Abstract

In the spirit of "naturalistic epistemology," many philosophers now conceive of a human being as a mechanistic or functional system. Reasoning is taken to be a mental or neurophysiological process which can be correlated with abstract reasing--taken to be a series of propositions, some designated as premises, some as intermediate steps, and one as the conclusion--in virtue of the way the process behaves in the system. Knowledge is roughly taken to be the culminating state of such a process of "reasonsing," reasoning which must of course be warranted, contain no false steps, etc. This model of reasoning and knowledge is, I argue, fundamentally wrong. I argue that we attribute abstract reasoning and, if the reasoning is of sufficiently high quality, knowledge to a person on the basis of what he is disposed to say in defense of his belief. We do not assume the existence of any internal process correlatable with the abstract reasoning we attribute to him. ;My defense of a dispositional theory of reasoning and knowledge consists of a sustained argument to show that the causal or inner process theory is incapable of accounting for many clear cases of knowledge, and a theory of dispositions which protects the dispositional theory from certain embarrassing counter examples. ;In chapter II I describe Gilbert Harman's version of a causal or inner process theory, arguing that it is subject to a certain type of counter example. The example shows that reasons or evidence can give a person knowledge that q without leading to or otherwise explaining his belief that q . Harman's "solution" to the difficulty presented by this type of case is shown to be inadequate. The difficulty, I argue, is intractable. I consider a number of plausible, but failing, attempts at weakening the causal requirement to overcome the difficulty. ;Doubt is cast on a theory which tries to define reasonsing functionally. According to functionalism, an inner process is reasoning in virtue of its causal role in the total system. The most plausible role for reasoning is producing or sustaining belief in a conclusion. . . . UMI