What Can We Learn from Psychology about the Nature of Knowledge?

Version antérieure d'un article paru dans Rivista di filosofia neo-scolastica, Milano 2002 0. Introduction Epistemology is a normative discipline. Traditionally it is supposed to tell us what we ought to believe, and under what conditions we can be said to know, in contrast to how we believe, and how we come to know. The latter questions call for descriptions of the origins of our knowledge in various areas, whereas the former asks about a definition of it. In this respect there is a fundamental difference between the kind of inquiry that psychologists, anthropologists, and historians lead about belief, perception, knowledge and other cognitive phenomena, and the kind of inquiry that philosophers and epistemologists lead about such notions. As a result, it often happens that when philosophers tell us that they are interested in the concept of knowledge, and in the analysis of this concept, they do not really talk about the same thing as psychologists when they talk to us about the way this concept is learned, acquired, or used by children and adults. Not only the objects, but the methods are not the same: philosophers inquire about the possibility of knowledge, and about our right to use this concept, and they deal with thought experiments, compare the meaning of epistemic words in natural language , and try to come up with the best account of what knowledge could be, and to give a theory of it, whereas psychologists attempt, more modestly, to say in what circumstances we come to know this or that, and they deal with real experiments about what people say and think, in the real world. But how can these different kinds of inquiries be completely divorced from each other? On the one hand, the philosopher-epistemologist must rely, in order to compare claims to knowledge, upon our actual use of this concept, and upon our ordinary intuitions about it. Even if he deals with the conditions of possibility of knowledge, he must rely on some description of it. On the other hand, when the psychologist attempts to give an analysis of our acquisition of the concept of knowledge, he must rely upon at least a preliminary definition of it, and he can hardly avoid to raise some normative questions. There must be some sort of trade off between the descriptive and the normative enterprise. In this talk, I shall not try to deal with all the …