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The Foundations of Knowing
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- GenresPhilosophy
218 pages, Hardcover
First published June 21, 1982
44 people want to read
About the author
Roderick M. Chisholm
43 books12 followersRoderick Milton Chisholm was an American philosopher known for his work on epistemology, metaphysics, free will, value theory, and the philosophy of perception. He was often called "the philosopher's philosopher.
Chisholm graduated from Brown University in 1938 and received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1942 under Clarence Irving Lewis and Donald C. Williams. He was drafted into the United States Army in July 1942 and did basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama. Chisholm administered psychological tests in Boston and New Haven. In 1943 he married Eleanor Parker, whom he had met as an undergraduate at Brown. He spent his academic career at Brown University and served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1973.
Chisholm trained many distinguished philosophers, including Selmer Bringsjord, Fred Feldman, Keith Lehrer, James Francis Ross, Richard Taylor, and Dean Zimmerman. He also had a significant influence on many colleagues, including Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa.
Chisholm graduated from Brown University in 1938 and received his Ph.D. at Harvard University in 1942 under Clarence Irving Lewis and Donald C. Williams. He was drafted into the United States Army in July 1942 and did basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama. Chisholm administered psychological tests in Boston and New Haven. In 1943 he married Eleanor Parker, whom he had met as an undergraduate at Brown. He spent his academic career at Brown University and served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1973.
Chisholm trained many distinguished philosophers, including Selmer Bringsjord, Fred Feldman, Keith Lehrer, James Francis Ross, Richard Taylor, and Dean Zimmerman. He also had a significant influence on many colleagues, including Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 11, 2022
Exemplary philosophical work. Part one presents his very compelling theory of knowledge and he creates a very interesting system. Especially valuable was the different degrees of justification that could be found, and how they were all analyzed in terms of rather basic notions such as preferability. Chisholm does a lot with very little. His solution to the Gettier problem involving non-defective evidence was also highly instructive. That evidence is sometimes defective does not mean that there is no evidence, one may just be in confounding situations. I find that idea to be very powerful. Generally I find myself agreeing a lot with Chisholm, despite normally not finding myself leaning towards internalist theories of knowledge. Chisholm is undeniably an exceptional epistemologist. The chapter on knowing that one knows is also highly instructive, even for the non-internalist.
The other parts stray a bit from the analysis of knowledge, but the topic remains focused on truth, evidence, foundations, and the relation between evidence and truth. In part 2 he offers fewer solutions, but presents some major problems, like the paradox of analysis, beautifully. The chapter on "What is a Transcendental Argument?" seemed uncharacteristically weak, however, but it is more than made up for in the other chapters. The problem of a criterion was handled masterfully. In the battle of the skeptic, the methodist, and the particularist, I think Chisholm shows us why we need to be particularists. Methodists wants us to start with a method, in order to tell us what we can know, that is, what it is that distinguishes appearance from reality. Particularists start with processes or instances of knowing. For instance, the methodist says we need to use our senses alone in order to arrive at real knowledge. The particularist says we know, for instance, that right now we are reading this text, and so we start with that fact and try to derive a method. We need to be particularists for unless we know what counts as instances of knowing, we cannot decide on which methods effectively bring us knowledge, roughly speaking. I find this idea quite compelling, even if I mostly approach epistemology from a methodist perspective.
Part 3 is my favorite in that Chisholm has footing in a not-so-often highlighted tradition of American philosophy and its handling of things like the given, the problem of skepticism, the problem of correspondence theory of truth, the synthetic/analytic distinction, and so on were exciting to read. It is written very well with a good survey of the literature backing up every discussion. It was a very comfy read, but the solutions offered are not as clear as the ones in part 1. Perhaps this is also due to the problems being less clear. For instance, regarding the given, there is no problem as such, it is just a question of what the given is, what it entails within epistemology, and whether it is the only source of knowledge. The given in the sense that there is a foundation of knowledge is accepted, for example, as well as the idea that the foundation of knowledge lies, in part, in appearances. But he rejects the idea that knowledge is only based on apprehension of appearances. That something appears to have certain properties is a matter of having experienced other properties, and there is some sense in which an appearance alone is not enough to buttress a whole system of beliefs. The beliefs need to be connected, perhaps, but he Chisholm unfortunately does not expand too much on this. My thoughts wandered into the topic more as I was reading, and it seems that the given, even if it in need of conceptual support, as the Kantian formula suggests, still relies on other appearances, and perhaps ultimately, on resemblance between appearances. The resemblance itself, furthermore, seems to also be a kind of appearing-to. The resemblance between two red circles is apparent, it seems self-evident. What remains as non-appearance forms of justification are perhaps logical truths, which are not in need of appearances in order to be true. For instance we can see that P and not-P are incompatible without filling out P and not-P with some sense content. But it is unclear whether we can think of logical truths without appearances of some kind, perhaps inner intuitions, or something strange of that kind. I do not know exactly where to stand on this topic.
What I took to be a major achievement of this book is how well Chisholm argues that perception is innocent until proven guilty. This is key for all epistemology. Our processes that seem to be truth-conducive must be taken to be truth-conducive until proven to be defective. Without this epistemic principle there is no knowledge and we fall headfirst into skepticism. It is worth reading this book for the support it gives to that principle alone.
Must be more to say, but I will return to it some other day.
The other parts stray a bit from the analysis of knowledge, but the topic remains focused on truth, evidence, foundations, and the relation between evidence and truth. In part 2 he offers fewer solutions, but presents some major problems, like the paradox of analysis, beautifully. The chapter on "What is a Transcendental Argument?" seemed uncharacteristically weak, however, but it is more than made up for in the other chapters. The problem of a criterion was handled masterfully. In the battle of the skeptic, the methodist, and the particularist, I think Chisholm shows us why we need to be particularists. Methodists wants us to start with a method, in order to tell us what we can know, that is, what it is that distinguishes appearance from reality. Particularists start with processes or instances of knowing. For instance, the methodist says we need to use our senses alone in order to arrive at real knowledge. The particularist says we know, for instance, that right now we are reading this text, and so we start with that fact and try to derive a method. We need to be particularists for unless we know what counts as instances of knowing, we cannot decide on which methods effectively bring us knowledge, roughly speaking. I find this idea quite compelling, even if I mostly approach epistemology from a methodist perspective.
Part 3 is my favorite in that Chisholm has footing in a not-so-often highlighted tradition of American philosophy and its handling of things like the given, the problem of skepticism, the problem of correspondence theory of truth, the synthetic/analytic distinction, and so on were exciting to read. It is written very well with a good survey of the literature backing up every discussion. It was a very comfy read, but the solutions offered are not as clear as the ones in part 1. Perhaps this is also due to the problems being less clear. For instance, regarding the given, there is no problem as such, it is just a question of what the given is, what it entails within epistemology, and whether it is the only source of knowledge. The given in the sense that there is a foundation of knowledge is accepted, for example, as well as the idea that the foundation of knowledge lies, in part, in appearances. But he rejects the idea that knowledge is only based on apprehension of appearances. That something appears to have certain properties is a matter of having experienced other properties, and there is some sense in which an appearance alone is not enough to buttress a whole system of beliefs. The beliefs need to be connected, perhaps, but he Chisholm unfortunately does not expand too much on this. My thoughts wandered into the topic more as I was reading, and it seems that the given, even if it in need of conceptual support, as the Kantian formula suggests, still relies on other appearances, and perhaps ultimately, on resemblance between appearances. The resemblance itself, furthermore, seems to also be a kind of appearing-to. The resemblance between two red circles is apparent, it seems self-evident. What remains as non-appearance forms of justification are perhaps logical truths, which are not in need of appearances in order to be true. For instance we can see that P and not-P are incompatible without filling out P and not-P with some sense content. But it is unclear whether we can think of logical truths without appearances of some kind, perhaps inner intuitions, or something strange of that kind. I do not know exactly where to stand on this topic.
What I took to be a major achievement of this book is how well Chisholm argues that perception is innocent until proven guilty. This is key for all epistemology. Our processes that seem to be truth-conducive must be taken to be truth-conducive until proven to be defective. Without this epistemic principle there is no knowledge and we fall headfirst into skepticism. It is worth reading this book for the support it gives to that principle alone.
Must be more to say, but I will return to it some other day.
Displaying 1 of 1 review