Standard Analytic Epistemology (SAE) is the name Michael Bishop (Florida State) and J.D. Trout (Illinois Institute of Technology) give to “the dominant approach to the theory of knowledge in the English-speaking world.”

And they have some problems with it.

Professor Trout contrasts their approach to epistemology, “Strategic Reliabilism,” to SAE in part of a lengthy and interesting interview by Richard Marshall at 3:16AM:

SAE… is based on a variety of descriptive theories of how our minds work. Those descriptive theories are crafted by philosophers, and those theories are substantially false. This should not be surprising. The mind and the world are complicated things. It would be shocking if you could presuppose a descriptive theory of the mind without the counsel of science—not to mention without its methods—and expect to have an intellectually serious epistemic enterprise. But that is what most epistemologists have done. What is remarkable is how little effort has been devoted to justifying this institutional neglect of science. But we have grown used to it. In a world in which philosophers take their intuitions, considered or not, as the touchstone of theory-construction, if not truth, it seems that the burden is on others to explain what is wrong with this assumption. This burden is a key feature of what Mike Bishop and I have described more broadly in recent work as “the epistemology of the con”. Just to be good sports, and to stay in the game, too often fully naturalistic philosophers carry this burden, even after all the lessons have been learned from the historical and social studies of science. 

So I believe the impatience of naturalistic philosophers is understandable, abandoning issues blessed by reigning epistemologists and taking up theory construction in psychology, occurring at the foundations of the cognitive science of judgment. But to oblige: Basically, the descriptive theory that underlies SAE is, while not a monolith, generally too simplistic, when it isn’t just false. Those in the grips of SAE too often give priority to the way things “seem” to them, or what we “clearly want to say” about certain kinds of scenarios. Adherence to our most jealously protected intuitions is no doubt comforting, and it fosters the feeling that, with enough work and attention, we can properly calibrate our beliefs and overcome our cognitive imperfections, including the overconfidence bias that leads us to errantly trust our intuitions. It seems to them that you can conclude there is no real sunk cost fallacy, if you can find a sunk-cost that is redeemed, and then conclude that redemption is not impossible so the sunk cost fallacy isn’t a genuine imperfection. Thus, our intuitions have been saved, no matter how cognitively costly the must more frequent, actual, failed redemptions may be. We find that epistemologists in the English-speaking world don’t show much initiative making the methods and findings of cognitive science constitutive of epistemic norms in the way that, say, philosophers of biology have made the practices and findings of biology constitutive of norms in philosophy of biology (say, when appraising proper function or taxonomy). 

The hard-won scientific findings about the natural contours of cognition provide faint constraints on the distinctly philosophical pronouncements of SAE. Philosophical accounts might hedge their claims, but their ceteris paribus clauses are self-protective, not evidentially probative. Without documenting mechanisms, the theory asserts that those mechanisms are capable of processing whatever information is necessary to meet the normative theory’s routine demands, whether that is withholding belief until you are certain X is true, until you consider the total evidence, until you consider all of the available evidence, or until you are justified, to name just a few common normative themes. We could not even begin to satisfy these normative aims unless we had perceptual and cognitive mechanism far different—much more powerful and expansive and controllable—than the ones we in fact possess. 

Of course, the last 40 years in epistemology has been a story of responsible naturalistic philosophers and psychologists pointing out the falsehoods in the implicit descriptive theory of Standard Analytic Epistemologists, and the SAEers insisting they didn’t need that part of a theory, offering an equally unestablished alternative. SAE is burdened by false descriptive theories, but its methodologies just aren’t well-suited to responsible or even courteous intellectual inquiry. It just isn’t collegial to run your research program by saying “Here is something I thought of, now prove me wrong.” There is too much that your opponent has to know in order to refute you, and nothing that you need to. But given the intuition-pumping method that has dominated SAE, a philosophical advocate claims success when their imaginable scenarios aren’t demonstrably false, or apparently inconsistent with intuitions, or with some stuff we might believe. At some point, you just have to point to the argument that this method is a recipe for keeping a corner of Philosophy busy, but it isn’t an intellectually reputable way to conduct yourself. 

The whole interview is here. Discussion welcome.