Philosophical Review

Epistemology and Cognition by Alvin I. GoldmanReview by: Gary HatfieldThe Philosophical Review, Vol. 98, No. 3 (Jul., 1989), pp. 386-390Published by: Duke University Press on behalf of Philosophical ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2185025 .

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BOOK REVIEWS

of language criticized in the long argument summarized in PI, ? 201, nor in the hypothesis of the completely detached sensation-language formu- lated in ? 243. Those look like his two points of certainty and they must be shown to be compatible with a more relaxed attitude to the Romulus case than Kripke or Malcolm envisage.

DAVID PEARS

Christ Church, Oxford

The Philosophical Review, Vol. XCVIII, No. 3 (July 1989)

EPISTEMOLOGY AND COGNITION. By ALVIN I. GOLDMAN. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1986. Pp. viii, 437. $27.50.

In this impressive volume, Goldman aims to reform epistemology first by showing the propriety of a reliabilist conception of epistemic evalua- tion, and then by arguing that given this conception, psychology and cog- nitive science are essential to the enterprise of epistemology (or "epi- stemics," as Goldman labels his reformed version of the discipline). In addition, he defends a realist conception of truth, arguing that such a conception is to be preferred to an anti-realist notion of truth as "war- ranted assent" because it provides an objective standard for assessing epi- stemic reliability.

The central feature of Goldman's revamping of epistemology is his re- conception of the object of epistemic evaluation. Traditional epistemology evaluates claims to knowledge; it has sought the conditions under which a belief counts as knowledge, and has found these conditions in the knower's evidence (or perhaps reasons) for a particular claim. Psycholog- ical processes occurring in the knower have not been deemed relevant to such evaluations, because they have not been taken to affect the warrant for a claim. Goldman wishes to displace the primary locus of evaluation from claims to know to processes of belief formation. Although ultimately he would include among the objects to be evaluated institutional struc- tures that guide the production of beliefs, the present book focuses on belief processes in individual knowers. It thus shifts the target of epistemic evaluation from claims themselves to the psychology of claim-makers; as a result, psychology and cognitive science are given the crucial role of iden- tifying the processes that will be evaluated (pp. 7, 53, 57). Psychology will not replace epistemology, however, for it remains within the province of the latter to decide, as does Goldman in his book, that psychological pro- cesses are proper objects of epistemic evaluation and to determine how they should be evaluated.

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Goldman's proposed reconception of the object of epistemic evaluation gains prima facie plausibility through his comparison of the evaluation of the knower's processes of belief formation with the calibration of an in- strument or an adjudicator (pp. 4, 43-44, 113-116). Just as the scientist considers the causal characteristics of an instrument to be crucial to its trustworthiness as a measuring device, so too should the epistemologist regard the basic cognitive mechanisms of the knower. If it could be shown that the processes which give rise to beliefs are inherently reliable (or faulty), it would follow that the beliefs so produced are good candidates for knowledge (or false belief). The approach is not an attempt to develop a "logic of discovery," but a proposal for a quality control check of one's cognitive equipment. (Goldman proposes that "speed" and "power" be checked in addition to reliability, but his discussion is for the most part restricted to the latter.)

Two objections detract from this prima facie plausibility. First, it is un- likely that we can in fact determine the general reliability of the knower's psychological processes. According to Goldman's analysis, the basic object of assessment will be the knower's "native cognitive architecture," because it is by virtue of innate mechanisms that both initial beliefs and methods for attaining additional knowledge-the sorts of methods that traditional epistemology evaluates-are acquired. But, he argues, the justification of learned methods depends upon the reliability of the mechanisms by which they are acquired and maintained (pp. 5, 51-53, 92-93). This argument is open to question. Consider a case in which a child learns the multiplica- tion tables because he fears punishment if he fails. Is the basic process- type "learning motivated by the desire to avoid punishment" epistemically reliable? Will it lead to a high ratio of true beliefs? The answer to these questions depends upon the characteristics of the punisher. In a suffi- ciently powerful autocracy, masses of children could be inculcated with false beliefs through fear of punishment, resulting in a low reliability mea- sure for this basic learning mechanism. But even though a process-type is unreliable, it nonetheless may serve in the acquisition of knowledge. In the imagined circumstances, if a child were to learn accurate multiplica- tion tables and to learn how to tell they are accurate, she would know her tables. The general reliability of the learning process seems irrelevant; intuitively, it is sufficient that she can show her tables to be accurate. Goldman might counter by arguing that my example fails to acknowledge his contention that only the narrowest causally operative process-type should be evaluated (for example, just the instance of the process that led to successful learning); but I find his criterion for narrowness problem- atic, for in his example he uses reliability itself as a criterion, without showing that this division of process-types conforms to the process- typology of psychology (pp. 50-51). Or perhaps Goldman would counter

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by contending that the child's "understanding" of her tables must arise from "a suitable cognitive process"-as he claims in the case of the ability to "understand" the relation between theory and evidence (p. 90)-which process could then serve as the object of evaluation. But no one has yet seriously proposed a cognitive model of "understanding." In general, al- though Goldman provides examples in which use of an "approved" method is not sufficient for knowledge owing to defects in the learning situation (for example, pp. 91-93), he does not show that the reliability of the learning process constitutes a necessary condition for knowledge ac- quired by means of a reliable method.

The problem of assessing the reliability of native cognitive mechanisms becomes general when one considers the disanalogy between conditions for evaluating the cognitive mechanisms of humans and other animals. The native cognitive equipment of other animals is tested against their ecologically normal circumstances, but for humans it is not clear what the "normal" environment would be. The failure to take this problem into account plagues Part II of Goldman's book, in which he seeks to assess various cognitive mechanisms, from perception and memory to "belief updating" and "production systems." (Such assessments are admittedly provisional, but this fact doesn't affect the present point.) There is much that is valuable in this part, such as Goldman's use of contemporary psy- chological theory to counter previous claims that perception is unreliable, at least in scientific contexts, because it is inherently "theory laden" (pp. 189-191). But although he successfully removes this blanket objection to perceptual reliability, he is unable to provide his own general assessment. Goldman focuses on the reliability of perceptual judgments such as those involved in the recognition of objects (p. 185). Granting his main point that "top-down" influences in perception need not lead to unreliability, the problem of measuring perceptual reliability, given the essential role background beliefs must play in object recognition, remains. It is arguably the case that for humans, assessing the body of beliefs one brings to a perceptual judgment may require assessing one's entire "conceptual scheme." Even if such schemes could be assigned reliability values, it is doubtful that the processes by which they are acquired can be assigned determinate values, given the wide variety of conceptual schemes dif- fering in their veritistic qualities (by Goldman's realist standards) that have in fact been acquired through these processes. Indeed, owing to this va- riety, it looks as if Goldman's "primary epistemics" must render a negative assessment of human psychology. For in the end, Goldman's project must depend upon assessing the general reliability of the "native belief acquisi- tion process," and if we take all members of the human species in histor- ical time as instantiators of the same native psychology, Goldman's realist standard would yield a generally negative assessment. (Even the unlikely

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BOOK REVIEWS

supposition that native human psychology changed, say, at the time of the scientific revolution would not alter this assessment.) It seems more rea- sonable to evaluate knowers by the methods they use, which shifts the burden of epistemics to "secondary epistemics"-the assessment of various learned methods for attaining knowledge. But this is just the sub- ject matter of traditional epistemology and does not in itself require es- sential appeal to psychology or cognitive science.

A second objection to Goldman's calibration analogy is that the analogy itself breaks down when applied to the knower at the required level of generality. A scientific instrument is calibrated against a standard that has been determined independently of the instrument being calibrated. Against what standard can the knower be calibrated, when the knower itself (or the knower's putative knowledge) is both object and standard of calibration? Goldman attempts to answer questions like this by arguing that "on the proposed version of realism we can know of the world that a particular representation fits it" (p. 154). His argument consists of sup- posing (a) "that the world is such that the proposition 'There is a tree before me' fits it, that is, is true" and (b) "that the perceptual process is a reliable one." From these suppositions, Goldman says, it follows "ac- cording to my account of knowledge" that (c) "I may indeed know that there is a tree before me" (ibid.). But it is worth looking into the features of Goldman's account of knowledge that permit this conclusion. (I here pick out the relevant features from a quite articulated discussion illus- trated with numerous examples.) Adopting a strategy employed by many contemporary epistemologists, Goldman contends that we needn't know that conditions such as (a) and (b) obtain in order to know the conclusion (c), on pain of a regress of needing to know that we know (p. 56); it is enough that the conditions obtain, and that none of our beliefs under- mine our knowledge (as would a belief that the conditions do not obtain, pp. 62-63). But the permissibility of simply supposing that (a) is the case depends on Goldman's having previously ruled out the possibility that the world might not be such as to fit our representations, which he does by restricting the testing of reliability to "normal worlds," which are "worlds consistent with our general beliefs about the actual world" (p. 107); and the legitimacy of his simply supposing (b) depends on his having ruled out the possibility that the perceptual process is wildly unreliable, as envisioned in brain-in-the-vat skepticism, by contending that such a scenario fails to provide a "relevant" alternative to perceptual reliability (where "rele- vance" is left unanalyzed, p. 55). In the absence of further argument, these moves beg the question regarding realism.

Even though, in my judgment, the book fails to establish its thesis re- garding the need for and the possibility of assessing basic cognitive pro- cesses for reliability, its author is to be commended for the force with

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which he raises the question of the relevance of psychology to epistemo- logy. If Goldman has not established this relevance, he has at least taken the discussion beyond the hand-waving dismissal of the possibility that psychology conditions epistemology characteristic of too many earlier dis- cussions. If his book serves to renew interest in, and to boost the level of analysis of, the relation of epistemology and psychology, it will have made a valuable contribution to the literature.

GARY HATFIELD

University of Pennsylvania

The Philosophical Review, Vol. XCVIII, No. 3 (July 1989)

BRENTANO AND INTRINSIC VALUE. By RODERICK M. CHISHOLM. New York, N.Y., Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. xiii, 105. $24.95 cloth; $10.95 paper.

This book appears in Cambridge's Modern European Philosophy Series, the purpose of which is "to help to make contemporary European philosophy intelligible to a wider audience in the English-speaking world, and to suggest its interest and importance, in particular to those trained in analytic philosophy" (p. ix). If I may take myself as a paradigm of the intended audience, the book does not wholly achieve its stated purpose, for I did not find myself inspired to read Brentano's work on intrinsic value (though I did read some out of a sense of duty). Those who already have an interest in Brentano or Chisholm may be more enthusiastic about the book.

Brentano has two distinctive views relevant to intrinsic value: first, emo- tions are analogous to beliefs in that they can be objectively evaluated as correct or incorrect. And second, the evaluation of emotions is logically prior to the evaluation of states of affairs: a state of affairs has positive (or negative) intrinsic value just in case it is correct to love (or hate) it as an end. From these views it follows that meta-ethics begins with phenome- nology, yet intrinsic value is objective.

Chisholm's presentation of these views is very gradual and careful. He manages to keep some initially implausible ideas from seeming entirely implausible, and to make others seem quite plausible. Yet his style of pre- sentation does little to kindle enthusiasm. The reader is deluged with over two dozen definitions, several classifications, and a dozen principles in this short book. Footnotes present many quotations in the original German, and all references are supplemented with German editions.

In the course of presenting the apparatus of Brentano's account of in-

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