Is epistemology normative? Neopositivism vs naturalism

James Ladyman and Don Ross are ambiguous about the role of epistemological justification in their endeavor to naturalize metaphysics. In my previous post, I cited the following passage from their text regarding the demarcation problem:

We demarcate good science – around lines which are inevitably fuzzy near the boundary – by reference to institutional factors, not to directly epistemological ones. (Again, this reference is indirectly epistemological, and not irreducibly sociological, if the institutional factors that make science epistemologically superior themselves admit of epistemological justification, as they do.) (1)

Here, they appeal to institutional factors “if the institutional factors…admit of epistemological justification”. But this argument is either circular or incomplete. On the one hand, this is circular if science, as the exclusive source of epistemological justification, is the source of epistemological justification for its own institutional factors. On the other, this argument is incomplete – at best, and dogmatic at worst – if Ladyman and Ross provide no arguments for the institutional factors’ having epistemological justification. As they do not.

One of the possible reasons for this notable silence may concern the difficulty of the task given their competing epistemological commitments. Ladyman and Ross claim allegiance to the neopositivist tradition, as well as to Quinean naturalism. But these traditions conflict regarding the normative status of epistemology for science. Over several posts, I’ll discuss the background of the conflict, a criticism of Quine, and how it might related to Ladyman and Ross’s ambiguous stance on the role of epistemological justification in Every Thing Must Go.

The context of discovery and the context of justification

Hans Reichenbach distinguished between the logical analysis of scientific descriptions and theories and the accounts of the thought processes which generated scientific descriptions and theories. The logical analysis of science, then, is different from the historical, sociological, or psychological analysis of science. He referred to the former as the context of justification and the latter as the context of discovery.

There is a great difference between the system of logical interconnections of thought and the actual way in which thinking processes are performed. The psychological operations of thinking are rather vague and fluctuating processes; they almost never keep to the ways prescribed by logic and may even skip whole groups of operations which would be needed for a complete exposition of the subject in question. … It would be, therefore, a vain attempt to construct a theory of knowledge which is at the same time logically complete and in strict correspondence with the psychological processes of thought.
     The only way to escape this difficulty is to distinguish carefully the task of epistemology from that of psychology. Epistemology does not regard the processes of thinking in their actual occurrence; this task is entirely left to psychology. What epistemology intends is to construct thinking processes in a way in which they ought to occur if they are to be ranged in a consistent system; or to construct justifiable sets of operations which can be intercalated between the starting-point and the issue of thought-processes, replacing the real intermediate links. Epistemology thus considers a logical substitute rather than real processes. (2)

Separating the context of discovery from the context of justification was a central thesis of logical empiricism. Karl Popper had discussed the same separation in 1934:

[T]he act of conceiving or inventing a theory seems to me neither to call for logical analysis nor to be susceptible to it . . . the question of how it happens that a new idea occurs . . . may be of great interest to empirical psychology; but it is irrelevant to the logical analysis of scientific knowledge. (3)

Ladyman mildly endorses the separation in his Understanding Philosophy of Science:

In general, the evidence in favour of a hypothesis is independent of who believes it and who doesn’t, and whether an idea really is a good one is not at all dependent on whether it is a genius or a fool who first thinks of it. It seems plausible to argue that an evaluation of the evidence for a hypothesis ought to take no account of how, why and by whom the hypothesis was conceived. Some such distinction between the causal origins of scientific theories and their degree of confirmation is often thought to be important for the defence of the objectivity of scientific knowledge. (4)

Naturalistic epistemology

In 1969, W.V.O. Quine’s essay “Epistemology Naturalized” advocated for a naturalistic alternative to Reichenbach’s distinction. In a repudiation of the Cartesian model of epistemology, which was still operative in the logical empiricists’ epistemology, Quine argued that philosophers should give up the notion that science requires an a priori “first philosophy,” or any sort of epistemological and metaphysical groundwork, or justification, for its own activity. He aspired to abandon epistemology as a normative set of rules or standards that would dictate to scientists concerning their own methods and forms of inquiry.

Quine suggested that a normative theory of epistemology be replaced by a descriptive account of cognition. Rather than attempt to rationally reconstruct the regulating logic of human cognition engaged in scientific inquiry, philosophers should allow empirical psychology to study human cognition and describe it in scientific terms. Philosophers should give up the “ought” of epistemology in favor of the “is” of cognitive science.

But I think that at this point it may be more useful to say rather than epistemology still goes on, though in a new setting and a clarified status. Epistemology, or something like it, simply falls into place as a chapter of psychology and hence of natural science. It studies a natural phenomenon, viz., a physical human subject. This human subject is accorded a certain experimentally controlled input – certain patterns of irradiation in assorted frequencies, for instance – and in the fullness of time the subject delivers as output a description of the three-dimensional external world and its history. The relation between the meager input and the torrential output is a relation that we are prompted to study for somewhat the same reasons that always prompted epistemology; namely, in order to see how evidence relates to theory, and in what ways one’s theory of nature transcends any available evidence. (5)

The status of epistemology as normative, or regulative, is the essential tension between the neopositivistic and naturalistic positions, to each of which Ladyman and Ross are committed. Neopositivism seeks to articulate the logical structure our the world in an epistemologically normative language. Naturalistic epistemology, in the strong Quinean sense, seeks to eliminate the normative basis of epistemology altogether, replacing it with a descriptive account of human knowing from cognitive psychology and science.

Explaining the contrast

Hilary Kornblith clarified the novel trajectory of naturalized epistemology by considering the following three questions:

1. How ought we to arrive at our beliefs?
2. How do we arrive at our beliefs?
3. Are the processes by which we do arrive at our beliefs the ones by which we ought to arrive at our beliefs? (6)

Advocates of neopositivism would customarily have some answer for 1), acknowledge the existence of some answer for 2), and answer ‘no’ to 3).

But inasmuch as they reject a normative aim for epistemology, naturalistic philosophers reject question 1) as unworthy of consideration. Their stance is that 2) should be answered by cognitive psychologists, not by philosophers of science.

The tension is, then, that one commitment attempts to answer 1) while another dismisses the question as a whole.

***

Next, I’ll present a compelling criticism of Quinean naturalism from Harvey Siegel, who is is an advocate of Reichenbach’s separation of discovery from justification. His criticism serves to highlight the tension in Ladyman and Ross’s epistemological commitments.

Notes

1. James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go, p. 33.
2. Hans Reichenbach, Experience and Prediction, p. 5, in Harvey Siegel, “Justification, Discovery, and the Naturalizing of Epistemology,” p. 299.
3. Karl Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 27, in James Ladyman, Understanding Philosophy of Science, p. 75.
4. James Ladyman, Understanding Philosophy of Science, pp. 75-6.
5. W.V.O. Quine, “Epistemology Naturalized,” p. 82-3.
6. Hilary Kornblith, “Introduction: What is Naturalistic Epistemology?,” p. 1