Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #5: Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

This post is about a justification of knowledge in philosophy and whether something can be justified internally by the agent or externally. Here are the results, favouring externalism, but still with a sizable internalist camp.

Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

Accept or lean toward: externalism	398 / 931 (42.7%)
Other	287 / 931 (30.8%)
Accept or lean toward: internalism	246 / 931 (26.4%)

So, let us start the ball rolling. The first thing to say is that internalism and externalism can be applied to many areas of philosophy, from motivation to truth. However, the question here specifically related to justification of knowledge.

In basic terms, internalism refers to the idea that justification for a particular belief are available to the agent’s mind or consciousness. Externalism posits that factors outside of the agent’s mind can affect the justification of said belief.

Part of the problem, is the distinction between knowledge and belief. Can we have justified belief in something which is wrong?

First, some epistemologists understand externalism as a view that knowledge does not require justification while others think it should be understood as an externalist view of justification. Second, there is an important distinction between having good reasons for one’s belief (that is, propositional justification) and basing one’s belief on the good reasons one possesses (that is, doxastic justification).This distinction matters to the nature of the internalist thesis and consequently the I-E debate itself. Third, there are two different and prominent ways of understanding what is internal to a person. This bears on the nature of the internalist thesis and externalist arguments against internalism. (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy – IEP)

So we can distinguish, perhaps, between a true belief (say a superstition that just turns out to be true) and a justified true belief (JTB), which is something which is both true and justified with good reasons. However, Gettier’s famous problems showed that there were issues with the JTB thesis. For example:

Suppose that Smith possesses a good deal of evidence for the belief that someone in his office owns a Ford. Smith’s evidence includes such things as that Smith sees Jones drive a Ford to work every day and that Jones talks about the joys of owning a Ford. It turns out, however, that (unbeknownst to Smith) Jones is deceiving his coworkers into believing he owns a Ford. At the same time, though, someone else in Smith’s office, Brown, does own a Ford. So, Smith’s belief that someone in his office owns a Ford is both justified and true. Yet it seems to most people that Smith’s belief is not an instance of knowledge.

So in order to turn true belief into knowledge, there had to be, externalists posited, some causal or dependency relations between the belief and facts. Of course, this then raised the question as to whether externalists think that knowledge doesn’t require justification or that justification should be seen as external.

One must be careful. For example, I might believe that I may get a job at a company. This could be justified by good reasons, such as that I have the correct qualifications, they liked me in the interview and suchlike. However, I may in actuality just believe I will get the job (in spite of those good reasons) based on wishful thinking. Therefore, is my belief justified adequately or not? I am justified because there are to be accessed good reasons for the belief, but not justified because I base my belief on wishful thinking (some call this the difference between justification and well-foundedness).

Now the internalist believes that every condition which justifies a belief in internal. However, causal relations are generally external. As the IEP continues:

Since basing one’s belief on reasons is a causal relation between one’s belief and one’s reasons, internalists should not claim that every factor that determines doxastic justification is internal (see 1c below for further discussion of this). Accordingly, internalism should be understood as a view about propositional justification. Moreover, given that one cannot know unless one bases one’s belief on good reasons this implies that internalists will understand the justification condition in an account of knowledge as composed of two parts: propositional justification and some causal condition (typically referred to as “the basing relation”). This considerably complicates the I-E debate because there’s not a straightforward disagreement between internalist and externalist views of doxastic justification, since externalists typically avoid dissecting the justification condition. Common forms of externalism build in a causal requirement to justification, for example, one’s belief that p is produced by a reliable method. Nevertheless it is important to get the nature of the internalist thesis straight and only then determine the nature of the externalist objections.

Now there is great scope for making this post unnecessarily complex. Suffice it to say that internalism concerns itself with propositional justification and claims that this relies entirely on one’s “internal states could be one’s bodily states, one’s brain states, one’s mental states (if these are different than brain states), or one’s reflectively accessible states.” (IEP). There is argument over whether internal justification is simply reliant on (past or present?) mental states, or reflexively accessible states (mentalism and acessibilism) but we need not worry ourselves too much about that now. I will include this excerpt from quite a clear online essay to explain further:

Internalism is the thesis that knowledge or justification is gained by having good reasons for one’s true beliefs. Some examples of processes that one can use to form one’s current beliefs are perceptual experience, memory, and previously formed beliefs. It is important to note that a subject S’s reasons for believing a proposition p are not facts about p or p itself. Rather they are that p, or facts about p, are perceived by S in certain ways. For example, S does not form the belief that the tulips in the garden are red because they are red. Rather she/he forms that belief because it appears to her/him that the tulips in the garden are red. This is an internal factor in the knowledge requirement. For internalists, knowledge requires that one has a true belief with good supporting reasons or evidence. The good reasons/evidence requirement here becomes the justification requirement in the classical model of knowledge.

There are two branches of internalism, and they are known as mentalism and access internalism. The most common form of internalism is access internalism, which will be the focus of this essay. Within accessibility there are two branches: actual access and accessibility. Actual access is the idea that for every proposition p that one knows, one is also aware of the knowledge basis, or roots of p. Accessibility is the idea that for every proposition p that one knows, one can become aware of the knowledge basis, or roots of p. The actual access requirement seems to be too strong. It is implausible that one is always aware of where one learned a fact every time one uses it, especially facts learned long ago. In my opinion accessibility seems more plausible and is therefore a stronger claim. If one had to remember the basis for every piece of what we would like to call knowledge, most of our basic vocabularies would not count as knowledge, For example, I do not remember where, when or how I learned what a bus is, as I learned it a long time ago. However, it seems highly counter-intuitive to say that I do not therefore know how to recognise a bus. It would also have the absurd result that I ‘know’ a complicated philosophical concept that I learned about yesterday, more than I ‘know’ what a bus is, because of having memory of where and when I learned about the latter but not the former. Because of this, I will focus on accessibility.

Externalism is the thesis that knowledge does not require internal justification. There are different forms of externalism, but I will focus on process reliabilism, supposedly the most popular form of externalism. All externalists agree that in order to have knowledge, one must have a belief resulting from a process that reliably connects belief to truth. According to externalism, no support from any other beliefs or systems of beliefs is necessary. According to Alston, reliability requires that a process yields a high proportion of truths over a wide range of ordinarily encountered situations. This is known as process reliability. Alston admits that this definition is imprecise and that the already vague boundaries between what a typical and an atypical case is may shift over time. However, something that is intuitively pleasing about process reliabilism is that it rules out skeptical problems, by only focusing on facts that are directly relevant (or close) to the situation that one is actually in, and scepticism is assumed not to be relevant in most situations.

The author concludes:

In conclusion, I believe that internalism can be preferred to externalism on the basis that it rules out forgotten evidence as justification. There are arguments that forgotten evidence still justifies a belief, but I believe that this is only true from an objective basis, not a subjective basis. This is because I believe that a belief held without at least access to its evidence is not justified for the subject. I believe that because externalism seemingly treats justification as a purely objective phenomena, it fails to pick out what is important for human knowledge, which is, in my opinion, that truth be connected with belief not just because the world happens to be like that, but because the subject is aware and has evidence that the world is as it is. I believe that internalism is better able to do this.

Why this argument is important…

I actually think this argument could be important in terms of CS Lewis’ Argument from Reason whereby he claims that naturalists, being dependent upon causal relations of the world, cannot rationally hold to their own worldview, since external sources of epistemic justification cannot properly be rational, according to some.

As the IEP states:

Another issue with respect to naturalism in epistemology is its connection to naturalism in the philosophy of mind. The naturalist aims to understand the mind as a physical system. Since physical systems can be explained without invoking mental concepts a naturalist in epistemology is weary of using questionable mental concepts to elucidate the nature of epistemic concepts. Internalism in epistemology is not necessarily at odds with naturalism as a metaphysical view but the internalist’s preferred concepts tend to come from commonsense psychology rather than the natural sciences. Externalists, by contrast, tend to stress natural concepts like causation, reliability, and tracking because these set up better for a naturalist view in the philosophy of mind.

I haven’t done a particularly good job of explaining this because it just gets very confusing and intricate and its not a particularly fun (in my humble opinion) area of philosophy, though it is pretty fundamental to knowledge claims. For further reading, follow the links

#5 – Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

#6 – External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

#7 – Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

#8 – Belief in God: theism or atheism?

Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #4: Analytic-synthetic distinction

Last updated on: May 28, 2013 at 6:32 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

This is the third post after

This post is about a distinction in philosophy about truths, namely the analytic or synthetic distinction, and whether such categorisation is coherent. There is a clearer majority for this question than we have seen in previous posts:

Analytic-synthetic distinction: yes or no?

Accept or lean toward: yes	604 / 931 (64.9%)
Accept or lean toward: no	252 / 931 (27.1%)
Other	75 / 931 (8.1%)

But it is still not a runaway victory for proponents of the distinction. The distinction is rooted in the analysis of propositions (often particular types of statements known as affirmative subject-predicate judgements).

An analytic proposition is one where the predicate concept is contained within the subject concept. In other words, it is true by virtue of its meaning regardless of the way the world is. For example, the classic one is “all bachelors are unmarried” such that the concept of the subject (bachelors) is contained within the predicate (unmarried). Other examples:

The circle is not a square

The vixen is female

A synthetic proposition is one where the predicate concept is not contained within the subject concept. They are true because of the way the world is. An example would be “All bachelors are unhappy”, or:

All children are naughty

All creatures with hearts have kidneys

So far so good? Nice. Some of you who read or know about the a priori / a posteriori debate (linked above) will notice a similarity. Analytic propositions look very much like a priori judgements and synthetic propositions look much like a posteriori judgements. Immanuel Kant thought that there could be four types of proposition as a result (courtesy of wiki):

Examples of a priori propositions include:

“All bachelors are unmarried.”

“7 + 5 = 12.”

The justification of these propositions does not depend upon experience: One need not consult experience to determine whether all bachelors are unmarried, nor whether 7 + 5 = 12. (Of course, as Kant would grant, experience is required to understand the concepts “bachelor,” “unmarried,” “7”, “+” and so forth. However, the a priori/a posteriori distinction as employed here by Kant refers not to the origins of the concepts but to the justification of the propositions. Once we have the concepts, experience is no longer necessary.)

Examples of a posteriori propositions include:

“All bachelors are unhappy.”

“Tables exist.”

Both of these propositions are a posteriori: Any justification of them would require one’s experience.

The analytic/synthetic distinction and the a priori/a posteriori distinction together yield four types of propositions:

analytic a priori

synthetic a priori

analytic a posteriori

synthetic a posteriori

Kant says the third type is self-contradictory, so he discusses only the remaining three types as components of his epistemological framework.

Mathematically, and possibly due to the confinement of logic at the time, Kant believed mathematical claims like 7 + 5 = 12 to be synthetic because he felt 12 is not contained in the concept of 5, 7 or +. There would have to be some synthesis of thought to arrive at this. This fell into the synthetic a priori camp for him.

Frege and others came along and refined Kant’s thinking. But why bother with all this semantic and linguistic musing? As the SEP states:

Why should philosophy be interested in what would seem to be a purely linguistic notion? Because, especially in the first half of the Twentieth Century, many philosophers thought it could perform crucial epistemological work, providing an account, first, of our apparently a priori knowledge of mathematics, and then—with a little help from British empiricism—of our understanding of claims about the spatio-temporal world as well. Indeed, “conceptual analysis” soon came to constitute the very way particularly Anglophone philosophers characterized their work. Many additionally thought it would perform the metaphysical work of explaining the truth and necessity of mathematics, showing not only how it is we could know about these topics independently of experience, but how they could be true in all possible worlds.

This slight change was a move brought on by the Logical Positivists:

The logical positivists agreed with Kant that we have knowledge of mathematical truths, and further that mathematical propositions are a priori. However, they did not believe that any complex metaphysics, such as the type Kant supplied, are necessary to explain our knowledge of mathematical truths. Instead, the logical positivists maintained that our knowledge of judgments like “all bachelors are unmarried” and our knowledge of mathematics (and logic) are in the basic sense the same: all proceeded from our knowledge of the meanings of terms or the conventions of language.

Such that definitions could be various:

analytic proposition: a proposition whose truth depends solely on the meaning of its terms
analytic proposition: a proposition that is true (or false) by definition
analytic proposition: a proposition that is made true (or false) solely by the conventions of language

So why all the fuss? Well, it underpins truth values and that pretty much covers everything. It can get really bloody complex. I would refer to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy if you are that bothered. The most famous philosopher who has called the distinction into question is the great W.V. Quine who stated:

It is obvious that truth in general depends on both language and extralinguistic fact. …Thus one is tempted to suppose in general that the truth of a statement is somehow analyzable into a linguistic component and a factual component. Given this supposition, it next seems reasonable that in some statements the factual component should be null; and these are the analytic statements. But, for all its a priori reasonableness, a boundary between analytic and synthetic statements simply has not been drawn. That there is such a distinction to be drawn at all is an unempirical dogma of empiricists, a metaphysical article of faith.

—Willard v. O. Quine, Two dogmas of empiricism, p. 64

What he states is that analytic (think tautology) statements, being grounded in meaning, are independent of facts, but being synonymous, they inevitably lead to matters of fact, which is the realm, supposedly, or the more empirical synthetic philosophy. The problem, though, is that it all gets rather circular, such that:

All necessary (and all a priori) truths are analytic

Analyticity is needed to explain and legitimate necessity.

Robert Hanna (“The Return of the Analytic-Synthetic Distinction”) claims that the distinction is vital to allow much of the rest of philosophy to work and be grounded in semantics and reasonable explanation:

…no one has yet explained how analytic philosophy itself can really be possible without adequate theories of

(i) conceptual analysis,

(ii) analyticity,

(iii) an intelligible and defensible distinction between (a) logical, conceptual, or analytically necessary truths(i.e., truths about the kind of necessity that flows from the nature of concepts or intensions), and (b) non-logical, non-conceptual,substantive, or synthetically necessary truths (i.e., truths about the kind of necessity that flows from the nature of things in the world),

(iv) a priori knowledge of logical truths and conceptual truths,

and finally

(v) a priori knowledge of non-logical, substantive, or synthetically necessary truths, especially including mathematical truths.

Equally without a doubt, the second greatest urban legend of contemporary philosophy is that the A-S distinction does not matter anyway. To most contemporary philosophers, it seems technical, tedious, and trivial. But on the contrary, if the A-S distinction were either unintelligible or indefensible, then the very idea of a semantic content would go down, and correspondingly the very ideas of logical understanding, logical reasoning, conceptual understanding, conceptual reasoning, intensionality, intentionality, thinking, belief, cognition, and knowledge would all go down too,since all these inherently involve semantic content. For example, how could there be an intelligible and defensible notion of belief, without the correlative notion of belief content? Then the very idea of human rationality would also collapse, and “it’s the end of the world as we know it.”

Hanna’s rather feisty defence of the distinction continues later with a list of valid reasons why such a distinction steers us away from “postmodernist anti-rational nihilism”:

First, if the A-S distinction is intelligible and defensible, then an adequate theory of it provides an explanation of

(1) necessary truth and a priori knowledge,

and

(2) contingent truth and a posteriori knowledge.

This is just the beginning of his long list. But you get the idea. Personally, I do find it a little dry. Horses for courses, though.

#5 – Epistemic justification: internalism or externalism?

#6 – External world: idealism, skepticism, or non-skeptical realism?

#7 – Free will: compatibilism, libertarianism, or no free will?

#8 – Belief in God: theism or atheism?

Philosophy 101 (philpapers induced) #3 – Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Last updated on: April 19, 2013 at 6:04 am By Jonathan MS Pearce

This is the third post after

This post is about aesthetic value or, in other words, beauty and the like. Is beauty a purely subjective notion, or do ‘objects’ actually have intrinsic aesthetic value?

Here are the results from the survey:

Aesthetic value: objective or subjective?

Accept or lean toward: objective	382 / 931 (41.0%)
Accept or lean toward: subjective	321 / 931 (34.5%)
Other	228 / 931 (24.5%)

Which appears to be a fairly indecisive split.

If you remember my post on Plato, you might remember that he reckoned that there were ideal forms of everything which existed in some Platonic realm. Until a few hundred years ago, most philosophers concluded that beauty was objective, located in the object or the qualities of the object being evaluated. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) entry on “Beauty”:

In De Veritate Religione, Augustine asks explicitly whether things are beautiful because they give delight, or whether they give delight because they are beautiful; he emphatically opts for the second (Augustine, 247). Plato’s account in the Symposium and Plotinus’s in the Enneads connect beauty to a response of love and desire, but locate beauty itself in the realm of the Forms, and the beauty of particular objects in their participation in the Form.

Can you have the ideal form of something which is ugly, I wonder? Socrates, another subject of one of my factfiles, thought that beauty was instantiated in the object, rather than being represented by universals. In this way, however, it is objective and not entwined with the subjective response of the individual.

Subjectivists, on the other hand, believe that beauty is pretty much in the eye of the beholder, so to speak. As Hume said:

Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others. (Hume 1757, 136)

The issue with this kind of position is that if beauty is indeed entirely subjective, then the whole concept is pretty meaningless by point of fact that the word has no real meaning other than stating a particular preference of the individual. It seems remarkable, then, that our aesthetic judgements do seem to coincide to such an extent. Denying the beauty of a wonderful sunset is a difficult thing to do.

Conversely,

Such aesthetic words as ‘beautiful’ and ‘hideous’ are employed … not to make statements of fact, but simply to express certain feelings and evoke a certain response. It follows…that there is no sense attributing objective validity to aesthetic judgments, and no possibility of arguing about questions of value in aesthetics. (Ayer 1952, 113)

The SEP continues:

All meaningful claims either concern the meaning of terms or are empirical, in which case they are meaningful because observations could confirm or disconfirm them. ‘That song is beautiful’ has neither status, and hence has no empirical or conceptual content. It merely expresses a positive attitude of a particular viewer; it is an expression of pleasure, like a satisfied sigh. The question of beauty is not a genuine question, and we can safely leave it behind or alone. Most twentieth-century philosophers did just that.

Put another way, as more modern thinkers often do, it is the pleasure, perhaps, that makes something beautiful. Empiricist thought sees, say, colour as a perception. Without the perceiving mind, there is no colour as understood by the way different people have different perceptions of the ‘same colour’ (think colourblindness), and also how colours of objects can change depending on the lighting.

However, philosophers such as Kant saw something being lost in such subjective perception. The fact that we argue over beauty in all of these contexts goes some way to showing that we, at least intuitively, think there is a right and a wrong to such evaluations. If beauty is completely relative to individual experiencers, it doesn’t qualify as an important value. It becomes unrecognisable as a value at all across persons or societies (ie objectively). Thus it seems that there are both objective and subjective aspects to aesthetics.

Hume claimed that:

“Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved by practice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice, can alone entitle critics to this valuable character; and the joint verdict of such, wherever they are to found, is the true standard of taste and beauty” (“Of the Standard of Taste” 1757, 144).

If the best of the best seem to agree on their conclusions in evaluating aesthetics (why the classic works of art and literature persist) then this must indicate objectiveness or a close analogy to it. As the SEP states:

Though we cannot directly find a standard of beauty that sets out the qualities that a thing must possess in order to be beautiful, we can describe the qualities of a good critic or a tasteful person. Then the long-run consensus of such persons is the practical standard of taste and the means of justifying judgments about beauty.

Kant made some interesting points about disinterestedness. One must evaluate aesthetics without bringing any baggage to the table. This hints at intrinsic value and moves away from personal, subjective context. As he said himself:

…if you are looking at a beautiful valley primarily as a valuable real estate opportunity, you are not seeing it for its own sake, and cannot fully experience its beauty. If you are looking at a lovely woman and considering her as a possible sexual conquest, you are not able to experience her beauty in the fullest or purest sense; you are distracted from the form as represented in your experience.

This needs to be qualified though. There is dependency on what sort of thing the object is. A beautiful horse does not make a beautiful ox. Some things are more abstract, such as, say, a particular pattern.

What this means is, if we can all divorce ourselves from our own baggage, we would all agree, so Kant reckons, on what would be beautiful. This is a universalisation of judgement. The SEP surmises:

In the case of aesthetic judgments, however, the judgment remains subjective, but necessarily contains the ‘demand’ that everyone should reach the same judgment. The judgment conceptually entails a claim to inter-subjective validity. This accounts for the fact that we do very often argue about judgments of taste, and that we find tastes that are different than our own defective.

BUT. An object cannot, perhaps, be beautiful if it gives no pleasure to anybody:

An object cannot be beautiful if it can give pleasure to nobody: a beauty to which all men were forever indifferent is a contradiction in terms. … Beauty is therefore a positive value that is intrinsic; it is a pleasure. (Santayana 1896, 50–51)

Aesthetics, as a discipline, declined in favour as people stopped seeing it on a par with other truths: moral, epistemological and so on. A recent theory is one that proposes that it is a relationship. SEP says of Sartwell’s work (this guy has a bunch of You Tube vids, so check him out):

Crispin Sartwell in his book Six Names of Beauty (2004), attributes beauty neither exclusively to the subject nor to the object, but to the relation between them, and even more widely also to the situation or environment in which they are both embedded. He points out that when we attribute beauty to the night sky, for instance, we do not take ourselves simply to be reporting a state of pleasure in ourselves; we are turned outward toward it; we are celebrating the real world. On the other hand, if there were no perceivers capable of experiencing such things, there would be no beauty. Beauty, rather, emerges in situations in which subject and object are juxtaposed and connected.

There are many theories abounding which target symmetry and other factors as underpinning beauty, both in concrete stimuli such as people’s faces, and in mathematical constructions and equations. The Triple Helix Online blog sums up the discussion adeptly:

The emerging discipline of evolutionary psychology is based on the idea that not only have our physical traits been shaped by our adaptation to our ancestral environment, but our behaviour and preferences have likewise been shaped by natural selection [1]. This has led to many studies investigating the evolutionary reasons for the human concept of beauty, and their results are often surprising. Mostly, these studies examine whether a particular trait – for example symmetry, colour, and facial hair– is correlated with perceived attractiveness, and in doing so they focus on the biological and evolutionary reasons why some faces are commonly judged to be more attractive than others. They show that despite the old adage “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”, there are a number of traits which are generally and cross-culturally perceived as more attractive than others. However, this approach has come under much criticism – not only methodologically, but also from those who argue that attractiveness should be studied as a cultural concept only, or those who argue that it should not be studied at all [2].

I would advise reading this piece in its entirety as it sums up all of the different works which are looking to ground attractiveness in adaption, neurology and psychology. The conclusion to the piece feeds into this particular debate about objectivism and subjectivism:

It seems that this expanding field will not stop growing in the foreseeable future. As more traits – not just facial, but in body and behaviour – are found to correlate with attractiveness, our picture of the biological basis of beauty will become more filled out, perhaps to the point where it can compete with the widely-held cultural view of individual, subjective aesthetics. This exciting new discipline is pushing the boundaries of what science can and cannot tell us about the way we see the world around us, telling us that beauty is not in the eye, but in the specific adapted cognitive modules of the beholder.

So do these theories (facial markers, symmetry, hormone levels, neoteny, biological mechanisms etc) mean that the ideas of beauty are based in concrete objects, that they are, indeed objective?

All told, it is no wonder that philosophers are split on objective vs subjective. It seems it might well be a case of being both, but without anyone being able to put their fingers on it!

What do YOU think?