Many years ago, I began having casual conversations about reasoning with two young philosophers, Stephen Stich and Alvin Goldman. The conversation turned serious when we began to realize that we were interested in many of the same questions concerning epistemology. Epistemology is the study of what counts as knowledge, how we can best obtain knowledge, and what can be known with certainty. The three of us and a psychology graduate student named Tim Wilson started a long-running seminar.
The philosophers were quite taken with the idea that there was a science purporting to address empirically some of the philosophical questions about knowledge that had been around for twenty-six hundred years. They were intrigued to find that psychologists had begun to study reasoning tools of the kind reported in this book, such as schemas and heuristics, and to show the relevance of tools of scientific discovery to understanding of everyday life. Moreover, they saw that psychologists really did have ways of scientifically investigating some of these questions. They also saw that the philosophical literature had much to offer the scientific approach to reasoning, both with respect to guidance about the important questions to ask and what can be regarded as knowledge.
Goldman gave the name “epistemics” to the new discipline that fuses theory of knowledge, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of science (which is concerned with appraisal of the methods and conclusions of scientists). Stich began a movement called X φ. The X stands for “experimental”; the Greek symbol phi stands for “philosophy.” Stich and his many students have continued to do work that is both excellent psychology and important philosophy. I hasten to say that none of us was as original as we initially thought. It turned out that many philosophers and psychologists were thinking along similar lines. But I think we did help to crystallize some important ideas that were floating around in the zeitgeist.
Chapters 15 and 16 deal in part with epistemics as defined by Goldman. The work discussed also reflects the experimental stance of X φ as developed by Stich. The philosopher’s stock-in-trade has always been assertions about “our intuitions.” Stich and his colleagues have shown that intuitions about the nature of the world, what one can call knowledge, and what one regards as moral can be so diverse across cultures and from individual to individual that it often makes no sense to appeal to a chimera called “our intuitions.”1