Knowledge and its Place in Nature // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of Notre Dame https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23456-knowledge-and-its-place-in-nature/[12/23/15, 11:14:51 AM] HILARY KORNBLITH Knowledge and its Place in Nature Kornblith, Hilary, Knowledge and its Place in Nature , Oxford, 2003, 177pp, $ 29.95 (hbk), ISBN 0199246319. We seek to represent the world. When our representations succeed in a particularly fortuitous manner, we term the result ’knowledge.’ But questions then arise: which representation qualify as knowledge, and why? One of the divers epistemological theories lately bruited about would assimilate all empirical knowledge—representations of the world properly obtained—to results certified by the various sciences (liberally understood). Call this doctrine ’naturalism.’ Yet mention naturalism, and many philosophers smirk. The reason? Too vague and underspecified, or so some epistemologists claim. This places a special burden on those seeking to advance the cause of naturalism (I include myself here) to clarify naturalism’s relation to more conventional forms of philosophizing. In this regard, Hilary Kornblith’s Knowledge and its Place in Nature both succeeds and fails. Success occurs in those chapters where Kornblith directly addresses and defends naturalism against two prime forms of mystery-mongering rampant in philosophy—invoking intuitions and sacralizing norms. However, and more importantly, Kornblith ultimately fails to advance the case for naturalism. For he attempts to link his variant of naturalism—a decidedly anti-metaphysical doctrine as usually understood — to a deeply problematic claim that knowledge constitutes a “natural kind”—a stubbornly metaphysical doctrine as usually understood. The result disappoints. The book has six chapters. Chapters 1, 5, and 6 explore the meta-theme of how Kornblith conceives of naturalism’s relation to more traditional conceptions of philosophy. Chapter 1 contrasts appeals to intuition and naturalism as methodological arbiters of philosophical practice. Kornblith examines arguments by George Bealer to the effect that if naturalists have no room for appeal to intuition, then so much the worse for naturalism. Bealer and others charge that naturalism must be ruled out as a philosophy because it cannot accommodate what is, in point of fact, standard operating procedure for philosophers. Although Nelson Goodman’s name appears nowhere in the text and Kornblith cites no works of his, Kornblith’s defense here has the appropriate Goodmanian flavor, viz., that “Recognition of appropriate inferential patterns is an empirical affair for the naturalist” (22). Kornblith effectively rebuts the various cavils against naturalism raised by friends of intuitions. He rightly, I would say, identifies philosophy as more a particular set of questions, and not as possessing its own special methods or unique . priori insights. 2003.12.01 Search NDPR Reviewed by Paul A. Roth, University of Missouri, St. Louis Author Search NDPR