Philosophy what can i know

Popularly, Philosophy is associated with stargazing and asking questions that are as vague as they are irrelevant, and to which there are no answers. To the contrary, Philosophy deals in a clear and precise manner with the real world, its complex social and material nature, and our place in it. Because of this, philosophical fields of studies are diverse. Philosophy — the love of wisdom — is an activity of attempting to understand the world, in all its aspects.

The conjunction of E1 and E2 by itself implies nothing about the accessibility of justification. But mentalist internalists who endorse the first principle below will also be committed to accessibility internalism, and evidentialists who also endorse the second principle below will be committed to the accessibility of justification:.

Necessity The principles that determine what is evidence for what are a priori recognizable. Although E1 and E2 by themselves do not imply access internalism, their conjunction with Luminosity and Necessity may imply access internalism.

Next, let us consider why reliabilism is an externalist theory. Even if the operations of the sources are mental states, their reliability is not itself be a mental state. Therefore, reliabilists reject mentalist internalism. Anyone who knows anything necessarily knows many things.

Our knowledge forms a body, and that body has a structure: knowing some things requires knowing other things. But what is this structure? Epistemologists who think that knowledge involves justification tend to regard the structure of our knowledge as deriving from the structure of our justifications.

We will, therefore, focus on the latter. According to foundationalism, our justified beliefs are structured like a building: they are divided into a foundation and a superstructure, the latter resting upon the former. Beliefs belonging to the foundation are basic. Beliefs belonging to the superstructure are nonbasic and receive justification from the justified beliefs in the foundation.

Before we evaluate this foundationalist account of justification, let us first try to spell it out more precisely. What is it for a justified belief to be basic? The following definition captures this thought:. So you believe. Unless something very strange is going on, B is an example of a justified belief.

DB tells us that B is basic if and only if it does not owe its justification to any other beliefs of yours. So if B is indeed basic, there might be some item or other to which B owes its justification, but that item would not be another belief of yours.

Let us turn to the question of where the justification that attaches to B might come from, if we think of basicality as defined by DB. Note that DB merely tells us how B is not justified. It says nothing about how B is justified. DB, therefore, does not answer that question.

What we need, in addition to DB, is an account of what it is that justifies a belief such as B. On such a view, B is justified because B carries with it an epistemic privilege such as infallibility, indubitability, or incorrigibility for a discussion of various kinds of epistemic privilege, see Alston []. Note that B is a belief about how the hat appears to you. So B is a belief about a perceptual experience of yours.

Other mental states about which a subject can have basic beliefs may include such things as having a headache, being tired, feeling pleasure, or having a desire for a cup of coffee. Beliefs about external objects cannot qualify as basic, according to this kind of foundationalism, for it is impossible for such beliefs to enjoy the kind of epistemic privilege necessary for being basic.

According to a different version of foundationalism, B is justified by some further mental state of yours, but not by a further belief of yours. According to this alternative proposal, B and E are distinct mental states. The idea is that what justifies B is E. Since E is an experience, not a belief of yours, B can, according to DB , still be basic. Privilege foundationalism is generally thought to restrict basic beliefs so that beliefs about contingent, mind-independent facts cannot be basic, since beliefs about such facts are generally thought to lack the privilege that attends our introspective beliefs about our own present mental states, or our beliefs about a priori necessities.

Experiential foundationalism is not restrictive in the same way. Suppose instead of B , you believe. Unlike B , H is about the hat itself, and not the way the hat appears to you. Such a belief is not one about which we are infallible or otherwise epistemically privileged. Privilege foundationalism would, therefore, classify H as nonbasic.

It is, however, quite plausible to think that E justifies not only B but H as well. If E is indeed what justifies H , and H does not receive any additional justification from any further beliefs of yours, then H qualifies, according to DB , as basic.

Experiential Foundationalism, then, combines two crucial ideas: i when a justified belief is basic, its justification is not owed to any other belief; ii what in fact justifies basic beliefs are experiences.

It is not clear, therefore, how privilege foundationalism can account for the justification of ordinary perceptual beliefs like H. This could be viewed as a reason for preferring experiential foundationalism to privilege foundationalism. DB articulates one conception of basicality. EB makes it more difficult for a belief to be basic than DB does. The J-Question Why are perceptual experiences a source of justification? One way of answering the J-question is as follows: perceptual experiences are a source of justification only when, and only because, we have justification for taking them to be reliable.

What might give us justification for thinking that our perceptual experiences are reliable? We are supposing, then, that justification for attributing reliability to your perceptual experiences consists of memories of perceptual success.

On this view, a perceptual experience E justifies a perceptual belief only when, and only because, you have suitable track-record memories that give you justification for considering E reliable. If this view is correct, then it is clear how DB and EB differ.

Your having justification for H depends on your having justification for believing something else in addition to H , namely that your visual experiences are reliable.

As a result H is not basic in the sense defined by EB. However, H might still be basic in the sense defined by DB. If you are justified in believing H and your justification is owed solely to E and M , neither of which includes any beliefs, then your belief is doxastically—though not epistemically—basic. But there are other possible answers to the J-question. Another answer is that perceptual experiences are a source of justification when, and because, they are of types that reliably produce true beliefs.

Yet another answer is that perceptual experiences are a source of justification when, and because, they have a certain phenomenology: that of presenting their content as true. To conclude this section, let us briefly consider how justification is supposed to be transferred from basic to nonbasic beliefs. There are two options: the justificatory relation between basic and nonbasic beliefs could be deductive or non-deductive.

But if we consider a random selection of typical beliefs we hold, it is not easy to see from which basic beliefs they could be deduced. Foundationalists, therefore, typically conceive of the link between the foundation and the superstructure in non-deductive terms. Foundationalism says that knowledge and justification are structured like a building, consisting of a superstructure that rests upon a foundation.

According to coherentism, this metaphor gets things wrong. Knowledge and justification are structured like a web where the strength of any given area depends on the strength of the surrounding areas. Coherentists, then, deny that there are any basic beliefs. As we saw in the previous section, there are two different ways of conceiving of basicality. Consequently, there are two corresponding ways of construing coherentism: as the denial of doxastic basicality or as the denial of epistemic basicality.

Consider first coherentism as the denial of doxastic basicality:. Doxastic Coherentism Every justified belief receives its justification from other beliefs in its epistemic neighborhood.

Let us apply this thought to the hat example we considered in Section 3. According to coherentism, H receives its justification from other beliefs in the epistemic vicinity of H. They constitute your evidence or your reasons for taking H to be true. Which beliefs might make up this set of justification-conferring neighborhood beliefs? We will consider two approaches to answering this question. The first is known as inference to the best explanation.

Such inferences generate what is called explanatory coherence see chapter 7 in Harman So the relevant set of beliefs is the following:. There are of course alternative explanations of why you have E. Perhaps you are hallucinating that the hat is blue. Perhaps an evil demon makes the hat look blue to you when in fact it is red.

Perhaps you are the sort of person to whom hats always look blue. Note that an explanatory coherentist can also explain the lack of justification. Suppose you remember that you just took a hallucinatory drug that makes things look blue to you. That would prevent you from being justified in believing H. The explanatory coherentist can account for this by pointing out that, in the case we are considering now, the truth of H would not be the best explanation of why you are having experience E.

Rather, your having taken the hallucinatory drug would explain your having E at least as well as the hypothesis H would explain it. One challenge for explanatory coherentists is to explain what makes one explanation better than another.

What we need is an explanation of why you are having E. According to the evil demon hypothesis, you are having E because the evil demon is causing you to have E , in order to trick you. But why is it bad? What we need to answer this question is a general and principled account of what makes one explanation better than another.

Suppose we appeal to the fact that you are not justified in believing in the existence of evil demons. The general idea would be this: If there are two competing explanations, E1 and E2, and E1 consists of or includes a proposition that you are not justified in believing whereas E2 does not, then E2 is better than E1.

The problem with this idea is that it puts the cart before the horse. Explanatory coherentism is supposed to help us understand what it is for beliefs to be justified. If explanatory coherentism were to proceed in this way, it would be a circular, and thus uninformative, account of justification.

So the challenge that explanatory coherentism must meet is to give an account, without using the concept of justification, of what makes one explanation better than another. Let us move on to the second way in which the coherentist approach might be carried out. Suppose the subject knows that the origin of her belief that p is reliable. So she knows that beliefs coming from this source tend to be true. Such knowledge would give her an excellent link between the belief and its truth.

So we might say that the neighborhood beliefs which confer justification on H are the following:. Call coherentism of this kind reliability coherentism. If you believe 1 and 3 , you are in possession of a good reason for thinking that the hat is indeed blue. So you are in possession of a good reason for thinking that the belief in question, H , is true.

Like explanatory coherentism, this view faces a circularity problem. If H receives its justification in part because you also believe 3 , 3 itself must be justified.

But where would your justification for 3 come from? One answer would be: from your memory of perceptual success in the past.

You remember that your visual experiences have had a good track record. They have rarely led you astray. So if reliability coherentism is going to work, it would have to be legitimate to use a faculty for the very purpose of establishing the reliability of that faculty itself. But it is not clear that this is legitimate. We have seen that explanatory coherentism and reliability coherentism each face its own distinctive circularity problem.

Since both are versions of doxastic coherentism, they both face a further difficulty: Do people, under normal circumstances, really form beliefs like 1 , 2 , and 3? It would seem they do not. It could be objected, therefore, that these two versions of coherentism make excessive intellectual demands of ordinary subjects who are unlikely to have the background beliefs that, according to these versions of coherentism, are needed for justification.

This objection could be avoided by stripping coherentism of its doxastic element. The result would be the following version of coherentism, which results from rejecting EB the epistemic conception of basicality :. However, it is necessary that you have justification for believing 1 and 2. It is your having justification for 1 and 2 that gives you justification for believing H. A reliability coherentist might make an analogous point. Both versions of dependence coherentism, then, rest on the supposition that it is possible to have justification for a proposition without actually believing that proposition.

Dependence coherentism is a significant departure from the way coherentism has typically been construed by its advocates. According to the typical construal of coherentism, a belief is justified, only if the subject has certain further beliefs that constitute reasons for the given belief. Dependence coherentism rejects this. According to it, justification need not come in the form of beliefs.

It can come in the form of introspective and memorial experience, so long as such experience gives a subject justification for beliefs about either reliability or explanatory coherence. In fact, dependence coherentism allows for the possibility that a belief is justified, not by receiving any of its justification from other beliefs, but solely by suitable perceptual experiences and memory experience.

Next, let us examine some of the reasons provided in the debate over foundationalism and coherentism. The main argument for foundationalism is called the regress argument. If B 1 is not basic, it would have to come from another belief, B 2.

But B 2 can justify B 1 only if B 2 is justified itself. If B 2 is basic, the justificatory chain would end with B 2. But if B 2 is not basic, we need a further belief, B 3. If B 3 is not basic, we need a fourth belief, and so forth. Unless the ensuing regress terminates in a basic belief, we get two possibilities: the regress will either loop back to B 1 or continue ad infinitum. According to the regress argument, both of these possibilities are unacceptable. Therefore, if there are justified beliefs, there must be basic beliefs.

This argument suffers from various weaknesses. First, we may wonder whether the alternatives to foundationalism are really unacceptable. In the recent literature on this subject, we actually find an elaborate defense of the position that infinitism is the correct solution to the regress problem.

The issue is not whether a simple argument of the form p therefore p can justify the belief that p. Of course it cannot. Rather, the issue is ultimately whether, in the attempt to show that trust in our faculties is reasonable, we may make use of the input our faculties deliver. The grief and anger of another have never quite the same significance for him as they have for me. For him these situations are lived through, for me they are displayed. Merleau-Ponty [ ].

The interesting problem of other minds is not the epistemological problem… It is the conceptual problem, how I can understand the attribution of mental states to others. Bilgrami agrees Some philosophers go further than Nagel and insist that the conceptual is the fundamental problem; others see little in it Hyslop How one understands this problem is a matter of some contention Gomes What all agree is that the problem is associated with the work of Wittgenstein, and in particular section from the Philosophical Investigations :.

That is, what I have to do is not simply to make a transition in imagination from one place of pain to another. As, from the pain in the hand to pain in the arm.

For I am not to imagine that I feel pain in some region of his body…. Some associate the conceptual problem here with the problem of coming to have mental concepts that are completely general.

Evans has proposed that to have a thought about an object to the effect that it is F consider: Tom is angry requires the exercise of the following two capacities:. One being the capacity to think of x , which could be equally exercised in thoughts about x to the effect that it is G or H ; and the other being a conception of what it is to be F , which could be equally exercised in thoughts about other individuals, to the effect that they are F.

The problem, reflected in , is how to understand the extension to others of a concept acquired in this way. Strawson considers how it is that one ascribes mental states to others and concludes that one cannot do this if we insist on divorcing mental states from the behaving body.

While many will accept that the conceptual problem is the first problem we encounter in connection with others, others go further and claim that once one addresses the conceptual problem there is no room for the epistemological one.

This is because our way of thinking and talking about mind will have application to others built into it from the start. It has been pointed out that to say what is required for grasp of a concept is not yet to show that that concept is instantiated.

Some can only see in this proposal a retreat into behaviorism. Others, however, insist that this is not the case—at least if behaviorism is understood as a reductionist thesis. Austin Cook Some take issue with McDowell over whether the latter is only a philosophically generated concept Wright , but it is hard to deny that the move from the former concept to the latter is deeply significant.

Alvin Goldman has distinguished a descriptive from a normative epistemological problem of other minds. Section 1 and section 2 were largely concerned with the latter; this section will concern itself with the former.

The descriptive problem is associated with what Goldman terms mind reading or mentalizing. While many species of animal may be thought to have minds, only some will be capable of representing another as having minds. Questions of justification and conceptual difficulty are not of concern to the descriptive theorist, nor are metaphysical questions concerning the nature of mind; what concerns the descriptive epistemologist is how what she says measures up with what is being learned in the empirical disciplines of developmental psychology and neuroscience.

Theory-theory has its roots in a paper by Premack and Woodruff , which argued that certain problem-solving behavior observed in chimpanzees should be taken as evidence that they possess a theory of mind, as evidence that they are able to make predictions about the behavior of others that impute to them unobservable mental states.

Premack and Woodruff take this imputation to be a rather primitive and unsophisticated reaction to the observation of certain behavior, so natural in both humans and chimpanzees that it would take an effort to suppress it.

In particular, it would need to be shown that the creature possesses the concept of false belief. Wimmer and Perner devised a test that purported to show just that. The original test was carried out with normally developing human children and taken to show that the capacity to represent false beliefs is present in 4 to 6 year olds, but absent in 3 year olds.

One proposal see, e. The other proposal see, e. This approach to understanding how we attribute mental states to others has several notable features: i it dovetails with the dominant approach to solving the knowledge-of-other-minds problem as it proposes that our belief here is the result of postulating mental states as the best explanation of observed behavior; ii it dovetails with a functionalist account of mind; and iii it can solve the asymmetry problem, as some hold the child comes to attribute mental states to herself on the same model as she does others Gopnik All three features of this theory have come under criticism.

One suggestion to accommodate this data is that we postulate two systems: one that operates in the infant and that is fast, efficient, inflexible and non-normative, and another that develops later and operates in tandem with the earlier one in the mature human and that is effortful, inflexible, normative and language-dependent Apperly and Butterfill ; for a good summary of this work and a critique of it, see Jacob forthcoming.

Robert Gordon, Jane Heal and Alvin Goldman propose an alternative to the theory-theory account of how to understand the attribution of mental states to others. Heal identifies in theory-theory a scientific motivation that runs roughshod over important differences between human beings and the rest of the natural world. Heal is particularly concerned with the question, What further thoughts will a person have given what thoughts I already know her to have?

Heal also traces out further questions about others that may concern us. Gordon , insists that simulation theory must be formulated in such a way as to avoid reliance on both introspection and inference from oneself to the other. Rather than imagine what I would do in your situation, he suggests that I imagine being you in your situation. Simulation theory has its roots in Verstehen theories favored by sociologists and historians such as Collingwood and Dilthey as well as work by Lipps on empathy; for an overview here see Stueber For an overview of the different versions of simulation theory that have been advocated see Barlassina and Gordon Over the years theory-theory and simulation theory have moved closer towards each other, giving rise to various hybrid accounts of how it is that we attribute minds to others.

But there are those who challenge both theories and any hybrid versions that they have spawned. Influenced by work in phenomenology and embodied cognition, Gallagher and Zahavi propose that our attribution of mental states to others is the result of perception of and reaction to behavior understood as expressive of mental life.

Furthermore, they suggest that the activation of mirror neurons be understood as serving action or response preparation rather than as supporting simulation, cf. Gallagher and Zahavi reject inferential accounts of how we know others in favor of a direct perceptual one, and they understand behavior e. Gurwitsch []. This work aims to move us away from an overly-intellectualized way of thinking of other minds and to turn our attention to the world that we live and act in with others. The emphasis here is less on individual beliefs and desires than in shared intentions and goals.

Interaction theory can be seen as an extension of enactivist theories of perception that understand perception as a highly complex action-oriented phenomenon, incorporating both meaning and emotion: to see an object is to see it as affording me opportunity for action, and this opportunity is taken to be part of how I make sense of the world and what gives the world value for me cf.

Clarke, Noe, Varela et al. To see the other person is to see her as affording interaction; in this regard, direct perception is direct enactive perception. Rather than taking individual agents to be constitutive of social interaction, these interaction theorists take them to be constituted by their interaction with others.

Person model theory finds certain limitations in each of the theories that it opposes. Thus, it is proposed that the understanding of persons is a step-by-step process of enrichment, central to which is the acceptance of a multiplicity of strategies TT, ST, and IT among them.

Which strategy is deployed is dependent upon such things as context, how similar or different the other is from oneself, whether the understanding is of an emotion or a propositional attitude, and the complexity of the mental state.

The idea of the deployment of a multiplicity of strategies is not unique to Person Theory. What this work highlights is how much may be involved when it comes to understanding others. In order to avoid this conclusion, Reid argued that philosophers must jettison the Cartesian framework of ideas and its trust in reason over the deliverances of sense.

According to Reid, the faculties of reason and perception should be regarded as being on an equal footing. Rather than insist that all human belief is regulated by reason, Reid holds that we should allow that our perceptions of the world are guided by principles for which no proof can be offered.

Amongst the regulative principles Reid identifies there are two concerning others: i there is life and intelligence in our fellow men; and ii certain features of the countenance, sounds of the voice and gestures of the body indicate certain thoughts and dispositions of mind Reid According to Mill, all truths are known in one of two ways: either directly, through the authority of consciousness, or indirectly, by inference from truths known directly.

Mill believes that knowledge arrived indirectly in this way is sufficient to avoid the concern of solipsism. Despite this possibility, Malebranche thinks there is reason to believe that God arranged things so that the same physical conditions do produce the same sensations i.

The threat of solipsism is a very particular one for the idealism of George Berkeley. Without proof of other minds, idealism will amount to nothing but solipsism.

Some philosophers find an argument from analogy also in the work of David Hume, while others interpret his work in a more naturalistic vein. Precisely how this remarkable capacity operates is a matter of some debate. There are those who agree with Reid and find Hume unable to escape the confines of his own mind. These philosophers argue that Hume recognizes the problem of other minds that arises for the Cartesian framework that he endorses, and holds that sympathy can do no more than get us to feel our own feelings in response to what we observe in the other.

But there are others who take Hume to turn his back on scepticism and the very business of providing reasons for the belief that others have thoughts and feelings. Smith rejects the idea that I can feel what another feels. He writes,. Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations….

That this is the source of our fellow-feeling for the misery of others, that it is by changing places in fancy with the sufferer, that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels, may be demonstrated by many obvious observations, if it should not be thought sufficiently evident of itself. It can be a very intense journey. Our college students today are far more practical. When I was in college, which was in the last hey-day of the radical movement, it was a more philosophically reflective time.

Now, they want to get good jobs and get rich fast. Despite this, and the fact that so many students are facing massive debt and a bleak economy, how can you make the case that they should study philosophy? To challenge your own point of view. Also, you need to be a citizen in this world. You need to know your responsibilities. And it enriches your inner life. You have lots of frameworks to apply to problems, and so many ways to interpret things.

It makes life so much more interesting. And it helps us increase our humanity. What do you think are the biggest philosophical issues of our time? The growth in scientific knowledge presents new philosophical issues. The idea of the multiverse. Where are we in the universe? Physics is blowing our minds about this. The question of whether some of these scientific theories are really even scientific.

Can we get predictions out of them? And with the growth in cognitive science and neuroscience. Are we discovering what we really are? Are we solving the problem of free will? How much do the advances in neuroscience tell us about the deep philosophical issues? These are the questions that philosophers are now facing. But I also think, to a certain extent, that our society is becoming much more secular. So the question about how we find meaning in our lives, given that many people no longer look to monotheism as much as they used to in terms of defining the meaning of their life.

This is something that philosophers ought to be addressing. This conversation was edited and condensed for clarity and length. Skip to content Site Navigation The Atlantic. Popular Latest.