Certain Doubts

I’m reviewing this book for Notre Dame Philosophical Review, so I will use this forum to raise some issues that occur in the discussion that I won’t bring up in a relatively short review. Here’s one such issue, one between Feldman and Sosa on the problem of the speckled hen.

Sosa’s original argument distinguished between aspects of one’s visual field and what one notices, so that there could be a hen in one’s visual field with 48 speckles and yet one not notice this aspect. Feldman makes a further distinction, between peripheral and focal noticing. His example concerns the red light on his telephone, which he comes to be aware of focally while at the same time becoming aware that he has been peripherally aware of the light being on for some time. Feldman says that focal awareness produces phenomenal concepts and only phenomenal concepts play a role in justifying beliefs. So, Feldman holds, one might peripherally notice the 48 speckles, but not acquire that phenomenal concept.

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I’ve got a friend who is an associate dean here, an anthropologist, who encouraged his kids to take as much logic and epistemology in college as they could get. In talking with him, I think he views epistemology as a branch of logic–in the way one would think of it if one thought of epistemology primarily in terms of non-deductive inference and confirmation theory.

I suspect this view is appropriate to much of the history of epistemology, with the more contemporary, normative view of epistemology being a more recent development. This difference leads to a question: when did the change take place, and why? My first thought is to cite Chisholm and his teacher, C.I. Lewis, with their emphasis on irreducible prima facie credibility for certain evidential connections. But perhaps the story is more complicated. For example, some have suggested that it is the pragmatists who are responsible for turning epistemology from a primary concern for non-deductive inference and confirmation theory to the contemporary emphasis on justification with the resulting normative conception of the discipline.

Any ideas here?

In case you haven’t heard, Richard Heck has started a new searchable database of online papers in philosophy at PhOnline. If you have online papers in epistemology, I urge you to use this site. You will need to register as an author, and then use the site to insert your papers into the database. The site will be the equivalent of Philosopher’s Index for online work.

There’s a new draft of John’s paper “Holding Defeat to the Fire” linked to in the sidebar. Check it out!

Sosa’s latest account of safety is:

S’s belief that p is safe iff S holds it on a basis that this belief would not have without being true.

He offers this new account to avoid the Kripke red-fake/green-barn counterexample. Here’s how it works with that case. S believes that there’s a green barn in the field, and deduces that there’s a barn in the field. In that case, the first belief is safe, having a perceptual basis, and the second is safe as well, have a deductive basis. Had S simply formed the perceptual belief that there’s a barn in the field, however, it would not have been safe.

What’s interesting is Sosa’s explanation of the intuition that we don’t know that the object in the field is a barn. We have that intuition, according to Sosa, because of the way our perceptual phenomenology works: we are appeared to barn-in-the-field-ly, and also are appeared to greenly, so that the basis of the belief that there’s a barn in the field is the first appearance state. Were the phenomenology different, so that we are appeared to green-barn-in-the-field-ly, no violation of safety would occur either for the belief that there’s a green barn in the field or that there’s a barn in the field.

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Hawthorne and others take knowledge to be central to practical reasoning, in the sense that if one employs premises that one does not know to be true, one has done something wrong. I wonder the extent to which this claim is dependent on refusing to think that knowledge is explicable in terms of some of the standard approaches to the nature of knowledge, such as undefeated justified true belief. One way to approach this question is to ask what sense of ‘wrong’ might be involved in various failures of these conditions.

Suppose we distinguish senses of ‘wrong’ in terms of things that are wrong because the person is justly criticizable or blameworthy from things that are wrong in some other way. Consider, then, a case where you reason through premises that you don’t believe. Paradigm cases of this occur when the subject is depressed or experiencing emotional interference at the opposite end of the emotional spectrum. In such cases, the subject is justly criticized for employing those premises: consider a guy at the craps table who, giddy because of a winning streak, lets hope outrun conviction and bets the farm on the next roll. “You’re pathetic” comes to mind…

So, too, if the person isn’t letting hope outrun conviction, but lets conviction outrun evidence (as any normal human would have to in order to be convinced that they were going to win on the next toss). We shake our heads in dismay as we watch the folly unfold, and our actions constitute justified criticism of the reasoning process leading to the action.

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Brian Weatherson has a new argument on his blog for why gettier cases are cases of knowledge. His first argument was something like this: an analysis of knowledge ought to be relatively simple, and gettier cases, if they are not cases of knowledge, conflict with this point. He now has given up on this argument, and uses three others in its place. The three arguments rely on the following claims:
1. Knowledge is a norm of belief.
2. Knowledge is central to practical reasoning, in the sense that if you reason using something you don’t know to be true, you’ve done something wrong.
3. Knowledge is the norm of assertion.

I won’t comment on these three premises further; I’ve already said a number of things here about each of them. But in a recent post, Weatherson adds another argument.

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I’m curious about what your intuitions are in this variation of the painted mule case. Apologies if it’s already been gone over in the literature or elsewhere. As usual, I’ll stipulate that a painted mule really would look like a zebra.

Jordan the zookeeper has just fed the zebra, and seen that it is the same zebra that he has cared for for years. Jordan hears someone ask Jackie, a small child looking into the cage, “Do you know what that animal is?” Jackie says, “I know that it’s a zebra.” It crosses Jordan’s mind that zebras look much like mules except for the coloring, and that if an appropriately painted mule were in the cage Jackie would still think it was a zebra. Jordan also knows that no one has ever pulled such a prank in this zoo, and in fact thinks that nobody has ever even thought of substituting a painted mule for a zebra in any zoo anywhere.

Should Jordan evaluate Jackie’s knowledge claim, “I know that it’s a zebra,” as true or false? If Jordan said, “Jackie knows that it’s a zebra,” would it be true or false? Is your answer affected at all by the fact that Jordan can rule out (in the way that Jackie can’t) that the zebra is a painted mule?

My answers are likely as theoretically laden as anyone’s here, but I’ll put them in the comments so you can formulate your answers without looking at mine.

An irrelevant question: Wouldn’t The Painted Mule be a great name for a nightclub?

A primary motivation for finding a place for useful falsehoods resides in wanting to explain how one can use a false theory to acquire knowledge. Ptolemaic astronomers knew where the planets would be at fixed points in the future, and Newtonian physicists can predict the behavior of medium-sized objects close to the earth–”predict” in the sense that implies knowledge. The reason they have knowledge of this sort is that objects behave as if the theory is true even if in fact the theory is false.

This instrumentalist fact guides Klein’s theory. He requires that the useful falsehood entail a truth that justifies the same belief justified by the useful falsehood. The instrumentalist claim is entailed by the false theory, is true, and justifies the same belief justified by the useful falsehood. It’s exactly the claim he’s looking for (and cites).

It is interesting, I think, to compare the situation of ancient Ptolemaic astronomy with ancient astrology. In both cases, the theories are subject to anomalies, but were accepted because of some predictive success for the theories. So, instead of considering the situation of the behavior of a heavenly body, consider an astrological prediction of a baby becoming a well-known public figure in virtue of being born on a certain day. Further, suppose the astrological theory has been tested sufficiently for such cases that the body of information available justifies believing that the child will be famous, and assume that the prediction is correct.

Here, the instrumentalist fact threatens to give the wrong results, doesn’t it? We’re not very tempted to say that the astrologers knew the child would be famous. So what’s the difference between ancient astrology and Ptolemaic astronomy?

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Here’s a further issue for Klein’s account of useful falsehoods. For reference, here’s the full account again:

The belief that uf is a useful falsehood to S (for acquiring knowledge) by producing a
doxastically justified belief that h iff:
1. uf is false
2. The belief that uf is doxastically justified for S
3. The belief that uf is essential in the causal production of the belief that h
4. uf propositionally justifies h
5. uf entails a true proposition, t
6. t propositionally justifies h
7. Whatever doxastically justifies the belief that uf for S also propositionally
justifies t for S.

According to the above account, whatever justifies the false belief has to justify the true proposition as well, and both the true proposition and the false belief have to justify the piece of knowledge in question. Suppose we left the account there, expunging clause 5 altogether. Are there cases in which this elimination causes a problem? Another way to put this question is as follows. Klein develops his account to honor Hilpinen’s remark about being close to the truth, and alethic presupposition is one way of clarifying that idea. But why can’t being close to the truth be taken only in terms of being justified by the same evidence, both the useful falsehood and the truth that is explanatorily operative when we say why the inferred belief counts as knowledge? The idea is that the useful falsehood is close to the truth simply in virtue of being evidenced by precisely the same evidence that justifies the truth in question.

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