Anpeng Liu

Hilary Kornblith’s book is motivated by the conviction that philosophers have tended to overvalue and overemphasize reflection in their accounts of central philosophical phenomena. He seeks to pinpoint this tendency and to correct it. Kornblith’s claim is not without precedent. It is an oft-repeated theme of 20th-century philosophy that philosophers have tended to give ‘overly intellectualized’ accounts of important phenomena. One thinks here of Wittgenstein, Ryle and many others. One version of this charge is that philosophers have tended to appeal to higher-order thoughts when first-order thoughts about the world are all that’s needed. A more specific version of this charge is that philosophers have tended to appeal to second-order thoughts with normative, or quasi-normative, contents when all that’s needed are first-order thoughts with factual contents. It is this second version of the charge that Kornblith is particularly interested in pressing. Although he doesn’t spell it out, the connection between this project and Kornblith’s previous work on naturalistic conceptions of epistemology should be fairly obvious. Very roughly, if you want humans to look a lot closer to the lower animals, then you’d better think that most central human abilities can be explained without appeal to reflection and without appeal to normative thought. What’s good and important about Kornblith’s book is that he gives this charge a sustained and illuminating treatment. He looks in detail at accounts of knowledge, reasoning, epistemic agency, free will and normativity; he identifies sympathetically some of the temptations to think that we must resort to second-order resources to explain these phenomena; and he attempts to show that the appeal never works and is, in any case, not needed, since first-order accounts manage very well.