Wrapping up my comments of externalism I come to Williamson's book Knowledge and Its Limits. For simplicity Williamson is arguing from a perspective that overlooks substance dualism. So all the Thomists and Cartesians will obviously have troubles with his externalism. He points out that we've spent all this time making belief prior to knowledge and justification to be what makes true belief knowledge. His basic thesis is that knowledge is a separate mental state from belief. Now belief and justifying ones belief may lead one to knowledge. But that is a new state from the belief. He makes the further claim of equating knowledge and evidence. Thus when we say that we have evidence for a belief (as part of a justification) we really are speaking about something we know.
Now despite the fact most people when they first hear this start shaking their head, I think it is quite helpful. I mentioned in earlier posts on the topic of exertnalism (1, 2, 3) that one problem many have with externalism of justification is that it undermines the entire epistemological project. That is, it suggests we can avoid talking about reasons and being rational. I think that Williamson offers a way to take a few of the insights of say Alston or Plantinga without some of the problems that made many of us hesitant to adopt reliabilism. Further, by linking evidence and knowledge, Williamson gets us a lot of the strengths of naturalized epistemology. (At least as I see it) We can, for instance, avoid talk of justifying a belief as knowledge and simply talk about how evidence warrants a theory. Thus we can still have talk of reasons, but without falling back onto various foundationalist schemes that often creep up in talk of justification.
Now Williamson's reason for being an externalist is simple. Knowledge is factive. That is to know p depends upon the facts and thus environment related to p. Thus ones internal state might be the same as an other person, but unless the environment entails that p you don't know. This captures our intuition that knowledge entails the truth of what is known. For an internalist, knowledge thus can never be a mental state.
By distinguishing belief and knowledge Williamson also allows us to keep our sense that some important mentals states are internal. However Williamson goes one step further by suggesting that knowledge is one of our most fundamental mental states. He argues, fairly persuasively, for instance that believing is acting as if we knew. Thus to believe p is to treat p as if we knew it. He does caution, however, that he can't do a full blown conceptual analysis of belief in terms of knowledge. His argument basically is though that the farther one is from knowing p the less one ought to believe p, thus capturing some sense of epistemological development.
. . . the claim that belief is what aims at knowledge is consonant with the suggestion in disjunctive accounts that illusion is somehow parasitic on veridical perception. Properly developed, the insight behind disjunctive theories leads to a non-conjunctive account of knowledge and a non-disjunctive account of belief.
While belief aims at knowledge, various mental processes aim at more specific factive mental states. Perception aims at perceiving that something is so; memory aims at remembering that something is so. Since knowing is the most general factive state, all such processes aim at kinds of knowledge. If a creature could not engage in such processes without some capacity for success, we may conjecture that nothing could have a mind without having a capacity for knowledge.
Just as a note of interest, you might be interested in reading my classmate's critique of Williamson's Knowledge and Its Limits.
The argument is basically the argument against the unconscious. I'm a pretty big proponent of the reality of the unconsciousness. The notion of an unconscious goes back at least to the neoPlatonists and perhaps to Plato, depending upon how you read him. So it's a solid position.
For instance Jonah's counterargument is the example of not being in the mental state of hoping if I don't know I was hoping. Yet it seems to me that when we look at past behavior we often find ourselves describing attributes we had that we didn't know. The obvious one is repressed anger. But I think anyone who thinks about it will be able to come up with quite a few. Now if we have mental-like attributes predicated of ourselves exactly what are they if not mental states?
The real issue is the issue of what a mental state is. The claim that to be a mental state something must be luminous really is a view that comes out of the Cartesian approach to the mental, I think. That's not to say that one can't criticize Williamson's luminosity arguments. I think one can. But if ones criticisms are the just premise that there is no unconscious, then I think the phenomena of everyday life argues against it.
Clark,
I don't understand why you say that T.W. is arguing from a position that assumes the falsity of substance dualism, can you explain?
He explicitly states it in his book on page 49. He doesn't state that dualism invalidates his arguments (although I suspect it would cause serious problems for some arguments). He does say that the kind of internalism he argues against is the main one prevalent today and that he'll ignore dualism.
Just to add to the above comments, the fact he doesn't focus on dualism (thereby having a de facto assumption of its falsity) doesn't imply that some of his anti-internalist arguments wouldn't apply equally to dualism. Simply that he doesn't nuance them. I seem to recall a paper a few weeks back arguing that most anti-internalist arguments don't work against dualism though. Alas I never got around to reading more than the abstract and don't recall the link.
I've closed comments in order to avoid spam since I don't check this older blog as much anymore.
and Theology
Number of unique visitors:
Blogged by Clark Goble