Naturalized epistemology

5. The role of normative issues

Epistemology’s descriptive task is to identify how people actually arrive at beliefs. But what people actually do is not necessarily what they ought to do. Epistemology’s normative task is to identify how people ought (rationally) to arrive at their beliefs, and this seems to go well beyond the descriptive task (see Normative epistemology). Not all naturalists hope that they can do away with traditional epistemology entirely and replace it with natural science. But those with this hope have trouble finding a place in their project for the normative task of epistemology, since science seems incapable of prescription. Radical naturalists could argue that the normative issue is not worth pursuing, so that reducing epistemology to its descriptive task leaves out nothing worth doing. But this is an implausible option on its face. However, their only other choice is daunting: they must argue that science can tell us how we ought to arrive at our beliefs.

Naturalists who want to argue that science can answer the normative question have two options. In the spirit of Hume they can assume that the way we arrive at our beliefs is (more or less) the way we ought to. (But is this assumption a scientific or an epistemological claim?) Epistemology’s descriptive task is clearly within the province of science; if we completed the normative by completing the descriptive task, then science could handle both sides of traditional epistemology. Unfortunately, the claim that we ought to maintain our existing belief-management practices more or less as they are faces difficulties. The main problem lies in the data that psychologists have already gathered. These data show that normal human cognitive processes are shot through with faulty logic, bad probabilistic inferences and wishful thinking (Nisbett and Ross 1980; Taylor 1989). Beliefs with such origins do not count as knowledge.

Perhaps radical naturalists need not assume that people ought to maintain their actual belief-management practices, however. Instead, they could try arguing that discoverable facts about things other than our actual belief-management practices will allow us to accomplish epistemology’s normative task (but will they be able to make these discoveries without relying on the belief-management practices they question?). For example, scientists might be able to determine that all (rational?) human beings have a common epistemic goal, whether it is reaching the truth or predicting the future course of sensory stimulation or whatever. If so, then, as Quine (1992) has pointed out, epistemology’s normative task could be performed by engineers. Engineers could work out the best ways available to people (given our limited faculties and resources) for reaching their epistemic goal. We could say that these efficient methods are the ones people ought to adopt, even at the expense of fairly radical changes in their actual practices. Normative epistemology becomes part of engineering science, not a branch of epistemology that is outside of science.

But while engineers investigate efficient ways to do such things as to transport or kill people, they do not investigate the issue ‘Ought we to transport or kill people?’ Only after it is established that it is important to achieve some goal does engineering come into play. The issue of what epistemic agents ought to aim at is not an engineering issue. It remains a philosophical issue which cannot be absorbed into science.

The problem would be rather trivial if scientists discovered that there is a single, unvarying goal (or prioritized set of goals) which everyone wants to reach by managing their beliefs as they do, and which does not look silly on its face. Even if the goal is ‘wired in’, we would worry about committing a ‘naturalistic fallacy’ and say ‘The fact that something is everyone’s goal does not entail that it ought to be’. Even the fact that a goal is forced on everyone does not show that we have grounds for pursuing it. Still, the temptation to take this goal as the one we ought to pursue would probably be overwhelming. However, it is by no means obvious that such a single, unvarying goal exists. In different cultures at the same time, and in the same culture at different times, people might be aiming to accomplish a variety of things by believing what they do, and the (conscious and unconscious) belief-management principles they employ might also differ widely. Given the possibility of significant diversity, epistemologists need some way to decide which competing goals and sets of belief-management principles are right for cognitive agents. Perhaps the diversity would be reduced if we focused on the goals of scientists during those times when they are being scientific. But even if it were so reduced, we would need some way of arguing that the goals of the scientists are the ones which epistemic agents ought to pursue. Several ways to handle such normative issues are open to radical naturalists.

First, they could say that belief-management principles should be evaluated from the point of view of natural selection, so that the greater the survival value of these principles, the better the principles. Once this (epistemological?) claim is made, then science can take over, by describing the belief-generating mechanisms of human beings (and other animals?) and explaining how they have the survival value they do. (But how will naturalists absorb the growing data that suggest that wishful thinking, a paradigm case of irrationality, is adaptive?)

Second, naturalists could exploit the elastic boundaries of science in order to call conceptual analysis science. Then they could use conceptual analysis to defend some view about what epistemic agents’ goals or evaluative concepts are, and make the (epistemological?) claim that belief-management principles should be evaluated from the standpoint of those goals or concepts. Supposing, as several epistemologists have, that conceptual analysis reveals truth or predictive power to be the goal of epistemic agents, then (theoretical) scientists can go on to clarify the extent to which people naturally achieve the epistemic aim. And engineering will be useful in that it might help people to find better ways to achieve the epistemic goal.

Third, Stephen Stich (1988) suggests a pragmatic approach to normative issues. First he criticizes the strategy of using conceptual analysis to discover the goals and concepts of epistemic agents. The goals and evaluative epistemic concepts that are part of ordinary language are as likely as belief-management principles themselves to vary from culture to culture (see Cognitive pluralism). So it is arbitrary to rely on them when we select management principles. ‘In the absence of any reason to think that the locally prevailing notions of epistemic evaluation are superior to the alternatives, why should we care one whit whether the cognitive processes we use are sanctioned by those evaluative concepts?’ (Stich 1988: 406). Then Stich points out that there are many common values, such as happiness or reproductive success, that are not epistemic values but can be considered relevant to our cognitive lives. Stich suggests a pragmatic approach: he makes the (epistemological? ethical?) claim that we should evaluate belief-management principles from the standpoint of these non-epistemic values. Here again theoretical science will help us to evaluate our actual belief-forming mechanisms and engineering will help us to improve upon them.