Genetic Epistemology and Naturalized Epistemology
نویسنده
چکیده
When I started studying philosophy at the lycée , the very first book that I read happened to be Piaget’s Sagesse et illusions de la philosophie. I hated it. It explained that philosophy can, to some extent, keep its traditional role of searching for wisdom in the practical domain, but that it is no better than poetry when it tries to say things about the nature of the world, and even when it sets to itself the role of giving a critical examination of the scope of our knowledge of it. Only from within scientific inquiry, Piaget argued, could one give such an account, and the philosopher had to become a scientist himself to be able to say interesting things about theoretical matters. I disagreed, because I thought that confining philosophy to the quest of wisdom was, in spite of the apparent nobleness of this grand aim, a way of leaving it with a peau de chagrin and of dismissing it altogether. It took me more than twenty years to realize that Piaget was right. But I have come to reach more or less the formal operational stage in philosophy— or at least I hope— and it’s too late for me to come back to the sensorimotor stage in this discipline, so that I could start again on the right foot to have a chance of becoming a little scientist. I agree now with Piaget, but still not completely. The purpose of this paper is to explain why Piaget was almost right.
منابع مشابه
Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology, Epistemic Normativity and the Gettier Problem
W. V. Quine is one of the most prominent advocates of the naturalistic approach to epistemology and he argues that epistemology should be naturalized and transformed into a sub-discipline of psychology and hence a chapter in science. In his famous paper " Epistemology Naturalized, " Quine starts to compare epistemology with the logical and set-theoretical studies of the foundations of mathemati...
متن کاملEpistemology Naturalized: The Info-Computationalist Approach
We will give an account of the naturalized epistemology based on the computational character of cognition and agency -which includes evolutionary approaches to cognition (Lorenz 1977, Popper 1978, Toulmin 1972 and Campbell et al. 1989, Harms 2004). In this framework knowledge is seen as a result of the structuring of input data (data → information → knowledge) by an interactive computational pr...
متن کاملThe Representation of Judgment Heuristics and the Generality Problem
In his debates with Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, Gerd Gigerenzer puts forward a stricter standard for the proper representation of judgment heuristics. I argue that Gigerenzer’s stricter standard contributes to naturalized epistemology in two ways. First, Gigerenzer’s standard can be used to winnow away cognitive processes that are inappropriately characterized and should not be used in th...
متن کامل