Chisholm's Internalism and Its Consequences

Abstract: Among the important themes in Roderick Chisholm's epistemology are his commitment to internalism, his defense of the independence of epistemology from empirical science, and his assumption that we do know most of what we initially think we know. In “Roderick Chisholm and the Shaping of American Epistemology” Hilary Kornblith argues that Chisholm's views lead to a radical divorce between the factors that justify beliefs and the factors that cause beliefs, that Chisholm's views have the consequence that there is no connection between justification and truth, and that Chisholm's kind of epistemology is unable to give epistemic advice. I argue that Chisholm's views do not have these consequences.     

The Ontological Status of Persons*

Chisholm held that persons are essentially persons. The Constitution View affords a non‐Chisholmian way m defend the thesis that persons are essentially persons. The Constitution View shows how persons are constituted by‐but not identical to‐human animals. On the Constitution View, being a person determines a person's persistence conditions. On the Animalist View, being an animal determines a person's persistence conditions. Things of kind K have ontological significance if their persistence conditions are determined by their being members of K. On Chisholm's view, persons have ontological significance, but animals do not. On Animalism, animals have ontological significance, but persons do not. After explaining the notion of ontological significance, this article argues that persons do have ontological significance, and hence that Animalism is not true     

Can Internalism Be Saved?

Abstract: Richard Feldman argues that a good deal more of Chisholm's approach can be saved than I allow in “Roderick Chisholm and the Shaping of American Epistemology.” More than this, Feldman argues that there are other, and still more defensible, forms of internalism. I argue here that the problems I presented for Chisholm's view are not so easily sidestepped either within Chisholm's system or by other forms of internalism.     

Chisholm on freedom

Abstract: This critical examination of Roderick Chisholm's agent causal brand of libertarianism develops a problem about luck that undermines his earlier and later libertarian views on free will and moral responsibility and defends the thesis that a modest libertarian alternative considerably softens the problem. The alternative calls for an indeterministic connection in the action‐producing process that is further removed from action than Chisholm demands. The article also explores the implications of a relatively new variant of a Frankfurt‐style case for Chisholm's views of free will and moral responsibility and for libertarianism in general. It is suggested that Chisholm's efforts will and should continue to offer important assistance to libertarians who are determined to succeed where he apparently fell short.     

Reading Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters as Latina Feminist Philosophy

Through an analysis of the interconnections or lack thereof between gender and epistemology, I present Cristina García's The Agüero Sisters as a text of Latina feminist philosophy. First, I use the works of Linda Alcoff and Walter Mignolo to illustrate the political nature of epistemology and how women and people of color in particular are disenfranchised from such a political endeavor. Then I examine the connections among the concepts of origin, absence, inheritance, and knowledge‐construction in García's novel to further a critique of standard epistemology and point to an emphasis on reconnection with feminine and maternal knowledge for this text's female characters. Moreover, a depiction and elaboration of María Lugones's ideas of the “coloniality of gender” and “decolonial feminism” in this novel augments this critical examination of epistemology and places emphasis on women as knowledge‐producers.     

Moral knowledge and self control in Mengzi: rectitude,courage, and Qi

In this paper, I reveal systematic aspects of the moral epistemology of the Warring States Confucian, Mengzi. Mengzi thinks moral knowledge is ‘internally’ available to humans because it is acquired through normative dictates built into the human heart–mind (xin). Those dictates are capable of motivating and justifying an agent's normative categorizations. Such dictates are linked to Mengzi's conception of human nature (ren xing) as good. I then interpret Mengzi's difficult discussion of courage and qi in Mengzi 2A: 2 as illuminating the idea of ‘internal’ justification. The epistemology of courage is intimately related in 2A: 2 to its practice. Finally, I indicate at the end in outline the ways in which Mengzi and Gaozi are engaged in a dispute about moral epistemology that pits each of them against Xunzi and also against Zhuangzi.     

The Wax and the Mechanical Mind: Reexamining Hobbes's Objections to Descartes's Meditations

Many critics, Descartes himself included, have seen Hobbes as uncharitable or even incoherent in his Objections to the Meditations on First Philosophy. I argue that when understood within the wider context of his views of the late 1630s and early 1640s, Hobbes's Objections are coherent and reflect his goal of providing an epistemology consistent with a mechanical philosophy. I demonstrate the importance of this epistemology for understanding his Fourth Objection concerning the nature of the wax and contend that Hobbes's brief claims in that Objection are best understood as a summary of the mechanism for scientific knowledge found in his broader work. Far from displaying his confusion, Hobbes's Fourth Objection in fact pinpoints a key weakness of Descartes's faculty psychology: its unintelligibility within a mechanical philosophy.     

Reconsidering P-Prims Theory From the Viewpoint of Situated Cognition

Andrea diSessa's work appears to be representative of the 1980s research on the preconceptions and epistemology of physics. His theoretical framework also seems to be representative of 1980s cognitive science theory such as mental models. Although my theoretical perspective, based on a Gibsonian and situated cognition viewpoint, is different from diSessa's, I agree with him on many points. At the same time, however, I also feel that we have to reinterpret his contributions from a different perspective. In this commentary, therefore, I summarize how the situated cognition view can reinterpret diSessa's work as representative of 1980s research on the epistemology of physics.     

DEWEY ON EXTENDED COGNITION AND EPISTEMOLOGY

There is a surge of attempts to draw out the epistemological consequences of views according to which cognition is deeply embedded, embodied and/or extended (e‐cog). The principal machinery used for doing so is that of analytic epistemology. Here I argue that Dewey's pragmatic epistemology may be better fit to the task. I start by pointing out the profound similarities between Dewey's view on cognition and that emerging from literature of more recent date. Crucially, the benefit of looking at Dewey is that Dewey, unlike contemporary writers, also devises a corresponding epistemology. I then identify two senses in which contemporary analytic epistemology conflicts with e‐cog—concluding from that the superiority of the Deweyian framework, at least as it concerns accommodating e‐cog.     

Quine's Argument from Despair

Quine's argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine's argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher's quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language is a mistake, there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science. I will argue that a great deal of the confusion surrounding Quine's argument is prompted by certain phrases in his seminal ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Scrutinizing Quine's work both before and after the latter paper provides a better key to understanding his remarkable views about the epistemological relation between theory and evidence.     

Identity Politics and Dialectical Reason: Beyond an Epistemology of Provenance

Identity politics is important within feminism. However, it often presupposes an overly subjectivist theory of knowledge that I term an epistemology of provenance. I explore some works of feminist standpoint theory that begin to address the difficulties of such an epistemology. I then bring Sartre's account of knowledge in the Critique of Dialectical Reason to bear on these difficulties, arguing that his work offers tools for addressing them more adequately.     

IS NONDEFECTIVELY JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF KNOWLEDGE?

The traditional conception of knowledge as justified true belief is refuted in two famous counterexamples by Edmund L. Gettier. Roderick M. Chisholm has attempted to rescue a version of the traditional conception by distinguishing between defective and nondefective kinds of justification, and redefining knowledge more specifically as nondefectively justified true belief. Chisholm's revised definition avoids Gettier's counterexamples, but goes too far in the opposite direction, imposing conditions that are too narrow and not jointly necessary for knowledge. Chisholm's definition excludes some claims that intuitively constitute genuine knowledge¹ by entailing that if a true belief is invalidated as knowledge when defectively justified by a total body of evidence that also makes evident at least one false proposition, then no knowledge whatsoever can be supported by the same evidence. An alternative analysis of knowledge is proposed, according to which the potential loophole between the state of affairs that justifies belief in a proposition, and the state of affairs that makes the proposition true, permitted by the traditional concept of knowledge and discovered by Gettier's counterexamples, is closed by redefining knowledge as semantically-epistemically evidentially relevant justified true belief.     

Wittgenstein and Nonsense: Psychologism,Kantianism, and the Habitus

This paper is a critical examination of Wittgenstein's view of the limits of intelligibility. In it I criticize standard analytic readings of Wittgenstein as an advocate of transcendental or behaviourist theses in epistemology; and I propose an alternative interpretation of Wittgenstein's view as a social contextualism that transcends the false dichotomy between Kantianism and psychologism. I argue that this social contextualism is strikingly similar to the social account of epistemic practices developed by Pierre Bourdieu. Through a comparison between Wittgenstein's and Bourdieu's view and an analysis of the notion of habitus , I try to show how social contextualism can account for the distinction between sense and nonsense without falling into transcendental constructivism or social behaviourism.     

A Euthyphronic Problem for Kitcher's Epistemology of Science

Philip Kitcher has advanced an epistemology of science that purports to be naturalistic. For Kitcher, this entails that his epistemology of science must explain the correctness of belief-regulating norms while endorsing a realist notion of truth. This paper concerns whether or not Kitcher's epistemology of science is naturalistic on these terms. I find that it is not but that by supplementing the account we can secure its naturalistic standing.     

ANTHROPOLOGY,POLANYI, AND AFROPENTECOSTAL RITUAL: A SCIENTIFIC AND THEOLOGICAL EPISTEMOLOGY OF PARTICIPATION

The 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis sponsored both an International Congress of Arts and Sciences aimed at unity of knowledge and an anthropology exhibit of diverse peoples. Jointly these represented a quest for unifying knowledge in a diverse world that was fractured by isolated specializations and segregated peoples. In historical perspective, the Congress's quest for knowledge is overshadowed by Ota Benga who was part of the anthropology exhibit. The 1904 World's Fair can be viewed as a Euro‐American ritual, a global pilgrimage, which sought to celebrate the advances and resolve the challenges of modernity and human diversity. Three years later Afropentecostalism dealt with these same issues with different methods and rituals. This ritual system became the most culturally diverse and fastest growing religious movement of the twentieth century. I suggest that the anthropological method of Frank Hamilton Cushing, the postcritical epistemology of Michael Polanyi, and the Afropente‐costal ritual movement initiated by William J. Seymour are all attempts to develop a postmodern epistemology that is simultaneously constructive, focused on discerning reality, and broad enough to allow for human consciousness and diverse human communities. I explore this confluence of scientific and participatory epistemology through six theses.     

Epistemological principles for developmental psychology in Frege and Piaget

My main aim is to identify and discuss parallels between the epistemologies of Gottlob Frege and Jean Piaget. Although their work has attracted massive attention individually, parallels in their work have gone unnoticed. My discussion is in four parts and covers psychologism and epistemology; five epistemological criteria in Frege's rational epistemology under an AEIOU mnemonic, namely autonomy, entailment, intersubjectivity, objectivity and universality; the elaboration of these same criteria in Piaget's developmental epistemology; their implications for developmental psychology and epistemology. One main conclusion is that the same criteria fit both Frege's and Piaget's epistemology. A second conclusion is that Piaget's developmental epistemology can be regarded as an elaboration of Frege's rational epistemology in each of these five respects on both methodological and substantive grounds. Both conclusions are compatible with non-psychologism, which was accepted by both Frege and Piaget.     

Second‐Personal Respect,the Experiential Aspect of Respect,and Feminist Philosophy

I argue that Stephen Darwall's account of second‐personal respect should be of special interest to feminists because it opens up space for the development of certain feminist resources. Specifically, Darwall's account leaves room for an experiential aspect of respect, and I suggest that abilities related to this aspect may vary along with social position. I then point out a potential parallel between the feminist critique of epistemology and a budding feminist critique of moral philosophy (specifically relating to respect).     

Embodied Disbelief: Poststructural Feminist Atheism

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re‐explain Derrida's “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory.     

Chisholm's Epistemic Principles

Abstract: An exposition and discussion of Chisholm's “epistemic principles.” These are compared with relevant views of Wilfrid Sellars and Richard Foley. A further comparison, with the approach favored by Descartes, is argued to throw light on the status of such principles.