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KNOWLEDGE, JUSTIFICATION, AND TRUTH KNOWLEDGE, JUSTIFICATION, AND TRUTH: A SELLARSIAN APPROACH TOEPISTEMOLOGYLaurence Alan BonJourA DISSERTATIONPRESENTED TO THEFACULTY OF PRINCETON UNIVERSITYIN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREEOF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHYRECOMMENDED FOR ACCEPTANCE BY THEDEPARTMENT OFPHILOSOPHYJune, 1969TABLE OF CONTENTSACKNOWLEDGMENTSINTRODUCTIONCHAPTER ONE: KNOWLEDGE AND THEGIVEN1. The Problem of Knowledge.2. Lewis on the Given.3. Two Kinds of Apprehension.4. Why the Given is a Myth.CHAPTER TWO: OBSERVATION, COHERENCE, ANDJUSTIFICATION5. The Nature of Coherence.6. Observation Without theGiven.7. Observation andJustification.CHAPTER THREE: TRUTH ANDCORRESPONDENCE8. The Problem of EmpiricalTruth.9. Truth and Picturing: A SimplifiedExample.10. Truth and Picturing: OurConceptual System.CONCLUSIONBIBLIOGRAPHYABSTRACTACKNOWLEDGMENTSMy greatest intellectual debt is to my adviser, Richard Rorty, bothfor originally introducing me to Sellars' philosophy in a way whichstimulated me to persevere in the face of the initial difficultyand obscurity of Sellars' writings, and for much indispensableadvice and encouragement in connection with the present essay. Mysecond reader, Gilbert Harman, provided many thoughtful andchallenging remarks and suggestions. I have discussed almost every part of the essay at length with myfriends Carolyn Magid and Alexander Nehamas. Their invariablypenetrating questions and objections very often forced me to reviseand clarify my views on the issues discussed herein, and thusgreatly increased the adequacy of the final product.Mrs. A. W. Gertzel deserves thanks for her careful typing of thefinal copy.I was generously supported during the writing of this essay, asthrough the whole of my graduate studies, by the DanforthFoundation through its Danforth Graduate Fellow program.My wife, Barbe, was a constant and invaluable source ofencouragement, aid, and comfort.INTRODUCTIONThe present essay has two faces. On the one hand, it is an essayin what I conceive to be the fundamental problems of epistemology,and a presentation and defense of solutions to those problems whichI find plausible. On the other hand, it is also an essay in thephilosophy of Wilfrid Sellars, and a selective defense thereof.obviously the connecting link which is required to make these twofaces of the essay compatible with one another is a belief on mypart that Sellars' epistemological position is fundamentallysound. From the latter of these two standpoints, the essay, though itscontent is largely suggested and inspired by Sellars' philosophy,does not attempt to present anything like an exegetical account ofhis writings. One reason for this that an exegetical approach toSellars could not succeed in anything like the space of this essay.Sellars' papers are numerous, mostly very long, extremelycondensed, and extremely difficult, and an adequate exegeticaltreatment of them would require many years and many volumes (whichis not to suggest that it would not be worth doing). And to treatonly a small portion of Sellars' work would be to place it in theworst possible light and inevitably make key aspects seem seriouslyimplausible. If Sellars has any one outstanding characteristic asa philosopher it is that his philosophy is thoroughly systematic;his accounts of widely separated issues complement and reinforceeach other in a way which makes the whole considerably more thanthe sum of its parts. This made it seem more worthwhile in an essayof this length to try to convey the broad, perhaps sometimesschematic, outlines of Sellars' epistemological position, ratherthan concentrating on detailed exegesis.A further related factor militating against an exegetical approachis what some would call the dialectical character of Sellars'writing, and what others would call its obscurity. The argument inone of his papers is always tortuous and winding, like the flowerin the crannied wall, to use a metaphor which Sellars himself citesas a typical description of his style [SM viii]; it ispacked to overflowing with historical allusion, dialectical thrustand counterthrust, detailed technical development of specificpoints, and suggestive remarks about further issues. These featuresmake Sellars' papers, in my view, enormously challenging andrewarding from a philosophical standpoint; they repay close readingand re-reading and even re-re-reading. But these same featuresoften have the result that the central position and argument of thepaper is obscured by the dialectical detail. And this makes it seemworthwhile to attempt to present and argue for the centralSellarsian position in abstraction from the details, even at therisk of possible oversimplification and distortion at somepoints. Thus the present essay differs in at least two important ways fromSellars' own accounts of the subjects with which it deals. In thefirst place, the order of exposition and argument is vastlydifferent and, I think, much more straightforward. Secondly, myaccount is in many ways simpler than Sellars' own. Whether thislatter difference results from my having oversimplified the issuesinvolved, or alternatively from Sellars having overcomplicatedthem, is difficult to say, largely because the finer subtleties ofSellars' position are difficult to grasp with any degree ofconfidence. It is my impression that the balance of opinion amongthose who have read Sellars would incline to the latter point ofview, but this fact does not make me very confident that such aview is correct.Thus I emphatically do not want to claim that Sellars himself wouldapprove of everything that I have written; on the contrary I amfairly certain that he would not. What I do want to claim is thatthe major theses of the essay are at least simplified versions ofSellars' own, and that the arguments given for those theses are atleast similar to his. Perhaps the best way to put the matter is tosay that this essay represents a systematic presentation anddevelopment of what I have learned from Sellars, without any verystrong presumption either that my learning has been accurate andcomplete, or that my development of Sellars' views closelyparallels his own. I have been guided and influenced by Sellars onalmost every page, but I have been more concerned throughout to saysomething clear and defensible, than to precisely follow thedetails of Sellars' account. Considered as a systematic discussion of epistemology, the essaycould be characterized as an attempt to take seriously thetraditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and pushit to the hilt. The first two chapters are concerned with the issueof justification, and examine two alternative approaches to atheory of justification. In chapter one, the traditional solutionto the problem of justification, viz. the doctrine of the Given,is examined and found wanting. This conclusion leads, in chaptertwo, to an attempt to examine and render plausible the onlyapparent dialectical alternative to the Given, viz. a coherencetheory of justification. The prime concern of chapter two is toshow how a coherence account of justification can still leave roomfor something like an empirical constraint on human knowledge.Chapter three then focuses on the concept of truth, and attemptsto show that a coherence theory of justification does notnecessarily involve a coherence theory of truth. This is done bydefending a greatly modified reconstruction of the traditionalcorrespondence theory of truth. Thus the essay as a whole presentssomething approaching a unified picture of human knowledge.Because of the scope of the systematic issues with which it deals,the essay is often fairly broad-grained in its analysis. Thejustification for this, if one is required, is that although fine-grained analyses are without doubt often extremely valuable andworthwhile, philosophy is in my view (and Sellars') ultimately asystematic enterprise whose most fundamental issues can only bediscussed adequately in a broad context, the very scope of whichforces a broad-grained and sometimes even schematic account.Sometimes it is worthwhile to forget the trees and look at theforest, and I submit that one of those times is when one is doingbasic epistemology. I shall try throughout, however, to compensateto some extent by suggesting in passing how the results of such asystematic, albeit schematic, approach can shed light on issues ofa somewhat more specific sort. One of the consequences of a broad systematic approach is that thediscussion often crosses the borders of epistemology in the strictsense to trespass upon the philosophy of science, the philosophyof language, and the philosophy of mind. For this I make noapology; on the contrary I should want to argue that neglect ofthese other areas, and especially of the first, has often resultedin bad epistemology. Despite its current partial eclipse,epistemology remains in many ways the core of philosophy and canneglect the peripheral areas only at great cost to itselfand to them. So much for preliminaries. I proceed in the first chapter toconsider the traditional account of knowledge, a problem whichgrows out of it, and the traditional solution to that problem.[Table of Contents] -- [Go to Chapter 1]Published with the permission of Prof. Laurence BonJour. Transcribed into hypertext by Andrew Chrucky , June 20, 1997.Notes{1} The writings of Sellars which are most relevant to mypurposes are his two papers, "Empiricism and the Philosophy ofMind," and "Some Reflections on Language Games," both reprinted inhis Science, Perception and Reality (London: Routledge &Kegan Paul, 1963); also his book Science and Metaphysics(London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968). References to thesethree works will use the abbreviations "EPM," "RLG,"and "SM," respectively, and will usually be inserted in thetext to avoid unnecessary proliferation of footnotes.[Table of Contents] -- [Go to Chapter 1] |
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