There is some discussion in the blogosphere about Paul Krugman's tendency to make claims about the "motives" of Bush & co. One reasonable defense of the practice comes from Crooked Timber. The discussion, however, brought to mind an issue that arises with respect to what Paul Ricoeuer dubbed "the hermeneutics of suspicion," the practice of critics like Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud of attacking certain views by exposing their real motives or origins. In general, I don't find the blogosphere conducive to substantial philosophical argument, but in this case, and since it bears on the Krugman discussion, let me just post part of a forthcoming paper on "The Hermeneutics of Suspicion" (in The Future for Philosophy volume) that constitutes a defense, as it were, of the epistemological foundations of Krugman's practice (not to mention the more sophisticated forms in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud):
On the reading urged here, we should understand Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as seeking a naturalistically respectable account of how we arrived at our current, conscious self-understandings. But arriving at such an understanding of the causal genesis of our conscious self-understandings is not--obviously, at least--equivalent to a “hermeneutics of suspicion,” to an understanding that should make us regard them as “suspect.” Why, to put it simply, is the correct naturalistic account of the genesis of our beliefs a reason to make us suspicious of those beliefs? It is useful, I believe, to take a short, though perhaps surprising, detour through Anglo-American epistemology of the past forty years to see how and why the “naturalistic” turn of Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud remains philosophically important.
In 1963, in a remarkably brief paper, Edmund Gettier convinced most philosophers that the received wisdom of millenia about the concept of knowledge was mistaken: “knowledge” was not simply a matter of having a justified, true belief, since one could adduce examples of beliefs that were both “justified” and “true” but which didn’t seem to be cases of “knowledge.” The Gettier counter-examples to the “justified true belief” analysis of “knowledge” all had the form of the following example:
Suppose Smith and Jones apply for the same job. And suppose Smith is justified in believing both that (1) Jones will get the job, and (2) Jones has 10 coins in his pocket. Smith would then also be justified in believing that (3) the person who gets the job will have 10 coins in his pocket. In fact, Smith (not Jones) gets the job and, as it happens, he has 10 coins in his pocket. (3) turns out to be a justified true belief, but it doesn’t seem that Smith “knows” (3). Of course, Smith should believe (3), but not for the reasons that he does. He has a true belief, but not knowledge.
The legacy of the Gettier counter-examples was a powerful one: a justified true belief isn’t “knowledge” when the justification for the true belief isn’t the cause of why the agent holds the belief. As Philip Kitcher put the point, in explaining the stimulus Gettier provided to the “naturalistic” turn in epistemology: “the epistemic status of a belief state depends on the etiology of the state.” Beliefs caused the “wrong” way suffer epistemically.
We can understand, now, the logic of the hermeneutics of suspicion as exploiting precisely this point about the epistemic status of belief: we should be suspicious of the epistemic status of beliefs that have the wrong causal etiology. That’s the lesson of the Gettier counter-examples, and it is the lesson which underwrites the suspicion that Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud recommend by way of providing alternative causal trajectories to explain our beliefs. To be sure, beliefs with the wrong causal etiology might be true; but since they are no longer cases of knowledge, we have no reason to presume that to be the case. To the contrary, we now have reason to be suspicious--nothing more--of their veritistic properties.
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