Abstract
In this chapter we examine some of the verses about perceptual, intellectual, and revelatory knowledge. It is argued that these Qur’ānic verses are best understood as ways of defining knowledge in terms of certain natural and acquired epistemic dispositions or virtues. Human beings are held accountable by the Qur’ān for the proper use of their perceptual and rational faculties. The Qur’ānic concept of revelation as God’s testimony is highlighted along with the Qur’ānic emphasis on the Prophet’s responsibility for proper communication of the content of revelation. It is argued that knowledge for the Qur’ān seems to involve effective exercise of our natural perceptual, rational, and intuitive faculties as well as acquired dispositions or intellectual virtues. The Qur’ānic verses talk both about proper use of natural faculties and exercise of acquired intellectual virtues for acquisition of knowledge. Hence, it is suggested that the divide between responsibilist and reliabilist camps of virtue epistemology needs to be bridged. Some developments in this direction are noted.
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Notes
- 1.
For the distinction between active and passive perceptual knowledge see Pritchard (2016, 30).
- 2.
This idea, along with testimonial knowledge, is used as an argument against the so-called credit view of knowledge advocated by Ernest Sosa (2007, 92 onwards), John Greco (2003, 117), and Wayne Riggs (2007, 336–41). To put it very roughly and without an eye to variations in their respective positions, these thinkers claim that knowledge is true belief attained by the epistemic agent through the exercise of her abilities/competence. Such exercise of epistemic abilities makes the agent creditworthy for attaining true belief. Zagzebsky (1996, 2009) also has a credit view of knowledge and, hence, is open to the same challenge.
- 3.
The Qur’ānic term qulūb used here means heart-mind and stands for the faculty of understanding in this context. A lot of the times the Qur’ān uses the term fuād, plural afidata, to signify heart-mind which stands for consciousness as a whole including its emotive aspect.
- 4.
Booth (2016, 53) notes that medieval Islamic philosophers also hold that one is responsible for the contents of her/his beliefs insofar as one has control over one’s mind to set it up to receive knowledge of first principles from the active intellect. Of course Booth’s discussion is in the context of Neo-Platonist Islamic philosophy rather than the Qur’ān which seemingly places a more direct responsibility on our shoulders for exercise of our reason.
- 5.
On the question of what it means for God to speak to humans in the literal sense, there is a long tradition of theories beginning with medieval Muslim philosophers like al-Farabi and Avicenna and extending to contemporary thinkers like Fazlur Rahman (2011). Rahman’s own position can be found in the chapter on revelation in his Major Themes of the Qur’ān (2009). In a recent discussion of the matter Nicholas Wolterstorff (1995) offers a comprehensive theory on the subject couched in the language of contemporary analytic philosophy.
- 6.
See Muhammad Iqbal (2012) The Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam, particularly Lecture V.
- 7.
Although I have not discussed memorial knowledge here, the theme of remembrance in various forms is constantly present in the Qur’ān.
- 8.
As Mats Wahlberg defines it, testimonial knowledge is “knowledge gained from the spoken or written words of other people,” absent any reason for the hearer to think that the speaker is lying or misinformed (2014: 1). Most human knowledge is of this type. Only a small portion of our knowledge is acquired through personal observation or intellectual effort. The rest, even about our own biology, ancestry, community, history, and hard sciences like physics, etc., comes through the testimony of others. The true beliefs that we gain through the testimony of others, often given in books, are fully justified. Learning about some aspect of the theory of relativity, for example, through a textbook can give me justified true beliefs about relativity. In a nutshell, our lives generally depend on this kind of testimonial knowledge. Similarly, as Wahlberg argues effectively, our knowledge of God is mainly based on God’s own testimony through revelation plus our use of natural reason. We can form justified true beliefs about God on the basis of revelation. Given the fact that we broadly accept testimony as a source of knowledge in ordinary life, we need to do the same in the case of God’s testimony about His existence as well as His guidance for mankind.
- 9.
Basically there are two views of testimonial knowledge in philosophical literature: reductionist and non-reductionist. Non-reductionists like J. L. Austin (1979) and many subsequent writers, claim that as long as the hearer does not have any relevant defeaters, i.e., relevant evidence to the contrary, s/he can acquire testimonial knowledge simply by the testimony of the speaker. The reductionists, among whom David Hume (1967) is the primary figure, believe that the hearer must be in possession of some independent positive reasons for accepting the testimony and only then can acquire testimonial knowledge.
- 10.
Greco (2000, 182–4) argues that Zagzebsky-style intellectual virtues are neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge and in fact we need reliabilist virtues (reliably functioning faculties) for attaining knowledge. However he seems to de-emphasize the role of acquired intellectual virtues in the acquisition of knowledge. It seems to me that in high-grade knowledge (knowledge which is the product of sustained enquiry, for example) properly functioning faculties need to be supplemented by acquired intellectual virtues. Sosa (2007, 88) also considers competences, which for him include reliable natural faculties as well as acquired virtues (2007, 86), as playing a constitutive role in attaining true beliefs that reach the status of knowledge. I take him to mean that natural faculties/virtues are presupposed by application of virtues derived from learning, i.e., acquired virtues.
- 11.
That these two positions can be usefully combined comes out effectively from some recent analyses such as Juan Comesana‘s “Evidentialist Reliabilism,” where he argues that both evidentialism, an internalist position upon which responsibilism is based, and reliabilism can benefit from a combination of these two approaches in epistemology (Comesana 2010). For how evidentialism can connect with acquired intellectual virtues see Jason Baehr (2009). Alvin Goldman (2011) also proposes a synthesis of reliabilism and evidentialism. Ernest Sosa (2004) suggests in a similar vein that both internalism and externalism may be right.
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Adeel, M.A. (2019). The Qur’ānic Hints about Epistemic Responsibility: An Analysis of Etymological Variants of ‘i-l-m in the Text. In: Epistemology of the Quran. Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17558-0_3
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