Certain Doubts

I just learned that Jason’s new book Knowledge and Interests will be out late summer or early fall with Oxford. Here’s the central claim of the book:

There are cases in which two people are similarly situated, but one has knowledge, whereas the other does not, because one has greater practical investment in the truth or falsity of her beliefs. The central purpose of this book is to argue that we must take our intuitions about these cases at face-value.

Some of the ideas in the book are on this blog and have appeared in previous papers of Jason’s, but I’m sure that leaves plenty of justification for buying the book!

Philosophical blogdom is in a bit of a tizzy over Posner’s remarks as guest blogger on Brian Leiter’s site. Posner insists that the reasons we give for moral positions we hold can only be rationalizations, maintaining that the real reason we hold the views have to do with cultural and social factors rather than the arguments we give for these views.

In response at Left2Right, Gerald Dworkin says,

Analogy: I came to believe there were an infinite number of primes because a friend passed on this information to me when I was 11. But he also, I learned later, passed on lots of other things which were not true. But I now actually have a proof of this fact and so hold the belief now on that basis. The claim that my belief is just a rationalization requires showing one of two things. Either that such proofs are not themselves good reasons or that I would have continued to believe the claim even if I had no such proof.

Posner must believe one or both of these things about moral beliefs. Either there are no good arguments for moral beliefs or that even if there are these do not explain why we hold them.

It’s pretty clear from Posner’s post that he doesn’t wish to take on the challenge of showing that all the arguments for moral beliefs are bad arguments. Instead, he wishes to take the second route of impugning the pedigree of the beliefs, which Dworkin characterizes in terms of a counterfactual: we’d believe the claims even if the arguments are bad. This point is certainly relevant to what counts as a rationalization, but not in the way most imagine, I think. The counterfactual in question (and the related question of what explains the belief) should be viewed, at most, as evidentially related to rationalizing rather than constitutive of it.

So here’s the argument.

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Philosophers can be, at times, inordinately dense. I’m in that state now, I fear. It’s engendered by considering the interesting email exchange copied to me by Jonathan Schaffer and David Sosa. The discussion is a follow-up to a previous post here about Ernie Sosa’s charge that contextualism is not a theory of knowledge, and Keith DeRose’s granting the point while rebutting its negative connotations for contextualism.

A central issue in the discussion is whether contextualism is evidence for (without entailing) a position they call epistemic pluralism. At first blush, there are three positions here: epistemic eliminativism, which says there are no knowledge relations; epistemic monism, which says there is just one knowledge relation; and epistemic pluralism, which says there are many knowledge relations.

Apoplexy befalls me at these characterizations. I’m inclined to think I’m just being dense here, but let’s see.

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Plantinga once told me that the proper response to Lehrer’s gypsy lawyer case is this: “The lawyer doesn’t know, but he is in a position to know.” Here the idea is that the lawyer already has all the evidence needed, but doesn’t know because the belief is based improperly (according to many, including Plantinga). And recently I’ve been considering here the possibility that knowing p puts one in a position to know other things, where being in such a position might be used to explain the value of knowledge over true belief. For it to do that, the possession of knowledge would itself have to imply being in a position to know some specific range of truths.

The obvious sense of the phrase is a bit different, I think. Bush is in a position to know about security threats to the U.S. because all he has to do is ask and he’ll find out. I’m in a position to know details of our departmental budget because I can look them up onPeopleSoft. Bush doesn’t have the access codes needed to do this (unless the new Aschcroft powers far exceed my assumptions here) and so isn’t in a position to know this information.

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As a followup to the earlier post on the idea that being in a position to know other truths explains how knowledge is more valuable than true belief, suppose the set of claims that you are in a position to know is not insular, so that by coming to know some of them that you don’t already know, the class of things you are in a position to know might expand. Let C be the initial class of things you are in a position to know in virtue of knowing p, and C+ the class of things you’d be in a position to know if you come to know everything in C. We also assume that believing p itself does not put one in a position to know all of C. Furthermore, if we imagine you coming to know everything in C, and compare it with believing everything in C, we still get a difference, because we assume that believing everything in C does not put one in the position to know everything in C+ (as knowing everything in C does).

Defending the position to know idea will require stopping the argument contained in Patrick Hawley’s comment on the first post. Here’s how it works. Begin with knowing p, and then assume knowledge is expanded to include all of C. Then assume that this knowledge is expanded to include all of C+. The end state of this process is knowing everything that is knowable for you, and once you reach that point, there is nothing you are in a position to know that you don’t already know. And if we compare knowing all this with merely truly believing all of it, we won’t be able to explain the difference between the value of truly believing and knowing in such a case by appeal to the idea of what one is in a position to know.

Once you start down this slope, it’s pretty slippery. But why can’t a defender of the position simply grant the argument but question its relevance?

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I’ll be gone for the next week, and won’t be able to do much with the blog because of it. I’ll try to check email when I can. My spam-preventing techniques often force comments to be approved by me before appearing, so if you comment and it doesn’t appear, please be patient. I’ll approve as soon as I get a chance to check email.

Here’s some thoughts on an idea about the value of knowledge. The idea comes from John Turri, who posted the idea here over at Fake Barn Country. It’s a really interesting idea, one I hadn’t thought of, but well worth thinking about. A word of caution though: biologists say that the optimal strategy for predators and predatees(?) trying to get food or avoid being food is stochastic, and my travels through the logical space of the proposal will be optimal in precisely this sense.

To lead into John’s proposal, consider the Plato account: knowledge is more valuable than true belief because mere true belief is more likely to get up and wander off tomorrow than is knowledge. Not exactly the most careful formulation, but for the best formulation along these lines, see Tim Williamson’s formulation in K&IL.

I think all such Plato accounts fail, on grounds having to do with misleading defeaters. The world can conspire against you so that you will, or are likely to, encounter misleading defeaters in the future. And the true beliefs you have that aren’t knowledge might be, we might put the point, fundamentalist beliefs–entrenched by non-epistemic factors so that any further evidence acquired will be explained away rather than attended to.

OK, enough stagesetting, I think. The central point here is the diachronic nature of the Plato account, for which John substitutes a synchronic account. The details of it have to do with being in a position to know truths other than the particular truth known. John focuses on Sosa’s account, where the known claim p has to be in a field of propositions, where the field is such that, in one’s normal environment, you’d most likely be correct with respect to propositions in that field. As John glosses this account, you are in a position to know the other truths in this field. Since I think counterfactual accounts are nearly always mistaken, I’ll just focus here on John’s gloss rather than on the basis for it in Sosa’s thought.

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If you have seen the syllabus for the Fodor and Peacocke course on Representations taught last spring at NYU, here’s the link. There are quite interesting papers linked from this page by Fodor and Brandom and others on perception and givenness.

Keith’s response to Ernie’s complaint that contextualism is not a theory of knowledge is to grant that it isn’t, but maintain that it is important to epistemology nonetheless. Keith says, “To the extent that contextualism/invariantism is an issue in the philosophy of language, it’s a piece of philosophy of language that is of profound importance epistemology. How we should proceed in studying knowledge will be greatly affected by how we come down on the contextualism/invariantism issue. For contextualism opens up possibilities for dealing with issues and puzzles in epistemology which, of course, must be rejected if invariantism is instead correct the correct position. And how could it be otherwise?”

Basic areas of philosophy are surely related in interesting ways to semantical projects, and it is important to see exactly how. For example, how are semantics and metaphysics related? I would have thought that the answer can’t be at the substantive level of telling us what things there are, or what the nature of things is; instead, the connection will be, I suspect, at the level of logical form.

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Keith’s explanation of contextualism as a semantic theory relevant to offering a theory of knowledge, but not offering one itself, led me to think a bit more about two quite different approaches to the theory of knowledge, so I’m going to write a couple posts about the connections between semantics and theory. Here I’ll characterize what I take to be a different way of thinking about epistemology that makes semantics not as central as Keith’s defense of contextualism would have it. Keith’s approach, as I understand it, is that contextualism is central to epistemology because a semantic characterization of central epistemic terms is central to the project of epistemologists, and such information is essential in the process of theory construction.

Value-driven epistemology, of the sort I’ve defended, begins elsewhere. It begins with questions of value, in particular, questions about the value of intellectual states and accomplishments. These might include knowledge, justification, understanding, true belief, etc. Underlying this approach is a mild skepticism about the semantic project. As I noted in an earlier reply to Keith’s comment, I’ve always been attracted by Keith Lehrer’s remark that he’s interested in knowledge, not in what ‘knows’ means.

Here’s the skeptical part.

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