Analytic epistemologists, please turn your jobs over to psychologists!

Epistemology and the Psychology of Human Judgment by Michael A. Bishop and J. D. Trout (2005) is my favorite book about epistemology. Here are some nice quotes:

"When we began to study epistemology in graduate school, it seemed so full of promise. Who wouldn't want to divine the structure of knowledge? But somewhere around the third epicycle on a counterexample involving reliable clairvoyants, back-up electrical generators, or an environment full of objects that are phenomenologically identical but ontologically distinct, SAE [Standard Analytic Epistemology] jumped the shark."

"the main problem with SAE is methodological: its goals and methods are beyond repair."

"In the natural sciences ... hypotheses are typically tested against the world. But in SAE, hypotheses are tested against the well-considered judgments of other (similarly trained) philosophers."

"SAE rejects various accounts solely on the grounds that they violate these judgments. ... If physics had been burdened with such a conservative method, we wouldn't have relativity, quantum mechanics (or perhaps even Copernicanism!)." 

"This is a thoroughly descriptive endeavor." 

"SAE is actually an odd kind of cultural anthropology: building theories that describe how privileged (mostly) Westerners with Ph.D.s in Philosophy engage in epistemic assessment. ... If SAE is but anthropology, it is unclear on what grounds its proponents can reasonably make universal normative claims about the nature, origin, and limits of human knowledge." 

"Insofar as the core of the theories of SAE is descriptive, they are very likely to be bad descriptive theories." 

"If philosophers want an account that mimics their epistemological judgments, all we would need is a psychologist who is willing to model our judgments ... . Indeed, if philosophers really want to begin their epistemological musings with a descriptive core that accurately accounts for their judgments about knowledge or justification, they would save a lot of time, energy, and expense by employing a few psychology graduate students." 

"It doesn't matter how deeply philosophers may have considered and refined their epistemic judgments. We still need to know what's so great about philosophers' considered epistemic judgments."