Meta-epistemology

Metaepistemology is the study of the underlying assumptions of epistemology. As the "theory of knowledge", epistemology is concerned with questions about what knowledge is and how much people can know. Metaepistemology, by contrast, investigates what the aims and methods of epistemology should be, whether there are objective facts about what people know, and related issues.

Epistemology is typically viewed as a normative field focused on reflective thought rather than empirical evidence. It is usually seen as methodologically distinct from the sciences, with methods including the use of intuitions, thought experiments, conceptual analysis, and explication. Other views include naturalism, which holds that epistemology should be scientifically-informed; experimental philosophy, which argues against intuitions and for the use of empirical studies; pragmatism, which argues for the reconstruction of epistemic concepts to achieve practical goals; and feminism, which criticises gendered bias in epistemology.

Metaepistemology investigates epistemic facts, for example, facts about what people know. According to epistemic realists, facts about knowledge are objective and depend on the way the world is rather than subjective opinion. Anti-realists deny the existence of such facts. Error theorists deny the existence of epistemic facts altogether while instrumentalists and relativists simply deny that they are objective. Expressivism argues that statements about knowledge do not aim to represent facts in the first place, but instead express attitudes like "this belief is good enough". Views such as quasi-realism and constitutivism attempt to derive some of the benefits of realism without accepting the existence of objective epistemic facts. Constitutivism, for example, explains epistemic facts in terms of the nature of belief. Within the epistemology of epistemology, views include epistemic internalism and externalism as well as metaepistemological scepticism.

A number of questions arise from the normativity of epistemology. For example, metaepistemologists investigate whether people have obligations to hold the right beliefs and if this implies that they have voluntary control over what they believe. Other questions include what the source of epistemic normativity is or how to characterise epistemic value. The connection between normative judgements and epistemic motivation is another line of investigation. As a twin metanormative discipline, metaepistemology's relationship with metaethics is a matter of debate. Some theorists view the disciplines as strictly analogous whilst others see important distinctions between the two.

Background

Terminology

Metaepistemology is the branch of epistemology focused on the fundamental assumptions of epistemology. As a form of metaphilosophy, it is a reflective or higher-order discipline that takes ordinary epistemology as its subject matter, which itself is a first-order or substantive discipline. Although there is a general agreement that metaepistemology reflects on epistemology in some sense, its exact definition is contested. Some sources define it narrowly as the epistemology of epistemology, including ''The Blackwell Dictionary of Western Philosophy'' which states that the role of metaepistemology is in comparing different epistemologies and analysing epistemic concepts. Others emphasise the role of metaepistemology in examining epistemology's goals, methods and criteria of adequacy. Metaepistemology is also sometimes characterised as the study of epistemic statements and judgements, including their semantic, ontological and pragmatic status, or as the study of epistemic facts and reasons.

''Metaepistemology'' is a relatively modern term and probably originated at some point in the 20th century. Dominique Kuenzle identifies its first use as a 1959 article by Roderick Firth discussing the views of Roderick Chisholm on the ethics of belief. Richard Brandt used the term in the 1967 edition of the ''Encyclopedia of Philosophy'', defining it as a higher-order discipline, analogous to metaethics, that attempts to explain epistemic concepts and to understand the underlying logic of epistemic statements. In 1978, also inspired by the work of Roderick Chisholm, William Alston released "Meta-Ethics and Meta-Epistemology", the first paper with the explicit aim of defining the distinction between metaepistemology and substantive epistemology, in which he defined metaepistemology as the study of "the conceptual and methodological foundations of pistemology" Kuenzle notes only a few uses prior to 2017, but Christos Kyriacou and Robin McKenna state that increasing interest in the field arose around the beginning of the 21st century due to a growing recognition that epistemology is a normative field like ethics.

Relationship between epistemology and metaepistemology

The division between metaepistemology and the other branches of epistemology—as well as their connections with one another—is debated by metaepistemologists. For example, the ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' divides epistemology into three branches analogously to the three branches of ethics: metaepistemology, normative epistemology and applied epistemology. Richard Fumerton instead divides epistemology into metaepistemology and applied epistemology. According to Fumerton, the idea of a branch of normative epistemology is problematic because, in his view, epistemic normativity is inherently different in character to moral normativity.

Views about the relationship between metaepistemology and the other branches of epistemology fall into two groups: autonomy and interdependency. According to the autonomy view, metaepistemology is an entirely independent branch of epistemology that neither depends on the other branches nor entails any particular position in them. For example, according to this view, a person being an epistemic realist, anti-realist, or relativist has no implications for whether they should be a coherentist, foundationalist, or reliabilist, and vice versa. According to the interdependency view, on the other hand, there are strong theoretical interdependencies between the branches and a normative epistemological view may even be fully derivable from a metaepistemological one. Furthermore, according to the latter view, metaepistemology may have relevance to issues of practical importance like climate change scepticism.

Nature and methodology of epistemology

Epistemology is commonly defined as the "theory of knowledge". In this sense, it investigates the nature of knowledge and how far it extends, but epistemologists also investigate other concepts such as justification, understanding and rationality. To account for this diversity of interests, epistemology is sometimes characterised as two connected projects: '' gnoseology'' concerned with the theory of knowledge, and ''intellectual ethics'' concerned with guiding inquiry according to proper intellectual norms. Epistemology is traditionally viewed as an ''a priori'' discipline focused on reflective thought rather than empirical evidence, and as autonomous from the results and methods of the sciences. It is also generally seen as a normative discipline, evaluating beliefs as either justified or unjustified and prescribing the proper way to form beliefs. As the central focus of epistemology, knowledge is generally understood in terms of determinate beliefs, but degrees of belief or credences are also important concepts, and metaepistemologists have debated which is more fundamental to epistemology.

Alternative views of epistemology may deny some or all of the traditional features of epistemology. For example, naturalistic epistemology denies the autonomy of epistemology, holding that epistemology should be informed by either the methods or ontology of science. In its most radical form, associated in particular with the naturalised epistemology of W. V. Quine, it claims that epistemology should be replaced with empirical disciplines such as psychology or cognitive science. Advocates of experimental philosophy claim that epistemology should use ''a posteriori'' methods such as experiments and empirical data, either replacing traditional philosophical methods or merely supplementing them. More traditional methods include the use of intuitions about particular cases or thought experiments to support epistemological theories or ideas. A prominent example in epistemology is the use of intuitions regarding Gettier cases to test theories of knowledge. These are hypothetical cases in which candidate conditions for knowledge are met but intuitively do not appear to count as knowledge due to luck being involved. Intuitions are also used in the process of reflective equilibrium, in which conflicting intuitions are brought into alignment by modifying or removing intuitions until they form a coherent system of beliefs.

Related to the use of intuitions is the method of analysis to clarify epistemic terms. Traditionally, analysis in epistemology has been seen as conceptual analysis, which attempts to clarify concepts such as knowledge by providing necessary and sufficient conditions for their use. A similar view sees analysis as semantic or linguistic analysis, in which the way terms are actually used is tracked to try and reveal their meaning. However, the problems posed to the conceptual analysis of knowledge by Gettier cases have led some philosophers including Timothy Williamson to become pessimistic about such approaches. Williamson and naturalists like Hilary Kornblith have also argued that epistemologists should be concerned with actual epistemic phenomena and states rather than words and concepts. According to an alternative viewpoint, analysis in epistemology is metaphysical analysis, which aims at understanding the nature of the thing being investigated.

An alternative methodology to philosophical analysis is explication. Explication aims to clarify a term by replacing it with a more precisely defined technical term. The technical term should remain close in meaning to the original term but can deviate from intuitions to fulfil theoretical or practical goals. For example, the scientific term "fish" excludes whales to better capture the facts of biology, even if whales may be included in the colloquial or pre-scientific meaning of the word. Practical explication, also known as a function-first approach, identifies the purpose or function of a term to clarify its meaning. Proposed functions of the term knowledge, for example, include its role in identifying reliable sources of information and in marking an end-point for inquiry. This approach is associated with the pragmatism of Charles Sanders Peirce and neopragmatists such as Mark Kaplan and Edward Craig. Inspired by Craig, Jonathan Weinberg has proposed an explicitly metaepistemological pragmatism that allows epistemic concepts to be redesigned to fulfil practical goals, resulting in a method of "analysis-by-imagined-reconstruction".

Another methodological issue in epistemology is the debate between particularists and generalists. According to particularists, particular cases of knowledge need to be identified before the general principles underlying knowledge can be understood. Generalists, on the other hand, argue that the principles underlying knowledge are required to reliably identify cases. This debate is made more complicated by the fact that each question seems to depend on the other; a general theory of knowledge is needed to know if particular cases count as knowledge, but a theory of knowledge is potentially arbitrary without being tested against particular cases. This is known as the problem of the criterion. Generalism was popular in modern philosophy, but by the middle of the 20th century, particularism was the dominant view. In the 21st century, particularism became less dominant after a period driven by responses to Gettier cases, and epistemic methodology widened to include considerations regarding the value of knowledge and the relationships between knowledge and related concepts such as assertion.

According to feminist epistemology, epistemology has been historically rooted in androcentric bias. An example cited by some feminist philosophers is epistemology's focus on propositional knowledge, which they argue is due to femininity being associated with emotional and practical forms of knowledge while being devalued compared to stereotypes of masculine rationality and theoreticity. At the same time, feminists typically argue against a value-free or "disinterested" methodology, holding that epistemology is inherently value-laden. The problem of reconciling feminist epistemology's criticism of androcentric bias and simultaneous acceptance that feminism has its own biases is called the "bias paradox". Louise Antony has embraced feminist naturalised epistemology to solve this problem, arguing that feminists should try to show that feminist values produce empirically better theories. Other feminist approaches to epistemology can also be viewed as in conversation with different viewpoints, and as extending criticisms of traditional epistemology from a feminist lens. For example, Sally Haslanger has argued from a pragmatist feminist perspective that epistemic concepts should be reformed to remove androcentric biases so they can better serve their purposes within epistemology.

Epistemic realism and anti-realism

As in metaethics, views about the metaphysics of epistemology can be divided into epistemic realism and anti-realism. In its most minimal form, epistemic realism claims that there are mind-independent epistemic facts. This means that statements about what a person knows, for example, are objectively true or false, and their truth or falsity depends on the way the world is rather than personal opinion or cultural consensus. Epistemic realism generally takes these epistemic facts to be normative and to provide categorical reasons for belief. In other words, these facts have authority over what a person should believe, regardless of their goals or desires. Epistemic realists can be divided into reductionists, who believe that epistemic facts can be reduced to descriptive or natural facts, and antireductionists, who believe that epistemic facts are irreducibly normative.

Epistemic reductionists are generally naturalist realists while antireductionists tend to be non-naturalists. That is, reductionists tend to believe that epistemic facts can be identified with natural facts while antireductionists take them to be a ''sui generis'' type of fact. Reductionists can be further divided into analytic reductionists, who accept conceptual analysis, and synthetic reductionists, who think that epistemic reductions can only be found empirically. For example, Hilary Kornblith argues that knowledge is a natural kind and should therefore be investigated empirically, akin to other natural kinds like gold. An argument against reductionism is G. E. Moore's open question argument in metaethics, which has been adapted for epistemology. It claims that statements such as "this belief is reliably produced, but is it knowledge?" are open questions, which shows that knowledge is not identical in meaning to any natural property.

Epistemic anti-realists deny the existence of mind-independent epistemic facts. Epistemic error theorists agree with realists that the truth or falsity of epistemic statements depend on epistemic facts. But they argue that there are no epistemic facts, so all epistemic statements are false. Some forms of anti-realism accept the existence of epistemic facts, but deny they are independent of human desires or customs. For example, epistemic instrumentalism takes epistemic facts to depend on goals or desires—such as the desire to only believe the truth—and hence denies categorical reasons for belief in favour of hypothetical or instrumental reasons. Epistemic relativism holds that epistemic truths are relative to some other factor such as culture.

Some epistemologists view epistemic contextualism as a form of relativism. It asserts that the accuracy of knowledge claims can vary depending on the context in which they are used. In other words, it is possible for a knowledge claim to be true in a scenario with low standards but false in one with high standards, even if the evidence is the same. For example, according to contextualism, whether someone knows that a flight has a connection in a certain city depends not just on their evidence but also on the context. So, a person might know about the connection on the basis of an overheard conversation if it has no practical importance to them. But if they need to know whether there is a connection—if they urgently need to meet someone in that city say—then they would need to do further checks before they can confidently say they know one way or the other. A view sometimes called ''new age relativism'' goes even further by claiming that knowledge claims can be assessed in many different ways, even if the standards are the same. In opposition to all forms of contextualism and relativism is invariantism. It states that knowledge claims are absolutely true or false and do not change from context to context.

Another view is expressivism. It denies the existence of epistemic facts, like error theory, but also denies that epistemic statements have any representational content. In other words, it denies that epistemic statements even attempt to accurately describe facts. It follows from this that epistemic statements cannot be true or false, since they do not represent the world as being a particular way. This denial that epistemic statements have a representational content capable of being true or false is called epistemic non-cognitivism. It constitutes a major departure from the realist's semantic framework of cognitivism, which claims that epistemic statements attempt to accurately represent facts. According to non-cognitivist semantics, epistemic statements are instead used to express desires or attitudes like approval or disapproval. For example, some expressivists interpret knowledge claims as expressing the attitude that one's belief is "good enough".

One form of expressivism is called quasi-realism. It attempts to recover aspects of realism from within an expressivist framework. In particular, it adopts minimal or deflationary views about truth, facts and properties. According to this approach, truth and facthood are linguistic devices; to say "it is a fact that S knows that p" is not to assert there are facts, it is just to emphasise one's confidence that "S knows that p". In this way, quasi-realists attempt to recover the language of realism without accepting realist metaphysics. A view that seeks to find a middle ground between realism and anti-realism is constitutivism, sometimes called constructivism. It argues that normative facts are grounded by facts about agents, such as facts about their desires or about the pre-conditions of their agency. Within metaepistemology, this view generally argues that it is a constitutive part of the concept of belief that it aims at the truth. Proponents argue this view retains some benefits of both realism and anti-realism; it generates epistemic objectivity and categorical reasons for belief without the metaphysical costs of realism.

The debate between realism and anti-realism includes a number of different arguments. Epistemic realism has been the default presupposition of mainstream epistemology and so has not received many explicit defences. Those that exist generally focus on the alleged incoherence of anti-realism. For instance, some realists argue error theory is self-defeating since it entails that there are no reasons for belief, and therefore no reasons to believe error theory. A similar argument against expressivism states that it depends on taking a perspective external to epistemic inquiry, but to argue for expressivism requires engaging in epistemic inquiry. Realism has its own challenges though. For example, evolutionary debunking arguments due to Sharon Street claim that people's epistemic attitudes can be explained by Darwinian evolution and that evolution has no reason to track epistemic facts. Some philosophers also argue that epistemic realism cannot account for widespread disagreement about epistemology.

Epistemology of epistemology

The epistemology of epistemology asks how there is knowledge about epistemic facts and reasons. An important distinction related to this question is between epistemic internalism and externalism. According to a common characterisation, internalism is the view that justification consists in having cognitively accessible reasons for a belief. Another internalist view, called mentalism, claims that justification depends on mental states; for example, an agent must have a mental state that counts as evidence for a belief for it to be justified. Externalism is the denial of internalism. It holds that justification does not always need cognitively accessible reasons and may not always depend on mental states. A common externalist view is reliabilism, which views justification as a question of whether a belief was formed through a reliable process.

Since internalism explains epistemic reasons as reflectively accessible mental states, it entails that epistemic facts can in principle be known through reflection. Externalism rejects this focus on reasons and reflection as an overly intellectualised account of everyday knowledge. It usually holds that access to reasons is not required for knowledge and places focus instead on reliable cognitive processes. However, the rejection of reasons as central to knowledge is sometimes seen as a dismissal of epistemic normativity altogether. Some externalist accounts such as Ernest Sosa's take a more moderate approach by supplementing a basic form of reliabilist knowledge with a reflective knowledge concerned with reasons and the coherence of beliefs.

Also related to the internalism–externalism debate is the position of metaepistemological scepticism, defended most prominently by Richard Fumerton and Barry Stroud. Metaepistemological scepticism claims that it is impossible to form a satisfying response to the problem of scepticism. It claims that whilst externalism provides an account of how there could be knowledge, it is not a philosophically satisfying account. For Fumerton, this is because it allows people to know about things even if they do not have direct cognitive access to them. However, metaepistemological sceptics also view direct acquaintance as a problematic answer to scepticism. In particular, they argue that direct acquaintance with the external world is impossible or that responses relying on direct acquaintance are problematically circular. So for metaepistemological scepticism, all possible responses fail to solve the problem of scepticism. Opponents of metaepistemological scepticism include Michael Williams, who argues that the questions raised by metaepistemological sceptics are ill-formed or unnatural in some way.

Another issue relevant to the epistemology of epistemology is the reliability of intuitions about epistemic facts. Some philosophers argue that intuitions can be unreliable and often differ from person to person. For example, some empirical studies from experimental philosophers have indicated that intuitions are unstable and are influenced by philosophically irrelevant factors such as personality or cultural background, although these results are disputed. According to more traditional epistemologists, scepticism of intuitions is self-defeating since it leaves no way to evaluate the strength of arguments or evidence.

Normativity and reasons for belief

Epistemology is widely agreed to be a normative discipline. It investigates what ought to be believed and when beliefs are justified or unjustified. A common way to understand justification is in terms of deontic concepts like permission and obligation. For example, some epistemologists hold that there is an obligation to only form beliefs based on evidence. Opponents of a deontic understanding of justification such as William Alston argue that there is no voluntary control over belief, so it is inappropriate to apply concepts like ought or obligation to it. Proponents of a deontic conception have responded in a number of ways. Some argue that at least some beliefs are under direct voluntary control while others argue that indirect influence is enough to support deontic concepts.

Deeply related to the notion of normativity are reasons. Epistemic reasons are usually identified as reasons for belief as opposed to reasons for actions, which are in the domain of practical reason. Furthermore, epistemic reasons are reasons for belief from an epistemic point of view – that is, reasons deriving from an epistemic aim like knowledge rather than a purely pragmatic aim like self-enrichment. Normative reasons are generally distinguished from explanatory reasons, which explain why somebody holds a belief. They are also distinguished from motivational reasons, which are the subjective reasons that moved a person to have a certain belief. Normative reasons are concerned not with why a person holds a belief, but the things that favour that belief over another and make it the correct thing to believe.

One question in metaepistemology concerns what the source of epistemic normativity is. According to instrumentalists, epistemic reasons depend on agents' goals or desires and are hence instrumental reasons. Intrinsicalists, by contrast, hold that epistemic reasons are brutely or intrinsically normative and on this basis generally accept categorical reasons for belief. One challenge to instrumentalism is the problem of accounting for evidence of trivial or counterproductive beliefs. For example, if a person learns the ending to a movie that they had hoped to watch without foreknowledge of the plot, they have good reasons to believe how it will end despite not having a corresponding goal or desire. Instrumentalists have responded to this challenge by arguing that gaining true beliefs always serves some epistemic interest or that the reasons in such cases are not truly normative reasons.

A theory that attempts to explain the normativity found in epistemology is epistemic consequentialism. Similar to consequentialism in ethics, epistemic consequentialism claims that the epistemic rightness of a belief depends on the value of its consequences. This view is often paired with the idea that epistemic value depends on the accuracy of beliefs; that is, true beliefs have intrinsic value and false beliefs have intrinsic disvalue. Thus, epistemic consequentialism is generally taken to claim that something is epistemically right if it maximises the number of true beliefs and minimises the number of false beliefs. A prominent objection to this combination of views is the idea that it allows trade-offs between beliefs, such as believing something inaccurate today if it will contribute to a greater number of accurate beliefs in the future.

Another question is what it means for something to be epistemically valuable. Some philosophers like T. M. Scanlon think that value can be defined in terms of properties that elicit pro- or con-attitudes. So-called "buck-passing accounts" deny the view that some properties are intrinsically valuable, instead " passing the buck" to more basic attitude-providing properties. In particular, the buck-passing account of epistemic value claims that something is epistemically valuable if it has properties that provide reasons to believe it. One objection to buck-passing accounts is the "wrong kind of reasons" problem. According to this problem, there can be reasons to have an attitude towards something that is unrelated to its value. For example, somebody may have reason to believe something because they find it comforting, but this is unrelated to its epistemic value.

The connection between normativity and motivation in metaepistemology is debated. Judgement internalists argue that normative epistemic judgements (like "p is justified") always involve motivation (like being motivated to believe that p), while externalists believe they can sometimes fail to motivate beliefs. However, most agree there is usually a connection, which requires an explanation. Some theorists explain epistemic motivation in terms of moral or pragmatic concerns, while others see it as intrinsic to belief itself. The issue also intersects with the debate between cognitivism and non-cognitivism. Non-cognitivists view epistemic statements as expressions of desires, which are inherently motivational, whereas cognitivists see them merely as representations. Hence, cognitivists face a challenge of explaining how epistemic facts can motivate beliefs.

With the increasing focus on normativity in epistemology, philosophers have come to question how deep the connections are between metaepistemology and other metanormative disciplines such as metaethics. According to the parity thesis, metaethics and metaepistemology are structurally equivalent to one another so that any positions taken in one should carry over to the other. Normative realists like Terence Cuneo have used this idea as part of "companions in guilt" arguments to extend arguments for epistemic realism to moral realism. Meanwhile, anti-realists like Sharon Street, Allan Gibbard and Matthew Chrisman have taken the reverse approach, extending arguments for moral anti-realism to epistemic anti-realism. In opposition to the parity thesis is the disparity thesis, which claims that there are important disanalogies between metaethics and metaepistemology. For example, philosophers such as Chris Heathwood, Jonas Olson, and James Lenman have argued that moral facts are irreducibly normative while epistemic facts are reducible to descriptive facts.

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{{epistemology

Epistemology
Metaphilosophy