Tag Archives: Western Philosophy

The Future of the History of Philosophy

Posted on by under History, Philosophy, Shared

by Josh Platzky Miller and Lea Cantor

From The Philosopher, vol. 111, no. 1 (“Where is Philosophy Going?“).
If you enjoy reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation.
We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

One way to scry the future of philosophy is to look at its past. However, the history of philosophy – both as a field of academic study and in more popular literature – tends to tell a rather narrow and parochial story. This story predominantly focuses on Europe to the exclusion of almost everywhere else. The shift away from such a bias has already begun, especially in the specialist history of philosophy literature, but there are still deeply Eurocentric assumptions built into the most influential general histories of philosophy available today. One invisible assumption, still widely adopted, is that there is such a thing as “Western Philosophy”. As we will argue, the history of philosophy – both in Europe and globally – would be better understood if we abandoned the idea of a “Western Philosophy”. To see why, we start with the most widespread narratives about philosophy’s past.

***

Mainstream histories of philosophy contain what we might call a “Standard Narrative”: that philosophy begins in ancient Greece, usually starting with Thales; that it is continuous to the present day (the “Plato to NATO” picture); and that it is a largely self-standing European achievement with minimal influence from elsewhere. Some form of this picture is present in most influential histories of philosophy, from Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1945) to more recent works like Anthony Gottlieb’s The Dream of Reason: A History of Western Philosophy (2000), Anthony Kenny’s New History of Western Philosophy (2010), James Garvey and Jeremy Stangroom’s The Story of Philosophy: a History of Western Thought (2012), and A.C. Grayling’s History of Philosophy (2019). In these histories, the Standard Narrative tends to be equated to the history of “Western Philosophy”, although it is sometimes used interchangeably with philosophy as such, for instance in Philip Stokes’ Philosophy: 100 Essential Thinkers (2016).

So far, so familiar. But there are real problems with the Standard Narrative. Most obviously, for a supposedly continuous tradition, we might have some questions about a glaring c. 600-year gap (about 450-1050 CE). The gap seems to suggest that there weren’t really any philosophers for over half a millennium – or, as Brian Magee presents it, “for a long time scarcely any new intellectual work of lasting importance was done.”

We might further wonder about a history of philosophy that tells a story of almost entirely men boasting an age-old European lineage. How have the Ancient Greeks become equated to Western Europeans when their main interactions were with the Eastern Mediterranean, and they themselves often hailed from the Levant and North Africa? What of the “canonical” thinkers in the Graeco-Roman world who were actually from contemporary Turkey (e.g., Thales), Egypt (e.g., Plotinus), and Algeria (e.g., Augustine)? And that’s just the start of it: what about philosophers prior to the Greeks, or altogether excluded from the ambit of Ancient Philosophy, who wrote in languages other than Greek or Latin, such as Sanskrit or classical Chinese?

The Standard Narrative is presented by historians of philosophy in Europe as having been passed down since antiquity. Yet, one of its most striking features is how recently it was fabricated. Even until the late 1700s, many European histories of philosophy offered a significantly different picture. For instance, Gilles Ménage in France published a History of Women Philosophers (1690), while in Germany, Johann Jakob Brucker’s 1742 Critical History of Philosophy contained hundreds of pages on philosophy prior to the Greeks and beyond Europe.

The Standard Narrative is presented by historians of philosophy in Europe as having been passed down since antiquity. Yet, one of its most striking features is how recently it was fabricated.

How, then, did we arrive at the Standard Narrative? The story of a Greek origin of philosophy became common in late-18th century Eurocentric historiography. It was used to cement the exclusion of non-European traditions from the mainstream canon of philosophy in the 19th century. Echoing Peter Park’s important 2013 book, Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy, Yoko Arisaka recently emphasised that the broader Standard Narrative “is in fact a particular post-19th century construction arising out of the German tradition and establishing itself as the canonical Eurocentric history of philosophy”. It emerged from a long history of exclusion and marginalisation that is tied up with a host of extra-philosophical concerns, including European colonial expansion, slavery, pseudoscientific racial theorising, gendered social restructuring, academic disciplinary specialisation, religious sectarianism, and political expediency. Prominent European philosophers increasingly made a lot of noise about ancient Greece having inaugurated an unprecedented era of logic and reason, of logos, freed from superstition and murky mythos.

By the early 20th century, the Standard Narrative had largely assumed its contemporary form in specialist texts. Amongst Anglophones, it then became popularised through best-selling books like Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy (1926) – the most sold book in the United States that year, with some four million copies sold overall – and Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, which has sold an estimated two million copies since first publication in 1945 and made the Standard Narrative widely known under the label of “Western Philosophy”. The Standard Narrative has since spread to become globally influential, especially in former European settler-colonies.

Contemporary, 21st-century histories of philosophy have an ambivalent relationship to the Standard Narrative. There is usually some recognition of its inadequacy and parochialism, especially amongst feminist historians of philosophy such as Mary Ellen Waithe and Eileen O’Neill. This is also true amongst figures working on less Eurocentric, more global histories (or histories “without any gaps”), such as Hajime Nakamura, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, and Peter Adamson. However, many continue to replicate the Standard Narrative as the basis for a specifically “Western Philosophy”, and hence remain wedded to its basic premises (Greek origins, insularity, and continuity with contemporary Europe). In so doing, even contemporary histories of philosophy set up a false dichotomy between so-called “Western” and “non-Western” philosophy, trapped by the Eurocentric biases that birthed it, and are thus unable to offer a truly global history of philosophy.

***

If the future of the history of philosophy is global rather than Eurocentric, how do we get there? One lesson is from feminist critiques of male-dominated history of philosophy: simply adding [excluded group XX] and stirring is inadequate; genuine integration in the history of philosophy might mean reimagining what counts as philosophy. The same is likely to be true for rewriting the history of philosophy from a non-Eurocentric or global perspective. This will require much painstaking work, from historiographical challenges (that is, how to write such history) to exploring how philosophising itself has been conceptualised beyond Europe.

Meanwhile, however, there is a major hurdle to address: the idea of a “Western Philosophy” itself. The idea of “Western Philosophy” is largely taken for granted: few authors have attempted to define what the term picks out, mostly leaving it implicit and equivalent to the Standard Narrative (noteworthy exceptions include Ben Kies in the 1950s, and Lucy Allais and Christoph Schuringa more recently). When explanations are attempted, these turn out to be implausible, unstable or nonspecific to this supposed “tradition”: from a purely geographical descriptor, to supposed characteristics like “secular” or “scientific” thinking, “rational inquiry” or “concern with argumentation”, to simply a “legacy of the Greeks”.

If “Western Philosophy” is defined by a commitment to secular thinking, then most Greek philosophers probably wouldn’t qualify.

The idea of “Western Philosophy” cannot be purely geographical, since “west” is a relational term. Does it rule out “any sources east of Suez”, as Antony Flew put it in his Introduction to Western Philosophy (1971)? If so, this would exclude Australia and New Zealand while including indigenous thinkers from the Americas. Nor is “Western Philosophy” easily defined by putative characteristics. Take secular thinking: as Grayling puts it in his recent History of Philosophy, “this is a history of philosophy, not of theology and religion”. But if “Western Philosophy” is defined by a commitment to secular thinking, then most Greek philosophers probably wouldn’t qualify (interest in the nature of the divine and theological concepts underpinned many of their philosophical theories and scientific explanations), let alone Medieval Christian thinkers in the “Latin West”. In Europe, you would have to wait until about the 18th or even 19th century before finding widespread secular theorisations in metaphysics, ethics, and so on. On the other hand, you can find plenty of evidence of “secular thinking” amongst, say, ancient Indian Cārvāka/Lokāyata thinkers, but nobody sees Cārvāka as part of “Western Philosophy”.

What about the “legacy of the Greeks” idea? On this conception, philosophy in the Islamic world (as Peter Adamson frames it) would be a much stronger contender for being characteristic of “Western Philosophy” than anything happening across medieval Latin Christendom in Europe for, roughly, 600 years. As it happens, this is precisely the issue with the 600-year-gap in the continuity story. If there is any continuity in philosophising with Greek sources in or around Europe, the story predominantly runs through scholars east and south of Greece, in Byzantium and the Islamic world. In this period, translations of Greek texts proliferated in numerous languages, including Syriac, Arabic, Aramaic, Hebrew, Armenian, Coptic, and Ge’ez.

The incoherence of the idea of “Western Philosophy” doesn’t stop at the 600-year gap: one exemplar is Ibn Rushd (Latinised as Averroes, 1126-1198), a rationalist scholar working between Al-Andalus – contemporary Spain, one of the westernmost regions of Europe, no less – and northwest Africa, especially contemporary Morocco. Ibn Rushd’s commentaries on Aristotle and distinctive philosophical views were hugely influential in Europe up to the 16th century. If we wanted to tell a story that was continuous, Greek-responding, and in a geographical “West” (of Europe), then Ibn Rushd would appear to be an essential part of such a narrative. However, he is rarely foregrounded in Histories of “Western Philosophy”, and sometimes excluded entirely. Often, he is presented in passing as having merely “preserved” and “transmitted” Aristotle.

“Western Philosophy” is presented as a purely European phenomenon (at most, perhaps, extending to North America and Australasia), hermetically sealed from outside influence.

This leads us to the final major problem with the idea of “Western Philosophy”: insularity. It is presented as a purely European phenomenon (at most, perhaps, extending to North America and Australasia), hermetically sealed from outside influence. Even some of the “global” histories of philosophy, such as Julian Baggini’s How the World Thinks (2018), recreate the narrative of hermetically sealed traditions in isolation from one another. Despite being written out of histories of “Western Philosophy”, however, there is increasing scholarly interest in the histories of exchange, connection, and conversation (or even outright theft of ideas) between canonically “Western” philosophers and the rest of the world. Some examples are well known, such as the influence of Indian and East Asian philosophy on Schopenhauer and Heidegger, while others have been the subject of more recent scholarly work, such as Leibniz’s interest in China.

This trend also holds within the ancient periodisation of “Western Philosophy”, which downplays the exchanges between ancient Greece and much of Egypt, Babylonia, Persia, and India, as well as between the Roman Empire and much of North Africa and Eurasia. In fact, some scholars have argued that quintessential periods in so-called “Western” history, such as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, are in fact the product of European learning from Islamic and, later, indigenous American, African, Indian, and Chinese thinkers.

Historical entanglement is, perhaps, the key problem with the narrative of “Western Philosophy”: if philosophers in Europe have, throughout history, been in conversation with those outside of Europe, then it becomes difficult to justify sectioning off a “Western Philosophy” that is distinctive from all others (much less holding “Western Philosophy” as unique and equivalent to philosophy proper). This is precisely the argument raised by Ben Kies (1917-1979), a South African school teacher, anti-colonial activist, and public intellectual – and perhaps the first person to challenge the idea of a “Western Philosophy”. As Kies argued in 1953, the formation of this narrative is primarily “a matter of myth and political metaphysics”. Moreover, as Kies argues, the project of “Western Civilisation”, with an attendant “Western Philosophy”, only becomes widespread in post-World War II attempts to recuperate a racial category of “white civilisation”. If Kies is right, then “Western Philosophy” is fundamentally an ideological construction, tied to forms of political dominance. This would explain why none of its explanations can coherently track the cast of characters and intellectual movements associated with it.

***

The idea of a “Western Philosophy” is a recent invention: a political project that masks its origins in, to no small degree, racial and imperialist thinking. Indeed, the very idea itself is the productof a fabricated history that does not fit the facts, and inhibits our understanding of both philosophy and its history. As a result, we should abandon the idea of a “Western Philosophy” and re-examine the history of philosophy without its distorting effects. In doing so, we have much to learn from the past. Throughout history, thinkers around the world have engaged in philosophy that is “cross-cultural”, even globally entangled, but today their insights and methods are largely missing in historiographical and metaphilosophical debates. We suggest that a crucial step to rectify this situation is to draw these approaches into the history and historiography of philosophy, without reusing and reinforcing the Eurocentric category of “Western Philosophy”.

—

If you are interested in reading more about these issues, we recommend:

—

Josh Platzky Miller is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of the Free State (South Africa), with a PhD from the University of Cambridge. Josh’s primary research interests are social movements, African and Latin American politics and political thought, social epistemology and the imagination, and the global history and historiography of philosophy.
(Not really on) Twitter: @jplatzkymiller

Lea Cantor is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at Worcester College, University of Oxford, and a British Society for the History of Philosophy Postgraduate Fellow (2022-2023). Lea’s primary research interests are in classical Chinese philosophy, early Greek philosophy, the reception of ancient Chinese and Greek philosophy in European philosophy, comparative methodology, and the global history and historiography of philosophy.
Website: leacantor.com
Twitter: @LeaMundi

Josh and Lea are organising a conference addressing these themes in April 2023.

From The Philosopher, vol. 111, no. 1 (“Where is Philosophy Going?“).
If you enjoyed reading this, please consider becoming a patron or making a small donation.
We are unfunded and your support is greatly appreciated.

This article is shared from The Philosopher – Published since 1923.

The Philosopher is the journal of the PSE (Philosophical Society of England), a charitable organisation founded in 1913 to provide an alternative to the formal university-based discipline. You can find out more about the history of the PSE here.

Read the original article here.

Philosophers in the Midst of History

Posted on by under Education, History, Philosophy

This excellent series by Professor Gregory B. Sadler helps put some major thinkers in the Western tradition into historical context. Context is key when attempting to properly interpret a writer’s intentions, motives, influences, and thought processes.

These are video recordings from sessions in a quarterly lecture/discussion series, hosted by the Frank Weyenberg Library. Each of these talks takes a philosopher and places him or her within the historical context informing his or her work and life.

Videos in this series include:

  • Aristotle, Athens, and Alexander the Great
  • Anselm of Canterbury, the Church, and the Normans
  • Rene Descartes, Early Modernity, and the Wars of Religion
  • Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism, and the Holocaust
  • Plato, Athenian Democracy, and the Greek Enlightenment
  • Boethius, King Theodoric, and the Middle Ages
  • Thomas Hobbes, English Civil War, and Modern Political Theory
  • Nietzsche, the Apex of the West, and the Threat of Nihilism
  • Cicero, Greek Philosophy, and the Fall of the Roman Church
  • Augustine of Hippo, Struggles in the Church, and Rome’s Fall
  • John Locke, Absolute Monarchy, and Constitutional Government
  • Albert Camus, Absurd World, Resistance to Evil
  • Epictetus, Slavery, Stoicism, and the Roman Empire
  • Thomas Aquinas, Mendicant Orders, and High Middle Ages
  • J-J Rousseau, Barbarism, Civilization, and Revolutions

The video series is ongoing, so expect more to come in the future!

After a decade in traditional academic positions, Dr. Sadler started ReasonIO and began doing philosophical work in more practical contexts. He is an APPA-certified philosophical counselor, a public speaker, an author, an ethics trainer, and an executive coach (among other things!). He is also the editor of Stoicism Today and the producer of the Half Hour Hegel series.

Want to support this public philosophy work? Become a Patreon backer! Patreon.com/sadler

Interested in booking Dr. Sadler for a talk, interview, workshop, consultation, or tutoring? Check out ReasonIO!

An Imagined Dialogue on Eastern & Western Philosophy & The Nature of Knowledge

Posted on by under Education, Philosophy

“The search for knowledge is like the search for true love. We live in a web of relationships, be it of propositions or people. Sometimes we are in a skeptical mood and we grasp for a solid base—a belief that we’re sure of or a friend or lover we can trust completely—but experience seems to admonish us, ‘all are fickle’; at such times the web can seem inscrutable. Then at other times we’re completely in the moment and the web is worldwide, and we’re secure in its interrelationships, confident in our position. We’re in a web all right—just sometimes we see ourselves as the spider other times as the fly.” – Raam Gokhale

“Truth may have been found but might never be known.” – Kedar Joshi

________________________________________

Ram: You know the quote from Kipling, “East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet”? Do you think it applies to philosophy?

Kedar: It applies there more than anywhere else. Western philosophy demands the rigors of sound arguments. Eastern philosophy is virtually indistinguishable from religion.

Ram: But “NEVER the twain shall meet” is pretty radical. Don’t you think they must meet in some sense if both are to be labeled as philosophy? To compare them, to use the same word, ‘philosophy’, to describe them, they must have something in common. It’s not like say comparing farming with the Dewey-decimal system, for example.

Kedar: You seem to have a common ground in mind?

Ram: I do. I think it’s contained in the inscription at the Temple of the Delphic oracle, namely ‘Know Thyself’.

Kedar: Hmm. I think you’re right. Western philosophy exhorts ‘Know Thyself’ in order to know all other things. Eastern philosophy exhorts ‘Know Thyself’ in order to forget about all other things.

Ram: As usual, you’ve put things very pithily. In western philosophy, whether you’re dealing with ideas that have an external existence as in Plato or Berkeley or ideas only present in the mind as in Descartes, Locke, or Hume, ideas are known first and are the basis of knowing everything else. Know thyself in order to know all other things.

Kedar: How about your favorite philosopher, Wittgenstein? Doesn’t he argue that even self-knowledge is only possible through outward criteria, that there is no such thing as a private language? I for one would be only too happy to dismiss Wittgenstein as not a true philosopher.

Ram: Ah so that’s how philosophers trade barbs huh? They don’t directly insult each other; they insult each other’s intellectual heroes. I agree Wittgenstein doesn’t fit the paradigm too neatly but you must admit, even his linguistic analysis can be described as an exercise in ‘Knowing Thyself’—except in his case the thyself that you’re exhorted to know is the linguistic practices of your “form of life”, your community of speakers. Not ‘Know Thyself in order to know all other things’ but ‘know the practices of thy community in order not to muck up the enterprise of knowing other things’.

Kedar: At any rate, the later Wittgenstein is understood partly as attacking the phenomenalists who definitely fit into the ‘Know Thyself in order to know all other things’ camp. So I guess he’s a philosopher in the same sense as the statement, ‘Philosophy is crap’ is itself taken to express a philosophical position.

Ram: You put it more crudely than I would but I think we agree that in western philosophy, ‘Knowing Thyself’ is generally necessary in order to know other things. Wittgenstein might be an exception, but if he is, he is the exception that proves the rule.

Kedar: OK…perhaps. Now how about eastern philosophy? I take it you have in mind ‘Atman is Brahman’ and the doctrine of Maya from the Vedas when you say eastern philosophy exhorts, ‘Know Thyself in order to forget about all other things’.

Ram: Actually you said eastern philosophy exhorts ‘Know Thyself in order to forget about all other things’. I recently read The Tao of Physics and I would have to redescribe eastern philosophy as exhorting, ‘Know Thyself in order to know the subjective nature of all other things’. I think that’s a more accurate formulation of eastern philosophy.

Kedar: Interesting reformulation. It still fits the ‘Atman is Brahman’ and Maya doctrines of Hindu philosophy. And I can see how one might draw parallels with quantum mechanics where the observer plays an inseparable role in the process of observing. But can it really be taken to represent all eastern philosophy? I mean I don’t know much about Chinese and Japanese philosophy for instance.

Ram: Actually it better fits non-Hindu eastern philosophy, especially Taoism, much better because, unlike Hinduism, Taoism, in exhorting us to see the subjective nature of all other things, actively encourages us to understand all other things. Each separate thing is a Tao, composed of opposites like the yin-yang, with each piece containing the seeds of its opposite. The parallels with modern physics are clear: matter is energy; particles are waves. In Hinduism, a genuine interest in understanding individual things outside the self is sometimes lacking. This is certainly true in Hinduism’s emphasis on the big picture, of transcending the veil of Maya in order for the atman or self to merge with the Brahman or God. But even Hinduism holds that the duality of Shiva and Shakti, the male and female elements, like yin and yang from Taoism, or matter and energy, particles and waves from modern physics, can be seen in everything.

Kedar: OK it seems ‘the twain do meet’ in the exhortation, ‘Know Thyself’. That’s how we can recognize eastern philosophy and western philosophy, as different as they are, as philosophy. But they clearly differ in their recommendation of how best we can know ourselves.

Ram: That’s right and the methods they recommend are suited to their widely divergent views about the nature of reality—the ‘twains’ do meet but from then on steam in opposite directions. Western science has been making successively more accurate maps of the world but their first approximation was always common sense. Common sense is what all the theorizing must tie back to. And the methods of common sense–ordinary seeing is believing—are at the core of classical science just as ordinary introspection is at the heart of western philosophy. Eastern philosophy seeks to transcend common sense; common sense is Maya. The essence of reality is glimpsed in mystical visions. The extra-ordinary visions may explain the world of common sense but their basis is an ineffable contradiction: all things are a unity of opposites, opposites like the tendency to rest/to move, to sometimes exhibit ‘male’ sometimes ‘female’ characteristics, etc. We see these opposites first in our innermost natures. ‘Know thyself in order to know the subjective nature of all other things’.

Kedar: And quantum mechanics…I guess it just so happens reality has dictated western maps have eastern legends?

Ram: I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Kedar: But like you I consider myself more of a western philosopher. Must the west be so short-changed?

Ram: Not at all. Western philosophy’s great contribution is a healthy skepticism. While eastern philosophy goes on to prescribe how to go about acquiring self-knowledge be it through yogic meditation or contemplation of Zen paradoxes, western philosophy, facing a much simpler task as far as acquiring self-knowledge is concerned, goes on to either explicate how we then acquire knowledge of external things or failing that raises doubts about whether such knowledge is even possible.

Kedar: Ahem, with all this talk of knowledge, don’t you think we should define knowledge first?

Ram: You’re right. Surprisingly, as different as they are, both eastern and western philosophy, I think, would agree, at least as a first approximation, that knowledge is justified, true belief…just the things they believe and their methods of justification would be as different as night and day.

Kedar: I know ‘justified, true belief’ has been a definition of knowledge at least as far back as Plato but I am not sure it’s correct.

Ram: Well a lot of contemporary epistemologists think that the traditional definition needs at least a fourth condition to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. And even the ones that don’t think that the traditional 3-condition definition is deficient, think that justification has to be radically reinterpreted.

Kedar: I’m not referring to that. I think knowledge is just true belief not justified true belief. Yet even with the simpler definition, I don’t think we ever have knowledge because we’re never sufficiently confident in our beliefs. Indeed the more beliefs we have, the less sure we are of any of them. Our uncertainty is even warranted on purely probabilistic grounds.

Ram: You and I have had this conversation before. As I recall, you think justification is merely a tool that helps us to have greater conviction in our beliefs but that it itself isn’t really necessary for knowledge.

Kedar: That’s right.

Ram: I think you have the ‘man-on-the-street’ on your side. I think if we asked an ordinary person to define knowledge, he would say true belief. Justification is usually the kind of thing only philosophers worry about.

Kedar: Is this another way that philosophers trade insults, by saying the ‘man-on-the-street’ would agree with you? Philosophers are a passive-aggressive lot aren’t they? You know me: I usually walk on the opposite side of the street as the ‘man-on-the-street’. So I don’t exactly find comfort in having the ‘man-on-the-street’ on my side.

Ram: Philosophy makes strange bedfellows. I usually find comfort in using words as they are used in everyday speech and, as yours is the more ‘everyday’ definition, let me try to see things from your perspective. First let me try to put a philosopher in your corner so you feel a little more secure. The philosopher Robert Nozick, like you, drops justification from his basic account of knowledge though like you he also thinks justification has a very important role to play in how we acquire knowledge. According to Nozick, knowledge is true belief except the belief has to be so ‘secure’ that it would vary with the truth of what’s believed in ‘close’ counterfactual situations.

Kedar: Could you elaborate?

Ram: Sure. I believe I’m talking to you. And in fact I AM talking to you. But for my belief to count as knowledge, Nozick would say my belief would have to be such that if I weren’t talking to you, I wouldn’t believe I was talking to you and in other not-too-farfetched situations where I would be talking to you, I would continue to believe I’m talking to you. As Nozick says it, my belief has to ‘track’ the truth in close counterfactual situations in order to count as knowledge.

Kedar: I don’t think I walk on the same side of the street as Mr. Nozick either. If I weren’t talking to you, I might still believe that I was; and there may be situations where I would be talking to you but for whatever reason I wouldn’t believe I was talking to you. Still that doesn’t change the fact that I know here and now that I am talking to you.

Ram: Nozick tries to capture this intuition by restricting his tracking conditions to close counterfactual situations. For example if I were drugged I could believe I’m talking to you even if I wasn’t talking to you. But Nozick would say that is not a close possible world. In ‘normal’ situations where I wouldn’t be talking to you, I would (undrugged) simply be talking to someone else or to no one at all. And in such circumstances, it might seem reasonable to require that I wouldn’t continue to believe I’m talking to you if my belief is to count as knowledge.

Kedar: But even if in close-counterfactual situations my belief doesn’t track the truth, even then I think I could still be said to know. What does it matter if I’m drugged and would think I’m talking to you even when I’m not. If I believe I’m talking to you when I AM talking to you, and my belief is caused by the usual perceptual cues, and not the drug in my system, then in those circumstances I’m right and have knowledge. For instance, I can give an accurate report of our conversation. It doesn’t matter that the drug would make me believe I’m talking to you even when I’m not. In that case I don’t have knowledge but that shouldn’t infect the case where the belief is properly caused.

Ram: I think I agree with you, though other people, in particular some epistemologists, might have different intuitions so we have to make the situation more precise. Imagine the drug that’s in my system only works when I don’t hear anything for a length of time. We may imagine the doctor has prescribed it to alleviate my desperate fear of being alone. Then in close counterfactual situations when I’m not talking with you, I would still believe I’m talking with you. My intuition is that, despite this weird drug, when I’m talking with you, I know I’m talking with you. We could imagine a doctor saying the drug only affects my judgment when I don’t hear any sounds for a length of time.

Nozick with his observations about ‘keeping the method fixed’ has some wiggle-room to deal with our intuitions, but ultimately I think he fails. But let’s not lose sight of what his tracking conditions were really meant to do. They were intended to rule out lucky guesses as not instances of knowledge; the intuition he was trying to capture is that if your belief is only accidentally true, it shouldn’t count as knowledge. The trouble is in our example, the belief I am talking to you is NOT accidentally true—it’s properly caused by the fact that I am talking to you; it’s just that even if it weren’t true, there would be another cause—namely the drug—that would make me believe I was talking to you; but the existence of this other cause doesn’t make my belief accidentally true when the right cause is the one that’s operating at the present time.

Kedar: My view of knowledge, as you know, permits even accidentally true beliefs or lucky guesses to count, provided they are firmly believed.

Ram: I was wondering when you were going to say that. I happen to think lucky guesses should be excluded, though not as Nozick does, so let me try to dissuade you with the following example: suppose someone has a dream he is going to win the lottery; the dream firmly convinces him it’s going to happen and so he buys a ticket; the ticket wins. You would say that though he wasn’t justified in believing he would win, he nevertheless knew he would win?

Kedar: Sure I would. Wouldn’t we in such circumstances say he JUST KNEW he was going to win?

Ram: Watch it! You’re in danger of appealing to the man-on-the-street again. The man-on-the-street’s intuitions can be notoriously slippery. Though in the lottery example, we could picture him agreeing to the claim, ‘the dreamer just knew he was going to win’, if we pressed him, the man-on-the-street could equally be brought to say the dreamer didn’t really know he was going to win, he just got lucky.

We’ve had this type of conversation before. The other day when we were talking about necessity in the Deccan Dugout, you stated there can be multiple, sometimes conflicting intuitions about the proper meaning of common words. But you said the philosopher has the right, the obligation, to select or define a technical meaning to suit his purpose. I submit to you, justified, true belief or some account of knowledge that precludes accidentally true beliefs is a more technical, philosophically more interesting definition of knowledge than just true belief, and so should be chosen by the philosopher over the latter.

Kedar: Well I have to admit just true belief as a definition of knowledge is not very philosophically interesting. For example, as you pointed out before, a man could be said to acquire a lot of knowledge on this definition simply by believing each pair of a series of contradictory statements. One of each pair has to be true and if he ‘hedges his bets’ by believing both he’s guaranteed to have knowledge. This is clearly a pretty ridiculous way of acquiring knowledge. Perhaps when I proposed the ‘true-belief’ definition, I was guilty of appealing to the man-on-the-street’s lesser intuitions.

So it seems beliefs have to be non-accidentally true in order to count as knowledge. How do we flush out exactly the conditions necessary to rule out accidentally true beliefs?

Ram: Certainly if someone as illustrious as Robert Nozick, the winner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, has failed, we should be on guard.

Kedar: I’m not sure whether you’re being facetious or passive-aggressive again, but we definitely should be on guard. For example, your justification condition—we would want to say most people have knowledge about the content of their perceptual beliefs without having a justification for them. We know the causes that make most perceptual beliefs true—i.e. their reliability in conditions of good lighting, the perceiver not being under the influence of drugs, etc.—so we would say such people are justified but these people may not be aware all the premises that go into their justification.

Ram: You bring up an interesting point. Could someone be justified in his knowledge claim only from the outside and still be said to know?

Kedar: What do you mean ‘from the outside’?

Ram: I mean inaccessible to the putative knower. This is the internalism/externalism distinction one encounters in contemporary epistemology. We from the outside, external perspective know why the man-on-the-street’s perceptual beliefs are justified but from the internal perspective, based solely on what the man is aware of, the man might have no justification—he simply believes what he sees. The question is do we want to require the man be aware of the full justification of his beliefs in order to know them or do we allow external justifications to support his knowledge claims?

Kedar: I’ve re-girded myself against the man-on-the-street. My intuitions about justifications are that it’s an internal thing, so I would say if the man-on-the-street doesn’t have the full justifications for his perceptual beliefs internally, so much the worse for him—he doesn’t know.

Ram: Now we have to be careful what we require as full justification. For consider the following example. A man in an empty public square sees a prominent clock in a country known for punctuality and precision…

Kedar: Not India, I take it.

Ram: Ha, Ha, OK not India. The man notices that the clock reads 5:00 pm. He thinks to himself, ‘clocks around here generally tell the correct time’, looks at the position of the sun in the sky and judges that it’s about 5:00 pm and takes similar other measures to justify his belief that it is in fact 5:00 pm. Suppose it is in fact 5:00 pm but the clock he is looking at stopped working at 5:00 am. A philosopher named Edmund Gettier used examples like this to argue that knowledge can’t simply be justified, true belief because the man seems to meet all three conditions but we don’t want to say he knows it’s 5:00 pm.

Kedar: Interesting example. My first inclination is to maintain that knowledge can be justified, true belief. It’s just that the man’s justification is not a full, complete justification.

Ram: I had the same reaction when I first heard this example. But remember: you’re committed to justification being internal, that the man be fully aware of each premise in his justification. What would you have him do? Wait a few minutes to see if the clock is running? We could suppose the clock did coincidentally restart at 5:00 pm so it seems to be running. Still we don’t want to say that the man who relies on such an on-off clock knows what time it is. Do we want to further require he examine the inner workings of the clock? Again since the clock has restarted, inner workings might yield no clue that in fact it’s reading 5:00 am and that therefore the man’s belief that it’s 5:00 pm is only accidentally true.

In general any belief inductively justified can be false. That’s the nature of inductive justification. All we have to do to cook up a Gettieresque example is to imagine a scenario in which the inductively justified belief would be false but suppose the belief coincidentally is true. Then you have truth, belief, justification—just not knowledge.

Kedar: Extending your example to the n-th degree, we could imagine a full justification would require a justification for induction, which the history of philosophy has taught us is a losing battle.

Ram: Fortunately it’s not as bad as that. In the case of inductive justification you could argue that a justification only has to make it likely that the conclusion-belief is true. Against Gettieresque examples, the only thing that’s required is that there be no genuine defeaters of that justification as there are in the clock example.

Kedar: What’s a genuine defeater?

Ram: Well, a defeater of a person’s justification for a belief is a true proposition such that if the person believed this proposition, he would no longer be justified in holding the belief in question. The proposition ‘the clock stopped working at 5:00 am’ is a defeater, a genuine defeater, in the earlier example because if the man believed it, he would no longer be justified in believing it’s 5:00 pm.

Kedar: I guess to understand why you say genuine defeater, I have to know what’s a non-genuine defeater.

Ram: A non-genuine defeater, or a misleading defeater as it’s known in the literature, is a proposition that is a defeater in the sense that were the putative knower to believe it, he would no longer be justified. But it is a misleading defeater in the sense that its power to defeat is dependent on a false proposition. That at least is how my graduate school professor, Peter Klein, a defeasibility theorist, put it.

Kedar: Can you give an example?

Ram: We already had one. The drug that caused conversations to be imagined when no conversation was going on is an example of a misleading defeater. Imagine that I was unknowingly given this drug. This proposition is a defeater of my justification for believing that I’m talking to you. It is a defeater because if I believed it, I would no longer be justified in believing I was talking to you. Yet to some it seems like a misleading defeater because its power to defeat is dependent on the false proposition that the drug in my system is active right now. Remember we said the drug doesn’t operate so long as I hear sounds.

Kedar: OK—I think I have some sense of defeasibility theories of knowledge. And in Nozick I got some flavor of a different type of theory. I know we couldn’t have covered every epistemological theory but did we at least hit all the major classifications?

Ram: Let’s see…Nozick was an example of reliabilism. We talked about defeasibility. I guess the only other major strand is the causal theory of knowledge.

Kedar: That sounds interesting…maybe just the kind of theory I can espouse. I don’t know exactly what a causal theory of knowledge is but it sounds like it could fit our intuitions in the drug case. There we said I know I am talking to you because my belief is caused by the facts that make it true.

Ram: A causal theory has strong intuitive appeal. We want to say what’s true caused us to know it’s true. It’s the basis of our most common beliefs, namely perceptual beliefs. Seeing is believing because the thing we believe plays a causal role in forming our belief.

Kedar: And a causal theory would handle our Gettieresque clock example. The man doesn’t know it’s 5:00 pm because there is a causal disconnect between it actually being 5:00 pm and his belief that it’s 5:00 pm.

Ram: That’s right, but…

Kedar: I just knew there would be a but. Did you ever think, philosophy is crap because it’s full of butts?

Ram: Very funny. Seriously though, a causal theory of knowledge faces some challenges distinguishing causal connections of the right sort from causal connections that don’t result in knowledge.

Kedar: Could you give an example of the wrong sort of causal connection?

Ram: Certainly. Let’s modify our drugged conversation example. Suppose the drug administered unknown to me makes me imagine a conversation, perhaps a very flattering conversation, when someone is talking to me. I think we would say I don’t know you’re talking to me though my belief that you’re talking to me is caused by your talking to me.

Kedar: It’s funny how our strongest intuitions fall prey to such easy to dream up counterexamples.

Ram: They’re not that easy to dream up—I’ve just heard them or their kind before. For example another criticism of the causal theory I’ve heard is that it’s unable to handle deductive knowledge like our knowledge of the truths of mathematics. Numbers don’t cause anything because they’re simply logical constructs.

Kedar: Remember, I happen to be a Platonist about truths of mathematics so I can believe that somehow they cause our beliefs. They cause our beliefs because our mind directly ‘grasps’ them.

Ram: Well let’s just say numbers pose difficulties for most ‘normal’ causal theorists of knowledge.

Kedar: As usual you’re being very cagey and passive-aggressively insulting. We’ve surveyed the major epistemological theories but you still haven’t said which one you prefer.

Ram: If I am being cagey it’s not from any deviousness. Remember, like Wittgenstein, I’m an ordinary language philosopher. To borrow Wittgenstein’s metaphor, maybe knowledge is like a family resemblance: we see a family’s photographs and the faces all seem to resemble one another but we may be hard-pressed to find a single feature that is common to them all; knowledge may be like that, a concept that has many intuitions running through it without one being common to them all. For example, for knowledge we have intuitions that it must be reliable, non-accidental, caused by the thing known, be supported by a justification. It wouldn’t surprise me if all these intuitions couldn’t be brought together under one rubric. Maybe all philosophically interesting concepts are like that, making our attempts to find necessary and sufficient conditions for them ultimately doomed to failure.

Kedar: Don’t be so pessimistic. After all, as different as eastern and western philosophies are, you found a common thread running through all of them—know thyself.

Ram: I think I got lucky. But you may have a point. Maybe I got lucky because philosophy is a more technical word than knowledge. Maybe philosophers should only focus on words that have already been lifted out of the confused din of common discourse. Maybe epistemologists would do better to focus on concepts like evidence or justification which are already more technical than knowledge.

Though, wouldn’t it be funny if the word philosophy was the only philosophically interesting word that permits a philosophically satisfying definition?

Kedar: I think that would be funny only to a philosopher. I choose to believe that concepts like justification and evidence would permit philosophically interesting definitions. Let’s talk about them next.

Ram: Wait a minute. I see by the clock outside it’s 5:00 pm. I think I better be getting back. We can talk about justification and evidence next time.

Kedar: OK. Meanwhile I’ll take the imagined conversation drug and think about what you and I might say.

eastunleashed

March 6, 2011

Philosophy Now Forums