1. The descriptive core of the theories of Standard Analytic Epistemology

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As we noted in chapter 1, proponents of Standard Analytic Epistemology

aim to provide an account of knowledge and epistemic justification. One

of the main success conditions on such an account is the stasis requirement

: The correct account of knowledge or justification will ‘‘leave our

epistemic situation largely unchanged. That is to say, it is expected to turn

out that according to the criteria of justified belief we come to accept, we

know, or are justified in believing, pretty much what we reflectively think

we know or are entitled to believe’’ (Kim 1988, 382). If an account of

justification must satisfy the stasis condition in order to be successful, then

such an account can be successful only if (a) for every belief B, clearly in

the extension of the predicate ‘is justified’ as used by proponents of SAE,

the account yields the result that B is justified, and (b) for every belief N,

clearly not in the extension of the predicate ‘is justified’ as used by proponents

of SAE, the account yields the result that N is not justified. (A

similar condition can be defined for a successful account of knowledge.)

The commitment to epistemic stasis is embodied in the method of

SAE. Philosophers accept or reject an epistemological theory on the basis

of whether it accords with their considered judgments. Gettier’s (1963)

paper is a classic because it describes clear and compelling examples in

which the justified true belief (JTB) account of knowledge is at odds with

our considered judgments about knowledge. Our central worry about SAE

arises from the fact that its epistemic theories are so often rejected solely on

the grounds that they violate our considered epistemic judgments. Why

should we place so much trust in our well-considered judgments? We need

some reason for thinking that our well-considered epistemic judgments

are correct. The Aristotelian Principle provides us with part (but only

The Troubles with Standard Analytic Epistemology 105

part) of the story about how we can test the deliverances of those judgments

under the heat of careful experimentation rather than in the relaxation

of the philosophical salon. Perhaps our armchair judgments will

survive those fires. But before offering the world recommendations about

how we should reason or what we should believe about important matters,

it seems prudent to check.

Suppose God gave us the theory of justification that best satisfied the

stasis requirement. What sort of information would such a theory give us?

What would that theory be about? We can approach this as a problem of

reverse engineering: Given how SAE works, what is its likely output? Some

might note close analogies between epistemology and science. In SAE and

science, articles are written primarily for and by people who have received

distinctive educations and who have a highly specialized set of skills. While

there is not much empirical work on the subject, it seems plausible to

suppose that this education significantly affects the concepts, categories,

and inferential patterns one uses in thinking about the world. So far, so

good. In the natural sciences, however, hypotheses are typically tested

against the world. But in SAE, hypotheses are tested against the wellconsidered

judgments of other (similarly trained) philosophers.

Given how SAE works, it seems doubtful that it is geared to informing

us about how regular folk think about justification. One needn’t be a

sociologist to realize that philosophers as a group are a relatively small and

idiosyncratic sample of folks (Goldman 1999a). Philosophers’ median

education and intelligence are surely well above average. We speculate that

philosophers’ median scores on various MMPI scales (e.g., social alienation,

hypersensitivity, social introversion) might be above average as well.

Of course, proponents of SAE might view this as being all to the good.

They might argue: ‘‘We don’t want to offer a description of the epistemic

practices of common folk. We’re examining the concepts of experts. If you

want to know what the right concept of bird is, ask an ornithologist. If you

want to know what the right concept of justification is, ask an epistemologist.’’

If this is the sort of move a proponent of SAE might make, we

need to ask: What exactly is an epistemologist an expert about?

If we take the Aristotelian Principle to heart, if we believe that good

reasoning tends to lead to better outcomes than bad reasoning, then we

might wonder whether SAE tells us about how a wide variety of people

who lead flourishing lives—people in a wide range of stations, in different

cultures, in different times—have reasoned about important matters. But

this is a deeply empirical matter, and one that the conservative method of

SAE does not seem especially well designed to illuminate. If, however, epistemologists themselves tend to lead particularly successful lives, then

perhaps providing people with their epistemic autobiographies would be

useful. It is not obvious, however, that when socioeconomic factors are

controlled for, epistemologists as a group lead more or less meaningful or

flourishing lives than other folk.

So what is SAE geared to tell us about? We suggest that it tells us

about the reflective epistemic judgments of a group of idiosyncratic people

who have been trained to use highly specialized epistemic concepts and

patterns of thought. By ‘highly specialized’ we mean that people who have

not received the relevant training would find at least some of those concepts

and patterns of thought strange, foreign, or unfamiliar. The conservative

goals and methods of SAE are suited to the task of providing

an account of the considered epistemic judgments of (mostly) well-off

Westerners with Ph.D.’s in Philosophy. This is a thoroughly descriptive

endeavor. Such an account aims to describe the clear application conditions

of an expression as it is used by a particular group of people. It is an

open question whether SAE also provides knowledge of normative matters.

But this possibility should not hide the heretofore unrecognized

naturalistic essence of SAE.

A particularly dramatic way to see that the core of SAE is a descriptive

theory of analytic epistemologists’ own epistemic judgments is to consider

how SAE might be different if it were conducted by a very different group

of people. In a fascinating study, Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich (2001)

found that people in different cultural and socioeconomic groups make

significantly different epistemic judgments. A group of Western subjects

and non-Western subjects were given the following Gettier-style example:

Bob has a friend, Jill, who has driven a Buick for many years. Bob therefore

thinks that Jill drives an American car. He is not aware, however, that her

Buick has recently been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced

it with a Pontiac, which is a different kind of American car. Does Bob really

know that Jill drives an American car, or does he only believe it?

REALLY KNOWS ONLY BELIEVES

A large majority of Western subjects gave the answer sanctioned by SAE

(‘‘only believes’’), but a majority of East Asians and a majority of subjects

from India gave the opposite answer (‘‘really knows’’) (2001, 443).

Weinberg et al. considered an anti-reliabilist type of example in which

a reasoner, as a result of being hit on the head with a rock, unwittingly

acquires a reliable belief-forming mechanism for determining ambient

The Troubles with Standard Analytic Epistemology 107

temperature. They found significant differences in the judgments of

Western and East Asian subjects. A majority of both groups of subjects,

however, thought that the reasoner did not have knowledge of the ambient

temperature (2001, 439–440).

Another fascinating finding involved giving high socioeconomic status

(SES) subjects and low SES subjects the following case:

It’s clear that smoking cigarettes increases the likelihood of getting cancer.

However, there is now a great deal of evidence that just using nicotine by

itself without smoking (for instance, by taking a nicotine pill) does not

increase the likelihood of getting cancer. Jim knows about this evidence and

as a result, he believes that using nicotine does not increase the likelihood of

getting cancer. It is possible that the tobacco companies dishonestly made

up and publicized this evidence that using nicotine does not increase the

likelihood of cancer, and that the evidence is really false and misleading.

Now, the tobacco companies did not actually make up this evidence, but

Jim is not aware of this fact. Does Jim really know that using nicotine

doesn’t increase the likelihood of getting cancer, or does he only believe it?

REALLY KNOWS ONLY BELIEVES

There were statistically significant differences between high and low SES

subjects. Low SES subjects were evenly divided on whether Jim really

knows or only believes that using nicotine doesn’t increase the likelihood

of getting cancer. High SES subjects were much more likely to say that Jim

only believes it (82%) (2001, 447–48).

The possibility that there is considerable variation (not only across

cultures but also within cultures) in people’s epistemic judgments makes

it plausible to believe that we learn about the epistemic judgments of

an idiosyncratic group of people when we do SAE. This is as descriptive a

fact as there could possibly be. Indeed, it suggests that SAE is actually an

odd kind of cultural anthropology: building theories that describe how

privileged (mostly) Westerners with Ph.D.s in Philosophy engage in epistemic

assessment. Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich call this endeavor ‘‘ethnoepistemology’’

(454). If SAE is but anthropology, it is unclear on what

grounds its proponents can reasonably make universal normative claims

about the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge. To make universal

claims—to claim SAE is more lofty than anthropology—has the

uncomfortable feel of brute cultural imperialism.

Now it may turn out that there is less diversity in people’s epistemic

judgments than the fascinating studies by Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich

108 Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment

suggest. But even if the diversity findings collapse, this, by itself, won’t

help show that SAE is normative. Even if SAE describes a universal practice,

rather than a culturally situated one, that doesn’t make SAE normative.

The diversity findings simply allow us to put our point dramatically:

SAE appears to describe the idiosyncratic epistemic practices of a particular

group of people. But even if the world came to be populated only by

analytic epistemologists, the central endeavor of SAE would still be essentially

descriptive.

As a descriptive attempt to capture the epistemic judgments of philosophers,

we have powerful reasons to think that the methods of psychology

are superior to those of SAE. Insofar as the core of the theories

of SAE is descriptive, they are very likely to be bad descriptive theories.

This point is not essential to our argument. But it is worth noting that

psychologists develop models of our concepts all the time. These models

mimic our categorization judgments. (These models can mimic concepts

with ‘‘fuzzy boundaries’’ and indeterminate instances.) If philosophers

want an account that mimics their epistemological judgments, all we would

need is a psychologist who is willing to model our judgments (e.g., Smith

and Medin 1981, Keil 1989). Indeed, if philosophers really want to begin

their epistemological musings with a descriptive core that accurately accounts

for their judgments about knowledge or justification, they could

save a lot of time, energy, and expense by employing a few psychology

graduate students.