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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 January 2010
According to what might be described as ‘humanist’ approaches to epistemology, the fundamental task of epistemology is to investigate the nature, scope and origins of human knowledge. Evidently, what we can know depends upon the nature of our cognitive faculties, including our senses and our understanding. Since there may be significant differences between human cognitive faculties and those of other beings, it would seem that an investigation of the nature, scope and origins of human knowledge must therefore concern itself, in the first instance, with uncovering the structure and operations of the human cognitive apparatus. The most influential versions of humanism in epistemology have also been inclined to insist both that it is contingent that our cognitive faculties are as they are, and that an investigation of these faculties must be largely empirical. An empirical investigation is to be understood, very roughly, as one which relies upon observation and experiment, and to describe such an investigation as naturalistic is to draw attention to the fact that it is presupposed by humanism that the faculties being investigated are a part of the natural world, the world of space, time and causal law.
1 I take it that a cognitive faculty is one the proper exercise of which is necessary for the acquisition of knowledge.
2 Locke, John, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Nidditch, P. H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar
3 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Selby-Bigge, L. A. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978)Google Scholar.
4 Foreword to Locke's Essay, p. xxiii.
5 Essay, I.i.2.
6 Treatise, p. xv.
7 Ibid., p. xvi.
8 In his Introduction to Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986)Google Scholar, Alvin I. Goldman defends a conception of epistemology which combines elements of what I am calling ‘universalism’ and ‘humanism’, though Goldman's label for humanist epistemology is ‘psychologistic epistemology’.
9 McGinn, Colin presses these questions in The Character of Mind (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 1–4.Google Scholar
10 McGinn, , The Character of Mind, p. 2.Google Scholar
11 Walsh, W. H., Kant–s Criticism of Metaphysics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1975), p. 89.Google Scholar
12 For example, McGinn, claims in The Character of Mind, p. 1Google Scholar, that ‘it is frequently a good test of a theory of some mental phenomenon to ask whether the proposed theory would be applicable to all actual and possible creatures exemplifying that phenomenon’.
13 Wittgenstein, L., Philosophical Investigations, translated by Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), section 281.Google Scholar
14 Cf. Walsh, , Kant's Criticism of Metaphysics, pp. 251–2Google Scholar and Cassam, Q., Self and World (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 12–21.Google Scholar
15 All references in this form are to Smith's, Norman Kemp translation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Macmillan, 1929).Google Scholar
16 This is the less ‘weighty’ of the two senses of ‘object’ which Strawson, P. F. distinguishes in The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1966), pp. 72–3.Google Scholar
17 This way of putting things is suggested by Allison, Henry in Kant's Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defense (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), chapters 5 and 6Google Scholar.
18 A discursive understanding is characterized by Kant as one whose knowledge must be ‘by means of concepts’ (A68/B93). He adds that ‘the only use which the understanding can make of these concepts is to judge by means of the’ (ibid.). As W. H. Walsh remarks, it was Kant's consistent doctrine that ‘the categories were by no means peculiar to human nature, but were involved in discursive thinking as such’ (Reason and Experience (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1947), pp. 163–4Google Scholar).
19 To the extent that Kant's account of the role of the categories is an important element of his ‘transcendental psychology’, its universalist orientation is not brought out by Patricia Kitcher's characterization of transcendental psychology as seeking ‘to determine the necessary and universal elements of human cognition’ (Kant's Transcendental Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1990), p. 19Google Scholar).
20 Strawson reads Kant in this way in ‘Kant's New Foundations of Metaphysics’, in Entity and Identity and Other Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 237–8Google Scholar. He quotes B145–6 in support of this reading. For a more detailed discussion on Kant's position on this question, see Falkenstein, Lorne, Kant's Intuitionism: A Commentary on the Transcendental Aesthetic (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995), pp. 193–200.Google Scholar
21 See Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 10–13.
22 Paul Guyer appears to attribute this version of subjectivism to Kant in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 367Google Scholar.
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24 This is the moral of Harrison's, Ross important paper on ‘Transcendental Arguments and Idealism’, in Idealism Past and Present, ed. Vesey, G., Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).Google Scholar
25 As Falkenstein puts it, Kant's view is that it is a ‘contingent truth that, for us, space is a necessary ground of outer appearances’ (Kant's Intuitionism, 199). The related idea that some necessary or ‘eternal’ truths are only contingently necessary has also been attributed to Descartes. See Curley, Edwin, ‘Descartes on the Creation of Eternal Truths’, Philosophical Review 93/4 (10 1984), 569–97.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26 Kant's Transcendental Idealism, 10.
27 Ibid., p. 9.
28 Allison, Henry, ‘Transcendental Idealism: A Retrospective’, in Idealism and Freedom: Essays on Kant's Theoretical and Practical Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 4–5.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
29 Ibid., p. 4.
30 Kant's Transcendental Idealism, pp. 83–4.
31 Ibid., p. 19.
32 Ibid., p. 29.
33 ‘The Disappearing “We”’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volume 58 (1984), 233.Google Scholar
34 Nagel, Thomas, The View From Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 18.Google Scholar
35 This aspect of Kant's position is rightly emphasized by Lear in ‘The Disappearing “We”’, 232.
36 The Bounds of Sense, pp. 77–8.
37 Strawson, , ‘Sensibility, Understanding, and the Doctrine of Synthesis: Comments on Henrich and Guyer’, in Kant's Transcendental Deductions: The Three ‘Critiques’ and the ‘Opus postumum’, ed. Förster, E. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989), p. 71.Google Scholar
38 The Bounds of Sense, p. 81.
39 Strawson, , ‘Kant's New Foundations of Metaphysics’, pp. 239–40.Google Scholar
40 Ibid., p. 240.
41 Cf. The Bounds of Sense, pp. 82–5
42 Strawson, , ‘Kant's New Foundations of Metaphysics’, p. 237.Google Scholar
43 The Bounds of Sense, p. 49.
44 Strawson, P.F., Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar (London: Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1974), p. 16.Google Scholar
45 Craig, Edward, ‘Arithmetic and Fact’, in Exercises in Analysis: Essays by Students of Casimer Lewy, ed. Hacking, I. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 91.Google Scholar
46 These remarks are only intended to give a very rough indication of how an effective response to scepticism about reason might go. On their own, they are unlikely to persuade those who question the ability of rational reflection to deliver knowledge of things in themselves.
47 This is, of course, not to suggest that the epistemological standing of analytic knowledge is wholly unproblematic.
48 One question for someone who argues in this way is whether, as has so far been assumed, analytically necessary conditions are, in the realist's sense, objectively necessary conditions. I will not pursue this difficult issue here
