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To cite this article: PHILIP KITCHER (1993) Knowledge, Society, and History, Canadian
Journal of Philosophy, 23:2, 155-177
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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 155
Volume 23, Number 2, June 1993, pp. 155- 178
Knowledge, Society,
and History1
PHILIP KITCHER
University of California/San Diego
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La Jolla, CA 92093
USA
1 The first version of this paper was written at the invitation of the Program
Committee for the Western Canadian Philosophical Association, and presented at
the Fall1991 Meeting of the Association. I am grateful to members of that audience
and to subsequent audiences at Queen's University (Kingston), the Southern
California Philosophy of Science Group, the University of Pittsburgh, the University
of Illinois (Urbana), and Harvard University, for their help in the paper's evolution.
I also want to thank an anonymous referee for CJP for an extremely penetrating
discussion. Many of the comments, questions, and criticisms that I have received
will be taken up in future work.
156 Philip Kitcher
ics, etc.) and the set of propositions recording the sensory experi-
ences of the knower.
II
runs as follows:
latter processes involve inferences from yet other beliefs, then, by the
same token, those more fundamental beliefs must, in their turn, be
generated by processes of types that regularly generate true beliefs.
Ultimately, there must be basic beliefs, produced by reliable processes
that do not involve inferences from prior beliefs.3 Among the more
plausible candidates for such beliefs are our opinions about the objects
we perceive. 4 Or, perhaps, there are beliefs that we acquire as a simple
matter of normal development, independently of the stimuli that im-
pinge upon us, and perhaps these ontogenetic mechanisms are them-
selves reliable. 5
How should we relate this picture of our knower to the lives that
people lead, the experiences they have, and the knowledge they acquire?
There are two obvious possibilities. According to the first, the order of
3 Although these beliefs are causally basic, they do not have the status traditionally
associated with foundational beliefs, of beingjustificationally basic: whether they are
justified depends on other facets of the subject's belief system. In other words, the
explanation of why they are there does not involve reference to other beliefs, but
the explanation of why they are justified does. This point was pioneered in several
important papers of Wilfrid Sellars, particularly in 'Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind' (reprinted as Ch. 3 of Science, Perception, and Reality [London: Routledge
1963]). However, as the referee for this paper pointed out, my reliabilistic develop-
ment of this point differs in important respects from Sellars's articulation of it. My
approach is closer to that offered by Komblith in 'Beyond Foundationalism and the
Coherence Theory.'
4 Although, on many accounts of perception, our beliefs about ordinary objects result
from complex psychological processes involving inferences from unconscious be-
liefs. See, for example, the account offered by David Marrin Vision (San Francisco:
Freeman 1982).
5 Here I have in mind the kinds of views about language acquisition developed by
Noam Chomsky in Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972),
and other writings.
Knowledge, Society, and History 159
6 For discussion of this example, and a brief survey of the relevant historical material,
see my 'Theories, Theorists, and Theoretical Change,' Philosophical Review 87 (1978)
519-47.
7 It might be better to say that a conditionally reliable process has failed to be reliable:
Priestley has engaged in a process that has a good chance of generating true belief
if the background to which it is applied was itself reliably generated. I am grateful
to the referee who has convinced me that this approach to the reliability of belief-
generating processes needs more detailed discussion than I can give it here.
160 Philip Kitcher
For any Sand any p, such that S correctly believes that p, whether
S knows that p depends not simply on the psychological processes
undergone by S but on the activities of a chain of others, extending
from those who have taught S into both the contemporary and
ancestral communities.
8 See the closing sentences of 'Camap and Logical Truth' in The Ways of Paradox
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1976).
Knowledge, Society, and History 161
III
9 Problems about the proper form of an epistemic society have recently been dis-
cussed by several authors. See, for example, Alvin Goldman, 'Foundations of Social
Epistemics,' Synthese 73 (1987) 109-44; Nicholas Rescher, Cognitive Economy (Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1989); and David Hull, Science as a Process
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990). I discuss the specific problems noted
in the text in 'The Division of Cognitive Labor; Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990) 5-23,
'Authority, Deference, and the Role of Individual Reason,' in Eman McMullin, ed.,
The Social Dimension of Scientific Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press 1992) 244-71, and, most systematically, in the final chapter of The Advancement
of Science (New York: Oxford University Press 1993).
162 Philip Kitcher
There is not simply one lineage that leads from the distant past to
the present, but many. To claim that one among these lineages (the
one that runs through the high points of Western science) generates
true beliefs and the others error would require providing a clear
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criterion for the superiority of that lineage. But this cannot be done
either in terms of the process or the product. What we take to be
the bizarre beliefs and practices of other societies serve the mem-
bers of those societies well in their interactions with nature. Nor
can we suppose that the kinds of processes and community delib-
erations that occurred in the lineages leading to alternative socie-
ties were inferior to those that marked the development of Western
science. The conviction that our beliefs, but not theirs, match reality
thus rests on an unjustified prejudice. 11
11 The clearest versions of this line of reasoning emerge in the writings of some
contemporary sociologists of knowledge, who have been much influenced by the
anthropological work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, and by the studies of
Mary Douglas. See, in particular, David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Lon-
don: Routledge 1976; Chicago: University of Chicago 1991 (2nd ed.]), and many of
the essays collected in Martin Hollis and Stephen Lukes, eds., Rationality and
Relativism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1982).
Knowledge, Society, and History 163
The history of science also reveals that the standards that are used
in assessing candidate beliefs, and consequently the inferences that
are performed in generating and sustaining belief, are themselves
variable through the course of inquiry. These standards are modi-
fied in response to the differing needs of members of communities
(where these needs are not necessarily epistemic) and they are
jointly constitutive of the ways in which members of the commu-
nity conceive of reality and of the ways in which they order their
social relations. Because those standards are inculcated in the
process of socialization into the community, each of us tacitly
adopts them in our reasoning, and it is thus hopeless to think that
the complex reasoning processes in which people undoubtedly
engage can somehow provide an independent corrective to the
contingent decisions that have been made in the past. 13
12 This is the 'pessimistic induction on the history of science' (or what Hilary Putnam
calls 'the disastrous meta-induction' in Meaning and the Moral Sciences [London:
Routledge 1978), 25). The challenge to convergence is very clear in Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Sharp formulations of the argument have been
offered by Larry Laudan, Science and Values (Berkeley, CA: The University of
California Press 1984), Ch. 5; and Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press 1986), Ch. 7.
13 This argument has its roots in an interpretation of the later work of Wittgenstein,
and in sociological reflections on the writings of Mary Douglas (in particular Purity
and Danger [London: Routledge 1966]). For developed versions, see Bloor, Knowledge
and Social Imagery, and especially Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and
the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985).
164 Philip Kitcher
IV
Let us begin with the argument from the inaccessibility of reality. This
begins with the sensible observation that we can never have 'out of
theory experiences' in which we ascend to some point from which we
can compare the claims that we make against reality to see if they match
up. Does that observation doom the traditional epistemologist's talk of
truth?
This question generates an important crux in contemporary philoso-
phy. There seem to be three generic options. One, accepted by those who
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14 The original version of the pragmatist conception is due to C.S. Peirce, and is
developed in some detail by Wilfrid Sellars in Science and Metaphysics (London:
Routledge 1967), Ch. 5; the account in terms of ideally situated knowers is proposed
by Hilary Putnam (see Reason, Truth, and History [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press 1981), 55-6, for a particularly crisp formulation, and numerous passages
in Meaning and the Moral Sciences, and other subsequent writings).
15 For careful elaborations of accounts of truth along these lines, see Dorothy Grover,
Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap, 'A Prosentential Theory of Truth,' Philosophical
Studies 27 (1975) 73-125, and Paul Horwich, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell1990). As Fine
(The Shaky Game, Ch. 7 and 8) makes very clear, his 'natural ontological attitude'
amounts to using a 'no-theory' of truth to counter skeptical and relativistic objec-
tions to claims about scientific knowledge.
Knowledge, Society, and History 165
16 Putnam (Reason, Truth, and History) is sensitive to the worry that his account may
seem to 'explain a clear notion with a vague one' (56). But the root of the trouble is
not vagueness. Rather it is the difficulty of understanding what we could mean by
hailing a process as justificatory or as ideally justificatory independently of its
propensity to deliver truth. The problem may be approached in another way by
reflecting on Michael Dummett's preferred account of mathematical truth in terms
of proof. What singles out certain patterns as proof procedures? What gives them
their special status? We are, I think, bound to ask these questions, and, once the
explication of truth in terms of proof has been adopted, we are deprived of resources
for answering them. (See Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas [Oxford: Oxford
University Press 1978], and my The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge, 143.)
166 Philip Kitcher
17 Fine has considerable fun with the idea of the 'desk-thumping, foot-stamping shout'
that insists on the idea that the objects of commonsense and natural science REALLY
exist (The Shaky Game, 129). Putnam attributes to his opponents appropriate distri-
butions of capital letters (see 'Realism and Reason; 123-40). Of course, it is incum-
bent on defenders of correspondence truth to do better than stamp their feet and
sprinkle capital letters, and I shall try to show below how we can make some
headway in articulating the intuitive feeling that something important is lost both
in NOA and in Putnam's internal realism.
Knowledge, Society, and History 167
18 I use the example of pictorial representations because it makes very immediate the
idea of a relation of correspondence between representation and reality. However,
it should not be thought that such representations have a special status because they
lack the conventional characteristics of linguistic representations. To cite one impor-
tant example, the collinearity of stations on the map of the London Underground
does not correspond to the collinearity of the actual stations. (Despite this, the map
has been used with enormous success by millions of people, and is, subject to its
conventions, absolutely exact!) Thus I dissent in several ways from Paul Horwich's
attempt to show that a deflationary account of truth can accommodate the 'corre-
spondence intuition' (see his Truth, 115-17).
19 This is very clear in the writings of Daniel Dennett (see, in particular, The Intentional
Stance [Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books 1987]), but the fundamental conception
goes back at least to Wilfrid Sellars's seminal essay 'Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind' (Ch. 5 of Science, Perception, and Reality [London: Routledge 1963)).
20 The point here is akin to one that is familiar from discussions of explanation and
168 Philip Kitcher
account could be given for each- or for all- of us. Just as we regard
our subjects as forming their beliefs through complex processes, fre-
quently involving interactions with independent objects (objects inde-
pendent of them), so too, we are to regard our own beliefs as the joint
product of interactions with a world of mind-independent objects (ob-
jects that are independent of all minds), of the character of the perceptual
and cognitive apparatus that is put to work in those interactions, and of
the socially shaped systems of belief and commitment that we bring to
the interactions. Just as the correspondence between representation and
reality is manifested in the pattern of successes of our subjects, so too our
own successes are to be viewed as stemming from the correspondence
of the underlying representations to a mind~independent nature.
Realism, I suggest, should be thought of as the position that makes this
analogical move. 21 In making the analogy, we do not, of course, suppose
that there is some entity that looks down on all of us in the way that we
23 Realists are often accused of having failed to understand the achievements and the
problems of Kant's epistemology. Realism's WORLD is thus made to seem
noumenal in the least charitable interpretation of that term. But if we keep our gaze
firmly on the analogical move to realism, this interpretation cannot be sustained.
170 Philip Kitcher
v
One of the important achievements of twentieth-century genetics, rou-
tine enough to be assigned to a scientific underdass, is the ability to
manufacture organisms that will express chosen characteristics: fruitflies
that will have a particular bristle-number or that will engage in a certain
mating behavior, bacteria that will grow on a selected medium or that
will produce some desirable substance (such as insulin). Design of these
organisms is based on claims about the organization of genes in the
Knowledge, Society, and History 171
any claims entertained by human beings have this property, and, more
specifically, what is the basis of the success in the particular instances
we espouse. Selectionist explanations do not merely observe that certain
entities survive the winnowing, but identify the characteristics of those
entities that have contributed to their survival. So, to take my example,
we need an account of contemporary biological successes in the manu-
facture of organisms with antecedently specified traits.
Focusing on a particular family of instances also avoids the charge that
science has somehow been set an overly grandiose project. Instead of
casting the task as one of science explaining its own success, we can
frame a more reasonable endeavor by asking how it is that a particular
group of people (twentieth century geneticists) operating with a specifi-
able collection of principles (the lore of twentieth century genetics) is able
systematically to intervene in nature in specific ways (manufacturing a
host of organisms). The 'miracle' argument should be viewed as de-
manding an explanation of the connection between the representational
states that are causally efficacious in their practice and the successful
outcome of that practice, and as offering, in response, the claim that those
representational states accurately represent that part of nature with
which they are concerned.
At this point, we encounter the Argument from Cultural Variation.
Construing the 'miracle' argument as a collection of naturalistic obser-
vations about people's states and practical successes may avoid accusa-
tions of setting impossible tasks or overlooking the possibility of a
selectionist explanation, but it is vulnerable to rebuttal from naturalistic
observations of the successes of others who hold beliefs incompatible
with those for whose truth we are trying to argue. We cannot claim that
24 For an extremely lucid formulation of these points, see Bas van Fraassen, The
Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980), 39-40.
172 Philip Kitcher
(B) claim that the beliefs of the others are not incompatible with the
beliefs involved in explanations of our successes
(C) claim that the explanation of the successes of the others involves
beliefs that are not incompatible with the beliefs involved in the
explanation of our own successes.
I shall now outline how these strategies might be invoked in coping with
a favored example.
Famously, the Karam believe that the cassowary is not a bird. Casso-
waries do not fly, and so do not fall under the classification Yakt that
covers most of the things we mark out as birds. 25 What does this show
about the truth of our beliefs about birds?
Appealing to (A}, one might suggest that the Karam differ from us in
the success of practices based on states that are about birds and other
flying things. No doubt they are able to do all kinds of classificatory jobs,
but they lack the sophisticated abilities to make inferences about ana-
tomical, physiological, and molecular relationships that are supplied
within a taxonomy based on the appreciation of evolutionary relation-
ships.26 Appealing to (B), one could point out that the Karam agree with
us in a vast host of beliefs about birds: cassowaries are like parrots,
25 For use of this example, see Barry Barnes and David Bloor, 'Relativism, Rationalism,
and the Sociology of Knowledge,' in M. Hollis and S. Lukes, eds., Rationality and
Relativism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1982) 21-47, esp. 38 ff. Barnes and Bloor rely
on R. Bulmer, 'Why is the Cassowary not a Bird?' (Man, new series 2 [1%7] 5-25).
26 Strictly speaking, realists need not claim this much. Those with nominalistic incli-
nations in systematics may want to contend for the independent existence of the
individual entities classified (the organisms) while denying that there is an objec-
tively correct way of assorting them. But most contemporary systematists would
want to go further.
Knowledge, Society, and History 173
27 The strategy I deploy here derives from the seminal work of Saul Kripke and Keith
Donnellan on reference. I discuss the case of Priestley at some length in 'Theories,
Theorists, and Theoretical Change,' and elaborate the account of Fresnel in chapter
5 of The Advancement of Science.
Knowledge, Society, and History 175
talk of the truth of current beliefs. Let me now tum to the issue of the
processes through which our beliefs have emerged. Proponents of the
argument from temporal variation are likely to insist that the processes
leading to the inculcation of belief have been modified during the history
of thought. There have been great changes in methodological standards
and in social arrangements for the production of knowledge. Is it possi-
ble to understand so varied a collection of processes as enabling contem-
porary knowers, whose knowledge, as the Socio-Historical conception
concedes, is ineluctably dependent on the past, to form reliable beliefs
about nature?
Once again, I shall attempt to provide a blueprint for answering this
type of criticism without delving into the details. According to the
version of the Socio-Historical conception that I aim to defend, as we learn
more about nature, we improve our understanding of how to learn about
nature. 28 The history of inquiry must thus be seen as doubly progressive,
advancing both in terms of substantive doctrine and in terms of methods
and procedures. How might this optimistic vision be justified?
One suggestion is that we have tacitly known, since the beginning,
how to conduct inquiry into nature. It is now fashionable in some
quarters to suppose that natural selection bequeathed to our remote
hominid ancestors an appropriate framework for framing generaliza-
tions about nature and dispositions to follow reliable rules of inference. 29
28 This is a point that has been emphasized by Dudley Shapere. See his Reason and the
Growth of Knowledge (Dordrecht: Reidel1984).
29 See, for example, W.V. Quine, 'Natural Kinds,' in Ontological Relativity and Other
Essays (New York: Columbia University Press 1970), and Nicholas Rescher, A Useful
Inheritance: Evolutionary Aspects of the Theory of Knowledge (New York: Rowman and
Allanheld 1989). A somewhat more extensive presentation of the argument of the
text is given in my 'The Naturalists Return,' esp. 101), and a full-dress version in
Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books 1990).
176 Philip Kitcher
opposition, while showing how there are live possibilities for resolving
difficulties at home. As this is done again and again, one side is reduced
to the predicament of Simplicio in Galileo' s Dialogue, vainly insisting on
the possibility of solutions that cannot yet be formulated. Traditional
confirmation theories are extremely helpful in enabling us to see how
the local skirmishes are fought. They have very little to say about how
the wars are won - and that silence has been exploited to considerable
effect by those who deploy the history of science to undermine our
confidence in the growth of knowledge. 31
Let me review the argument of this paper. Traditional conceptions of
knowledge, I claim, need amendment, and the amendment I propose is
the Socio-Historical conception of knowledge. That conception points
towards new problems, the problems of understanding the coordination
of the efforts of knowers as well as the successful performances of
individual subjects. Yet, like traditional approaches to knowledge, the
Socio-Historical conception is vulnerable to skeptical challenges, chal-
lenges all the more virulent because they can apparently be buttressed
by appeals to the history of inquiry. I have tried to indicate the ways in
which such challenges should be met, but, at this stage, there is no
substitute for the details. Because our beliefs are ineluctably dependent
on the endeavors of our predecessors, we cannot hope to understand
their epistemic status without probing the history. Can we discard the
fictions of traditional epistemology without collapsing into skepticism?
I believe that we can, but going beyond the outline of hopeful strategies
is a complex of tasks for many other occasions.
31 Once again, I only indicate the outline of a line of argument. For far more detail-
but still not enough- see Chapters 6 and 7 of The Advancement of Science.