I think uh we can't do epistemology in isolation we always have to do it in context with metaphysics that is to say we have to also be talking about the nature of reality so we want to say ontological question that's right yeah what what's the furniture of the universe so to speak what's what's real and what isn't real and then the question so the question is anytime I want to say you know this is true or this is real there this a fact right or whatever that's to make a claim about reality and the follow-up
queen always claim always is well how do you know that so you're making the claim but you're also making a justificatory claim so reality or and then broadly speaking when we try to say things about what's true about reality as a whole then we are doing metaphysics you the special Sciences say we're studying physics or chemistry or biology but if we can step back and say are for example space and time features of the universe as a whole is the universe Eternal or infinite in various Dimensions does a God exist or not uh those are
all metaphysical metaphysical questions so to come back to this is just the one more point that I want to make is that all of the things that we talk about when we start talking about sense perception and forming Concepts and grammar and logic and stories and statistics all of that has to work right from the beginning with doing some philosophy of mind that is to say what is this thing that we call the mind and one of the things that early modern philosophy now this is 1400s 1500s on into the 1600s was simultaneously struggling with
was understanding the human being and if uh for example you have what was common for many centuries I say a dualistic understanding of the human being that the human being is a body but also a soul or or a physicality plus a spiritual element and that these are two very different metaphysical things right one is subject to corruption and the other is in in principle Eternal uh and that they have you know different ontological makeups different agendas different ultimate Destinies then on the metaphysics side you know how do those two come together how do they
work together how do they fit together what's the proper understanding of of those two but that metaphysical understanding of what it is to be a human being will shape how you think about epistemology right from the go so if you are say an empiricist uh and you want to say well we start in say the physical world and I have a physical body with physical senses and there's a causal story about how those interact with each other but somehow I have to get that across this metaphysical Gulf from the physical to the spiritual so that
my mind which I think of as being on the spirit side of things or on the soul side of things can confront it and then do various things that we that we uh we think we're going to do with our with our minds our reason and our emotions and so forth and that metaphysical Gulf if you can't bridge that Gulf metaphysically uh is going to cause you problems epistemologically and so one reason why we end up in postmodernism a few centuries later I think is not only going to be because the early empiricist theories had
problems the early rationalist theories had problems various attempts to overcome them like Kant led to problems and so forth it wasn't only that there were epistemological problems that worked themselves out and led to dead ends but at the same time we were struggling with the metaphysical problem as I'm thinking of it the Mind Body problem and once we said or once we were starting from the perspective that ideas or nonphysical realities or stories are non-physical realities and they're in a mind and we're conceiving conceiving of that as something separate from the physical world as a
non-physical world it's a very difficult to try to find how that then relates back to that physical world so I would say in your field for example where you come out of Professional Psychology it's interesting that Professional Psychology only came on board in the late 1800s uh and so we say you know this is the my potted history of your your discipline we have the early freudians and the early behaviorists both coming on board in 1900 and one of the things that that they're both trying to do is to say well finally we can start
to study the mind scientifically we can have a science of the mind but what they were reacting against was still in the 1800s was the idea that the Mind somehow didn't fit into nature it was an extranatural thing it was a a ghost in the machine and the the fitting of the ghost in the machine we don't have a theory that that that works this out uh and both of them uh were of course reflecting on Darwin and Darwin's more robustly naturalistic understanding of the human being that we're going to see the mind not as
a ghost that's in the wet wear or in the biological wear but has a some sort of emergent phenomenon or a bipu but only when we stop thinking about uh uh the human being as a ghost plus a machine to use that metaphor or a spirit plus a body is two different things as much more of a naturalist integrate then we start to think that we can do SCI psychology scientifically now the forian and the behaviorists I think they were both disasters in various ways they were genius but they you know this is again the
early steps of science but what they are starting to do though is say we're not going to study the human being uh we are going to study the human being as part part of the natural world and but notice that this is now into the 1900s and psychology is a very new science and this is already 300 years after modern philosophy had been taken over in a sense by the epistemologist and had worked their way into a very skeptical form so my hope is uh if we're talking about where the future has to go psychology
has been online for a century now a little more than a century now extraordinarily complex stuff as as we all know but we we're making progress there but I think it's still early days and what the psychologists work out has to be integrated with newer and better epistemology it has to be an epistemology that integrates the best from the empiricist tradition the best from the rationalist tradition and and so on so that's my uh summary story of how we ended up where where we are and why I'm not and why I'm not a thoroughgoing skeptic
on on any of these issues I see it's as an ongoing scientific project [Music]
