Against Knowledge Closure
Cambridge University Press, July 2019
Blurb:
“Knowledge closure is the claim that, if an agent S knows P, recognizes that P implies Q, and believes Q because it is implied by P, then S knows Q. Closure is a pivotal epistemological principle that is widely endorsed by contemporary epistemologists. Against Knowledge Closure is the first book-length treatment of the issue and the most sustained argument for closure failure to date. Unlike most prior arguments for closure failure, Marc Alspector-Kelly’s critique of closure does not presuppose any particular epistemological theory; his argument is, instead, intuitively compelling and applicable to a wide variety of epistemological views. His discussion ranges over much of the epistemological landscape, including skepticism, warrant, transmission and transmission failure, fallibilism, sensitivity, safety, evidentialism, reliabilism, contextualism, entitlement, circularity and bootstrapping, justification, and justification closure. As a result, the volume will be of interest to any epistemologist or student of epistemology and related subjects.”
A Review:
‘Marc Alspector-Kelly provides the most comprehensive treatment available of the much-debated topic of epistemic closure, and his own arguments are a valuable antidote to the current consensus in favor of closure. Henceforth, epistemologists who discuss closure will have to reckon with Alspector-Kelly’s original and sophisticated case against this principle.’ Peter Murphy, University of Indianapolis
Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology
Timothy McGrew, Marc Alspector-Kelly, and Fritz Allhoff, Eds., Wiley Blackwell, 2009
Blurb:
“Philosophy of science came into its own in the 20th century, but the issues at the heart of the subject have been in discussion since antiquity. Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology combines excerpts from key historical writings with insightful commentary to provide a text that distinctively follows strands of scientific inquiry, investigation, and debate for the past 2,500 years. Beginning with the Ancient Greeks, Part I examines the roots of ancient and medieval philosophy of science before proceeding to the scientific revolution, with extensive coverage of such scientists as Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton as well as modern philosophers including Descartes, Hume, and Kant. Part II covers philosophy of science in the 20th century, first laying out the fundamental doctrines of the highly influential logical positivist movement and the emergence of its “received view” of scientific theories. It then traces the challenges to the received view and the impact of those challenges on issues in contemporary philosophy of science such as confirmation and observation, methodology, and realism.
Unmatched in breadth and depth, Philosophy of Science: An Historical Anthology is a comprehensive work that will take the reader on a grand tour of the philosophy of science from antiquity to the modern age.”
Articles
Wright Back to Dretske, or Why You Might As Well Deny Knowledge Closure
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90(3), 570-611 (2015)
Fred Dretske notoriously claimed that knowledge closure sometimes fails. Crispin Wright agrees that warrant does not transmit in the relevant cases, but only because the agent must already be warranted in believing the conclusion in order to acquire her warrant for the premise. So the agent ends up being warranted in believing, and so knowing, the conclusion in those cases too: closure is preserved. Wright’s argument requires that the conclusion’s having to be warranted beforehand explains transmission failure. I argue that it doesn’t, and that the correct explanation does not imply that the agent will end up warranted in believing the conclusion when transmission fails. Those who agree that transmission does fail in those cases, therefore, might as well follow Dretske in denying knowledge closure too.
Constructive Empiricism Revisited
(review of Paul Dicken, Constructive Empiricism: Epistemology and the Philosophy of Science)
Metascience 21(1), 187-191 (2012)
Why Safety Doesn’t Save Closure
Synthese 183, 127-142 (2011)
Almost every epistemologist believes that closure is true. Indeed, they often believe that
it so obviously true that any theory implying its denial is thereby refuted. Some prominent epistemologists have nevertheless denied it, most famously Fred Dretske and
Robert Nozick. There are closure advocates who see other virtues in those accounts,
however, and so who introduce revisions of one sort or another in order to preserve
closure while maintaining their spirit. One popular approach is to replace the “sensitivity” constraint at the heart of both of those accounts with a “safety” constraint,
as advocated by Timothy Williamson, Duncan Pritchard, Ernest Sosa, Stephen Luper,
and others. The purpose of this essay is to show that this approach does not succeed:
safety does not save closure. And neither does a popular variation on the safety theme,
the safe-basis or safe-indicator account.
Pretending to See
Philosophical Psychology 19(6), 713-728 (2006)
There are three distinct projects—ontological, phenomenological, and conceptual—to pursue in the philosophy of perception. They are, however, rarely distinguished. Failure to distinguish them has resulted in their being pursued as one. Their completion then requires that they admit of the same solution, while accommodating the existence of misperception and the scientific facts concerning the perceptual process. The lesson to learn from misperceptions and those facts is, however, that no such common solution is possible, and that the projects must, and can, be pursued separately. Pursuit of the phenomenological and conceptual projects then requires a context in which discourse concerning objects of perception is permitted without ontological commitment to such objects. This is supplied by treating certain uses of perceptual locutions as within a context of pretense.
Knowledge Externalism
Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87, 289-300 (2006)
A popular counterexample directed against externalist epistemological views is that of an agent (Lehrer’s “Truetemp” for example) whose beliefs are clearly neither justified nor known but that were generated in the manner that the externalist requires, thereby demonstrating externalism to be insufficient. In this essay I develop and defend an externalist account of knowledge – essentially an elaboration of Fred Dreske’s information-theoretic account – that is not susceptible to those criticisms. I then briefly discuss the relationship between knowledge and justification.
Constructive Empiricism and Epistemic Modesty: Response to van Fraassen and Monton
Erkenntnis 64, 371-379 (2006)
Bas van Fraassen claims that constructive empiricism strikes a balance between the empiricist’s commitments to epistemic modesty – that one’s opinion should extend no further beyond the deliverances of experience than is necessary – and to the rationality of science. In ‘‘Should the Empiricist be a Constructive Empiricist?’’ I argued that if the constructive empiricist follows through on her commitment to epistemic modesty she will find herself adopting a much more extreme position than van Fraassen suggests. Van Fraassen and Bradley Monton have recently responded. My purpose here is to contest their response. The goal is not merely the rebuttal of a rebuttal; there is a lesson to learn concerning the realist/anti-realist dialectic generated by van Fraassen’s view.
Seeing the Unobservable: van Fraassen and the Limits of Experience
Synthese 140, 331-353 (2004)
Van Fraassen maintains that the information that we can glean from experience is limited to those entities and processes that are detectable by means of our unaided senses. His challenge to the realist, I suggest, is that the attempt to inferentially transcend those limits amounts to a reversion to rationalism. Under pressure from such examples as microscopic observation, he has recently widened the scope of the phenomena to include object-like experiences without empirical objects of experience. With this change in mind, I argue that van Fraassen needs an account of perception whose consequence is that we can only see what we see with the unaided eye. I then argue that reflection on the epistemically significant aspects of the perceptual process renders van Fraassen’s characterization of the limits of experience implausible; technologically enhanced perception brings “unobservables” within those limits. An empiricism that is compatible with realism results.
The NOAer’s Dilemma: Constructive Empiricism and the Natural Ontological Attitude
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 33(3), 307-322 (2003)
Faced with interminable combat over some piece of philosophical terrain, someone will inevitably suggest that the contested ground is nothing more than a philosophically manufactured illusion. Arthur Fine has long advocated such a response–the “natural ontological attitude” or NOA–to the realism debate in the philosophy of science. Notwithstanding Fine’s claim to have identified a position that is neither realist nor anti-realist, critics charge that NOA, on its face, amounts to realist position. I endorse this criticism with attention to the relation between NOA and Bas van Fraassen’s Constructive Empiricism (CE). An alternative interpretation of NOA is genuinely non-realist, but only because its doxastic recommendations are effectively identical to proposed by the constructive empiricist. There is yet another interpretation of NOA that might constitute a genuine alternative to both realism and CE. That interpretation is, however, too underdeveloped in Fine’s work to constitute genuine middle ground. I explore this alternative further in the latter sections of the paper.
Stroud’s Carnap
Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 64(2), 276-302 (2002)
In “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” Camap drew his famous distinction between ‘internal’ and ‘external’ questions of existence, pronouncing the former meaningful and the latter meaningless. In The Significance of Philosophical Scepticism, Barry Stroud understands Carnap to be applying the verification criterion of meaningfulness in order to refute Cartesian skepticism. I suggest that Stroud misrepresents both Carnap’s aim and method. Camap was responding to critics who suggested that his willingness to quantify over abstract entities in his work in semantics violated his commitment to empiricism. He rejected that criticism as presupposing a super‐scientific standpoint from which constraints on the admissible domain of entities of science could be delivered. Carnap wanted to insulate science from the imposition of first‐philosophical metaphysical prejudice, not to defuse scepticism by appeal to verificationism.
Should the Empiricist be a Constructive Empiricist?
Philosophy of Science 68(4), 413-431 (2001)
Bas van Fraassen does not argue that everyone should be a constructive empiricist. He claims only that constructive empiricism (CE) is a coherent post-positivist alternative to realism, notwithstanding the realist’s charge that CE is arbitrary and irrational. He does argue, however, that the empiricist is obliged to limit belief as CE prescribes. Criticism of CE has been largely directed at van Fraassen’s claim that CE is a coherent option. Far less attention has been directed at his claim that empiricists should be constructive empiricists. I consider his various attempts to support this claim, conclude that they are unsuccessful, and suggest that the empiricist who repudiates CE does not thereby abandon contemporary empiricism itself.
On Quine on Carnap on Ontology
Philosophical Studies, 102, 93-122 (2001)
Rudolf Carnap’s essay “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” is standardly taken to be the swan song of the positivists’ revolt against metaphysics. Their disdain for the metaphysical, the story goes, was finally put to rest when W.V. Quine demonstrated that Carnap’s last attempt to dodge metaphysical issues fails, and then showed that metaphysics has a legitimate place within a generally naturalistic framework. I will argue that, given Quine’s understanding of the phrase “ontological commitment”, Carnap had no objection to ontological commitment to abstract entities. He did, however, object to his critics’ suggestion that commitment to empiricism requires nominalism. His rejection of external questions is a rejection of any a priori constraint on admissible ontologies for empirical science. ESO therefore expresses Carnap’s rejection of the synthetic a priori rather than his endorsement of the analytic a priori as Quine thought. But the rejection of the synthetic a priori is just what Quine’s naturalistic rejection of first philosophy involves. So Quine’s and Carnap’s views are much closer than Quine ever suspected. Unfortunately, Quine’s misinterpretation of Carnap’s views has led to a misunderstanding of the implications of Quine’s own naturalistic turn for contemporary ontological inquiry.