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Bove, Vincenzo

English

Military Culture and Institutional Trust: Evidence from Conscription Reforms in Europe

Coraci, Davide

Cevolani, Gustavo

Inference to the best neuroscientific explanation

Betti, Alessandro

Gori, Marco

Neural time-reversed generalized Riccati equation

Foravalle, Marco

Italian

L’Oltremare dei Re. Diplomazia, colonialismo e cultura materiale nelle collezioni dei Savoia

Martello, D.

Reporting accountability in cultural organizations

Maggioni, N.

Galletta, L.

A Comparison of Hosting Techniques for Online Cybersecurity Competitions

Bruno, Matteo

A universal framework for inclusive 15-minute cities

Njougouo, T.

Speed-accuracy trade-offs in best-of-n collective decision making through heterogeneous mean-field modeling

Cavalli, Martina

Grafici di storie d'amore, 1972-1973

De Benedetto, Matteo

BOOK REVIEW
Metascience
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11016-024-00999-1
Naturalistic epistemology has a bit of an odd status in philosophy nowadays. Most 
philosophers would probably agree that knowledge is a natural phenomenon, albeit 
with a distinctive normative nature, and that, as such, epistemology should take 
into serious consideration the relevant results of natural sciences. Nevertheless, 
naturalistic epistemology seems to have somehow acquired a bad reputation among 
philosophers, up to the point that it has become quite rare to find contemporary 
epistemological works that explicitly situate themselves in this tradition. Jan Faye’s 
book, instead, clearly states this intellectual heritage in its first sentence: “What you 
are about to read is a naturalistic account of human knowledge in a biological and 
social setting” (v).
Faye’s naturalistic account of human knowledge centers around the division 
between biological and social forms of knowledge. Biological forms of knowledge 
encompass all forms of experiential knowledge that we share with many animals. 
These kinds of knowledge are non-linguistic, and they are justified non-proposition-
ally via the evolutionary reliability of the cognitive mechanisms that produced them. 
Social forms of knowledge, instead, encompass all linguistic forms of knowledge, 
and they are, for the most part, typically human. Their justification is based on epis-
temic norms that are ultimately conventional in character. In this way, Faye divides 
human knowledge into two different dimensions, a biological one, in which knowl-
edge is understood as a pure cognitive adaptation to the environment, and a social 
one, in which knowledge is a cultural product of humans’ self-reflection ability.
The nine chapters of the book take us on a journey through the different types 
of biological and social knowledge. We start with very basic forms of experiential 
knowledge and, chapter after chapter, we make our way to the pinnacle of human 
Accepted: 28 June 2024
© The Author(s) 2024
The great chain of knowing
Jan Faye: The biological and social dimensions of human knowledge. 
London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023, ix + 315 pp, €149.99 HB
Matteo De Benedetto1
  Matteo De Benedetto
matteo.debenedetto@rub.de
1 Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
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Metascience
knowledge, namely, science. The book can be naturally divided into two parts: a first 
part, encompassing Chapters 1 to 4, and a second part, encompassing Chapters 5 to 9.
The first part of the book describes the biological forms of knowledge. Chapter 2 
starts with the most basic form of knowledge of the external world that humans and 
animals share, i.e., image-based knowledge. This denotes the disposition of organ-
isms to adapt their behavior to specific sensory images. Such a simple, automatic 
recognition of some part of the environment by an organism does not involve any 
belief or concept. Yet, it is the most widespread form of knowledge of the envi-
ronment that organisms have, as Faye argues with a series of specific examples of 
animal knowledge. Then, we encounter concepts-based knowledge, a more complex 
form of knowledge thanks to which organisms can classify sensory information into 
types. Chapter 3 discusses two other basic forms of knowledge, i.e., behavioral and 
actional knowledge. These two forms are structurally equivalent to image-based and 
concepts-based knowledge, but they are acquired through our internal senses instead 
of our external ones. This chapter also contains an interesting deflationary discussion 
of the know-how/know-that distinction. Chapter 4 defends the knowledge-status of 
these biological forms of knowledge against some traditional philosophical argu-
ments. Faye offers a convincing non-propositional reliabilist justification of biologi-
cal forms of knowledge: these forms of knowledge are of a pre-linguistic nature and, 
as such, they are directly justified by the adaptive reliability of the cognitive pro-
cesses that produced them. Because of the non-propositional character of this form 
of reliabilism, Faye argues, we do not need to resort to bedrock beliefs or indefeasible 
propositional justifications to justify these biological forms of knowledge.
The second part of the book, Chapters 5 to 9, describes instead the social forms of 
knowledge. After a discussion of how language might have evolved, we encounter, 
in Chapter 6, the simplest social form of human knowledge, i.e., empirical knowl-
edge. This form of knowledge denotes everyday knowledge about the way things 
are, i.e., our true non-sensory beliefs about visible things. Empirical knowledge is 
qualitatively different from all biological forms of knowledge, in that it is expressed 
through language, it is propositional, and many of its features are socially determined 
in a conventional way. Chapter 7 describes the status of empirical knowledge from 
the perspective of social epistemology. We find a conventionalist characterization of 
traditional epistemic norms of truth and propositional justification as ultimately built 
upon the inter-subjective agreement between members of a community. This chapter 
also includes an interesting defense of testimony as a naturalistically viable form of 
justification for empirical knowledge. Finally, with Chapters 8 and 9, we arrive at 
the most cultural form of human knowledge, theoretical knowledge, and at its most 
reliable generator, science. According to Faye, science expands humans’ epistemic 
repertoire with knowledge of invisible entities. More exactly, argues Faye, objects 
of theoretical knowledge can be invisible, but they must be somehow instrumentally 
observable. Otherwise, they cannot be known, but they remain only useful abstrac-
tions for organizing empirical phenomena. In this sense, we find here a sort of dual 
epistemological theory of scientific entities that blends experimentalism and logi-
cal empiricism. According to this view, science produces empirical and theoretical 
knowledge only about instrumentally observable entities, visible and invisible ones, 
whereas the non-observable entities postulated by scientific theories, understood as 
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Metascience
linguistic frameworks, serve only an ancillary role as useful abstractions. In Chap-
ter 9, this view of science is applied to two classical topics in general philosophy of 
science: scientific understanding and epistemic values.
There are many things to like about this book. First and foremost, in these times 
of philosophical overspecialization, it is refreshing to read a book that tries to build 
a general philosophical picture including insights from epistemology, philosophy of 
science, philosophy of language, as well as from various relevant scientific disci-
plines. Moreover, the general picture developed in this book constitutes an attrac-
tive epistemological framework for naturalistically minded philosophers. In fact, the 
author manages to describe the diversity of the various epistemic practices in which 
humans and animals engage, but, at the same time, also highlight their common cog-
nitive-evolutionary origins.
From a critical point of view, certain parts of the book are unfortunately not as 
detailed and well-situated in contemporary philosophical and scientific literature as 
others. Consider, for instance, the notion of ‘concept’ employed in the book. This 
notion is very important for the overall epistemological picture of the book, because, 
according to the Faye, it is through concepts that animals and humans are able to 
acquire the most advanced biological forms of knowledge without using language. 
As such, one would expect a detailed characterization of what concepts are, their 
psychological structure and format, how they relate to each other, how they allow 
an organism to gain knowledge, and so on. Instead, we are given only a very mini-
mal functional characterization of a concept and no answer to the other questions. 
According to Faye, a concept is “a cognitive schema of an animal that enables it to 
grasp a separable property or an [sic] separable object as to be a specific sort when-
ever it receives sensory information about this individual property or this individual 
object” (59). This definition gives us a rough idea of what a concept is supposed to 
do, namely, it is supposed to categorize sensory information via some specific cogni-
tive mechanism, but it does not give us nearly enough information to understand the 
precise nature, functioning, and scope of concepts-based forms of knowledge. This 
lack of details is unfortunate, especially considering that cognitive scientists have 
recently made tremendous progress in understanding the psychology of concepts. 
Indeed, some contemporary accounts of concepts and conceptual development in 
cognitive science would have fit perfectly with the general biological-social episte-
mological picture of the book. I am thinking, for instance, about the so-called core 
cognition theories of conceptual development (cf. Carey 2009; Spelke 2022). These 
theories posit an inherited basis of cognitive mechanisms that equip animals and 
infants with specific proto-conceptual resources about certain domains of phenom-
ena (e.g., cause, object, number, space, action), from which children develop mature 
inferentially-rich symbolic concepts, thanks to the aid of language and of their social 
environment. Analogously, it is unfortunate that the second part of the book—about 
the social dimension of human knowledge—does not engage much with contempo-
rary social epistemology. Given the extremely wide scope of the book, these short-
comings in certain areas are forgivable, but it would have been nice to better situate 
the book in these contemporary philosophical and scientific literatures.
Finally, I will close this review with a general thought about the status of natural-
istic epistemology. It is commonplace in naturalistic epistemology to complain about 
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Metascience
the non-naturalistic status of mainstream epistemology. This book is no exception. 
Indeed, if one looks at what the hot topics in epistemology are nowadays, it seems 
that there is very little naturalistic epistemology out there. Yet, if we widen the scope 
of what we count as epistemology, we can find several examples of epistemological 
research done from a naturalistic perspective. I am thinking, for instance, about all 
the work that philosophers of cognitive science have recently done on the philosophi-
cal implications of recent psychology of reasoning or of the vast repertoire of models 
of epistemic dynamics that formal epistemology now offers. Moreover, one can find 
in contemporary philosophy of science several accounts of specific epistemic phe-
nomena that take seriously the results of cognitive science. In this sense, it seems to 
me that naturalistic epistemology is nowadays mostly practiced outside the sub-dis-
ciplinary boundaries of traditional epistemology. If I am right, it is among these com-
munities of self-exiled naturalistic epistemologists that this book will find its readers.
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References
Carey, S. 2009. The origin of concepts. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Spelke, E. S. 2022. What babies know. vol. 1 Core Knowledge and Composition.
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The great chain of knowing

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