Gupta’s non-propositional conception of experience

Last week, I attend an excellent talk and seminar from Anil Gupta, author of Empiricism and Experience, in which he presented his non-propositional conception of experience and its contribution to rational thought, along with his latest thoughts on the metaphysics of experience.

Gupta’s central thesis can be simply stated as the claim that rational entitlement to knowledge is not generated solely by present experience, but by experience in conjunction with the prior metaphysical and experiential standing of the subject. It is this pre-existing ‘view’ that the subject brings to experience that yields entitlement to knowledge, thereby enabling them to make rational judgements even in cases where their ontology is radically mistaken; e.g. they are a ‘brain in a vat’ (BIV). This contrasts with views, such as Pryor’s dogmatism, that take experience itself to confer prima facie rational entitlement, and Wright’s entitlement of cognitive project, which flows from the logical structure of rational enquiry.

New Books

I’ve recently taken delivery of a couple of books that are currently on my reading list. They are Timothy Williamson’s The Philosophy of Philosophy (2007, Blackwell Publishing) and The Possibility of Knowledge by Quassim Cassam (2007, Oxford University Press).

The first of these has been recommended to me by several people and is based upon Williamson’s Brown University lectures on metaphilosophy (hence the title). As I’m still reading Williamson’s previous book, Knowledge and Its Limits, I’ll probably concentrate on finishing that one first before reading The Philosophy of Philosophy some time this summer.

Work in Progress Seminar

I gave a talk at last week’s graduate work in progress (WiP) seminar on Williamson’s account of knowledge and some of the issues I’ve blogged about here recently. In particular, I developed an objection concerning the explanatory value of Williamson’s account, which I then tried to defend the account against on the basis of the burden of proof argument given below.

I think it would be fair to say that my suggestions met with mixed reactions. On the one hand, not everyone felt that I was being fair to Williamson by characterising his account as saying nothing particularly substantive about the nature of knowledge given the fact that he had written an entire book on the subject. On the other hand, some found it difficult to accept that there could be a satisfying explanation of something—in this case whether a given belief either does or does not constitute knowledge—without providing a complete set of necessary and sufficient conditions, which was exactly the position I was arguing against. Conversely, others felt that the constraints upon a theory of knowledge I set up begged the question against the Williamsonian view, even though I was claiming that these constraints could be met by the view provided that they are not interpreted too strongly (i.e. as mandating a set of general principles for knowledge, rather than the requirement to give a principled explanation of each of its instances).

Explanatory Constraints upon the Theory of Knowledge

A potential objection to Williamson’s account of knowledge that I mentioned in a previous post turns upon the issue of whether such an account needs to provide a finite set of principles for determining whether and why individual justified beliefs constitute knowledge. JTB theories of knowledge meet this constraint by providing a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. This makes it possible both to identify cases of knowledge (in terms of whether all of the necessary conditions are met) and to say in cases where knowledge isn’t present why this is the case (for example because the subject’s belief fails to be sufficiently reliable, or because the truth condition isn’t met).

Williamson, on the other hand, holds that it is impossible to provide a set of sufficient conditions for knowledge, although his account does entail certain necessary conditions that are spelt out in terms of ‘the metaphysics of states’ (for Williamson, knowledge is semantically unanalysable, and therefore primitive). As previously described, Williamson characterises knowledge both as a mental state (whatever that term turns out to mean) and as ‘the most general factive stative attitude, that which one has to a proposition if one has any factive stative attitude to it at all’ (Williamson 2000: 34). On the face of it, this would seem to severely weaken the explanatory power of Williamson’s account since it is no longer possible to say purely with reference to terms set out within the account whether a given state constitutes knowledge or not. Consequently, Williamson appears to render the state of knowing, and the concept of knowledge, somewhat mysterious and unexplained. This in turn makes his account unsatisfying when taken as a theory of knowledge whose purpose is, by most accounts, to explain such things.

Ways of Knowing

I’m currently attending a series of seminars by Quassim Cassam entitled Knowledge and Explanation in which he is discussing (amongst other things) the relation between perceptual terms, like seeing, hearing, and so on, and knowing. Such terms are commonly referred to as ways of knowing, which is a phrase Cassam uses often—in fact, it’s the title of a paper he has written on the subject. Taken on its own, however, this phrase is ambiguous and could have either of the following two senses:

1. A way by which one arrives at a state of knowing.
2. A particular kind or class of knowledge.

Cassam, I take it, favours the first sense according to which, for example, seeing x a way in which we can get into the position of knowing x. Williamson, on the other hand, favours the second, since on his view a way of knowing is a determinate of the determinable ‘knowledge’. Williamson compares ways of knowing to colours in that everything which is some particular colour (i.e. way of knowing) is, ipso facto, coloured (cf. knowledge), and vice versa. Thus a way of knowing is just one particular form or class of knowledge, rather than a way of arriving at a state (i.e. knowledge) that is distinct from the way of knowing.

Williamson on Knowledge

I’m currently reading Timothy Williamson’s book, Knowledge and Its Limits, and there are a few aspects of his view that I find troubling. On the whole, I’m quite sympathetic to Williamson’s project of rehabilitating epistemology as a branch of the philosophy of mind and the idea that knowing is a (purely) mental state. This is of course highly controversial given standard analyses of knowledge as some kind of justified true belief. Given that knowledge is factive and truth is normally taken to be non-mental, most standard analyses deem knowledge to be non-mental (or at least not purely mental) due to the presence of the truth condition. Williamson, on the other hand, argues that the state of knowing is analysable and instead of explaining knowledge in terms of belief, truth, justification, etc., the state of knowing should be taken to be implicated in the latter concepts, hence the slogan ‘knowledge first’.

Williamson’s position is comparable to McDowell’s, who conceives of perception and knowing as ‘taking in’ the relevant facts such that the subject’s mental state cannot be described as being purely internal to its body. McDowell takes this to have major epistemological benefits in that it explains mental states in terms of object-involving Russellian acquaintance-like relations. It also tallies nicely with semantic externalism and the extended mind hypothesis, essentially pushing the boundary of the mental out into the world where (some might say) they belong. In a way, Williamson is simply applying the insight of semantic externalism—that meaning “ain’t in the head”—to the metaphysics of mental states, which, according to Williamson and McDowell, ain’t in the head either.

Welcome to my New Blog

Welcome to Inverted Spectrum, my new philosophy blog. In it I hope to discuss matters relating to my Ph.D. research in the philosophy of mind, perception and epistemology, as well as other issues of philosophical interest, news, web links, etc.

This site is something of an experiment in that it’s the first time that I’ve published a blog via a web-based service like WordPress. It takes over from my old philosophy blog, The Real World, which will continue to be available via my home page at www.keithwilson.org.uk, but which I don’t intend to update for the foreseeable future (the main reason being that it takes too long and is too fiddly to maintain this site in conjunction with my other online content, although perhaps that will become easier with the latest version of iWeb).

My main web site also includes some more information about myself, my philosophical interests and writing, so feel free to check it out if you’re interested. I also intend to post some of the more recent talks and papers that I’m writing on Academia.edu, an excellent site that enables academics working in different areas to network and share their work online (although when I do so I will normally link to them from a blog post here as well, so there’s no need to watch both sites).

Thanks for stopping by and I hope you’ll enjoy, comment on and discuss the material that I post here. Studying philosophy has always been something of an adventure for me, and I look forward to sharing part of that journey with some fellow travellers through the wonderful medium of the Internet. Or something like that…