Preface

Practical Epistemology

This is a book about what I am calling practical epistemology. It reflects two of my most deeply held prejudices as a teacher. I believe that abstract questions in academic philosophy are intrinsically interesting not just to professionals but to smart, inquisitive students as well. I also believe that carefully reflecting on the great questions in Western philosophy (What is knowledge? Is it possible? Does God exist? Do we have genuine free will?—to say nothing of the equally important moral, political, and legal questions that philosophers have posed and attempted to answer) improves one’s general critical thinking skills. So I would claim that a good philosophy course is good for a lot more than just general education credits and will be of value no matter what your major is or career aspirations are.

The book begins with three classic questions in the theory of knowledge—What is the value of truth? Can we know anything? What is the nature of knowledge in the first place? It then introduces a little logic and a particular theory of evidence evaluation—inference to the best explanation. This view of argument analysis is the cornerstone of my entire discussion throughout the book. We then turn our attention to some issues in the history and philosophy of science—the role of experiments, Semmelweis’s discovery of the causes of childbed fever, and Darwin’s theory of common descent by natural selection. The book concludes with discussions of capital punishment, evidence as narrative, and some thoughts about the nature of evidence and truth.

Critical Thinking

This brings me to my second, and even more deeply held, prejudice as a philosophy teacher. I am committed to the value of critical thinking—or, as it is sometimes called, practical, or informal, logic—as a tool for undergraduate and professional success. I pretend little modesty here. I have heard from too many students that the techniques developed in chapters 4 through 12 have proven not just useful but essential in their other undergraduate and graduate classes, and indeed, in their professional lives.

Where I do claim some modesty, however, is that I take little credit for discovering these techniques. They were all first articulated by my friend and mentor, Larry Wright. I had the honor of working with Larry as a teaching assistant when he was putting together his first published articulation of inference to the best explanation as a procedure for argument analysis.2 That graduate school experience fundamentally shaped my perception of what it is to be a philosopher and what it is to be an effective undergraduate teacher. Inference to the best explanation has gone on to inform much of what I have done in my professional scholarship. It has also guided my own teaching career. To Larry, I owe a debt of gratitude that cannot really be expressed.

If this book accomplishes nothing else, I hope it at least tempts readers to utilize the somewhat structured, almost ritualistic procedure I am calling the inference-to-the-best-explanation recipe as a test of the quality of evidence presented in an argument. I do believe that you will be pleasantly surprised at how often it proves useful.

To My Student Readers

I want this book to be fun, interesting, and useful to you. Depending on your academic and intellectual personality, it may prove impossible to accomplish all these goals. But even if I fail in conveying the intrinsic interest in philosophical and intellectual questions, and even if you find my style boring or pedantic, I do hope you will discover the utility in the careful, systematic study and analysis of arguments. Inference to the best explanation is not the only approach to argument analysis (though I remain convinced it is the most valuable), but it is one that invites wide application to the kinds of arguments we find in our daily and professional lives and, of course, in the natural sciences and most of the rest of the typical undergraduate curriculum.

If I have any readers who are not in formal philosophy courses or who are using this book as a supplementary source, I’d like to extend a sincere invitation. Each chapter concludes with some exercises and what I am calling a quiz. If you’d like feedback on any or all of these, I would be happy to provide it. I should always be available at the following email address: jjohnson@eou.edu.

Please do feel free to contact me with any questions or requests for feedback. And, of course, I would welcome hearing about any mistakes, typos, and the like. One of the joys of this form of publishing is that errors can be relatively easily corrected.

To My Fellow Philosophy Instructors

I have used earlier drafts of this manuscript in two pretty different courses. The most straightforward of these are courses in critical thinking. Although I’d like to think that all the material would be useful in such contexts, I can well imagine instructors who would choose to use only chapter 1 and chapters 4 through 12 or maybe chapter 13. This is the material that I have focused most of my critical thinking teaching on for the last forty years.

The course that the book was originally designed for, however, was an introduction to philosophy course. At Eastern Oregon University, the course I created was called Self, World, and God. The God part, of course, was issues in the philosophy of religion, and the self part was issues in philosophical psychology and cognitive science. World was a catchall for epistemology, philosophy of science, and a general methodology of analyzing arguments in terms of inference to the best explanation—the material sketched out in this book.

Two Further Debts

All authors need to acknowledge the help and support of their life partners. Understanding and sustenance from those one loves most are almost preconditions for successful writing. In my case, I have had the incredible good fortune to have a bright, talented, and unbelievably supportive wife for almost fifty years now. Colleen is not just a beautiful lady that I love more than I can express, but for almost thirty years, she was my closest colleague during exactly the time the material in this book was being tested in my courses and when I began to compose the earliest drafts of the chapters herein contained. We team-taught together and discussed inference to the best explanation so often that it is almost as hard to separate my thoughts on these questions from hers as it is to separate them from Larry Wright’s. Thanks, Colly.

Finally, I need to acknowledge and thank the Library at Portland State University for awarding me a grant to complete this book as part of their PDXOpen: Open Access Textbooks initiative. In particular, I owe Ms. Karen Bjork, head of digital initiatives, a huge thanks and shout-out. Karen not only championed my project from the beginning but coached and cajoled to keep me on track in my writing and finally secured additional funding for professional copyediting. Thank you very much, Karen.

Notes