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Knowledge, Society, and

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PHILIP KITCHER
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University of California/San Diego , La Jolla , CA ,
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To cite this article: PHILIP KITCHER (1993) Knowledge, Society, and History, Canadian
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CANADIAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY 155
Volume 23, Number 2, June 1993, pp. 155- 178
Knowledge, Society,
and History1
PHILIP KITCHER
University of California/San Diego
La Jolla, CA 92093
USA
Here is a traditional way of thinking about human knowledge.
(1) Knowledge is a species of true belief. The crucial difference

between knowledge and other kinds of true belief is that propo-
sitions that are known have a special property (they are justified,
or warranted).
(2a) Justified (warranted) propositions either have intrinsic justifica-
tion (they are self-warranting for the knower) or else they are
obtainable by means of a justification-conferring argument from
other justified propositions that the knower believes.
(3a) The only propositions with intrinsic justification are those that fall
into one of two classes: the set of a priori truths (logic, mathemat-
1 The first version of this paper was written at the invitation of the Program
Committee for the Western Canadian Philosophical Association, and presented at
the Fall1991 Meeting of the Association. I am grateful to members of that audience
and to subsequent audiences at Queen's University (Kingston), the Southern
California Philosophy of Science Group, the University of Pittsburgh, the University
of Illinois (Urbana), and Harvard University, for their help in the paper's evolution.
I also want to thank an anonymous referee for CJP for an extremely penetrating
discussion. Many of the comments, questions, and criticisms that I have received
will be taken up in future work.
156 Philip Kitcher
ics, etc.) and the set of propositions recording the sensory experi-
ences of the knower.
An alternative picture of human knowledge is generated by retaining

(1) and replacing (2a) by
(2b) No propositions have intrinsic justification. Justification accrues

primarily to sets of propositions, and the justified propositions are
those that belong to justified sets.
(3b) A set of propositions is justified if it is maximally coherent with

respect to the subject's sensory experiences.
These alternative conceptions have been prominent in twentieth-cen-

tury articulations of a venerable philosophical tradition, one that em-
braces such major figures as Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hume, and Kant.
They have recently waned in popularity under pressure from various
lines of criticism. I want to ask if the currently fashionable ways of
amending (1)-(3) inherit unremarked errors of the traditional view of
human knowledge.
Motivation for my inquiry comes from recognizing the distance be-
tween the traditional philosophical conception and much contemporary
discussion, especially in such disciplines as anthropology, sociology, and
the history of science, of cultural and temporal variations in 'knowledge.'
Itemsof'knowledge' arefrequentlyidentifiedassimplysociallyapproved
beliefs. In a spirit of tolerance, such identifications could be regarded as
settling for a more lenient construal of knowledge, and philosophers could
note gently that, in some circles, talk of 'knowledge' does not imply the
exacting requirements of the traditional conception. However, the point
of that talk is not just to appropriate a term for purposes of convenience.
Rather, those who equate knowledgewithsocially approved belief intend
to deny the legitimacy of the allegedly more exacting standards that
philosophers have traditionally sought to impose.
Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians do not lavish time on
confronting the traditional picture of knowledge, but starting with an
explicit (and influential) version of that picture helps us to see just what
they find absurd and obsessive in philosophical discussions of knowl-
edge. The root of their objections is, I suggest, the individualistic fiction
that permeates philosophical thinking about knowledge. Once we rec-
ognize that knowers are epistemically dependent on past and present
members of the societies to which they belong, then, it is alleged, the
notions of truth and justification become suspect. My goal is to make this
line of criticism as clear as possible, and to see what can be said in
response to it.
Knowledge, Society, and History 157
II
No one should doubt that the conception of knowledge developed in

(1)-(3) is fiction. Its champions maintain that the fiction is harmless
idealization. We can test that defense by nudging the account in the
direction of greater realism.
Start with a point that has been made by many philosophers: justifi-
cation and knowledge do not depend just on the logical relations among
propositions but on the psychological relations that obtain among the
belief-states of the subject. The Argument for Psychologistic Epistemology
runs as follows:
Consider a subject S who believes that p and justifiably believes

q1, ...,q". Suppose that there is a justification-conferring argument
from q1, ...,q" top. According to (3a) it would follow that Sis justified
in believing that p. However, this need not be the case, for S may
not recognize the evidential bearing of q1, ... ,qn on p, but may believe
p for quite different (and unwholesome) reasons. Justification of a
belief depends on the ways in which that belief is generated and
sustained.
I regard this argument as sound, and as offering an important correction

to the traditional conception embodied in (1)-(3). 2 Let us try to develop
accounts of knowledge and justification that are consonant with it.
Retain from (1) the idea that for someone to know a proposition the
subject must believe the proposition and the proposition must be true.
The crucial 'third condition' is now that the belief-state must be pro-
duced 'in the right way.' What does 'rightness' amount to here? That is
controversial, but whether or not it is the whole story, I shall endorse
Minimal Reliabilism:
For S to know that p or for -5 to be justified in believing that pit must

be the case that S's belief that p be produced by a process of a type
that regularly (reliably) generates true beliefs.
2 This argument is advanced by Gilbert Harman in Thought (Princeton: Princeton

University Press 1973), Ch. 2; Alvin Goldman in 'What is Justified Belief?' in G.
Pappas, ed., Justification and Knowledge (Dordrecht: Reidel1980); Hilary Komblith
in 'Beyond Foundationalism and the Coherence Theory,' Journal of Philosophy 77
(1980) 597-612; and me in The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge (New York: Oxford
University Press 1983), Ch. 1. The locus classicus is now Goldman's Epistemology and
Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1986).
158 Philip Kitcher
Although further articulation would be valuable (How do we divide

processes into types? What is the standard of reliability?), Minimal
Reliabilism is definite enough to enable us to look for substitutes for (2)
and (3).
Now consider someone who knows a lot. Take any of the propositions
our subject knows. That proposition must be true, and the subject must
believe it. Moreover, the belief must be produced by a process of a type
that regularly generates true beliefs. Some such processes involve infer-
ences from prior beliefs that the subject has, and, if justification is to be
conferred on the end-state, then these prior beliefs themselves must be
produced by processes of types that regularly generate true beliefs. If the
latter processes involve inferences from yet other beliefs, then, by the
same token, those more fundamental beliefs must, in their turn, be
generated by processes of types that regularly generate true beliefs.
Ultimately, there must be basic beliefs, produced by reliable processes
that do not involve inferences from prior beliefs.3 Among the more
plausible candidates for such beliefs are our opinions about the objects
we perceive. 4 Or, perhaps, there are beliefs that we acquire as a simple
matter of normal development, independently of the stimuli that im-
pinge upon us, and perhaps these ontogenetic mechanisms are them-
selves reliable. 5
How should we relate this picture of our knower to the lives that
people lead, the experiences they have, and the knowledge they acquire?
There are two obvious possibilities. According to the first, the order of
3 Although these beliefs are causally basic, they do not have the status traditionally
associated with foundational beliefs, of beingjustificationally basic: whether they are
justified depends on other facets of the subject's belief system. In other words, the
explanation of why they are there does not involve reference to other beliefs, but
the explanation of why they are justified does. This point was pioneered in several
important papers of Wilfrid Sellars, particularly in 'Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind' (reprinted as Ch. 3 of Science, Perception, and Reality [London: Routledge
1963]). However, as the referee for this paper pointed out, my reliabilistic develop-
ment of this point differs in important respects from Sellars's articulation of it. My
approach is closer to that offered by Komblith in 'Beyond Foundationalism and the
Coherence Theory.'
4 Although, on many accounts of perception, our beliefs about ordinary objects result
from complex psychological processes involving inferences from unconscious be-
liefs. See, for example, the account offered by David Marrin Vision (San Francisco:
Freeman 1982).
5 Here I have in mind the kinds of views about language acquisition developed by
Noam Chomsky in Language and Mind (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1972),
and other writings.
justification is the temporal/causal order. We begin in childhood with

the simple things, acquiring basic justified beliefs, and, as time goes on,
we engage in more and more inferences and form more and more
complicated justified beliefs. The second story holds that the formation
of belief is much more haphazard. From childhood on, we believe all
sorts of things, but it is only in our maturity that we undertake intellec-
tual house-cleaning, recognizing the dependence of some of our beliefs
on others, and the ultimate dependence of all of them on our basic beliefs.
Whichever option we select, what emerges is a Robinson Crusoe picture
of human knowledge. Psychologism and reliabilism offer genuine ad-
vances on the conception with which we began, but the individualism
of that conception remains. Knowledge is something that individuals

acquire by themselves, through the proper exercise of their psychologi-
cal capacities in reliable belief-generating processes. But Robinson Crusoe
is fiction in epistemology as well as in literature.
Consider the formation of prime candidates for basic beliefs. Light is
scattered from the surface of a sleeping dog. It reaches the eyes of an
observer who forms the belief that the dog is sleeping. Let us assume that
the process leading from retinal irradiation to belief-formation involves
no inferences from prior beliefs. Then it is tempting to say that we have
a reliable process of belief-formation that issues in a basic belief. Yet the
formation of that belief is plainly dependent on the conceptual resources
available to the observer. Only those who employ the categories dog and
sleeping will form the belief that the dog is sleeping when given that
pattern of sensory irradiation. To see how an apparently innocuous
episode of belief-formation might be deeply problematic, we need only
tum to examples of observations made by those whose observational
categories are, from our perspective, wrongheaded, confused, or incon-
sistent. Inspecting the gas discharged in a glass vessel, Joseph Priestley
reports that he has isolated dephlogisticated air.6 An apparently reliable
process has gone awry? Blame is presumably to be assigned to the
conceptual background that Priestley brings to the situation. But that is
simply to reveal that for Priestley andfor us the issue of whether processes
6 For discussion of this example, and a brief survey of the relevant historical material,
see my 'Theories, Theorists, and Theoretical Change,' Philosophical Review 87 (1978)
519-47.
7 It might be better to say that a conditionally reliable process has failed to be reliable:
Priestley has engaged in a process that has a good chance of generating true belief
if the background to which it is applied was itself reliably generated. I am grateful
to the referee who has convinced me that this approach to the reliability of belief-
generating processes needs more detailed discussion than I can give it here.
160 Philip Kitcher
of perception regularly generate true beliefs depends on our propensities

for categorizing nature.
Where did those propensities come from? Surely from those who
taught us in early childhood (and beyond). We all absorb, blindly and
uncritically, what Quine aptly calls 'the lore' of our ancestors. 8 If it is
proposed that the causal/temporal order represents the order of justifi-
cation, then the epistemic standing of a subject's beliefs cannot simply
be a matter of what the subject has done. The tree of justification sprawls
beyond the individual. Even if our subject's cognitive mechanisms work
flawlessly, she is epistemically dependent on what she has borrowed
from those who initially socialized her. Garbage in, garbage out.
To save the Robinson Crusoe pictUre of human knowledge, one must

choose the second option: we begin with a haphazard collection of
beliefs, and, in our epistemic maturity, we regenerate them in a more
adequate fashion. So we conceive of knowers as undertaking the kind of
overhaul that Frege planned in the case of arithmetic and Descartes
hoped to do for knowledge in general. We shuck off our dependence on
the lore of our ancestors and rebuild our belief systems from scratch. But
how exactly is this to be done? What categories are we to employ to frame
the propositions we entertain? Seeking an Archimedean point from
which to measure our commitments, we find only empty space.
Neither option allows us to confine knowledge and justification to the
individual knower. Psychologism and Minimal Reliabilism lead us in-
exorably to the Socio-Historical Conception of Human Knowledge:
For any Sand any p, such that S correctly believes that p, whether
S knows that p depends not simply on the psychological processes
undergone by S but on the activities of a chain of others, extending
from those who have taught S into both the contemporary and
ancestral communities.
As I have formulated it, the Socio-Historical conception does not give up

the notions of truth and justification. Instead, it regards the epistemic
status of the beliefs of current subjects as dependent on the reliability of
a social-historical process that extends into the distant past.
Even so, the Socio-Historical conception calls for reconfiguration of
traditional methodology. From Descartes and Bacon on, the primary task
of logic and methodology has been to identify the proper ways in which
8 See the closing sentences of 'Camap and Logical Truth' in The Ways of Paradox
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1976).
individual minds should behave: we need to eradicate the Idols, follow

the proper rules for the direction of the mind, perform our deductions
and inductions in accordance with the correct principles. This is an
important enterprise, but it leaves untouched an equally significant
epistemic project. It is not enough for individuals to do their bit. The
society of knowers must be organized so that individual efforts are
coordinated so as to promote the attainment of truth, so that the unavoid-
able deference to authority does not stifle the introduction of corrective
ideas, so that the mechanisms for forming and transmitting consensus
offer the best chance for attaining true beliee
Traditional epistemology can absorb the suggested revisions, perhaps
even welcome them. However, the social-historical conception of knowl-

edge provides a point of entry for more sweeping challenges. It is time
to confront the arguments from cultural and temporal diversity.
III
According to my conservative version of the social-historical conception,

contemporary subjects know things only if the socio-historical process
through which the ancestral lore was amassed is conducive to the
attainment of truth. Why should we take such a rosy view of the process?
Many anthropologists, sociologists, and historians of science believe
that optimists deceive themselves. They offer a number of different kinds
of considerations.
1. The Inaccessibility of Reality Argument.

Those who adopt the traditional conception of knowledge and who
claim that some people know something are committed to suppos-
ing that some current beliefs correspond to the way the world is.
But how can this correspondence ever be checked? It is conceded
9 Problems about the proper form of an epistemic society have recently been dis-
cussed by several authors. See, for example, Alvin Goldman, 'Foundations of Social
Epistemics,' Synthese 73 (1987) 109-44; Nicholas Rescher, Cognitive Economy (Pitts-
burgh: University of Pittsburgh Press 1989); and David Hull, Science as a Process
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1990). I discuss the specific problems noted
in the text in 'The Division of Cognitive Labor; Journal of Philosophy 87 (1990) 5-23,
'Authority, Deference, and the Role of Individual Reason,' in Eman McMullin, ed.,
The Social Dimension of Scientific Knowledge (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame
Press 1992) 244-71, and, most systematically, in the final chapter of The Advancement
of Science (New York: Oxford University Press 1993).
162 Philip Kitcher
that there is no transparent process through which the nature of

reality is revealed to us. We are never in a position to step outside
our conceptions and check that they match the world. Hence the
idea that there is any such match is simply an article of faith. 10
2. The Argument from Cultural Variation.
There is not simply one lineage that leads from the distant past to
the present, but many. To claim that one among these lineages (the
one that runs through the high points of Western science) generates
true beliefs and the others error would require providing a clear
criterion for the superiority of that lineage. But this cannot be done
either in terms of the process or the product. What we take to be
the bizarre beliefs and practices of other societies serve the mem-
bers of those societies well in their interactions with nature. Nor
can we suppose that the kinds of processes and community delib-
erations that occurred in the lineages leading to alternative socie-
ties were inferior to those that marked the development of Western
science. The conviction that our beliefs, but not theirs, match reality
thus rests on an unjustified prejudice. 11
3. The Argument from Temporal Variation.

During the history of Western science, our predecessors have
frequently been confident that their claims corresponded to reality.
By our lights, their confidence was misplaced, and we see the
history of science as a succession of errors. Nor is it possible to
10 Contemporary versions of this argument descend primarily, I think, from Thomas

Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press
1970 [1st ed. 1962]), esp. 170-1, 206-7. But the arguments themselves are far older,
occurring in highly developed forms in the writings of nineteenth-century idealists.
Contemporary versions of the arguments which relate them to post-Kantian discus-
sions of epistemological problems can be found throughout the recent writings of
Hilary Putnam; see, for example, the title essay in Realism with a Human Face
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1992).
11 The clearest versions of this line of reasoning emerge in the writings of some
contemporary sociologists of knowledge, who have been much influenced by the
anthropological work of E.E. Evans-Pritchard on the Azande, and by the studies of
Mary Douglas. See, in particular, David Bloor, Knowledge and Social Imagery (Lon-
don: Routledge 1976; Chicago: University of Chicago 1991 (2nd ed.]), and many of
the essays collected in Martin Hollis and Stephen Lukes, eds., Rationality and
Relativism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1982).
discern in this history 'any coherent pattern of ontological devel-

opment.' There is no linear, or cumulative, eradication of errors
but, instead, an alternation of concepts in which later members
often resemble much earlier notions more closely than their imme-
diate predecessors. Under these circumstances we have no warrant
for claiming that we have, at last, formed beliefs that match real-
ity.I2
4. The Argument from the Social Inculcation of Standards.

The history of science also reveals that the standards that are used
in assessing candidate beliefs, and consequently the inferences that
are performed in generating and sustaining belief, are themselves
variable through the course of inquiry. These standards are modi-
fied in response to the differing needs of members of communities
(where these needs are not necessarily epistemic) and they are
jointly constitutive of the ways in which members of the commu-
nity conceive of reality and of the ways in which they order their
social relations. Because those standards are inculcated in the
process of socialization into the community, each of us tacitly
adopts them in our reasoning, and it is thus hopeless to think that
the complex reasoning processes in which people undoubtedly
engage can somehow provide an independent corrective to the
contingent decisions that have been made in the past. 13
These arguments are widely influential and individually persuasive.

Taken together, they contrive to block the most obvious ways of defend-
ing traditional epistemology's use of the notions of truth and justifica-
tion. Nonetheless, I am not quite ready to capitulate.
12 This is the 'pessimistic induction on the history of science' (or what Hilary Putnam
calls 'the disastrous meta-induction' in Meaning and the Moral Sciences [London:
Routledge 1978), 25). The challenge to convergence is very clear in Kuhn, The
Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Sharp formulations of the argument have been
offered by Larry Laudan, Science and Values (Berkeley, CA: The University of
California Press 1984), Ch. 5; and Arthur Fine, The Shaky Game (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press 1986), Ch. 7.
13 This argument has its roots in an interpretation of the later work of Wittgenstein,
and in sociological reflections on the writings of Mary Douglas (in particular Purity
and Danger [London: Routledge 1966]). For developed versions, see Bloor, Knowledge
and Social Imagery, and especially Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer, Leviathan and
the Air-Pump (Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985).
164 Philip Kitcher
IV
Let us begin with the argument from the inaccessibility of reality. This
begins with the sensible observation that we can never have 'out of
theory experiences' in which we ascend to some point from which we
can compare the claims that we make against reality to see if they match
up. Does that observation doom the traditional epistemologist's talk of
truth?
This question generates an important crux in contemporary philoso-
phy. There seem to be three generic options. One, accepted by those who
propose to liberate 'knowledge' from its traditional obsessions, is to

maintain that the only legitimate concept of truth is truth as correspon-
dence and to deny that there is any way of checking the alleged corre-
spondences. Its polar opposite shares the presupposition about truth-
truth is correspondence to reality - and tries to face the skeptic or
relativist head-on. Between these two is a currently popular strategy of
deflecting the objection by cleaving to a different conception of truth.
Because this option is so inviting, I want to consider whether it answers
to those realist motivations that point us towards the correspondence
theory of truth and the epistemological troubles that lie beyond.
Of course, there are rival theories (or maybe pictures, or non-theories)
of truth available. Pragmatists suggest that truth is simply what emerges
in the ideal limit of rational inquiry, or that the truth is what an ideally
episternically situated agent believes/4 deflationists aver that the entire
truth about truth is that it licenses the assertion of those sentences we
count as true. 15 I believe that, unfortunately, neither of these tempting
lines of escape will both resolve the problem posed by the argument from
inaccessibility and answer to compelling motivations for a more robust
version of realism.
14 The original version of the pragmatist conception is due to C.S. Peirce, and is
developed in some detail by Wilfrid Sellars in Science and Metaphysics (London:
Routledge 1967), Ch. 5; the account in terms of ideally situated knowers is proposed
by Hilary Putnam (see Reason, Truth, and History [Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press 1981), 55-6, for a particularly crisp formulation, and numerous passages
in Meaning and the Moral Sciences, and other subsequent writings).
15 For careful elaborations of accounts of truth along these lines, see Dorothy Grover,
Joseph Camp, and Nuel Belnap, 'A Prosentential Theory of Truth,' Philosophical
Studies 27 (1975) 73-125, and Paul Horwich, Truth (Oxford: Blackwell1990). As Fine
(The Shaky Game, Ch. 7 and 8) makes very clear, his 'natural ontological attitude'
amounts to using a 'no-theory' of truth to counter skeptical and relativistic objec-
tions to claims about scientific knowledge.
A pragmatic theory of truth couched in terms of the limit of rational

inquiry may avoid the letter of the objection but only to encounter a
parallel difficulty. A claim that a particular belief is true, on the pragma-
tist's account, implies that the proposition believed will be part of the
corpus generated in the ideal limit of inquiry. But that ideal limit is as
inaccessible as the reality beloved of the correspondence theory. How
then do we check that our target proposition actually belongs? If we were
assured that the belief corpora in the history of Western science exhibited
some nice convergence property, then we might appeal to that property
to ground our claim about the limit. But, as the argument from temporal
variation makes plain, claims of convergence are suspect. Furthermore,

the proposed checking procedure would be as indirect as those that a
correspondence theorist might suggest.
Switching from truth as what emerges in the limit of inquiry to truth
as 'an idealization of rational acceptability' sidesteps the problem. But it
invites us to ask what makes a situation epistemically ideal. Recall the
steps that led to the socio-historical conception of knowledge. We were
to explain (partially) the difference between knowledge and mere true
belief - the property of being justified, if you like - in terms of the
reliable generation of true belief. In other words, the notion of truth was
conceived as explanatorily prior to that of justification. If we now identify
truth with ideal justification, then, it appears, we cannot explain what an
ideal justification is in any non-circular way. How then do we under-
stand the notion of ideal justification, and how do we defend claims that
particular statements are ideally justified (i.e. true)? It seems that one
difficulty has given way to two. 16
The deflationist' s view of truth evades any such problems. If announc-
ing that a proposition is true is equivalent to asserting the proposition
then our ordinary grounds for assertion can serve to underwrite the
ascription of truth. No out-of-theory checking is needed. But, I suggest,
16 Putnam (Reason, Truth, and History) is sensitive to the worry that his account may
seem to 'explain a clear notion with a vague one' (56). But the root of the trouble is
not vagueness. Rather it is the difficulty of understanding what we could mean by
hailing a process as justificatory or as ideally justificatory independently of its
propensity to deliver truth. The problem may be approached in another way by
reflecting on Michael Dummett's preferred account of mathematical truth in terms
of proof. What singles out certain patterns as proof procedures? What gives them
their special status? We are, I think, bound to ask these questions, and, once the
explication of truth in terms of proof has been adopted, we are deprived of resources
for answering them. (See Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas [Oxford: Oxford
University Press 1978], and my The Nature of Mathematical Knowledge, 143.)
166 Philip Kitcher
the deflationist's theory does not deliver what traditional epistemology

wants.
Deflationists are fond of deriding as 'metaphysical' the craving for a
more elaborate theory of truth. 17 But that craving has humble sources.
Within the ordinary framework supplied by science and common sense
we have a picture of the knowing subject. As the result of interactions
with independently existing objects - including other people - the
subject passes through a sequence of states. Some of those states have
propositional content, or, to put it less pompously, they are about things
in the world, typically things independent of the subject. Such states
might succeed or fail in representing the world as it is. We mark the

difference between those propositional states that accurately represent
reality from those that do not by dividing the pertinent propositions into
those that are true from those that are false. The notion of truth as
correspondence is thus not some peculiar metaphysical extravagance
but part of an important way of thinking about ourselves and others.
Instead of starting with a view of Realism as committed to very
abstract doctrines about THE WORLD, or about the character of the 'one
true theory,' I propose to let realism be the position that emerges from
what I take to be the most powerful line of motivating argument.
Realism, if you like, is just that view that answers to particular intuitions.
The motivating argument I want to consider is a very simple argument
by analogy, which begins from reflection on a familiar type of situation.
Imagine that you are watching the behavior of a group of subjects,
each of whom is trying to perform the same task. For the sake of
concreteness, let the task be that of finding a route between two places,
and suppose that the subjects have each been given a map. Some of these
maps are different from others, and, as we shall see, the differences
matter. Consequent upon their study of whichever map they have
received, the subjects form representations of the way in which their
target relates to various objects they can see, and these representations
influence their attempts to perform the task. We explain the differential
successes, in part, by noting the relations between map and domain
17 Fine has considerable fun with the idea of the 'desk-thumping, foot-stamping shout'
that insists on the idea that the objects of commonsense and natural science REALLY
exist (The Shaky Game, 129). Putnam attributes to his opponents appropriate distri-
butions of capital letters (see 'Realism and Reason; 123-40). Of course, it is incum-
bent on defenders of correspondence truth to do better than stamp their feet and
sprinkle capital letters, and I shall try to show below how we can make some
headway in articulating the intuitive feeling that something important is lost both
in NOA and in Putnam's internal realism.
mapped - or, derivatively, the relations between the representations

induced by the map and the objects among which they are trying to
navigate. 18
Major features of the pattern of successful and unsuccessful behavior
are seen as flowing from a relation of correspondence between repre-
sentation and reality-but of course there will be people with inaccurate
representations who make compensating errors as well as those with
accurate representations who bungle the task in one way or another. We
may expect that a more elaborate psychological story will recognize the
ways in which representational states combine in directing behavior,
thus revealing the ways in which the basic pattern of accuracy-success,
inaccuracy-failure, is amended. But the crucial point is that the idea of a

relation of correspondence between thoughts, statements, images, on the
one side, and an independent reality on the other, is employed in
explaining the behavior of others.
The explanations envisaged are outgrowths of our ordinary ways of
understanding thought and action. As many philosophers of mind have
emphasized in response to eliminativist proposals, ascribing beliefs,
desires, hopes, and intentions provides a powerful way of explaining
human behavior (and perhaps the behavior of other organisms, too). 19
Individual successes can, of course, be explained by citing the content of
individual beliefs: Ophelia finds her way to the brook because she
believes that the path through the wicket-gate leads to the willows, as
indeed it does. But the pattern of success and failure cannot be under-
stood by simply stringing together these accounts of individual cases.
That is explained only by noting the systematic influence of states that
correspond to the ways in which the objects are disposed. 20
18 I use the example of pictorial representations because it makes very immediate the
idea of a relation of correspondence between representation and reality. However,
it should not be thought that such representations have a special status because they
lack the conventional characteristics of linguistic representations. To cite one impor-
tant example, the collinearity of stations on the map of the London Underground
does not correspond to the collinearity of the actual stations. (Despite this, the map
has been used with enormous success by millions of people, and is, subject to its
conventions, absolutely exact!) Thus I dissent in several ways from Paul Horwich's
attempt to show that a deflationary account of truth can accommodate the 'corre-
spondence intuition' (see his Truth, 115-17).
19 This is very clear in the writings of Daniel Dennett (see, in particular, The Intentional
Stance [Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books 1987]), but the fundamental conception
goes back at least to Wilfrid Sellars's seminal essay 'Empiricism and the Philosophy
of Mind' (Ch. 5 of Science, Perception, and Reality [London: Routledge 1963)).
20 The point here is akin to one that is familiar from discussions of explanation and
168 Philip Kitcher
Continuing to reflect on the performances of our subjects, we recog-

nize that their representations are formed through processes that depend
on their biological characteristics, on the lore that they absorb from their
societies, and from other interactions with independent objects. We
recognize that matters of biology, of social inculcation, or of exposure to
nature might affect the representations they form, crippling or enhanc-
ing their performances. Operating from within our own system of capacities,
social background, and experiences, we can explain why our subjects think
what they think, do what they do, and succeed to the extent that they
succeed. The realist move is to suppose that exactly the same type of
account could be given for each- or for all- of us. Just as we regard
our subjects as forming their beliefs through complex processes, fre-
quently involving interactions with independent objects (objects inde-
pendent of them), so too, we are to regard our own beliefs as the joint
product of interactions with a world of mind-independent objects (ob-
jects that are independent of all minds), of the character of the perceptual
and cognitive apparatus that is put to work in those interactions, and of
the socially shaped systems of belief and commitment that we bring to
the interactions. Just as the correspondence between representation and
reality is manifested in the pattern of successes of our subjects, so too our
own successes are to be viewed as stemming from the correspondence
of the underlying representations to a mind~independent nature.
Realism, I suggest, should be thought of as the position that makes this
analogical move. 21 In making the analogy, we do not, of course, suppose
that there is some entity that looks down on all of us in the way that we
reduction. We cannot explain the systematic predominance of male births among

humans by recounting the details of innumerable events of copulation, fertilization,
and embryonic growth. For further discussion, see Elliott Sober, 'Equilibrium
Explanation,' Philosophical Studies 43 (1983) 201-10, and my 'Explanatory Unification
and the Causal Structure of the World,' in P. Kitcher and W. Salmon, eds., Scientific
Explanation (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1990) 410-505, esp. 426-30.
In the context of discussions of truth, the point was forcefully made by Hartry Field,
'Tarski's Theory of Truth,' journal of Philosophy 69 (1972) 347-75. Field denied that a
mere list of assignments of referents to expressions was sufficient for the theory of
reference, and, derivatively, for the theory of truth. Setting the theory of truth in the
context of explaining successful behavior enables us to see that understanding
systematic success demands more than simply conjoining claims like 'Ophelia
believes that the path leads to the willows and the path does lead to the willows.'
We need to identify the generic property - correspondence to reality - that is
shared by the pertinent representations.
21 In arriving at this formulation, I have been helped by discussion with David

Bakhurst.
imagined ourselves surveying a class of subjects. We have no need of

such hypotheses: for we regard the relations between our subjects, the
objects about which they form representations, and their performances
as unaffected by the presence of observers.
I claim that this very elementary way of thinking about ourselves, our
thoughts and our actions, is what lies behind what is often viewed as
'naive' or 'metaphysical' realism. There are, I think, advantages in un-
derstanding realism in terms of the motivating analogy, both for re-
straining realism from overextending its doctrine and for responding to
the most important lines of criticism. Thus, for example, I think that the
best strategy for responding to powerful objections to realist reliance on
reference is to view our understanding of reference as generated by

analogy from our assignment of referents to the tokens of others. But this
is only a gesture at a line of argument that I postpone for present
purposes.22
Although more needs to be said, I hope that these brief remarks
indicate why the argument from the inaccessibility of reality should not
be evaded by simply abandoning the idea of truth as correspondence.
How, then, should we respond to it? The answer, I suggest, is to chal-
lenge the demand for a check of the contents of our beliefs against the
reality to which we hope that they correspond. It is wrong to think either
that we have unmediated access to external nature, so that some of our
beliefs are undistorted reflections of the way the world is, or that external
nature is totally ineffable, so that any claims about correspondence to it
must be speculation about mysterious noumena. 23 On the simple picture
I have sketched of subjects and their states, our beliefs are partially
caused by our interactions with nature, mediated, of course, by our
capacities and our inherited framework of concepts. How then can we
tell if the products of this multifactorial process are accurate or not?
There are two possibilities. We can reflect on the process or look for
special features of the product. The latter strategy emerges straightfor-
22 The problems generated by Putnam's 'permutation' arguments ('Realism and

Reason,' and Ch. 2 of Reason, Truth, and History) are deep and difficult, but I think
that my approach to realism can at least help to make clearer what the realist wants
to claim. Similarly, I believe that it enables us to scrutinize more thoroughly Fine's
charge that realism's defense of abductive reasoning rests on a fallacy. Cashing these
promissory notes must wait for other occasions.
23 Realists are often accused of having failed to understand the achievements and the
problems of Kant's epistemology. Realism's WORLD is thus made to seem
noumenal in the least charitable interpretation of that term. But if we keep our gaze
firmly on the analogical move to realism, this interpretation cannot be sustained.
170 Philip Kitcher
wardly from my discussion of the rationale of our appeals to accurate

representation. Viewing skilful practice as sometimes grounded in be-
liefs that correspond to nature, we can contend that it would be extraor-
dinary if we were to be able to interact so successfully with the world on
the basis of distorted representations of it. This is a general version of the
celebrated 'Miracle' argument for scientific realism. I shall consider its
credentials shortly.
The second possibility is to examine the processes of belief-formation
and to argue that they are conducive to the attainment of accurate
representations of reality. Here the approach would be to use what we
believe about human subjects- for what else do we have to go on? -
to appraise the ways in which people form beliefs.

Defense of the traditional conception of knowledge (amended in the
ways I suggested earlier) will require the successful execution of both
strategies. For without examining the processes of belief-formation we
would be unable to salvage the notion of justified belief. Moreover, the
distinction between skilled performance and bungling provides our only
mark of the difference between accurate and inaccurate representations
and, consequently, our only means of appraising the conduciveness to
truth of belief-forming processes. Were we to find that our contemporary
beliefs were not sanctioned as especially accurate by applying that test,
then we would not be able to salvage the notion of truth (or, at least, not
without re-evaluating our own status as knowers).
It should now be dear how the four arguments that threaten the
traditional conception work so powerfully together. Escaping the Inac-
cessibility-of-Reality argument requires us to perform a double task. The
argument from Cultural Variation tries to undercut our ability to defend
the privileged status of current beliefs in terms of their special relation
to skilled performance. The arguments from Temporal Variation and
Social Inculcation of Standards invite us to take a negative view of the
processes that underlie the formation of current beliefs. In the conclud-
ing section of this paper I shall try to respond- all too briefly, I fear-
to these arguments.
v
One of the important achievements of twentieth-century genetics, rou-
tine enough to be assigned to a scientific underdass, is the ability to
manufacture organisms that will express chosen characteristics: fruitflies
that will have a particular bristle-number or that will engage in a certain
mating behavior, bacteria that will grow on a selected medium or that
will produce some desirable substance (such as insulin). Design of these
organisms is based on claims about the organization of genes in the
genome, on the structure of the genetic material, the properties of various

enzymes, and a mass of further claims. The success of the practice is to
be traced to the truth of the claims relied on by the designers. Otherwise
it would be a 'miracle' if it all worked, wouldn't it?
Not everyone is impressed with the 'miracle' argument. It is some-
times suggested that there is no legitimate scientific task of explaining
the success of science, or that the explanation can be provided by
recognizing that the claims that we presently endorse are those that have
survived in a selection process, precisely because they enable us to
intervene in nature. 24 However, simply pointing out that we discard
those claims that lack this type of pragmatic success, fails to explain why
any claims entertained by human beings have this property, and, more
specifically, what is the basis of the success in the particular instances
we espouse. Selectionist explanations do not merely observe that certain
entities survive the winnowing, but identify the characteristics of those
entities that have contributed to their survival. So, to take my example,
we need an account of contemporary biological successes in the manu-
facture of organisms with antecedently specified traits.
Focusing on a particular family of instances also avoids the charge that
science has somehow been set an overly grandiose project. Instead of
casting the task as one of science explaining its own success, we can
frame a more reasonable endeavor by asking how it is that a particular
group of people (twentieth century geneticists) operating with a specifi-
able collection of principles (the lore of twentieth century genetics) is able
systematically to intervene in nature in specific ways (manufacturing a
host of organisms). The 'miracle' argument should be viewed as de-
manding an explanation of the connection between the representational
states that are causally efficacious in their practice and the successful
outcome of that practice, and as offering, in response, the claim that those
representational states accurately represent that part of nature with
which they are concerned.
At this point, we encounter the Argument from Cultural Variation.
Construing the 'miracle' argument as a collection of naturalistic obser-
vations about people's states and practical successes may avoid accusa-
tions of setting impossible tasks or overlooking the possibility of a
selectionist explanation, but it is vulnerable to rebuttal from naturalistic
observations of the successes of others who hold beliefs incompatible
with those for whose truth we are trying to argue. We cannot claim that
24 For an extremely lucid formulation of these points, see Bas van Fraassen, The
Scientific Image (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1980), 39-40.
172 Philip Kitcher
the success of one group Gt in some intervention It is to be explained in

terms of the truth of their belief that p, if a parallel argument would
require us to explain the success of G2 in h in terms of the truth of their
belief that q, where p and q are logically incompatible.
Formulating the argument in this slightly pedantic way enables us to
see how to meet it. Cultural variation in belief is not a threat unless there
are rival cultures whose successes require explanation through the as-
sumed accuracy of incompatible beliefs. So there are a number of ways
to diagnose difficulties in alleged appeals to the exotic beliefs of others:
(A) claim that the practice of the others is not successful

(B) claim that the beliefs of the others are not incompatible with the
beliefs involved in explanations of our successes
(C) claim that the explanation of the successes of the others involves
beliefs that are not incompatible with the beliefs involved in the
explanation of our own successes.
I shall now outline how these strategies might be invoked in coping with
a favored example.
Famously, the Karam believe that the cassowary is not a bird. Casso-
waries do not fly, and so do not fall under the classification Yakt that
covers most of the things we mark out as birds. 25 What does this show
about the truth of our beliefs about birds?
Appealing to (A}, one might suggest that the Karam differ from us in
the success of practices based on states that are about birds and other
flying things. No doubt they are able to do all kinds of classificatory jobs,
but they lack the sophisticated abilities to make inferences about ana-
tomical, physiological, and molecular relationships that are supplied
within a taxonomy based on the appreciation of evolutionary relation-
ships.26 Appealing to (B), one could point out that the Karam agree with
us in a vast host of beliefs about birds: cassowaries are like parrots,
25 For use of this example, see Barry Barnes and David Bloor, 'Relativism, Rationalism,
and the Sociology of Knowledge,' in M. Hollis and S. Lukes, eds., Rationality and
Relativism (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1982) 21-47, esp. 38 ff. Barnes and Bloor rely
on R. Bulmer, 'Why is the Cassowary not a Bird?' (Man, new series 2 [1%7] 5-25).
26 Strictly speaking, realists need not claim this much. Those with nominalistic incli-
nations in systematics may want to contend for the independent existence of the
individual entities classified (the organisms) while denying that there is an objec-
tively correct way of assorting them. But most contemporary systematists would
want to go further.
hawks, and finches in various points of anatomical organization, unlike

them in lacking the ability to fly. Conjoining both observations in the
service of (C), one could conclude that there is a wide variety of practical
successes spread across the cultures, and that this diversity of successful
practices can be explained in terms of a set of representational states whose
contents are jointly consistent.
This necessarily brief outline, reveals, I hope, that, in the examples
most frequently cited, (A) and (B) are typically partial observations in
the serviCe of (C). I thus offer a recipe for responding to individual
arguments about cultural variation in belief: show that the total set of
practical successes can be explained without supposing that there are
inconsistent representations of nature.

I suggest that a similar strategy will succeed in defusing the argument
from temporal variation in belief. The so-called 'pessimistic induction'
(or 'disastrous meta-induction') on the history of science depends criti-
cally on giving a very broad-brush treatment of scientific practices. We
are told that most of the theories espoused by our predecessors have
turned out to be incorrect, and invited to consider whether, without
being arrogant, we can view our own epistemic situation as any differ-
ent. Typically, the point is urged against realist theses about unobserv-
able entities, but, as those who celebrate the fall of the theory-observation
distinction will hasten to point out, the argument can be made fully
general. Our predecessors adopted a ·variety of conceptual schemes,
which are manifest in their 'observation reports' as in their 'theorizing,'
having the same epistemic warrant for doing so as we have for accepting
our own - and yet, by our lights, those schemes fail to correspond to
reality.
The beginning of wisdom in evaluating this argument seems to me to
get beyond the talk of 'theories' and 'conceptual schemes.' Our ancestors
made a large number of different claims about nature, and they used
those claims in trying to explain and predict aspects of the world. To
what extent did they differ from us? To what extent were they successful
in their explanation and prediction? And, most importantly, to what
extent were their explanatory and predictive successes traceable to
beliefs that we would reject?
These questions are exactly parallel to those raised in connection with
the argument from cultural variation. They become blurred in the usual
appeals to the presence of discredited theories in the past history of
science, and it is important to bring them into focus. I shall try to do so
by looking briefly at Larry Laudan's influential attempt to 'confute'
convergent realism (Science and Values, Ch. 5).
According to Laudan, there are scores of past theories that have been
strikingly successful, which we now acknowledge as having employed
nonreferential central .terms. Among his examples is Fresnel's theory of
174 Philip Kitcher
diffraction and interference, which is, he claims, committed to the exist-

ence of an all-pervading ether. Now it is undeniably true that Fresnel
believed that there had to be an all-pervading medium in which light
waves are propagated, and that he labelled this hypothetical medium
'the ether.' Moreover he offered successful- and, by our lights, formally
largely correct - mathematical derivations of interference and diffrac-
tion patterns in terms of the propagation of light waves. The crucial
question is whether we can separate Fresnel's successes from his faulty
beliefs.
The very existence of contemporary textbook presentations of Fres-
nel's mathematics suggests that this is not impossible. But, of course, it
is important to block the obvious charge that we succeed in referring

where Fresnel did not. Thinking carefully about reference in Fresnel's
text will, I claim, support the hypothesis that Fresnel's mathematical
formulations refer to the propagation of electromagnetic waves: what
explains his productions of his tokens is his intention to refer to the waves
propagated in his experiments on diffraction and interference -just as
Priestley's linguistic behavior is best explained by supposing that some
of his tokens of 'dephlogisticated air' refer to the samples of gas in his
jars. Thus, I propose that the successes of Fresnel's work in optics stem
from his references to genuine existents (electromagnetic waves), and
that his failures of reference (his tokens that are fixed as referring to
oscillations in the ether) are not involved in the successful parts of his
work. 27
In general, Laudan's examples of past successful theories should be
treated by recognizing that the failures of reference and the false claims
do not contribute to the successes. Laudan thinks of truth and falsehood
as applying to whole theories, so that failure to achieve the whole truth
infects a vast amount of prior practice. As he rightly points out, early
twentieth century geology, committed to laterally stable continents, was
very successful. But the successes in no way derive from the faulty commit-
ment to lateral stability, which acts not as a premise in explanations and
predictions, but as afaulty constraint, especially in biogeography and paleome-
teorology (the areas which Wegener used to make his case for continental
drift). The geological case illustrates vividly points that can be seen in
other instances- for example, Kuhn's attempts to stress kinship be-
tween Aristotle and Einstein, thus undermining the notion of'a coherent
27 The strategy I deploy here derives from the seminal work of Saul Kripke and Keith
Donnellan on reference. I discuss the case of Priestley at some length in 'Theories,
Theorists, and Theoretical Change,' and elaborate the account of Fresnel in chapter
5 of The Advancement of Science.
direction of ontological development' in the history of science. Only by

teasing apart the particular successes and failures of past practices can
one hope to understand how the historical development of the sciences
has not simply been 'one damned thing after another,' but a cumulative
process.
Let me drive the point home with an analogy. If someone proposes
that successful basketball teams are those with tall players, she is not
confuted simply by noting that some highly successful team has one
short member. For it is quite possible that the successful games are those
in which that member spends time on the bench.
So far, I have concentrated on those criticisms that attack our right to
talk of the truth of current beliefs. Let me now tum to the issue of the
processes through which our beliefs have emerged. Proponents of the
argument from temporal variation are likely to insist that the processes
leading to the inculcation of belief have been modified during the history
of thought. There have been great changes in methodological standards
and in social arrangements for the production of knowledge. Is it possi-
ble to understand so varied a collection of processes as enabling contem-
porary knowers, whose knowledge, as the Socio-Historical conception
concedes, is ineluctably dependent on the past, to form reliable beliefs
about nature?
Once again, I shall attempt to provide a blueprint for answering this
type of criticism without delving into the details. According to the
version of the Socio-Historical conception that I aim to defend, as we learn
more about nature, we improve our understanding of how to learn about
nature. 28 The history of inquiry must thus be seen as doubly progressive,
advancing both in terms of substantive doctrine and in terms of methods
and procedures. How might this optimistic vision be justified?
One suggestion is that we have tacitly known, since the beginning,
how to conduct inquiry into nature. It is now fashionable in some
quarters to suppose that natural selection bequeathed to our remote
hominid ancestors an appropriate framework for framing generaliza-
tions about nature and dispositions to follow reliable rules of inference. 29
28 This is a point that has been emphasized by Dudley Shapere. See his Reason and the
Growth of Knowledge (Dordrecht: Reidel1984).
29 See, for example, W.V. Quine, 'Natural Kinds,' in Ontological Relativity and Other
Essays (New York: Columbia University Press 1970), and Nicholas Rescher, A Useful
Inheritance: Evolutionary Aspects of the Theory of Knowledge (New York: Rowman and
Allanheld 1989). A somewhat more extensive presentation of the argument of the
text is given in my 'The Naturalists Return,' esp. 101), and a full-dress version in
Stephen Stich, The Fragmentation of Reason (Cambridge, MA: Bradford Books 1990).
176 Philip Kitcher
But I find no such encouragement in Darwin. Selection would have

tolerated any number of peculiar cognitive propensities, provided only
that they directed appropriate behavior in the natural and social envi-
ronments of savanna-dwelling primates living in small groups. If we are
to defend the view that we have achieved reliable cognitive strategies
for probing nature, we cannot reassure ourselves by identifying an
excellent starting point. Instead, we must focus on the character of the
processes that have transformed the conceptions of our remote ancestors
into those that we espouse.
It is precisely at this point that recent work in the history and sociology
of science becomes profoundly relevant. According to a growing consen-

sus, manifested in numerous detailed studies, the human intellectual
odyssey has been as haphazard and contingent as the voyage from
Troy to Ithaca. 30 Decisions to adopt particular substantive views and
particular standards for appraising those views are, so the consensus has
it, typically radically underdeterrnined by the input from nature. Such
decisions are made by choosing a particular way of relating the actors to
nature and to one another, a 'form of life,' and the allegedly 'reliable'
methods that emerge from the historical process are, in consequence, only
sanctioned within one such 'form oflife.'Therewerenumerousaltemative
waysofgoingon, whicheasilyrnighthavebeen,butwerenot, triumphant,
and which would have favored very different 'reliable methods.'
In my judgment, this currently fashionable picture of the history of
science thrives on exploiting the gap between traditional philosophical
accounts of justification and confirmation and the problems and predica-
ments that scientists, past and present, encounter. Traditional philoso-
phy of science has been very good at understanding the tactics of
scientific argument, but very poor at recognizing the strategies by means
of which scientists persuade one another. When we immerse ourselves
in the writings of Darwin or Lavoisier, aiming to understand how their
proposals were successful, it is very easy to identify and to analyze
individual pieces of argument. Yet what is needed to counter the fash-
ionable overinterpretations of the thesis that theories are underdeter-
rnined by input from nature is a way of seeing how these individual
pieces of argument are marshalled to provide decisive reasons for scien-
tific change.
The debates that surround large scientific changes are, I believe, very
like games of grandmaster chess. A minor weakness is opened up here,
30 A watershed article that summarizes a wealth of problematic instances is Steven

Shapin's 'History of Science and its Social Reconstructions,' History of Science 20
(1982) 157-211.
a piece is placed to advantage there, until, eventually, the accumulation

of small gains tells decisively in favor of one of the players. In the
transitions associated with the names of Darwin and Lavoisier, there is
no single piece of evidence or argument that decides the issue. The
participants face numerous, complex predicaments in which they strug-
gle to find ways of accommodating apparent inconsistencies subject to
the constraint of retaining a unifying perspective on the phenomena with
which they seek to deal. There are typically tree-like structures that
represent the alternative ways of escaping threats of inconsistency. The
job of the scientist is, in essence, to close off the possible avenues for the
opposition, while showing how there are live possibilities for resolving
difficulties at home. As this is done again and again, one side is reduced
to the predicament of Simplicio in Galileo' s Dialogue, vainly insisting on
the possibility of solutions that cannot yet be formulated. Traditional
confirmation theories are extremely helpful in enabling us to see how
the local skirmishes are fought. They have very little to say about how
the wars are won - and that silence has been exploited to considerable
effect by those who deploy the history of science to undermine our
confidence in the growth of knowledge. 31
Let me review the argument of this paper. Traditional conceptions of
knowledge, I claim, need amendment, and the amendment I propose is
the Socio-Historical conception of knowledge. That conception points
towards new problems, the problems of understanding the coordination
of the efforts of knowers as well as the successful performances of
individual subjects. Yet, like traditional approaches to knowledge, the
Socio-Historical conception is vulnerable to skeptical challenges, chal-
lenges all the more virulent because they can apparently be buttressed
by appeals to the history of inquiry. I have tried to indicate the ways in
which such challenges should be met, but, at this stage, there is no
substitute for the details. Because our beliefs are ineluctably dependent
on the endeavors of our predecessors, we cannot hope to understand
their epistemic status without probing the history. Can we discard the
fictions of traditional epistemology without collapsing into skepticism?
I believe that we can, but going beyond the outline of hopeful strategies
is a complex of tasks for many other occasions.
Received: March, 1992
31 Once again, I only indicate the outline of a line of argument. For far more detail-
but still not enough- see Chapters 6 and 7 of The Advancement of Science.

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Here is a traditional way of thinking about human knowledge.

(1) Knowledge is a species of true belief. The crucial difference

An alternative picture of human knowledge is generated by retaining

(2b) No propositions have intrinsic justification. Justification accrues

(3b) A set of propositions is justified if it is maximally coherent with

respect to the subject's sensory experiences.

These alternative conceptions have been prominent in twentieth-cen-

No one should doubt that the conception of knowledge developed in

Consider a subject S who believes that p and justifiably believes

I regard this argument as sound, and as offering an important correction

For S to know that p or for -5 to be justified in believing that pit must

2 This argument is advanced by Gilbert Harman in Thought (Princeton: Princeton

Although further articulation would be valuable (How do we divide

justification is the temporal/causal order. We begin in childhood with

of that conception remains. Knowledge is something that individuals

of perception regularly generate true beliefs depends on our propensities

To save the Robinson Crusoe pictUre of human knowledge, one must

As I have formulated it, the Socio-Historical conception does not give up

individual minds should behave: we need to eradicate the Idols, follow

even welcome them. However, the social-historical conception of knowl-

According to my conservative version of the social-historical conception,

1. The Inaccessibility of Reality Argument.

that there is no transparent process through which the nature of

2. The Argument from Cultural Variation.

3. The Argument from Temporal Variation.

10 Contemporary versions of this argument descend primarily, I think, from Thomas

discern in this history 'any coherent pattern of ontological devel-

4. The Argument from the Social Inculcation of Standards.

These arguments are widely influential and individually persuasive.

propose to liberate 'knowledge' from its traditional obsessions, is to

A pragmatic theory of truth couched in terms of the limit of rational

variation makes plain, claims of convergence are suspect. Furthermore,

the deflationist's theory does not deliver what traditional epistemology

might succeed or fail in representing the world as it is. We mark the

mapped - or, derivatively, the relations between the representations

inaccuracy-failure, is amended. But the crucial point is that the idea of a

Continuing to reflect on the performances of our subjects, we recog-

reduction. We cannot explain the systematic predominance of male births among

21 In arriving at this formulation, I have been helped by discussion with David

imagined ourselves surveying a class of subjects. We have no need of

reference is to view our understanding of reference as generated by

22 The problems generated by Putnam's 'permutation' arguments ('Realism and

wardly from my discussion of the rationale of our appeals to accurate

to appraise the ways in which people form beliefs.

genome, on the structure of the genetic material, the properties of various

the success of one group Gt in some intervention It is to be explained in

(A) claim that the practice of the others is not successful

hawks, and finches in various points of anatomical organization, unlike

inconsistent representations of nature.

diffraction and interference, which is, he claims, committed to the exist-

is important to block the obvious charge that we succeed in referring

direction of ontological development' in the history of science. Only by

But I find no such encouragement in Darwin. Selection would have

of science becomes profoundly relevant. According to a growing consen-

30 A watershed article that summarizes a wealth of problematic instances is Steven

a piece is placed to advantage there, until, eventually, the accumulation

Received: March, 1992

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