Weblog: There is Some Truth in That

In a recent paper in Mind, Michael Blome-Tillmann defends a form of ‘knows’ contextualism that is broadly Lewisean. His project is, in its broad forms, very similar to that in one of my forthcoming papers. In my paper, I argue that Lewis’s particular suggested rules for proper ignoring are inessential to the central contextualist insight, which is that one can model ‘knows’ in a way similar to context-sensitive quantifier domains, and that maybe he should have just rested happily with the latter, rather than trying to articulate all the relevant rules. Blome-Tillmann agrees with me that Lewis’s particular rules are inessential to his broader project, but, unlike me, he goes on to attempt the ambitious task of articulating rules that will do the relevant work. So rather than rest content with the main contextualist point, as I do, Blome-Tillmann argues for a different solution than Lewis’s to Lewis’s original, more ambitious project. The suggestion is to replace the Lewisean ‘Rule of Attention’ with a ‘Rule of Presupposition’:

(RP) If w is compatible with the speakers’ pragmatic presuppositions in C, then w cannot be properly ignored in C.

Pragmatic presuppositions here are meant to be understood in the Stalnakerian way. The basic idea is that there are different ways to attend to skeptical possibilities; if you just listen to a presentation of them but continue to presuppose them not to obtain, then you can still ‘properly ignore’ them. But if our common ground shifts so as to include those possibilities, then they are no longer properly ignored.

It may well be that the Rule of Presupposition does a better job with cases than does the original Rule of Attention on the whole. But it does worse in at least some cases. Consider some expression PHI, used to pick out an individual, whose felicity requires that some p be presupposed. For example, the expression “the man sitting at the table” requires it to be common ground that there is a uniquely salient man sitting at a uniquely salient table. Now consider a sentence of the form “PHI does not know q”, where p obviously entails q–e.g., “the man sitting at the table does not know that there is a table.”

Intuitively (once we’ve bought into contextualism), some such sentences can both be felicitous and vary in truth from context to context, even when discussing the same subject and proposition. For example, someone in a skeptical context might say “the man sitting at the table does not know that there is a table” truly, even as, in another, nonskeptical context, someone might say “the man sitting at the table does know that there is a table” and speak truly. This is the sort of result contextualists want to capture. But I don’t think Blome-Tillmann can capture it. Anybody who utters that sentence felicitously is in a context in which it is presupposed that there is a table. (The previous paragraph gave a recipe for coming up with lots of similar examples.) Blome-Tillman’s Rule of Presupposition, then, cannot explain the difference between the skeptical context and the nonskeptical one with respect to whether non-table-including possibilities are properly ignored. And none of Lewis’s other rules, besides the Attention one that Blome-Tillman rejects, looks well-suited to do the job either.

So I don’t think that presupposition can do the work Blome-Tillman wants it to do in articulating what possibilities are properly ignored. I still think it’s best not to get too worked up about these details, and rest content with the contextualist insight.

Tags: contextualism, knowledge, Michael Blome-Tillmann, presupposition, qec

I’m going to be discussing an argument that I know Jason Stanley to have given, but I’m away from my copy of his book at the moment, so I can’t cite it properly, or check and see who else has discussed it (or even whether it’s original to Jason). I’ll follow up if citation protocol ends up demanding it.

Here’s a naive argument against ‘knows’ contextualism. (This isn’t the Stanley argument I want to discuss; it’s part of the set-up for it.) Assume contextualism. Now suppose you’re in a nonskeptical context, and I’m in a skeptical one, and we’re both talking about me and the proposition that p, a proposition with which I stand in a pretty strong epistemic relation — one strong enough for your non-skeptical ‘knows’, but not for my skeptical ‘knows’. You say: “Jonathan knows p.” Now, according to this naive objection, I’m forced to say this:

(1) I don’t know that p, but what you said was true.

This sounds like a crazy thing to say, under the circumstances, but it looks like contextualism predicts that it should be fine.

Of course, contextualism doesn’t predict that (1) should be fine; the naive objection is naive. Contextualism avoids the felicity of this utterance by observing that it won’t be assertable for me. What you said entails p (even your nonskeptical ‘knows’ is factive). Since I’m not in a context in which “I know that what you said is true” is true, I therefore can’t assert that what you said is true. Indeed, (1) is Moore-paradoxical, or near enough, since it straightforwardly and transparently entails “I don’t know that p, but p.”

So there’s a naive objection to contextualism and a good response on the contextualist’s behalf. But Jason Stanley thinks the game isn’t over yet, for he has a tweak on the objection to make it less naive in a way that he thinks will avoid the response. Take the same set-up as before; you’re in a non-skeptical context and you say “Jonathan knows p,” and I’m in a skeptical context where “I know p” is false. Now, Jason asks, why shouldn’t I give this sentence?

(2) I don’t know that p, but if p is true, then what you said is true.

Here, the second conjunct doesn’t entail that p, so the sentence isn’t Moore-paradoxical. Insofar as (2) also sounds crazy, we have a version of the objection that isn’t susceptible to the quick response given above. (Does (2) sound crazy? Is it a natural enough sentence to generate clear intuitions? I don’t know. Let’s grant for the purpose of argument that it sucks to have to render this sentence assertible.) The contextualist, I contend, is not committed to the assertibility of (2). Although (2) is not Moore-paradoxical, because the second conjunct does not entail p, its infelicity can still be explained as a violation of the knowledge norm of assertion, since it’s second conjunct will, in the relevant cases, be unknown. Continue Reading »

Tags: assertion, conditionals, contextualism, Jason Stanley, knowledge, Moore-paradoxicality

Suppose you think that it’s possible to know that p, even though your epistemic position vis-a-vis p is weak enough for ‘it might be that not-p’, in its epistemic reading, to be true. I don’t really see why you’d want to think this myself, but I guess some people think that (a) this is a good reading of ‘fallibilism’ and (b) fallibilism is true. If you think this, then you face the problem to explain the infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions. Why’s it sound so bad to say “I know that p but p might be false”?

The obvious explanation is that it’s a contradiction: according to standard epistemic modal logic, ‘might’, in its epistemic reading, is just the dual of ‘know’. But the fallibilist of this stripe has closed off that response. What’s he say instead? Dougherty and Rysiew propose a pragmatic line: “p might be false,” they say, implicates but does not entail that there is a significant chance of not-p. And while a chance of not-p is consistent with knowledge that p, a significant chance of not-p is not. Fantl and McGrath supplement the story by suggesting that the significance of various chances can be a stakes-sensitive matter; the same possibility, with the same likelihood, can be significant if the stakes are high, and insignificant if the stakes are low.

Now I get nervous when Gricean pragmatic stories are asked to do work like this. Too often, the data don’t generalize the right ways. Here’s one problem: the pragmatic effect doesn’t seem appropriately cancelable. Consider:

It’s possible that it will rain today, but I know it won’t rain today.

The badness of this sentence is explained, on the view in question, by suggesting that the first conjunct pragmatically implicates that there is a significant chance that it will rain today. It predicts, then, that if we cancel the implication, we’re left with felicity. But this prediction is not borne out; this is still bad:

It’s possible that it will rain today, but there’s no significant chance that it will rain today, so I know it won’t rain today.

Also, there’s a point that Derek Ball raised in Jason Stanley’s seminar last week, inspired by Seth Yalcin: the infelicity of concessive knowledge attributions persists in non-assertoric contexts. “Suppose that you know it will rain today and it might not rain today.” “If you know it will rain today and it might not rain today, then you know something that might not happen.” Etc. The Gricean story is peculiar to assertions, and therefore insufficiently general.

I think there’s a better view in the same spirit. (Well, maybe in the same spirit; I’m not quite sure what the intuitive motivation behind this project is. My suggestion won’t vindicate the coherence of concessive knowledge propositions. But like I said, I’m not sure I see why anyone would want to do that.) The line we’ve been considering is one in which “there is some possibility of p” pragmatically implicates that there is some significant possibility of p. But the existential quantifier is going to have a context-sensitive domain restriction anyway. We could suppose that in the relevant contexts, we’re only quantifying only significant possibilities. Then “there is some possibility of p” would, in the relevant context, entail that there is some significant possibility of p.

On this approach, you can still get a lot of the stuff that Fantl and McGrath want. On this view, whether there is a possibility of p will depend on the stakes, since all possibilities are significant possibilities, and whether a possibility is significant depends on stakes. So their ‘impurism’ would infect ‘possibility’ talk too. (This is not a result of the view they actually offer, which I’m criticizing: they have ‘pure’ possibilities, where talk of them implicates results about ‘impure’ significant possibilities.) But the concessive knowledge attributions will be genuine contradictions.

Tags: concessive knowledge attributions, fallibilism, Fantl and McGrath, knowledge, ssi

I’ve long been troubled by failing to understand what ‘fallibilism’ and ‘infallibilism’ are supposed to amount to. Here’s an example of the sort of discussion I find puzzling.

Bohghossian and Peacocke write:

A priori justification is not infallible justification. Just as one may be justified in believing an ordinary empirical proposition that is empirically revealed on empirical grounds to be false, so one may be justified (non-conclusively) in believing an a priori proposition that is subsequently revealed on a priori grounds to be false.

I find this passage puzzling, for at least two reasons. First, Boghossian and Peacocke characterize a priori propositions for Boghossian and Peacocke as those which can be known a priori; so the idea of an a priori proposition that turns out to be false looks to me to be incoherent.

Second, it’s not clear what the second sentence has to do with the first. The second sentence is about what may happen when you’re justified in believing something — that thing may turn out, either empirically or a priori, to be fase. The first sentence, however, isn’t a claim about all justification; it’s a claim about a priori justification. It can’t be that a priori justification is fallible merely because it’s possible to be justified in believing some a priori proposition that turns out false; if a priori justification is fallible, then there has to be a sense in which you can be wrong even if you’re a priori justified. And that just isn’t established or claimed in this passage. Is the idea supposed to be that any time you are justified in believing some a priori proposition, you’re justified a priori? That would fill out the enthymeme, but it has the disadvantage to being totally implausible.

So I don’t really know what Boghossian and Peacocke are up to here. Or, in general, what people who talk about a priori justification being fallible are up to.

Tags: apriority, fallibilism

The idea that knowledge entails certainty is a very intuitive one. It’s easy to forget this, because most of us have it drilled into us, early in our epistemological careers, that embracing a certainty requirement on knowledge leads to skepticism, and we’re rightly convinced that skepticsm is crazy, so we start getting used to the idea that there can be uncertain knowledge. Someone can know that p without being certain that p. If we say it enough times, it will stop sounding like a contradiction. And most of us have now said it enough times, so that it has stopped sounding like a contradiction.

Faced with a choice between skepticism and uncertain knowledge, we should indeed choose the latter. But we shouldn’t forget that it’s an intuitive cost. Given the choice to avoid both, we should consider it seriously.

Is this sounding familiar? It’s exactly the opening structure of Lewis’s “Elusive Knowledge,” but discussing certainty instead of fallibility. I think the argument goes through in just the same way. Contextualists about ‘knows’ are uniquely positioned to vindicate that knowledge is certain knowledge, and to do it without resulting in skepticism.

The basic structure of it is easy. Let ‘knows’ and ‘is certain that’ both be context-sensitive, and let it be that for any context c, the property picked out by the former in c entails that picked out by the latter in c. But a typical effect of asking or enquiring about ‘certainty’ is to induce a more skeptical context. So I might answer differently to the question “do you know that p” than I would to the question “are you certain that p”. But once I’ve answered ‘yes’ to the first, I face strong pressure not to say ‘no’ the second — or if I do, it will feel like a retraction.

So if you’re a contextualist about ‘knows,’ then you can, if you want, think that knowledge requires certainty. And it looks to me as if there’s every reason we should want that. “I’m not certain that p but I know that p” sounds crazy.

Tags: certainty, contextualism, knowledge, Philosophy

What should a contextualist who likes normative principles involving ‘knows’ say? Signing up to the knowledge norms means embracing something typically expressed by sentences fitting something like this schema:

(N) Iff S knows p, then S is permitted to phi

Some candidates for phi: S believe p; S rely on p in practical reasoning; S assert p. What I want to do right now is just outline the options for the contextualist who wants to make something suitably in the spirit of (N) true. I see four choices:

(1) Make the normative language contextualist. Now (N) is true in all contexts; “S knows p” is true in all the same contexts in which “S is permitted to phi” is true; the normative language shifts along with the ‘knows’ language. In skeptical contexts, “S is permitted to phi” will be false, while in nonskeptical ones, it will be true. In his “Knowledge, Context, and the Agent’s Point of View,” Timothy Williamson assumes this interpretation, and plausibly argues that the resultant view is pretty unattractive. If somebody says “S should phi,” and somebody else says “S should not phi,” and they’re talking about the same S at the same time and using ‘phi’ to describe the same course of action, then we shouldn’t think they’re both right. (Jenkins and Nolan have a paper defending contextualist ‘ought’ discourse, though; I’ve been meaning to have a close look at it to see if it can help.)

(2) Limit the norm to the claim that (N) be true in any subject’s context, leaving the right-hand side with an invariantist interpretation. If “S knows p” is true in S’s context, then S is permitted to phi. This is DeRose’s view about assertion. (His 2002 paper is not at all clear about how to interpret his version of (N), but his new book is explicit here. See my NDPR review for discussion.) We don’t get the oddness that Williamson charges against (1), but there are reasons to be unhappy. For one thing, Jason suggested in seminar that this interpretation is ad hoc. I’m not sure about that. Maybe. Also, as Danielle pointed out in seminar, we do, at least apparently, get some truths that are in tension with what might be the spirit of the knowledge norms. If I’m not in S’s context, for example, I might truly say “S knows p but is not permitted to phi.” As I mentioned in seminar, DeRose has a defense that mitigates quite a lot against this objection — in many of the relevant cases, we should expect speakers to adopt contextual standards appropriate to the subject’s situation. I think this will work a lot, but not quite enough. (I’m worried about, for example, cases in which speakers are ignorant of the subject’s situations. Here is a related blog post.) I’m also worried that there often won’t be a determinate standard in place in a subject’s context who isn’t talking about knowledge (another blog post). I am working on idea about the assertion norm that is in this neighborhood, but, I think, gets around a lot of these objections; more on that soon.

(3) Make (N) true in some particular favored context. Suppose I’m a contextualist and I agree with Williamson when he writes that knowledge is the norm of assertion. One way to do that would be to say that the particular ‘knows’ relation picked out by Williamson’s particular conversational context as he wrote his book is the invariantist norm of assertion. To take this strategy is to embrace a particular disambiguation of (N): Iff S knows(x) p, then S is permitted to phi. Now I’m not sure how plausible this kind of strategy will be in these instances (it certainly runs into at least some of the objections against (2)-type strategies), but it at least represents a position in logical space. I think there are some at least minimally parallel situations where this kind of strategy is correct. (This came out of a discussion I had with Derek Ball and Danielle Sgaravatti over dinner.) Here is an example of a normative principle that contains an uncontroversially context-sensitive term:

(M) S shouldn’t murder anybody.

The quantifier “anybody” in English takes a context-sensitive domain, so in theory, we face the same kinds of questions about how to interpret this principle. Strategy (2) here is of course nuts; take some subject S who isn’t talking about Derek, such that in his context, ‘anybody’ does not quantify over Derek. If S were to ask, in his present context, “is anybody taller than 6-foot-2?”, the correct answer would be ‘no’. According to the (2)-interpretation, (M) carries no prohibition against murdering Derek (who is tall). So the (2)-interpretation of (M) is not the best one. I think the (3)-interpretation of (M) is pretty plausibly correct; an utterance of (M) will typically be one about some privileged domain of individuals. A contextualist could interpret knowledge norms this way if he wanted to. I’m not terribly inclined toward this view, but it looks like a legitimate one.

(4) This is the kind of strategy I’m most interested in at the moment. Like the defender of (1), I want to make (N) true in all contexts, but I don’t want to do it by exploiting context-sensitivity of normative language. Instead, I suggest that in at least some instances of the schema, the ‘phi’ bits will be context-sensitive. (Notice, by the way, that a contextualist needn’t adopt a uniform treatment for all instances of the schema. There’s nothing stopping him, for example, from employing strategy (4) for the norm of belief by arguing that ‘believes’ is context-sensitive, picking a favored context for the norm of assertion, and flatly denying the norm of practical reasoning. Norms must be considered one at a time.) Suppose I’m a contextualist about ‘believes’. Then I might think that in any context c, it is permissible that ‘S believes p’ be true in c iff ‘S knows p’ is true in c. Then we can have ‘knows p’ and ‘is permitted to believe p’ swinging together, without the troublesome implication that two people could give contradictory advice, while both being correct. (Two people could each offer sentences that appear contradictory, but the sentences inside their ‘oughts’ will express compossible propositions.) Maybe you’ll think this sounds totally ad hoc. I wouldn’t blame you a bit; so far I’ve just pointed out a bit of conceptual space. But I’m working on a paper that pursues this strategy in some detail, hopefully along with a plausible motivation, with respect to the knowledge norm of belief. Again, more sometime soon.

Tags: contextualism, knowledge, knowledge norms

I know that there is snow outside; this knowledge is based in part on my visual experience. When I look out the window, I have experiences that partially constitute seeing snow. I also know that squares have four sides. Arguably, this knowledge is independent of experience, depending only on my conceptual competence, or rational capacities, or something like that. My knowledge that squares have four sides is not derived from experience, the way that my knowledge that there is snow outside is.

According to certain prominent rationalist views, what explains this difference is that my knowledge about squares, unlike my knowledge of snow, is based not on perception but on intuition. I have the intuition that p, and intuitions are a source of evidence, and so now I have justification for believing that p. It’s hard for me to see how, on a view like this, the relevant knowledge comes out independent of experience. For intuitions are experiences, every bit as much as perceptual experiences are. Indeed, some rationalists characterize intuitions phenomenologically: intuitions feel a certain way, and having that sort of feeling provides justification for intuitive beliefs.

On this sort of view, intuitions look to be just another kind of way of experiencing the world. One way that we experience the world is by seeing things; another is by intuiting things. You can call things learned that latter way a priori if you want to, but this just doesn’t look to me like belief independent from experience. On the contrary, on this sort of a view, it looks like the a priori beliefs are those that are based on a certain kind of experience: the intuitions.

Tags: apriority, experience, intuition, rationalism

A priori justification or knowledge is meant to be independent from experience in some sense. But it’s a bit tricky to explain just what that sense is. It’s usually allowed that there are some roles for experience that are merely enabling in a way that is consistent with apriority. For example, maybe you think particular perceptual experiences are necessary for possession of color concepts — you have to have seen yellow in order to entertain thoughts about that color, and so your knowledge that yellow things aren’t green requires having had a certain experience. If you think that, you can still think it’s a priori that yellow things aren’t green, because you think that the role for experience here is not warranting — it’s just part of what lets you entertain the thought in the first place. (Side note: also, if you think that, you should read my colleague Derek Ball’s paper to see why you’re probably wrong in thinking that you need particular experiences to have these concepts.)

There are other ways for experience to be relevant to the justification of a priori beliefs than by enabling the concepts that are part of their contents. It’s also standardly allowed that certain experiences would defeat a priori justification — the experience of lots of misleading but authoritative testimonial evidence, for example, could make it unreasonable to retain some particular a priori belief. If such obtained, then you wouldn’t be justified; therefore, your justification depends on such experience not obtaining. Thus does, for example, Marcus Giaquinto distinguish between ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ roles for experience:

We could mark the distinction by saying that if a belief is rationally revisable in the light of future experience, its retention is negatively dependent on experience; and if a belief cannot have been justifiably acquired unless some experience was used as grounds in the process, its acquisition is positively dependent on experience.

But there is room for a kind of dependence on experience that is neither ‘negative dependence’ nor ‘positive dependence’ in Giaquinto’s sense. And I think that it, too, is consistent with apriority. We can distinguish between the reasons in favor of some belief, on the one hand, and various conditions that are necessary for those reasons to count in favor of the belief, on the other. And in at least some cases, we should think that experiences can play that latter role in a way consistent with apriority. I’ll close with an example, and continue with further thoughts and possible applications in another post.

Consider a moderately complicated proof. Suppose it requires a couple dozen lines, and involves fairly lengthy sentences. In fact, it is valid, and indeed, I have produced it correctly — every step followed from the previous one in a way that I appreciated while writing it down on my blackboard. I’ve reached my conclusion, but I do not, at this moment, know it to be true. The reason this is so is that the proof is too complicated for me to know it sound straightaway; the chance of making a mistake is too great. Sometimes I apply rules incorrectly; sometimes I accidentally change variables. I don’t do this very often — no more than most philosophers — but I do it often enough that it would be unreasonable to be confident in the soundness at this point. Instead, I should go back and check my work. I review each step, looking for mistakes, and find that I made none. Now I know the conclusion.

My experience of checking my proof played a significant role in my knowledge of its conclusion. Certainly, that latter knowledge at least counterfactually depends upon it. But these experiences, of course, weren’t necessary for the possession of any concepts in the conclusion; I was perfectly capable of entertaining the thought before I began. And this is a positive dependence on experience; it’s not just that I need to lack particular misleading experiences. Nevertheless, this looks like a merely enabling role for experience; my belief in the conclusion is not based on my experience of checking the proof; it is based only on the premises. If those are a priori, then my knowledge of the conclusion is too.

So there are ways for experience to play merely enabling roles beyond the ones articulated above.

Tags: apriority, Philosophy, warranting and enabling

Fantl and McGrath argue that the combination of the following two views is problematic:

(JJ) If you are justified in believing that p, then p is warranted enough to justify you in phi-ing, for any phi. (Quoted from p. 99)

(Moderate Externalism about Justification) Justification does not supervene on the subject’s internal states. In particular, external properties like reliability and Gettierizedness can make a difference in whether one is justified in a particular belief. (Paraphrased from p. 107)

Fantl and McGrath argue that (JJ) implies that ‘purist fallibilism’ about justification cannot be true. Now as I wrote a little while ago, I don’t really buy into the notion of purism. And to be honest, I have some problems with the notion of fallibilism, too — I’ll try to write them up sometime soon. But set all that aside. The basic idea is that, if you accept (JJ), then you think that there might be two subjects that differ only in, for example, how important p is to each subject, such that one is justified in believing that p and the other is not. I guess I think that’s right, although I’m thinking of things in a way different from the way Fantl and McGrath do.

Fantl and McGrath think that people who accept this and are also moderate externalists (hereafter ‘externalists’) “commit themselves to counterintuitive claims about action.” First, Fantl and McGrath observe the familiar point that externalists think there could be intrinsic duplicates who differ in their justification facts; externalists, therefore they face the New Evil Demon problem. That’s familiar stuff, and, as Fantl and McGrath say, there are many possible responses. But they think things get worse once you also accept (JJ). They write:

Moderate externalists who accept JJ not only have to say that two subjects who differ only in how reliable they are can differ in what they are justified in believing. They also have to say that the subjects can differ in what they are justified in doing. This is counterintuitive. (108)

It’s not really clear to me that this is a counterintuitive verdict. But more to the point, I just don’t see why Fantl and McGrath think externalists who accept JJ are thereby committed to it. They don’t, as far as I can see, explain why they think this result should obtain. It plainly doesn’t follow in any direct way from externalism and JJ; externalism says that external properties can influence belief-justification facts, and JJ gives one link between belief-justification and action-justification, but it’s just nowhere near strong enough to imply, as Fantl and McGrath seem to think it implies, that external properties can shift action-justification facts.

Take subject LOW who is justified in believing p, and for whom p justifies Xing. Externalists are committed to the possibility, in at least some cases, of another subject, HIGH, intrinsically identical to LOW, who is not justified in believing p. Fantl and McGrath seem to think that externalists are committed by (JJ) to think it possible, consistent with these stipulations, that HIGH is not justified in Xing, but (JJ) just doesn’t get them anywhere near that commitment. Indeed, (JJ) is silent about HIGH. This principle tells you about what happens when a subject is justified in believing p; it entails nothing about what happens when a subject is not justified in believing p. For all (JJ) says, p may justify HIGH in Xing, too. (Consider this coherent principle that entails (JJ): If anyone intrinsically identical to you is justified in believing p, then p is warranted enough to justify you in phi-ing, for any phi.)

Suppose we considered a stronger, biconditional, principle:

(JJ*) If and only if you are justified in believing that p, then p is warranted enough to justify you in phi-ing, for any phi.

I don’t know whether (JJ*) is plausible or not; it’s strictly stronger than the principle Fantl and McGrath defend. It gets around the problem I just raised for their charge against the externalist. But even (JJ*) isn’t strong enough to deliver an entailment from externalism to a difference in what actions are justified between LOW and HIGH. Externalism and (JJ*) commit one to the verdict that p cannot justify HIGH in Xing, even though it can justify LOW in Xing. That’s a far cry from the stated claim that nothing justifies HIGH in Xing. And I just don’t see any plausible argument that this could be the case. It may be, for all (JJ*) says, that HIGH and LOW must be  justified in performing all the same actions, but that they have divergent propositions justifying those same actions. (The plausible way to develop this line, I think, is that HIGH’s reasons are a proper subset of LOW’s.)

So I don’t think that externalists who like (JJ), or even those who accept (JJ*), are committed to the allegedly counterintuitive claims about action that Fantl and McGrath charge.

Tags: action, Fantl and McGrath, justification, Knowledge in an Uncertain World, pragmatic encroachment, purism

Tags: epistemology, Fantl and McGrath, knowledge, Knowledge in an Uncertain World, Philosophy, purism, ssi

Here is a draft of a review of Keith DeRose’s new book. Comments welcome.

Tags: contextualism, Keith DeRose, knowledge

I’ve just written up an abstract for a paper I’m thinking about writing on the bearing of x-phi on the alleged apriority of philosophy. Short answer: there is none—even if the x-phi critics are right about the need for philosophers to be doing more science. I’ve posted it on the Arché Methodology Blog; I’d welcome any comments on it over there.

Tags: apriority, experimental philosophy

It’s a little bit natural to think that ‘knows’ contextualism and the shifty kind of invariantist that’s sometimes called an ‘SSI theorist’ or an ‘IRI theorist’ come to a bit of an intuitive draw considering two kinds of third-person knowledge attributions. High Howie has whatever features you think makes it harder to know, or makes ‘know’ express a stronger relation: he’s thinking about skeptical possibilities, it’s really important to him whether p, or whatever. Low Louie is just the opposite: to Louie, p’s no big deal, he’s not worried about it, whatever. High Howie says things like “I don’t know that p,” while Low Louie says things like “I know that p,” and both utterances look pretty good, even though in some sense Howie and Louie look to be in identical epistemic situations — they have the same evidence, or something like that.

(Now I happen to think that it’s not at all clear how to make sense of that last stipulation. This basically amounts to a worry whether there is any correct generalization characterizing the difference between the shifty SSI-like views from ‘classical invariantism’. But I’m setting that aside for now, assuming, as is usual in this discussion, that the sense in which Howie and Louie are in the same ‘epistemic position’ is tractable — and does not at least really trivially entail that they’re alike with respect to knowledge. I’ll here use ‘epistemic position’ technically to mean the stuff that traditional invariantists affirm, but shifty people deny, comprise a supervenience base for knowledge.) Continue Reading »

Tags: contextualism, intellectualism, Keith DeRose, knowledge, ssi

Keith DeRose accepts something like the knowledge norm of assertion — although as a contextualist, he can’t have it entirely straightforwardly. He at least thinks this much: the assertability conditions for S for ‘p’ are the same as the truth conditions for ‘I know p’ in S’s mouth. He takes it to be obvious that these are different than the assertability conditions for ‘I know p’.

Now I’m one of those weirdos who is actually a bit sympathetic to the KK principle. So I’m interested in his argument. I find it pretty uncompelling. DeRose writes:

Both equations of standards — (1) those for properly asserting that p with those for properly asserting that one knows that p, and (2) those for properly asserting that one knows that p with those for actually knowing that p — are mistaken, as I trust the considerations below will show to anyone who has deliberated over close calls about whether one is positioned well enough to claim to know that p or should cool one’s heels and only assert that p. (The Case for Contextualism, 103.)

I won’t continue with his argument, because I’m already not on board. I’m pretty sure I’ve never deliberated over a close call about whether I was in a good enough situation to assert that I know p, or whether I should cool my heels and only assert that p. Indeed, that strikes me as a totally bizarre thing to do. DeRose himself says that to assert that p is, in some sense, to represent oneself as knowing p.

I know that there are strong theoretical reasons for denying KK, and for accepting the knowledge norm of assertion, and I see that those two verdicts together predict that there will be cases like these in which one can assert p but not that one knows p. But to take such cases as a clear starting point strikes me as bizarre; this, to me, is a cost that I’ll accept if I’m forced to. But it’s by no means obvious that this ever happens. “p but I don’t know whether I know p” is not good.

Am I off base here? Do you ever consider whether Kp is warrantedly assertable, or whether to just stick with the safer p? I don’t. (I know I don’t.)

Tags: assertion, Keith DeRose, knowledge, knowledge norms

This week I’m thinking about Laurence Bonjour’s In Defense of Pure Reason. In §4.4, Bonjour offers what he takes to be a very straightforward argument against the infallibility of rational insight: just look, he says, at all the examples of alleged cases of rational insight that are false — some have been empirically refuted, and some been shown a priori to be incoherent, and some are just inconsistent with others in a way that guarantees that at least some are false.

He qualifies the charge of fallibility, recognizing that it’s open to deny that such cases of seeming rational insight into something that ends up being fall are genuine rational insights at all; this, he says, is a “mere terminological or conceptual stipulation” and “fails to secure infallibility in any epistemologically useful sense”.

I don’t see what infallibility was ever going to amount to if it was to be something stronger than what Bonjour thinks is an uninteresting sense. Did or could anybody ever have thought that anything that seemed to be a rational insight thereby guaranteed its truth? Descartes, for example, recognized the possibility that human reason might be deceived by a God or demon, or imperfectly designed, such that it led into error.

What is the correct characterization of a strong form of infallibility?

Tags: apriority, epistemology, fallibilism, Philosophy

Timothy Williamson has famously defended these two claims:

(1) Knowledge cannot be analyzed

(2) Knowledge can play lots of important explanatory roles all over the place

These two claims, if true, give us reason to think about the role of knowledge very differently; use it to explain things, instead, of as something we’re trying to explain. Call this project — the one recommended in the previous sentence — ‘knowledge first.’ The question I’m wondering about right now is, what is the relationship between (1) and knowledge first? Does the case for knowledge first depend on the case for (1)?

(Cards on the table: I’m a guy who thinks that (1) and (2) are both true and that knowledge first is a good idea. So I’m engaging now in a fairly academic question about what depends on what.)

Surely (1) and (2) are consistent (modulo possible worries about whether it’s possible to analyze anything). ‘Prime number’ can be analyzed if anything can, but this is no obstacle to our using the notion of a prime number to explain various phenomena in the world — for example, in theorizing about encryption algorithms.

Suppose (2) is true. The case for (2) would presumably consist largely of examples — cases in which we got good explanatory payoff by invoking knowledge. That’s the sort of thing that makes up the latter two thirds of Knowledge and Its Limits. And suppose (1) were unestablished, or even known to be false. Wouldn’t (2) all by itself make a strong case for knowledge first?

Tags: knowledge, knowledge first, timothy williamson

Elusive There. Try to go there, and straightaway it disappears. That is how walking destroys there.

Tags: contextualism, david lewis, elusive knowledge, videos

John Hawthorne gives an argument that contextualists about knowledge face considerable pressure to be contextualists about terms that refer to things widely thought to be linked to knowledge, like ‘is epsitemically permitted to assert’ or ‘relies inappropriately upon in one’s practical reasoning’. I’m inclined to agree. He argues, however, that it’s not at all plausible to treat words like ‘inappropriately’ as in the relevant way context-sensitive. Now actually, I’m sort of inclined to agree with that, too, although I’m not at all sure he’s right. What I am pretty sure of is that his argument for this conclusion is pretty bad.

Suppose I’m in an everyday context and have pretty good evidence for the true p, such that ‘I know that p’ is true in my context. Then I go ahead and assert that p and rely on p in my practical reasoning. Now you come along in a more skeptical context where ‘Jonathan knows that p’ is false. Now you want to say, ‘Jonathan ought not to have asserted p’ and ‘relying on p was inappropriate.’ Hawthorne says that a contextualist treatment of this latter is implausible:

Assertability conditions and propriety conditions for practical reasoning just don’t seem to vary in that way. The practical reasoning considered above is inappropriate, regardless of what an ascriber is attending to, and parallel remarks apply to the propriety of flat-out assertions of lottery propositions (in the setting envisaged). (90)

I can’t read this as anything but a pretty blatant use/mention confusion. The relevant kind of contextualist can explain and predict that “the practical reasoning above is inappropriate, regardless of what an ascriber is attending to” is true. It’s exactly the same reason why, pace Lewis when he’s being sloppy, it’s not a result of contextualism about ‘knows’ that whether S knows p depends in part on what an ascriber is attending to. That, again, is just the same reason why it’s not true that whether you are female depends on whom I’m talking to. Your gender has nothing to do with me; neither, according to contextualism about ‘knows’, does whether you know p. And neither, according to the hypothetical view under consideration under which ‘inappropriate’ is context-sensitive, does whether your action is inappropriate depend on anything about me.

Tags: contextualism, John Hawthorne, knowledge, Knowledge and Lotteries, knowledge norms

I’m on the record as thinking there are tight connections between counterfactuals and knowledge.

Robbie Williams, in his “Defending Conditional Excluded Middle,” denies this. At least, he argues for a strong disconnect between them. Robbie argues, among other things, that there are strong reasons to accept both (A) and (B):

(A) If I were to flip a fair coin a billion times, it would not land heads a billion times.

(B) If I were to flip a fair coin a billion times, it would not be knowable that it would not land heads a billion times.

Since, Robbie says, (A) and (B) are both true, it can’t be that (A) entails the negation of (B) — therefore Bennett’s view, which connects knowledge and counterfactuals in a way implying that entailment, is false. Robbie’s argument for (A) is that rejecting it would require rejecting the truth of too many of our ordinary counterfactuals, since they enjoy no stronger metaphysical grounds than those for (A) — since there’s a genuine physical probability of really wacky things happening all the time, we have nothing better than this kind of probabilistic connection between antecedent and consequent in lots of counterfactuals that we want to maintain.

The way Robbie puts the point is that denying (A) would be to commit oneself to an error theory, since it would make our ordinary judgments about ordinary counterfactuals wrong all the time. This move seems to me a bit odd; to my ear, (A) does not look obviously true. Indeed, it looks like we should reject it. That’s not to say I can’t be moved by an argument in favor of it — I can — but if we’re in the game of respecting pre-theoretic intuitions, it seems to me that to accept (A) is to embrace something of an error theory, too. We can make it worse if we make the problematic possibility more salient:

(A*) If I were to flip a fair coin a billion times, the possibility of its landing heads a billion times would not be the one to become actual.

If you agree with me that (A*) is equivalent to (A), and that (A*) sounds false, then you must likewise agree with me that Robbie, in embracing (A), commits to a bit of error theory himself. That’s not to say it’s therefore a bad view; it’s just to say that we’re already in the game of weighing various intuitive costs. It’s not so simple as error theories are bad, therefore (A) must be true.

(Another observation: Robbie thinks it’d be bad to deny (A) because it would make us deny the truth of many ordinary counterfactuals, which play important roles in philosophy. He writes:

Error-theories in general should be avoided where possible, I think; but an error-theory concerning counterfactuals would be especially bad. For counterfactuals are one of the main tools of constructive philosophy: we use them in defining up dispositional properties, epistemic states, causation etc. An error-theory of counterfactuals is no isolated cost: it bleeds throughout philosophy.

Perhaps this is right. But if it is true that counterfactuals play really important roles in construction of philosophical theories, then it’s not just their truth that matters — it’s also our knowledge of them. So a view that preserves many of these counterfactuals as true, but that leaves us with very little knowledge about counterfactuals, seems to have a lot of what is problematic in common with the error theory Robbie discusses.)

Robbie gives three arguments for (B). I’ll discuss the first two in this blog post; I think that they have analogues against (A).

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Tags: conditional excluded middle, counterfactuals, epistemology, knowledge, lottery paradox

Here’s an insanely simple argument for contextualism about knowledge. I think it’s sound, although I’m not sure I’d expect many people to be persuaded by it. I’d be interested in hearing about how readers might think it best to resist it.

Here’s premise one. Epistemic modals are intimately connected to knowledge in something like the following way: it might be that p iff the relevant base of knowledge doesn’t entail that not-p. This is pretty much standard, I think, although of course people argue about just which knowledge base is the relevant one. This much looks like common ground, for instance, in the debate between contextualists and relativists about epistemic modals. What’s at issue there is how the relevant knowledge base gets fixed — whose knowledge counts. If you need an argument for this connection, just reflect on the absurdity of “it might be that p, but I know that not-p” and “I don’t know that p, but it must be that p”. (I’m assuming the duality of might and must.)

Here’s premise two. In many situations, both of the following obtain: (a) were someone to say “I know that p”, that utterance would be accommodated and accepted as true; (b) were someone to say “it might be that not-p”, that utterance would be accommodated and accepted as true. For example, in my current situation, I could truly assert “I know that Derek will respond to Paul (because that’s what the workshop schedule indicates)”. Alternatively, I could truly assert “Derek might not respond to Paul (because it’s possible that he’ll get sick during the lunch break and have to go home).” (Of course, I can’t go both ways; in no context can I say both things; the point is that in some contexts I could say either.)

These two premises, all by themselves, put the invariantist in hot water. Take one of the situations described in premise two, and suppose invariantism is true. In that situation, by premise two, “S knows that p” expresses a truth in some context; therefore, by invariantism, it expresses a truth in all contexts. But, by premise one, “S knows that p” is inconsistent with “it might be that not-p”. So this modal claim must be false in all contexts—against the stipulation of premise two.

The obvious solution, from my point of view, is contextualism about ‘knows’. Then we can maintain the connection between ‘knows’ and ‘might’ in all contexts, and have each sentence true in some context. I don’t see any option nearly so appealing for the invariantist. But this argument is so simple that it can’t be decisive. So what should the invariantist say?

Tags: contextualism, epistemic modals, knowledge

In chapter 1 of Knowledge and Lotteries, John Hawthorne introduces the knowledge norm of practical reasoning: “At a rough first pass, one ought only to use that which one knows as a premise in one’s deliberations.” (p.30) He then immediately qualifies this principle in two ways with this footnote (fn.77):

Qualification 1: “In a situation where I have no clue what is going on, I may take certain things for granted in order to prevent paralysis, especially when I need to act quickly.”

Qualification 2: “If I am in a situation where the difference between ‘Probably p’ and ‘p’ is irrelevant to the case at hand, I may use ‘p’ as a basis on which to act even though I only know that probably p.”

I don’t see why either of these are true in a sense that demands qualification of the rough first pass given above. With regard to qualification 1, let’s suppose I’m in a situation where I have no clue what is going on. This isn’t literally plausible, of course; in any situation in which my actions are rationally evaluable, I’ll have some clue what’s going on. So I suppose this must be understood as a kind of exaggeration. Perhaps, for instance, I suddenly find myself being charged at by a rhinoceros, and have no idea how I got there. It’s clear, however, that if I just stand pat I will be very shortly gored to death. There’s a button nearby with no label; I don’t really have any clue what it is or what it does. But it may well be rational to press it, since that’s the only real option I have and it’s clear that if I do nothing, I will die. Maybe the button will open a trap door for rhino or for me—who knows? It’s worth a try.

The thing is, all the premises that I’m using, if I so reason, are things I know. I know that there’s a rhino; I know that I’ll die if I do nothing; I know that there’s a button; I know that maybe if I press the button I’ll survive. So I don’t see what pressure cases in which I have to act under extreme uncertainty put on the rough principle stated.

Similarly, if I’m in a situation where the difference between ‘probably p’ and ‘p’ is irrelevant to the case at hand, why think that I’m using ‘p’ as a basis to act? We’ve just stipulated that ‘probably p’ will do just as well—why not say I’m acting on that known proposition?

I don’t really see what Hawthorne is up to in this footnote. (I suspect these issues may be developed in the later paper with Jason Stanley — I read that a couple of years ago, but need to have another look.)

Tags: John Hawthorne, knowledge, Knowledge and Lotteries, knowledge norms, practical reasoning

I’m teaching a contemporary epistemology course with Yuri to Honours students this year. We started with Linda Zagzebski’s “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems”, which, to my mind, helpfully turns attention away from attempts to analyze knowledge on which students may have spent much of their intro epistemology courses. I read it a few years ago, and found it totally convincing; I read it again this week, and found it totally convincing again, but noticed that the argument wasn’t nearly so straightforward as I’d thought it was. In fact, I’m not sure what it is. (But I still find it compelling.)

Here’s what Zagzebski says. She understands Gettier as having refuted the JTB theory thus: imagine a case in which JB but not T. Now change the case so that T, but just by luck — not in a way connected to JB. Now you have a Gettier case — an intuitive counterexample to K = JTB. That’s what she said Gettier did. Then she says we can generalize the argument. Her target is any view that tries to analyze knowledge as T + X, where X doesn’t entail T. Do just the same thing, she says, as Gettier: take a case in which X and not T (guaranteed possible), then tweak the case so as to make T true in a way unrelated to X.

(One might worry here as to whether this latter step is always possible. Juan Comasaña told me via Twitter that he wants to resist the argument here. I have a hard time seeing how it couldn’t be done, for any X that’s plausibly natural enough to figure into an analysis. We’d need X to be consistent with not-T, but for X & T together to entail that X and T are closely connected. That seems, at least, really weird. Maybe there’s an argument lurking that this is impossible? Or maybe it’s possible after all? I’m not sure. Thoughts? Anyway, this isn’t the point I wanted to press.)

Ok, so, modulo the parenthetical, we’ve generated a case according to Zagzebski’s recipe. Now, she tells us, we have a counterexample to the K = T + X theory. She offers:

…a general rule for the generation of Gettier cases. … Make the element of justification (warrant) strong enough for knowledge, but make the belief false. … Now emend the case by adding another element of luck, only this time an element which makes the belief true after all. The second element must be independent of the element of warrant so that the degree of warrant is unchanged. … We now have a case in which the belief is justified (warranted) in a sense strong enough for knowledge, the belief is true, but it is not knowledge.

What’s interesting about this passage is that she’s making a general claim about the ultimate outcome of all instances of her argument schema. But the original Gettier argument, it is traditionally thought, depends on a particular sort of judgment about a particular case; we think about the story about Smith and Jones and Brown in Barcelona, and see that this is a case of JTB without K. If that’s right, then it’s totally mysterious how Zagzebski or anyone could be confident that the same pattern will hold of other attempts to analyze. But the argument isn’t a non sequitor; it’s (at least) prima facie compelling. Why?

At a workshop on thought experiments I attended in Brazil this summer, Anna-Sara Malmgren suggested that thought experiment judgments carry with them a kind of implicit generality that is best explained by their being products of nonconscious inferential reasoning. This, it seems, might be just the sort of case to support her suggestion. Our initial Gettier judgment constituted a kind of commitment to a general principle that rules out the kind of luck that Zagzebski is focusing on. If that’s right, then metaphilosophical emphasis on cases may be misplaced; lots more of our thought experiment judgments may be more based on theory than is always realized. Without a move like that, it’s hard for me to see how Zagzebski’s argument could make any sense.

Tags: gettier cases, linda zagzebski, Philosophy, thought experiments

In his 2002 paper “Assertion, Knowledge, and Context,” Keith DeRose gave an argument for contextualism about ‘knows’ that took basically this form: knowledge is the norm of assertion; assertability varies according to context; therefore, knowledge varies according to context.

This was a pretty confused argument — though of course this is much clearer in retrospect, with the advantage of years of engagement with SSI. The problem is that contextualism is a thesis about the word ‘knows’, not about knowledge, while ‘knowledge is the norm of assertion’ seems like it must be a thesis about knowledge, not about English. In fact, something like a knowledge norm for assertion, combined with the observation that what you’re allowed to assert depends on your situation, provides a pretty good argument for SSI; I take it to be exactly parallel to the main argument for SSI that Stanley and Fantl and McGrath give.

In chapter 3 of his new book The Case for Contextualism, DeRose essentially reproduces the content of that 2002 paper, but he does add about two new pages of material designed to correct this aspect of the original. Now, in contrast to earlier, he recognizes the need to clarify the statement of the knowledge norm of assertion, if it is to be understood in contextualist terms. He gives us:

The Relativized Knowledge Account of Assertion (KAA-R): A speaker, S, is well-enough positioned with respect to p to be able to properly assert that p if and only if S knows that p according to the standards for knowledge that are in place as S makes her assertion. (99)

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Tags: assertion, contextualism, Keith DeRose, knowledge, ssi

I’m reviewing a book for the first time; do any philosophers have tips on how to plan/organize/read/etc.? This is all new to me, and I’d welcome any advice from veterans on how to proceed. Do you like to take notes along the way? Should I plan on reading cover-to-cover more than once? How do you decide what to focus on?

Tags: professional philosophy

According to orthodoxy, what’s true in a fiction goes beyond what’s entailed by the text making up the story. Although fictions are gappy (there’s no fact about whether Hamlet had an even number of hairs), some things are determinately true without being stated, or being entailed by thugs that are stated (Hamlet was not a leprechaun). This orthodoxy is pretty much universal, I think, and I’ve relied on it in my work on thought experiments.

In the past few months, I’ve worried a bit about that orthodoxy. I don’t think orthodoxy here should be abandoned, but I do think it faces an important challenge that hasn’t, to my knowledge, been articulated before. The challenge begins with a consideration of non-fiction.

Not all non-fiction is true; some works of non-fiction are mistaken, and some are fraudulent. (All biographies are non-fiction, but not all biographies are true.) What determines whether a non-fiction is true? The key to the challenge is this: we can and should distinguish between whether a work of non-fiction is true, and whether it is merely misleading. I could write a very deceptively misleading biography of David Lewis, such that anyone who read it would walk away with rampant false beliefs about him. But if I did so using only true sentences, relying on pragmatic implicatures and natural assumptions to generate the misleading nature of my non-fiction, then, I claim, the biography I have written is true.

Now take a fiction made up of just the same sentences I used in my misleading autobiography of Lewis. This is just the sort of situation where, according to orthodoxy, principles of generation for truth in fiction will generate false propositions and add them to the set of fictional truths. But this, given what we’ve said in the previous paragraph, is inconsistent with the truism that contents of fictions don’t work in ways radically different from those of non-fictions. A non-fiction’s content is true if its sentences are. Can we really deny that a fiction, sentence-by-sentence identical with a non-fiction, has true content if its corresponding non-fiction does? That’s the puzzle.

Here, as I see them, are the options:

1. Reject orthodoxy. What’s true in the fiction does not, after all, go beyond what’s given in the literal text.
2. Posit a stark disanalogy. Their obvious forms of similarity notwithstanding, fictions and non-fictions get content in radically divergent ways.
3. Bifurcate ‘content’. (Brian Weatherson suggested this to me when I posed the puzzle to him.) Agree with the conclusion about ‘content’ of fictions in some sense, while insisting that there’s a richer ‘true in the fiction’ that goes beyond content.

I guess I’m inclined to agree with Brian that, of these choices, (3) is the best way to go. But I’d be interested to hear if anyone thinks I’m selling the other possibilities short, or have overlooked additional possible solutions.

Tags: fiction, thought experiments, truth in fiction

Intuitions and Begging the Question is now under review. Check it out if you’re interested in reading what I think about intuitions, and making me wish I’d asked you for comments on it before submitting it.

My next project: making revisions to Explaining Away Intuitions.

Here, incidentally, is where I have all my papers online now.

Tags: eai, ibq

I’m reading, and enjoying, Dan Ariely’s book Predictably Irrational, which catalogues a number of systematic ways in which human economic decisions fall short of the sort of ideal that traditional economic theory assumes. Some, but nothing close to all, of the data was already familiar to me, and I’ve always been interested and impressed by the relevant experiments — as, for example, cases in which A is preferred among {A, B}, but where B is favored — including favored over A — among {A, B, C}. Ariely has some interesting things to say about applications of this sort of data, both in obvious places (advertising) and in unobvious ones (courtship).

On the whole, I think I’d recommend the book. But I do think that Ariely badly misfires in his Chapter 5, “The Influence of Arousal: Why Hot Is Much Hotter Than We Realize.” The main thesis of this chapter is that humans grossly underestimate the effects of future sexual arousal on future decision-making. For example, in their ‘cool’ state, humans tend to predict that they will behave, while aroused, in ways more responsible and moral than they in fact do. This thesis is eminently plausible, and Ariely is right about its implications for, for instance, ideal sex education. My problem with his discussion is that his experiments don’t remotely establish his claim, but he pretends that they do.

As I said, his claim looks pretty plausible anyway, so criticizing his experiments and presentation is in some sense intellectual. That, obviously, isn’t about to stop me.

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Tags: dan ariely, psychology