- March 28th, 2023, 12:40 pm
#438896
Those acknowledging scientific empiricism as the highest epistemic authority (concerning synthetic truths at least) can argue that there is a retrospective meta-justification for it:
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"The substantive picture of nature’s ways that is secured through our empirical inquiries is itself ultimately justified, retrospectively as it were, through validating the presuppositions on whose basis inquiry has proceeded. As we develop science there must come a 'closing of the circle.' The world-picture that science delivers into our hands must eventually become such as to explain how it is that creatures such as ourselves, emplaced in the world as we are, investigating it by the processes we actually use, should do fairly well at developing a workable view of that world. The 'validation of scientific method' must in the end itself become scientifically validated. Science must (and can) retrovalidate itself by providing the material (in terms of a science-based world-view) for justifying the methods of science.
The rational structure of the overall process of justification accordingly looks as follows:
1. We use various sorts of experiential data as evidence for objective fact.
2. We do this in the first instance for practical reasons, faute de mieux, because only by proceeding in this way can we hope to resolve our questions with any degree of rational satisfaction.
But as we proceed two things happen:
(i) On the pragmatic side we find that we obtain a world picture on whose basis we can operate effectively. (Pragmatic revalidation.)
(ii) On the cognitive side we find that we arrive at a picture of the world and our place within it that provides an explanation of how it is that we are enabled to get things (roughly) right—that we are in fact justified in using our phenomenal data as data of objective fact. (Explanatory revalidation.)
The success at issue here is twofold—both in terms of understanding (cognition) and in terms of application (praxis). And it is this ultimate success that justifies and rationalizes, retrospectively, our evidential proceedings. Though the process is cyclic and circular, there is nothing vicious and vitiating about it. The reasoning at issue is not a matter of linear sequence but of a systemic coherence prepared to accept the circles and cycles of cognitive feedback.
We thus arrive at the overall situation of a dual 'retrojustification.' For all the presuppositions of inquiry are ultimately justified because a 'wisdom of hindsight' enables us to see that by their means we have been able to achieve both practical success and a theoretical understanding of our place in the world’s scheme of things."
(Rescher, Nicholas. Reality and Its Appearance. New York: Continuum, 2010. pp. 60-62)
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They can also argue against epistemic rationalism (about synthetic truths) that…
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"…philosophical intuition is and always will be laughably unreliable."
(p. 144)
"I do not see what there is to be learned (from intuitions) about fundamentals, especially about ontology. A reflective equilibrium among intuitions is unlikely to deliver any sort of existence proof (unless perhaps a proof of the existence of God that is better than expert philosophical theology has managed to produce in the past three thousand years)."
(p. 148)
"Suppose we are metaphilosophers (as today we are) and we are searching for a sound way of garnering truths. Many methods of inquiry are on offer. There is of course scientific method. There is devotion to Moorean common sense. There is phenomenology. There are intuitions and the method of reflective equilibrium. There are, allegedly, 'higher' sources of illumination, from classical divine revelation to mysticism to current New Age…well, we are in California. How to choose? (Not that the choice must be unique.)
Unfortunately, metaphilosophy is branch of philosophy, and so there is an inevitable bootstrap problem. But, Armstrong argues, at least we can fairly theory-neutrally take a look at track records. Not at track records of producing truths, because we could not establish those without begging some of the crucial questions. Rather, we can look at track records of producing consensus, of getting people to change their minds on the basis of reasons, of getting them to stop disagreeing and also to agree on novel propositions. Consensus production is no guarantee of reliability, of course, but it is the closest thing we have to a metaphilosophical mark or indicator of soundness.
Now, of the methods I listed a moment ago, which have historically been good at producing consensus? One stands out: Scientific method. A second is salient as well, though in a slightly degenerate way, that of common sense. (One might say that 'common sense' does not produce consensus, but is just de facto consensus. But there is, if you will, a 'method' of common sense; it is the ordinary, unreflective use of perception and memory.) What of the others?
In particular, what of philosophical method taken as a whole? There is a corner in which the philosophical track record is good: logic. Otherwise, the history of philosophy is a disgusting mess of squabbling, inconclusion, dogma and counter-dogma, trendy patois, fashionable but actually groundless assumptions, vacillation from one paradigm to another, mere speculation, and sheer abuse. Nothing in that sordid history can be called progress, except what derives directly from developments in logic or in science, and consensus has always been limited to what are really very small groups of people confined in small geographical regions over short periods of time. If we use consensus production as our yardstick, then – and again, I know no other – we find that as between science, common sense and philosophy, science and common sense do very well while philosophy comes in a pathetically weak third. I take this seriously. And I believe that a felicitous explanatory coordination between common sense and science is the best that philosophy can hope to achieve."
(pp. 148-9)
(Lycan, William G. "Bealer on the Possibility of Philosophical Knowledge." Philosophical Studies 81 (1996): 143-150.)
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"Philosophers who give great weight to intuitions need to offer some account of why such intuitions are reliable and are to be trusted; at least, they need to sketch how we would have acquired a reliable capacity of this sort. Descartes based his confidence in thought processes that involve 'clear and distinct ideas' upon the existence of a good God who would not deceive him. Upon what do contemporary philosophers of intuition base their claims? Of course, if the purpose of such philosophy is merely to codify and systematize the intuitions that (for whatever reason) are held, then a philosophy built upon intuitions will need no further basis. And it will have no further validity."
(Nozick, Robert. Invariances: The Structure of the Objective World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. p. 125)
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"We may philosophize well or ill, but we must philosophize." – Wilfrid Sellars
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