|
Pages numbers from my personal copy
p.2 In this post, I will read through Bradley’s essay and discuss some ways in which his arguments predict, but also fall short of, views expounded in this later tradition. I will pay particular attention to Sellars. The profound yet difficult arguments of ‘Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind’ (1956) provide much of the impetus for subsequent analytic pragmatism: Rorty, Brandom and McDowell owe more to Sellars than to Quine or Davidson, though I shall try, also, to make some points of comparison with their work.
p.2 Bradley makes clear that he believes sensation to furnish the basic materials for knowledge and that the facts of perception are, in part, non-rational (that is, independent of the mind). We hence cannot make ourselves independent of certain non-rational data. Yet, he argues, this does not mean that we have any access to independent facts or to judgements free from error.
p.3 Sellars aims to show the impossibility of claiming that knowledge is given in perception apart from conceptual activity, which is to say, apart from inference: in order to function as knowledge, basic sensations must be subsumed within a system of inferences
p.3 A foundationalist system infers knowledge from a set of atomic facts.
p.5 particularized judgements, strong enough to count as knowledge, can in fact be fallible.
p.7 Bradley proposes that knowledge is secure in so far as it builds a system; it must not repose upon a certain base of facts.
p.7 On Bradley’s conception, then, facts are true “just so far as they work, just so far as they contribute to the order of experience” (336).
p.8 It is all a question of relative contribution to my known world-order. (336)
p.8 foundationalism holds a certain set of beliefs to be infallible: they are the ultimate destination of the referral. Coherentism, on the other hand, privileges no set of beliefs as infallibile. A proposition is referred to the world-order as a whole.
p.8 justification occurs holistically and not merely sequentially.
p.8 justification should not be understood like a chain; rather, a belief is referred to the system itself.
p.8 knowledge, properly speaking, belongs to the justificatory space of reasons.
p.8 As Sellars himself puts it, “one couldn’t have observational knowledge of any fact unless one knew many other things as well” (§36). The point is not that sense data themselves are inferentially structured, but that for them to count as knowledge, they have to be inferentially articulated.
p.9 Sellars’ argument against this kind of rationalism is a key step towards his notion of the “space of reasons” that defines knowledge. He goes on to extrapolate that an is judgement involves a level of confidence absent from a looks judgement: I am confident that my perception can be correlated with that of other subjects in optimal observing conditions. In making this point, Sellars implies what Brandom terms a “two-ply” account of observation. The first level involves the simple ability to discriminate between stimuli and respond to them. This does not constitute any kind of awareness that we might term “knowledge”. Rather, knowledge (and conceptuality) emerges only on the second level, in which responses take on inferential roles.
p.11 Sellars places an important stricture on knowledge: it is not just about naming concepts, but using them and knowing how to use them.
p.11 Sellars’ thus sees our knowledge as a system.
p.11-12 empirical knowledge, like its sophisticated extension, science, is rational, not because it has a foundation but because it is a self-correcting enterprise which can put any claim in jeopardy, though not all at once. (§38)
p.12 Thus, the key interaction is not between a fact and the foundations of a system, but between a new fact and the system as a whole. This new fact thus can be rejected, accepted, or accepted whilst inducing a modification of the system.
p.12 Quine’s famous “forcefield” metaphor: ...total science is like a field of force whose boundary conditions are experience.
p.12 Re-evaluation of some statements entails re-evaluation of others, because of their logical interconnections – the logical laws being in turn simply certain further statements of the system, certain further elements of the field.
p.12 No particular experiences are linked with any particular statements in the interior of the field, except indirectly through considerations of equilibrium affecting the field as a whole.
p.14 if coherentism does not anchor beliefs in sense judgements, then it is possible to form a coherent system completely independent from such judgements – indeed, in direct contradiction to them. What matters, after all, is the coherence of that system.
p.14 I certainly find Brandom helpful in clarifying many aspects of Sellars, particularly his argument that we may come to have knowledge of things to which we were only previously responding (the sentience/sapience distinction).
|
