Catherine Elgin

The fundamental debate in contemporary epistemology has been between foundationalists, coherentists, and contextualists. The parties in the debate generally contend that we have knowledge, that having knowledge requires justified belief, and that justified belief consists either in being rationally inferable from some special set of propositions, in cohering in a special way with other beliefs accepted by the subject, or in bearing some special relation to a context in which they are formed or the subject is situated. In this book Elgin opposes views of these kinds and defends a different sort of epistemological theory. Unlike most epistemologists, her theory is not concerned with knowledge; it is concerned with “tenable opinion.” In her view, actual knowledge is more than one can hope for in most cognitive endeavors.

The arts and the sciences perform many of the same cognitive functions, both serving to advance understanding. This paper explores some of the ways exemplification operates in the two fields. Both scientific experiments and works of art highlight, underscore, display, or convey some of their own features. They thereby focus attention on them, and make them available for examination and projection. Thus, the Michelson-Morley experiment exemplifies the constancy of the speed of light. Jackson Pollock'sNumber One exemplifies the viscosity of paint. Despite their similarities, science and art might seem to differ in their attitude toward facts. Science is said to adhere to facts; art, to be indifferent to them. Such, I urge, is not the case. Science, like art, often scorns fact to advance understanding through fiction. Thought experiments, I contend, are scientific fictions; literary and pictorial fictions, aesthetic thought experiments.

A challenger of traditions and boundaries A pivotal figure in 20th-century philosophy, Nelson Goodman has made seminal contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of language, with surprising connections that cut across traditional boundaries. In the early 1950s, Goodman, Quine, and White published a series of papers that threatened to torpedo fundamental assumptions of traditional philosophy. They advocated repudiating analyticity, necessity, and prior assumptions. Some philosophers, realizing the seismic effects repudiation would cause, argued that philosophy should retain the familiar framework. Others considered the arguments compelling, but despaired of doing philosophy without the framework. Goodman disagreed with both factions. Rather than regretting the loss of structure, he capitalized on the opportunities that arise when the strictures of tradition are loosened.

W. V. Quine is famous, or perhaps infamous, for his repudiation of the analytic/synthetic distinction and kindred dualisms—the necessary/contingent dichotomy and the a priori/a posteriori dichotomy. As these dualisms have come back into vogue in recent years, it might seem that the denial of the dualisms is no part of Quine's enduring legacy. Such a conclusion is unwarranted—not only because the dualisms are deeply problematic, but because "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" haunts even those who want to retain them. "Two Dogmas" reconfigured the philosophical terrain and issued a challenge to philosophy's self understanding—a challenge that has yet to be fully met. The commitment to the analytic/synthetic distinction derives from the recognition that the truth of any sentence depends on two things: the way the world is and what the sentence means. It seems natural, then, that each sentence should be subject to a sort of factor analysis that disentangles the contribution of language to its truth value from the contribution of the world. Just how much each contributes varies from one sentence to the next. When the contribution of the world goes to zero, the sentence is analytic.