Abstract
There is a line of reasoning in metaepistemology that is congenial to naturalism and hard to resist, yet ultimately misguided: that knowledge might be a natural kind, and that this would undermine the use of conceptual analysis in the theory of knowledge. In this paper, I first bring out various problems with Hilary Kornblith’s argument from the causal–explanatory indispensability of knowledge to the natural kindhood of knowledge. I then criticize the argument from the natural kindhood of knowledge against the method of conceptual analysis in the theory of knowledge. A natural motivation for this argument is the following seemingly plausible principle: if knowledge is a natural kind, then the concept of knowledge is a natural kind concept. Since this principle lacks adequate support, the crucial semantic claim that the concept of knowledge is a natural kind concept must be defended in some more direct way. However, there are two striking epistemic disanalogies between the concept of knowledge and paradigmatic natural kind concepts that militate against this semantic claim. Conceptual analyses of knowledge are not affected by total error, and the proponents of such analyses are not subject to a priori conceptual obliviousness. I conclude that the argument from natural kindhood does not succeed in undermining the use of conceptual analysis in the theory of knowledge.
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Notes
Other proponents of naturalized epistemology tend to concur. For example, Victor Kumar claims: “If knowledge is a natural kind, then the satisfaction conditions for ‘knowledge’ cannot be discovered through armchair reflection of the sort that is characteristic of traditional conceptual analysis.” (Kumar 2014, p. 442).
I follow the usual convention of indicating reference to concepts with small caps.
This qualification is supposed to rule out circular or irrelevant necessary conditions, such as the condition of being self-identical or being such that 2 \(+\) 2 \(=\) 4. In fact, I think that an adequate account of philosophical analysis requires a more substantial and specific condition than the fairly vague requirement of being illuminating (cf. Horvath, manuscript). But for our present purposes, this condition should work reasonably well.
For example, in his An Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology Matthias Steup writes: “For an analysis to be correct, the analysans must specify conditions that are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the analysandum. [...] For an analysis to be successful, it must be illuminating [...]” (Steup 1996, pp. 27–28).
Why this hedged formulation? Because the connection between a philosophical analysis and the essence of the relevant property or kind is less straightforward than is commonly assumed (cf. Horvath, manuscript). In particular, the nature of this link depends on one’s general metaphysical commitments concerning the metaphysics of properties and essences. For example, if one takes properties to be mere sets of possibilia (cf. Lewis 1986, Chap. 1.5), then all necessarily co-instantiated properties will be identical, and thus a necessary biconditional that states necessary and sufficient conditions for X will effectively just tell us that a certain property X—which can be expressed in at least two different ways—is necessarily self-co-instantiated. However, such general truths about properties arguably do not belong to the essence of any particular property, and thus the necessary biconditional in question would not reveal the specific nature of the property of being X (cf. Fine 1995). In this case, an analysis of X would be more like an informative identity claim, such as ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, than like a claim about the essence of being X—because being the set of all possible Xs might already exhaust the latter.
I use the terms ‘essence’ and ‘nature’ interchangeably in this paper.
I indicate reference to properties or kinds with italics, and I will mostly gloss over the difference, if any, between properties and kinds (unless explicitly noted otherwise).
One might object that conceptual analysis could also pursue the weaker goal of providing a cluster analysis, e.g., in the sense of Searle (1969, Chap. 7), which would seem to be compatible with the homeostatic cluster account of natural kinds (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue). The basic idea is that something only needs to satisfy sufficiently many (but not all) of the analyzing features that a cluster analysis of some category K specifies in order to qualify as an instance of K. From a methodological point of view, however, this can only be seen as a highly revisionary proposal, at least with respect to the category of knowledge—it certainly does not reflect how most epistemologists conceive of their own attempts at analyzing knowledge.
In fact, Kornblith explicitly endorses the basic contours of the Putnam–Kripke conception of natural kinds and natural kind concepts (Kornblith 2002, pp. 12–13, fn. 17 & 18).
Note that the converse argument from ‘knowledge is a natural kind concept’ to ‘knowledge is a natural kind’ clearly fails, because a natural kind concept may fail to pick out any kind at all, as in the case of phlogiston, or it may pick out a disjunctive, non-natural kind, as in the case of jade. One might object that it is not clear what exactly makes phlogiston or jade a natural kind concept in the first place, given that they actually fail to pick out a natural kind (thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue). First, of course, what makes them natural kind concepts is the fact that they are equally nondescriptive as paradigmatic natural kind concepts, such as mass or gold. But since nondescriptiveness is not sufficient for being a natural kind concept—given that one can even refer to a non-natural kind like bachelorhood with a nondescriptive concept (see below in the main text)—there must be some further reason why it is legitimate to regard phlogiston and jade as natural kind concepts. A plausible suggestion would be that the way the concepts phlogiston and jade were introduced is completely analogous to the way certain paradigmatic natural kind concepts were introduced, and this, together with their nondescriptiveness, suffices to regard them as natural kind concepts. With some amount of idealization, we can say that, for example, the concept phlogiston was introduced to refer to a certain natural phenomenon that was (incorrectly) thought to play a particular theoretical role in chemistry—just like the concept mass was introduced to refer to a certain natural phenomenon that was (correctly) thought to play a particular theoretical role in physics. And again with some amount of idealization, we can say that the concept jade was introduced by ostension to particular instances of jade, with the (unsuccessful) intention of referring to that kind of stuff or natural kind (depending on the conceptual sophistication of those who introduced the concept)—just like the concept gold was introduced by ostension to particular instances of gold, with the (successful) intention of referring to that kind of stuff or natural kind (see also Soames 2007).
According to some accounts of natural kind concepts, they must at least have a minimal descriptive core in order to solve the so-called ‘qua-problem’ (see, e.g., Devitt and Sterelny 1999). For example, one might try to fix the reference of the concept tiger to the natural kind tiger by ostension to actual tigers, which is one important way to fix the reference of natural kind concepts. But then it may still be indeterminate whether tiger refers to tigers, animals, living beings, or material objects. For this reason, natural kind concepts may need a certain minimum of descriptive features in their content, such as being an animal. As a consequence, one may come to know certain trivial facts about tigers merely on the basis of analyzing the concept tiger, e.g., that tigers are animals. This is still a far cry from illuminating necessary and sufficient conditions for being a tiger, however.
Natural kind concepts are also standardly regarded as rigid designators (cf. Kripke 1980), i.e., as concepts that have the same referent in all possible worlds (where they have a referent at all). However, it is an open question whether the notion of rigidity—which was primarily developed for singular terms—can also be extended to general terms or general concepts, like water, gold, or bachelor (cf. Besson 2010; Schwartz 1980, 2002; Soames 2002, Chap. 9). For example, if one identifies the reference of general concepts with their extension, then the reference of most natural kind concepts will clearly not be the same in all relevant possible worlds. There surely could have been, e.g., more or less water or gold than there actually is, so the extension of water and gold changes across possible worlds. What if one identifies the reference of general concepts with the relevant property or kind instead, e.g., with the property of being gold in case of the concept gold? This assigns a reference to gold that does indeed remain constant across all relevant possible worlds. But the same holds for general concepts that are clearly not natural kind concepts. For example, if the concept bachelor has the property of being a bachelor as its referent, then it surely refers to that property in all possible worlds where it has a referent at all—for, which other property should it refer to if not to the property being a bachelor? For these reasons, I put the issue of rigidity aside in this paper. The whole work in an argument against conceptual analysis is done by the nondescriptiveness of natural kind concepts anyway.
It should be noted, however, that the natural kindhood of biological species is a highly controversial issue in contemporary philosophy of biology (cf. Bird and Tobin 2015, Sect. 2.1). In particular, it is not clear whether the nature of biological species can be understood in terms of their intrinsic, microstructural properties—or whether it must instead be understood in extrinsic, relational terms (cf. Okasha 2002; LaPorte 2004).
For the multiple realizability of knowledge it does not matter whether knowledge is a composite state that consists of a belief that satisfies various further conditions, such as justification or truth—which is the orthodox view in epistemology (cf. Nagel 2013)—, or whether knowledge is a distinctive mental state in its own right (cf. Williamson 1995, 2000; Nagel 2013).
Thanks to Brendan Balcerak Jackson for discussion.
We are only considering a special science explanation here, of course, just as Kornblith does in the case of knowledge and cognitive ethology.
Thanks to Kirk Michaelian for pressing this point.
A proposed analysis \(\hbox {A}_{\mathrm{p}}\) of K is subject to total error iff none of the analyzing features that figure in \(\hbox {A}_{\mathrm{p}}\) also figure in the correct analysis \(\hbox {A}_{\mathrm{c}}\) of K.
A thinker T is subject to a priori conceptual obliviousness with respect to the correct analysis \(\hbox {A}_\mathrm{c}\) of K iff T possesses none (or almost none) of the concepts \(\hbox {C}_\mathrm{1}\), ..., \(\hbox {C}_\mathrm{n}\) that are needed for grasping the analyzing features that figure in \(\hbox {A}_\mathrm{c}\), and there is no realistic way for T to acquire \(\hbox {C}_\mathrm{1}\), ..., \(\hbox {C}_\mathrm{n}\) solely through further a priori theorizing.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank Brendan Balcerak Jackson, Thomas Grundmann, Frank Hofmann, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa, Stan Husi, Jens Kipper, Hilary Kornblith, Kirk Michaelian, Wolfgang Schwarz, Anand Vaidya, and various anonymous reviewers for numerous helpful comments on this paper and its non-identical predecessors. The paper originated from a critical comment on Hilary Kornblith’s work at the 2nd Cologne Summer School in Philosophy in August 2007 at the University of Cologne. Special thanks to Hilary for extensive discussion and plenty of encouragement. I also want to thank the participants of Hilary’s doctoral colloquium at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in March 2008—Kristoffer Ahlstrom-Vij, Jeremy Cushing, Jeff Dunn, Meghan Masto, Alex Sarch, Kirk Michaelian, Indrani Bhattacharjee, and Hilary Kornblith—for their generous engagement with my paper and very valuable comments. Thanks also to Brendan Balcerak Jackson, Magdalena Balcerak Jackson, Alma Barner and Wolfgang Schwarz for their very helpful comments in a reading group session of the Emmy Noether Independent Junior Research Group Understanding and the A Priori in June 2009, which was kindly hosted by the University of Cologne and generously supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft DFG (German Research Foundation). Additional thanks to the DFG for supporting my research on this paper as part of the project Eine Verteidigung der Begriffsanalyse gegen die Herausforderungen des Naturalismus (A Defense of Conceptual Analysis against the Challenges from Naturalism), which was kindly hosted by the University of Cologne from 2007 to 2010 (under the auspices of Thomas Grundmann).
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Horvath, J. Conceptual analysis and natural kinds: the case of knowledge. Synthese 193, 167–184 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0751-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0751-z