Two Crises for the Proof Paradigm in the Enlightenment

In Chapter 2, the author critically discusses the epistemologies of David Hume and Immanuel Kant. The author distinguishes the skeptical Hume from the naturalist Hume. The author presents the skeptical Hume’s philosophy as a response to what he calls Berkeley’s puzzle. He argues that Hume’s skeptical arguments are self-refuting and self-undermining and that Hume’s analysis of cause is an example of an explanation-impairing framework substitution. Hume’s solution to his skeptical arguments was a new kind of epistemology, a naturalistic epistemology. The author presents Kant’s epistemology as a response to the state of rationalist metaphysics at the time of Kant’s first Critique. Kant’s epistemology was similar to Hume’s in one important respect. Just as Hume had psychologized the idea of causal necessity, Kant psychologized the idea of metaphysical necessity. The author argues that both solutions were a form of relativism. This chapter primarily serves to motivate a search for a non-skeptical, non-relativist, non-Platonist theory of epistemic rationality.

Phenomenology of the Life-World and Naturalistic Epistemology

This paper aims to reveal parallels between the phenomenological concept of the life-world in Edmund Husserl and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the naturalistic epistemology of Gerhard Vollmer, in which a central concept is the mesocosmos (“world of medium size”). Such a comparison is necessary because the concepts of life-world and mesocosmos are quite similar in content, since they both refer to the human dimension of our world experience, to our natural position in the world. However, these concepts are far from identical. In Husserl’s case, the world of life is the world of pre-scientific experience taking place before scientific idealizations. According to Merleau-Ponty, the world of life is primarily a world of perceptual experience, in which I participate not as a subject of culture, but as an anonymous subject of perception, as a living perceptive body. Both philosophers call for a return to the life-world as a ground of scientific idealizations in order to overcome a crisis brought about by an excessive trust in scientific knowledge and “objectifying thinking”. In turn, Vollmer interprets the mesocosmos as a “world of medium size” that we can successfully explore due to the evolutionary adaptation of our cognitive abilities. This is our “ecological niche”, but while Husserl and Merleau-Ponty encourage us to return to this “cradle of humankind” to take root in it, Vollmer emphasizes that we are not bound to our ecological niche and can expand our knowledge both in the direction of the microworld and in the direction of the “world of mega scales”. He calls this process the objectification and deanthropomorphization of our picture of the world, and this is, in his view, the main trend of the development of scientific knowledge in its history, which is supported by the views of some prominent scientists of the 20th century.

'Epistemology Naturalized' and the Vienna Circle

This paper considers W.V.O. Quine's inauguration of naturalistic epistemology at the 14th International Congress of Philosophy in Vienna in 1969 and argues that, contrary to his suggestions, naturalistic epistemology was practiced in the Vienna Circle already back in the days when he visited them fresh out of graduate school.

An Analysis of Alvin Goldman’s Naturalized Epistemology

This work, “An Analysis of Alvin Goldman’s Naturalistic Epistemology,” aims at presenting the contributions of Alvin Goldman in am epistemic bent. As a branch of philosophy, epistemology has significantly advanced right from the classic, medieval, modern, and contemporary epochs. The effects of postmodernist thinkers’ radical approach to philosophy are evident in almost all philosophy branches. With the notion of doing epistemology through science championed by W.V.O. Quine, Alvin Goldman, John Kuhn, and some other scholars have raised objections and counter objections to such a deconstructionist mindset within the epistemic circle. Expectedly, these naturalistic epistemologists had discontinuity with one another in their positions. Goldman is concerned with such traditional epistemological problems as developing an adequate theoretical understanding of knowledge and justified believing. This paper shows that in his naturalistic discontinuity with Quine, Alvin Goldman did not conceive epistemology as part of science the same way Quine conceived it. Goldman’s view that answering traditional epistemological questions requires both a priori philosophy and the application of scientific results. Goldman’s naturalism is the view that epistemology “needs help” from science. His primary concern is in the area of traditional epistemological problems, including developing an adequate theoretical understanding of knowledge and justified believing. In this paper, I see Goldman’s divergence in the opinion of his naturalistic epistemology with Quine and other naturalistic epistemologists not as a problem but indeed part of epistemic consolidation. In the course of this work, analytic, evaluation, library research, and descriptive methods as well as internet materials, were employed.

Truth, Paradoxes, Freedom, Applications, and Knowledge

This chapter begins by showing that with the problems of mathematical existence and determinate truth solved, a sophisticated inferentialist theory of mathematics leads to mathematical conventionalism. A philosophical worry harkening back to the Carnap/Quine debate is addressed before a number of issues in the philosophy of mathematics are given conventionalist treatments. The chapter discusses how conventionalists can handle the set-theoretic paradoxes, the freedom of mathematics, the many applications of mathematics to the physical world, and then provides a naturalistic epistemology of mathematics, even addressing the epistemology of consistency. In almost all of these cases, the discussion in the chapter shows that a conventionalist theory deals with these issues in a more satisfying way than other approaches to the philosophy of mathematics.

Normative epistemology

There are three kinds of normative work in epistemology. The first is the provision of epistemic advice, which offers guidance towards improving the cognitive condition of an individual or community. This advice often concerns science. Philosophers in the tradition of Francis Bacon have sought to identify and advocate proper forms of scientific research and explanation. More generally, according to some philosophers, a principal epistemological task is that of finding and recommending ways to improve the whole range of our individual and collective cognitive activities. A second kind of epistemology is classified as normative because evaluative concepts figure in explanations. For example, A.J. Ayer explains knowledge partly in terms of having a right to be sure. Other evaluative notions enter into work in this category, such as intellectual duties, responsibilities and virtues. Some of these are specifically ethical notions; some are non-ethical evaluative notions such as proper cognitive functioning and intellectual excellence. Epistemic concepts such as justification and rationality appear to be normative, or at least evaluative, in a way that contrasts with purely desciptive concepts. One tendency in naturalistic epistemology is to seek either to explain away this appearance or to reconcile it with a scientific worldview. Non-naturalistic efforts in epistemology commonly find no reason to undertake this project, and are consequently often counted as normative. Most historical epistemology is normative by this standard.

Epistemology by experiment

The naturalistic epistemology of individual knowledge should follow the procedure usual in the epistemology of science: generalize from suc- cesfull cognitive practices!In the case of naturalistic epistemology the data base — the cogitive practices it is supposed to generalize, are practices based on cognitive skills, like perceptual cognition, language acquisition and use and inference. This would then make cognitive psychology a guide for epistemology

Genetička epistemologija i kantov koncept apriornog znanja

By its approach to the problem of knowledge, genetic epistemology can be said to belong to the naturalistic epistemology, the basic characteristic of which is that it tries to understand what knowledge is using the description of the knowing subject, as we find it in 'the contemporary science. Genetic epistemology uses the results of genetic (developmental) psychology of knowledge and evolutionary biology in order to discover the mechanisms of the development, of mental structures showing the relevance of empirical knowledge for any epistemological interest. On the one hand, there is a purely psiihological epistemology as Kant’s is, and we are interested in the relation between these two epistemologies. If Kant’s expression »before all experience« is correctly understood, that is, as logical priority, there is no impediment in principle to view the genetic epistemology as a kind of scientific corroboration for Kant’s standpoint. On the other hand, it makes certain revisions of Kant’s conception, but their relation is a good example of interaction between science and philosophy. This interaction and coordination is, among other things, one of the most important characteristics of genetic epistemology in a wider sense — interdisciplinary approach which includes empirical and normative (deductive) disciplines as well.