GENETIC EPISTEMOLOGY
AND NATURALIZED EPISTEMOLOGY
Pascal Engel
When I started studying philosophy at the lycée , the very first book that I read happened to be Piaget’s Sagesse et illusions de la philosophie. I hated it. It explained that philosophy
can, to some extent, keep its traditional role of searching for wisdom in the
practical domain, but that it is no better than poetry when it tries to say
things about the nature of the world, and even when it sets to itself the role
of giving a critical examination of the scope of our knowledge of it. Only from
within scientific inquiry, Piaget argued, could one give such an account, and
the philosopher had to become a scientist himself to be able to say interesting
things about theoretical matters. I disagreed, because I thought that confining
philosophy to the quest of wisdom was, in spite of the apparent nobleness of
this grand aim, a way of leaving it with a peau de chagrin and of dismissing it altogether. It took me more than twenty
years to realize that Piaget was right. But I have come to reach more or less
the formal operational stage in philosophy— or at least I hope— and it’s too
late for me to come back to the sensorimotor stage in this discipline, so that
I could start again on the right foot to have a chance of becoming a little
scientist. I agree now with Piaget, but still not completely. The purpose of
this paper is to explain why Piaget was almost
right.
About
a century ago, logicians such as Frege and philosophers such as Husserl have
established what we may call the official doctrine of philosophers about the
relation of their discipline to psychology. They have argued that psychology,
as an empirical science, has nothing to do whatsoever in any genuine account of
knowledge, for knowledge deals with objective
truths and not with subjective
psychological processes or states,
with the reasons or justifications of
our beliefs and judgments and not with their causes , with the normative properties of knowledge and not with the natural properties of our mental equipment. This set of confusions— of the
objective with the subjective, of reasons with causes, of the normative with
the natural and the descriptive, and of the a priori with the empirical — has been labelled psychologism., and considered as the original sin of any sort of
naturalistic analysis of knowledge. Psychologism in the domain of knowledge
involves, according to the official doctrine, a fallacy which is no less
pervasive than the naturalistic fallacy in the domain of ethics, of trying to
derive “ought” from “is”, or of trying to draw, as Kant said, morality from
life, moral norms from empirical facts.
The
revolt against psychology and psychologism has been one dominant slogan of many
schools of philosophy during the first part of this century. Two major schools
of philosophical thought, phenomenology and analytic philosophy, have, in spite
of all their disagreements, agreed on at least this: when one deals with
knowledge, one should altogether banish what Husserl called the “natural
attitude” of starting with empirical facts of the natural world. The logical
positivists made a sharp distinction between the “context of discovery ” of
scientific hypotheses, by which we inquire in their psychological, historical
or social origins and their “context of justification”, which deals with the
conditions of their logical validity. They have also made a sharp distinction
between analytic statements, true in virtue of their meaning, and synthetic
statements, true in virtue of empirically verifiable facts, and considered that
philosophy had to do only with a priori or “conceptual” matters, concerning the
meaning of our statements, and not with any sort of empirical inquiry, in
particular in psychology.
The
psychologists themselves have, in a sense, agreed with these official doctrines
of the philosophers. In their desire to secure the status of psychology as an
empirical science, they have insisted that they were dealing only with the
natural, factual, or causal side of knowledge, not with its normative, a
priori, or rational side, which they considered as irrelevant for their
investigations. Indeed at the very time when psychologists were leaving the philosophy
departments and were creating their own university departments, the
philosophers were slamming the door upon them[1].
Today
the situation is, in many respects, not very different, but in other, important
respects, it has changed. A number of philosophers have challenged the
analytic/ synthetic distinction, and denied that there is any strong dividing
line between purely conceptual matters and empirical matters. They have, to a
large extent, moved away from the “linguistic turn” characteristic of the analytic
school in philosophy. A number of philosophers of science have challenged the
distinction between the context of discovery and the logic of justification. And,
last but not least, the so-called “cognitive revolution” has reached the shores
of the philosophical island, and a number of its inhabitants are today much
more doubtful that they can inquire about knowledge without looking at what
cognitive scientists have to say about it. This has led some to think that, in
many ways, we have returned more or less to the situation which was prevalent
before Frege and Husserl’s rejection of psychologism, when naturalism was
prevailing in the theory of knowledge, when Mill, Mach, Haeckel, or Baldwin
were its leading stars. We are no more evolutionists in the sense of Spencer,
nor associationists in the sense of Mill, but we can afford to be sophisticated
neo-darwinians and computational cognitivists. Today’s slogan is that
epistemology, the theory of knowledge, must be, after Quine’s phrase,
“naturalized”. On one reading of this slogan, it means exactly what Piaget
himself was recommanding: the theory of knowledge must become the psychology,
or the biology of knowledge, or at least must be continuous with them, even if
the ways of naturalisation are often not the same as Piaget’s.
The
question that I want to ask here is this: can a naturalized epistemology really
account not only for knowledge in general, but also for our concept of knowledge, as it is usually conceived by philosophers when they
inquire, in an a priori and
conceptual manner, about the features of this concept and build theories about
it? By changing the doctrine, are not
the proponents of naturalisation simply changing the subject, that is talking about something else? In particular, when
they propose that we could consider knowledge as something equivalent to the
natural processes and states of “cognition”, which would be causal and lawful,
are they not simply ignoring the very normativity of the usual concept of knowledge, and thus
are they not simply reverting to the psychologist’s naturalistic fallacy? In
other word, can naturalized epistemology be really epistemology at all?
In
the first part of this paper, I try to show how we can escape this dilemma, and
keep the naturalism while still accounting for the normative features of
knowledge. This implies that one tries to understand better the nature of the
desired form of naturalism, by distinguishing it from its reductivists versions
(the “nothing but” syndrome), as well as understanding better the normativity
in question. In the second part of the paper, I try to explain why it seems to
me that Piaget was aware of these difficulties, and proposed in fact something
like the non reductivist version of naturalised epistemology that we are
looking for. But I say only “something like”, because he does not seem to me to
escape completely from these difficulties. This is why I think that, in a more
specific sense, he was only almost right.
I
Let
us start with a truism. The theory of knowledge deals with knowledge. So we
better had to know what we are talking about. Let me first recall you what are
the main features of this concept, by providing what the philosophers are
generally supposed to be good at, that is giving a sort of a priori conceptual analysis or definition of it. This
seems to beg the question against a naturalised epistemologist, for he
precisely challenges the presupposition that we can give such an a
priori philosophical or conceptual
analysis, which would rely on our pretheorical intuitions about it. But we have
to start somewhere, and we could not even explain knowledge in terms of natural
psychological or biological processes if we could not say what it is that we
are explaining.
The
traditional analysis of the concept of knowledge can be found in Plato’s Theetetus , and, in its general form it
is still the one that you can find in the contemporary philosophical
literature, especially within the analytic tradition. It goes like this:
(K) X knows that p if and only if
(a) X believes that p
(b) p is true
(c) X is justified in believing that
p .
This is just Plato’s definition that
“knowledge (epistémè) is true (or
correct) belief or opinion (doxa)
together with reason or justification (orthos
logos ). The definition is vague unless we are more precise about what each
term means. First knowledge, on this definition, is knowledge that , or propositional knowledge; it is, in the
contemporary philosopher’s idiom, an intentional state, or a propositional
attitude. This implies that it is not knowledge
how , or implicit or tacit knowledge, that we are dealing with. This is
related to another feature of the definition: in order for knowledge to be
knowledge, one must have belief . Belief
could be also understood as a dispositional state, of an implicit kind. But it
is understood here as an explicit one, or at least as an implicit one which
would involve some relation to a proposition or an intentional content. Hence
the phrase used: “belief that p ”, where “p ” is a proposition. This seems to rule
out perception, and to concentrate upon judgment,
as a state which can be articulated linguistically, at least potentially. But
in fact it rules out perceptions only in so far as these are not conceived as
propositional states. This account for condition (a). Condition (b) has to be
added, because it goes with the notion of knowledge that the beliefs on which
it is based are true. This is just a
matter of defintion: somebody who would have a false belief p could not be said to know
that p (i.e “I know that p but p is false” is an absurdity). Another
condition has to be added, for, as Plato showed, somebody could have true
beliefs, but arrive at them through some sort of chance or luck, and so not
have knowledge of p. Therefore (a) and (b) are only necessary for
knowledge, but not sufficient. Hence condition (c): for true belief to be
knowledge, the subject must in some way be justified
in believing truly that p, to be in some sort of specific
relation to p . If we abstract from
the fact that we have not yet defined what a true belief is, and not defined
truth itself, the tricky element is to define what justification means. This
means, in ordinary terms, that the subject must have a reason to believe that p truly, but what is the nature of the
appropriate relation of being a reason with respect to what it is a reason for?
Here philosophers tell us different stories. Some say that for a true belief to
be justified, it must be in some sense founded or
based on other basic or primary
beliefs, or be itself such a belief. Others say that it must cohere, or be in some logical or other
sense, consistent with other beliefs which sustain it. Others that the beliefs
must be obtainable by a reliable method of investigation. The theory of knowledge begins, for
philosophers, when we try to spell out the meaning of this relation of
justification. And there are strong divergences in the answers, which all
constitute philosophical theories of knowledge.
As one can see, Plato’s definition, as stated
here, is far from complete; it contains many gaps, and it fails to give
necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. Indeed some philosophers
think that no such necessary and sufficient conditions can be given, and that
we must rest content with this approximate definition, for knowledge is not a
natural kind, which could be defined in, say the way we define water as being H2O.
But be it as it may,this is enough for my purposes. When philosophers say that
the concept of knowledge is a normative concept, they mean in general three things. First
they mean that the features and conditions of knowledge (a)-(c) are more or
less definitional of it: something would not be knowledge if it did not contain
these elements. “Normative” here refers
to the conceptual, a priori features in question, considered to be
attached to it as a matter of conceptual
necessity . Second the concept of knowledge is normative in a more specific
sense, which comes with condition (c). In order for a true belief to be
knowledge, we must in some sense evaluate
it, to confer upon it the property
of being correct and incorrect, in whatever sense in which we
could cash out this notion. We ordinarily suppose that this implies that there
is some rational evaluation, but even a “mad” evaluative
property could fit this bill. For instance we could say that a true belief is
knowedge only if it is kascher or written somewhere in the Bible or the
Coran. This would be, I assume, crazy (although I do not want to offense anybody
of religious persuasion), but it would still retain the normative-evaluative
element I am referring to. This also indicates that we can say that the
philosopher’s concept of knowledge is normative in a third sense: it is
normative in the sense that there are different ways of understanding and
spelling out the nature of the justification relation. In other terms the
normativity comes here at a meta-level, the level at which we an evaluate the
nature of the evaluative justificatory relation itself, and disagree, rightly
or wrongly, with the other accounts, and try to defend our own account of it. “Normative”
means here that there is room for an appraisal, critical or not, of the
normative properties of knowledge themselves.
I
have located the normative properties of the concept of knowledge in the
justification relation alluded to in condition (c). But in fact the evaluative
element enters also the sub-parts of the definition. It seems to belong to the
concept of belief itself that a belief can be correct or incorrect, and it
seems also to belong to the concept of truth itself that truth is a normative
property. Truth is a property of our beliefs that it worth having, at which our
beliefs aim.. It’s not, on this view,
simply a factual matter that our beliefs are true: they better have to be so,
and not false, if they are to perform their role as building blocks of
knowledge. This point, that truth is a normative and evaluative concept, is
contested. But it is also one of the senses in which knowledge as true
justified belief is said to contain a normative dimension.
The
naturalists, and especially the psychologists who are naturalists— as I assume
that most scientific psychologists are— may react at this point by claiming
that the philosopher’s definition of knowledge begs the question against them. First,
as I have already said, it assumes that a “pure” or “a priori” definition of
knowledge can be given from our intuitions, and independently of any empirical
investigation. Second, the definition seems to exclude certain apparently
natural senses of the notion of knowledge which are precisely investigated by
psychologists: knowings-how, skills, implicit knowledge, or perceptual
non-propositional knowledge, if such there be. And third, it assumes that the
so-called normative elements in the definition are somehow irreducible and not
susceptible of a further analysis, which could reduce it in factual or
descriptive terms. In particular, are not evaluations, or judgments of value,
or the idea that our beliefs can be true and rational, or justified,
susceptible of being analysed as the outcome of certain psychological processes
of a complex, but perfectly ascertainable, factual nature?
The
philosopher here has a standard reply, which is in a sense the same as the
argument from the naturalistic or psychologistic fallacy: we cannot derive the
normative from the factual, for the derivation would be circular. It would
presuppose, in the naturalistic definiens
or explanans , the very normative properties of knowledge which are
contained in the definiendum or explanandum. The point can be illustrated with the notion
of knowledge itself, as I already mentionned above. Suppose, for instance, that
we say that something is knowledge if it is the regular outcome of certain
cognitive processes and representations, which intervene between the stimuli of
an organism from its environment and its behaviour or its actions, and that we
call these processes and representations, whatever they are, “cognitions”. But
these “cognitions” would constitute knowledge only if they could, in some
sense, instantiate the normative properties of our ordinary notion of knowledge
itself, as they are codified by our conceptual analysis. For otherwise it would
always be open to an objector to such an analysis that its proponent has only
dealt with apart , even if it’s an
important part, of what we call knowledge, and hence that the analysis
is at best incomplete, or at worst circular. It would be incomplete, because
the element of justification would be missing: a subject could have such
cognitive states without ever knowing that he has them, and without being in
any sense able to evaluate them. It would be circular, the objection goes,
because we have simply assumed that the so-called cognitive states already
constitute knowledge. The point can also be illustrated, most familiarly, with
other normative concepts, such as, prominently logical concepts. Suppose that
we want to account for our concept of, say, logical negation and logical
inconsistency between proposition through an analysis of some psychological
states of our judging (consciously or not) that two propositions, or schemes,
or images, or whatever, are in some sense incompatible
and, to use Mill’s or Bain’s phrase, “destructive of one another”. This would
not, however, amount to a real analysis of the intented concept of negation or
inconsistency, because the very notion of “incompatible state” or
representation already mentions the notion of negation or of contradiction
between propositions. One can find, in Frege or Husserl’s polemics against
psychologists, numerous examples of this kind of circularity argument. The fact
that they adressed the associationist psychology of their time does not seem to
affect the fact that a number of more refined and very different kinds of
psychological explanations are guilty of the same vicious circularity. The well
known point, argued at length by Frege and Husserl, is that logical concepts,
such as negation, and the inferences that they licence, are normative, and that
one confuses the causal properties of the representations of processes which
underly our performance of these inferences, with their normative properties. Truth
itself just becomes the recognition of truth, and thus loses its objectivity and
normativity.
The
circularity argument can be summarised through a well known apologue ( which
was first used by an unorthodox disciple of Kant, Jacob Friedrich Fries, and
then by Schopenhauer, and later by Popper and some his disciples to deal
precisely with some versions of evolutionary epistemology). The baron of
Münchhausen is famous, among other things, for having, one day, succeeded in
performing the following feat: he drew himself out of a swamp, together with
his horse, by pulling up his hair with his hand. The naturalist psychologist
does the same, by trying to draw out the normative properties of thought and
knowledge from their natural, swampy, properties. But this is cheating, and we
know that Münchhausen was a liar. The morals of the story is that would be nice
indeed if we could perform the trick, but it is a best wishful thinking to
believe that we could.
It
is now high time that we consider the possible answers that the naturalised
epistemologist can give to such a threat. There are two possible answers.
The
first one has already been indicated. We could call it the “so what?” response.
It consists in simply rejecting the philosopher’s definition of knowedge, and
to say that the naturalised epistemologist can discharge the obligation of defining,
or even in a looser sense characterising, the notion of knowledge. In this
sense he says that he is not trying to do what the a priorist philosopher is
saying that he does: giving a descriptive and naturalistic account of the
notion of knowledge and of other normative concepts related to it. For there
are only particular scientific descriptions of natural processes, in
neurophysiological, biological, and causal terms. This is Quine’s answer, in at
least a number of his writings where he proposes the notion of a naturalised
epistemology. According to him such an epistemologist has only to describe, in
behavioural, and non intentional terms, the relations between an organism and
its environment. There exist only causal relations. Since these relations are
only causal, they contain no intentionalistic elements, such as notions like
belief. The concept of truth itself contains no normative elements. It consists
simply in the fact that we can pass from certain sentences such as “ ‘Snow is
white’ is true iff snow is white” to “disquoted” sentences such as “snow is
white”, according to Tarski’s famous equivalence schema. And there is no need
to ask for questions about the justification, validity, or rationality of
knowledge claims. Hence traditional
questions about the validity of our knowledge, such as the problem of
scepticism do not arise: as Quine says, the only doubts are scientific doubts. Radical
or transcendantal doubts, such as those of which philosophers are found of, are
just irrelevant. Epistemology keeps
its name only by courtesy. In fact it is eliminated, because there is no such
things as what we ordinarily call knowledge: it can be reduced, all the way
down, to causal processes.
Quine’s
version of naturalised epistemology if course behaviourist, in the Skinnerian
style. But the same “so what” response can also be given from a neuroscientific
standpoint (Patricia and Paul Churchland), or even from an evolutionary
neo-darwinian standpoint (Donald Campbell). We describe how the brain works, or
how our species has adapted, through a series of blind random variations and
selections. It’s only our illusion to think that our claims to knowledge are
“justified”. For at bottom the processes which account for selection are
blindly causal.
From
a psychological point of view, this deflationary answer is unsatisfactory: for
it does not even try to explain why we can have the feeling that our claims to
knowledge are justified, and that we can engage in such activities as assessing
our beliefs and call them “knowledge”. From a logical point of view, it is
self-defeating. For although it proposes to get rid of the very ordinary notion
of knowledge, it nevertheless purports to give a theory about it, and to claim that this theory is correct; but how can this be done, if one does
not even admit that we could speak of the truth or of the correctness of this
theory? How could the eliminativist just say that he or she believes in his own theory to be true if the concept of belief itself is
empty? This just seems to illustrate that it is not easy to dispense completely
with such normative notions.
This
suggests a second reaction. Perhaps the naturalised epistemologist does not
need to deny that the concept of knowledge and the other notions of
epistemology have a normative character. But he may try to explain them through
notions which, although they are normative, can lend themselves to some sort of
naturalistic analysis in psychological or in biological terms. In this sense,
what the naturalised epistemologist has to do first is to find an appropriate
equivalent of the troublesome evaluative notion of justification.
This
is what some contemporary philosophers- epistemologists have done. In a number
of works, and in particular in his book Epistemology
and Cognition , the American philosopher Alvin Goldman has suggested that
the notion of justification could be analysed further in the following way:
(1)
X knows that p iff p is causally related in any appropriate
way, with the fact that X believes that p.
Since
it tries to cash out the notion of justification in terms of a causal relation,
this is sometimes called the “causalist” analysis of knowledge. The proposal is
to characterise the relation as causal, in order to account for the causal
processes which make knowledge possible. This processes must not be simply
causal in the sense of being descriptive. They must also have a normative
element. Goldman proposes that this element is provided if we use the idea that
these causal processes must not be just any sort of causal processes. They must
be reliable in the sense that they lead, in a secured
way, to a large number of true beliefs, which are thus justified if and only if
they are the outcome of these reliable processes. According to Goldman, when we
talk of the justification of our beliefs, we are just in fact talking about the
reliability of the processes which lead to them, and which produce a high
proportion of true beliefs.
This
is an a priori analysis,
just as the traditional definition. But it can be backed by an empirical
psychological analysis, for we have the means to investigate the nature of
these processes. Here we can use the concepts of cognitive psychology, and the
duality between process and representation. By studying the cognitive psychology
of perception and of memory, of logical deductive and inductive inference, of
imagination and of various sort of problem solving and of heuristics of the individual. Which of these processes are
reliable? Which lead us to less errors than others, and what are the conditions
of their correct functionning? Goldman’s programme consists in using an
informed psychology in order to assess knowledge claims.
His
analysis does not get rid of the normative notions. He still talks of normative
justifications. But he tries also to give a factual analysis of them. This
looks attractive, and seems to escape the Münchhausen problem. But a number of
problems remain. First what is the criterion of reliability? Goldman suggests
that it is that the causal processes are “appropriate” or “normal”. He could
just as well have said “correct”, but then we step back onto a normative
notion, and how are we to define it? He tries to define it, by saying that the
processes in question must be able to produce a high proportion of true
beliefs, which he estimates as equal or superior to 50 %. But what does this
fancy arithmetic mean, and how can it be ascertained? Second, what is
reliability itself? The criterion just mentionned seems to suggest that it
could be unnoticed by the subject, that is unconscious and external to his
access. But then how can we say that reliability give us an equivalent of
justification, if justification and knowledge are properties to which the
subject must be able to have a conscious access? How could we be justified
without believing that we are? How could we be engaged in the task of revising
our beliefs and improve our knowledge, if all this happens through processes to
which we have no internal access? What is a norm, or indeed a rule, which could
not been recognised as such or ascertained by the subject itself, and he could
not check with the help of the evaluation of others, as teachers of the norm?
For
these reasons, and for other technical ones into which I shall not enter here,
the reliabilist proposal of naturalised epistemology does not solve really our
problem. At best it is bound to appeal to the normative features that it wants
to explain “naturalistically”.
There
is another solution, which I shall ony indicate (for lack of time). It consists
in adopting a version of drawinian evolutionary epistemology: our knowledge
feature are just those which have conducted our species to adapt. But how can
we, on such a view, account for the normative features of knowledge? The trick
here consists in suggesting first to replace the notion of reliability by a functional notion, the notion of proper functionning of our cognitive
processes. This is a normative notion, because a proper function is a function
which is normal. But it can be also
reduced to a causal notion, if we tie the function itself with the causal
circumstances, through natural selection, of its historical origin in the
species. Thus teleology is, by the usual maneuver, discharged at the causal
level. Second we could account for the fact that certain of our beliefs and
principles of inference appear to us to be justified and obvious through the
fact that these are precisely the beliefs and the principles which have had an
adaptative role and which have enhanced inclusive fitness. Upon this view,
there would be a sort of natural preestablished harmony between what we
experience as justified true beliefs, principles or methods one the one hand,
and the effective reliability of these beliefs, principles and methods. This is
nice, but it explains only the fact that some cognitive mechanisms for
producing the beliefs have evolved, not the production of the particular
beliefs and inference which we have come to have, and the feeling of their
obviousness only in a very general way.
In
spite of all their difficulties, I want to suggest that such views, reliabilist
and teleological-evolutionary, are on the right track, at least in the general
sense. What they have in common is both the recognition of the normative
dimension of knowledge and an attempt to come to grip with at least some sort
of causal explanation of it through natural factors. They do not try to escape
from the circle of normativity or the Münchhausen problem. For there is no way
to avoid it. This does not mean that these attempts are wrong. It only means
that we have to think of the circle as virtuous, instead of as vicious.
The
suggestion is that there is an intimate relationship between the normative
“superior” dimension of knowledge, the one that we can analyse in more or less
conceptual, abstract, and a priori terms, and its underlying causal nature in
natural “inferior” processes of a psychological and biological nature, for
norms are not floating in some mysterious platonic or transcendental realm: the
normative is not independent from the factual, it emerges from it. Now the notion of emergence is suspect to many,
and justly so. It has the flavour of a creeping dualism, where the normative
element in our thought could be more or less detached from its underlying
causal basis. So I would rather prefer the notion that a number of philosophers
have proposed to replace it, the notion of supervenience
. Supervenience, in the version that I would advocate, is not a relation of
bilateral determination nor of reduction. It is a relation of determination of
some “supervenient” properties by “subvenient ones”, with the former being
reduced to the latter. I would take a lot of time to explain the nature of the
appropriate relation, but the thought is this: norms depend from natural facts,
but they are not reducible to them.
II
Let us now, at last, turn to Piaget
and genetic epistemology. My initial question, you remember, was: is he a
naturalised epistemologist, and does he escape the kind of difficulties that I
have described, and if so how?
It seems to me obvious that genetic
epistemology is a species of naturalised epistemology, for it attempts to
account for our knowledge, natural and scientific, through an analysis of its
growth through biological, and then cognitive-developmental structures, and
because development is a natural process. As I already said at the beginning,
he disavows the idea that the theory of knowledge could be made only at the
normative, conceptual level. His main targets here are not modern analytic
philosophers, whom he never read, but the Kantian transcendental approach to
knowledge, which (with some qualifications) he rejects, and the logical
positivist method of an analysis of the meaning of scientific statements. He
believes that epistemology cannot be made in such an a priori way, be it based
on a transcendental subject or on a logical analysis of meaning. He sees, as I
said, genetic epistemology has continuous with psychology, and indeed as a
special kind of psychology, his own brand of developmental psychology. But does
Piaget falls into the traps that philosophers have usually denounced in such
attempts? On the positive side, I want to indicate that he does not, and that
his own solution is in fact close to the one that I have suggested. On the
negative side, I want to indicate that he still encounters encounters problems
with his account on the normative dimension.
First
the positive, bright, side. I see four faces of it. 1) Piaget is well aware of
the psychologistic fallacy in logic, which he himself denounces in a number of
places (for instance in La psychologie de
l’intelligence). For him the logical structures studied by logicians are
perfectly abstract, structural in the formal sense of the term, and it is not
the aim of genetic epistemology to put forward a latter day version of the
empiricist view of logic which was proposed by Mill and Bain, among many
others. But he does not want to say either that they are, as Frege and Russell
conceived them, purely platonic structures independent of the knowing subject. Indeed,
as well known, he wants to account for the way in which they are acquired,
through a series of processes of internalisation of operations which are, in
their very nature, tied to actions. The resulting effect, logical thought at its
maturity, is the product of this development. But it is the product of a series
of assimilations which are neither preprogrammed in the mind nor completely
causal in nature. 2) This feature is linked to the second one which I want to
emphasize: the knowing subject does not passively receive its knowledge
structures; he elaborates upon them, and he comes to evaluate them, espacially
through the dynamical revision of belief and knowledge. Thus the normative
element in the notion of knowledge is recognized by Piaget. As we have seen
this element is linked to three senses of the notion of “normativity”:
conceptual necessity, evaluative justification, and meta-level evaluation of
evaluations. These featuress come in the forefront in many studies of logical
thinking, where he acknowledges the sense of necessity that it attached
to logical norms and principles, and in many studies about the notion of
knowledge where he stresses the point on the necessity of the relation
of justification which is felt by the subjects when they claim to know. When we
claim to have have knowledge of an item, we evaluate it. This modal element is
present in every norm, and it has been also studied by Piaget, perhaps in more
detail, about moral norms, in Le jugement
moral chez l’enfant , among other studies. The leading idea here is not
very different from that which was proposed by many logician which defended the
idea that logic involve norms and ideal principles of deductive reasoning just
in the same sense as the sense in which morals involve norms of deontic,
practical reasoning. 3) Third, as Professor Richard Kitchener remarks in his
book on Piaget’s theory of knowledge (Yale 1986, ch.5), we can make the very
distinction between the first level of normative evaluation and the second
level of evaluation that I have made above. There is on the one hand what
Kitchner calls “normative epistemology”, or “epistemology proper”, which deals
with the question: “How is knowledge (developmentally) possible?”, and there is
on the other hand what Kitchener calls “meta-epistemology”, which raises
questions about the relationship between genetic epistemology and the history
of science. 4) Finally, the account given by Piaget of the relationship between
the normative conditions of knowledge and the natural world seems to be just in
the spirit of the non-reductive kind of naturalism that I have advocated.
Now
on the darker, more negative side, we can remark that the normative level is
not sufficiently distingued from the empirical and natural one. Professor
Kitchner, in the book just mentionned says that “the aim of epistemology may
better be put by saying that epistemology is the study of the constitution of
valid knowledge.”(p.133). Yes, but in what sense of valid ? Let us consider briefly the logical case. Remind yourself
of the famous story of Achilles and the Tortoise, as it is told by Lewis
Carroll. Achilles wants to make the Tortoise accept the conclusion of an
argument of the modus ponens or detachment form: if , if p then q, and if p, then q . But the Tortoise refuses to
draw the inference, although she agrees that the proposition is true. She fails
to recognize the distinction between a true proposition and a valid principle of inference. Or, if you want, the question
asked by Lewis Carroll is: ow can logic move the mind? It’s not sufficient that
we have valid principles. we must understand also why we ought to follow then, that
how we can apply our normative principles. From a Piagetian point of view, the
question : “How can logic move the mind?” does not make sense and cannot arise,
because logic is, in a sense, already in the mind. Not, as I have said, in the
sense that its structures would be, so to say, already there in our mental
equipment, but in the sense that they develop. But then we still have to
understand why we can make the distinction between true propositions and valid
principles of inference, which are normative. But it’s not obvious how this
distinction can be made within genetic epistemology. Professor Kitchner says
(p.28) that it “contains both empirical aspects and normative ones”, but this
is not enough. We want to understand not only how they can be articulated, but
also how they can be distinguished from each other in the first place. It looks
as if I am, here again, pressing the philosophical point which motivated the
normative definition of knowledge that we have considered, and that the genetic
epistemology can answer that he does not need to work at this normative a
priori , level. Piaget considers the Kantian question of the conditions of
possibility of knowledge. But this is immediatly to dismiss it. He says (in a
paper of 1978 in American Psychologist,
“What is psychology?”) that “transcendental” simply designates what, in
knowledge, comes not from the object, but from the structures constructed by
the subject” (p.649, quoted in Kitchner, p.78). The notion of a prioricity is
not dissociated from the notion of chronological priority, and it is
genetically constructed. So far, so good. But isn’t there another notion of a
prioricity, which is the one that I have advocated, and which as to do with
understanding the normative conditions of the concept of knowledge (not
of knowledge itself)? In that respect in what sense exactly is an epistemic
stage epistemic ? In what sense does
it involve structures which cannot be described only as causal, but as
involving a normative element? (see, e.g., the case of perception, of which
Piaget (1950 a, Introduction à
l’épistémologie génétique, says that it is “irrational” in its more
elementary compisitions (Kitchner,p.46): what, by constrast, is a piece of
knowledge which is rational?). I do not find clear answers to such questions.
Let
me end by some suggestions, about how we could try to understand better the
relationships between what I have called the normative dimension of knowledge
and its natural dimension.
First
we can, and should pursue Piaget studies about the genetic origins of the
notion of necessary knowledge, and of modalities such as necessity, possibiliy
and contingency, in order to give a constructive account of such notions (this
is largely what Professor Leslie Smith does in his recent book Necessary Knowledge, L. Erlbaum, 1996).
Second,
we should pay more attention to what seems to be a basic feature of normativity.
I have said that normativity comes in mostly through the possibility that a
subject has of evaluating his own states of cognition, his own beliefs, and his
own knowledge, through some sort of reflexion. This is, of course, what
corresponds to “reflective abstraction”, in Piaget’s sense, and it has also
something to do with the concept of inhibition. It is fundamentally, the
possibility of having not only representations, but also met-representations,
not only beliefs, but also beliefs about one’s beliefs. Here the work on the
child’s theory of mind is highly relevant. The question arises, in this field,
of whether this metareprentative ability of whether it is modular, and domain
specific, or not. But we can try to marry the two perspectives, in the way
Professor Karmilov-Smith does when she studies the processes of rediscription
of informations which occur at the level of refexive jugment of the mind over
its operations, in her book Beyond
Modularity.
Third,
in a less Piagetian vein, we should stress another essential feature of
normativity. I have spoken, until now, of norms of knowledge as if they could
be only, so to say, internal to the subject. But even if it is necessary, it is
far from sufficient. A norm, or a rule is norm not only if we can recognise it,
in a reflexive manner, but also if it can be taught to us by others, and if we
can confront our understanding of it through checking how others understand it.
It thus belongs to the concept of normativity that it has an essentially
intersubjective, and indeed social dimension. Little, it seems to me, is said
by Piaget about this dimension, which has also to do with language and the
integration, by a subject, of linguistic rules and norms. In a sense, this
social and linguistic dimension has been with the philosopher’s account from
the very start, since their normative conceptual definition is given at the
level of developped, reflexive, and conscious thought. It may well be an
account only at this level. But this level, I have tried to show, is indispensable,
even when one tries to understand the psychological developmental processes
which underly it.