Epistemology

A priori
These are beliefs such as Descartes ‘clear and distinct ideas’ that can be recognised prior to independently of experience.
Mathematical or geometrical truths can be known a priori – a triangle has three sides regardless of whether I can see it or not 2+3 will (arguably) always =5. The same could apply to colours (eg).
Many a priori beliefs are analytic – true by definition. Propositions such as ‘all bachelors are unmarried’ can be known without there being any bachelors in the world. However, it can be argued that these propositions tell us nothing about the world.

A posteriori
These are truths known through experience – Empirical knowledge. I can only know through experience, for example, that ‘apples are tasty’.
Natural science is very important to Empirical knowledge. Many a posteriori claims depend on knowledge of ‘laws of nature’. However, unlike a priori statements, a posteriori knowledge tells us things about the world. These arguments are synthetic as they involve the synthesis of concepts.

Philosophical scepticism

There are three features that distinguish philosophical scepticism from ordinary scepticism. Firstly, Philosophical scepticism goes further and doubts different things, for example, you could doubt whether a train will arrive on time, a philosopher may doubt the very existence of the train and the nature of time. In this way it is often hyperbolic.
Secondly, a philosopher may well doubt something that they truly believe, because they cannot be certain of it (eg).
Thirdly, philosophical scepticism tests our knowledge claims (eg).
The 5 main claims that stem from philosophical skepticism: 2 ways to defeat the skeptic: 1) Descartes global skepticism 2) transcendental arguments (6 egs) Global skepticism: 4 problems with global skepticism:
Infinite regress
For a belief to work it must be supported by good reason and the reason will be something else believe. The second belief must also be supported by some further reason. This leads to an ‘infinite regress of justification’.
In order to attempt to stop this infinite regress we can turn to Foudationalism and Coherentism (brief description).

Foundationalism

Coherentism

Through this idea that our body of knowledge could be structured like a building on secure foundations breaks down. The argument is that knowledge, justification and certainty admit of degrees, they are not something one either has or has not.

According to the Coherentist, the process of justification can have no ultimate ground and so the proper response to the infinite regress of justification argument is not to search for special incorrigible beliefs, but to allow that the process of justification can indeed go on indefinitely. A belief will be justified by another belief, which in turn may be justified by another. The process goes on and on, and no set of beliefs is the sole justification for the rest.

A belief is well justified not just because it doesn’t contradict any other beliefs that one holds, but also because it is supported or explained by them.

The greater the evidential support given to a belief – the more intimately enmeshed it is with my other beliefs within the system – the better justified it is.

Coherentism lead to the formation of a web of interlocking beliefs. As we acquire new beliefs the rest of the web has to be adjusted accordingly.

ADVANTAGES of Coherentism
Could give us a more pragmatic and workable theory of knowledge. The Cartesian approach to epistemology has left us with truths if reason which are insufficient to give us any knowledge of the world.Theories can be adjusted according to coherentism, not simply discarded. OBJECTIONS to Coherentism
Some would maintain that some ideas are indeed incorrigible, and that they cannot, therefore, be revised in the light of new evidence. Descartes argued that mathematics and the cogito were such beliefs. An Empiricist foundationalist might insist that knowledge of ones own sense data is so basic that it can be known immediately, irrespective of what other beliefs one holds.The Plurality Objection: There is nothing in the coherentist’s account of justification to suggest that there cant be two or more equally justified sets of beliefs. So longs as two sets of beliefs are equally coherent there appears to be no way of choosing between them.
This means that, whilst my beliefs could be justified in coherentist terms, they could not actually represent the world.Reply: Surely there is some connection to between the sensation we experience and empirical knowledge, otherwise there seems to be no constraint on what beliefs we have about the world. The coherentist answer is that it is the beliefs we acquire about what we perceive can enter into justifying relations with other beliefs.

RELIABLISM:

This is the view of justification that claims that a belief is justified if it is produced by a reliable method rather than by being based on good reason. A reliable method is one which is most likely to produce a true belief.

It can be argued that justification for certain ‘facts’ of general knowledge can be obtained by the testimony of reliable authorities on the specific topics. By being told by a reliable source one can then claim justification for a belief.
* There are plenty examples of knowledge claims for which we have very little clue about how to justify.
* Many beliefs about the world around s are produced by sensory inputs. This is normally a reliable method for the production of such beliefs, and so such beliefs are normally regarded as well justified.
* Not understanding the underlying mechanisms of perception does not seem to disqualify it as a method of producing knowledge.
* In cases such as when a farmer knows when the right time is to sow his seeds, he does seem to have knowledge however, cannot offer any justification.
* According to Reliabilism, what makes such beliefs justified is the mechanism which produced the beliefs, as it is a reliable one. The methods are ones which tend to produce true beliefs.
* Therefore, what justifies a belief is not that it fits with or is supported by other beliefs which one explicitly has, but rather that it is acquired by a reliable method.
* Even if the justification is external to the mind, the belief is yet none the less justified. A sea captain who uses a compass to navigate may have nor real understanding of how a compass works, but none the less is the method a reliable one. The captain may even believe that the compass is controlled by navigating spirits, and this belief would not alter the reliability of the method.
* This suggests that knowledge does not consist in someone having any explicit understanding of the justification for their belief – all that matters is that they have reached the belief in an appropriate way.
* The sea captain has acquired a belief in the correct route by a reliable method although he cannot provide any justification as to why it is a justified one.

Knowledge and Perception

REALISM and ANTI-REALISM

This hopes to address the question of how much if what we are perceiving is really out there. If someone is a realist about something, then they believe it exists independently of our minds. If someone is an anti-realist about something, they think it is mind-dependent.

- Numbers, e.g. the number 7: Plato famously thought that numbers existed independently of humans, not in the world that we see and touch, but in a world we can only perceive with our minds; a world of ideas or ‘forms’. Pythagoras thought that to understand the world truly one must first look for the mathematical structures that lie behind appearances. He also revealed how music and harmony have a mathematical basis.
- Your reflection in the mirror: is your reflection behind the mirror, in your mind, or nowhere?
- Colours, e.g. red: ‘Red’ can be said to be the way humans see a particular wavelength of light when it hits their retinas. Others see it as the name for the particular wavelength itself. It could also be the name for a physical object’s propensity to bounce back visible light at a particular frequency. So red could be in the head, in the air or on the tomato.
- Morality: Are good and evil objectively real? Those who think that morality exists independently of human minds, perhaps as a creation of God or as an objective moral law, are realists. Those who think that morality is in some sense a product of human minds are anti-realists.
- Beauty: Some people believe that the concept of beauty is so universal that there must be an external standard of beauty to which these things refer. Other people think that beauty is subjective and is thus solely in the eye of the beholder.
- Electrons: Some people believe that electrons and other such entities that cannot be directly observed are just a useful story we invent to make sense of experimental data. Other people believe that such objects do exist and exist as we conceive them.
- Scientific laws, e.g. e=mc²: These laws are undoubtedly formulated in the minds of humans, but they also have to be successful in explaining and predicting aspects of the world. Some anti-realists believe that the laws do not correspond to anything and cannot really be said to be true or false. They are therefore, merely instrumental in helping humans control and manipulate the world. A realist might believe that scientific laws, as they slowly evolve, edge closer to the truth – to matching the laws of the universe.
- Matter: Some argue that the only things we are ever aware of are ideas or sensations in our minds and that matter is just a convenient way of talking about these sensations. Most people believe that there is a material universe that we perceive all around us.

NAÏVE or direct REALISM

This could otherwise be described as the position of common sense.
- Claims the world is pretty much as it appears to our senses.
- All objects are composed of matter , they occupy space and have properties such as size shape, texture, smell, taste and colour. These properties are perceived directly by the senses. Objects continue to observe the laws of physics and retain their properties whether or not anyone is there to perceive them
- If a tree falls in a forest it makes a sound whether or not there is anyone there to hear it.

CRITICISM 1)
Objects are not exactly as we perceive them to be. When looking at something from a distance is appears to get smaller, although it is technically the same size. A naïve realist would have to construct a very sophisticated argument to explain how objects actually shrink as they move away.

CRITICISM 2)
Berkeley explains in one of his three dialogues between Hylas and Philonus how clouds appear several different colours dependant on how far away you are from them. Since the clouds may appear red from a distance and any number of colours from different perspectives, according to Berkeley I makes no sense to suppose that they have any real colour. Colour is an appearance to us, not something objectively real.
Berkeley also uses the examples of heat and cold – luke-warm water feels hot to a cold hand and cold to a hot hand. They are not, therefore, real properties of objects but effects such objects but effects such objects have on observers like us.

CRITICISM 3)
Justification for the object appears circular. The naïve realists claim that we perceive the world as it really is, presupposes that we know what things are really like.
- A naïve realist could argue that we know what we are perceiving is really there by appealing to the testimony of others. However the sceptic can just as easily argue that if the human perceptual system distorts reality then it will distort it in the same way for all humans.

CRITICISM 4)
Using the testimony of others does not really help as we know that some people perceive the world differently, for example because of colour-blindness. Also, we perceive the world differently at different times. What we are tired or drunk things appear distorted, onto top of this we are occasionally subject to illusions and hallucinations. The naïve realist cannot seem to distinguish perceiving something which is there, and perceiving something which in reality is not there.

PRIMARY AND SECONDARY QUALITIES

Primary qualities
Real, physical qualities of the object.Secondary qualities The ‘powers’ of the object that produce experiences in humans and animals.Other Associate properties, often a social concept, but in part result of the primary or secondary qualities.Position of object Number
Shape
Size
MotionColour Temperature
Smell
Sound
TasteBeauty Value
Addictive
Importance
Disposable Physical objects act and interact with each other purely on the basis of their primary qualities.

Other than Berkeley’s contribution, there are several other considerations that have led philosophers to draw the primary secondary quality distinction:
1. All primary qualities are measurable mathematically and geometrically. In meditation 6 Descartes decides that only those qualities that are represented geometrically are real and this leads him to exclude weight and hardness which have no shape, position or size. Locke draws the conclusion differently, including these two in the list of primary qualities.
2. natural sciences may lead us to suppose that the world cannot be precisely as it appears to be; physics tells us that light is a form of electro-magnetic radiation and that what we perceive as different colours are in reality simply light waves of different lengths. `light in itself, in other words is not coloured. In reality it possesses only the primary qualities of having a certain magnitude or wavelength, of travelling at a particular speed, and so on.
3. Some philosophers have argued that certain properties are essential to objects while others are not. They argue that the essential ones must be primary while the inessential ones must be secondary. It is possible to think of an object without any secondary qualities. Many things fall into this category – gases, bacteria and perhaps ghosts. However, when we attempt to think of the object without any secondary qualities, our imagination fails us.

REPRESENTATIVE REALISM

Representative realism distinguishes our sensations, or sense data from the thing perceived. The physical object causes a sensation in us which is a representation of the real thing. So we now have two worlds: the world as it is in itself, and a picture of the world as it appears to our minds. But how accurate is our representation or the world? According to representative realism some aspects of our sensations are accurate while others are not. So our representation of the so called primary qualities of size, shape, position and motion represent accurately what is out there. Physical objects really have these properties. But our experience of colour, sound, smell, taste and so on, do not. These properties do not exist in the objects themselves in the same way that primary qualities do. Rather such sensations are imperfect representations produced in us by the secondary qualities of objects. So our different experiences of smells represent different shapes of molecules, for example.

Secondary qualities map onto real differences in the objects, but at a scale too small for us to detect.

CRITICISM 1)
How are we to tell when our senses are not ‘deceiving’ us?
Critics of representative realism would claim that we never perceive primary qualities directly, only secondary qualities. Everything we perceive must come from our five senses, so we must infer the existence of an independent object with primary qualities purely from our awareness of secondary qualities. How can we be sure that our senses are accurate in their representation? Without independent access, we cannot place our sensations and the physical objects side by side in order to make a comparison.

CRITICISM 2)
Veil of perception.

IDEALISM

Idealism is an ontology (a theory of being) as well as a theory of perception.

The 3 major ontology’s:

Materialism: Everything in the world is made of matter, interacting with other bits of matter.
Dualism: Claims that everything can be reduced to two classes: matter and – which occupies physical space and spirit or mind. This view can be traced back before recorded history, but it was Descartes in the modern era who gave it its most forceful philosophical expression.
Idealism: the view that what is real depends upon the mind, that the matter world does not exist outside the mind. According to Idealist Berkeley, All that exists are minds and their ideas, sensations and thoughts. We know we have a mind, we know we perceive various colours and shapes, and so on. But to suppose that there is a material world that causes these sensations is a leap of faith that we do not need to make. To be an idealist is to take an anti-realist stance regarding matter.

BERKELEY

Berkeley termed sense data (and the other contents of the mind) IDEAS and claimed that physical objects don’t exist independently of the mind, but in reality are collections of such ideas.

He held the same empirical belief as Locke that all the contents of the mind must come from experience. So, for example, a blind person cannot have the concept of red, since they have not had any experience of red.

Matter also poses problems. According to the representative realist, matter is something we cannot experience since it lies beyond the veil of perception. It is the cause of our experience, but not something we can actually perceive directly. But Berkeley argues that if we accept that we cannot experience matter then it follows from the Empiricist principle that we cannot have a concept of it. The concept ‘material object’ is empty of content, for there is no possible experience, no possible sensation, from which we could acquire it. He claimed that the Representative Realists talk about ‘matter’ was literally meaningless and that the idea of an unperceivable thing was a contradiction in terms. Berkeley concluded that an objects being consists solely in its being perceived; coining the term ‘esse est percipi’ – to be is to be perceived.

IDEALISM does not seem to able to explain the difference perceptual error and veridical (truthful or accurate) perception. If everything we perceive is a kind of dream, as the idealist seems to be saying then there would appear to be no difference between seeing something as it really is, and being mistaken; or between hallucinating and actually seeing something. However, the perceptual error is also a problem for the representative realist – we cannot distinguish these things by appeal to the way the world really is in itself, since we have no access to such a world. This means that the distinction has to be made from within ones experience.

CRITICISM 1)
While the idealist seems to have explained the difference between illusions and veridical experiences, they still face a difficulty: what happens to the object when no one is perceiving them?
For example – you light a fire and it roars alight and you leave the room and so it ceases to be, then you return and it is blazing again.
Idealism seems to imply there are ‘gaps’ in the fires existence when it is not perceived. Physical things have no hidden sides, no interiors, no secret aspects. They disappear and reappear without explanation, and there are no unobserved processes going on in the interim.

CRITICISM 2)
Idealism appears not to be able to give any explanation of why there is such regularity and predictability in our experience, nor, where our ideas come from.

- Berkeley’s defence
Berkeley suggests there is an all-powerful god who is a permanent perceiver of all possible ideas. By perceiving everything when no humans or animals are perceiving them, Berkeley’s God ensures that physical objects retain the kind of continuous existence that realists and common sense would claim for them. This also explains both the origin and the regularity of our sense data.

CRITICISM of Berkeley
God helps Berkeley out of his difficulties, but we have no independent reason to suppose either that there is a God or, if there is, that he acts as Berkeley imagines.

PHENOMENALISM

Phenomenalism is a nineteenth- and twentieth – century attempt at updating Berkeley’s insights. Phenomenalists attempt to improve on idealism by offering a more plausible explanation of both the occurrences of sense data, and their regularity. According to this view, objects are collections not just of actual sense data, or phenomena, but also of possible ones.

Its claim is that physical objects exist unperceived so long as they retain the potential to be perceived. As J. S. Mill put it: ‘matter […] may be defined, a Permanent Possibility of Sensation’. The seeds of this idea are already there in Berkeley when he suggests that we can say that physical objects exist so long as it is possible to see them, even though they may not actually be perceived. Where the idealist says that to be is to be perceived, the phenomenalist says that to be is to be perceivable.

One variation on Phenomenalism that gained particular favour is linguistic Phenomenalism. This is a theory about what we really mean when we talk about physical objects. The linguistic phenomenalist claims that all talk of independently existing objects can be translated into talk about sense data without any loss of meaning. Such a claim is backed up by considering how we learn a language.

Talk about physical objects is just shorthand for talk about sense data. So the word ‘apple’ does not really refer to some independent material object, it really means something like ‘round, red and green, hard, sweet, slightly sharp, crunchy, etc.. collection of potential sense data’.

All objects are just collections of sense data. They have no independent existence.
If the translation of talk about physical objects into talk about sense data is to work, there must be no loss of meaning between the original and the translation. Just as a translation of a French expression into English should not retain any French words, so there must be no physical object expression left over in the translation from physical object language into ‘phenomenal’ or ‘sense data language’.

For example: the physical object expression: the melon rolls across the wooden table and knocks over a glass.
Becomes: A round yellow patch rotates ad moves left across the brown expanse reaching a transparent, hard container-shaped collection of sense data which turns suddenly downwards.

Note that all phenomenalists are not saying that we should all start talking in phenomenalese. Obviously this would be impractical since it would take too long and communication would break down.

Rather they are arguing that it is possible to remove all talk of physical objects form our speech with no loss of meaning. It may be long winded and unwieldy, btu ultimately it means exactly the same. If this is right, it shows that belief in the existence of independent physical objects is redundant.

The linguistic phenomenalist can also deal with the problem faced by idealism of explaining what we mean when we talk about objects that are not currently being perceived.

For example there is an unobserved tree falling in the forest really means something like: if you approached the large green and brown expanse and walked into it for a while, then a small brown and green patch would shift in relation to the other brown and green patches and a roaring noise and shaking would also be experienced.

Instead of explaining perception by reference to the independent existence of material objects as the realists do, we should appeal to continuing possibilities of experience; possibilities which will be triggered by the occurrence of suitable conditions.

My not seeing the tree, although it continues to exist hidden in the forest, by claiming that this simply means that if suitable conditions were to obtain then I would see the tree, but presently these conditions so not obtain.
‘if…then’ statements of this sort are called hypothetical since they make claims about states of affairs which are not actual, but which would be if certain conditions were satisfied.

Hypothetical statements are going to be central to any complete phenomenal translation since we can never perceive every possible aspect of an object at any time

One benefit of Phenomenalism is that its anti-realist position makes it resistant to skeptical attack since it closes the gap between our experience and the world. Or the realist there is always the lurking skeptical question ‘How can I be sure that there really is a table in this room’.

Phenomenalism can dismiss such worries. In saying ‘there is a table in the room’ the phenomenalist simply means: ‘if I were to look in the room then I would have table-like experiences’ an this is true whether dreaming or not.

CRITICISM of Phenomenalism

Despite its advantages, we may still harbor the same worries over this form of anti-realism as we did over idealism. Simply to say that an object is a ‘permanent possibility of sensation’ is not much of an explanation either of the occurrences of perceptual experience or of its regularity.
Another way of posing this worry is to ask what makes the phenomenalists’ hypothetical statements true. Where the realist can readily answer this by appealing to a continuous material object, the phenomenalist appears able only to throw up her hands.
-The standard phenomenalist reply is to appeal to regularities in past experience. If every time in the past that you have gone for a walk into the forest you have had the same pattern of tree like experiences, then this justifies you in making the general hypothetical claim that if you were to go once more to the forest you would once again have the same tree like experiences. A statement of regularity, in other words, is good evidence for the truth of a hypothetical.
-Such a response may still strike us as an inadequate account of the actual nature of our perceptual experience. The reason why the tree reappears every time I go on the same walk in the forest cannot be that it has appeared in the past under similar circumstances.

Past regularities, do not constitute an object’s existence unperceived. Instead, says the realist, the independent existence of the object explains regularities.
For the realist, the phenomenalist just gets things the wrong way around.
Why should matter retain the properties it does so as to be ready on occasion to provide us with predictable sense data?
The only possible justification for supposing that matter will retain its properties unperceived is because of past regularities, and so the realist is in the same boat as the phenomenalist when it comes to explaining why experience is as it is.

- Another line of criticism of Phenomenalism concerns the impossibility of translating all talk about objects into talk about sense data.
- E.g. There is a machine gun beneath the window in the room next door. Would translate to: if you left this room, turned right and walked down the corridor and into the next room then you would have window like experiences and then if you approach the window like experiences and looked down, then you would have machine gun experiences.
- Clearly the translation is not complete, and all such talk must be further reduced to talk about sense data. The hypothetical statement must be expanded to include descriptions of ‘walking down corridor like experiences’ and ‘room like experiences’
- The difficulty is that each hypothetical statement that we use is talking about what an observer would perceive under certain conditions. But these conditions have to be characterized in terms of physical objects and spatial relations.
- So any phenomenal translation will be not only infinitely complex and long but also impossible, even in principle, to complete since it must reintroduce physical object language at each turn. This seems to show that our language is dependent on the assumption of an independently existing world and cannot be translated into statements about actual and potential sense data.