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Abstract
In the following dialogue between TT – a foundationalist – and WdeV – a Sellarsian, we offer our differing assessments of the principle for observational knowledge proposed in Wilfrid Sellars’s ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’. Sellars writes: ‘For a Konstatierung “This is green” to “express observational knowledge”, not only must it be a symptom or sign of the presence of a green object in standard conditions, but the perceiver must know that tokens of “This is green” are symptoms of the presence of green objects in conditions which are standard for visual perception.’ In the ensuing dialogue, TT argues that it sets the bar too high when knowledge about perceptual conditions is required for ordinary observational knowledge – that young children, for example, are implausibly excluded as knowers given Sellars’s principle. WdeV defends Sellars’s metaknowledge requirement against these charges. Results from developmental psychology are surveyed for what they show about the actual capabilities of young children. The implications of these results for the success of Sellars’s principle are debated.
Notes
1 William Alston, ‘What’s Wrong with Immediate Knowledge?’, in Epistemic Justification (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), p. 64.
2 Citations from Sellars’s ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ have dual page references. ‘KMG’ refers to the reprint of Sellars’s essay that is included in our commentary on it: Willem deVries and Timm Triplett, Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars’s ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2000), pp. 205–76. ‘SPR’ refers to Wilfrid Sellars, Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), pp. 127–96.
3 We discussed Alston’s objection in Chapter 8 of Knowledge, Mind, and the Given, but much more can be said – one of the motivations of this dialogue.
4 In his study guide to ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, Robert Brandom is vague on this, but he seems to think that Sellars’s level ascent requirement goes too far, and that one could just as well back off and remain with an externalist epistemology. See Robert Brandom, ‘Study Guide’, in Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), p. 159. Whatever the value of the point philosophically, Sellars clearly rejected pure externalism.
5 There is another way into epistemic holism for Sellars, namely via his coherence theory of concepts. But then one must both buy Sellars’s theory of concepts and overcome Roderick Firth’s arguments that the coherence theory of justification is independent of a coherence theory of concepts. See Roderick Firth, ‘Coherence, Certainty, and Epistemic Priority’, Journal of Philosophy, 61 (1964), pp. 545–7. No matter what one’s theory of concepts, the level ascent requirement in SPOK forces a form of epistemic holism.
6 Alston, ‘What’s Wrong with Immediate Knowledge?’, p. 70.
7 ‘Good Heavens! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing it.’ Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Act II, Scene 4.
8 Psychological nominalism is the doctrine that ‘all awareness of sorts, resemblances, facts, etc., in short, all awareness of abstract entities – indeed, all awareness even of particulars – is a linguistic affair’ (Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, KMG, p. 240, SPR, p. 160).
9 Sellars thinks of the knowledge game as a norm‐governed activity that, like all norm‐governed activities in his view, depends for its existence on social, usually language‐mediated interaction. Such norm‐governed social forms of activities are essentially holistic in their mode of being, Sellars believes, because their elements are defined by their place in the whole pattern of activity. Individual pieces of behaviour fit into or exemplify these forms of activity only as parts of patterns among actual and counterfactual behaviours having certain causal roots. Thus, one could agree with Sellars that it is illuminating to liken knowledge to a ‘game’, but disagree, for instance, about the status of norms. If it is a ‘game’ we are by nature equipped and compelled to play, then our earliest, infantile explorations might as well be treated as moves in the game. (This might lead one to some form of naturalized epistemology.) Again, one could use the ‘game’ metaphor, but deny the holistic treatment of games, and thus hold on to the empiricist picture of knowledge acquisition by gradual accretion from simple beginnings.
10 An important additional question concerns WdeV’s appeal to implicit abilities in order to account for the cognitive abilities Sellars requires of knowers. While WdeV here takes the position that Sellars can countenance a subject’s having only implicit knowledge of, for example, standard perceptual conditions, without being able to make explicit what these conditions are, he acknowledges that more needs to be said in defence of this position. TT disagrees with WdeV’s position, but this is unfortunately a debate that cannot be pursued here.
11 Josef Perner, Understanding the Representational Mind (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press, 1991), pp. 160–2.
12 Ibid., p. 158.
13 Ibid., p. 155.
14 Ibid., pp. 161–2. See especially figure 7.2, p. 161. Since for Perner grasping the aspectuality of knowledge is a necessary condition for having an information theory of knowledge, Perner’s claim that the latter theory is acquired ‘at the age of about 4’ is in tension with the data he cites indicating a later age for the understanding of aspectuality. Unfortunately for our ability to resolve this discrepancy, the studies that produced the data Perner cites are unpublished.
15 Susan Sugarman, Children’s Early Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 205–6.
16 Catherine Garvey, Children’s Talk (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), pp. 68–9.
17 Ibid., p. 154.
18 Barbara Tizard and Martin Hughes, Young Children Learning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), p. 124.
19 These studies include, in addition to the Perner study already cited, J. H. Flavell, E. R. Flavell, and F. L. Green, ‘Development of the Appearance–Reality Distinction’, Cognitive Psychology, 15 (1987), pp. 95–120; J. H. Flavell, F. L. Green, K. E. Wahl, and E. R. Flavell, ‘The Effects of Question Clarification and Memory Aids on Young Children’s Performance on Appearance–Reality Tasks’, Cognitive Development, 2 (1987), pp. 127–44; Janet Wilde Astington, The Child’s Discovery of the Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), see especially p. 118. All these studies indicate that there are limitations in children’s metaknowledge, that is, their knowledge about knowledge, about evidential requirements for beliefs, about conditions under which one should attribute a false belief to another or to oneself, and so on. Prior to around age 4, children appear to lack such metaknowledge.
20 Sugarman, Children’s Early Thought, p. 206.
21 Here’s where Brandom’s work does hook into Sellars adroitly. See Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994).
22 See n. 19 above.
23 Michael Schulman, The Passionate Mind (New York: The Free Press, 1991), pp. 108–9. The study referred to in the quoted passage is L. Hood and L. Bloom, ‘What, When, and How About Why: A Longitudinal Study of Early Expressions of Causality’, Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 44 (1979), pp. 1–47. See Schulman’s footnote containing this citation for additional studies supporting an early age for the acquisition of causal concepts.
24 P. Das Gupta and P. E. Bryant, ‘Young Children’s Causal Inferences’, Child Development, 60 (1989), pp. 1138–46, quoted passage from p. 1145.
25 Ibid., p. 1139.
26 Ibid., p. 1145.
27 I understand that Sellars does not see knowledge as different in kind from differential response capacities. For Sellars, a knowledge state is a differential response capacity of sufficient complexity to be accorded its normative evaluation as a knowledge state. (TT)
28 Garvey, Children’s Talk, p. 69.
29 See Robert Audi, The Structure of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 199–205; Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 3rd edn (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice‐Hall, 1989), p. 55; Paul Moser (using the locution ‘contravener’), Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 101, 105.
30 Sellars, ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’, KMG, p. 247, SPR, p. 168.
31 See Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars, ‘Intentionality and the Mental’, in Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2, ed. H. Feigl, M. Scriven, and G. Maxwell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1957), pp. 507–39. When Chisholm objects that ‘infants, mutes, and animals’ can’t have beliefs according to Sellars (p. 524), one of Sellars’s concerns in his response is the determinateness of the representations of such beings (see pp. 527–8).
32 See Barbara von Eckardt, What is Cognitive Science? (Cambridge, MA: Bradford/MIT Press, 1993), pp. 6ff., for a discussion of the centrality of ANTCOG (Adult Normal Typical Cognition).
33 Astington, The Child’s Discovery of the Mind, pp. 118–19.
34 ‘Cognitive developments in the second year of life [i.e. prior to the age range we are here concerned about] … include, at least, the ability to form categories and concepts.’ Lois Bloom, The Transition from Infancy to Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 241. See also Schulman, The Passionate Mind, pp. 38–9.
35 See n. 34 above.
36 See Jerome Bruner, The Culture of Education (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. xii.
37 See ibid., pp. 50–2; also Bloom, The Transition from Infancy to Language, p. 25.
38 I particularly recommend Paul Moser’s comprehensive and detailed internalist foundationalism as developed in Knowledge and Evidence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Compare Roderick Chisholm, ‘A Version of Foundationalism’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, 5 (1980), pp. 543–64. It is also noteworthy that former critic of foundationalism Laurence BonJour has come to develop an internalist version of foundationalism. See his ‘Foundationalism and the External World’, Philosophical Perspectives, 13 (1999), pp. 229–49 (TT).
39 One can be a normativist about knowledge states without being an epistemic virtue theorist. For a good discussion of virtue theories in epistemology and objections to them, see John Greco, ‘Virtues in Epistemology’, in The Oxford Handbook of Epistemology, ed. Paul K. Moser (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 287–315.