Skip to main content
Loading Explore guides…
Philosophy Debates · Acedra
Home
Explore
Philosophy
Philosophy Debates
Sign in to save
Chat
If YouTube asks you to sign in, open the video on YouTube.
Watch on YouTube
Reload player
Transcript
18 segments
Copy
Hide video
0:06
As we now understand, philosophy is still being widely discussed and developed even as you watch this video. Now we will present some more perspectives of recent debates in epistemology, philosophy of perception, and related areas which directly interface with contemporary scientific research. Let’s begin with John McDowell, who is called a “post-analytical” thinker who developed a Wittgensteinian conception
0:30
of language and epistemology akin to Sellars, toward a non-reductive naturalism in the vein of Gadamer, where we passively experience reality but actively conceptualize it as a cultural “second nature”. Drawing on many recent pragmatists and even Hegel and Kant, though avoiding idealism, he writes on how our perception of the world interacts with intentionality and belief by breaking with the traditional foundationalist-coherentist divide
0:59
toward a foundationalism of the experience with coherentist elements, as it is inherently conceptual in warranting judgements. Another epistemological naturalist is Alvin Goldman, who developed a response to the Gettier challenge focusing on the reliability of the cognitive processes involved in belief formation. Instead of the traditional absolute normative understanding of epistemology, epistemological justification becomes secondary when we consider the connection
1:29
between one’s belief and its truthfulness, since reasons can be given but are subjugated by the fact that we either do or do not have a true belief given its cognitive reliability. Goldman generated another recent epistemological standpoint of “virtue epistemology”, developed contemporarily by Ernest Sosa. It is a normative program which focuses on agents and communities, and how given virtues or vices influence the acquisition of beliefs and the
1:58
formation of knowledge, in a manner very similar to Aristotelian virtue theory in ethics. Sosa’s version of it bears strong ties to Goldman’s reliability, being called “virtue reliabilism”, where the intellectual faculties responsible for creating a reliable, truthful belief are taken as virtues to be developed by a person in their community. Another foundationalist in epistemology and ethics, though not a naturalist,
2:25
Robert Audi defends an intuitionism of truth and moral values. Much like natural law philosophers, he focuses on rationality as an overall criterion for both, however on a revised foundationalism where its axioms are taken to be fallible and thus shift themselves to properly compose a more correct structure of beliefs about the world. This rationality, however, is variable from person to person and may generate false beliefs even in the best of conditions.
2:54
More recently, philosophy of science and feminism have intertwined in epistemological debate. Authors such as Helen Longino centered the debate about the social aspects of theories of knowledge, where an “objectivist” and/or “neutral” perspective is usually taken to underlie truth or good epistemic values, and are usually coined by a single group: white heterosexual men. Now, she doesn’t claim that women would have a special epistemic insight, but scientifically
3:22
speaking there is an inherent bias in reading and interpreting data – that’s why science values reproducibility and peer evaluation. Ignoring the power and statistical dynamics of the lack of more diverse teams means giving in to this bias, directly affecting the quality of the scientific and epistemological endeavor. Miranda Fricker develops this perspective introducing the concept of “epistemic injustice”, further bringing epistemology into an applied practice,
3:50
where this lack of population diversity in scientific testimony renders not only a poorer theory, but also an unjust one, as the epistemic agencies of minorities and others are denied and their perspectives ignored. Susan Haack, another who attempts to conciliate foundationalism and coherentism through her “foundherentism”, disagrees with the importance of feminist epistemology in favor of traditional objectiveness, claiming women’s specific
4:17
perspective has no bearing on truth. Her own conception arises as a criticism to analytic and pragmatic theories toward an understanding of the foundation of knowledge as empirical evidence, and how we interconnect and correct them as we proceed in finding truth through its coherentist aspect. As we’ve seen, naturalism has been slowly developing toward a closer dialogue with other sciences, and such is the case of Patricia and Paul Churchland since the 1970s. Both being
4:46
neuroscientists, together they developed a strongly reductionist interpretation of epistemology and theory of mind. According to them, as we progress in understanding the nervous system and how consciousness develops from it, the entire field of psychology will become obsolete as mental phenomena will inevitably be reduced to neurological activity – going so far as comparing it to the superseded physical concept of phlogiston. Antonio Damasio,
5:13
also a neuroscientist, tackled many philosophical issues in the same manner, however in a less reductionist fashion than the Churchlands, writing on a Spinoza-like world, when we consider that the world and our nervous system are part of the same continuum, against the Cartesian dualism which still has footing in academic and everyday perceptions of the mind. From this background, an entire new method of philosophical inquiry arose by the early 2000s
5:41
which has been growing rapidly. Experimental philosophy, or as it is often stylized, X-phi, attempts to deal with philosophical issues by directly discussing them with scientific evidence, or even going as far as having philosophers do empirical research toward finding data to test these ideas. Though we’ll name some individual researchers, many of them cooperate with each other in several papers, overlapping several common topics, so keep this in mind while we do
6:08
a lightning round. Joshua Knobe directly utilizes empirical research to tackle moral dilemmas and political questions, studying external factors which may influence our agency, responsibility, and freedom as to what we usually consider when dealing with these subjects. The manner in which we formulate a phrase, for example –coining the “Knobe effect”. Jonathan Haidt as well, focusing on the ethical and political sphere with “social intuitionism”, claiming that
6:36
our moral judgements are but a reflection of our physiological and cultural biases, much like a dog wags its tail when its happy: both our ethical and political positions are predominantly influenced by our gut reactions rather than our rationality, and external elements such as disgust may alter them without us knowing. Joshua Greene tackled moral dilemmas focusing more on cognitive science and neurological imaging, writing much about the neuroscientific and behavioral aspects
7:06
of what we consider morality, and also how evolution and these elements affect our life in society. Don Loeb works with the issue of moral disagreement against strong realist positions and how analyzing varied cultural evidence from all around the world provides valuable insight on how communities influence what we consider ethical. Alexandra Plakias also focuses on disagreement and extraneous factors to morality such as disgust as well as the perception and ethics of food.
7:37
Mark Alfano tackles virtue theories criticizing strong notions of character, given wide data on “situationist psychology”, where the specifics of a situation influence one’s action much more than theoretical virtues or enduring traits. Finally, Jesse Prinz studies how perception, ethics, and language can integrate with these experimental data, studying a cognitivist, realist account of morality, however attuned to one’s own moral community, thereby also being a
8:07
relativist, agreeing with Loeb and Plakias. Though philosophy has many more authors, concepts, and areas which we did not get into, we should now have an awareness of what is currently being done in philosophy today. From armchairs to laboratories, philosophers still go to extreme lengths to try and understand life, the universe, and everything else, just as they have for more than 2000 years, and they surely will continue doing so for as long as they possibly can.
Here to help you learn
Sign in to keep a private conversation with your course tutor.
Ask me anything about the material…
Sign in to chat