Kusch Martin
Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Universitätsstraße 7, 1010 Vienna, Austria.
Synthese. 2017;194(12):4687-4703. doi: 10.1007/s11229-016-1041-0. Epub 2016 Feb 23.
There are a number of debates that are relevant to questions concerning objectivity in science. One of the eldest, and still one of the most intensely fought, is the debate over epistemic relativism. -All forms of epistemic relativism commit themselves to the view that it is impossible to show in a neutral, non-question-begging, way that one "epistemic system", that is, one interconnected set of epistemic standards, is epistemically superior to (all) others. I shall call this view "No-metajustification". No-metajustification is commonly taken to deny the of standards. In this paper I shall discuss two currently popular attempts to attack "No-metajustification". The first attempt attacks no-metajustification by challenging a particular strategy of arguing in its defence: this strategy involves the ancient Pyrrhonian "Problem of the Criterion". The second attempt to refute No-metajustification targets its metaphysical underpinning: to wit, the claim that there are, or could be, several fundamentally different and irreconcilable epistemic systems. I shall call this assumption "Pluralism". I shall address three questions with respect to these attempts to refute epistemic relativism by attacking no-metajustification: (i) Can the epistemic relativist rely on the Problem of the Criterion in support of No-metajustification? (ii) Is a combination of Chisholmian "particularism" (i.e. the insistence that we know lots of things) and epistemic naturalism an effective weapon against No-metajustification? And (iii) is Pluralism a defensible assumption?
有许多辩论与科学客观性问题相关。其中最古老且至今仍争论激烈的一场辩论，是关于认知相对主义的辩论。——所有形式的认知相对主义都秉持这样一种观点，即不可能以一种中立的、非循环论证的方式表明一种“认知体系”，也就是一套相互关联的认知标准，在认知层面上优于（所有）其他认知体系。我将这种观点称为“无元辩护”。无元辩护通常被认为是否认标准的客观性。在本文中，我将讨论当前两种流行的攻击“无元辩护”的尝试。第一种尝试通过质疑其辩护中的一种特定论证策略来攻击无元辩护：这种策略涉及古代皮浪主义的“标准问题”。第二种反驳无元辩护的尝试针对其形而上学基础：即声称存在或可能存在几种根本不同且不可调和的认知体系。我将这种假设称为“多元主义”。关于这些通过攻击无元辩护来反驳认知相对主义的尝试，我将探讨三个问题：（i）认知相对主义者能否依靠标准问题来支持无元辩护？（ii）奇泽姆式的“特殊主义”（即坚持我们知道很多事物）与认知自然主义的结合是否是对抗无元辩护的有效武器？以及（iii）多元主义是否是一个可辩护的假设？
