Background
Dretske, Fred Irwin was born on December 9, 1932 in Waukegan.
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Fred Irwin Dretske
Edit ProfileEducation
Purdue University and University of Minnesota.
Career
1957 -9, Teaching Assistant, University of Minnesota. 1960-1990, Instructor, then Assistant, Associate, then full Professor, University of Wisconsin, Madison. Since 1990, full Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University.
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Fred Dretske’s major contributions to philosophy are concentrated in four specific areas: the nature of perception, the nature of knowledge, the explanation of behaviour in terms of reasons and the status of the laws of nature. Almost uniquely, he is a philosopher with an initial background in engineering: a first degree in electrical engineering together with brief work experience in the same field. Some of his illustrations and his general orientation undoubtedly reflect this background. As well as this, Dretske utilizes for his philosophical purposes knowledge °f the psychology of perception, learning theory, cognitive science, evolutionary biology and information theory. Via an interest in philosophy of science, he rapidly became immersed in epistemological issues, both early and latterly in perception. What attracted most attention, and certainly controversy, in Dretske’s first book was the distinction therein drawn between epistemic and non-epistemic seeing—the latter, which he has also called simple seeing, involving visual discrimination but free of belief content. To see a cat is not to sec that a cat is present; nor is it to see that anything whatever is the case. Epistemic seeing is more sophisticated and presupposes the prior ability to see-without-identifying. In Knowledge °nd the Flow of Information ( 1981 ) this distinction was cashed out in terms of a difference in the way m which information can be encoded. In a Perceptual experience it is encoded in analog form, whereas with cognitive states like knowledge or belief it is encoded in digital form, with specific propositional content. Two strands in Dretske's account of knowledge can be separated out. First, as with perception, there is the account in information-theoretic terms. Knowledge is equated with informationcaused belief. To know that some source, s, is F, is to have the belief that it is F caused or sustained by the information that it is F. Second, Dretske gave one of the earliest formulations of the now quite popular ‘relevant alternatives’ account of knowledge (1970,1971), an important aspect of which is its treatment of sceptical possibilities. A denial is boldly made that knowledge is closed under known entailment. Something can be known although the knower docs not know that certain sceptical possibilities do not obtain. One can know that one is seeing a daffodil while not being in a position to exclude such outlandish alternatives as its being a mass hallucination, a clever facsimile, etc.: only relevant alternatives need be excluded, and what these are depends upon the particular context. As with knowledge so too with explanation of behaviour in terms of reasons Dretske broadly seeks to safeguard the commonsensical or folk-psychological position. Such explanations do not have to give way to, because they do not clash with, scientific explanations of bodily movements. Nor do beliefs have a merely epiphcnomenal status. In Explaining Behavior (1988), Dretske ambitiously undertakes to show that human behaviour is to be explained in terms of the causal powers which beliefs and desires possess in virtue of the propositional contents they have, through prior learning. For instance, a’s now stroking a cat might be explained by the occurrence in a of an internal state which is a token of a type of state representing the presence of a cat and tending to produce movements M because earlier tokens of this state had been followed by similar movements which had been rewarded. Hence, explanation in terms of an agent’s reasons invokes the idea of a structuring cause where this is a matter of explaining why some belief now produces the particular effect it does produce because of what happened in the past. In philosophy of science, Dretske’s name is associated with a view about the laws of nature, sometimes called the Dretske-Armstrong Tooley view, according to which laws of nature are to be understood not as generalizations about particular instances but as singular statements linking properties or universals.
