Is McCulloch correct? Do we need consciousness, reason, and volition in order to have a meaningful study of how we can know things?McCulloch wrote:...epistemology...is meaningless without consciousness beings, with reason and volition, that can know stuff...
I agree with McCulloch that all three components are necessary for epistemology. The requirement for "consciousness" seems unarguable--without it we couldn't know anything, and so obviously we couldn't know how we know things. The requirement for "reason" also seems unavoidable, since the lack of logic and rationality would doom any attempt at reasoned study of how we can know what we know.
This leaves "volition" as the one element that is perhaps possible to deny. We should probably separate the question of "Do we truly have volition?" from the question of "Does epistemology seem to require that attribute which we routinely perceive as our volition--i.e., our apparent ability to deliberate and make choices from the options available to us?"
In other words, let's leave aside for now the question of "Does volition actually exist?" Whether or not it actually exists, we certainly do at least have the inner sense or the illusion of being able to select from various options on the basis of desire or logic or perceived value (or perhaps even whim).
My background in education tells me that in order to get students to learn, you need to get them to want to learn. It is very difficult to force a student to learn something she doesn't really want to know. You can try to offer external rewards--i.e., prizes, praises, privileges, etc--but the very best way to motivate for learning comes from internal motivation. As educators, we want to help the student understand why it is important to her to learn the material. So it seems that volition is a vital aspect of general learning, and this would apply to epistemology as well.
Beyond that, we have to choose to think about epistemology rather than something else. We have to choose which arguments to analyze, and the standards by which we will analyze them. We need to choose which authors to read, which empirical studies to include. We need choose how we will rank the evidence, and we need to choose to carry all of this through to the conclusion which we adopt. The entire process is time-consuming and demanding; if we didn't want to do this, we probably wouldn't bother with it at all--and in fact most people don't think much about it as they go about their daily activities.
To me, it seems that volition--or at least the illusion of volition--is as necessary as consciousness and reason if we are to have a viable epistemology. What do you think?
