Critical Rationalism and the Theory of Society

Critical Rationalism and the Open Society Volume 1

Masoud Mohammadi Alamuti

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000361292
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Théorie critique

Investigating Karl Popper's philosophy of critical rationalism, Critical Rationalism and the Theory of Society, Volume 1, explores a non-justificationist conception of critical reason and its fundamental outcomes for the theory of society.

Through a set of fundamental contributions to epistemology, the theory of rationality and sociology, this volume (a) situates the idea of critical rationalism in its true epistemological context, (b) uses non-justificationist epistemology to reinvent critical rationalism and (c) applies its revised concept of rationality to show how people's access to critical reason enables them to agree on the common values and social institutions necessary for a peaceful and just social order. These contributions lead the reader to a new epistemological understanding of the idea of critical rationalism and recognition of how a non-justificational concept of reason changes the content of the theory of society.

The reader also learns how thinkers, movements and masses apply their critical reason to replace an established social order with an ideal one through activating five types of driving forces of social change: metaphysical, moral, legal, political and economic. Written for philosophers and sociologists, this book will appeal to social scientists such as moral philosophers, legal scholars, political scientists and economists.

Chapter 1

Epistemology and the problem of objective knowledge

Masoud Mohammadi Alamuti

Section I: knowledge as justified true belief

What is the main task of epistemology? One short answer is that epistemology reveals the legitimacy of our concept of knowledge by explaining how achieving knowledge is possible. As Laurence BonJour (2010: 4) argues, the main epistemological question concerns the standards that must be satisfied for a claim of knowledge to be true. According to traditional epistemology, knowledge is justified true belief. In a different sense, knowledge is a special kind of belief that can be justified. As Alan Musgrave (1974: 561) points out, the idea of knowledge as justified true belief can be defined briefly in the following way: “… to say ‘I know X’ means something like ‘I believe X, and I can justify my belief in X, and X is true’ ”. The history of epistemology is, in fact, the history of a great debate about the truth or falsity of this central idea.

In short, one party in this debate, the dogmatists, assert that their belief in X is true because it can be justified. The opposing party, the sceptics, try to show that there can be no justification for the belief in X to be true. Hence, our theory of knowledge depends mainly on our answer to the question of whether our knowledge claims can be justified. In this chapter, I emphasize the central point that it is justificationism that has directed the focus in the main debate between dogmatists and the sceptics towards the wrong problem in their theories of knowledge: the question of whether or not argument or experience can justify a claim of knowledge.

It is worth noting that defining knowledge as justified true belief leads us to a theory of knowledge that formulates the knowing process through which objective knowledge in terms of justified true belief would be the result or conclusion. The next section will show that both the dogmatist and sceptic epistemologies offer justificationist solutions to the problem of objective knowledge that assume, from very beginning, that the knowing process must lead to justified true belief if it aims at creating objective knowledge. However, while the dogmatist claims that this process is capable of leading us to justified true belief at its conclusion, the sceptic argues that justified true belief would not be the result of such process and that objective knowledge is hence untenable.

In order to clarify the idea of knowledge as justified true belief, we need to refer to its three main conditions. As pointed out by Alan Musgrave (1993: 2),

… the first condition for the truth of a statement of the form “A knows that P” (where A is a person and P a proposition) is that A genuinely believes that P. But clearly belief is not enough: I may genuinely believe that someone is outside the door, but if in fact there is no one there I will not be said to know it. Belief is, as the philosophers say, a necessary condition for knowledge but not a sufficient condition. What else is required?

Musgrave (1993: 2) replies that a second condition is that ‘P is true’.

If I am to know that there is someone outside the door, then there really must be someone outside the door. Before the belief is entitled to be called “knowledge”, what is believed must be true. If I say “I know that P” and then find out that P is false, I will withdraw my claim to knowledge: I will say that I thought I knew that P but did not really know it.

Musgrave then asks if anything else is required and answers with:

A third condition for knowledge will be apparent in what has already been said. For me to know something it is not enough that I believe it and that it happens to be true; I must also be able to give reasons for my belief, or justify it … Only if I can justify my claim and show that it was not a lucky guess, will I be said to know it.

(Musgrave 1993: 3)

With these three conditions in mind, for a statement of the form ‘A knows that P’ to be correct, it must be the case that:

• (1)A believes that P.
• (2)P is true.
• (3)A can justify his belief in that P.

We have now arrived at the traditional philosophical distinction between genuine knowledge and mere belief or opinion: “genuine knowledge is justified true belief” (Musgrave 1993: 3). The three conditions for knowledge incorporated into the traditional view (belief, truth and justification) are meant to be individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions.

In 1963, Edmund L. Gettier wrote a short paper which generated a great deal of interest and has had enormous influence on subsequent developments in epistemology. Gettier (1963: 121–123) devises rather bizarre cases according to which a person has a justified true belief although we would not say that the person knew the proposition in question. Gettier’s cases actually refute the idea of knowledge as justified true belief. Gettier argues that, keeping in mind (a) as defined below, we can show that it does not state a sufficient condition for someone knowing a given proposition:

(a)S knows that P IFF (i) P is true.

• (ii)S believes that P.
• (iii)S is justified in believing that P.

Gettier (1963: 121) argues:

I shall begin by noting two points. First, in the sense of “justified” in which S’s being justified in believing P is a necessary condition of S’s knowing that P, it is possible for a person to be justified in believing a proposition that is in fact false. Secondly, for any proposition P, if S is justified in believing P, and P entails Q, and S deduces Q from P and accepts Q as a result of this deduction, then S is justified in believing Q.

Against this background, Musgrave (1993: 5) asks us to suppose that

Smith has a friend, Jones, who he knows has in the past always owned a Ford and who has just offered Smith a lift in a Ford. Smith justifiably believes (a) Jones owns a Ford. Smith has another friend, Brown, of whose whereabouts he is totally ignorant. However, Smith deduces from “Jones owns a Ford” the proposition (b) “Either Jones owns a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona”, and so comes to believe this proposition too. Now suppose that Jones does not in fact own a Ford (the car he is driving is a rental car), but that by lucky chance Brown is in fact in Barcelona. Does Smith know (b)? Not intuitively not. Yet he believes (b), (b) is true, and he is justified in believing (b) since he deduced it from (a) which he justifiably believes.

This quotation presents an example indicating that the idea of objective knowledge as justified true belief is untenable (Gettier 1963: 122–123).

Defenders of the justified true belief account of knowledge must either bite the bullet and say that, contrary to intuition, Smith does know (b) or argue that he does not because one of the three conditions for knowledge is not satisfied, after all. The only plausible candidate for the unsatisfied condition is the third: Smith is not justified in believing (b). Gettier’s example has an importance consequence for justificationist epistemology: without conclusive reasons for justifying the truth of a claim of knowledge, objective knowledge would be untenable. In this sense, we should give the third condition for knowledge a strong interpretation, whereby justifying a belief means having conclusive reasons for it, reasons that do prove it. Therefore, it is not unfair to argue that a belief might not be entitled to be called ‘knowledge’ if the reasons are less than conclusive. It is in this sense that traditional epistemology equalizes knowledge with justification. In regard to the Gettier’s objection, it is the third condition, which has not been met, that makes Smith’s belief in the proposition (b) true.

It is worthy of note that justification, by its very nature, has some kind of connection with truth. This can be seen by considering how the process of justifying a belief, conceived as showing that the belief has the property of being justified, is always used to provide the grounds required for considering the belief true. Having said that, the standards we use for determining justification are responsive to our considered judgments about which internal sources tend to produce true beliefs. The way we comprehend justification therefore helps us to understand how our claim of knowledge is actually true.

Dogmatists and sceptics agree that knowledge, if it exists, is justified true belief. They disagree only about whether knowledge is attainable. They agree, in other words, that talk of absolute or objective truth makes sense only if that truth can be known – that a belief is ‘objective’ only if it is true and known to be true. They disagree only about whether anything can be known to be true and hence about whether any belief can be ‘objective’. Given the notion of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’, I shall now review the dogmatic and sceptic epistemologies to see how they deal with the problem of objective knowledge.

Section II: the dogmatic epistemology of justified true belief

As noted earlier, the history of epistemology is, in large measure, the history of a great debate about whether man can know anything. This section briefly describes the theories of knowledge that dogmatism and scepticism offer to explain the process of knowledge formation beginning with premises and ending to conclusion. It is important to note that these theories of knowledge assume the conclusion of such a process of knowledge formation as justified true belief and then attempt to address the logical process through which the truth of the premises is transmitted to conclusion. In this context, the idea of knowledge as justified true belief plays a key role, for, if the conclusion of such a knowing process is defined from very beginning as a justified true belief, then the premises and the form of inference upon which such a justified true conclusion can be drawn must themselves be infallible. The dogmatists claim that the knower can reach objective knowledge through infallible premises and inference forms; the sceptics, however, argue that the claim of using unjustified premises to conclude objective knowledge in terms of justified true belief is baseless since the premises and inference forms are fallible.

Dogmatic epistemology

In order to see how dogmatic epistemology defends its theory of objective knowledge, we should know how it explains justification of conclusion through its premises. To prove that a statement X is true, we must produce additional statement(s) Y, from which X logically follows: Y then establishes X in the sense that, given Y is true, X must also be true. Obviously, however, the truth of Y needs to be established in turn, and so on ad infinitum. Under this condition, the dogmatist requires a stop to the justification process at some point(s) in order to show that certain ultimate premises which do not need further justification build the foundations of our objective knowledge. This argument leads the dogmatic to claim that infallible premises justify conclusion by an infallible form of reasoning. In sum, if objective knowledge is defined as the final product of a rational argument starting with certain premises and if such a final product must be justified by its premises, then we should admit that objective knowledge can be produced if and only if: (a) the premises are infallible and (b) the inference forms are undisputable.

Hence, dogmatic epistemology faces a twofold challenge. First, it must show that infallible premises are stopping the infinite regress upon which an objective conclusion is drawn. Second, the very forms of inference through which premises transmit their truth to the conclusion should be regarded as infallible. In brief, a conclusion can be justified as indisputably true through its logical relation with the premises.

As observed by Musgrave (1993: 562),

Dogmatists were the champions of “objectivity”: they insisted that objective truth can be known, that we do have a means of proving it. Now the chief weapon in the sceptic’s armoury was the infinite regress of proofs, discovered already by the Greeks.

Whereas dogmatists and sceptics agree upon the premise that objective knowledge is justified true belief, they disagree about whether anything can be known to be true. The dogmatic theory of knowledge is called dogmatic because of its assumption that premises and form of inference can be taken into account as infallible. If, however, these assumptions actually are untenable, the dogmatist integrates infinite regress, arguing that the acceptance of certain premises of a valid argument must be admitted dogmatically or without justification.

Dogmatic epistemology uses the notions of self-evident principles or sense experiences in order to stop the infinite regress of proofs at ‘first principles’, whose truth is guaranteed. The justification of all other beliefs is then relative to these ‘first principles’. Yet dogmatists disagree amongst themselves about what the ‘first principles’ are. Empiricism claims that our senses enable us to know the truth of certain observation statements immediately. Intellectualism believes that intellectual intuition enables us to see the truth of first principles immediately. Allow me to discuss these two major branches of dogmatist epistemology briefly.

The intellectualist theory of knowledge

The father of intellectualism, the French philosopher Rene De...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Epistemology and the problem of objective knowledge
• 2 Karl Popper’s critical rationalism: an epistemological critique
• 3 William Bartley’s pancritical rationalism
• 4 Towards a non-justificationist epistemology
• 5 Unfalsified conjecture and critical rationality: towards a new theory of rationality
• 6 Justificationism and the theory of society
• 7 Critical rationalism and the theory of human action
• 8 The theory of social order: a critical rationalist understanding
• 9 Towards a critical rationalist theory of social change
• 10 Critical rationalism and the theory of society: a summary
• Index