Knowledge and Rationality

Abstract

At the end of his paper ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge’¹, Alvin Goldman says that ‘the trouble with many philosophical treatments of knowledge is that they are inspired by Cartesian-like conceptions of justification or vindication’ and that ‘there is a consequent tendency to overintellectualise or overrationalise the notion of knowledge’. His own account, which is opposed to this, is supposed to be offered in the spirit of naturalised epistemology. I present these remarks simply as a text to which to speak; I shall not try to examine or criticise Goldman’s own account itself, except by indirect implication. I am convinced, however, that the policy of naturalised epistemology is a case either of a changing of the question or of going in the wrong direction. I mean by this that either the questions raised by naturalised epistemology are quite different from and thus not rivals to traditional epistemological questions, or that the account of the concept of knowledge offered or presupposed is quite wrong-headed.²