The Problem of the Criterion
Some Knowledge is Good Enough
What do you know? How do you know it? According to philosopher Roderick Chisholm, you can answer the first question first and then proceed to the second question, or you can answer the second question first and then proceed to the first. Either you can know something (“particularism”) and then ask how you know it or you can know nothing and then ask how you can know something. (“methodism”). But either way, you hit up against a problem—“the problem of the criterion.” Either you assume knowledge when you don’t have it, or you assume knowledge about how to acquire knowledge when you don’t have that, either.
Now to say this in simpler terms, either you can start with givens, commonsense, everyday knowledge, practical and tacit understanding and then seek to clarify and revise it; or you can start with a kind of bracketing and try to build the world out from first principles—but you won’t get very far. The former makes more intuitive sense, but arguably isn’t very rigorous. It’s not really knowledge that you have. The latter seems rigorous, but is sort of empty, shallow, and undirected, the kind of abstraction that earns philosophers the ire and suspicion of regular folks.
Me, I’m a particularist. That is, I start with what I assume I know and work from there, rather than trying to achieve knowledge on the basis of some pristine, neutral method.
Particularism is natural to me—I’m Jewish. The Biblical teaching of “na’aseh v’nishma” (“We will do and we will obey”) is a kind of summons to particularism, to throwing yourself into the world and then enquiring about it, rather than trying to hold the world fixed and getting vertigo every time it moves, as in Kafka’s depiction of the philosopher in “The Top” (a great portrait of the methodist):
A CERTAIN PHILOSOPHER used to hang about wherever children were at play. And whenever he saw a boy with a top, he would lie in wait. As soon as the top began to spin the philosopher went in pursuit and tried to catch it. He was not perturbed when the children noisily protested and tried to keep him away from their toy; so long as he could catch the top while it was still spinning, he was happy, but only for a moment; then he threw it to the ground and walked away. For he believed that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top, for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things. For this reason he did not busy himself with great problems, it seemed to him uneconomical. Once the smallest detail was understood, then everything was understood, which was why he busied himself only with the spinning top. And whenever preparations were being made for the spinning of the top, he hoped that this time it would succeed: as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty, but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand, he felt nauseated. The screaming of the children, which hitherto he had not heard and which now suddenly pierced his ears, chased him away, and he tottered like a top under a clumsy whip.
Translated by Tania and James Stern
When people hear the word “particularism” they may think of moral particularism, as in the concept of owing different things to different people or groups, but arguably moral particularism is just a sub-species of epistemological particularism, which says that you are on solid enough ground beginning with where you are, rather than trying to find an Archimidean point from which you might then decide where to place yourself.
The particularist view is advanced by Heidegger and Gadamer, by Wittgenstein (especially the later Wittgenstein), by Montaigne, as well as by Franz Rosenzweig. More recently, it’s a view I find developed cogently in Moshe Koppel’s Judaism Straight Up, a fictionalized dialogue between Shimon (the particularist) and Heidi (the methodist). The book is often read as a competition between moral particularism and moral universalism, but it could also be fruitfully read as a competition between epistemological particularism and epistemological methodism.
The fact that people shudder when thinking of Heidegger’s politics is a good sign of the weakness of particularism— if you start with what you know and you’re wrong, what are your guardrails. The German National Socialist is accountable only to other German nationalists, not to Soviet Bolsheviks or American capitalists. The form of the kind of self-enclosed, self-confidence that knows no external critique and views all outsiders as suspect, on the grounds that they are methodist, and don’t share “the world” with one to understand is a problem for all particularists. Particularists say, “I don’t have to defend why I know X, I just do.” But how does that work when encountering someone who knows “Not X”? Either they both know something or neither knows anything.
We encounter conflicting worldviews all the time. Clashes between competing particularisms seem intractable. But at least both sides, even when they conflict, share a common appreciation for the idea that cultural boundedness makes it possible to know and value anything at all. The conflict between the methodist and the particularist, by contrast, is even more intractable, for the methodist says, “You move too quickly to knowledge,” and the particularist says, “You move too slowly to knowledge.” And neither can say who is right, because each must make an assumption—each must choose a criterion—on the basis of which to decide how to think and act and value.
Maybe Chisholm’s exercise is useful in urging us to be humble. We can’t know a lot of what we think we do. But as a particularist, I’m not too concerned. A reductio against perfect knowledge needn’t lead to cynicism or nihilism, but to a rule that is something like “be loyal to what you think you know until that trust is broken,” then revise accordingly. Is that just a highfalutin way of making a virtue of confirmation bias? Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s just saying that having a disconfirmation bias is not inherently virtuous. Be open minded enough to revise your priors, but don’t get too anxious about why you think what you think that you feel you have to reinvent the wheel in every moment.
Epistemological particularism is the peace we must make with the “good enough.”