Erkenn (2011) 75:495–503

DOI 10.1007/s10670-011-9337-4

Epistemology, the History of Epistemology, Historical

Epistemology

Barry Stroud

Received: 27 September 2011 / Accepted: 27 September 2011 / Published online: 19 October 2011
Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2011

Abstract A brief discussion of the ways in which awareness of and sensitivity to

the history of philosophy can contribute to epistemology even if epistemology is
understood as a distinctively philosophical and not primarily historical enterprise.

What is the relation between the three apparently different kinds of study mentioned
in my title? If epistemology is the study of knowledge, I suppose historical
epistemology would be any historical study of any part or aspect or domain of
human knowledge. There are a great many different ways of taking an historical
interest in this or that aspect of human knowledge. Science in all of its forms, for
instance, is one kind of human knowledge. And there is the study of the history of
science. There is also the study of the history of the history of science, which would
be a kind of second level historical epistemology. The same is true of historical
knowledge in general. It too can be studied historically. And the history of that kind
of historical study would represent a further level of historical knowledge. There
would seem to be no firm limits to something as all-encompassing as historical
epistemology.
That part of philosophy called epistemology, as I understand it, is the
philosophical study of certain questions about human knowledge and belief and
thought and reasoning and so on that have been part of philosophy since more or
less the beginning. It too can be investigated historically, although it need not be.
The historical study of philosophical epistemology would be the historical study of
efforts to gain philosophical understanding or knowledge of the nature and scope of
human knowledge. Since efforts to get that kind of understanding have a history, the
questions philosophical epistemology asks today about human knowledge are not

B. Stroud (&)
Department of Philosophy, University of California, 314 Moses Hall #2390, Berkeley,
CA 94720-2390, USA
e-mail: barrys@berkeley.edu

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necessarily the same as they once were. But that does not mean that philosophical
epistemology is itself an historical subject, or that it pursues only or even primarily
historical understanding.
Painting and music, for instance, also have a long history. What is done in
painting or music today is not the same as it once was. What is to be done in
painting or music now depends on what painting and music have been in the past
and on what they have become at this point in their history. Whatever is produced in
those fields at any time will be part of the history of painting or of music, but it will
be a piece of painting or music, not a work of history that seeks historical
understanding of something or other. The same is true even of the history of
activities that do produce studies or accounts or explanations of something or other,
such as the physical sciences or mathematics. Whatever accounts they give of
something, they are not historical accounts. Similarly, as I see it, what is to be done
now in philosophical epistemology depends on the current state of enquiry into
epistemological questions. But the fact that those questions are now to be addressed
as they have come to be understood at this point in the history of the subject does
not mean that the questions of philosophical epistemology are historical questions,
or that what is now called for in epistemology is something historical in character.
So the fact that philosophical epistemology has a history does not mean that it is
an historical subject. But there remains a question about what philosophical
epistemology really is—what it aspires to, and how it hopes to achieve it. The basic
questions of epistemology, as I understand them, are extremely general. Knowledge
is one of the most distinctive and pervasive features of human life. It exists in one
form or another in all human societies and in all periods in which human beings
have lived. So it can look as if there is something to enquire into and to understand
about human knowledge as it is sought for or attained under any conditions at all.
There is something to be asked and understood about it at the most general level at
which anything distinctively human is to be understood.
In that respect, the study of human knowledge in general would be like the study
of other things essential to a distinctively human life, like human digestion or
human respiration or human socialization. The study of such basic human functions
of course changes through the ages, and in that sense the investigation of them has a
history. But what those investigations seek to understand at different periods of
history is not itself something historical. It is something universally and
distinctively human.
I don’t want to make too much of the parallel between human knowledge and
human digestion. Maybe human socialization is a better parallel. Socialization is
present wherever there is human life, but in many different forms. That does not
preclude a completely general study or understanding of it. This at least suggests
that there might be equally general but non-historical questions to be investigated
about the nature of human knowledge and how it is possible. The answers would be
equally general and would apply to all knowledge by anyone, anywhere, just as
there might be some completely general truths about human socialization. This
raises the question whether there is anything interesting or important to be learned
and understood about human knowledge at such a completely general level.

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That is a question that the possibility of a distinctively philosophical epistemol-

ogy seems to depend on. It is in that sense a philosophical question; it asks about the
possibility or prospects of a certain kind of philosophical investigation. But it does
not appear to be a purely historical question. And it does not appear to be something
we could hope to settle in advance, by abstract argument. It looks as if we could get
somewhere in answering that question about the prospects of a certain kind of
philosophical enquiry only by trying to conduct an investigation of human
knowledge in general and seeing what we can learn by pursuing it. That is what I
think has been going on in philosophical epistemology. Do we, or can we, get some
completely general philosophical understanding of human knowledge in that way?
If there are basic questions of epistemology, and if, as I have suggested, those
questions are not themselves historical, it does not mean that what might be called
historical epistemology has no role in any attempt to answer them. On the contrary.
I think historical awareness and sensitivity to the sources of the philosophical
problems of human knowledge are essential to the proper understanding of those
problems, and hence to an understanding of the subject itself. Without informed
recognition of how the central questions and ideas of epistemology have come down
to us, what you say in epistemology is likely to be of very little value. This seems to
me to be borne out by a great deal of what has been going on in the subject for a
long time. Much of it is really of very little value.
An understanding of history is therefore important. But rather than speaking of an
historically ‘oriented’ epistemology, I would prefer to call it historically informed
epistemology. That is what I think we need: greater sensitivity to the sources of the
problems of epistemology, and of philosophy generally, and so greater sensitivity to
their distinctively philosophical character. A large part of that concern with sources
as I think of it would be attention to the historical sources of the ways of thinking
that give the problems their special character. There are probably also deeper and
more pervasive human sources of philosophical reflection itself. They too must
somehow be explored, and exposed, if we are to see what we are really after, or have
been after, in epistemology.
There is not much sign of this kind of diagnostic interest in current and recent
philosophical epistemology. That is due in part to the apparently widely-held
assumption that it is pretty well known what the real problems of epistemology are,
and we just need to get on with the effort of solving them. There is the further
assumption, on the part of many philosophers, not only that the questions are not
primarily historical, but that epistemology is simply a different subject from the
history of epistemology.
My resistance to this widespread neglect of history in epistemology does not
come from the idea that philosophical epistemology is the same thing as the history
of epistemology. I think ignoring the history of the subject is unfortunate for other
reasons. For me, one of the most difficult aspects of epistemology as we face its
questions today is exactly what its problems really are. What is really in question,
what does it take to bring it into question, and what would it take to answer the
questions satisfactorily? And what is the distinctive philosophical character of those
questions? These are diagnostic concerns. Attention to philosophical ways of
thinking in the past can help reveal how the questions we now regard as

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epistemological have come to have the significance they have for us. This is
something I think we need to understand better than we do before we can be sure we
know what the problems really are and what it would take to make progress on
them. The same is true, after all, of painting and music. You cannot understand and
respond appropriately to the best of what is done in painting or music today without
a good sense of its relation to what has gone before.
One reason an understanding of the history of philosophical ways of thinking is
important is that not just anything we know or can find out about human knowledge
amounts to a contribution to philosophical epistemology. We know that human
beings come to know things about the world by perceiving things around them, for
instance, and by gradually becoming socialized into a culture that provides them
with the resources for thinking and speaking about, and so eventually coming to
know, many things about what the world is like. That is a very general truth about
human knowledge in general, but as it stands it does not appear to answer any
pressing philosophical question about knowledge. The general phenomenon it
describes could be understood and explained more fully by detailed studies of
human learning, of language acquisition, of human socialization, and so on.
In the philosophical understanding of knowledge what is typically at stake is the
possibility of knowledge of certain kinds in the face of what look like potential
obstacles to it. The apparent obstacles are revealed by reflection at that same
completely general level on obvious features of the human condition. Sense-
perception, for instance, is essential to human knowledge. But it is a general truth
that all perception, however it works, operates only within certain limits. No one’s
perceptions extend to everything that is so. So there appears to be a very general
question about where the limits of human perception lie. What sorts of things, in
general, can human beings be said to perceive? It has been part of epistemology
since at least the time of Plato to proceed as if there is or could be a completely
general single answer to this question. The idea is that there is a definite and
identifiable domain of what it is possible for human beings to perceive, and that its
limits can somehow be established in advance. Are there really good reasons to
accept that assumption? How has the idea come to seem to need no defence in
philosophy? That is at least in part an historical question.
Of course, not everyone who shares that general assumption about the limits of
perception agrees about where those limits actually are. But even the wider
consensus gives rise to epistemological questions of a very familiar general kind.
Given the most that human beings can strictly speaking perceive by means of the
senses, whatever that might be, how can they know anything beyond that? We know
that everything anyone perceives is something that is thereby perceived. How can
anyone know by perception something that is and would be so whether it is
perceived or not? And we know that, in general, every sense perception by anyone
occurs at some particular time and place. How then can anyone know what is so at
places or times at which no one ever perceives anything, including even the very
immediate future? And if there are limits to what one person can ever perceive of
other people, so the most they can perceive is what people do or what happens to
them, how can anyone know anything about the thoughts and feelings of others?
And since whatever anyone perceives to be so is something that could have been

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otherwise, how can anyone know some things to be necessarily true, with no
possibility of their having been otherwise?
These traditional philosophical questions about human knowledge are all
generated by thinking in completely general terms about the means by which
human beings gain knowledge of the world. It seems that there must be
discoverable, acceptable answers to these questions, since we obviously do know
many things about what is so right now, and at places and times no one has ever
visited, as well as about the thoughts and feelings of other people, and about what is
necessarily so. But simply to say, or even to insist, that we do know such things is
not in itself to give a satisfactory answer to the epistemological questions. The
challenge is to explain, in the face of the apparent obstacles, how any knowledge of
any of these kinds is possible.
Let me take the case of sense perception in particular as only one of many
possible illustrations of what I see as the relation between philosophical
epistemology and the history of epistemology. There is a long and still-continuing
tradition of understanding perception in a way that I think makes knowledge of the
world impossible, or at least impossible to explain. Philosophers who have held, or
now hold, some such view of perception do not acknowledge—in fact would
typically deny—that the view has any such unacceptable consequences. They see it
as uncontroversial, as nothing more than what must be accepted by anyone who
reflects in completely general terms on human ways of getting knowledge of the
world. Since it would be absurd to deny that we all know many of the sorts of things
we think we know, and equally absurd to deny that we know them somehow on the
basis of perception, that way of understanding perception that still lies at the heart of
traditional epistemology can also seem undeniable. It is thought that that it could not
possibly have the disastrous consequences often claimed for it.
I think that view of perception does have disastrous consequences when it is held
to consistently and strictly applied to our actual situation. So I think there can be no
satisfactory answer to the traditional epistemological question about knowledge of
the wider world while those assumptions about perception remain in place. But
there are very strong pressures towards accepting those fundamental assumptions.
That is why I think philosophical epistemology now needs to get to the bottom of
what I see as an impasse. This is where I think history comes into play. It will not be
only the history of epistemology, or even only the history of philosophy more
generally. And I don’t say better history is all we need by way of diagnosis. But we
do need (or I need) a better understanding of how we got to where we are now than I
think we have at the moment.
If what is needed now in epistemology is at least recognition of the fatal
consequences of that traditional but still widely shared conception of perception, it
must be explained how and why that way of thinking is not forced on us, that there
are alternative ways of understanding how we know things about the world by
perception. One kind of contribution along those lines would be to explain how we
came to think of perception in general in those ways—how it has come to look like
the only possibility.
One major factor, either as cause or as effect, has undoubtedly been the virtual
assimilation of perception to sensation. There are very understandable reasons for

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that, especially since the beginnings of the new science in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Perception takes place through the sense organs. A sense
organ is affected in certain ways, with the result that a perceiver becomes aware of
something or other. The effect on a sense organ is the end result of a process
typically starting from objects in the environment. Such causal processes are what
connect a perceiver to the world around him. Of course, the world has many effects
on people that they are not aware of at all. But in perception, as in sensation, the
person is aware of something or other. That awareness is the effect of happenings in
some part of the body. And each sensory effect is brought about through a particular
organ or channel. This means, as Berkeley eventually put it, that each of the senses
has its own ‘‘proper objects’’ of awareness. No one is ever aware by sight of the
same thing he is aware of by touch or by hearing. So it is basic to this picture that
there is not necessarily any similarity between whatever a perceiver is aware of and
whatever is so in the world that produces that effect.
This is all very familiar and well-travelled territory, both in the history of
philosophy and in the history of science. The best-known and most fully-developed
versions of philosophical views of perception of this kind came after or as part of
new scientific advances. The ‘‘new way of ideas’’ that revolutionized the
understanding of the mind in general, along with the ‘‘impressions’’, ‘‘sensa’’,
‘‘sense data’’, and ‘‘the given’’, and so on that eventually succeeded it, all appear to
derive from this modern, roughly mechanical picture of a person’s relation to the
rest of the world.
But the apparent consequences of this picture for an understanding of thought and
knowledge of objects in the world around us have never been squarely faced, or
faced up to. It carries with it the inevitable implication that perceiving and thinking
and believing and so on are all to be understood as a matter of receiving or
entertaining in the mind certain ‘‘representations’’ of objects or of how things are
beyond one’s ‘‘representations’’ of them. This implication is thought to be benign or
unproblematic; it is seen as the only possibility, given that we do perceive and know
things about the world by perception. This picture is still very much with us, even
among philosophers of a heavily materialist persuasion who would shudder at the
thought of anything like ‘‘sense data’’ or ‘‘impressions’’ or other apparent ephemera.
But even for such philosophers it still seems undeniable that it is only by means of
something that counts as an inner ‘‘representation’’ of parts of the world that human
perception and thought are possible.
When it is understood as a completely general picture of the mind, and
consistently applied to our actual situation, surely this cannot be right. Descartes, for
instance, who certainly held some such view, thought that every sensory experience
he ever had while awake was an experience he also could have while asleep and
dreaming. He took that to imply (rightly, it seems to me) that he could never know
anything about the world around him on the basis of his sensory experiences alone.
No one could have any more reason on that basis alone to believe any particular
thing about a world beyond his sensory experience than to believe anything else,
however fanciful. Of course, Descartes also thought he had excellent non-perceptual
reasons for believing and trusting in the kinds of things he accepts about the world;
the inadequacy of sense perception alone was part of what he wanted to bring out.

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But those of us who disagree with Descartes and think we know many things about
the world by perception without having to rely on any help from a beneficent God
cannot accept that view of perceptual experience. It restricts our perceptual access to
nothing more than ‘‘ideas’’ or ‘‘representations’’ in the mind, and so leaves us
always short of the familiar objects we believe in in the world itself.
There is no question that the new physical science was seen to give dramatic
support and legitimacy to this idea of the sensory experience or the perception or the
idea or sensory effect as perceivers’ only access to the wider world around them.
This is not just the platitude that we come to know things about the world by
experience, or perception, or even because of the effects the world has on us as we
move around in it. No revolutionary new science was needed to convince anyone of
such obvious general truths. We have no difficulty in everyday life in explaining
how people often come to know the things they do by perceiving what is going on
around them. This picture involves not just the familiar general idea of experience
or perception, but the specific idea of particular sensory experiences or perceptions,
individual items that make their appearance at particular times. Nor is it just a story
of the production of physical effects on organisms. It introduces particular items that
also have certain qualities or features that a perceiver can be aware of. It is only
because there is awareness that it counts as a case of perception or sensation. And
those experienced qualities or features are no part of the complete story physical
science tells of the physical organism.
This idea is perhaps still present in the so-called ‘‘problem of consciousness’’ that
puzzles so many philosophers at the moment. How can it be explained that
physiological processes come to possess such distinctive ‘experienced’ character-
istics? I think it is much harder than it has apparently seemed to understand how
awareness, perception, thought, belief, and so on could come to have been thought
of in these problematic ways—as if it there really is no other alternative. So I see
this as still a rich area for further study in the history of epistemology, as well as the
history of science, or historical epistemology. It would all contribute to what I think
of as philosophical epistemology.
It remains doubtful whether even all that would lead us to the real source or
motivation behind these ways of thinking. There is no question that concentration
on the details of the causal processes of perception seemed to lend them new and
powerful support. In antiquity, or in Aristotle anyway, what a perceiver was said to
perceive was the very quality of the object he sees, not some ‘inner’ or ‘mental’
representation of something standing in some so-far unexplained relation to it. In at
least that respect, the Aristotelian view was closer to common sense. But it could
give no satisfactory explanation of how a perceiver could receive or have access to
such a direct awareness of things around him. It was in offering an account of an
intelligible intervening mechanism between the two that the new science was
thought to have supplanted Aristotle. But that account in turn has its own
unsatisfactory implications.
But even in antiquity there was an idea that seems to lie behind the problematic
conception of perception that I have been drawing attention to. It is perhaps a more
fundamental version of the same idea. So historical epistemology probably needs to
go further back than the sixteenth century to come to terms with the ways of

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thinking that I think continue to present obstacles to our understanding of human

knowledge.
In his Theaetetus Plato argues that knowledge is not the same thing as perception
on the grounds that no case of perception as such is a case of knowledge.1
Perception involves a bodily sense-organ, but it is taken to be nothing more than a
purely passive affection that usually brings about an effect in the mind. Perception
itself cannot be knowledge since knowledge involves belief, which in turn requires
an activity of ‘‘the mind’’. ‘‘Knowledge is to be found’’, Socrates says, ‘‘not in the
experiences but in the process of reasoning about them’’. It is ‘‘not in the
experiences that it is possible to grasp being and truth’’ (Theaetetus 186D).
This again is more than the everyday idea of perception or experience that we
might appeal to explain how somebody knows some particular thing. Here we
apparently have what I see as the fatal idea of ‘experiences’ (plural)—what look like
particular items that are no more than passive affections but involve awareness. We
can be led by such ‘experiences’ to think and so perhaps eventually to know things,
but that belief or knowledge will be a matter of ‘the mind’ or ‘reason’, not of
perception or the senses. This division into separate faculties with their own
distinctive domains and tasks looks like another expression, or perhaps the real
source, of the problematic conception of perception I have been talking about. Some
such idea of distinct faculties or regions of the mind is still with us today in other
forms, and is therefore perhaps responsible for other difficulties in present-day
epistemology.
There is, for instance, the familiar traditional distinction between completely
different kinds and sources of knowledge: what is completely independent of all
experience and so must be derived from ‘reason’ alone, on the one hand, and what is
based at least to some extent on perceptual experience, on the other. How have we
come to think of human beings and their achievements in this completely
compartmentalized way? Are they to be understood as combinations of distinct and
independent faculties or functions, rather than as individual agents who come to be
able to do many different kinds of things in many different kinds of ways? It is
obviously difficult to explain why a division into separate parts or ‘faculties’ has
come to seem so natural. Can we not think equally clearly of human beings as
simply having many different kinds of abilities: they can see, and think, and feel,
and come to know things, in many different sorts of ways? Could historical
epistemology, or the history of epistemology, or the history of anything at all,
possibly reveal the real sources of those apparently ‘natural’ ways of thinking that
stand in the way of a more unproblematic understanding of ourselves?
But suppose we did come to understand the sources of those apparently
unavoidable ways of thinking, at least to some extent. Suppose we came to see that
those are not the only ways in which we are forced to think about human beings and
their different achievements. Suppose that by overcoming those constricting
dichotomies of the past we could eventually abandon the traditional view of the
limits of perception that for so long has presented an obstacle to the proper

1
For an illuminating account of the essentials of Plato’s argument see Frede (1987). Here I simply
summarize Frede’s account.

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understanding of human knowledge. Would we then have a satisfactory answer to

the traditional epistemological problem of our perceptual knowledge of the world?
Whether we did or not would presumably depend on what that new understanding of
perception amounted to, and on what we had to take ourselves to understand and to
know in order to gain that new conception of how we come to know things in that
way.
One possibility is that with that new understanding of the relation between
perception and knowledge we would simply lose the old epistemological problem
altogether. It would have gone away with the restrictive conception of perception
that was needed to raise the problem in its most pressing form. But if that problem in
that form had gone away, could we any longer say that we now do understand the
possibility of human knowledge in general in a way that finally satisfies us? Would
we have a satisfactory answer to the philosophical epistemological question about
human knowledge of the world? Or would we simply have lost any such completely
general understanding of our position, or perhaps even lost the desire to seek any
such general understanding of ourselves? This is a hard and very complicated
question. But I think it is not a question that historical epistemology, or the history
of epistemology, or even epistemology itself, can be expected to answer.

Reference

Frede, M. (1987). Observations on Perception in Plato’s Later Dialogues. In M. Frede (Ed.), Essays in
ancient philosophy (pp. 3–10). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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