Epistemic Responsibility

Lorraine Code

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438480510
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Epistemología en filosofía

Having adequate knowledge of the world is not just a matter of survival but also one of obligation. This obligation to "know well" is what philosophers have termed "epistemic responsibility." In this innovative and eclectic study, Lorraine Code explores the possibilities inherent in this concept as a basis for understanding human attempts to know and understand the world and for discerning the nature of intellectual virtue. By focusing on the idea that knowing is a creative process guided by imperatives of epistemic responsibility, Code provides a fresh perspective on the theory of knowledge. From this new perspective, Code poses questions about knowledge that have a different focus from those traditionally raised in the two leading epistemological theories, foundationalism and coherentism. While not rejecting these approaches, this new position moves away from a primary concentration on determinate products and towards an examination of ever-changing processes. Arguing that knowledge never exists as an ungrounded abstraction but rather emerges through dialogue between variously authoritative "knowers" situated within particular social and historical contexts, she draws extensively on examples from lived social experience to illustrate the ways in which human beings have long tried to recognize and meet their epistemic responsibilities. This edition of Epistemic Responsibility includes a new preface from Lorraine Code.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Epistemic Responsibility

If a North American motorist rents a car in Britain and proceeds to drive on the right-hand side of the road, thereby causing an accident, the courts will not accept as an excuse that he or she did not know that one drives on the left in Britain. One who takes the wheel of a car has a responsibility to know the rules of the road. So it is with civil and criminal law in general: ignorance does not exonerate in instances of violation. A householder who throws rubbish over the fence onto the neighbor’s roses cannot acceptably plead ignorance of the laws pertaining to another’s property; nor is a landowner who sprays trees with a noxious chemical exempted from responsibility for any attendant, wider environmental damage simply because of avowed ignorance about the possible effects of insecticide. People engaging in such activities are expected to have a reasonable degree of knowledge about their consequences and implications.

Analogous examples can be suggested from a broader political context. Although many Germans claim not to have known what was happening in Nazi concentration camps, and thus argue that they cannot reasonably be held accountable, others believe they should have made an effort, that in not knowing, they were derelict in what can plausibly be declared a responsibility. Similarly, when a new contraceptive drug is declared safe on the basis of broad latitudinal testing but inadequate longitudinal studies, protesters can reasonably declare that no drug so tested can responsibly be pronounced safe. Such a pronouncement would not be so different from the claims of nuclear scientists to people living near test sites that there was nothing to fear. Without first carrying out adequate investigations to produce knowledge, it is irresponsible to make such declarations. So, too, South African upholders of apartheid, who claim to know that blacks prefer to live in “their own” communities for they are not at ease in white society, may well be uttering propaganda statements based on inadequate investigations of the preferences of blacks.

Similar considerations arise in the personal domain. In a friendship, one is expected to know what counts as a confidence and what is information for public consumption. A breach of trust will not readily be repaired even though the one who broke the confidence was not actually told that the item in question was confidential. This is but one instance of the kinds of things one needs to know about other people to conduct personal relationships well. Such relationships generate a complex set of responsibilities that can be fulfilled only by cultivating an appropriate sensitivity to the other person’s situation.

In these examples, I adduce a set of claims about expectations and responsibilities. In each case, a responsibility to know is at issue, and it is to that responsibility that I wish to draw attention. It is true that, in many of the cases, it is the action(s) based upon the inadequate or carelessly arrived at knowledge claims or beliefs that come under public scrutiny and that seem to invite moral and/or legal censure, for the consequences of being wrong are serious. But it is instructive, for epistemological purposes, to focus upon the assumed or alleged knowledge itself, to consider what is involved in the contention that there is, often, a responsibility to know, or at least to know better than one does.

The points I have raised in these examples about our responsibility to know are neither new nor startling. They articulate familiar, if often implicit, aspects of our experiences about the place and status of knowledge as the basis for action in everyday life. I shall propose, though, that examples taken from commonplace occurrences in ordinary cognitive activity are significant for theory of knowledge. In fact, I shall outline an approach to theory of knowledge that turns questions about, and conditions for, epistemic responsibility into focal points of explication and analysis. Central to this approach will be the view that knowing well is a matter of considerable moral significance; hence, moral issues and questions of “character” are often integral aspects of epistemic evaluation. I shall maintain that one is frequently in a better position to understand how, or what, a person knows, and to understand the implications of that presumed knowledge, when it can be placed in the context of the putative knower’s character. Concentration upon questions of this nature—upon questions about the moral implications of knowledge claims and about the character of would-be knowers—will yield a new perspective on the knowledge-seeking enterprise.

Looking at cognitive activity from this perspective raises a different set of questions about knowledge from those posed in the two leading approaches to theory of knowledge: in foundational-ist and coherentist theories. These new questions are not posed to challenge coherentist or foundationalist ways of thinking, however. Indeed, to an extent, they are suggested by certain coherentist and/or foundationalist insights.

The central concern of foundationalist epistemology is perhaps best captured in the question with which Bertrand Russell opens The Problems of Philosophy:1 “Is there any knowledge in the world which is so certain that no reasonable man could doubt it?” Foundationalists share the belief that Russell’s question can be answered in the affirmative, that knowledge claims discovered to be “so certain” can stand as the basis—the foundation—of a system of knowledge. They hold that a body of knowledge is composed of separate (or separable) “pieces” or “parts” and that a nonsymmetrical relation, analogous to the relation of physical support, holds between the foundations and the rest of the system. Foundations are understood to be a special, primary part or set of parts; therefore, they bear a relation to all the other parts of the system, which none of these parts bear, reciprocally, to the foundation. Just as the base of a pyramid supports the rest of the structure yet the higher levels do not support the base, so foundations support a system of knowledge.2 Some foundationalists, of whom Descartes is the outstanding example, assume that knowledge claims arrived at by deductive reasoning from a “clear and distinct” starting point will themselves be just as clear and distinct. Their clarity and distinctness derives from the clarity and distinctness of that starting point. Others, in particular some of the logical positivists as well as empiricists such as Russell himself, Moore, and Ayer, hold that the degree of certainty in knowledge claims diminishes as one moves away from the core, or foundational, propositions.

Although these common, central foundationalist concerns can be identified, it is not possible to go on to elaborate a single, monolithic foundationalist doctrine, for foundationalist theories differ from one another, particularly with respect to the degree of certainty they require of foundations. According to the strictest of such theories, foundations, to qualify as such, must be absolutely, timelessly certain. According to modest foundationalism, however, foundations should be only as certain as possible; indeed, they may even be corrigible, though not of all the foundational propositions of a system could be declared uncertain and in need of amendment at the same time. As the contrast between Descartes, on the one hand, and Moore, Russell, and Ayer, on the other, shows, foundationalism cannot be straightforwardly aligned either with rationalism or with empiricism.

For coherentist epistemology, the source of evaluation and justification of a belief or knowledge claim lies in its relations with other beliefs or “knowns” within a system; explanatory relations or relations of probability or logic might be taken into account. To be considered justified, a belief must fit, without causing contradictions or other problems of inconsistency, into an interlocking system of mutually compatible truths. No belief is more fundamental than any other within the system. Classical instances of coherence theory are found in the great rationalist metaphysical systems, such as those of Leibniz and Spinoza, and in German and British idealism. Some coherentists, such as Neurath and Hempel, see the systems of pure mathematics and theoretical physics as paradigmatic for showing how the coherence relation works: all the statements of these systems are related to one another by relations of logical implication. Indeed, purists might argue that a coherence theory can justify only such analytic or a priori claims, that to move away from the paradigm of mathematics or physics and apply coherence criteria to a posteriori knowledge is, in fact, to work with an entirely different theory. Others argue, and plausibly I think, that coherence within a theoretical system is just as important a criterion for assessing knowledge claims within the empirical sciences as is the degree to which those claims are grounded in experience. Indeed, in fields of enquiry such as history, coherence is of crucial importance, for the possibility of checking knowledge claims against real events is remote, if not nonexistent. In such disciplines, though, one does not deal exclusively with criteria of coherence: at some points, the system must establish contact with the “real” world.

There is a wide spectrum of positions, all of which can reasonably be designated coherentist, within modern epistemology. Some recent work, less tied to the deductive model than the work of Neurath and Hempel, emphasizes the significance of explanatory coherence. The goal of enquiry might be described, in Gilbert Harman’s words, as that of arriving, by a process of inductive inference, at “the best total explanatory account.”3 By contrast, Keith Lehrer gives considerable weight to what one might call “subjective coherence”: the need for a reciprocal adjustment between the coherent system of knowledge and/or beliefs a person employs in moving about the world (what he calls a person’s “acceptance system”) and a putatively “new” knowledge claim, which is in the process of becoming part of the system.4 A new claim is acceptable and a knower reasonable in accepting it only to the extent that it fits with the system of what is already known. And Lawrence Bonjour, who explicitly ties his coherentist position to a realist metaphysics, argues that there simply is no good reason to believe that one objective world would, in the long run, provide “coherent input to incompatible systems.”5 Coherence, presumably, will manifest itself in an ultimate synthesis of compatible knowledge claims.

Questions about epistemic responsibility take some of their thrust from what are best called the “empirico-realist” implications of some versions of foundationalism. There is a realist imperative at the center of all the exhortations to responsibility I have cited in my opening examples: an insistence that responsible knowledge claims can arise only out of investigations, in part empirical and inductive, that attempt to discover how things really are, both actually and potentially. To this extent, questions about epistemic responsibility arise out of sympathy with some conceptions of the foundationalist project: the goal is to ensure that knowledge claims are well-grounded in the world, that they respect the constraints the world imposes upon those who would know it.

Responsible knowers are uneasy about possible inconsistency and incoherence within their own system of knowledge and within “public” systems of knowledge that they are tempted to endorse or inclined to reject. Many of the examples cited at the outset require would-be knowers not to turn aside from, or attempt to explain away, aspects of experience that do not fit with what they can reasonably claim to know. Indeed, claims about epistemic responsibility in some of these cases suggest that, if the putative knowers had been appropriately alert to the incoherence of certain claims (say, about the drug or the nuclear test) within the wider context of scientific knowledge, even as it is accessible to the lay public, they would not have rested content with thinking they knew.

Having said that, however, it is important to state that this project arises out of a certain disenchantment with foundationalism and coherentism. It is probably true that these approaches, separately or jointly, represent the best efforts of epistemology so far to approach “the problem of knowledge.” They can neither reasonably be rejected outright, nor can they be set aside as having completed their project. We still really do not know what it is (that is, understand what it is) to know even the simple fact that “This is green.” Nonetheless, part of my disaffection with traditional epistemology has to do with what can only be seen as an aridity, manifested in the amount of discussion devoted to questions just like that one: analyses of how our simple perceptual and inductive beliefs are justified. My intention is neither to minimize the importance of these questions nor to deny that there is much work to be done in these areas. These problems are enormously difficult ones whose solutions would be of paramount significance for the future of epistemological enquiry. Efforts to show and understand the extent to which knowledge can be founded and efforts to construct as coherent a system of knowledge as possible must surely be recognized as fundamentally important to any philosophical enterprise. But enquiry within established foundationalist/coherentist discourse is, by and large, conducted under the assumption that a fairly well-understood range of questions and possible answers demarcates the permissible focus of epistemological debate. The implicit view often seems to be that, if epistemologists could get clear about what justifies our claims that this is a hand and that is a doorknob, then all the rest would follow. In other words, such propositional claims, once explicated, would provide paradigms for the explanation and justification of all knowledge. Yet philosophers are aware, too, that even when these problems have not been solved, other questions about knowledge can be raised and debated fruitfully: questions that form the core of debate in the philosophies of science, social science, or law, to name but a few examples. Many of these enquiries are conducted in a context totally lacking such simple paradigms, yet intricate and subtle questions about the nature of knowledge can still be posed.

I am suggesting, then, that it is possible to look at human cognitive activity in another way and to ask quite a different set of questions about it. My point is not so much to claim that traditional epistemology has neglected the issues I shall address but to maintain that there is a choice about what questions are to be considered central in discussions of human knowledge-seeking activity. Only by approaching this activity from a different perspective will it be possible to provide the missing complement to foundationalist and coherentist theories. I shall therefore outline an approach that raises questions and puts forward proposals about what counts as good cognitive activity that slip through even the most carefully constructed foundationalist or coherentist nets. Furthermore, I shall show that this project can be undertaken without waiting for traditional epistemological tasks either to be completed or abandoned.

My emphasis upon cognitive activity is intentional and important. The major contrast between the line of approach to be developed here and the predominant tradition is in the way this new position moves away from a concentration upon products, end-states of cognition. It turns, instead, to an examination of process, of efforts to achieve these end-states. It does so from a conviction that concentration upon products restricts the possible results of enquiry in two ways. First, and perhaps implicitly, it construes the cognitive subject as a featureless abstraction, a constantly repeated element in a consistently repeated operation where the cognitive activity of that subject is not itself open to significant epistemological scrutiny. Second, concentration upon end-states grants them an unwarranted finality, making them seem implausibly definitive, static, and removed from the flux of cognitive process. Consequently, the dominant tradition forces the analysis and evaluation of knowledge into unreasonably constricted molds.

My intention is to shift the emphasis of investigation and evaluation so that knowers, or would-be knowers, come to bear as much of the onus of credibility as “the known” has standardly borne. The discussion will focus upon how everyday, practical, epistemic life provides the context in which knowledge, belief, understanding, and epistemological questions themselves can be developed. It will concentrate upon the concerns real knowers have, in complex situations, about being responsible in their cognitive endeavors. I will take as my point of departure the strong claim that experience grounds knowledge; there will be no attempt to arrive at a description of “pure” knowledge that might somehow prescind from or transcend experience.

The conceptual apparatus for such a shift in the focus of enquiry is available, at least in essence, elsewhere in the philosophical tradition. I take the Kantian conception of a creative synthesis of the imagination to be one of the most important innovations in the history of philosophy. It provides a conceptual framework that can account for the active nature of human cognition, taking and structuring experience to the extent allowed by the world and human cognitive capacities. These two factors, the nature of the world and of human cognitive capacity, impose strong constraints upon the form and content knowledge as (interim) product can have. Although neither “the world” nor human cognitive capacities can be assumed to be immutable, they constitute an objective, if shifting, framework within which the creative synthesis must take place. Within these constraints, however, there is considerable scope for freedom in making sense of the world. Any account of knowledge that recognizes this degree of creativity, therefore, must, at the same time, recognize a need for cognitive imperatives to limit what kinds of sense can responsibly be made of the world.

It is undeniable that human flourishing is deeply dependent upon knowing well. Human beings seem, for the most part, to be concerned to conduct their epistemic lives well, whether from a conviction that knowledge is valuable in its...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface to the second edition
• Preface
• 1 Introduction: Epistemic Responsibility
• I Intellectual Virtue
• II Cognitive Activity
• III Epistemic Life
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover