Some clarifications (class, day 3)
Dru asked me to clarify my epistemological leanings in the last post. I responded that I was torn, although drawn to Donald Davidson and John McDowell, who agree in their critique of Quine, but differ in central ways. Interestingly, although I’m not aiming to study ethics per se, I keep coming back to the ethical implications of epistemology (and the requirement for ethics to have an epistemological framework).
In class today, we’re going over my instructor’s book, Sweet Dreams in America, which I’ve talked about here before. Welch is sketching out a practical ethic based upon the work of Foucault and others. She eschews talk of essences and foundations to ethics, rather grounding it in aesthetics. That’s a topic for a whole other post (for which I’d first have to get some education in the continental study of aesthetics). However, it’s made me revisit the question of what I want in a theory of knowledge, and what role I hope it would play in other areas (like metaphysics and ethics).
The main problem, as I understand it, is how to bring together the sensory activity of the world impacting us (through sound waves, eardrums, light waves, our retina etc) and the creation and sustaining of beliefs. For a long time, it was thought that there are certain true beliefs that "just are", by virtue of language (i.e. "A bachelor is an unmarried man") and others which require language plus the world. Then came Quine ("Two Dogmas of Empiricism"), who shot down this distinction (of analytic and synthetic). He said that this was an "empiricist dogma", along with the idea that we can check with is true by lining up language and the world in a sort of one-to-one correspondence. Why? Because our beliefs are holistic and hang together. In order to hold onto a belief, we’re willing to make adjustments elsewhere in our network, whether by re-interpreting what we’ve seen, or even by changing our rules of logic to an extent.
This is revolutionary, but it has a problem: Quine still thought that we could put individual statements to the test by facing them up to a "tribunal of experience" and all of our other beliefs. He thought that our holistic wolrdview was still dualistic, to an extent–made up of language and experience.
Davidson criticizes Quine for this, but has his own dualism–while he argues against the idea that we can have a conceptual scheme which is separate from the world of experience ("On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme"), he maintains a distinction between causes, which are physical, and reasons, which are rational. Because of this, he refuses to allow the physical world to play a justificatory role in our beliefs. Beliefs only point to other beliefs, never to the world. Davidson doesn’t think this leads to skepticism, however, because it is in the nature of our beliefs to be largely true. Thus, coherence with other beliefs is usually a good test of truth (although it will never guarantee it).
What I appreciate in both of these thinkers is that they are trying to give an explanation of our knowing in terms of physical phenomena and natural science. How things are in our biology and our surrounding world would seem to e constituitive of how we know (since we are, after all, physical beings). By these broad statements, I’m not trying to be indebted to any particular form of physicalism, but simply to point out that I think the starting places are useful.
Philosophically, however, Davidson’s thoughts still lead to skepticism. Thinkers like Richard Rorty believe this is reason to abandon the philosophical project of trying to link metaphysics with epistemology. Whatever is the "fact of the matter" about the world, it can always be described in competing ways, ways which count as knowledge because of historical and social considerations. I’ll admit that I have some appreciation for Rorty’s instincts, which are historical. In fact, this is what I am enjoying about this class–it is the case that how we have viewed "knowledge" in various arenas (or the creation of these subject division) is influenced by societal and cultural considerations.
The fear I have with this perspective is the spectre of ethical relativism, however. Dividing our view of the world and the world itself so sharply means that our ethics have no teeth in the natural world. By this I do not mean that we should revert to a naive Aristotelian ethic that equates the good with what humans "naturally" do (this is to overlook the lessons of Foucauldian genealogy and, more basically, to commit a fallacy).
At this point is where my desire to agree with John McDowell comes in (note that I didn’t say I agree with him yet–I’m still investigating). For him, epistemology and ethics are inseparable (he is an ethical realist). Further, while he agrees with Davidson in his critique of Quine, he criticizes Davidson for falling prey to the same dualistic myth. McDowell believes that the physical sensory impacts of the world already come to us "saddled" with conceptual content. Yet he is not a determinist, since this receptivity (the world with its conceptual content) is paired with spontaneity, the ability to make judgements about how things are.
I had an intriguing (but short) conversation with a student at Washington University’s PPN (Psychology, Philosophy and Neurology) program a while ago. He said that he liked McDowell because, in his opinion, neuroscience agreed with the picture that he was painting. Whether or not this is the case, I don’t know. And whether McDowell’s philosophy of mind/epistemology must lead to his ethical realism, I’m still wondering about.
But, in terms of a course like this, in which the assumption is that narratives construct reality, that pragmatism is the only solution to ethical dilemmas, I wonder–is this yet another version of the Myth of the Given? Is it possible to accept a Foucauldian critique of what "counts" as knowledge at different historical times, yet also to firmly ethics in some key biological and philosophical insights? He would probably say no, since I am assuming that "biological insights" count as knowledge because of my historical milieu, etc. Yet I still wonder, and because of these competing approaches (straddling the continental-analytic divide, fuzzying lines between metaphsyics-epistemology-ethics), my posts haven’t been very clear.
Hopefully I’ll be able to make things a bit more systematic in my sustained final paper.