a range of “compromise” theories, which claim that humans have both innate and acquired knowledge.
Rationalism and Empiricism
The second debate related to the problem of the origins of knowledge is that between Rationalism and Empiricism. According to rationalists, the ultimate source of human knowledge is the faculty of reason; according to empiricists, it is experience. The nature of reason is a difficult problem, but it is generally assumed to be a unique feature or faculty of the mind through which truths about reality may be grasped. Such a thesis is double-sided: it holds, on the one hand, that reality is in principle knowable and, on the other hand, that there is a human faculty (or set of faculties) capable of knowing it. One thus might define rationalism as the theory that there is an isomorphism (a mirroring relationship) between reason and reality that makes it possible for the former to apprehend the latter just as it is. Rationalists contend that, if such a correspondence were lacking, it would be impossible for human beings to understand the world.
Almost no philosopher has been a strict, thoroughgoing empiricist—i.e., one who holds that literally all knowledge comes from experience. Even John Locke (Locke, John) (1632–1704), considered the father of modern empiricism, thought that there is some knowledge that does not derive from experience, though he held that it was “trifling” and empty of content. Hume held similar views.
Empiricism thus generally acknowledges the existence of a priori knowledge but denies its significance. Accordingly, it is more accurately defined as the theory that all significant or factual propositions are known through experience. Even defined in this way, however, it continues to contrast significantly with rationalism. Rationalists hold that human beings have knowledge that is prior to experience and yet significant. Empiricists deny that this is possible.
The term experience is usually understood to refer to ordinary physical sensations—or in Hume's parlance, “impressions.” For strict empiricists this definition has the implication that the human mind is passive—a “ tabula rasa” that receives impressions and more or less records them as they are.
The conception of the mind as a tabula rasa posed serious challenges for empiricists. It raised the question, for example, of how one can have knowledge of entities, such as dragons, that cannot be found in experience. The response of classical empiricists such as Locke and Hume was to show that the complex concept of a dragon can be reduced to simple concepts (such as wings, the body of a snake, the head of a horse), all of which derive from impressions. On such a view the mind is still considered primarily passive, but it is conceded that it has the power to combine simple ideas into complex ones.
But there are further difficulties. The empiricist must explain how abstract ideas, such as the concept of a perfect triangle, can be reduced to elements apprehended by the senses when no perfect triangles are found in nature. He must also give an account of how general concepts (universal) are possible. It is obvious that one does not experience “mankind” through the senses; yet such concepts are meaningful, and propositions containing them are known to be true. The same difficulty applies to colour concepts. Some empiricists have argued that one arrives at the concept of red, for example, by mentally abstracting from one's experience of individual red items. The difficulty with this suggestion is that one cannot know what to count as an experience of red unless one already has a concept of red in mind. If it is replied that the concept of red and others like it are acquired when we are taught the word red in childhood, a similar difficulty arises. The teaching process, according to the empiricist, consists of pointing to a red object and telling the child “This is red.” This process is repeated a number of times until the child forms the concept of red by abstracting from the series of examples he is shown. But these examples are necessarily very limited: they do not include even a fraction of the shades of red the child might ever see. Consequently, it is possible for the child to abstract or generalize from them in a variety of different ways, only some of which would correspond to the way the community of adult language users happens to apply the term red. How then does the child know which abstraction is the “right” one to draw from the examples? According to the rationalist, the only way to account for the child's selection of the correct concept is to suppose that at least part of it is innate.
Skepticism
Many philosophers, as well as many people studying philosophy for the first time, have been struck by the seemingly indecisive nature of philosophical argumentation. For every argument there seems to be a counterargument, and for every position a counterposition. To a considerable extent, Skepticism is born of such reflection. Some ancient skeptics contended that all arguments are equally bad and, accordingly, that nothing can be proved. The contemporary American philosopher Benson Mates, who claims to be a modern representative of this tradition, has argued that all philosophical arguments are equally good.
Ironically, skepticism itself is a kind of philosophy, and the question has been raised whether it manages to escape its own criticisms. The answer to this question depends on what is meant by skepticism. Historically, the term refers to a variety of different views and practices. But however it is understood, skepticism represents a challenge to the claim that human beings possess or can acquire knowledge.
In giving even this minimal characterization, it is important to emphasize that skeptics and nonskeptics alike accept the same definition of knowledge, one that implies two things: (1) if A knows that p, then p is true, and (2) if A knows that p, then A cannot be mistaken; i.e., it is logically impossible that he is wrong. Thus, if a person says that he knows Smith will arrive at nine o'clock and Smith does not arrive at nine o'clock, then that person must withdraw his claim to know. He might say instead that he thought he knew or that he felt sure, but he cannot rationally continue to insist that he knew if what he claimed to know turns out to be false.
Given this definition of knowledge, in order for the skeptical challenge to succeed, it is not necessary to show that the person who claims to know that p is in fact mistaken; it is enough to show that a mistake is logically possible. This condition corresponds to the second of the two clauses mentioned above. If the skeptic can establish that this clause is false in the case of a person's claim to know that p, he will have proved that the person does not know that p. Thus arises the skeptic's practice of searching for possible counterexamples to ordinary knowledge claims.
One variety of radical skepticism claims that there is no such thing as knowledge of an external world. According to this view, it is at least logically possible that one is merely a brain in a vat and that one's sense experiences of apparently real objects (e.g., the sight of a tree) are produced by carefully engineered electrical stimulations. Again, given the definition of knowledge above, this kind of argument is sound, because it shows that there is a logical gap between knowledge claims about the external world and the sense experiences that can be adduced as evidence to support them. No matter how much evidence of this sort one has, it is always logically possible that the corresponding knowledge claim is false.
The history of epistemology
Ancient philosophy
The pre-Socratics
The central focus of ancient Greek philosophy was the problem of motion. Many pre-Socratic philosophers thought that no logically coherent account of motion and change could be given. Although this problem was primarily a concern of metaphysics, not epistemology, it had the consequence that all major Greek philosophers held that knowledge must not itself change or be changeable in any respect. This requirement motivated Parmenides (fl. 5th century BC), for example, to hold that thinking is identical with “being” (i.e., all objects of thought exist and are unchanging) and that it is impossible to think of “nonbeing” or “becoming” in any way.
Plato
Plato accepted the Parmenidean constraint that knowledge must be unchanging. One consequence of this view, as Plato pointed out in the Theaetetus, is that sense experience cannot be a source of knowledge, because the objects apprehended through it are subject to change. To the extent that humans have knowledge, they attain it by transcending sense experience in order to discover unchanging objects through the exercise of reason.The Platonic theory of knowledge thus contains two parts: first, an investigation into the nature of unchanging objects and, second, a discussion of how these objects can be known through reason. Of the many literary devices Plato used to illustrate his theory, the best known is the allegory of the cave, which appears in Book VII of the Republic. The allegory depicts people living in a cave, which represents the world of sense-experience. In the cave people see only unreal objects, shadows, or images. Through a painful intellectual process, which involves the rejection and overcoming of the familiar sensible world, they begin an ascent out of the cave into reality. This process is the analogue of the exercise of reason, which allows one to apprehend unchanging objects and thus to acquire knowledge. The upward journey, which few people are able to complete, culminates in the direct vision of the Sun, which represents the source of knowledge.
Plato's investigation of unchanging objects begins with the observation that every faculty of the mind apprehends a unique set of objects: hearing apprehends sounds, sight apprehends visual images, smell apprehends odours, and so on. Knowing also is a mental faculty, according to Plato, and therefore there must be a unique set of objects that it apprehends. Roughly speaking, these objects are the entities denoted by terms that can be used as predicates—e.g., “good,” “white,” and “triangle.” To say “This is a triangle,” for example, is to attribute a certain property, that of being a triangle, to a certain spatiotemporal object, such as a figure drawn in the sand. Plato is here distinguishing between specific triangles that are drawn, sketched, or painted and the common property they share, that of being triangular. Objects of the former kind, which he calls “particulars,” are always located somewhere in space and time—i.e., in the world of appearance. The property they share is a “form” or “idea” (though the latter term is not used in any psychological sense). Unlike particulars, forms do not exist in space and time; moreover, they do not change. They are thus the objects that one apprehends when one has knowledge.
Reason is used to discover unchanging forms through the method of dialectic, which Plato inherited from his teacher Socrates. The method involves a process of question and answer designed to elicit a “real definition.” By a real definition Plato means a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that exactly determine the entities to which a given concept applies. The entities to which the concept “being a brother” applies, for example, are determined by the concepts “being male” and “being a sibling”: it is both necessary and sufficient for a person to be a brother that he be male and a sibling. Anyone who grasps these conditions understands precisely what being a brother is.
In the Republic, Plato applies the dialectical method to the concept of justice. In response to a proposal by Cephalus that “justice” means the same as “honesty in word and deed,” Socrates points out that, under some conditions, it is just not to tell the truth or to repay debts. Suppose one borrows a weapon from a person who later loses his sanity. If the person then demands his weapon back in order to kill someone who is innocent, it would be just to lie to him, stating that one no longer had the weapon. Therefore, “justice” cannot mean the same as “honesty in word and deed.” By this technique of proposing one definition after another and subjecting each to possible counterexamples, Socrates attempts to discover a definition that cannot be refuted. In doing so he apprehends the form of justice, the common feature that all just things share.
Plato's search for definitions and, thereby, forms is a search for knowledge. But how should knowledge in general be defined? In the Theaetetus Plato argues that, at a minimum, knowledge involves true belief. No one can know what is false. A person may believe that he knows something, which is in fact false, but in that case he does not really know, he only thinks he knows. But knowledge is more than simply true belief. Suppose that someone has a dream in April that there will be an earthquake in September, and on the basis of his dream he forms the belief that there will be an earthquake in September. Suppose also that in fact there is an earthquake in September. The person has a true belief about the earthquake, but not knowledge of it. What he lacks is a good reason to support his true belief. In a word, he lacks justification. Using arguments such as these, Plato contends that knowledge is justified true belief.
Although there has been much disagreement about the nature of justification, the Platonic definition of knowledge was widely accepted until the mid-20th century, when the American philosopher Edmund L. Gettier produced a startling counterexample. Suppose that Kathy knows Oscar very well. Kathy is walking across the mall, and Oscar is walking behind her, out of sight. In front of her, Kathy sees someone walking toward her who looks exactly like Oscar. Unbeknownst to her, however, it is Oscar's twin brother. Kathy forms the belief that Oscar is walking across the mall. Her belief is true, because Oscar is in fact walking across the mall (though she does not see him doing it). And her true belief seems to be justified, because the evidence she has for it is the same as the evidence she would have had if the person she had seen were really Oscar and not Oscar's twin. In other words, if her belief that Oscar is walking across the mall is justified when the person she sees is Oscar, then it also must be justified when the person she sees is Oscar's twin, because in both cases the evidence—the sight of an Oscar-like figure walking across the mall—is the same. Nonetheless, Kathy does not know that Oscar is walking across the mall. According to Gettier, the problem is that Kathy's belief is not causally connected to its object (Oscar) in the right way.
Aristotle
In the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle (384–322 BC) claims that each science consists of a set of first principles, which are necessarily true and knowable directly, and a set of truths, which are both logically derivable from and causally explained by the first principles. The demonstration of a scientific truth is accomplished by means of a series of syllogisms (syllogism)—a form of argument invented by Aristotle—in which the premises of each syllogism in the series are justified as the conclusions of earlier syllogisms. In each syllogism, the premises not only logically necessitate the conclusion (i.e., the truth of the premises makes it logically impossible for the conclusion to be false) but causally explain it as well. Thus, in the syllogismAll stars are distant objects.
All distant objects twinkle.
Therefore, all stars twinkle.
the fact that stars twinkle is explained by the fact that all distant objects twinkle and the fact that stars are distant objects. The premises of the first syllogism in the series are first principles, which do not require demonstration, and the conclusion of the final syllogism is the scientific truth in question.
Much of what Aristotle says about knowledge is part of his doctrine about the nature of the soul, and in particular the human soul. As he uses the term, the soul (psyche) of a thing is what makes it alive; thus, every living thing, including plant life, has a soul. The mind or intellect (nous) can be described variously as a power, faculty, part, or aspect of the human soul. It should be noted that for Aristotle “soul” and “intellect” are scientific terms.
In an enigmatic passage, Aristotle claims that “actual knowledge is identical with its object.” By this he seems to mean something like the following. When a person learns something, he “acquires” it in some sense. What he acquires must be either different from the thing he knows or identical with it. If it is different, then there is a discrepancy between what he has in mind and the object of his knowledge. But such a discrepancy seems to be incompatible with the existence of knowledge. For knowledge, which must be true and accurate, cannot deviate from its object in any way. One cannot know that blue is a colour, for example, if the object of that knowledge is something other than that blue is a colour. This idea, that knowledge is identical with its object, is dimly reflected in the modern formula for expressing one of the necessary conditions of knowledge: A knows that p only if it is true that p.
To assert that knowledge and its object must be identical raises a question: In what way is knowledge “in” a person? Suppose that Smith knows what dogs are—i.e., he knows what it is to be a dog. Then, in some sense, dogs, or being a dog, must be in the mind of Smith. But how can this be? Aristotle derives his answer from his general theory of reality. According to him, all (terrestrial) substances are composed of two principles: form and matter. All dogs, for example, consist of a form—the form of being a dog—and matter, which is the stuff out of which they are made. The form of an object makes it the kind of thing it is. Matter, on the other hand, is literally unintelligible. Consequently, what is in the knower when he knows what dogs are is just the form of being a dog.
In his sketchy account of the process of thinking in De anima (On the Soul), Aristotle says that the intellect, like everything else, must have two parts: something analogous to matter and something analogous to form. The first of these is the passive intellect; the second is active intellect, of which Aristotle speaks tersely. “Intellect in this sense is separable, impassible, unmixed, since it is in its essential nature activity. …When intellect is set free from its present conditions it appears as just what it is and nothing more: it alone is immortal and eternal…and without it nothing thinks.”
This part of Aristotle's views about knowledge is an extension of what he says about sensation. According to him, sensation occurs when the sense organ is stimulated by the sense object, typically through some medium, such as light for vision and air for hearing. This stimulation causes a “sensible species” to be generated in the sense organ itself. This “species” is some sort of representation of the object sensed. As Aristotle describes the process, the sense organ receives “the form of sensible objects without the matter, just as the wax receives the impression of the signet-ring without the iron or the gold.”
Ancient Skepticism
After the death of Aristotle the next significant development in the history of epistemology was the rise of Skepticism, of which there were at least two kinds. The first, Academic Skepticism, arose in the Academy (the school founded by Plato) in the 3rd century BC and was propounded by the Greek philosopher Arcesilaus (c. 315–c. 240 BC), about whom Cicero (Cicero, Marcus Tullius) (106–43 BC), Sextus Empiricus (fl. 3rd century AD), and Diogenes Laërtius (fl. 3rd century AD) provide information. The Academic Skeptics, who are sometimes called “dogmatic” Skeptics, argued that nothing could be known with certainty. This form of Skepticism seems susceptible to the objection, raised by the Stoic Antipater (fl. c. 135 BC) and others, that the view is self-contradictory. To know that knowledge is impossible is to know something; hence, dogmatic Skepticism must be false.
Carneades (c. 213–129 BC), also a member of the Academy, developed a subtle reply to this charge. Academic Skepticism, he insisted, is not a theory about knowledge or the world but rather a kind of argumentative strategy. According to this strategy, the skeptic does not try to prove that he knows nothing. Instead, he simply assumes that he knows nothing and defends that assumption against attack. The burden of proof, in other words, is on those who believe that knowledge is possible.
Carneades' interpretation of Academic Skepticism renders it very similar to the other major kind, Pyrrhonism, which takes its name from Pyrrho of Elis (c. 365–275 BC). Pyrrhonists, while not asserting or denying anything, attempted to show that one ought to suspend judgment and avoid making any knowledge claims at all, even the negative claim that nothing is known. The Pyrrhonist's strategy was to show that, for every proposition supported by some evidence, there is an opposite proposition supported by evidence that is equally good. Arguments like these, which are designed to refute both sides of an issue, are known as “tropes.” The judgment that a tower is round when seen at a distance, for example, is contradicted by the judgment that the tower is square when seen up close. The judgment that Providence cares for all things, which is supported by the orderliness of the heavenly bodies, is contradicted by the judgment that many good people suffer misery and many bad people enjoy happiness. The judgment that apples have many properties—shape, colour, taste, and aroma—each of which affects a sense organ, is contradicted by the equally good possibility that apples have only one property that affects each sense organ differently.
What is at stake in these arguments is “the problem of the criterion”—i.e., the problem of determining a justifiable standard against which to measure the worth or validity of judgments, or claims to knowledge. According to the Pyrrhonists, every possible criterion is either groundless or inconclusive. Thus, suppose that something is offered as a criterion. The Pyrrhonist will ask what justification there is for it. If no justification is offered, then the criterion is groundless. If, on the other hand, a justification is produced, then the justification itself is either justified or it is not. If it is not justified, then again the criterion is groundless. If it is justified, then there must be some criterion that justifies it. But this is just what the dogmatist was supposed to have provided in the first place.
If the Pyrrhonist needed to make judgments in order to survive, he would be in trouble. In fact, however, there is a way of living that bypasses judgment. He can live quite nicely, according to Sextus, by following custom and accepting things as they appear to him. In doing so, he does not judge the correctness of anything but merely accepts appearances for what they are.
Ancient Pyrrhonism is not strictly an epistemology, since it has no theory of knowledge and is content to undermine the dogmatic epistemologies of others, especially Stoicism and Epicureanism. Pyrrho himself was said to have had ethical motives for attacking dogmatists: being reconciled to not knowing anything, Pyrrho thought, induced serenity (ataraxia).
St. Augustine (Augustine, Saint)
St. Augustine of Hippo (Augustine, Saint) (354–430) claimed that human knowledge would be impossible if God (Christianity) did not “illumine” the human mind and thereby allow it to see, grasp, or understand ideas. Ideas as Augustine construed them are—like Plato's—timeless, immutable, and accessible only to the mind. They are indeed in some mysterious way a part of God and seen in God. Illumination, the other element of the theory, was for Augustine and his many followers, at least through the 14th century (Middle Ages), a technical notion, built upon a visual metaphor inherited from Plotinus (205–270) and other Neoplatonic thinkers. According to this view, the human mind is like an eye that can see when and only when God, the source of light, illumines it. Varying his metaphor, Augustine sometimes says that the human mind “participates” in God and even, as in On the Teacher (389), that Christ illumines the mind by dwelling in it. It is important to emphasize that Augustine's theory of illumination concerns all knowledge, and not specifically mystical or spiritual knowledge.
Before he articulated this theory in his mature years, soon after his conversion to Christianity, Augustine was concerned to refute the Skepticism of the Academy. In Against the Academicians (386) he claimed that, if nothing else, humans know disjunctive tautologies such as “Either there is one world or there is not one world” and “Either the world is finite or it is infinite.” Humans also know many propositions that begin with the phrase “It appears to me that,” such as “It appears to me that what I perceive is made up of earth and sky, or what appears to be earth and sky.” Furthermore, they know logical (or what he calls “dialectical”) propositions—for example, “If there are four elements in the world, there are not five,” “If there is one sun, there are not two,” “One and the same soul cannot die and still be immortal,” and “Man cannot at the same time be happy and unhappy.”
Many other refutations of Skepticism occur in Augustine's later works, notably On the Free Choice of the Will (389–395), On the Trinity (399/400–416/421), and The City of God (413–426/427). In the last of these, Augustine proposes other examples of things about which people can be absolutely certain. Again in explicit refutation of the Skeptics of the Academy, he argues that, if a person is deceived, then it is certain that he exists. Expressing the point in the first person, as René Descartes (Descartes, René) (1596–1650) did some 1,200 years later, Augustine says, “If I am deceived, then I exist” (Si fallor, sum). A variation on this line of reasoning appears in On the Trinity, where he argues that, if he is deceived, he is at least certain that he is alive.
Augustine also points out that, since he knows, he knows that he knows; and he notes that this can be reiterated an infinite number of times: If I know that I know that I am alive, then I know that I know that I know that I am alive. In 20th-century epistemic logic, this thesis was codified as the axiom “If A knows that p, then A knows that A knows that p.” In The City of God Augustine claims that he knows that he loves: “For neither am I deceived in this, that I love, since in those things which I love I am not deceived.” With Skepticism thus refuted, Augustine simply denies that he has ever been able to doubt what he has learned through his sensations or even through the testimony of most people.
One thousand years passed before Skepticism recovered from Augustine's criticisms, but then it arose like the phoenix of Egyptian mythology. Meanwhile, Augustine's Platonic epistemology dominated the Middle Ages until the mid-13th century, when St. Albertus Magnus (Albertus Magnus, Saint) (1200–80) and his student St. Thomas Aquinas (Aquinas, Thomas, Saint) (1224/25–74) developed an alternative to Augustinian illuminationism.
Medieval philosophy
St. Anselm of Canterbury
The phrase that St. Anselm of Canterbury (Anselm of Canterbury, Saint) (c. 1033–1109) used to describe his philosophy—namely, “faith seeking reason” (fides quaerens intellectum)—well characterizes medieval philosophy as a whole. All the great medieval philosophers—Christian, Jewish, and Islamic alike—were also theologians. Virtually every object of interest was related to their belief in God, and virtually every solution to every problem, including the problem of knowledge, contained God as an essential part. Indeed, Anselm himself equated truth and intelligibility with God. As he noted at the beginning of his Proslogium (1077–78), however, there is a tension between the view that God is truth and intelligibility and the fact that humans have no perception of God. How can there be knowledge of God, he asks, when all knowledge comes through the senses and God, being immaterial, cannot be sensed? His answer is to distinguish between knowing something by being acquainted with it through sensation and knowing something through a description. Knowledge by description is possible using concepts formed on the basis of sensation. Thus, all knowledge of God depends upon the description that he is “the thing than which a greater cannot be conceived.” From this premise Anselm infers, in his ontological argument for the existence of God, that humans can know that there exists a God that is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-just, all-merciful, and immaterial. Eight hundred years later, Russell would develop an epistemological theory based on a similar distinction between knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description, though he would have vigorously denied that the distinction could be used to show that God exists.
St. Thomas Aquinas (Aquinas, Thomas, Saint)
With the translation into Latin of Aristotle's On the Soul in the early 13th century, the Platonic and Augustinian epistemology that dominated the early Middle Ages was gradually displaced. Following Aristotle, Aquinas recognized different kinds of knowledge. Sensory knowledge arises from sensing particular things. Because it has individual things as its object and is shared with brute animals, however, sensory knowledge is a lower form of awareness than scientific knowledge, which is characterized by generality. To say that scientific knowledge is characteristically general is not to diminish the importance of specificity: scientific knowledge also should be rich in detail, and God's knowledge is the most detailed of all. The detail, however, must be essential to the kind of thing being studied and not peculiar to certain instances of it. Aquinas thought that, though the highest knowledge humans can possess is knowledge of God, knowledge of physical objects is better suited to human capabilities. Only this kind of knowledge will be considered here.
Aquinas's discussion of knowledge in the Summa theologiae is an elaboration on the thought of Aristotle. Aquinas claims that knowledge is obtained when the active intellect abstracts a concept from an image received from the senses. In one account of this process, abstraction is the act of isolating from an image of a particular object the elements that are essential to its being an object of that kind. From the image of a dog, for example, the intellect abstracts the ideas of being alive, being capable of reproduction and movement, and whatever else might be essential to being a dog. These ideas are distinguished from ideas of properties that are peculiar to particular dogs, such as the property of being owned by Smith or the property of weighing 20 pounds.
As stated earlier, Aristotle typically spoke of the form of an object as being in the mind or intellect of the knower and the matter as being outside it. Although it was necessary for Aristotle to say something like this in order to escape the absurdity of holding that material objects exist in the mind exactly as they do in the physical world, there is something unsatisfying about it. Physical things contain matter as an essential element, and, if their matter is no part of what is known, then it seems that human knowledge is incomplete. In order to counter this worry, Aquinas revised Aristotle's theory to say that not only the form but also the “species” of an object is in the intellect. A species is a combination of form and something like a general idea of matter, which Aquinas called “common matter.” Common matter is contrasted with “individuated matter,” which is the stuff that comprises the physical bulk of an object. One objection to this theory is that it seems to follow from it that the objects of human knowledge are ideas rather than things. That is, if knowing a thing consists of having its form and species in one's intellect, then it appears that the form and species, not the thing, is what is known. It might seem, then, that Aquinas's view is a type of Idealism.
Aquinas had anticipated this kind of criticism in a number of ways. Because it includes the idea of matter, the species of an object seems more like the object itself than does an immaterial Aristotelian form. Moreover, for Aquinas science does not aim at knowing any particular object but rather at knowing what is common to all objects of a certain kind. In this respect, Aquinas's views are similar to those of modern scientists. For example, the particular billiard ball that Smith drops from his window is of no direct concern to physics. What physicists are interested in are the laws that govern the behaviour of any falling object.
As assuaging as these considerations might be, they do not blunt the main force of the objection. In order to meet it, Aquinas introduced a distinction between what is known and that by which what is known is known. To specify what is known—say, an individual dog—is to specify the object of knowledge; to specify that by which what is known is known—say, the image or the species of a dog—is to specify the apparatus of knowledge. Thus the species of a thing that is known is not itself an object of knowledge, though it can become an object of knowledge by being reflected upon.
John Duns Scotus (Duns Scotus, John)
Although he accepted some aspects of Aristotelian abstractionism, John Duns Scotus (Duns Scotus, John) (c. 1266–1308) did not base his account of human knowledge on this alone. According to him, there are four classes of things that can be known with certainty. First, there are things that are knowable simpliciter, including true identity statements such as “Cicero is Tully” and propositions, later called analytic, such as “Man is rational.” Duns Scotus claims that such truths “coincide” with that which makes them true. One consequence of this view is that the negation of a simple truth is always inconsistent, even if it is not explicitly contradictory. The negation of “The whole is greater than any proper part,” for example, is not explicitly contradictory, as is “Snow is white and snow is not white.” Nevertheless it is inconsistent, because there is no possible situation in which it is true.
The second class consists of things that are known through experience, where “experience” is understood in an Aristotelian sense implying numerous encounters. The knowledge afforded by experience is inductive, grounded in the principle that “whatever occurs in a great many instances by a cause that is not free is the natural effect of that cause.” It is important to note that Duns Scotus's confidence in induction did not survive the Middle Ages. Nicholas Of Autrecourt (1300–50), whose views anticipated the radical skepticism of Hume, argued at length that no amount of observed correlation between two types of events is sufficient to establish a necessary causal connection between them, and thus that inferences based on causal assumptions are never rationally justified.
The third class consists of things that directly concern one's own actions. Humans who are awake, for example, know immediately and with certainty—and not through any inference—that they are awake; similarly, they know with certainty that they think and that they see and hear and have other sense experiences. Even if a sense experience is caused by a defective sense organ, it remains true that one is directly aware of the content of the sensation. When one has the sensation of seeing a round object, for example, one is directly aware of the roundness, even if the thing one is seeing is not really round.
Finally, the fourth class contains things that are knowable through the human senses. Apparently unconcerned by the threat of Skepticism, Duns Scotus maintained that sensation affords knowledge of the heavens, the earth, the sea, and all the things that are in them.
Duns Scotus's most important contribution to epistemology is his distinction between “intuitive” and “abstractive” cognition. Intuitive cognition (intuition) is the immediate and indubitable awareness of the existence of a thing. It is knowledge “precisely of a present object 【known】 as being present and of an existent object 【known】 as being existent.” If a person sees Socrates before him, then, according to Duns Scotus, he has intuitive knowledge of the proposition that Socrates exists and of the proposition that Socrates is the cause of that knowledge. Abstractive cognition, in contrast, is knowledge about a thing that is abstracted from, or logically independent of, that thing's actual existence or nonexistence.
William of Ockham (Ockham, William of)
Several parts of Duns Scotus's account are vulnerable to Skeptical challenges—e.g., his endorsement of the certainty of knowledge based on sensation and his claim that intuitive knowledge of an object guarantees its existence. William of Ockham (Ockham, William of) (c. 1285–1349?) radically revised Duns Scotus's theory of intuitive knowledge. Unlike Duns Scotus, Ockham did not require the object of intuitive knowledge to exist; nor did he hold that intuitive knowledge must be caused by its object. To the question, “What is the distinction between intuitive and abstractive knowledge?,” Ockham answered that they are simply different. His answer notwithstanding, it is characteristic of intuitive knowledge, according to Ockham, that it is unmediated. There is no gap between the knower and the known that might undermine certainty: “I say that the thing itself is known immediately without any medium between itself and the act by which it is seen or apprehended.”
According to Ockham, there are two kinds of intuitive knowledge: natural and supernatural. In cases of natural intuitive knowledge, the object exists, the knower judges that the object exists, and the object causes the knowledge. In cases of supernatural intuitive knowledge, the object does not exist, the knower judges that the object does not exist, and God is the cause of the knowledge.
Ockham recognized that God might cause a person to think that he has intuitive knowledge of an existent object when in fact there is no such object. But this would be a case of false belief, he contends, not intuitive knowledge. Unfortunately, by acknowledging that there is no way to distinguish between genuine intuitive knowledge and divine counterfeits, Ockham effectively conceded the issue to the Skeptics.
Later medieval philosophy followed a fairly straight path toward Skepticism. John Of Mirecourt (fl. 14th century) was censured by the University of Paris in 1347 for maintaining, among other things, that external reality cannot be known with certainty because God can cause illusions to seem real. A year earlier, Nicholas of Autrecourt was condemned by Pope Clement VI for holding that one can have certain knowledge only of the logical principles of identity and contradiction and the immediate reports of sensation. As noted above, he denied that causal relations exist; he also denied the reality of substance. He credited these errors, along with many others, to Aristotle, about whom he said: “In all his natural philosophy and metaphysics, Aristotle had hardly reached two evidently certain conclusions, perhaps not even a single one.” By this time, the link between Skepticism and criticism of Aristotle had become fairly strong. In On My Ignorance and That of Many Others (1367), for example, the Italian poet Petrarch (1304–74) cited Aristotle as “the most famous” of those who do not have knowledge.
Scientific theology to secular science
For most of the Middle Ages there was no distinction between theology and science (scientia). Science was knowledge that was deduced from self-evident principles, and theology received its principles from God, the source of all principles. By the 14th century, however, scientific and theological thinking began to diverge. Roughly speaking, theologians began to argue that human knowledge was narrowly circumscribed. They often invoked the omnipotence of God in order to undercut the pretensions of human reason, and in place of rationalism in theology they promoted a kind of fideism (i.e., a philosophy based entirely on faith).
The Italian theologian Gregory Of Rimini (d. 1358) exemplified this development. Inspired by Ockham, Gregory argued that, whereas science concerns what is accessible to humans through natural means—i.e., through sensation and intelligence—theology deals with what is accessible only in a supernatural way. Thus, theology is not scientific. The role of theology is to explain the meaning of the Bible and the articles of faith and to deduce conclusions from them. Since the credibility of the Bible rests upon belief in divine revelation, theology lacks a rational foundation. Furthermore, since there is neither self-evident knowledge of God nor any natural experience of him, humans can have only an abstract understanding of what he is.
Ockham and Gregory did not intend their views to undermine theology. To the contrary, for them, theology is in a sense more certain than science, because it is built upon principles that are guaranteed to be true by God, whereas the principles of science must be as fallible as their human creators. Unfortunately for theology, the prestige of science increased in the 16th century and skyrocketed in the 17th and 18th centuries. Modern thinkers preferred to reach their own conclusions using reason and experience, even if ultimately these conclusions did not have the authority of God to support them. As theologians lost confidence in reason, other thinkers, who had little or no commitment to Aristotelian thought, became its champions, thus furthering the development of modern science.
Modern philosophy
Faith and reason
Although modern philosophers as a group are usually thought to be purely secular thinkers, in fact nothing could be further from the truth. From the early 17th century until the middle of the 18th century, all the great philosophers incorporated substantial religious elements into their work. In his Meditations (1641), for example, Descartes offered two distinct proofs of the existence of God and asserted that no one who does not have a rationally well-founded belief in God can have knowledge in the proper sense of the term. Benedict de Spinoza (Spinoza, Benedict de) (1632–77) began his Ethics (1677) with a proof of God's existence and then discussed at length its implications for understanding all reality. And George Berkeley (Berkeley, George) (1685–1753) explained the apparent stability of the sensible world by appealing to God's constant thought of it.
Among the reasons modern philosophers are mistakenly thought to be primarily secular thinkers is that many of their epistemological principles, including some that were designed to defend religion, were later interpreted as subverting the rationality of religious belief. The views of Thomas Hobbes (Hobbes, Thomas) (1588–1679) might briefly be considered in this connection. In contrast to the standard view of the Middle Ages that propositions of faith are rational, Hobbes argued that such propositions belong not to the intellect but to the will. The significance of religious propositions, in other words, lies not in what they say but in how they are used. To profess a religious proposition is not to assert a factual claim about the world, which may then be supported or refuted with reasons, but merely to give praise and honour to God and to obey the commands of lawful religious authorities. Indeed, one does not even need to understand the meanings of the words in the proposition in order for this function to be fulfilled: simply mouthing them would be sufficient.
In An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), Locke further eroded the intellectual status of religious propositions by making them subordinate to reason in several respects. First, reason can restrict the possible content of propositions allegedly revealed by God; in particular, no proposition of faith can be a contradiction. Furthermore, because no revelation can contain an idea not derived from sense experience, we should not believe St. Paul when he speaks of experiencing things as “eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man to conceive.…” Another respect in which reason takes precedence over faith is that knowledge based on immediate sense experience (what Locke calls “intuitive knowledge”) is always more certain than any alleged revelation. Thus, a person who sees that someone is dead cannot have it revealed to him that that person is at that moment alive. Rational proofs in mathematics and science also cannot be controverted by divine revelation. The interior angles of a rectangle equal 360°, and no alleged revelation to the contrary is credible. In short, says Locke, “Nothing that is contrary to, and inconsistent with, the clear and self-evident dictates of reason, has a right to be urged or assented to as a matter of faith.”
What space, then, does faith occupy in the mansion of human beliefs? According to Locke, it shares a room with probable truths (probability and statistics), which are propositions of which reason cannot be certain. There are two types of probable truth: that which concerns observable matters of fact, and that which goes “beyond the discovery of our sense.” Religious propositions can belong to either category, as can empirical and scientific propositions. Thus the propositions “Caesar crossed the Rubicon” and “Jesus walked on water” belong to the first category, because they make claims about events that would be observable if they occurred; on the other hand, propositions like “Heat is caused by the friction of imperceptibly small bodies” and “Angels exist” belong to the second category, because they concern entities that by definition cannot be objects of sense experience.
Although it might seem that Locke's mixing of religious and scientific claims helped to secure a place for the former, in fact it did not. For Locke also held that “reason must judge” whether or not something is a revelation and more generally that “Reason must be our last judge and guide in everything.” Although this maxim was intended to reconcile reason and revelation—indeed, he calls reason “natural revelation” and revelation “natural reason enlarged by a new set of discoveries communicated by God”—over the course of 200 years reason repeatedly judged that alleged revelations had no scientific or intellectual standing.
Despite the strong religious elements in the thought of modern philosophers, especially those writing before the middle of the 18th century, contemporary epistemologists have been interested only in the purely secular aspects of their work. Accordingly, these aspects will predominate in the following discussion.
Epistemology and modern science
The Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus (Copernicus, Nicolaus) (1473–1543) argued in On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres (1543) that the Earth revolves around the Sun. His theory (Copernican system) was epistemologically shocking for at least two reasons. First, it directly contravened the way in which humans experienced their relation to the Sun, and in doing so it made ordinary nonscientific reasoning about the world seem unreliable—indeed, like a kind of superstition. Second, it contradicted the account presented in several books of the Bible, most importantly the story in Genesis of the structure of the cosmos, according to which the Earth is at the centre of creation. If Copernicus were right, then the Bible could no longer be treated as a reliable source of scientific knowledge.
Many of the discoveries of the Italian astronomer Galileo Galilei (Galileo) (1564–1642) were equally unsettling. His telescope seemed to reveal that unaided human vision gives false, or at least seriously incomplete, information about the nature of celestial bodies. In addition, his mathematical descriptions of physical phenomena indicated that much of our sense experience of these phenomena contributes nothing to our knowledge of them.
Another counterintuitive theory of Galileo was his distinction between the “primary” and the “secondary” qualities of an object. Whereas primary qualities—such as figure, quantity, and motion—are genuine properties of things and are knowable by mathematics, secondary qualities—such as colour, odour, taste, and sound—exist only in human consciousness and are not part of the objects to which they are normally attributed.
René Descartes (Descartes, René)
Both the rise of modern science and the rediscovery of Skepticism were important influences on Descartes. Although he believed that certain knowledge was possible and that modern science would one day enable humans to become the masters of nature, he also thought that Skepticism presented a legitimate challenge that needed an answer, one that only he could provide.The challenge of Skepticism, as Descartes saw it, is vividly described in his Meditations. He considered the possibility that an “evil genius” with extraordinary powers has deceived him to such an extent that all his beliefs are false. But it is not possible, Descartes contended, that all his beliefs are false, for if he has false beliefs, he is thinking, and if he is thinking, then he exists. Therefore, his belief that he exists cannot be false, as long as he is thinking. This line of argument is summarized in the formula cogito, ergo sum (“I think, therefore I am”).
Descartes distinguished two sources of knowledge: intuition and deduction. Intuition is an unmediated mental “seeing,” or direct apprehension. Descartes's intuition of his own thinking guarantees that his belief that he is thinking is true. Although his formula might suggest that his belief that he exists is guaranteed by deduction rather than intuition (because it contains the term “therefore”), in the Objections and Replies (1642) he states explicitly that the certainty of this belief also is based upon intuition.
If one could know only that one thinks and that one exists, human knowledge would be depressingly meager. Accordingly, Descartes attempted to broaden the limits of knowledge by proving to his own satisfaction that God exists; that the standard for knowing something is having a “clear and distinct” idea of it; that mind is more easily known than body; that the essence of matter is extension; and, finally, that most of his former beliefs are true.
Unfortunately for Descartes, few people were convinced by these arguments. One major problem with them has come to be known as the “Cartesian circle.” Descartes's argument to show that his knowledge extends beyond his own existence depends upon the claim that whatever he perceives “clearly and distinctly” is true. This claim in turn is supported by his proof of the existence of God, together with the assertion that God, because he is not a deceiver, would not cause Descartes to be deceived in what he clearly and distinctly perceives. But because the criterion of clear and distinct perception presupposes the existence of God, Descartes cannot rely upon it in order to guarantee that he was not deceived (i.e., that he did not make a mistake) in the course of proving that God exists. Therefore, he does not know that his proof is cogent. But if he does not know this, then he cannot use the criterion of clear and distinct perception to show that he knows more than that he exists.
John Locke (Locke, John)
As mentioned above (The origins of knowledge: Rationalism and empiricism (epistemology)), whereas rationalist philosophers such as Descartes held that the ultimate source of human knowledge is reason, empiricists such as Locke argued that it is experience. Rationalist accounts of knowledge also typically involved the claim that at least some kinds of ideas are “innate,” or present in the mind at (or even before) birth. For philosophers such as Descartes and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm) (1646–1716), the hypothesis of innateness is required in order to explain how humans come to have ideas of certain kinds. These ideas include not only mathematical concepts such as numbers, which appear not to be derived from sense experience, but also, according to some thinkers, certain general metaphysical principles, such as “every event has a cause.”
Locke claimed that this line of argument has no force. He held that all ideas (except those that are “trifling”) can be explained in terms of experience. Instead of attacking the doctrine of innate ideas (innate idea) directly, however, his strategy was to refute it by showing that it is explanatorily otiose and hence dispensable.
There are two kinds of experience, according to Locke: observation of external objects—i.e., sensation—and observation of the internal operations of the mind. Locke called this latter kind of experience, for which there is no natural word in English, “reflection.” Some examples of reflection are perceiving, thinking, doubting, believing, reasoning, knowing, and willing.
As Locke uses the term, a “simple idea” is anything that is an “immediate object of perception” (i.e., an object as it is perceived by the mind) or anything that the mind “perceives in itself” through reflection. Simple ideas, whether they are ideas of perception or ideas of reflection, may be combined or repeated to produce “compound ideas,” as when the compound idea of an apple is produced by bringing together simple ideas of a certain colour, texture, odour, and figure. Abstract ideas are created when “ideas taken from particular beings become general representatives of all of the same kind.”
The “qualities” of an object are its powers to cause ideas in the mind. One consequence of this usage is that, in Locke's epistemology, words designating the sensible properties of objects are systematically ambiguous. The word red, for example, can mean either the idea of red in the mind or the quality in an object that causes that idea. Locke distinguished between primary and secondary qualities, as Galileo did. According to Locke, primary qualities, but not secondary qualities, are represented in the mind as they exist in the object itself. The primary qualities of an object, in other words, resemble the ideas they cause in the mind. Examples of primary qualities include “solidity, extension, figure, motion, or rest, and number.” Secondary qualities are configurations or arrangements of primary qualities that cause sensible ideas such as sounds, colours, odours, and tastes. Thus, according to Locke's view, the phenomenal redness of a fire engine is not in the fire engine itself, but its phenomenal solidity is. Similarly, the phenomenal sweet odour of a rose is not in the rose itself, but its phenomenal extension is.
In Book IV of the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Locke defines knowledge as “the perception of the connexion of and agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas.” Knowledge so defined admits of three degrees, according to Locke. The first is what he calls “intuitive knowledge,” in which the mind “perceives the agreement or disagreement of two ideas immediately by themselves, without the intervention of any other.” Although Locke's first examples of intuitive knowledge are analytic propositions such as “white is not black,” “a circle is not a triangle,” and “three are more than two,” later he says that “the knowledge of our own being we have by intuition.” Relying on the metaphor of light as Augustine and others had, Locke says of this knowledge that “the mind is presently filled with the clear light of it. It is on this intuition that depends all the certainty and evidence of all our knowledge.”
The second degree of knowledge obtains when “the mind perceives the agreement or disagreement of . . . ideas, but not immediately.” In these cases, some mediating idea makes it possible to see the connection between two other ideas. In a demonstration (or proof), for example, the connection between any premise and the conclusion is mediated by other premises and by the laws of logic. Demonstrative knowledge, although certain, is not as certain as intuitive knowledge, according to Locke, because it requires effort and attention to go through the steps needed to recognize the certainty of the conclusion.
A third degree of knowledge, “sensitive knowledge,” is roughly the same as what Duns Scotus called “intuitive cognition,” namely, the perception of “the particular existence of finite beings without us.” Unlike intuitive cognition, however, Locke's sensitive knowledge is not the most certain kind of knowledge it is possible to have. For him, it is less certain than intuitive or demonstrative knowledge.
Next in certainty to knowledge is probability (probability and statistics), which Locke defines as the appearance of agreement or disagreement of ideas with each other. Like knowledge, probability admits of degrees, the highest of which attaches to propositions endorsed by the general consent of all people in all ages. Locke may have had in mind the virtually general consent of his contemporaries in the proposition that God exists, but he also explicitly mentions beliefs about causal relations.
The next-highest degree of probability belongs to propositions that hold not universally but for the most part, such as “people prefer their own private advantage to the public good.” This sort of proposition is typically derived from history. A still lower degree of probability attaches to claims about specific facts, for example, that a man named Julius Caesar lived a long time ago. Problems arise when testimonies conflict, as they often do, but there is no simple rule or set of rules that determines how one ought to resolve such controversies.
Probability can concern not only objects of possible sense experience, as most of the foregoing examples do, but also things that are outside the sensible realm, such as angels, devils, magnetism, and molecules.
George Berkeley (Berkeley, George)
The next great figure in the development of empiricist epistemology was George Berkeley (Berkeley, George) (1685–1753). In his major work, Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge (1710), Berkeley asserted that nothing exists except ideas and spirits (minds or souls). He distinguished three kinds of ideas: those that come from sense experience correspond to Locke's simple ideas of perception; those that come from “attending to the passions and operations of the mind” correspond to Locke's ideas of reflection; and those that come from compounding, dividing, or otherwise representing ideas correspond to Locke's compound ideas. By “spirit” Berkeley meant “one simple, undivided, active being.” The activity of spirits consists of both understanding and willing: understanding is spirit perceiving ideas, and will is spirit producing ideas.
For Berkeley, ostensibly physical objects like tables and chairs are really nothing more than collections of sensible ideas. Since no idea can exist outside a mind, it follows that tables and chairs, as well all the other furniture of the physical world, exist only insofar as they are in the mind of someone—i.e., only insofar as they are perceived. For any nonthinking being, esse est percipi (“to be is to be perceived”).
The clichéd question of whether a tree falling in an uninhabited forest makes a sound is inspired by Berkeley's philosophy, though he never considered it in these terms. He did, however, consider the implicit objection and gave various answers to it. He sometimes says that a table in an unperceived room would be perceived if someone were there. This conditional response, however, is inadequate. Granted that the table would exist if it were perceived, does it exist when it is not perceived? Berkeley's more pertinent answer is that, when no human is perceiving a table or other such object, God is; and it is God's thinking that keeps the otherwise unperceived object in existence.
Although this doctrine initially strikes most people as strange, Berkeley claimed that he was merely describing the commonsense view of reality. To say that colours, sounds, trees, dogs, and tables are ideas is not to say that they do not really exist, it is merely to say what they really are. Moreover, to say that animals and pieces of furniture are ideas is not to say that they are diaphanous, gossamer, and evanescent. Opacity, density, and permanence are also ideas that partially constitute these objects.
Berkeley supports his main thesis with a syllogistic argument: physical things—such as trees, dogs, and houses—are things perceived by sense; things perceived by sense are ideas; therefore, physical things are ideas. If one objects that the second premise of the syllogism is false—people sense things, not ideas—Berkeley would reply that there are no sensations without ideas and that it makes no sense to speak of some additional thing that ideas are supposed to represent or resemble. Unlike Locke, Berkeley did not believe that there is anything “behind” or “underlying” ideas in a world external to the mind. Indeed, Berkeley claims that no clear idea can be attached to this notion.
One consequence of this view is that Locke's distinction between primary and secondary qualities is spurious. Extension, figure, motion, rest, and solidity are as much ideas as green, loud, and bitter are; there is nothing special about the former kind of idea. Furthermore, matter, as philosophers conceive it, does not exist, and indeed it is contradictory. For matter is supposedly unsensed extension, figure, and motion; but since extension, figure, and motion are ideas, they must be sensed.
Berkeley's doctrine that things unperceived by human beings continue to exist in the thought of God was not novel. It was part of the traditional belief of Christian philosophers from Augustine through Aquinas and at least to Descartes that God not only creates all things but also keeps them in existence by thinking of them. According to this view, if God were ever to stop thinking of a creature, it would immediately be annihilated.
David Hume (Hume, David)
Although Berkeley rejected the Lockean notions of primary and secondary qualities and matter, he retained Locke's beliefs in the existence of mind, substance, and causation as an unseen force or power in objects. Hume, in contrast, rejected all these notions.Kinds of perception
Hume recognized two kinds of perception: “impressions” and “ideas.” Impressions are perceptions that the mind experiences with the “most force and violence,” and ideas are the “faint images” of impressions. Hume considered this distinction so obvious that he demurred from explaining it at any length: as he indicates in a summary explication in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), impressions are felt, and ideas are thought. Nevertheless, he concedes that sometimes sleep, fever, or madness can produce ideas that approximate to the force of impressions, and some impressions can approach the weakness of ideas. But such occasions are rare.
The distinction between impressions and ideas is problematic in a way that Hume did not notice. The impression (experience) of anger, for example, has an unmistakable quality and intensity. But the idea of anger is not the same as a “weaker” experience of anger. Thinking of anger no more guarantees being angry than thinking of happiness guarantees being happy. So there seems to be a difference between the impression of anger and the idea of anger that Hume's theory does not capture.
All perceptions, whether impressions or ideas, can be either simple or complex. Whereas simple perceptions are not subject to further separation or distinction, complex perceptions are. To return to an example mentioned above, the perception of an apple is complex, insofar as it consists of a combination of simple perceptions of a certain shape, colour, texture, and aroma. It is noteworthy that, according to Hume, for every simple impression there is a simple idea that corresponds to it and differs from it only in force and vivacity, and vice versa. Thus, corresponding to the impression of red is the idea of red. This correlation does not hold true in general for complex perceptions. Although there is a correspondence between the complex impression of an apple and the complex idea of an apple, there is no impression that corresponds to the idea of Pegasus or to the idea of a unicorn; these complex ideas do not have a correlate in reality. Similarly, there is no complex idea corresponding to the complex impression of, say, an extensive vista of the city of Rome.
Because the formation of every simple idea is always preceded by the experience of a corresponding simple impression, and because the experience of every simple impression is always followed by the formation of a corresponding simple idea, it follows, according to Hume, that simple impressions are the causes of their corresponding simple ideas.
There are two kinds of impressions: those of sensation and those of reflection. Regarding the former, Hume says little more than that sensation “arises in the soul originally from unknown causes.” Impressions of reflection arise from a complicated series of mental operations. First, one experiences impressions of heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain; second, one forms corresponding ideas of heat or cold, thirst or hunger, pleasure or pain; and third, one's reflection on these ideas produces impressions of “desire and aversion, hope and fear.”
Because the faculty of imagination can divide and assemble disparate ideas at will, some explanation is needed for the fact that people tend to think in regular and predictable patterns. Hume says that the production of thoughts in the mind is guided by three principles: resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect. Thus, a person who thinks of one idea is likely to think of another idea that resembles it; his thought is likely to run from red to pink to white or from dog to wolf to coyote. Concerning contiguity, people are inclined to think of things that are next to each other in space and time. Finally and most importantly, people tend to create associations between ideas of things that are causally related. The ideas of fire and smoke, parent and child, and disease and death are connected in the mind for this reason.
Hume uses the principle of resemblance for another purpose: to explain the nature of general ideas. Hume holds that there are no abstract ideas, and he affirms that all ideas are particular. Some of them, however, function as general ideas—i.e., ideas that represent many objects of a certain kind—because they incline the mind to think of other ideas that they resemble.
Relations of ideas and matters of fact
According to Hume, the mind is capable of apprehending two kinds of proposition or truth: those expressing “relations of ideas” and those expressing “matters of fact.” The former can be intuited—i.e., seen directly—or deduced from other propositions. That a is identical with a, that b resembles c, and that d is larger than e are examples of propositions that are intuited. The negations of true propositions expressing relations of ideas are contradictory. Because the propositions of arithmetic and algebra are exclusively about relations of ideas, these disciplines are more certain than others. In the Treatise, Hume says that geometry is not quite as certain as arithmetic and algebra, because its original principles derive from sensation, and about sensation there can never be absolute certainty. He revised his views later, however, and in the An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) he put geometry on an equal footing with the other mathematical sciences.
Unlike propositions about relations of ideas, propositions about matters of fact are known only through experience. By far the most important of these propositions are those that express or presuppose causal relations—e.g., “Fire causes heat” and “A moving billiard ball communicates its motion to any stationary ball it strikes.” But how is it possible to know through experience that one kind of object or event causes another? What kind of experience would justify such a claim?
Cause and effect
In the Treatise, Hume observes that our idea of causation contains three components: contiguity (i.e., near proximity) of time and place, temporal priority of the cause, and a more mysterious component, which he calls “necessary connection.” In other words, when we say that x is a cause of y, we mean that instances of x and instances of y are always near each other in time and space, that instances of x occur before instances of y, and that there is some connection between x's and y's that makes it necessary that an instance of y occurs if an instance of x does.
It is easy to explain the origin in experience of the first two components of the idea of causation. In our past experience, all events consisting of a moving billiard ball striking a stationary one were quickly followed by events consisting of the movement of the formerly stationary ball. In addition, the first sort of event always preceded the second, and never the reverse. But whence the third component of the idea of causation, whereby we think that the striking of the stationary ball somehow necessitates that it will move? We certainly have not seen or otherwise directly observed this necessity in past experience, as we have the contiguity and temporal order of the striking and moving of billiard balls.
It is important to note that, were it not for the idea of necessary connection, we would have no reason to believe that a currently observed cause will produce an unseen effect in the future or that a currently observed effect was produced by an unseen cause in the past. For the mere fact that past instances of the cause and effect were contiguous and temporally ordered in a certain way does not logically imply that present and future instances will display the same relations. (Such an inference could be justified only if one assumed a principle such as “instances, of which we have had no experience, must resemble those, of which we have had experience, and that the course of nature continues always uniformly the same.” The problem with this principle is that it too stands in need of justification, and the only possible justification is question-begging. That is, one could argue that present and future experience will resemble past experience, because, in the past, present and future experience resembled past experience. But this argument clearly assumes what it sets out to prove.)
Hume offers a “skeptical (Skepticism) solution” of the problem of the origin of our idea of necessary connection. According to him, it arises from the feeling of “determination” that is created in the mind when it experiences the first member of a pair of events that it is long accustomed to experiencing together. When the mind observes the moving billiard ball strike the stationary one, it is moved by force of habit and custom to form an idea of the movement of the stationary ball—i.e., to believe that the stationary ball will move. The feeling of being “carried along” in this process is the impression from which the idea of necessary connection is derived. Hume's solution is “skeptical” in the sense that, though it accounts for the origins of our idea of necessary connection, it does not make our causal inferences any more rational than they were before. The solution explains why we are psychologically compelled to form beliefs about future effects and past causes, but it does not justify those beliefs logically. It remains true that our only evidence for these beliefs is our past experience of contiguity and temporal precedence. “All inferences from experience, therefore, are effects of custom, not of reasoning.” Thus, it is that custom, not reason, is the great guide of life.
Substance
From the time of Plato, one of the most basic notions in philosophy has been “substance”—that whose existence does not depend upon anything else. For Locke, the substance of an object is the hidden “substratum” in which the object's properties inhere and on which they depend for their existence. One of the reasons for Hume's importance in the history of philosophy is that he rejected this notion. In keeping with his strict empiricism, he held that the idea of substance, if it answers to anything genuine, must arise from experience. But what kind of experience can this be? By its proponents' own definition, substance is that which underlies an object's properties, including its sensible properties; it is therefore in principle unobservable. Hume concludes, “We have therefore no idea of substance, distinct from that of a collection of particular qualities, nor have we any other meaning when we either talk or reason concerning it.” Furthermore, the things that earlier philosophers had assumed were substances are in fact “nothing but a collection of simple ideas, that are united by the imagination, and have a particular name assigned to them.” Gold, to take Hume's example, is nothing but the collection of the ideas of yellow, malleable, fusible, and so on. Even the mind, or the “self,” is only a “heap or collection of different perceptions united together by certain relations and suppos'd tho' falsely, to be endow'd with a perfect simplicity or identity.” This conclusion had important consequences for the problem of personal identity, to which Locke had devoted considerable attention. For if there is nothing to the mind but a collection of perceptions, then there is no self that perdures as the subject of these perceptions. Therefore, it does not make sense to speak of the subject of certain perceptions yesterday as the same self, or the same person, as the subject of certain perceptions today or in the future. There is no self or person there.
Immanuel Kant (Kant, Immanuel)
Idealism is often defined as the view that everything that exists is mental—in other words, everything is either a mind or dependent for its existence on a mind. Kant was not strictly an idealist according to this definition. His doctrine of “ transcendental idealism” held that all theoretical (i.e., scientific) knowledge is a mixture of what is given in sense experience and what is contributed by the mind. The contributions of the mind are necessary conditions for having any sense experience at all. They include the spatial and temporal “forms” in which physical objects appear, as well as various extremely general features that together give the experience an intelligible structure. These features are imposed when the mind, in the act of forming a judgment about experience, brings the content of experience under one of the “pure concepts of the understanding.” These concepts are unity, plurality, and totality; reality, negation, and limitation; inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, and community (or reciprocity); and possibility, existence, and necessity. Among the more noteworthy of the mind's contributions to experience is causality, which Hume asserted has no real existence.His idealism notwithstanding, Kant also believed that there exists a world independent of the mind and completely unknowable by it. This world consists of “things-in-themselves,” which do not exist in space and time and do not enter into causal relations. Because of his commitment to realism (minimal though it may have been) Kant was disturbed by Berkeley's uncompromising idealism, which amounted to a denial of the existence of the external world. Kant found this incredible and rejected “the absurd conclusion that there can be appearance without anything that appears.”
Because Kant's theory attributes to the mind many aspects of reality that earlier theories had assumed were given in or derived from experience, it can be thought of as inverting the traditional relation in epistemology between the mind and the world. According to Kant, knowledge results not when the mind accommodates itself to the world but rather when the world conforms to the requirements of human sensibility and rationality. Kant compared his reorientation of epistemology to the Copernican revolution in astronomy, which placed the Sun rather than the Earth at the center of the universe.
According to Kant, the propositions that express human knowledge can be divided (analytic-synthetic distinction) into three kinds (see above A priori and a posteriori knowledge: Analytic and synthetic propositions (epistemology)): (1) analytic a priori propositions, such as “All bachelors are unmarried” and “All squares have four sides,” (2) synthetic a posteriori propositions, such as “The cat is on the mat” and “It is raining,” and (3) what he called “synthetic a priori” propositions, such as “Every event has a cause.” Although in the last kind of proposition the meaning of the predicate term is not contained in the meaning of the subject term, it is nevertheless possible to know the proposition independently of experience, because it expresses a condition imposed by the forms of sensibility. Nothing can be an object of experience unless it is experienced as having causes and effects. Kant stated that the main purpose of his doctrine of transcendental idealism was to show how these synthetic a priori propositions are possible.
Because human beings can experience the world only as a system that is bounded by space and time and completely determined by causal laws, it follows that they can have no theoretical (i.e., scientific) knowledge of anything that is inconsistent with such a realm or that by definition exists independently of it—this includes God, human freedom, and the immortality of the soul. Nevertheless, belief in these ideas is justified, according to Kant, because each is a necessary condition of our conceiving of ourselves as moral agents.
G.W.F. Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich)
The positive views of the German idealist philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich) (1770–1831) are notoriously difficult, and his epistemology is not susceptible of adequate summary within the scope of this article. Some of his criticisms of earlier epistemological views should be mentioned, however, since they helped to bring the modern era in philosophy to a close.
In his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Hegel criticized traditional empiricist epistemology for assuming that at least some of the sensory content of experience is simply “given” to the mind and apprehended directly as it is, without the mediation of concepts. According to Hegel, there is no such thing as direct apprehension, or unmediated knowledge. Although Kant also held that empirical knowledge necessarily involves concepts (as well as the mentally contributed forms of space and time), he nevertheless attributed too large a role to the given, according to Hegel.
Another mistake of earlier epistemological theories—both empiricist and rationalist—is the assumption that knowledge entails a kind of “correspondence” between belief and reality. The search for such a correspondence is logically absurd, Hegel argues, since every such search must end with some belief about whether the correspondence holds, in which case one has not advanced beyond belief. In other words, it is impossible to compare our beliefs with reality, because our experience of reality is always mediated by our beliefs. We cannot step outside belief altogether. For Hegel, the Kantian distinction between the phenomena of experience and the unknowable thing-in-itself is an instance of this absurdity.
Contemporary philosophy
Contemporary philosophy begins in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Much of what sets it off from modern philosophy is its explicit criticism of the modern tradition and sometimes its apparent indifference to it. There are two basic strains of contemporary philosophy: continental philosophy, which is the philosophical style of western European philosophers, and analytic philosophy (also called Anglo-American philosophy), which includes the work of many European philosophers who immigrated to Britain, the United States, and Australia shortly before World War II.
Continental epistemology
In epistemology, Continental philosophers during the first quarter of the 20th century were preoccupied with the problem of overcoming the apparent gap between the knower and the known (dualism). If a human being has access only to his own ideas of the world and not to the world itself, how can there be knowledge at all?
The German philosopher Edmund Husserl (Husserl, Edmund) (1859–1938) thought that the standard epistemological theories of his day lacked insight, because they did not focus on objects of knowledge as they are actually experienced by human beings. To emphasize this reorientation of thinking, he adopted the slogan, “To the things themselves.” Philosophers needed to recover a sense of what is given in experience itself, and this could be accomplished only through a careful description of experiential phenomena. Thus, Husserl called his philosophy “ Phenomenology,” which was to begin as a purely descriptive science and only later to ascend to a theoretical, or “transcendental,” one.According to Husserl, the philosophies of Descartes (Cartesianism) and Kant presupposed a gap between the aspiring knower and what is known, one that made claims to knowledge of the external world dubious and in need of justification. These presuppositions violated Husserl's belief that philosophy, as the most fundamental science, should be free of presuppositions. Thus, he held that it is illegitimate to assume that there is a problem about our knowledge of the external world prior to conducting a completely presuppositionless investigation of the matter. The device that Husserl used to remove these presuppositions was the epochē (Greek: “withholding” or “suspension”), originally a principle of ancient Greek skepticism but in Husserl's philosophy a technique of “bracketing,” or removing from consideration, not only all traditional philosophical theories but also all commonsensical beliefs so that pure phenomenological description can proceed.
The epochē was just one of a series of so-called transcendental reductions that Husserl proposed in order to ensure that he was not presupposing anything. One of these reductions supposedly gave one access to “the transcendental ego,” or “pure consciousness.” Although one might expect phenomenology then to describe the experience or contents of this ego, Husserl instead aimed at “ eidetic reduction”—that is, the discovery of the essences of various sorts of ideas, such as redness, surface, or relation. All these moves were part of Husserl's project of discovering a perfect methodology for philosophy, one that would ensure absolute certainty.
Husserl's transcendental ego seemed very much like the Cartesian mind that thinks of a world but has neither direct access to nor certainty of it. Accordingly, Husserl attempted, in Cartesian Meditations (1931), to overcome the apparent gap between the ego and the world—the very thing he had set out to destroy or to bypass in earlier works. Because the transcendental ego seems to be the only genuinely existent consciousness, Husserl also was faced with the task of overcoming the problem of solipsism.
Many of Husserl's followers, including his most famous student, Martin Heidegger (Heidegger, Martin) (1889–1976), recognized that something had gone radically wrong with the original direction of phenomenology. According to Heidegger's diagnosis, the root of the problem was Husserl's assumption that there is an “Archimedean point” of human knowledge. But there is no such ego detached from the world and filled with ideas or representations, according to Heidegger. In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger returned to the original formulation of the phenomenological project as a return to the things themselves. Thus, in Heidegger's approach, all transcendental reductions are abandoned. What he claimed to discover is that human beings are inherently world-bound. The world does not need to be derived; it is presupposed by human experience. In their prereflective experience, humans inhabit a sociocultural environment in which the primordial kind of cognition is practical and communal, not theoretical or individual (“egoistic”). Human beings interact with the things of their everyday world (Lebenswelt (life-world)) as a workman interacts with his tools; they hardly ever approach the world as a philosopher or scientist would. The theoretical knowledge of a philosopher is a derivative and specialized form of cognition, and the major mistake of epistemology from Descartes to Kant to Husserl was to treat philosophical knowledge as a paradigm of all knowledge.
Notwithstanding Heidegger's insistence that a human being is something that inhabits a world, he marked out human reality as ontologically special. He called this reality Dasein—the being, apart from all others, which is “present” to the world. Thus, as in Husserl's phenomenology, a cognitive being takes pride of place in Heidegger's philosophy.
In France, the principal representative of phenomenology in the mid-century was Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Merleau-Ponty, Maurice) (1908–61). Merleau-Ponty rejected Husserl's bracketing of the world, arguing that human experience of the world is primary, a view he encapsulated in the phrase “the primacy of perception.” He furthermore held that dualistic analyses of knowledge, best exemplified by traditional Cartesian mind-body dualism (mind–body dualism), are inadequate. In fact, no conceptualization of the world can be complete in his view. Because human cognitive experience requires a body and the body a position in space, human experience is necessarily perspectival and thus incomplete. Although humans experience material beings as multidimensional objects, part of the object always exceeds the cognitive grasp of the person, just because of his limited perspective. In Phenomenology of Perception (1945), Merleau-Ponty develops these ideas (along with a detailed attack on the sense-datum theory, discussed below).
The epistemological views of Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, Jean-Paul) (1905–80) are similar in some respects to those of Merleau-Ponty. Both philosophers reject Husserl's transcendental reductions, and both think of human reality as “being-in-the-world.” But Sartre's views have Cartesian elements that were anathema to Merleau-Ponty. Sartre distinguished between two basic kinds of being. Being-in-itself (en soi) is the inert and determinate world of nonhuman existence. Over and against it is being-for-itself (pour soi), which is the pure consciousness that defines human reality.
Later Continental philosophers attacked the entire philosophical tradition from Descartes to the 20th century for its explicit or implicit dualisms (dualism). Being/nonbeing, mind/body, knower/known, ego/world, being-in-itself/being-for-itself are all variations of a pattern of thinking that the philosophers of the last third of the 20th century tried to undermine. The structuralist Michel Foucault (Foucault, Michel) (1926–84), for example, wrote extensive historical studies, most notably The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), in an attempt to demonstrate that all concepts are historically conditioned and that many of the most important ones serve the political function of controlling people rather than any purely cognitive purpose. Jacques Derrida (Derrida, Jacques) has claimed that all dualisms are value-laden and indefensible. His technique of deconstruction aimed to show that every philosophical dichotomy is incoherent, because whatever can be said about one term of the dichotomy can also be said of the other.
Dissatisfaction with the Cartesian philosophical tradition can also be found in the United States. The American pragmatist John Dewey (Dewey, John) (1859–1952) directly challenged the idea that knowledge is primarily theoretical; experience, he argued, consists of an interaction between a living being and his environment. Knowledge is not a fixed apprehension of something but a process of acting and being acted upon. Richard Rorty (Rorty, Richard) has done much to reconcile Continental and analytic philosophy. He has argued that Dewey, Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein are the three greatest philosophers of the 20th century, specifically because of their attacks on the epistemological tradition of modern philosophy.
Analytic epistemology
analytic philosophy, the prevailing philosophy in the Anglo-American world from the beginning of the 20th century, has its origins in symbolic logic (or formal logic) on the one hand and in British Empiricism on the other. Some of its most important contributions have been made in areas other than epistemology, though its epistemological contributions also have been of the first order. Its main characteristics have been the avoidance of system building and a commitment to detailed, piecemeal analyses of specific issues. Within this tradition there have been two main approaches: a formal style deriving from logic and an informal style emphasizing ordinary language. Among those identified with the first method are Gottlob Frege (Frege, Gottlob) (1848–1925), Bertrand Russell (Russell, Bertrand) (1872–1970), Rudolf Carnap (Carnap, Rudolf) (1891–1970), Alfred Tarski (Tarski, Alfred) (1902–83), and W.V.O. Quine (Quine, Willard Van Orman) (1908–2000); and among those identified with the second are G.E. Moore (Moore, G E) (1873–1958), Gilbert Ryle (Ryle, Gilbert) (1900–76), J.L. Austin (Austin, John Langshaw) (1911–60), Norman Malcolm (1911–90), P.F. Strawson, and Zeno Vendler. Ludwig Wittgenstein (Wittgenstein, Ludwig) (1889–1951) can be situated in both groups, his early work, including the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), belonging to the former tradition and his later work, including the posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) and On Certainty (1969), to the latter.Perhaps the most distinctive feature of analytic philosophy is its emphasis on the role that language plays in the creation and resolution of philosophical problems. These problems, it is said, arise through misunderstandings of the forms and uses of everyday language. Wittgenstein said in this connection: “Philosophy is a battle against the bewitchment of the intelligence by means of language.” The adoption at the beginning of the 20th century of the idea that philosophical problems are in some important sense linguistic (or conceptual), a hallmark of the analytic approach, has been called the “linguistic turn.”
Commonsense philosophy (common sense, philosophy of), logical positivism, and naturalized epistemology
Three of the most notable schools of thought in analytic philosophy are commonsense philosophy, Logical Positivism, and naturalized epistemology. Commonsense philosophy is the name given to the epistemological views of Moore (Moore, G E), who attempted to defend what he called the “commonsense” view of the world against both skepticism and idealism. This view, according to Moore, comprises a number of propositions—such as the propositions that the Earth exists, that it is very old, and that other persons now exist on it—that virtually everybody knows with certainty to be true. Any philosophical theory that runs counter to the commonsense view, therefore, can be rejected out of hand as mistaken. Into this category fall all forms of skepticism and idealism. Wittgenstein also rejected skepticism and idealism, though for very different reasons. For him, these positions are based on simplistic misunderstandings of epistemic concepts, misunderstandings that arise from a failure to recognize the rich variety of ways in which epistemic language (including words like “belief,” “knowledge,” “certainty,” “justification,” and “doubt”) is used in everyday situations. In On Certainty, Wittgenstein contrasted the concepts of certainty and knowledge, arguing that certainty is not a “surer” form of knowledge but the necessary backdrop against which the “language games” of knowing, doubting, and inquiring take place. As that which “stands fast for all of us,” certitude is ultimately a kind of action: “Action lies at the bottom of the language game.”
The doctrines associated with Logical Positivism (also called logical empiricism) were developed originally in the 1920s and '30s by a group of philosophers and scientists known as the Vienna Circle. Logical positivism became one of the dominant schools of philosophy in England with the publication in 1936 of Language, Truth, and Logic, by A.J. Ayer (Ayer, Sir A.J.) (1910–89). Among the most influential theses put forward by the logical positivists was the claim that in order for a proposition with empirical content—i.e., one that purports to say something about the world—to be meaningful, or cognitively significant, it must be possible, at least in principle, to verify the proposition through experience. Since many of the utterances of traditional philosophy (especially metaphysical utterances, such as “God exists”) are not empirically verifiable even in principle, they are, according to the logical positivists, literally nonsense. In their view, the only legitimate function of philosophy is conceptual analysis—i.e., the logical clarification of concepts, especially those associated with natural science (e.g., probability and causality).
In his 1950 essay “Two Dogmas of Empiricism,” Quine launched an attack upon the traditional distinction between analytic statements, which were said to be true by virtue of the meanings of the terms they contain, and synthetic statements, which were supposed to be true (or false) by virtue of certain facts about the world. He argued powerfully that the difference is one of degree rather than kind. In a later work, Word and Object (1960), Quine (Quine, Willard Van Orman) developed a doctrine known as “naturalized epistemology.” According to this view, epistemology has no normative function—i.e., it does not tell us what we ought to believe; instead, its only legitimate role is to describe the way knowledge, and especially scientific knowledge, is actually obtained. In effect, its function is to describe how present science arrives at the beliefs accepted by the scientific community.
Perception and knowledge
The epistemological interests of analytic philosophers in the first half of the 20th century were largely focused on the relationship between knowledge and perception. The major figures in this period were Russell, Moore, H.H. Price (Price, H.H.) (1899–1984), C.D. Broad (1887–1971), Ayer, and H. Paul Grice (1913–88). Although their views differed considerably, all of them were advocates of a general doctrine known as sense-data theory.
The technical term sense-data is sometimes explained by means of examples. If one is hallucinating and sees pink rats, one is having a certain visual sensation of rats of a certain colour, though there are no real rats present. The sensation is what is called a “sense-datum.” The image one sees with one's eyes closed after looking fixedly at a bright light (an afterimage) is another example. Even in cases of normal vision, however, one can be said to be apprehending sense-data. For instance, when one looks at a round penny from a certain angle, the penny will seem to have an elliptical shape. In such a case, there is an elliptical sense-datum in one's visual field, though the penny itself continues to be round. This last example was held by Broad, Price, and Moore to be particularly important, for it seems to make a strong case for holding that one always perceives sense-data, whether one's perception is normal or abnormal.
In each of these examples, according to defenders of sense-data theory, there is something of which one is “directly” aware, meaning that one's awareness of it is immediate and does not depend on any inference or judgment. A sense-datum is thus frequently defined as an object of direct perception. According to Broad, Price, and Ayer, sense-data differ from physical objects in that they always have the properties they appear to have; i.e., they cannot appear to have properties they do not really have. The problem for the philosopher who accepts sense-data is then to show how, on the basis of these private sensations, one can be justified in believing that there are physical objects that exist independently of our perceptions. Russell in particular tried to show, in such works as The Problems of Philosophy (1912) and Our Knowledge of the External World (1914), that knowledge of the external world could be logically constructed out of sense-data.
Sense-data theory was criticized by proponents of the so-called theory of appearing, such as G.A. Paul and W.H.F. Barnes, who claimed that the arguments for their existence are invalid. From the fact that a penny looks elliptical from a certain perspective, they objected, it does not follow that there must exist a separate entity, distinct from the penny itself, that has the property of being elliptical. To assume that it does is simply to misunderstand how common perceptual situations are described. The most powerful such attack on sense-data theory was presented by Austin in his posthumously published lectures Sense and Sensibilia (1962).
The theory of appearing was in turn rejected by many philosophers, who held that it failed to provide an adequate account of the epistemological status of illusions and other visual anomalies. The aim of these thinkers was to give a coherent account of how knowledge is possible given the existence of sense-data and the possibility of perceptual error. The two main types of theories they developed were realism and phenomenalism.
realism
Realism is both an epistemological and a metaphysical doctrine. In its epistemological aspect, realism claims that at least some of the objects apprehended through perception are “public” rather than “private.” In its metaphysical aspect, realism holds that at least some objects of perception exist independently of the mind. It is especially the second of these principles that distinguishes realists from phenomenalists.
Realists believe that an intuitive (intuition), commonsense distinction can be made between two classes of entities perceived by human beings. One class, typically called “mental,” consists of things like headaches, thoughts, pains, and desires; the other class, typically called “physical,” consists of things such as tables, rocks, planets, persons, and animals and certain physical phenomena such as rainbows, lightning, and shadows. According to realist epistemology, mental entities are private, in the sense that each of them is apprehensible by one person only. Although more than one person can have a headache or feel pain, for example, no two people can have the very same headache or feel the very same pain. In contrast, physical objects are public—more than one person can see or touch the same chair.
Realists also believe that, whereas physical objects are mind-independent, mental objects are not. To say that an object is mind-independent is just to say that its existence does not depend on its being perceived or experienced by anyone. Thus, whether or not a particular table is being seen or touched by someone has no effect upon its existence. Even if no one is perceiving it, it would still exist (other things being equal). But this is not true of the mental. According to realists, if no one is having a headache, then it does not make sense to say that a headache exists. A headache is thus mind-dependent in a way in which tables, rocks, and shadows are not.
Traditional realist theories of knowledge thus begin by assuming the public-private distinction, and most realists also assume that one does not have to prove the existence of mental phenomena. These are things of which each person is directly aware, and there is no special “problem” about their existence. But they do not assume this to be true of physical phenomena. As the existence of visual aberrations, illusions, and other anomalies shows, one cannot be sure that in any perceptual situation one is apprehending physical objects. All a person can be sure of is that he is aware of something, an appearance of some sort—say of a bent stick in water. Whether that appearance corresponds to anything actually existing in the external world is an open question.
In his work Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940), Ayer called this difficulty “the egocentric predicament.” When a person looks at what he thinks is a physical object, such as a chair, what he is directly apprehending is a sense-datum, a certain visual appearance. But such an appearance seems to be private to that person; it seems to be something mental and not publicly accessible. What then justifies the individual's belief in the existence of supposedly external objects—i.e., physical entities that are public and exist independently of the mind? Realists developed two main responses to this challenge: direct (or “naive”) realism and representative realism, also called the “causal theory.”
In contrast to traditional realism, direct realism holds that physical objects themselves are perceived “directly.” That is, what one immediately perceives is the physical object itself (or a part of it); thus there is no problem about inferring the existence of such objects from the contents of one's perception. Some direct realists, such as Moore (Moore, G E) and his followers, continued to accept the existence of sense-data, but unlike traditional realists they held that, rather than mental entities, sense data might be physical parts of the surface of the perceived object itself. Other direct realists, such as the perceptual psychologist James J. Gibson (1904–79), rejected sense-data theory altogether, claiming that the surfaces of physical objects are normally directly observed. Thompson Clarke went beyond Moore in arguing that normally the entire physical object, rather than only its surface, is perceived directly.
All these views have trouble explaining perceptual anomalies. Indeed, it was because of such difficulties that Moore, in his last published paper, “Visual Sense-Data” (1957), abandoned direct realism. He held that, because the elliptical sense-datum one perceives when one looks at a round coin cannot be identical with the coin's circular surface, one cannot be seeing the coin directly. Hence, one cannot have direct knowledge of physical objects.
Although developed in response to the failure of direct realism, the theory of representative realism is in essence an old view; its best-known exponent in modern philosophy was Locke. It is also sometimes called “the scientific theory,” because it seems to be supported by findings in optics and physics. Like most forms of realism, representative realism holds that the direct objects of perception are sense-data (or their equivalents). What it adds is a scientifically grounded causal account of the origin of sense-data in the stimulation of sense organs and the operation of the central nervous system. Thus the theory would explain visual sense-data as follows. Light is reflected from an opaque surface, traverses an intervening space, and, if certain standard conditions are met, strikes the retina, where it activates a series of nerve cells, including the rods and cones, the bipolar cells, and the ganglion cells of the optic nerve, eventually resulting in an event in the brain consisting of the experience of a visual sense-datum—i.e., “seeing.”
Given an appropriate normal causal connection between the original external object and the sense-datum, representative realists assert that the sense-datum will accurately represent the object as it really is. Visual illusion is explained in various ways, but usually as the result of some anomaly in the causal chain that gives rise to distortions and other types of aberrant visual phenomena.
Representative realism is thus a theory of indirect perception, because it holds that human observers are directly aware of sense-data, and only indirectly aware of the physical objects that cause these data in the brain. The difficulty with this view is that, since one cannot compare the sense-datum that is directly perceived with the original object, one can never be sure that it gives an accurate representation of it; and therefore human beings cannot know that the real world corresponds to their perceptions. They are still confined within the circle of appearance after all. It thus seems that neither version of realism satisfactorily solves the problem with which it began.
phenomenalism
In light of the difficulties faced by realist theories of perception some philosophers, so-called phenomenalists, proposed a completely different way of analyzing the relationship between perception and knowledge. In particular, they rejected the distinction between independently existing physical objects and mind-dependent sense-data. They claimed that either the very notion of independent existence is nonsense because human beings have no evidence for it, or what is meant by “independent existence” must be understood in such a way as not to go beyond the sort of perceptual evidence human beings do or could have for the existence of such things. In effect, these philosophers challenged the cogency of the intuitive ideas that the ordinary person supposedly has about independent existence.
All variants of phenomenalism are strongly “verificationist.” That is, they wish to maintain that claims about the purported external world must be capable of verification, or confirmation. This entails that no such claim can assert the existence of, or otherwise make reference to, anything that is beyond the realm of possible perceptual experience.
Phenomenalists have thus tried to analyze in wholly perceptual terms what it means to say that a particular object—say a tomato—exists. Any such analysis, they claim, must begin by deciding what sort of an object a tomato is. In their view, a tomato is first of all something that has certain perceptible properties, including a certain size, weight, colour, and shape. If one were to abstract the set of all such properties from the object, however, nothing would be left over—there would be no presumed Lockean “substratum” that supports these properties and that itself is unperceived. There is thus no evidence in favour of such an unperceivable feature, and no reference to it is needed in explaining what a tomato or any so-called physical object is.
To talk about any existent object is thus to talk about a collection of perceivable features localized in a particular portion of space-time. Accordingly, to say that a tomato exists is to describe either a collection of properties that an observer is actually perceiving or a collection that such an observer would perceive under certain specified conditions. To say, for instance, that a tomato exists in the next room is to say that, if one went into that room, one would see a familiar reddish shape, one would obtain a certain taste if one bit into it, and one would feel something soft and smooth if one touched it. To speak about the tomato's existing unperceived in the next room thus does not entail that it is unperceivable. In principle, everything that exists is perceivable. Therefore, the notion of existing independently of perception has been misunderstood or mischaracterized by both philosophers and nonphilosophers. Once it is understood that objects are merely sets of properties and that such properties are in principle always perceivable, the notion that there is some sort of unbridgeable gap between people's perceptions and the objects they perceive is seen to be just a mistake.
In this view, perceptual error is explained in terms of coherence and predictability. To say with truth that one is perceiving a tomato means that one's present set of perceptual experiences and an unspecified set of future experiences will “cohere” in certain ways. That is, if the object a person is looking at is a tomato, then he can expect that, if he touches, tastes, and smells it, he will experience a recognizable grouping of sensations. If the object he has in his visual field is hallucinatory, then there will be a lack of coherence between what he touches, tastes, and smells. He might, for example, see a red shape but not be able to touch or taste anything.
The theory is generalized to include what others would touch, see, and hear as well, so that what the realists call “public” will also be defined in terms of the coherence of perceptions. A so-called physical object is public if the perceptions of many persons cohere or agree; otherwise it is not. This explains why a headache is not a public object. In similar fashion, a so-called physical object will be said to have an independent existence if expectations of future perceptual experiences are borne out. If tomorrow, or the day after, a person has perceptual experiences similar to those he had today, then he can say that the object he is perceiving has an independent existence. The phenomenalist thus attempts to account for all the facts that the realist wishes to explain without positing the existence of anything that transcends possible experience.
Criticisms of this view have tended to be technical. Generally speaking, however, realists have objected to it on the ground that it is counterintuitive to think of physical objects such as tomatoes as being sets of actual or possible perceptual experiences. The realist argues that human beings do have such experiences, or under certain circumstances would have them, because there is an object out there that exists independently of them and is their source. Phenomenalism, they contend, implies that, if no perceivers existed, then the world would contain no objects, and this is surely inconsistent both with what ordinary persons believe and with the known scientific fact that all sorts of objects existed in the universe long before there were any perceivers. But supporters deny that phenomenalism carries such an implication, and the debate about its merits remains unresolved.
Analytic epistemology today
In the last quarter of the 20th century, important contributions to epistemology were made by researchers in neuroscience, psychology, artificial intelligence, and computer science. These investigations produced insights into the nature of vision, the formation of mental representations of the external world, and the storage and retrieval of information in memory, among many other processes. The new approaches in effect revived indirect theories of perception that emphasized the subjective experience of the observer. Indeed, many of them made use of concepts—such as “qualia,” and “felt sensation”—that were essentially equivalent to the notion of sense-data.
Some of the new approaches also seemed to lend support to skeptical (Skepticism) conclusions of the sort that early sense-data theorists had attempted to overcome. The neurologist Richard Gregory, for example, argued in 1993 that no theory of direct perception, such as that proposed by Gibson, could be supported, given “the indirectness imposed by the many physiological steps or stages of visual and other sensory perception. … For these and other reasons we may safely abandon direct accounts of perception in favor of indirectly related and never certain … hypotheses of reality.” Similarly, work by another neurologist, Vilayanur Ramachandran, showed that the stimulation of certain areas of the brain in normal people produces sensations comparable to those felt in so-called “phantom limb” phenomena (the experience by an amputee of pains or other sensations that seem to be located in a missing limb). The conclusion that Ramachandran drew from his work is a modern variation of Descartes's “evil genius” hypothesis: that we can never be certain that the sensations we experience accurately reflect an external reality.
On the basis of experimental findings such as these, many philosophers adopted forms of radical skepticism. Benson Mates, for example, has declared: “Ultimately the only basis I can have for a claim to know that there exists something other than my own perceptions is the nature of those very perceptions. But they could be just as they are even if there did not exist anything else. Ergo, I have no basis for the knowledge-claim in question.” Mates concluded, following Sextus Empiricus, that human beings cannot make any justifiable assertions about anything other than their own sense experiences.
Philosophers have responded to these challenges in a variety of ways. Avrum Stroll, for example, has argued that the views of skeptics such as Mates, as well those of many other modern proponents of indirect perception, rest on a conceptual mistake: the failure to distinguish between scientific and philosophical accounts of the connection between sense experience and objects in the external world. In the case of vision, the scientific account (or, as he calls it, the “causal story”) describes the familiar sequence of events that occurs according to well known optical and physical laws. Citing this account, proponents of indirect perception point out that every event in such a causal sequence effects some modification of the input it receives from the preceding event. Thus, the light energy that strikes the retina is converted to electrochemical energy by the rods and cones, among other nerve cells, and the electrical impulses transmitted along the nervous pathways leading to the brain are reorganized in important ways at every synapse. From the fact that the input to every event in the sequence undergoes some modification, it follows that the end result of the process, the visual representation of the external object, must differ considerably from the elements of the original input, including the object itself. From this observation, theorists of indirect perception who are inclined toward skepticism conclude that one cannot be certain that the sensation one experiences in seeing a particular object represents the object as it really is.
But this last inference is unwarranted, according to Stroll. What the argument shows is only that the visual representation of the object and the object itself are different (a fact that hardly needs pointing out); it does not show that we cannot be certain whether the representation is accurate. Indeed, a strong argument can be made to show that our perceptual experiences cannot all be inaccurate, or “modified,” in this way. For if they were, then it would be impossible to compare any given perception with its object in order to determine whether the sensation represented the object accurately. But in that case, it also would be impossible to verify the claim that all our perceptions are inaccurate. Hence, the claim that all our perceptions are inaccurate is scientifically untestable. According to Stroll, this is a decisive objection against the skeptical position.
The implications of these developments in the cognitive sciences are clearly important for epistemology. The experimental evidence adduced for indirect perception has raised philosophical discussion of the nature of human perception to a new level. It is clear that a serious debate has begun, and at this point it is impossible to predict its outcome.
Additional Reading
General works
The texts of the classics mentioned below for which specific editions have not been noted are available in many English-language translations; two notable collections are The Loeb Classical Library and Oxford Classical Text series.
The history of epistemology
Ancient
An excellent collection on skepticism is Myles Burnyeat (ed.), The Skeptical Tradition (1983). Greek Skepticism in particular is covered in R.J. Hankinson, The Sceptics (1999). The chief epistemological works of Plato are his Meno, Theaetetus, and Republic, especially Books V–VII. The views of Aristotle can be found in On the Soul, Metaphysics, Book IV, ch. 5 and 6, and Posterior Analytics, Book I, ch. 3. The locus classicus for ancient skepticism is R.G. Bury (trans.), Sextus Empiricus, 4 vol. (1933–49, reprinted 1993–97), in The Loeb Classical Library series. From among the voluminous writings of Augustine is Against the Academicians, trans. by Mary Patricia Garvey (1942, reissued 1978).
Medieval
For the period as a whole, of interest are appropriate articles in The Cambridge History of Later Greek and Early Medieval Philosophy, ed. by A.H. Armstrong (1967); and The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Disintegration of Scholasticism, 1100–1600, ed. by Norman Kretzmann, Anthony Kenny, and Jan Pinborg (1982). Thoughts of Anselm of Canterbury,, are to be found in his Proslogium, ch. 1, and On Truth. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, discusses the soul in general in part I, question 77, and the intellectual powers of the soul in part I, question 79. The views of John Duns Scotus can be found in the relevant sections of his Philosophical Writings, trans. by Allan Wolter (1962, reprinted 1987); and in A.P. Martinich, “Duns Scotus on the Possibility of an Infinite Being,” Philosophical Topics, supplementary vol. 80, pp. 23–29 (1982). The ideas of William of Ockham can be found in the relevant sections of his Philosophical Writings, trans. by Philotheus Boehner (1957, reissued 1967).
Modern
Two excellent and now classic histories of early modern philosophy from different perspectives are Edwin Arthur Burtt, The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science, rev. ed. (1972), which emphasizes the effect of modern science on philosophy; and Richard H. Popkin, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, rev. and expanded ed. (1979; also published as The History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle, 2002), which emphasizes the rediscovery of skepticism in the 16th century. The greatest work of René Descartes is Meditations on First Philosophy, trans. by John Cottingham (1986; originally published in Latin, 1641). John Locke attacks the doctrine of innate ideas in Book I of his An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Peter H. Nidditch (1975, reprinted 1987), while his position on knowledge is developed in Books II and IV. A good introduction to Locke's thought is John W. Yolton, Locke: An Introduction (1985). The best work of George Berkeley is A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, ed. by Kenneth Winkler (1982); a more popular presentation of his views is Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous, ed. by Robert Merrihew Adams (1979). Daniel E. Flage, Berkeley's Doctrine of Notions: A Reconstruction Based on His Theory of Meaning (1987), discusses a central but neglected aspect of Berkeley's epistemology. David Hume's most expansive discussion of knowledge is in Book I of A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd ed., edited by L.A. Selby-Bigge and rev. by P.H. Nidditch (1978). A later and more accessible statement of Hume's view is presented in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. by Eric Steinberg, 2nd ed. (1993). Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Norman Kemp Smith (1929, reissued 1978; originally published in German, 1781), is Kant's greatest work. The best clear, brief, and accurate explanation of Kant's epistemology is A.C. Ewing, A Short Commentary on Kant's “Critique of Pure Reason” (1938, reprinted 1987). An important book that rejects the view of Kant as a phenomenalist or subjective idealist is Henry E. Allison, Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (1983). G.F.W. Hegel's criticisms of Kant are in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. from German by Elizabeth S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (1896, reprinted 1974), part III, section iii, B. A major study on the relationship between Kant and Hegel is Robert B. Pippin , Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989).
Contemporary
A short and readable history of Continental philosophy is Robert C. Solomon, Continental Philosophy Since 1750: The Rise and Fall of the Self (1988). Simon Critchley and William R. Schroeder (eds.), A Companion to Continental Philosophy (1998), is a useful anthology of secondary literature. John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of Knowledge and Action (1929, reissued 1979), is an attack on modern epistemology by an American pragmatist. Criticisms of classical epistemology are presented in Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), and Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers (1998). Paul Feyerabend, Against Method, 3rd ed. (1993), advocates what he describes as “an anarchistic theory of knowledge.” Karl R. Popper, Objective Knowledge: An Evolutionary Approach, rev. ed. (1979), arguing against a tradition that goes back at least to Aristotle, rejects the subjective interpretation of knowledge, according to which knowledge is located in individual people.An excellent introduction to analytic epistemology is Paul K. Moser, Dwayne H. Mulder, and J.D. Trout (eds.), The Theory of Knowledge: A Thematic Introduction (1998). Edmund L. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” in Analysis, 23:121–23 (June 1963), is considered by many to be a decisive refutation of the justified-true-belief analysis of knowledge. Noam Chomsky, Language and Problems of Knowledge (1988), discusses innateness, language, and psychology. Roderick M. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 3rd ed. (1989) is one of the best introductions to standard epistemological problems.The 20th-century literature on perception and knowledge is vast. A good general collection is Robert J. Swartz (ed.), Perceiving, Sensing, and Knowing: A Book of Readings in Twentieth-Century Sources in the Philosophy of Perception (1965, reissued 1978), which includes two important attacks upon sense-data theory—W.H.F. Barnes, “The Myth of Sense-Data,” and G.A. Paul, “Is There a Problem About Sense-Data?”—and a strong defense of the sense-datum view by C.D. Broad, “The Theory of Sensa.” The most important pre-World War II books on perception and knowledge are Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, 2nd ed. (1998), and Our Knowledge of the External World (1926, reissued 1993); G.E. Moore, Philosophical Studies (1922, reprinted 1970), especially the important articles defending sense-data theory, “Some Judgments of Perception” and “The Status of Sense-Data”; H.H. Price, Perception (1932, reprinted 1981), which invokes the notion of a sense-datum in defense of the causal theory of perception; and Alfred J. Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge (1940, reissued 1971), which merges sense-data theory with the principles of logical positivism. Notable works since World War II include Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (1949, reprinted 2000), which defends a sophisticated form of epistemological behaviourism; Roderick M. Chisholm, Perceiving: A Philosophical Study (1957); and J.L. Austin, Sense and Sensibilia (1962), which contains a withering assault on the sense-data theory from the standpoint of ordinary-language philosophy. Surfaces, perception, and knowledge are discussed in Thompson Clarke, “Seeing Surfaces and Physical Objects,” in Max Black (ed.), Philosophy in America (1965, reprinted 1967); James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (1979, reissued 1986); and Avrum Stroll, Surfaces (1988). The theory of representative realism is given a sophisticated defense in Frank Jackson, Perception: A Representative Theory (1977); and in Edmond Wright (ed.), The New Representationalisms: Essays in the Philosophy of Perception (1993). S. Ullman, “Against Direct Perception,” Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 3(3):373–415 (September 1980), is an attack on direct realism, especially J.J. Gibson's version of that theory, from the standpoint of modern cognitive science.Knowledge and the commonsense view of the world are discussed by G.E. Moore, “A Defence of Common Sense,” in his Philosophical Papers (1959); Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, trans. from German (1969, reprinted 1974); Norman Malcolm, Thought and Knowledge: Essays (1977); John R. Searle, Intentionality: An Essay in the Philosophy of Mind (1983), and Avrum Stroll, Sketches of Landscapes: Philosophy by Example (1998). An excellent simple survey of the impact of computer studies, work in artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and neurobiology on our knowledge of other minds is found in Paul M. Churchland, Matter and Consciousness: A Contemporary Introduction, rev. ed. (1988).
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