Erkenn (2011) 75:495–503 DOI 10.1007/s10670-011-9337-4
Epistemology, the History of Epistemology, Historical Epistemology Barry Stroud
Received: 27 September 2011 / Accepted: 27 September 2011 / Published online: 19 October 2011 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011
Abstract A brief discussion of the ways in which awareness of and sensitivity to the history of philosophy can contribute to epistemology even if epistemology is understood as a distinctively philosophical and not primarily historical enterprise.
What is the relation between the three apparently different kinds of study mentioned in my title? If epistemology is the study of knowledge, I suppose historical epistemology would be any historical study of any part or aspect or domain of human knowledge. There are a great many different ways of taking an historical interest in this or that aspect of human knowledge. Science in all of its forms, for instance, is one kind of human knowledge. And there is the study of the history of science. There is also the study of the history of the history of science, which would be a kind of second level historical epistemology. The same is true of historical knowledge in general. It too can be studied historically. And the history of that kind of historical study would represent a further level of historical knowledge. There would seem to be no firm limits to something as all-encompassing as historical epistemology. That part of philosophy called epistemology, as I understand it, is the philosophical study of certain questions about human knowledge and belief and thought and reasoning and so on that have been part of philosophy since more or less the beginning. It too can be investigated historically, although it need not be. The historical study of philosophical epistemology would be the historical study of efforts to gain philosophical understanding or knowledge of the nature and scope of human knowledge. Since efforts to get that kind of understanding have a history, the questions philosophical epistemology asks today about human knowledge are not B. Stroud (&) Department of Philosophy, University of California, 314 Moses Hall #2390, Berkeley, CA 94720-2390, USA e-mail:
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necessarily the same as they once were. But that does not mean that philosophical epistemology is itself an historical subject, or that it pursues only or even primarily historical understanding. Painting and music, for instance, also have a long history. What is done in painting or music today is not the same as it once was. What is to be done in painting or music now depends on what painting and music have been in the past and on what they have become at this point in their history. Whatever is produced in those fields at any time will be part of the history of painting or of music, but it will be a piece of painting or music, not a work of history that seeks historical understanding of something or other. The same is true even of the history of activities that do produce studies or accounts or explanations of something or other, such as the physical sciences or mathematics. Whatever accounts they give of something, they are not historical accounts. Similarly, as I see it, what is to be done now in philosophical epistemology depends on the current state of enquiry into epistemological questions. But the fact that those questions are now to be addressed as they have come to be understood at this point in the history of the subject does not mean that the questions of philosophical epistemology are historical questions, or that what is now called for in epistemology is something historical in character. So the fact that philosophical epistemology has a history does not mean that it is an historical subject. But there remains a question about what philosophical epistemology really is—what it aspires to, and how it hopes to achieve it. The basic questions of epistemology, as I understand them, are extremely general. Knowledge is one of the most distinctive and pervasive features of human life. It exists in one form or another in all human societies and in all periods in which human beings have lived. So it can look as if there is something to enquire into and to understand about human knowledge as it is sought for or attained under any conditions at all. There is something to be asked and understood about it at the most general level at which anything distinctively human is to be understood. In that respect, the study of human knowledge in general would be like the study of other things essential to a distinctively human life, like human digestion or human respiration or human socialization. The study of such basic human functions of course changes through the ages, and in that sense the investigation of them has a history. But what those investigations seek to understand at different periods of history is not itself something historical. It is something universally and distinctively human. I don’t want to make too much of the parallel between human knowledge and human digestion. Maybe human socialization is a better parallel. Socialization is present wherever there is human life, but in many different forms. That does not preclude a completely general study or understanding of it. This at least suggests that there might be equally general but non-historical questions to be investigated about the nature of human knowledge and how it is possible. The answers would be equally general and would apply to all knowledge by anyone, anywhere, just as there might be some completely general truths about human socialization. This raises the question whether there is anything interesting or important to be learned and understood about human knowledge at such a completely general level.
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That is a question that the possibility of a distinctively philosophical epistemology seems to depend on. It is in that sense a philosophical question; it asks about the possibility or prospects of a certain kind of philosophical investigation. But it does not appear to be a purely historical question. And it does not appear to be something we could hope to settle in advance, by abstract argument. It looks as if we could get somewhere in answering that question about the prospects of a certain kind of philosophical enquiry only by trying to conduct an investigation of human knowledge in general and seeing what we can learn by pursuing it. That is what I think has been going on in philosophical epistemology. Do we, or can we, get some completely general philosophical understanding of human knowledge in that way? If there are basic questions of epistemology, and if, as I have suggested, those questions are not themselves historical, it does not mean that what might be called historical epistemology has no role in any attempt to answer them. On the contrary. I think historical awareness and sensitivity to the sources of the philosophical problems of human knowledge are essential to the proper understanding of those problems, and hence to an understanding of the subject itself. Without informed recognition of how the central questions and ideas of epistemology have come down to us, what you say in epistemology is likely to be of very little value. This seems to me to be borne out by a great deal of what has been going on in the subject for a long time. Much of it is really of very little value. An understanding of history is therefore important. But rather than speaking of an historically ‘oriented’ epistemology, I would prefer to call it historically informed epistemology. That is what I think we need: greater sensitivity to the sources of the problems of epistemology, and of philosophy generally, and so greater sensitivity to their distinctively philosophical character. A large part of that concern with sources as I think of it would be attention to the historical sources of the ways of thinking that give the problems their special character. There are probably also deeper and more pervasive human sources of philosophical reflection itself. They too must somehow be explored, and exposed, if we are to see what we are really after, or have been after, in epistemology. There is not much sign of this kind of diagnostic interest in current and recent philosophical epistemology. That is due in part to the apparently widely-held assumption that it is pretty well known what the real problems of epistemology are, and we just need to get on with the effort of solving them. There is the further assumption, on the part of many philosophers, not only that the questions are not primarily historical, but that epistemology is simply a different subject from the history of epistemology. My resistance to this widespread neglect of history in epistemology does not come from the idea that philosophical epistemology is the same thing as the history of epistemology. I think ignoring the history of the subject is unfortunate for other reasons. For me, one of the most difficult aspects of epistemology as we face its questions today is exactly what its problems really are. What is really in question, what does it take to bring it into question, and what would it take to answer the questions satisfactorily? And what is the distinctive philosophical character of those questions? These are diagnostic concerns. Attention to philosophical ways of thinking in the past can help reveal how the questions we now regard as
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epistemological have come to have the significance they have for us. This is something I think we need to understand better than we do before we can be sure we know what the problems really are and what it would take to make progress on them. The same is true, after all, of painting and music. You cannot understand and respond appropriately to the best of what is done in painting or music today without a good sense of its relation to what has gone before. One reason an understanding of the history of philosophical ways of thinking is important is that not just anything we know or can find out about human knowledge amounts to a contribution to philosophical epistemology. We know that human beings come to know things about the world by perceiving things around them, for instance, and by gradually becoming socialized into a culture that provides them with the resources for thinking and speaking about, and so eventually coming to know, many things about what the world is like. That is a very general truth about human knowledge in general, but as it stands it does not appear to answer any pressing philosophical question about knowledge. The general phenomenon it describes could be understood and explained more fully by detailed studies of human learning, of language acquisition, of human socialization, and so on. In the philosophical understanding of knowledge what is typically at stake is the possibility of knowledge of certain kinds in the face of what look like potential obstacles to it. The apparent obstacles are revealed by reflection at that same completely general level on obvious features of the human condition. Senseperception, for instance, is essential to human knowledge. But it is a general truth that all perception, however it works, operates only within certain limits. No one’s perceptions extend to everything that is so. So there appears to be a very general question about where the limits of human perception lie. What sorts of things, in general, can human beings be said to perceive? It has been part of epistemology since at least the time of Plato to proceed as if there is or could be a completely general single answer to this question. The idea is that there is a definite and identifiable domain of what it is possible for human beings to perceive, and that its limits can somehow be established in advance. Are there really good reasons to accept that assumption? How has the idea come to seem to need no defence in philosophy? That is at least in part an historical question. Of course, not everyone who shares that general assumption about the limits of perception agrees about where those limits actually are. But even the wider consensus gives rise to epistemological questions of a very familiar general kind. Given the most that human beings can strictly speaking perceive by means of the senses, whatever that might be, how can they know anything beyond that? We know that everything anyone perceives is something that is thereby perceived. How can anyone know by perception something that is and would be so whether it is perceived or not? And we know that, in general, every sense perception by anyone occurs at some particular time and place. How then can anyone know what is so at places or times at which no one ever perceives anything, including even the very immediate future? And if there are limits to what one person can ever perceive of other people, so the most they can perceive is what people do or what happens to them, how can anyone know anything about the thoughts and feelings of others? And since whatever anyone perceives to be so is something that could have been
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otherwise, how can anyone know some things to be necessarily true, with no possibility of their having been otherwise? These traditional philosophical questions about human knowledge are all generated by thinking in completely general terms about the means by which human beings gain knowledge of the world. It seems that there must be discoverable, acceptable answers to these questions, since we obviously do know many things about what is so right now, and at places and times no one has ever visited, as well as about the thoughts and feelings of other people, and about what is necessarily so. But simply to say, or even to insist, that we do know such things is not in itself to give a satisfactory answer to the epistemological questions. The challenge is to explain, in the face of the apparent obstacles, how any knowledge of any of these kinds is possible. Let me take the case of sense perception in particular as only one of many possible illustrations of what I see as the relation between philosophical epistemology and the history of epistemology. There is a long and still-continuing tradition of understanding perception in a way that I think makes knowledge of the world impossible, or at least impossible to explain. Philosophers who have held, or now hold, some such view of perception do not acknowledge—in fact would typically deny—that the view has any such unacceptable consequences. They see it as uncontroversial, as nothing more than what must be accepted by anyone who reflects in completely general terms on human ways of getting knowledge of the world. Since it would be absurd to deny that we all know many of the sorts of things we think we know, and equally absurd to deny that we know them somehow on the basis of perception, that way of understanding perception that still lies at the heart of traditional epistemology can also seem undeniable. It is thought that that it could not possibly have the disastrous consequences often claimed for it. I think that view of perception does have disastrous consequences when it is held to consistently and strictly applied to our actual situation. So I think there can be no satisfactory answer to the traditional epistemological question about knowledge of the wider world while those assumptions about perception remain in place. But there are very strong pressures towards accepting those fundamental assumptions. That is why I think philosophical epistemology now needs to get to the bottom of what I see as an impasse. This is where I think history comes into play. It will not be only the history of epistemology, or even only the history of philosophy more generally. And I don’t say better history is all we need by way of diagnosis. But we do need (or I need) a better understanding of how we got to where we are now than I think we have at the moment. If what is needed now in epistemology is at least recognition of the fatal consequences of that traditional but still widely shared conception of perception, it must be explained how and why that way of thinking is not forced on us, that there are alternative ways of understanding how we know things about the world by perception. One kind of contribution along those lines would be to explain how we came to think of perception in general in those ways—how it has come to look like the only possibility. One major factor, either as cause or as effect, has undoubtedly been the virtual assimilation of perception to sensation. There are very understandable reasons for
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that, especially since the beginnings of the new science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Perception takes place through the sense organs. A sense organ is affected in certain ways, with the result that a perceiver becomes aware of something or other. The effect on a sense organ is the end result of a process typically starting from objects in the environment. Such causal processes are what connect a perceiver to the world around him. Of course, the world has many effects on people that they are not aware of at all. But in perception, as in sensation, the person is aware of something or other. That awareness is the effect of happenings in some part of the body. And each sensory effect is brought about through a particular organ or channel. This means, as Berkeley eventually put it, that each of the senses has its own ‘‘proper objects’’ of awareness. No one is ever aware by sight of the same thing he is aware of by touch or by hearing. So it is basic to this picture that there is not necessarily any similarity between whatever a perceiver is aware of and whatever is so in the world that produces that effect. This is all very familiar and well-travelled territory, both in the history of philosophy and in the history of science. The best-known and most fully-developed versions of philosophical views of perception of this kind came after or as part of new scientific advances. The ‘‘new way of ideas’’ that revolutionized the understanding of the mind in general, along with the ‘‘impressions’’, ‘‘sensa’’, ‘‘sense data’’, and ‘‘the given’’, and so on that eventually succeeded it, all appear to derive from this modern, roughly mechanical picture of a person’s relation to the rest of the world. But the apparent consequences of this picture for an understanding of thought and knowledge of objects in the world around us have never been squarely faced, or faced up to. It carries with it the inevitable implication that perceiving and thinking and believing and so on are all to be understood as a matter of receiving or entertaining in the mind certain ‘‘representations’’ of objects or of how things are beyond one’s ‘‘representations’’ of them. This implication is thought to be benign or unproblematic; it is seen as the only possibility, given that we do perceive and know things about the world by perception. This picture is still very much with us, even among philosophers of a heavily materialist persuasion who would shudder at the thought of anything like ‘‘sense data’’ or ‘‘impressions’’ or other apparent ephemera. But even for such philosophers it still seems undeniable that it is only by means of something that counts as an inner ‘‘representation’’ of parts of the world that human perception and thought are possible. When it is understood as a completely general picture of the mind, and consistently applied to our actual situation, surely this cannot be right. Descartes, for instance, who certainly held some such view, thought that every sensory experience he ever had while awake was an experience he also could have while asleep and dreaming. He took that to imply (rightly, it seems to me) that he could never know anything about the world around him on the basis of his sensory experiences alone. No one could have any more reason on that basis alone to believe any particular thing about a world beyond his sensory experience than to believe anything else, however fanciful. Of course, Descartes also thought he had excellent non-perceptual reasons for believing and trusting in the kinds of things he accepts about the world; the inadequacy of sense perception alone was part of what he wanted to bring out.
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But those of us who disagree with Descartes and think we know many things about the world by perception without having to rely on any help from a beneficent God cannot accept that view of perceptual experience. It restricts our perceptual access to nothing more than ‘‘ideas’’ or ‘‘representations’’ in the mind, and so leaves us always short of the familiar objects we believe in in the world itself. There is no question that the new physical science was seen to give dramatic support and legitimacy to this idea of the sensory experience or the perception or the idea or sensory effect as perceivers’ only access to the wider world around them. This is not just the platitude that we come to know things about the world by experience, or perception, or even because of the effects the world has on us as we move around in it. No revolutionary new science was needed to convince anyone of such obvious general truths. We have no difficulty in everyday life in explaining how people often come to know the things they do by perceiving what is going on around them. This picture involves not just the familiar general idea of experience or perception, but the specific idea of particular sensory experiences or perceptions, individual items that make their appearance at particular times. Nor is it just a story of the production of physical effects on organisms. It introduces particular items that also have certain qualities or features that a perceiver can be aware of. It is only because there is awareness that it counts as a case of perception or sensation. And those experienced qualities or features are no part of the complete story physical science tells of the physical organism. This idea is perhaps still present in the so-called ‘‘problem of consciousness’’ that puzzles so many philosophers at the moment. How can it be explained that physiological processes come to possess such distinctive ‘experienced’ characteristics? I think it is much harder than it has apparently seemed to understand how awareness, perception, thought, belief, and so on could come to have been thought of in these problematic ways—as if it there really is no other alternative. So I see this as still a rich area for further study in the history of epistemology, as well as the history of science, or historical epistemology. It would all contribute to what I think of as philosophical epistemology. It remains doubtful whether even all that would lead us to the real source or motivation behind these ways of thinking. There is no question that concentration on the details of the causal processes of perception seemed to lend them new and powerful support. In antiquity, or in Aristotle anyway, what a perceiver was said to perceive was the very quality of the object he sees, not some ‘inner’ or ‘mental’ representation of something standing in some so-far unexplained relation to it. In at least that respect, the Aristotelian view was closer to common sense. But it could give no satisfactory explanation of how a perceiver could receive or have access to such a direct awareness of things around him. It was in offering an account of an intelligible intervening mechanism between the two that the new science was thought to have supplanted Aristotle. But that account in turn has its own unsatisfactory implications. But even in antiquity there was an idea that seems to lie behind the problematic conception of perception that I have been drawing attention to. It is perhaps a more fundamental version of the same idea. So historical epistemology probably needs to go further back than the sixteenth century to come to terms with the ways of
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thinking that I think continue to present obstacles to our understanding of human knowledge. In his Theaetetus Plato argues that knowledge is not the same thing as perception on the grounds that no case of perception as such is a case of knowledge.1 Perception involves a bodily sense-organ, but it is taken to be nothing more than a purely passive affection that usually brings about an effect in the mind. Perception itself cannot be knowledge since knowledge involves belief, which in turn requires an activity of ‘‘the mind’’. ‘‘Knowledge is to be found’’, Socrates says, ‘‘not in the experiences but in the process of reasoning about them’’. It is ‘‘not in the experiences that it is possible to grasp being and truth’’ (Theaetetus 186D). This again is more than the everyday idea of perception or experience that we might appeal to explain how somebody knows some particular thing. Here we apparently have what I see as the fatal idea of ‘experiences’ (plural)—what look like particular items that are no more than passive affections but involve awareness. We can be led by such ‘experiences’ to think and so perhaps eventually to know things, but that belief or knowledge will be a matter of ‘the mind’ or ‘reason’, not of perception or the senses. This division into separate faculties with their own distinctive domains and tasks looks like another expression, or perhaps the real source, of the problematic conception of perception I have been talking about. Some such idea of distinct faculties or regions of the mind is still with us today in other forms, and is therefore perhaps responsible for other difficulties in present-day epistemology. There is, for instance, the familiar traditional distinction between completely different kinds and sources of knowledge: what is completely independent of all experience and so must be derived from ‘reason’ alone, on the one hand, and what is based at least to some extent on perceptual experience, on the other. How have we come to think of human beings and their achievements in this completely compartmentalized way? Are they to be understood as combinations of distinct and independent faculties or functions, rather than as individual agents who come to be able to do many different kinds of things in many different kinds of ways? It is obviously difficult to explain why a division into separate parts or ‘faculties’ has come to seem so natural. Can we not think equally clearly of human beings as simply having many different kinds of abilities: they can see, and think, and feel, and come to know things, in many different sorts of ways? Could historical epistemology, or the history of epistemology, or the history of anything at all, possibly reveal the real sources of those apparently ‘natural’ ways of thinking that stand in the way of a more unproblematic understanding of ourselves? But suppose we did come to understand the sources of those apparently unavoidable ways of thinking, at least to some extent. Suppose we came to see that those are not the only ways in which we are forced to think about human beings and their different achievements. Suppose that by overcoming those constricting dichotomies of the past we could eventually abandon the traditional view of the limits of perception that for so long has presented an obstacle to the proper 1
For an illuminating account of the essentials of Plato’s argument see Frede (1987). Here I simply summarize Frede’s account.
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understanding of human knowledge. Would we then have a satisfactory answer to the traditional epistemological problem of our perceptual knowledge of the world? Whether we did or not would presumably depend on what that new understanding of perception amounted to, and on what we had to take ourselves to understand and to know in order to gain that new conception of how we come to know things in that way. One possibility is that with that new understanding of the relation between perception and knowledge we would simply lose the old epistemological problem altogether. It would have gone away with the restrictive conception of perception that was needed to raise the problem in its most pressing form. But if that problem in that form had gone away, could we any longer say that we now do understand the possibility of human knowledge in general in a way that finally satisfies us? Would we have a satisfactory answer to the philosophical epistemological question about human knowledge of the world? Or would we simply have lost any such completely general understanding of our position, or perhaps even lost the desire to seek any such general understanding of ourselves? This is a hard and very complicated question. But I think it is not a question that historical epistemology, or the history of epistemology, or even epistemology itself, can be expected to answer.
Reference Frede, M. (1987). Observations on Perception in Plato’s Later Dialogues. In M. Frede (Ed.), Essays in ancient philosophy (pp. 3–10). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
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