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What has emerged over the last two chapters,
is that it was an historical accident that many of the classic empiricists
should have become attached either to scepticism or to phenomenalism. It was
their anti-nativism about concepts and about the contents of experience which
led them to phenomenalism. And it was, ultimately, their anti-nativism about
concepts (particularly the concept of best explanation) which led them to
scepticism about the physical world. Yet as I argued in chapter 9, opposition
to nativism was never really an essential part of the empiricist enterprise.
What was crucial, was rather opposition to belief-acquisition processes whose
reliability cannot begin to be accounted for in natural terms. Nativism was
only rejected because a theory of natural selection had not begun to be thought
of, and because the only available account of how information or concepts might
come to be innate involved intervention by God.
It
is, then, a consequence of my position that those later empiricists, such as
Russell and Ayer, who continued to oppose nativism and to be attracted towards
scepticism or phenomenalism, only did so because they had lost touch with their
empiricist roots. They somehow became entangled in the sceptical or
phenomenalist projects of classic empiricism for their own sakes, not noticing
that those projects had only arisen within empiricism as part of a deeper
concern - the concern, namely, that claims to knowledge should be constrained
by our best naturalistic theories of the powers of the human mind, and of the
mind's modes of access to reality. (Quine, on the other hand, may be seen to
have lost touch with the project of classic empiricism in a different way.
Instead of requiring merely that epistemology should be consistent with
science, he altogether denies the distinction between them. In Quine's version
of naturalism, all that there is to epistemology is science. But this,
implausibly, just rules as out of order any attempt to question whether science
can really provide us with knowledge.) With the advent of a natural theory of
evolution, there was no longer any need for opposition to nativism. And once
certain kinds of nativism are admitted as plausible, solutions to many forms of
scepticism may drop out quite easily.
It
is also a general moral of these last two chapters that much contemporary
theory of knowledge has erred, particularly by failing to pay due attention to
the traditional question of the possible sources of human knowledge. Many have
become ensared into ever-more technical disputes concerning the concept of
knowledge, which are largely irrelevant to the epistemological task - to know
what we know. They have also tried to solve the problem of scepticism directly,
setting aside the issue of the powers and faculties of the human mind
(including the question of innateness) as of minor significance. However, if
the strategy of argument I have pursued in the final two chapters has been
correct, then this concentration of effort has been a mistake. Without
considering the general powers of the human mind we cannot hope to settle the
question of what we may know ourselves to know. And only if certain forms of
nativism are accepted, can we justify realism about our knowledge of the
physical world.
If
there is one further moral to be drawn from these chapters - as indeed from
this book as a whole - it is this. Only by returning to the historical roots of
our contemporary debates, and by reconsidering the motives which led
philosophers to line up one way or the other, have we found our way to what, in
my view, are permanent solutions to the problems of scepticism. Those who do
not study the history of philosophy may easily come to mislocate their present
position on the landscape, and thus be mistaken about the proper avenues of
escape.
The
overall conclusion of this book is as I indicated at the outset that it would
be - that empiricism is as vibrant and defensible today as it ever was. My
contemporary empiricism has been shorn of the traditional opposition to
nativism, yet without losing touch with its essentially empiricist concerns.
Indeed, there is a strong case for saying that an empiricist should now accept
the existence of innate information-bearing mental structures (particularly
relating to language and vision), as well as the innateness of at least some
concepts and some knowledge. Yet empiricism may still retain its traditional
opposition to platonism, and more generally to the idea that we can obtain
substantial knowledge by reason alone. In such cases the empiricist demand for
a natural explanation, of how our intellects can have acquired the power to
obtain for us reliable information about substantive facts independent of our
thoughts, remains in full force. Nor does an appeal to natural selection
provide a rationalist with any adequate response. The result of these changes
is that empiricism may now drop all of its historical connections with
scepticism or phenomenalism, embracing instead a form of robust realism. My
contemporary empiricist may claim (partly via their acceptance of nativism)
that we can know ourselves to know that there is a physical world, and that we
can know that we have knowledge of many facts about that world, both particular
and general.
In the end, an empiricist is what everyone
should be.