Hilary Kornblith

Epistemology has changed dramatically since Descartes, but many of the questions epistemologists address today are no different from the questions Descartes addressed. I begin by raising four sets of questions with which Descartes concerned himself, and explain briefly why Descartes regarded these sets of questions as interchangeable. My main purpose, however, is not historical. Rather, I wish to present an outline of a naturalistic approach to these questions. I will not defend naturalistic epistemology. Instead, I hope to explore what a naturalistic approach to some traditional epistemological questions might look like; it is only through a better understanding of the consequences of naturalizing epistemology that we may hope properly to evaluate it. I will argue that questions which Descartes treated as interchangeable will have to be separated by naturalistically minded epistemologists. In the course of evaluating these questions from a naturalistic point of view, I hope to shed some light on the relation between reliability and justification, the dispute between internalist and externalist theories of justification, and the relation between ethics and epistemology.

We sometimes stop to reflect on our mental states, and such reflection can lead, at times, to changing our minds. It can, as well, lead us to endorse the very attitudes which we previously held. Such reflective endorsement has been called upon to play a wide range of roles in philosophical theorizing. It has been thought to ground a distinction between two fundamentally different kinds of knowledge: reflective knowledge and mere animal knowledge. It has been thought to serve as a ground for rational change of belief. It has been called upon to explain the possibility of freedom of the will. And it has been brought into service to explain the source of normativity. This chapter argues that it can play none of these roles.