The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy

Sellars, McDowell, Brandom

Chauncey Maher

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136223105
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophie
• Categoría: Phänomenologie in der Philosophie

In this volume, Maher contextualizes the work of a group of contemporary analytic philosophers—The Pittsburgh School—whose work is characterized by an interest in the history of philosophy and a commitment to normative functionalism, or the insight that to identify something as a manifestation of conceptual capacities is to place it in a space of norms. Wilfrid Sellars claimed that humans are distinctive because they occupy a norm-governed "space of reasons." Along with Sellars, Robert Brandom and John McDowell have tried to work out the implications of that idea for understanding knowledge, thought, norms, language, and intentional action. The aim of this book is to introduce their shared views on those topics, while also charting a few key disputes between them.

1 The Given

[T]he framework of Givenness … has … been so pervasive that few, if any, philosophers have been altogether free of it.

-Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, §1

INTRODUCTION

In trying to understand how we know things, it is tempting to appeal to the idea that something is simply “given.” What any particular philosopher means by that often depends on other ideas she holds. In this chapter, I want to show you one of the main reasons for appealing to something “given,” and why philosophers in the Pittsburgh School think that such appeals are always problematic.

1. A REGRESS

Suppose that Mark and Sarah enter their house and walk into the kitchen to put away some groceries. Remembering that the air conditioning is on, Sarah asks Mark, ‘Is the door shut?’ Mark peeks into the hall, sees that the door is shut and says so. Here Mark voices what he sees, passing his knowledge on to Sarah, who now knows that the door is shut.

When we say that some person S knows that P, we credit her with a certain status. Not only does S believe that P, but P must also be true. We would not say, for instance, that Sarah knows that the door is shut, even if it isn’t. ‘Knows’ is a verb of success. Moreover, in crediting S with knowledge, we generally take it that her belief does not merely happen to be true, as though she had no idea that what she believed was really true, as though she had no defense at all for holding that belief. Rather, we think that S is also justified in having that belief; for instance, she could say why she has it; she could provide justification for believing what she believes. So, on the standard view of knowledge, tracing back to Plato, knowledge is justified, true belief.¹

The fact that knowledge requires having reasons seems to spark trouble, for one’s knowledge would seem to be only as good as one’s justification. Surely one cannot count as having knowledge if one’s reasons for what one believes are lousy. For instance, Sarah’s knowledge is based on what Mark said. If Mark’s claim is false, then it’s questionable that Sarah knows that the door is shut. A true belief that’s based on a false or unsupported premise doesn’t seem like knowledge.² One’s justification itself must be good for one to count as having knowledge. And it seems as though it must be good in just the same way as the original putative piece of knowledge; it too must be known. For Sarah to count as knowing that the door is shut, she must also count as knowing, for instance, that Mark is reporting things accurately. But that fact sparks an infinite regress. On what grounds does Sarah believe that Mark is reporting things accurately? Perhaps because she recalls Mark accurately reporting such things in the past, and that this situation is no different. And on what grounds does she believe these further things? One piece of knowledge seems to rest on further knowledge.

Now notice that the case of knowledge that we have been considering is not special or unusual; indeed, it seems to be a representative case of knowledge. One person comes to know something on the basis of the reliable testimony of another person. There are, of course, many other things I might claim to know. For instance:

The moon is mountainous.

Atoms have electrons.

Some people like ice cream.

There are seven days in a week.

Einstein was a scientist.

Gold is a metal.

2+2=4

Torture is wrong.

I am thinking.

If our representative case faces a regress, then it’s likely that these other cases do too.

If the regress does not stop somewhere, there would seem to be no knowledge at all, for we cannot know infinitely many things.³ That is, skepticism would reign.

2. FOUNDATIONALISM AND THE GIVEN⁴

The most natural response to the regress is to identify something that stops it, a grounding or foundation of knowledge.⁵ The idea that there is or must be a foundation of knowledge is typically called ‘Foundationalism.’ However, as Michael Williams has emphasized, the regress is really part of a larger problematic, the “Agrippan Trilemma.”⁶ He writes,

According to the Agrippan skeptic, any attempt to justify a claim either opens a vicious regress or terminates in one of two unsatisfactory ways: we run out of things to say, thus making an ungrounded assumption; or we find ourselves repeating some claim or claims already entered, thus reasoning in a circle. … The Agrippan problem is to avoid the regress without lapsing into circularity or brute assumption. (Williams, 1977/1999, pp. 183–4)

For the Agrippan skeptic, an ungrounded assumption, reasoning in a circle, and a regress are all equally unacceptable. The Agrippan Trilemma constrains Foundationalism: a foundation cannot be a mere assumption or one of the very pieces of knowledge which we are seeking to ground.

Can Foundationalism be made to work? What else would a foundation need to be?

It would have to be capable of supporting the rest of one’s knowledge, while relying on no further knowledge.

Let me say a bit more about the nature of this reliance. Consider again the case of Sarah and Mark. Sarah gets her knowledge from Mark. Not only is he a causal or physical link between Sarah and the door, but what Mark said also serves as a premise for Sarah’s knowledge that the door is shut. From his claim she is able to infer that the door is shut. In this regard, Sarah’s knowledge seems to be based on inferring or reasoning.⁷ In contrast, Mark’s own knowledge that the door is shut is not similarly based on reasoning. He just sees that the door is shut. It’s true that there are probably many causal or physical intermediaries of Mark’s knowledge, such as the glasses resting on his nose, but those intermediaries do not serve as premises to any inferences that he draws. Because Mark’s knowledge is not based on reasoning or inference, it is non-inferential.

At a minimum, a foundation of knowledge would need to be non-inferential. For if it were a piece of inferential knowledge (as Sarah’s seems to be), it would clearly rest on the knowledge from which it was inferred, and therefore would not halt the regress.

While Mark’s knowledge that the door is shut is non-inferential, it nevertheless depends on other knowledge that he has. Specifically, it seems doubtful that Mark would know that the door is shut if he did not also know what a door is, under what conditions such a thing counts as being shut, and that the specific door in question was in such a condition.⁸ So, although Mark’s knowledge is non-inferential, it is not independent of other knowledge. Since it depends on other knowledge, what Mark knows would not halt the regress.

Thus, in general, it would seem that foundational knowledge needs to be independent knowledge, not simply non-inferential knowledge. In Williams’s useful phrase, such knowledge would have to be “intrinsically credible” (Williams, 1977/1999). It is crucial to see that while independent knowledge would have to be non-inferential, the converse is not true, as shown by Mark’s case; non-inferential knowledge is not necessarily independent knowledge. A piece of knowledge is independent of other knowledge if and only if it can be had without having any other knowledge at all.

The Given just is the idea that there could be a foundation of knowledge in that sense: there could be something capable of supporting the rest of one’s knowledge, while relying on no further knowledge.⁹ When we ask about the prospects of Foundationalism, we are asking about the prospects for finding a foundation, which is to ask about the prospects of finding the Given.

In Sellars words, “the point of the epistemological category of the given is … to explicate the idea that empirical knowledge rests on a ‘foundation’ of non-inferential knowledge of matter of fact” (EPM, §3). He elaborates:

One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is that there is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matter of fact such that (a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case, but presupposes no other knowledge either of particular matter of fact, or of general truths; and (b) such that the non-inferential knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims—particular and general—about the world. (EPM, §32)

Notice that he says that the point of the Given is to “explicate” the idea that knowledge rests on a non-inferential foundation. Thus, the Given should not be equated with non-inferential knowledge. It is the more specific idea that there is independent (“intrinsically credible”) knowledge that can support the rest of our knowledge.

It will be useful for us to have a more exact, general formulation of the Given. In his book on Sellars, Willem deVries provides an especially clear and general formulation of what the Given is supposed to be. I believe it helps unify what Sellars, McDowell, and Brandom say about the Given. DeVries writes:

(EI)	The Given is epistemically independent, that is, whatever positive epistemic status our cognitive encounter with the object has, it does not depend on the epistemic status of any other cognitive state.^10
(EE)	It is epistemically efficacious, that is, it can transmit positive epistemic status to other cognitive states of ours. (2005, pp. 98–9)

In what follows, when I talk about the Given, I will be relying on this formulation, unless I state otherwise.

What might the Given be?

At the beginning of “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind,” Sellars observes, “Many things have been said to be ‘Given’: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even Givenness itself” (§1). Intuitively, it would be something that is self-evident or certain or indubitable. Descartes, for instance, claims that one cannot doubt that one is thinking, for even to doubt is to think. And he goes on to treat that knowledge as a sort of foundation. However, he himself realizes that this particular piece of knowledge is not the best candidate for a foundation, for it is not clear how one could build the rest of one’s knowledge upon such a minimal fact. In addition to something that is self-evident or indubitable, we need something that will justify our knowledge of things beyond our own minds, our knowledge of the world and of other minds. To address that challenge, Descartes famously appeals to his knowledge of God.¹¹ Hume derides that move as a “very unexpected circuit” (Hume, 1748/2011).¹²

The trouble with Descartes’s appeal to his knowledge that he is thinking is that it is too narrow. That problem represents a general struggle in searching for a foundation of knowledge: there is a tug of war between the two conditions for a foundation. It needs to be narrow to be properly secure and independent of other knowledge; yet it also needs to be broad to provide adequate support for the rest of our knowledge.

So, it looks like the Given needs to be broader, broad enough especially to support what we know beyond the fact of our own thinking, or the contents of our own minds. Perhaps, then, the foundation should be something perceptual, something rooted in experience of the world.

That idea is partly reinforced by the apparent truism that we validate or invalidate our thoughts and claims about the world by appeal to what we encounter in that world. For instance, we ultimately check the claim that the door is shut by actually looking at the door. Because experience looks like an “ultimate court of appeals,” it appears to be a good candidate for the Given. Moreover, experience or knowledge of it seems to be non-inferential. We just have it; we don’t reason our way to it. That’s a further reason to think it could be the Given.

Is it?

In a rudimentary picture of visual experience, a mere visual encounter with an object gives the perceiver knowledge.¹³ For example, a mere visual encounter with a tomato would immediately give you knowledge of certain things about it, such as that is red. Simply encountering an object that is red (a tomato) is sufficient to make you aware of it as red. On that picture, one might not know everything about an object simply by looking at it, such as where it was grown or what variety it is. But there are at least some basic features of objects that one can know that those objects have merely by being presented with those objects, features such as being red. No other knowledge is necessary. That picture reinforces a certain way of thinking of concept acquisition: we acquire our most basic concepts simply by encountering objects that fall under those concepts.

That picture is obviously appealing for a Foundationalist. If some experiences really are like tha...