Days 4 and 5: Quine & Sellars – Two Roads to Naturalized Epistemology

•          Review Goldman

•          Folk Epistemology and Folk Psychology

•          Questions of Meaning and Questions of Substance

•          Folk Psychology and Folk Epistemology

•          Quine

•          Sellars

•          Inside → Out Epistemology

•          Descartes

•          Introduction to Paul Churchland

•          Introduction to Representations

•          Please read Mindware, chps 1, 2, and 4.

Review Goldman

•          Questions/Review

•          Why does Goldman think that empirical methods will be useful to epistemology?

–        Reliabilism?

–        Other approaches?

–        Does Goldman think epistemology simply reduces or turns into the application of empirical methods?

Folk Epistemology & Folk Psychology

•          What is folk epistemology (or epistemic folkways)?

•          What is folk psychology?

Questions of Meaning & Questions of Substance

•          Quine’s Critique of the Analytic-Synthetic distinction.  (The upshot, roughly, is that questions of meaning and substance are not as different as once thought.)

•          Some terms used to describe cognition figure in talk about knowledge and talk about mind (egs., “experience,” “memory” …)

•          What are the implications of Quine’s critique of analyticity for terms like those, i.e. terms found in folk epistemology and folk psychology?

Folk Psychology & Folk Epistemology

•          Consider the following claims:

–        (1) if one can report (without extra-sensory aids) on some feature of the perceivable world, then one experienced it;

–        (2) one experiences something if and only if one is conscious of it.

–        Reasons (from P.S. Churchland) for thinking at least one of the above is false

–        Other reasons to worry about some of our folk terminology

–         

Quine (1908-2000)

•          Challenged the analytic-synthetic distinction

•          Argued for a naturalized epistemology

•          In the spirit of Quine, consider: if the analysis of the meanings of terms like “experience” – used both in talk about the mind and talk about knowledge – makes substantive assumptions about the way the mind works, and those assumptions can be overturned by empirical investigation, then how useful is it to use the mere (empirically uninformed) analysis of such terms as foundational in our epistemology?

Sellars (1912-1989)

•          Argued that our self-conception is a corrigible framework; argued against “giveness” (and that can be applied to both perception of external objects and internal states)

•          Not as closely associated with naturalized epistemology as Quine, but some of Sellars’ views could be used to defend some sort of naturalized epistemology

•          If introspection makes use of folk psychological theory, and parts of that theory are false, then how useful is it to start doing epistemology and philosophy of mind by using introspection?  Should introspective results be used as a foundation for all other knowledge? Are they epistemically privileged or of higher quality?

Inside → Out Epistemology

•          What is it?

•          Some examples (Descartes, Husserl, BonJour…)

•          What does it take seriously?

•          What might it be missing?

•          Let’s be careful…

Descartes (1596-1650)

•          In his Meditations and Principles, it is clear that Descartes wants to start epistemology in an a priori manner; however…

•          In his Passions, it is equally clear that (after the a priori foundations are established) there is empirical work to be done to understand cognition (especially things like memory and emotions).  Moreover, he did work in dissection but suppressed publication of L’homme for political reasons.  He was a substance dualist, but popular misconceptions of Descartes notwithstanding, he was very interested in empirical studies of the (brain and) central nervous system

•          Many are familiar with the first point, but not the second; to ignore the second is to miss the role for empirical methods even in Descartes’ approach to cognition

•          Notice, though, the methodological priority given to starting on the inside and a priori, also found in some other thinkers

Introduction to Paul Churchland

•          Student of Wilfred Sellars

•          Eliminativist: thinks folk psychology is thoroughly false (unlike his teacher)

•          Thinks the above has radical implications for how we understand the mind and how we do epistemology (and semantics too)

•          Rejects inside-out epistemology

•          Rejects focus on sentential or propositional epistemology

Introduction to Representations

•          What are representations?

•          Why postulate them as part of a theory of mind or knowledge?