Epistemology: An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge

4. Epistemic Justification in a Functionalistic and Naturalistic Perspective

61 Chapter 4 Epistemic Justification in a Functionalistic and Naturalistic Perspective SYNOPSIS • Experience is always personal—a biographical episode in the life of an individual .The move from such subjectivity to objective, person-independent fact is never automatic. • Some suggest that a coordination can be effected through common-cause considerations. But this embarking is on a sea of difficulties. • The epistemologically appropriate justification of objective claims calls for a recourse to pragmatic argumentation. • The validation at issue emerges from evolutionary considerations,although it is rational rather than natural selection that is crucial here. • There, of course, remains an ineliminable prospect of error in relation to our experientially based knowledge claims. But this need not stand in the way of claiming the appropriateness—or even the truth—of our claims to objective knowledge. • As such considerations indicate, the concept of presumption is a crucial involvement of cognitive validation. EXPERIENCE AND FACT Once the idea of sensory certainty is called into question, the way is cleared to seeing sense-based knowledge in a practicalistic light.To gain a firm grip on the issue, it helps to draw a crucial distinction between cognitive experiences (which are always personal and subjective) and objective situations (which are not). “I take myself to be seeing a cat on that mat” is one sort of thing and “There actually is a cat on that mat” is something quite different. The former is purely person -coordinated and thereby merely autobiographical while the latter objective claim is decidedly impersonal.1 (Only in the special case of automatically selfappertaining issues such as feeling aches and pains will subjective experiences authorize claims in objective territory: to feel a headache is to have a headache.) Two facts are crucial in this connection: • Experience as such is always personal: it is always a matter of what occurs within the thought-realm of some individual. Thus all that is ever secured directly and totally by experience are claims in the order of subjectivity. • Such subjective claims are always autobiographical: they can never assure objective claims about facts regarding the “external” world without some further ado. These facts separate experience from objectivity. With objectively worldregarding facts we always transcend experience as such.The assertoric context of an objectively factual statement (“There is a cat there”) is something that outruns any merely experiential fact (“I take myself to be seeing a cat there”).There is always an epistemic gap between subjectivel experience and objective fact. But how can one manage to cross this epistemic gap between subjective experience and subject-transcending reality? Some theorists think that causality provides a natural and effective bridge across the gap.2 Let us examine this prospect. PROBLEMS OF COMMON-CAUSE EPISTEMOLOGY The basic idea of the causal approach is epistemic justification roots in the circumstance. Sosa’s endorsement of causal epistemology pivots on that experience causes our beliefs in some appropriate or standard way. However, this formula makes it transparently clear that epistemic justification will turn not just on causality alone but its suitability and thereby on the way in which this causality operates. And this little qualification of “standard appropriateness” has to carry a big burden of weight. Of course we cannot do without it: mere causality as such does not engender epistemic justification. (I was not epistemically justified in expecting the villain’s death after being shot on stage even when the wicked prop man had substituted a real loaded pistol—unbeknownst to one and all.) And the fly in the ointment is that things become unraveled when we proceed to take this idea of appropriate causation seriously. 62 Knowledge and Its Problems Suppose that I espouse the objective claim “That there is a cat on that mat” because I have a seeing-a-cat-on-the-mat experience, that is, because I take myself to be looking at a cat on the mat. What is now required for that experience to “be caused in the appropriate way”—that is, being appropriately produced by a cat on that mat? Clearly the only correct/appropriate/standard mode of experience production here is one that proceeds via an actual cat on that mat. Unless one construes “experience” in a question-begging way that is not just psychologically phenomenological but objectively authentic, experiences will not suffice for justifactory authentications. That is, something like the following causal story must obtain: There really is a cat on the mat. And in...