Hilary Kornblith Quotes
But there is no doubt that my own views on this are, in quite a number of ways, very different from those of Quine.
The kinds of claims I make about knowledge are thus meant to be illustrative of a general argumentative strategy which might well bear fruit in areas of philosophy which I have not thus far explored.
I was often asked how one could even make sense of this. Isn't the category of knowledge something that we project upon the world, rather than something that we discover in it?
I think that when I first suggested the idea that knowledge should be viewed as a natural kind, many people thought this was just crazy.
In my view, since the case can be made that knowledge too is a natural kind, the role of pretheoretical intuitions is similarly diminished in epistemology.
My own reasons for favouring talk of natural kinds is just that I believe the best accounts of the success of scientific theories presupposes the existence of natural kinds.
I do realise that talk of natural kinds dates back to Aristotle, but I'd better not say too much about ancient philosophers lest I be convicted of practicing history of philosophy without a license.
There is a worry that many have expressed that, on the naturalistic way of approaching philosophical questions, philosophy will somehow be co-opted by science. I'm not much worried about this.
What I hankered for was an account of knowledge which would do far more than get our intuitions about cases right; I wanted a kind of account which would somehow be explanatory.
Here, there is simply no substitute for the kind of work that experimental psychologists do, work which shows some mechanisms to be quite reliable, and others to be quite unreliable.
When reflection is thereby demystified, I believe that the temptation to view human knowledge as different in kind from animal knowledge is undermined.
By putting the first-person point of view in a naturalistic perspective, I believe that we may genuinely come to understand it for the first time.