A book by Paul Moser Philosophy after Objectivity: Making Sense in Perspective London Uni Press, 1993.
From the Preface
Philosophers, among other theorists, have long sought objective knowledge: roughly, knowledge of things whose existence does not depend on one’s conceiving of them. Skeptics can effectively demand non-questionbegging evidence for claims to objective knowledge or truth, even if they typically despair of achieving such evidence. This book examines questions about objective knowledge in order to characterize the kinds of reasons available to philosophers and other theorists.
Philosophers, like other theorists, fall into two general categories: those who take skeptics seriously and those who do not. Philosophers who take skeptics seriously investigate the availability of non-questionbegging evidence for their claims, particularly their ontological claims about what actually exists. Philosophers who do not take skeptics seriously disregard their concern for nonquestionbegging supporting evidence. It is not unusual for philosophers simply to ignore this concern for non-questionbegging evidence. Our ignoring skeptics will not, however, make them–or their concern for non-questionbegging evidence–go away. In contrast, our attending to skeptical concerns about evidence can yield important lessons about the status of our available evidence. This book identifies these lessons, and explores their implications for ontology, epistemology, the theory of meaning, the theory of practical rationality, and the philosophy of mind.
This book explains how various perennial disputes in philosophy rest not on genuine disagreement, but on conceptual diversity: that is, talk about different matters. Acknowledgment of conceptual diversity, we shall see, can resolve a range of traditional debates in philosophy. The book also explains why philosophers need not anchor their views in the physicalism of the natural sciences. This lesson has important implications for the philosophy of mind, even though it runs afoul of a currently orthodox position in that area.
Philosophy, with or without optimism toward objective knowledge, benefits markedly from hard questions and criticisms. When such questions and criticisms come from others, one owes not just definite answers but sincere appreciation as well. Various sections of this book have received helpful comments from the following philosophers: Robert Audi, Lynne Rudder Baker, Kathy Emmett Bohstedt, Tom Carson, Suzanne Cunningham, Harry Gensler, John Heil, Al Mele, Dwayne Mulder, John Post, Shelley Stillwell, J. D. Trout, and Arnold vander Nat. I thank these philosophers for helpful questions and comments.
I presented earlier versions of parts of the book to various philosophical audiences: a 1989 American Philosophical Association Pacific Division Symposium on Epistemology; a 1990 American Philosophical Association Central Division Colloquium on the Philosophy of Mind; a 1992 American Philosophical Association Central Division Colloquium on Epistemology; a 1992 American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Symposium on Rationality and Morality; the 1990 and 1991 Conferences of the Illinois Philosophical Association; and philosophy colloquia at the following institutions: Loyola University of Chicago, Northern Illinois University, the State University of New York at Buffalo, Wayne State University, the University of Iowa, and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. I thank these audiences for helpful discussions.
My graduate seminars at Loyola University of Chicago have been a source of valuable discussion. Dwayne Mulder and Bradley Owen stand out as helpful participants. I thank the members of my seminars for lively discussions on a number of topics relevant to this book. Loyola University of Chicago has provided a fine environment for work on this book, including a 1991 research leave of absence for completion of a penultimate version.
I am grateful to my family–Denise, Anna, and Laura–for tolerating my frequent absentmindedness at home, and for helping with this book in many ways. Remarkably, they consistently resist complaining about my philosophical obsessions. I thank my family for their patience, kindness, and encouragement. I also thank Angela Blackburn and the other members of the Oxford editorial staff who improved this book in many ways.
Some parts of this book have benefited from my recent publications. Some of chapter 1 draws on “A Dilemma for Internal Realism”, Philosophical Studies 59 ( 1990), and “Realism and Agnosticism”, American Philosophical Quarterly 29 ( 1992). Part of chapter 2 draws on “Justification in the Natural Sciences”, The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 42 ( 1991). Some of chapter 3 draws on “Malcolm on Wittgenstein on Rules”, Philosophy 66 ( 1991), and “Analyticity and Epistemology”, Dialectica 46 ( 1992). Part of chapter 5 makes use of some of “Physicalism and Intentional Attitudes”, Behavior and Philosophy 18 ( 1990) and “Physicalism and Global Supervenience”, The Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 ( 1992). In each case, I have revised the material in the original article. END OF PREFACE
The interesting thing is that there is no Popper entry in the Index, although there is a great deal about causation, endless references to concepts, conceptualisation and cognate matters, epistemology, epistemological standards, essences, explanation, interpretation, and, one of the longest lists (after concepts), justification!
So this author has been around the world, and in the literature for a long time without meeting any person or book that suggested to him that Popper had interesting things to say about objectivity, not to mention essences, causation and justification!
I first found Dr Moser as the editor of the 2002 Oxford Handbook of Epistemology which has a couple of fleeting references to Popper, but not on any of the major topics like justification.
“Where Popper (1972) understood ‘knowledge’ in a special sense as labeling, for example, theories and hypotheses that a group of scientists have made it their policy to utilize in their work, Cohen speaks of a single scientist as knowing….
If Cohen’s view is appropriate, then it impugns Alan R. White’s attempt (cf. 1982, 59–61) to fine-tune our understanding of the truth condition so that we speak of reality, not of truth, as the prime condition of knowledge. 7 My own later analysis of knowing that as a category broad enough to allow animals and infants to know will focus on the obtaining of the state of affairs expressed by the proposition that h rather than on that proposition’s being true. And the state of affairs expressed by a scientist’s simplification or idealization never occurs. So if utterances of the form, ‘S knows that h, ‘ do have both appropriate plural and singular subjects when we instantiate for ‘h’ such a simplification or idealization, then we should go along with Popper in regarding that as a different sense of ‘knows that’ and of ‘knowledge’ from the one of interest in my analysis, which Popper regards as concerning an aspect of a knowing subject.”
And elsewhere “Before the twentieth century, it was popular to think of scientific method as an instrument of discovery, but, in the heyday of logical empiricism, that conception came under severe scrutiny. Reichenbach, Hempel, and Popper distinguished between a “context of discovery” and a “context of justification, ” arguing that there were no methods that would lead scientists to the initial formulation of new hypotheses, but that, once proposed, possibly as a result of a variety of factors including imagination and luck, those hypotheses were subject to methodical check. In their treatments, scientific method reduced to the logic of confirmation.” (my emphasis)
