One line we can take here is to say that Galileo was right, and Cardinal Bellarmine was wrong, that Galileo's epsitemic principles and judgments were superior to Cardinal Bellarmine's. As Boghossian notes, there is some resistance to this sort of thought that is widespread throughout the humanities. The resistance is embodied by what Boghossian calls the Equal Validity view:
Equal Validity: There are many radically different, yet "equally valid" ways of knowing the world, with science being just one of them. (2006: 2)
Boghossian considers a range of positions that would count in favour of equal validity, focusing in his monograph on constructivism and relativism. Let's consider here the plausibility of what Boghossian describes as epistemic relativism.
Epistemic Relativism:
A. (Epistemic non-absolutism) There are no absolute facts about what belief a particular item of information justifies
B.(Epistemic relationism) if a person, S's, epistemic judgments are to have any prospect of being true, we must not construe his utterances of the form
"E justifies belief B"
as expressing the claim
"E justifies belief B"
but rather as expressing the claim: According to the epistemic system C, that I, S, accept, information E justifies belief B.
C. (Epistemic pluralism)There are many fundamentally different, genuinely alternative epistemic systems, but no facts by virtue of which one of these systems is more correct than any of the others (2006: 73)
If epistemic relativism is correct, it would seem as though there is no privileged perspective from which to claim that Galileo's epistemic principles and judgements are superior to Cardinal Bellarmine's.
Richard Rorty, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, attempts to defend something akin to Equal Validity by way of arguing in favour of just the sort of position Boghossian is calling epistemic relativism. Rorty writes:
But can we then find a way of saying that the considerations advanced against the Copernican theory by Cardinal Bellarmine—the scriptural description of the fabric of the heavens—were ‘‘illogical or unscientifc?’’. . . [Bellarmine] defended his view by saying that we had excellent independent (scriptural) evidence for believing that the heavens were roughly Ptolemaic. Was his evidence brought in from anothersphere, and was his proposed restriction of scope thus ‘‘unscientifc?’’ What determines that Scripture is not an excellent source of evidence for the way the heavens are set up? (Rorty 1981: 328-9)
Boghossian here quotes Rorty at some more length, noting that he answers his own question. Here, again, is Rorty with some provocative remarks:
So the question about whether Bellarmine . . . was bringing in extraneous ‘‘unscientific’’ considerations seems to me to be a question about whether there is some antecedent way of determining the relevance of one statement to another, some ‘‘grid’’ (to use Foucault’s term) which determines what sorts of evidence there could be for statements about the movements of planets. Obviously, the conclusion I wish to draw is that the ‘‘grid’’ which emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was not there to be appealed to in the early seventeenth century, at the time that Galileo was on trial. No conceivable epistemology, no study of the nature of human knowledge, could have ‘‘discovered’’ it before it was hammered out. The notion of what it was to be ‘‘scientific’’ was in the process of being formed. If one endorses the values . . . common to Galileo and Kant, then indeed Bellarmine was being ‘‘unscientific.’’ But, of course, almost all of us . . . are happy to endorse them. We are the heirs of three hundred years of rhetoric about the importance of distinguishing sharply between science and religion, science and politics, science and philosophy, and so on. This rhetoric has formed the culture of Europe. It made us what we are today.We are fortunate that no little perplexity within epistemology, or within the historiography of science, is enough to defeat it. But to proclaim our loyalty to these distinctions is not to say that there are ‘‘objective’’ and ‘‘rational’’ standards for adopting them. Galileo, so to speak, won the argument, and we all stand on the common ground of the ‘‘grid’’ of relevance and irrelevance which ‘‘modern philosophy’’ developed as a consequence of that victory. But what could show that the Bellarmine-Galileo issue ‘‘differs in kind’’ from the issue between, say, Kerensky and Lenin, or that between the Royal Academy (circa 1910) and Bloomsbury? (Op. cit. 330-1)What exactly are we to make of this? Does Rorty here give us any reason to approach the Galileo-Bellarmine issue as the epistemic relativist does? Boghossian's answer is a resounding "no." I will not retrace his arguments against epistemic relativism here. Rather, I invite readers to assess whether Rorty's take on the issue gives us any good reason to favour any of the three components of what Boghossian is calling epistemic relativism.
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ReplyDeleteNOTE: Gaven Kerr has asked me to post the following for him:
ReplyDeleteThanks for that interesting post. I have two points to make, one historical the other more systematic.
On the historical issue, I am led to believe from some secondary material that Cardinal Bellarmine himself had quite heterodox philosophical views that we quite anti-Aristotelian and just as revolutionary as Galileo’s. This anti-Aristotelianism led him to reject the typical philosophical and theological heritage that he would have been heavily schooled in, i.e. that of the scholastics. Now, a common feature of the major scholastics was that the justification of our empirical judgements must be from the world itself, this being nothing more that a traditional type of realism concerning the answerability of thought to the world. Thus, given that Bellarmine lived and was educated within an environment wherein thought was considered to be answerable to the world, there was in place precisely what Rorty denies in the second quote: a view of the mind/world relationship that holds our judgements about the natural world accountable to the world itself. So, given that Bellarmine found himself within such a context, his refusal to look into the telescope to see for himself represents a step away from the philosophical orthodoxy bequeathed to him by several major schools of scholastic thought. And if the refusal to take into consideration several major schools of thought with views pertinent to the issue at hand is epistemically blameworthy, then certainly Bellarmine is blameworthy.
So much then for the historical issue, let us now look at the systematic issue. As I understand it, the systematic issue is whether or not justification is relative to a particular epistemic context of discovery, such that one cannot be blamed if one remains with the generally accepted justificatory frameworks of a particular context of discovery even though adherence to such entails falsity. This in turn then is a species of whether or not justification ought to be context sensitive; and it seems to me that, objectively speaking, this is just wrong. If we seek to justify our judgements about the world, such judgements ought to be answerable to the world itself; to my mind such justification is offering a reason for why we think that our empirical judgements are the case, and what this thus entails is that the mind/world relationship must be suitably construed so that the world can be taken to offer a reason for an empirical judgement (see my post above on McDowell). Thus, if some philosopher living in a particular time or culture did not seek out empirical justifications for his or her empirical judgements because such a method of justification was unheard of, then I am inclined to say that such a philosopher ought to have done so, and failure to do so suggests a lack of vision or inability to break out of the commonly accepted paradigm of the time.
Interesting post and comment, good sirs. Thanks.
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