Hilary Kornblith Quotes

#1. I do agree with Stich that a quick move from our evolutionary origins to the reliability of our cognitive mechanisms is not legitimate. As I see it, the case for the reliability or unreliability of various cognitive mechanisms lies elsewhere.

Hilary Kornblith

#2. The various processes of belief acquisition which are native to a species include ones which may allow for the reliable pick-up of information, which, in turn, allows individual members of the species to successfully negotiate their environment and satisfy their various desires.

Hilary Kornblith

#3. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#4. I believe, that empirically informed approaches to the question have issued in more illuminating answers than the old armchair approaches. But I think that it would be a terrible mistake to give up on addressing normative questions in epistemology.

Hilary Kornblith

#5. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#6. What we need to do, however, is figure out what our best available theories of the mind suggest about epistemological issues, while we recognise that we may need to change our views on these questions as new evidence comes in.

Hilary Kornblith

#7. For one thing, I think that there are questions which philosophers raise which, although science bears on them, are not typically the central focus of those who work in the sciences. At the same time, I don't have a view of philosophy which marks it out as different in kind from scientific work

Hilary Kornblith

#8. Bealer has a number of reasons for thinking that a naturalistic epistemology is self-undermining. Let me focus on one of these. (I've tried to take on all of them in the first chapter of Knowledge and Its Place in Nature.)

Hilary Kornblith

#9. Rather, although belief may be adequate for explaining the behavior of individual animals - an animal which believes that p will behave no differently from an animal which knows that p - talk of knowledge is necessary once one begins to look at explaining the cognitive capacities of a species.

Hilary Kornblith

#10. 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?

Hilary Kornblith

#11. So I do, of course, reject much that is central not only to the psychology of Descartes and Kant, but to their epistemology as well. No doubt, the best available theories of today will look primitive in comparison with what we are in a position to understand hundreds of years from now.

Hilary Kornblith

#12. The role of empirical work in informing our philosophical theories, as I see it, is not that it gives us a better view of our folk concepts, but that it gives us a better view of knowledge, and the mind, and so on.

Hilary Kornblith

#13. When reflection is thereby demystified, I believe that the temptation to view human knowledge as different in kind from animal knowledge is undermined.

Hilary Kornblith

#14. I am quite wedded to the view that epistemologists should concern themselves with knowledge rather than our concept of knowledge. The analogy I like to draw here is with our understanding of (other) natural kinds.

Hilary Kornblith

#15. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#16. No one would suggest that we can adequately investigate what makes something an acid, or what makes something aluminum, by bringing our pretheoretical intuitions about these things into reflective equilibrium by way of armchair theorising.

Hilary Kornblith

#17. But there is no doubt that my own views on this are, in quite a number of ways, very different from those of Quine.

Hilary Kornblith

#18. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#19. I do think that it is legitimate to talk of goals and functions in nature, and that these things can be made sense of in naturalistic terms. There is nothing at all contrary to naturalism in the idea of goal-directed systems.

Hilary Kornblith

#20. Epistemologists should be concerned with knowledge and justification and so on, not our concepts of them; philosophers of mind should be concerned with various features of our mental life and the large-scale structure of the mind, not our concepts of mind, or consciousness, or anything else

Hilary Kornblith

#21. No one worries terribly much about who the questions belong to, or whether a given contribution is really philosophy or, instead, properly nothing but science. Perhaps another way to put this is that, although I think that knowledge is a natural kind, I don't think that philosophy is.

Hilary Kornblith

#22. Here, as in so many other cases, however, it turns out that a very commonsensical idea looks far less attractive when one examines some of the experimental work which is not available to us from the armchair.

Hilary Kornblith

#23. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#24. I largely defer to the cognitive ethologists. I believe that the arguments that they make on this score are extremely persuasive. More than this, I do think as well that a priori objections by philosophers to successful research programs in the sciences have a very bad track record.

Hilary Kornblith

#25. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#26. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#27. The idea that we should check on our unreflective belief acquisition sounds great, but we need to know whether the processes of reflection which we put to work serves to improve our reliability or not.

Hilary Kornblith

#28. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#29. When we recognise that reflective processes are no more outside the causal net than unreflective processes, and that they are bound by similar constraints, we may come to understand the nature of reflection for the first time.

Hilary Kornblith

#30. 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.

Hilary Kornblith

#31. If one's interest is not in some global question about the possibility of knowledge, but about some particular mechanism or inferential tendency, this fact about our evolutionary origin is of no use at all in addressing questions about reliability.

Hilary Kornblith