Abstract
Some versions of empiricism have been accused of being neither empirically confirmable nor analytically true and therefore meaningless or unknowable by their own lights. Carnap, and more recently van Fraassen, have responded to this objection by construing empiricism as a stance containing non-cognitive attitudes. The resulting stance empiricism is not subject to the norms of knowledge, and so does not self-defeat as per the objection. In response to this proposal, several philosophers have argued that if empiricism is a stance, then there can be no distinctively epistemic reasons in favor of adopting it, but only prudential or moral reasons. I defend stance empiricism against this objection by showing that stance empiricism furthers many plausibly epistemic goals, such as false belief avoidance, wisdom, and justification. I respond to three objections to my argument: that I assume a conception of epistemic reason that leads to problematic tradeoffs (I do not), that to have epistemic reason is just to be epistemically justified (it is not), and that my premise that experience is the only source of information has no empirical content (it does).
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Notes
For example, I will not address general worries about non-cognitive analyses of normative discourse, such as the worry, first raised by Geach (1960), that such analyses cannot account for non-assertoric predications of normative terms. I will also presuppose a distinction between empirical and non-empirical propositions. Finally, I ignore questions about the adequacy of empiricist treatments of certain kinds of knowledge, such as knowledge of one’s own mind, mathematics, and methodologically basic principles or rules like induction or modus ponens.
It seems to me that at this point, the objector must saddle the empiricist with an analysis of necessity as analyticity. For the claim that \(\hbox {E}_{\mathrm{K}}\) is necessary is less obviously false than the claim that it is analytic. Thanks to Tom Vinci for discussion of this point.
Andrew Fenton pointed out to me the need for such elaboration.
It is often held that the project of defining such a criterion has failed decisively. I am persuaded by Justus (2014) that the primary arguments for this view are not cogent. Furthermore, the kinds of significance criteria that have been refuted in the past are highly general—they are defined for an arbitrary language L. But they do not need to be. Rather, as Goldfarb and Ricketts (1992, pp. 74–75) argue, we can delineate the empiricist languages on a “case-by-case” basis, i.e., immanently for particular languages. This approach is likely to avoid the cycle of punctures and patches that significance criteria have been stuck in.
To be distinguished from irrational, i.e., contrary to epistemic reason.
Chakravartty couches his discussion in terms of van Fraassen’s thin conception of rational belief, which is a matter of “logical consistency and probabilistic coherence” (Chakravartty 2004, p. 180). But nothing in Chakravartty’s (2004) argument turns on this conception.
This is in contrast with Chakravartty (2011). There he points out that van Fraassen’s conception of rationality is in general too thin to decide between rival stances: many radically different stances are logically consistent and probabilistically coherent, and so the work of deciding between them falls on non-cognitive values. I will be working with a thicker conception of epistemic reason, one on which advancing an epistemic goal furnishes an epistemic reason, at least for epistemic stances.
Carnap regarded epistemology as an obscure mixture of psychology and logic, whose notions were explicanda in need of explication. I take ‘theoretical’, as he uses it, to pertain to explicated epistemology, which he discusses in his (1936).
An anonymous referee noted that one could use E1 to argue for traditional empiricism. This does not pose any problem in the present context since I am not trying to show that stance empiricism is preferable to traditional empiricism. The idea is to recruit E1 into the service of a normative empiricism that does not succumb to a self-defeat objection.
Andrew Fenton pointed this out to me.
Isaac Saney suggested a construal along these lines.
David’s (2014) more sophisticated version of this “veritist” view adds that we should non-accidentally believe interesting truths and not believe falsehoods. Nothing in my discussion will depend on these kinds of nuances.
An important advantage of this role conception of epistemic oughts is that it explains how it can be that one ought to believe a given proposition even if one cannot voluntarily do so. Just as a teacher who is so averse to the theory of evolution by natural selection that he cannot voluntarily bring himself to teach it ought to do so nonetheless, so we, qua cognizers, should believe things that we cannot. For further discussion of the denial of the epistemic “ought implies can” principle, see Feldman (2000, p. 674).
The agent described here does not necessarily take experience to be a more basic source of justification than intuition and therefore reject intuition as a source of evidence when so viewing it conflicts with what experience tells her. Rather, she rejects intuition as a source of justification because she cannot explain, in terms of any putative source of justification, why intuition should be reliable; even intuition-based methods provide no satisfactory explanation of their own reliability (cf. Bealer 1992, p. 116).
Feldman sees justification as a more plausible epistemic goal than truth because, intuitively, believing truly against all evidence is not a way to achieve epistemic success.
Tyler Hildebrand pointed this out to me.
An anonymous referee suggested that the teleological argument begs the question against proponents of the arationality argument generally, as the justified belief conception is part of the arationality argument per se. However, we have seen that Chakravartty (2004) allows, contrary to the justified belief conception, that epistemic rationality by proxy is a genuine notion of epistemic rationality. Moreover, there is no textual evidence that, with the exception of Boucher (2014), the other proponents of the arationality argument cited accept the justified belief conception.
Duncan MacIntosh raised with me the example of a healthy diet that improves cognitive functioning, but that is, he suggested, not the object of an epistemic reason.
Boucher’s contention that “if the benefits of stances are epistemic, we are still dealing with pragmatic justification inasmuch as the stance is justified in terms of the benefits of adopting it” might be taken as a self-standing assertion, as opposed to itself following abductively from its explanation of the Vizzina case. I see such an assertion as in need of justification and not as an appropriate starting point for theorizing. Moreover, it is vulnerable to my objection to the justified belief conception, discussed below.
I note that I am unaware of any advantages of such a view.
Functionism states a sufficient but not a necessary condition on having a kind of reason to do something. This is by design: I find it doubtful that all actions that are subject to moral reasons meet the stated condition.
Inference rules and axioms are interchangeable to a certain extent. But this does not mean that epistemic reasons for or against uses of inference rules are reducible to epistemic reasons for or against beliefs. There is an ineliminable inferential component in any systematic formulation of one’s knowledge: we cannot reason with axioms alone, but need inference rules to get from axioms to theorems.
Such an understanding is, I am suggesting, a desideratum. I doubt that it is a requirement.
I have not here advocated an account of observation that rules out sense-data theories of perception. Rather, my claim is that intersubjective observations are necessary for science as a social activity. For example, experimental results can be reproduced by distinct research teams only if these results are intersubjectively observable. For all I have said, sense-data may provide an adequate basis for one’s own private theory.
Van Fraassen seems to endorse Cartwright’s argument, though his remarks on it are cagey:
we may care about things above and beyond the effects they could have in our experience, and want to arrive at some beliefs about them independently of how they affect what we will or can observe. But Cartwright sees a dividing line there, and adds to the above ‘and, unlike other facts about us, this is not a matter of choice.’ At this point she makes contact, it seems to me, with my classification of further beliefs in what our accepted theories say, as rationally permissible but supererogatory as far as the scientific enterprise is concerned. (van Fraassen 2007, p. 344)
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Surovell, J.R. Stance empiricism and epistemic reason. Synthese 196, 709–733 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1539-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1539-0