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This volume draws together influential work by Hilary Kornblith on naturalistic epistemology. This approach sees epistemology not as conceptual analysis, but as an explanatory project constrained and informed by work in cognitive science. These essays expound and defend Kornblith's distinctive view of how we come to have knowledge of the world.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1: Beyond Foundationalism and the Coherence Theory
- 2: Justified Belief and Epistemically Responsible Action
- 3: How Internal Can You Get?
- 4: The Unattainability of Coherence
- 5: Epistemic Normativity
- 6: A Conservative Approach to Social Epistemology
- 7: Naturalism: Both Metaphysical and Epistemological
- 8: Knowledge in Humans and Other Animals
- 9: Does Reliabilism Make Knowledge Merely Conditional?
- 10: Naturalism and Intuitions
- 11: A Reliabilist Solution to the Problem of Promiscuous Bootstrapping
- 12: Why Should We Care about the Concept of Knowledge?
- 13: Reasons, Naturalism, and Transcendental Philosophy
About the author
Hilary Kornblith is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is the author of Inductive Inference and its Natural Ground (MIT, Press, 1993); Knowledge and its Place in Nature (OUP, 2002); and On Reflection (OUP 2012).
Summary
This volume draws together influential work by Hilary Kornblith on naturalistic epistemology. This approach sees epistemology not as conceptual analysis, but as an explanatory project constrained and informed by work in cognitive science. These essays expound and defend Kornblith's distinctive view of how we come to have knowledge of the world.
Additional text
As always Kornblith is a pleasure to read, in terms of both liveliness and forthrightness of argumentation. These are among the factors, no doubt, that explain the impact of his writing. He is also a bold thinker; and while some might find him too bold for their taste, I feel that philosophy can use more boldness than it usually gets. Boldness promotes diversity, and diversity is generally good for communities, ecosystems, and academic disciplines.
