The second error, which seems to have been introduced in copyediting, is more likely to interfere with comprehension. So I thought I should at least set the record straight here. The penultimate paragraph of my paper was meant to run thus:

The point cuts in both directions: pairs of intuitions like the ones featured above cannot be used to refute the knowledge norm of practical reasoning; neither can cases of that include both knowledge and appropriate action, or both ignorance and apt criticism of action, be used to speak directly in favor of the knowledge norm. The same point applies to attempts to evaluate knowledge norms from the other side: just as one can’t get very far from arguments of the form ‘S knows that p, but oughtn’t to Φ, neither can one get very far from arguments of the form ‘S doesn’t know that p, but it would be correct to Φ.’ Relatedly, pairs of cases that differ with respect to knowledge, but are alike with respect to appropriate action—as is plausible, for instance, with knowers and their Gettierized counterparts—do not bear at all directly on knowledge norms (contra  Gerkin (2011), pp. 535-36; Smithies (2011), p. 5). The knowledge norm identifies knowledge with reasons, but the facts about what reasons one has do not supervene on the facts about what actions are appropriate. (Perhaps there is supervenience in the other direction.)

The penultimate sentence of this paragraph unfortunately became rather mangled. (I regret that I whiffed my chance of catching it in proof corrections.) This is what was printed:

…Relatedly, pairs of cases that differ with respect to knowledge, but are alike with respect to appropriate action—as is plausible, for instance, with knowers and their Gettierized counterparts—do not bear at all directly on knowledge norms (contra Gerkin 2011, pp. 535–536; Smithies 2011, p. 5). The knowledge norm identifies knowledge with reasons, but the facts about what reasons one has to do does not supervene on the facts about what actions are appropriate. (Perhaps, there is supervenience in the other direction.)

The point I was trying to make was that everyone should agree that sometimes, pairs of subjects who have distinct reasons available to them ought nevertheless to perform the same actions—different reasons may point in the same direction. And given the knowledge norm, this is pretty plausible in the case of Gettier subjects and their knowledgable counterparts. Henry in fake barn country and twin-Henry in real barn country do not share all the same reasons: twin-Henry has the proposition that there is a barn in front of him, and Henry does not. Nevertheless, if they’re both allergic to barns, they are each reasonable in stepping away from the structure before him. Twin-Henry’s action is made reasonable by the reason that there is a barn before him (combined with his allergy and interests); Henry’s action is made reasonable by the reason that there is a building that looks just like a barn before him (combined with his allergy and interests).

First, some background — both to clue in any readers who are interested in reading but don’t know the Dretske, and so that I can make sure I have his framework clear in my own head.

Dretske’s central idea is to use information theory to elucidate knowledge. The first few chapters of his book are devoted to articulating the relevant ideas about information. At least for the purpose of argument, I want to take all of that on board for now. Here are some central ideas:

Suppose we’ve adopted a convention whose purpose is to tell me whether John is happy. You’ll send me a text message comprising either ‘YES’ or ‘NO’; it is understood that you will definitely send me YES if John is happy, and NO if he isn’t, and you (or anyone else) won’t send me any other message than the one. In fact, John is happy, so you send me a message, and the word ‘YES’ appears on my screen.

In Dretske’s terminology, my screen carries the information that John is happy, and it does so by virtue of having the word ‘YES’ on it. The idea is that only if John were happy would my screen say ‘YES’; there’s no other way for this to be so. There is, under the appropriate background assumptions, no possible way for my screen to be the way it is, without John being happy, so my screen carries the information that John is happy.

Dretske characterizes (at least a certain kind of) knowledge in terms of information:

K knows that s is F = K’s belief that s is F is caused (or causally sustained) by the information that s is F.

He clarifies what it is for information to cause a belief:

When … a signal carries the information that s is F in virtue of having property F’, when it is the signal’s being F’ that carries the information, then (and only then) will we say that the information that s is F causes whatever the signal’s being F’ causes.

So for me to know that John is happy, I need my belief to be caused (or sustained) by my screen’s saying ‘YES’, and for my screen’s saying ‘YES’ to carry the information that John is happy.

This is prima facie a very strong condition on knowledge. For my belief to be knowledge, it must be based on a signal that nomologically guarantees the content of my belief. If, for instance, there is any possibility that you will confuse the signals, texting ‘YES’ to try to tell me that John is not happy, or that you will lie to me, or that you yourself will misapprehend John’s emotional state, or that the phone company will send me a ‘YES’ when you sent a ‘NO’, then my screen does not carry the information that John is happy, so I can’t know that he’s happy.

It’s easy to see that this kind of picture runs into the risk of serious skeptical consequences. Lots and lots of our putative knowledge looks like it’s caused by signals that do not contain the information in question, in Dretske’s sense. Take testimony, for instance — suppose that you believe that Dretske’s book was published in 1981 because I said it was, and I said it was because I believed it. There’s no perfect relationship between my believing it was published in 1981 and its being published in 1981; there are in some intuitive sense possibilities where I have a wrong belief, and pass it on via my blog post. So my believing that it was 1981 doesn’t carry the information that it was 1981. (This is so even if my belief amounts to knowledge, because my belief may in fact have been causes by a signal that carries the information, even though there are other possible ways it could have been caused.) So you can’t get knowledge via my testimony.

Dretske’s own strategy for heading off these skeptical consequences, I understand, is to develop his ‘relevant alternatives’ approach to knowledge and information, according to which it is in some sense not a (genuine) possibility that I be wrong, if the circumstances are in fact such that I was right. I haven’t read that part of the book yet, so I’ll hold off on discussing that material. The idea I wanted to consider in this blog post — wow, that was a lot of exposition! — is a different strategy.

My believing that p doesn’t carry the information that p. But I have more properties than believing that p; might some of them carry the information that p, and causally produce or sustain your belief? Suppose, for instance, that I know that p. If I know that p, and tell you that p, and you believe me, we might say this: your belief was caused by my knowing that p. And my knowing that p (unlike my merely believing that p) carries the information that p. This is so, by Dretske’s lights, even absent any moves about relevant alternatives — there’s no possible case at all, not even an ‘irrelevant’ one, where I know that p but p is false. Knowledge looks like an excellent signal for the transmission of information.

When I mentioned this idea in the reading group, it was met with a fair amount of resistance, but no one was able to give a very clear statement of what was wrong with it. One potential worry concerned whether it was plausible that my knowing could plausibly be the relevantly causally efficacious state; wouldn’t my merely believing have had the same affect on you? Maybe so, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t my knowledge that had the effect in actuality. Dretske endorses a kind of a counterfactual approach to causation; I think my knowledge passes the test in this case: if I hadn’t known that p, I wouldn’t have asserted that p, and so you wouldn’t have believed that p. So your belief is caused by my knowledge.

Am I missing an obvious problem with this strategy? It looks like it’d be pretty helpful for someone attracted to Dretske’s approach.

The master argument of the paper, which Goldberg lays out quite succinctly, is this, which I quote:

P1. The property of being doxastically justified just is that property which turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge.

P2. No property that is internal in the Justification Internalist’s sense is the property which turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge.

Therefore

C. No property that is internal in the Justification Internalist’s sense is the property of being doxastically justified.

I think internalists have two fairly natural lines of defence. First, one might reject the very notion of some property that turns true unGettiered belief into knowledge, at least if we read ‘turns into’ in some kind of truth-making sort of way. No doubt there is in some weak sense a property P such that one has knowledge if and only if one has true belief, has P, and is not in a Gettier situation, but I see no reason to suppose that it will be a property any more interesting or natural than the disjunction, knows or false or Gettiered. (I rather suspect “Gettiered” itself can be understood at best conjunctively.) And I don’t think there’s any interesting sense in which this disjunction turns unGettiered true belief into knowledge.

In defence of this way of setting the issue up, Goldberg writes:

After all, ‘doxastic justification’ is a term of art, and so if we are to continue to use it, it must pick out something that is epistemically interesting. It picks out something epistemically interesting if P1 is true; but it is unclear whether it picks out something interesting if P1 is false. At a minimum, the burden of proof will be on those internalists who deny P1: if this is how they respond to the present argument, then we are owed an explanation of why we should care about the property of which the internalist is purporting to give us an account.

But there are other fairly natural reasons to care about justification available. For example, justification may be that property which permits knowledge, without being one that guarantees it.

The second way an internalist might resist Goldberg’s argument is to reject the considerations he brings to bear in favor of his P2. He imagines someone in an evil demon situation who is an intrinsic duplicate of someone with a justified belief. Take her perceptual belief that p. Her belief must be justified, by the internalist’s lights, but is not knowledge, since she is in an evil demon scenario. It is not knowledge, even if it happens to be true. This doesn’t support the argument unless we can also establish that this is not a Gettier case; at the moment it rather looks like one. (She has misleading evidence for p, and reasonably forms the belief that p on that basis; it turns out that p happens to be true.)

To close off this avenue, Goldberg asks us to suppose that it is probable that our subjects beliefs are true, due to the machinations of the demon.

Still, it is easy to tell yet another variant of the Evil Demon case on which this move – to explain away the ‘no knowledge’ verdict by appeal to Gettierizing luck – is not plausible in the least. Imagine the following scenario, involving the Not-so-Evil Demon: it is just like the ordinary Evil Demon scenario except the Not-so-Evil Demon has conspired to make 65% of your Doppelgänger’s beliefs true (the other 35% being false owing to systematic illusions sustained by Not-so-Evil). Imagine your Doppelgänger in this world. For any perceptual belief (s)he has, there is a 65% chance that the belief is true. If it’s true, this is not merely lucky.

But stipulating facts about luck is a dangerous game. There is of course some sense in which the not-so-evil demon victim isn’t merely lucky to believe truly, but is it the one relevant to Gettier cases? Probably not. Nothing in Gettier’s original cases precludes probability of true belief of this sort. Go back to Jones and the Ford and Brown in Barcelona; suppose Brown is in Barcelona 65% of the time, and Smith believes that Jones has a Ford or Brown is in Barcelona, as in the original case, solely on the basis of the misleading evidence about the Ford. This is still a paradigmatic Gettier situation, even though there may be some sense in which the belief is true not merely by luck. Given this parallel, I think the internalist has every reason to regard the subject of the not-so-evil demon as in a Gettier case. So there are good grounds for resisting Goldberg’s argument.

1. Knowledge, the mental state, is metaphysically (relatively) fundamental; it is among the (more) basic building blocks of the world. Questions about knowledge are questions about the (relatively) natural epistemic joints.
2. KNOWLEDGE, the concept, is conceptually (relatively) fundamental; it is among the (more) basic ideas in our understanding of the world. Questions about knowledge are questions about our (relatively) fundamental conceptual framework.

(The hedges there indicate that knowledge ‘first’ should surely not be meant to imply absolute priority; one can subscribe, for instance, to the metaphysical interpretation of the knowledge first project and still believe that physical particles are the most fundamental bits of the universe; knowledge is prior to most of psychology and epistemology, perhaps, but not prior to physics.)

My suspicion, which I’m not yet in a position to make good on, is that a lot of authors are fairly indiscriminate about this distinction, and furthermore that it matters. But I’m not at all ready to argue for that claim; I need to re-read a lot of this literature with the question in mind. In this blog post, however, I’ll highlight a number of passages that suggest each of the readings. Inclusion on this list is not meant as an indication either that the author endorses one interpretation over the other, or that the author is in any way confused on the matter; this is just a list of passages that strike me as suggestive of one of the two views, so that eventually I can look back and have a whole list of material to scrutinize.

I’ll continue to update this blog post as I find passages that appear relevant. Suggestions, of course, are extremely welcome!

Passages suggestive of the metaphysical interpretation:

•  ”E = K equates the extensions of the concepts knowledge and evidence in any possible situation; that is enough to make it an informative thesis. By itself, K = K does not equate the concepts themselves; nor is it to be read as offering an analysis of either the concept evidence or the concept knowledge, or as making one concept prior to the other in any sense. … [E]ven if the concepts are equivalent a priori, it does not follow that one is prior to the other.” (Williamson, KAIL 186)

Passages suggestive of the conceptual interpretation:

• “Perhaps we can understand how something could found belief only by thinking of it as knowledge.” (KAIL 186)
• “The transparency of evidence would make Ep equivalent to KEp. Given E = K, that is tantamount to making Kp equivalent to KKp.” (KAIL 191)
• “…my purpose is to establish that knowledge is conceptually connected to practical interests. This point is compatible with many different approaches to the nature of knowledge.” (Stanley, KAPI 89)

In all cases, bold emphasis mine; other emphasis in original.

The worry is this. Jason thinks that when the stakes are high, it’s harder to know. But stakes aren’t just a feature of an individual at a time; stakes are high for certain propositions when the truth or falsehood of those propositions make a big difference. It’s possible to be such that the stakes for p are high, but the stakes for q are low. For example, it may be very important to Hannah and her wife Sarah whether the bank is open tomorrow, but not at all important to them whether it will rain tomorrow. In such a case, they would need to meet more exacting ‘standards’ in order to know about the bank than they would to know about the rain. That’s a little bit counterintuitive, but only in the way that pragmatic encroachment is generally a little bit counterintuitive.

But here’s what might be a deeper problem. Suppose someone is in a situation like the one just mentioned — the stakes for p are high, but the stakes for q are low — but where the subject knows that if q, then p. If so, then it’s easy to know q, but hard to know p; but it looks like anyone who knows q could easily infer p. Closure plus the possibility of a case with this structure looks like they entail that the stakes-sensitive view can’t be right.

Do we have to say such cases are possible? I don’t see anything that forces us to, but certain cases are very naturally described in that way. Suppose Hannah and Sarah have an important bill, as per the standard high-stakes bank case; it’s very important to them whether the bank will be open on Saturday. Suppose also that they have a friend Franklin who is a bank teller, and they have some small interest in whether he will be at the bank on Saturday. Here, however, the stakes are low — nothing much hangs on whether they’re correct about Franklin’s location on Saturday. Assume that they have a good enough position for arbitrary strong knowledge standards for the proposition that Franklin will be at the bank only if it is open. So we have:

• p: The bank is open Saturday
• q: Franklin is at the bank Saturday
• The stakes for p are high
• The stakes for q are low
• Everyone knows that if q, then p.

If Hannah and Sarah have a middling epistemic position with respect to q, then it looks like they’re in a position to know q, but not to know p. But this violates closure.

Might Jason say that in such a case, the high stakes for p force the stakes up for q as well? He might, but it seems like a pretty strange thing to say. Intuitively, it doesn’t matter to them much at all whether Franklin is at work on Saturday. Their bill situation has nothing to do with Franklin. Maybe we can wrap our heads around the idea that the bill makes it harder to know that the bank is open — but can it really make it harder to know where their friends are?