Hilary Kornblith Quotes - Page 3

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Animals Arguing Belief Doubt Epistemology Focus Giving

Internalist approaches to epistemology, I believe, have a great deal of intuitive appeal. Internalists believe that the features in virtue of which a belief is justified must somehow be internal to the agent. On some views, this amounts to the claim that these features must be accessible to introspection and armchair reflection. On others, it amounts only to the claim that they must be mental features.

Hilary Kornblith

Believe, Reflection, Views

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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

Giving Up, Mistake, Believe

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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

Mind, Philosopher, Consciousness

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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

Reflection, May, Firsts

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I argue is that philosophers have had a tendency to present a kind of mystical view of the powers of reflection. Unreflective belief acquisition is seen in mechanistic terms, but when philosophers talk about reflection, it is as if reflective processes are not bound by the kinds of limitations which inevitably arise from being embedded within the same causal structure which governs unreflective belief acquisition.

Hilary Kornblith

Reflection, Views, Acquisition

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The fact that these scientific theories have a fine track record of successful prediction and explanation speaks for itself. (Which is not to say that I don't directly discuss the work of those philosophers who would disagree.) But even if we grant this, many will argue that scientific knowledge in humans, and, indeed, reflective knowledge in general, is quite different in kind from the knowledge we see in other animals.

Hilary Kornblith

Successful, Animal, Track

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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

Believe, Successful, Thinking

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Ethologists thus have an interest in looking at these capacities for the reliable acquisition of belief, and it is not surprising that they have a name for the true beliefs which are the typical product of these reliable capacities. They call them items of knowledge. So I argue that talk of knowledge may thereby be seen to be embedded within a successful empirical theory.

Hilary Kornblith

Successful, Names, Acquisition

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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

Desire, Acquisition, May

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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

Believe, Animal, Looks

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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

Believe, Reflection, Animal

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Latest quotes from interviews

"In my view, philosophers have shown a great deal more respect for the first-person point of view than it deserves. There's a lot of empirical work on the various psychological mechanisms by way of which the first-person point of view is produced, and, when we understand this, I believe, we can stop romanticising and mythologising the first-person perspective."

- Hilary Kornblith,

www.3ammagazine.com, added Mar 1, 2016

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