Epistemology is concerned with the foundations of science. Thus, the project of epistemology is to examine the grounds of particular beliefs about the world and is normally set to inspect the foundations on which empirical science is build. According to Quine, that the goal filosofical epistemology has long been trying to pursue, has had little success, and claims that it is likely to be an impossible task. Quines example is the once hi hopes for the foundation of mathematics to logic. As this project went forward, it became clear that mathematics could not be reduced to logic. Reductions in de foundation remains mathematically and philosophically fascinating, but it does not what the epistemologist would like of it: it does not reveal the grounds of mathematical knowledge, it does not show how mathematical certainty is possible. Quine divides the studies for the foundations of mathematics into two kinds: conceptual and doctrinal. The conceptual studies are concerned wicht clarifying concepts by defining them, some in the terms of others. The doctrinal studies are concerned with esthablisching laws by proving them, som on the basis of others.The same goes for epistemology, Quine claims. Hume pondered the epistemology of natural knowledge on both sides of the birfuctaion, the conceptual and the doctrinal. His handling of the conceptual side of the problem, mthe explanation of body in sensory terms, was bold and simple; he identified bodies outright with the sense impressions. If common sense distinguishes between the material apple and our sens impresiions of it on the ground that the apple is one enduring while the impressions are many and fleeting, then, Hume held, so much the worse for common sense; the notion of its being the same apple on one occasion and another is a vulgar confusion. What then on the doctrinal side, the justification of our knowledge of truths about nature? Her hume dispaird. By his indifiction of bodies with impresiions hed did succeed in construing some singular statements about bodies as indubitable thruths, yes; as truths about impressions, directly known. But general statements, also singular statements bouth the future, gained no increment of certainty by being construed as about impressions.

So Quine thinks that, on the doctrinal side, he does not see that we are farther along today than where Hume left us. The humean predicament is the human predicament.In fact, we have made progress. Kants Critique of pure reason was in fact partly a response to the human predicament. Kant, who stood in the rationalist tradition, was impressed by Humes empiricist arguments. He agreed that our knowledge of, for example, causality, cannot be based in experience. But at the same time we do have a notion causality. Humes solution was the skeptical solution: we cannot ever be sure if an apple at one point in time, is the same apple at another point in time. Sure, it is awfully likely to be so, but we dont have a fundamental certainty that it is so. Causality, in other words, no logical necessity. We cannot know causality, but we do it: causality is a step taken by the mind. Why do we do this, according to Hume? Custom of Habit is his answer. And so what Hume proposed in the realm of metaphysics, comes close to what Quine proposes in the realm of epistemology. We have knowledge, we dont know if it is unassailable true, but we have it. Thus, he proposes to settles for psychology, or human nature as Hume would have called it. Forget the search for an indubitable foundation of knowledge , lets just try to find out how this custom of habit came to be (evolutionary epistemology) and try to make sense of the step taken by the mind (psychology). So what progress did we make? Kants Copernican revolution. His project was a response to Humes skepticism. Because metaphysics did not make the progress the natural sciences and mathematics did, Kant proposed a change in thought. The basic assumption of the empiricist was that our a priori knowledge had to be founded in sense data, because this was the ultimate source of knowledge. Kant proposed, by way of experiment, to assume that sense data had to accord a priori knowledge (causality, space and time) in order to be meaningful experience. Kants Transcendental method aimed to find the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience. So what is the transcendental method and the transcendental argument that followed from it? Kant assumed experience as a given. The question he then asked was: how is experience possible? Off course, this question could be answered by way of empirical means. For example, we could argue that we have senses, and bodies which transpose data to our brains which give us our experience. But Kants task was to find the logical necessity of the necessity of experience. The true transcendental question was therefore:What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of experience?

We cannot find the necessary conditions by way of empirical science, as Hume has shown. Therefore we have to do some armchair reasoning, also known as philosophy. The question is: which traits cant we possibly dismiss in order to have experience. We can, for example, examine sight. Is sight a necessary condition for the possibility of experience? No, because also the blind have sight and they claim to have experience. And to use the Cartesian argument, we dont claim to have sight in our dreams, but we do have experience. For the same reason we do not necessarily need the existence of an external world. Space, at the contrary, must be there to have experience. Even the most abstract geometrical figure is meaningless if there is no space. Causality is also a necessary condition, otherwise we could make sense our sense data: in order to experience an apple, we must be able to think of it as the same thing through time. Otherwise we could not ever form any understanding of it. To sum up with the words of Charles Taylor, transcendental arguments:

start from some feature of our experience which they claim to be indubitable and beyond cavil. They then move to a stronger conclusion, one concerning the nature of the subject or his position in the world. They make this move by a regressive argument, to the effect that this stronger conclusion must be so if the indubitable fact about experience is to be possible (and being so, it must be possible).

If epistemology is under fire by the scepticim of Quine, we can respond with transcendental argument, in a way like Kant responded to Hume. This can be done in several ways. Cassam proposes one form of transcendental argument in the form of a how-possible question: to ask a how-possible question is to ask how something wHich looks impossible given other things that one knows or believes is nevertheless possible. In this way, Cassam moves forward claiming that how possible questions arise because of the tension between two natural assumptions, for example that we are capable of acting freely and the equally natural assumption that all actions are causally determined. And therefore, he asks the epistemological question: How is knowledge of the external world possible?We can ask this question, because we have the natural assumption that there is an external world, but we also have plausible skeptical objections. So according to Cassam. we dont aks how x is possible if there is nog perceived obstacle or no inclination to suppose that x is possible. His example: we dont ask how baseball is possible, or how round squares are possible.

I agree that we cannot ask how round squares are possible. This is simply a logical contradiction, and the basis for logic is the principle of noncontradiciton. But we can ask how baseball is possible, I claim. In fact, it is the same question as Kant put forward, namely how experience is possible. We dont need to have a perceived obstacle to suppose that baseball, or experience, is possible. The transcendental question for the possibility of basebal in line with Kants question of the possiblility of experience is:

What are the necessary conditions for the possibility of baseball?Lets examine. If we remove the audience, can we then still play baseball? Yes, it is not a necessary condition. We can also keep playing baseball if we exchange humans for robots, or digital computer models, we are still playing baseball if we play on hardcourt. But what if we would take out the ball? Baseball would be impossible, so it is a nesecarry condition. What if we, a batter, would catch the ball and score a home run?

But, as we have seen before, it is possible to answer this question empirically. My problem is that we can ask how baseball is possible.There was progress on the conceptual side. Bentham noticed that we do not need to specify an object for it to refer to. We need only show, by whatever means, how to translate all the whole sentences in which the term is to be used. Hume desperate measure of identifying bodies with impressions ceased to be the only conceivable way of making sense of talk of bodies, even granted that impressions were the only reality. One could undertake to explain talk of bodies in terms of talk of impressions by translating ones whole sentences about bodies into whole sentences about impressions, without equating the bodies themselves to anything.

Contextual definition. Or recognition of the sentene as the primary vehicle of meaning, was indispensable to te ensuing developments in the foundations of mathematics. Frege Russels doctrine of singular descriptions as incomplete symbols. Contextual definition was one of two resorts that could be expecte to have liberating effect upon the conceptual side of the epistemology of natural knowledge. The other is resort to the resource of set theory as auxiliary concepts.

Contextual definition is unassailable .sentences that have been given meaning as wholes are undeniably meaningful, and the use they make of their component terms is therefore meaningful, regardless of whether any translations ar offerd for those terms in isolation. To account for the external world as a logical construct of sense data such, in Russells terms, was the program. Carnap came close.

Doctrinal? there the Humean predicament remained unaltered. Carnaps constructions if carried succesfullyto completion, would have enabled us to translate all sentences about the world into terms of sens data, or obersvation, plus logic and set theory. But the mere fact that a sentence is couched in terms of observation, logic, and set theory does not mean that it can be proved form obersvation sentences by slogic ad set theory. Quine divides the studies for the foundations of mathematics into two kinds: conceptual and doctrinal. The conceptual studies are concerned wicht clarifying concepts by defining them, some in the terms of others. The doctrinal studies are concerned with esthablisching laws by proving them, som on the basis of others.

The most modest of generalizations about the observable traits will cover more cases than its utterer can have and occasions actuale to observe. The hopelessness of grounign natural science upon immediate experience in a firmly logical way was acknowledged. The Cartesian wuest for certainty had been the remote motivation of epistemology, both on tis conceptual and its doctrinal side; but htah quest was seen as a lost cause. To endow the truths of nature with the full authority of immediate experience was a forlorn a hope as hopin to endow the truths of mathematics with the potential obviousness of elementary logic.

Two reasons for epistemology left; clarify the sensory evidens for science, even if the inferential steps between sensory evidence and scientific doctrine must fall short of certainty. Second: such constructions would deepen our understanding of ou discourse about the wold, even apart from questions of evidence.

Impossible to strictly derive the science of the external world from sensory evidence. Two things remain:

One is that whatever evidence there is for science is sensory evidence. The other is that alls inculcation of meanings of words must rest ultimately on sensory evidence.

But carnaps rational reconstruction did not work. Any construction of physicalistic disocourse in therms of sense experience, logic, and set theory would have been as satisfactory if it made the pysicalistic discourse come out right.

Quines solution: why all this make belive. The stimulation of his sensory receptors is all evidence anybody has had to go on ultimatyle in arraving at his picture of the world =. NEE transcendental. Why not just see how this construction really prceeds, why not settle for psychology. No Circularity

No we should like to be able to translate science into logic and observation terms and set theory.the fact is, though, that the construction which carnap outlined in DLADW does not give translationial reduction either.

Same with humes causality: it cannot be grounded in sense data, but it is indespensible for experience.

Same goes for OB, it cannot be grounded in observation, logic and set theory, but it is indispensible for knowledge.

Ths plan, however illuminating, does not offer any key to translating the sentences of science into terms of observation

We must despair of any such reduction

So no rational reconstruction.

Given such a position, Quine recommends that epistemology can and should rid itself of all this creative reconstruction and make-believe (294). Quine asks, if the epistemologist is to admit that all an individual has to form his beliefs are his sensory experiences of the world then why not simply strive to understand how one moves from sensory experience to belief? That is, epistemology can simply consider itself a sub-branch of psychology

The goal of epistemology would be straightforward: a subject has a stimulation of his sensory receptors; the subject, from this sensory input, then forms a belief about the external world; the epistemologist would examine this causal relationship between the subjects experience and his belief. Quine admits that this transition in epistemological aims appears circular. If the goal of epistemology is to find a grounds for which one can be said to know that p from empirical evidence and thus reveal grounds for all empirical sciences then the epistemologist should not be able to use psychology, or any other empirical science for that matter, as a tool in his investigations. Quine, however, refutes any crime or wrong-doing in such circularity. Rather, he holds that this circularity does not pose a problem given that epistemology is to give up on any hopes of deducing science from sensory experience and observation. The circularity would indeed be a problem for a traditional account of epistemology attempting to do what Quine holds is likely to be impossible (discover grounds for certainty). But if the goal is to instead understand how sensory stimuli lead to beliefs and how observations lead to science then, Quine argues, we are entitled to use any means available.

As we have seen, Quine provides a list of reasons to propose that epistemologys traditional aim is perhaps both misdirected and futile. Quines proposed naturalized epistemology places epistemology under the umbrella of psychology; epistemology becomes a member of the natural sciences. As we have also seen, this move can only be made by removing a key aspect of traditional epistemology: the normative element. Quine offers a view of epistemology that deletes any need for prescription: sensory stimuli in a subject result in the subject generating a belief; that causal relationship is the object of study. That is, instead of questioning how beliefs ought to be formed, Quine seems to be arguing that how one does is how one should. While this new project Quine suggests may very well be worthy of study, he is right to believe that it is a job for the psychologist. The epistemologist cannot rid himself of the normative element for a number of reasons. First and foremost, Quines naturalized epistemology is a venture to study how beliefs are formed; traditional epistemology states as its goal almost always that it is searching for how knowledge is attained and what exactly can qualify as knowledge. Epistemology is only concerned with how beliefs are formed at a secondary level; the central concern is why such beliefs are formed and whether or not such beliefs are justified. In taking up the naturalized epistemology that Quine proposes we essentially end the quest for knowledge- we remove that which was our goal in the first place. We lose any hope of understanding what knowledge is. No matter to what degree one agrees with Quine, however misdirected or far off our dreams of Cartesian certainty are, in disbanding with a prescriptive epistemology that explains a proper way in which how to form beliefs we are conceding to the skeptic. A descriptive epistemology is simply not adequate in satisfying the aims of what a theory of knowledge is: description of belief formation is not a criteria for assessing the right one has to hold a belief.

The advantage of rational reconstruction had over straight psychology; namely, the advantage of translational reduction.

If all we hope for is a reconstruction that links science to experience in explicit ways short of translations, then it would seem more sensible to settle for psychology. Better to discover how science is in fact developed and learned that to fabricate a fictitious structure to a similar effect.

The empiricist made one major concession when he despaird of deducing the thruths of nature from sensory evidence. In despairing now even of translation those truths into terms of observation and logico-mathematical auxiliaries, he makes another major consession.

For suppose we hold, with the old empiricist Perice, that the very meaning of a statement consist in the difference its truth would make to possible experience.

In giving up hope of such translation, then, the empiricist is conceding that the empicical statements about the external world are iinaccesible.

Yes, just as causality is inaccessible; we can only now how it went, till the present moment, on the basis of custom of habit.

But if knowledge has to be incomplete in order to be knowledge, we do have true knowledge! True knowledge is just not to be found in the external world.

Knowledge is not off the external world, to be grasped. The external world is meaningful if it is shaped by knowledge!

Knowledge is meaningful OS

Meaning full OS are shaped by E L L C

The component statements simply do not have empirical meanings, by peirce standar, but a sufficiently inclusive portion of theory does. If we can aspire to a sort of LADW at all, it must be to one in which the text slated for translation into observational and LM terms are mostly broad theories taken as wholes, rather than just tems or short sentences.

Surely one has no choice but to be an empiricist so far as ones theory of linguistic meaning is concerned. NO!

Quine choose priority of data to consciousness. Same discussion as rational vs sense perception.

I have a different explanation. It is that the typical statement about bodies has no fund of experiental implications it can call its own. A substantial mass of theory, taken together, will commonly have experiential implicationsthis is how we make verifiable predictions.!!

We may not be able to explain why we arrive at theories wich make successful predictions, but we do arrive at such theories.

A sentence is an observation sentences if all verdicts on it depend on present sensory stimulation and on no stored information what goes into understanding the sentence.An observation sentence is one on which all speakers of the same language give the same verdict when given the same concurrent stimulation. To put the point negatively, an observation sentence is one that is not sensitive to differences in past experience within the speech community.

Membership of comm.? Fluently. Criterion that admids of degrees. What count as observation sentences for a community of specialist would not always so count for a lager community.

The old tendency to associate observation sentences with a subjective sensory subject matter is rather an irony when we reflect that obersvation sentence are alos meant to be intersubective tribunal of scientific hypotheses.

These two corresepond to the duality that I remarked upon early in this lecture: the duality between concept and doctrine, between knowing what a sentence means and knowing wheter it is true. The observation sentence is basic to both enterprises! It s relation to doctrine, to our knowledge of what is true, is ver much the traditional one: observation sentences are the repository of eviden for scientific hypothesis! [ skeptical solution ]Its relation to meaning is fundamental too, since observation sentences are the ones we are in a position to learn to understand first, both as children and as field linguists. For observation sentences are precisely the ones that we can correlate with observable circumstance of the occasion of utterance or assent, indepently of vatioantion in the past histories of individual informants. They afford the only entro to a language.But we dont have to go for psychology. Structural traits of color perception could have been predicted from survival value. And a more emphatically epistemological tpic that evolution helps to clarify is induction, now that we are allowing epistemology the resources of natural science.

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