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Reflective naturalism

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As I understand it, being justified is a status one has in relation to a person or group of people. If that’s not what epistemologists have in mind when they speak of epistemic justification, I have no idea what they mean.

—Sydney Morgenbesser.

Abstract

Here I will develop a naturalistic account of epistemic reflection and its significance for epistemology. I will first argue that thought, as opposed to mere information processing, requires a capacity for cognitive self-regulation. After discussing the basic capacities necessary for cognitive self-regulation of any kind, I will consider qualitatively different kinds of thought that can emerge when the basic capacities enable the creature to interiorize a form of social cooperation. First, I will discuss second-personal cooperation and the kind of thought that emerges from its interiorization. Then, I will discuss third-personal cooperation and the kind of thought that emerges from its interiorization. We will see that epistemic reflection is the interiorized version of interpersonal argumentation, which is the epistemic component of third-personal cooperation. In developing this account, I will draw heavily on the work of Michael Tomasello and other cognitive scientists advocating the “social intentionality hypothesis”. However, I will show how work done in the defeasible reasoning tradition can provide us with a deeper explanation of some claims made by advocates of the social intentionality hypothesis. Additionally, we will see that work done on social intentionality can help us better understand the significance of knowledge and justification as understood by the defeasible reasoning tradition. We will see that the social intentionality hypothesis and the defeasible reasoning tradition are mutually illuminating. By drawing equally on both, I will provide a novel account of the foundations of knowledge. This account will be shown to retain the benefits of traditional foundationalism while also incorporating recent coherentist insights from work on the epistemology of scientific measurement.

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Notes

  1. The leading proponent of this movement is Michael Tomasello (1999, 2014, 2021). Related ideas are pursued in Karmiloff-Smith (1992), Dunbar (1996), Frawley (1997), Mercier and Sperber (2011, 2017), Godfrey-Smith and Yegnashanakaran (2011), Scott-Philips (2015).

  2. Lehrer (1965, 1970), Lehrer and Paxson (1968), Hilpinen (1971), Swain (1974), Barker (1976), Klein (1971, 1976, 1980), Pollock (1986), Moser (1989), Schroeder (2015), de Almeida and Fett (2016), Paulson (2023a, b; forthcoming). See Shope (1983) for a useful overview of the history of defeasible reasoning in epistemology.

  3. Here I will be developing ideas found in Hurley (2003) and Camp (2009).

  4. Here I follow the taxonomy found in Tomasello (2014).

  5. This aspect of its significance is often overlooked by reflection’s detractors. See for example Kornblith (2011).

  6. Cf. Lorenz (1965), Tinbergen (1951).

  7. By “agent”, I don’t necessarily mean “moral agent”. I consider three kinds of agency below, only the last of which is moral agency.

  8. See Bruner (1972), Fodor (1975), Baars (1986), Miller (2003). Greenwood (1999) offers criticism but agrees with something close to this.

  9. Camp (2009) makes a similar point.

  10. In the case of non-human animals, pioneering work includes that of Griffin (1978), Premack and Woodruff (1978), and Cheney and Seyfarth (1980).

  11. Cf. Hurley (2003), Camp (2009), Tomasello (2014, 2021).

  12. I get the term from Tomasello (2014: Chapter 1).

  13. See Barsalou (1999, 2005, 2008).

  14. See also Hampton (2001), Washburn et al. (2006), Kornell et al. (2007), Call (2010).

  15. See Hare et al. (2000) for more on this.

  16. Again, in line with the terminology of Tomasello (2014: Chapter 3), here borrowing heavily from Tuomela (2007).

  17. Cf. Clark (1996), Tomasello (2008).

  18. This is somewhat like Stalnaker’s (1978) account of common ground, save that it is “quasi-propositional”. For more on this, see Tomasello (2008, 2014: Chapter 3).

  19. Brandom (1994) also gives an account of human thought in terms of scorekeeping in the game of giving and asking for reasons. The account on offer here owes much to his work, particularly his demonstration of the significance of toggling perspectives for doxastic scorekeeping, as well as the role discourse plays in rendering our practices explicit.

  20. They then go on to cite the following, Byrne and Whiten (1988), Dunbar (1996) Dunbar and Shultz (2003) Hrdy (2009) Humphrey (1976), Tomasello et al. (2005), Whiten and Byrne (1997).

  21. For example, see Tomasello (2021, p. 20).

  22. Tomasello draws heavily on Searle (1995, 2001) in his account of where the norms come from. I remain agnostic.

  23. Many of the studies cited here test the ability to recognize formal fallacies. Similar findings pertain to informal fallacies. See Hahn and Oaksford (2007), Neuman (2003), Neuman et al. (2006), Weinstock et al. (2004), Rips (2002).

  24. Baier (1981, p. 182) makes a similar claim about the methodology of the Meditations. There she also sympathetically discusses a view of human thought much like the one I propose here and its relation to Descartes’(2009) views.

  25. Consider, for example, the transition from the sensory fallibility argument (7:18) to the dream argument (7:19).

  26. The above gives us reason to think that the epistemological significance of inner speech goes deeper than is typically thought. For alternative accounts of its significance, see Jackendoff (1996), Bermudez (2003) and Munroe (2021).

  27. Cf. Brandom (1994).

  28. The first person to put it this way was Robert Audi (1993: Chapter 3), although the idea is latent in earlier work on defeasible reasoning. Cf. Lehrer (1965, 1970), Lehrer and Paxson (1968), Hilpinen (1971), Swain (1974), Barker (1976), Klein (1971, 1976, 1980), Pollock (1986), Moser (1989), de Almeida and Fett (2016), Schroeder (2015), Paulson (2023a, b; forthcoming). See Shope (1983) for a useful overview of the history of defeasible reasoning in epistemology.

  29. Cf. Ballantyne (2015).

  30. Cf. Klein (1980), Pollock (1986), de Almeida and Fett (2016).

  31. Similar terminology can be found in Klein (1980).

  32. Some call them “knowledge defeaters” (Audi 1993) or “propositional defeaters” (Bergmann 2006).

  33. Some working in the tradition, such as Peter Klein (2017), say it is a matter of the quality of her evidence. I talk of reasons to better connect the theory of justification with the philosophy of mind developed earlier in the paper.

  34. I develop this claim at greater length in my (2023b). There I argue that this helps explain the philosophical significance of knowledge for reasons that are not generally recognized in the literature.

  35. I mostly encounter this misunderstanding in conversation rather than in print.

  36. Swain (1974) calls this claim (or an analogue about knowledge) “an epistemologist’s pipe dream”. Once I show that GoGAR has the potential to move us toward the ideal endpoint and this potential is partially realized in the actual world, his claim will have been undermined.

  37. This is exactly what we see, for example, in when Marr (1982) explains the computational processes that enable us to discern luminance contours.

  38. See Clark (1996) for more on this.

  39. It is an empirical question the extent to which this inheritance is the product of unconscious imitation (Henrich & Boyd 2002; Muthkurishna & Henrich 2016) vs. socially recursive inference (Scott-Philips, 2015). See Sterelny (2017) for an overview of the debate.

  40. See Laland and Hoppitt (2003); Danchin and Luc-Alain (2004) and Sterelny (2012, p. 29).

  41. For more on rational pressure, see Goldberg (2020).

  42. Cf. MacFarlane (2014, p. 109).

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Beth Barker, Regina Hurley, Sanford Goldberg, Mikael Janvid, Nate Lauffer, Kathryn Pogin, and Peter van Elswyk for helpful comments and conversations.

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Paulson, S. Reflective naturalism. Synthese 203, 13 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04430-w

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