Kim, J. (1988). "What is ‘Naturalized Epistemology’?" In Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 2, Epistemology, 381-391
Kim on traditional epistemology
According to Kim, traditional epistemology involves attempts to provide answers to two interrelated questions:
- “what conditions must a belief meet if we are justified in accepting it as true?”
- “what beliefs are we justified in accepting?”
Traditional epistemology honors distinctions between good and bad beliefs by insisting on the notion of justification, that no belief is a candidate for being knowledge unless it can be justified by some appropriate means (as directly supported by sensory experience, as supported by inference, or as supported by a priori considerations).
The traditional tripartite analysis of knowledge
The traditional tripartite analysis of knowledge gives the necessary and sufficient set of conditions1 that a person must meet in order to qualify as knowing something.
A person S knows that some proposition P, if and only if the following three conditions are met:
- S believes that P
- P is true = you can believe the cat is on the mat even if it is false, but you cannot know that the cat is on the mat unless it happens to be true
- S’s belief that P is justified = the centrality of justification
To have knowledge is not sufficient to have true belief. Conditions 1 and 2 ensure true belief, but true belief doesn’t amount to knowledge because true belief can be on all kinds of basis that seem to undermine any claim to knowledge (e.g. guess work, wishful thinking).
“… there is a simple reason for our preoccupation with justification: it is the only specifically epistemic component in the classic tripartite conception of knowledge. Neither belief nor truth is a specifically epistemic notion: belief is a psychological concept and truth is a semantical-metaphysical concept.”
Belief is a kind of mental attitude we take towards propositions, and knowing what propositions someone believes doesn’t tell us anything about what they actually know. Truth is about the objective relationship between thought and reality, and is independent of knowledge. There could be many true facts about the world that we simply haven’t discovered. justification is thus the component of the analysis that relates belief and truth to knowledge.
The traditional analysis is intended to apply to propositional knowledge (know-that).
Ayer-version-of-the-analysis-of-knowledge refines the traditional analysis of knowledge presented by Kim by tightening what counts as belief (requiring sureness) and clarifying what counts as justification (having the right to be sure).
Gettier-challenge-to-the-traditional-analysis Goldman-on-the-Gettier-cases
Epistemology as normative
In Kim’s view, traditional epistemology is a normative discipline = seeks to understand the conditions (norms) under which propositions are actually ought to be believed.
It’s epistemology’s emphasis of justification that makes it a normative discipline.
“Justification is what makes knowledge itself a normative concept. On the surface at least, neither truth nor belief is normative or evaluative… But justification manifestly is normative. If a belief is justified for us, then it is permissible and reasonable, from the epistemic point of view, for us to hold it, and it would be epistemically irresponsible for us to hold beliefs that contradict it. If we consider believing or accepting a proposition to be an “action” in an appropriate sense, belief justification would then be a special case of justification of action, which in its broadest terms is the central concern of normative ethics.”
Kim’s critique of naturalized epistemology
Kim argues Quine-on-naturalized-epistemology fails to reflect the normative dimension of knowledge and thus fails to be genuine epistemology.
“[Quine] epistemology is to be a ‘chapter of psychology’, a law-based predictive-explanatory theory, like any other theory within empirical science; its principle job is to see how human cognizers develop theories (their ‘picture of the world’) from observation (that is, the stimulation of their sensory receptors). Quine is urging us to replace normative theory of cognition with a descriptive science.”
“…unless naturalized epistemology and classical epistemology share some of their central concerns, it’s difficult to see how one could replace the other, or be a way (a better way) of doing the other.”
Kim is arguing that Quine’s naturalized epistemology isn’t really epistemology at all. Kim notes that the only relations that Quine’s view can really consider are “causal-nomological” relations. Naturalized epistemology explains the causal process of how we come to believe, but not the evidential relation (why we ought to believe). For Kim, this means losing the normative dimension of epistemology if we opt for the naturalistic epistemology over and against the traditional approach.
Footnotes
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necessary conditions = each condition needs to be met. sufficient conditions = there are no further requirements over and above the conditions ↩