Unwitting Rape

This is a spin-off of a thread in this post. Content warning for rape. Probably not necessary or recommended reading for most readers.

Presumption of Innocence

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights has it that "everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence." This is a kind of legal protection against criminal conviction—you cannot be declared by the state to be guilty of a crime, or punished for it, unless your guilt has been proven.

The presumption of innocence is rightly considered a pillar of civilised society. But people have a tendency to over-apply it in irrelevant cases. The presumption of your innocence means that the state can't punish you for a crime unless it proves that you committed it. That's it. It has nothing to do with how one individual should treat or think about another, or whether an organisation should develop or continue a relationship with an accused individual. The presumption of innocence doesn't protect you from being unfriended on facebook, or shunned at conferences, or widely thought by other people to be a criminal. It just protects from being criminally convicted.

The weird world of academic philosophy this week is digesting an article that includes serious allegations of sexual harassment by Yale professor Thomas Pogge against philosophy students. While most of the people whose reactions I'm reading are expressing disgust at Pogge's behaviour and gratitude for Fernanda Lopez Aguilar, the woman who has come forward with the story, there are some (including Pogge himself, as well as some of the People who Leave Comments on Blogs) who caution the broader world from jumping to conclusions, on grounds related to the presumption of innocence. Pogge's statement discusses "trial by internet"—but since "the internet" is not contemplating the use of state power against his liberty, whatever metaphorical sense in which he is undergoing a "trial" is not one where he enjoys the presumption of innocence.

The admonition not to pass judgement about the allegations is simply the admonition to ignore them. "Don't believe anything unless it's been proven in a court of law." But this is just a ludicrous epistemic standard. Do you care whether powerful men in academic philosophy are using their stature to coerce students into compromising sexual situations? Then you should be interested in credible testimony to the effect that this one has been. Don't be tempted by the fallacious inference from it hasn't been proven in court to you have no way to tell whether it's true. (This, incidentally, is also why it makes sense for universities to have sexual assault policies.)

Moreover, it's not in general "jumping to conclusions" to accept someone's word. We learn from other people about what happened to them all the time. Talk of courtroom standards of evidence can make us forget the fact, but in general, we can get knowledge from other people. There's a temptation to think "it's just a he-said–she-said situation, so there's no way to know what really happened". While there are of course some cases that are like that, it's not in general true that any time testimony is disputed it can't be known to be true. Sometimes someone tells me something, and I thereby come to know it, even though someone else denies it. This is especially likely when the thing told is generally plausible, and fits well with other things I know, when there's no plausible explanation about why the testifier would say it if it weren't true, and the denial is both weak and self-serving. All these features seem to me to be present in the current case (and in many similar cases).

I believe Aguilar's allegations. They are serious and credible. They cohere with other stories many of us have heard about Pogge. The asinine hypothesis that she'd make them up out of spite, or for some kind of personal benefit, is the risible product of a preposterously misogynistic imagination. I think it'd be an epistemic error not to believe them—and a moral error too. It would be derelict for us as a community to ignore that which it's reasonable for us to believe—indeed, what which I think we know.

What is proof beyond a reasonable doubt?

As I finish up a few long-standing projects on knowledge (check out my draft monograph!) I'm hoping to start exploring a few new-for-me areas. In recent years my philosophical discussions on this blog have been relatively esoteric, trying out a new objection to so-and-so's third paper on such-and-such; when I was in grad school I used it as an early thinking-out-loud forum about more basic stuff. If I can swallow my pride enough, I may return to that form over the next several months. One area I'm quite ignorant and naive—but also curious—about is law. In particular, I'm curious about how legal concepts like evidence and testimony interact with epistemological concepts like evidence and testimony. I'm a complete novice in this field, so if I'm overlooking things that seem totally obvious to any readers, I'd be grateful to have it pointed out, especially if it comes along with reading advice.

One of my entry-points into the literature here is my UBC colleague John Woods's book Is Legal Reasoning Rational: An Introduction to the Epistemology of Law. (I'm maybe 40% of the way through a first read of it now.) Here's one thing I've found interesting so far. Woods writes, on p. 103:

Spike cannot be convicted unless a jury unanimously finds that his guilt has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. Certainty beyond a reasonable doubt is sometimes said to be moral certainty. Under either name, as Gifis writes, it is a conviction based on persuasive reasons and excluding doubts that a contrary conclusion can exist. This is much too strong a formulation. There is plenty of case law that allows for conviction even in the face of a perfectly reasonable case to the contrary, recognized as such by the jury. On an alternative formulation of the standard. A juror is said to be morally certain of a fact when he or she would act in reliance upon its truth in matters of greatest importance to himself or herself. Although better, this appears to omit the essential requirement of criminal proof that this readiness to act, this moral certainty, be grounded in the juror's belief that the burden of criminal proof has been met. In other words, it seems not to be sufficient for criminal conviction that a juror be in a state of moral certainty of the accused's guilt. It also matters how he came to be in that state. 

So we have these notions:

• Proof beyond a reasonable doubt
• Certainty beyond a reasonable doubt
• A juror's being in a state of moral certainty

Woods slides between the first two without comment. Maybe the thought is that there is this tight relationship: proofs establish certainty. (In logic or mathematics, this seems plausible—if I have a proof of something, then it is certain for me.) But as Woods points out, it's another matter whether my psychology reflects this certainty. I might have a proof but doubt anyway; or I might be irrationally certain, even absent a proof.

I wish Woods had explained further what he had in mind when he discusses appropriate conviction in the face of 'a perfectly reasonable case to the contrary'. (I am not sure who Gifis is—I don't see a citation.) Can there be 'perfectly reasonable' cases that have been proven not to be the case? If 'provability beyond a reasonable doubt' is closed under deduction, then it seems like there must be. (If it's been proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Jones committed the crime, then it's provable beyond a reasonable doubt that Jones wasn't framed.)

The alternative formulation mentioned seems to target the psychological state of being in a state of moral certainty. This feels at least analogous, maybe more, to the epistemological notion of belief or commitment. Some epistemologists, like Jennifer Nagel and Brian Weatherson, have emphasized that whether one is in this state depends (causally or constitutively, respectively) on the practical situation—when the stakes are high, one is less likely to believe. Maybe moral certainty is something like, being such that one would count as believing even in very high stakes cases. And although this state isn't, as Woods points out, sufficient for appropriate conviction, a normative connection seems plausible: one should only be in this state if one has a proof of corresponding strength. Don't be sure unless it's proven.

It's hard for me not to think in terms of knowledge. One contextualist way of mapping these thoughts would have it that, given a high standard for knowledge, all and only that which is proven beyond a reasonable doubt is 'known', and jurors should vote to convict if and only if they know the defendant guilty. I think this could make sense of these issues—although it'll probably be too simple in other respects, such as the restriction of admissible evidence. (Some things jurors know, they're not supposed to consider. (Or maybe a weird standard could count them as unknown? Something to think about.))

Anyway, I know I'm being really naive here, but I'd be interested in digging in a little bit, if anyone has ideas or reading suggestions.

Basing Actions on Knowledge at the Supreme Court

People sometimes complain about philosophy for its reliance on esoteric thought experiments. "Suppose someone wants to kill someone else, but falsely believes that she's allergic to a certain medicine that will actually help her, but he was ignoring certain defeaters his belief, but he wouldn't have been doing so if he had been raised by better epistemic role models, etc." No doubt there is a grain of truth behind the stereotype, and the criticism of it. But weird cases do matter—both because we're sometimes after necessary truths which should cover all cases, and because the world is a big and weird case, and sometimes weird cases are actual.

If you don't know it already, I am pleased to present to you the absolutely bizarre case of Heffernan v. City of Paterson, currently before the Supreme Court of the United States. If an undergrad had made it up as a counterexample to some principle in a philosophy course, I'd've raised my eyebrows and chuckled quietly at its cleverness.

A few more thoughts on university sexual assault policies

This post is part of a virtual teach-in in commemoration of UBC Sexual Assault Awareness month. See the #UBCSAAM hastag on twitter.

I suggested last week that often there will be grounds for institutional action in response to allegations of sexual assault, even if no criminal charges are filed or a criminal conviction cannot be reached.

One common response is that a policy that permits action in response to an assault that can't be proven in court is unfair to the alleged perpetrator. (I received several thoughts along these lines from members of the public at large in response to my op-ed.) I think this is a mistake—one that may be motivated by a failure to take seriously my suggestion that we sometimes have genuine knowledge, even when we can't prove something in court. I do not advocate institutional action in the absence of evidence or knowledge; I don't think, for example, that universities should expel students merely because they suspect them of being rapists. My proposal is that we should act on our knowledge. If the university knows that someone is attacking other students, it should take action to protect them. People sometimes forget that it's possible to have such knowledge without criminal trials, but it is obviously true. (I know that I walked my dog yesterday morning, even though I'd probably have a pretty difficult time proving it in court.) This was the core thought behind my Vancouver Sun op-ed—just because something is a criminal offence doesn't mean that law enforcement is the only entity that can or should be involved.

I think it's helpful to compare other criminal actions—sexual assault activates some weird patterns of intuitions. Suppose a student, Shen, has a habit of punching other students in the face. I'm assigning my students to work together in small groups on an assignment, and Paksima expresses a desire not to work with Shen, because she's afraid that he'll punch her in the face again. I've never seen Shen punch anybody in the face—and when I ask him about Paksima's broken nose, he says he doesn't know how she got it, but speculates that maybe she broke her own nose to get him into trouble.

Depending on the details of the case, I think I might, under these circumstances, be able to know what has happened. While it is literally a case of 'he said–she said', there are possible such cases where one can know who is being honest and who is lying. But let's suppose for the purpose of argument that we're looking at a version of the case where I can't have genuine knowledge about how Paksima's nose ended up broken. Maybe for some reason the possibility that it's an elaborate and costly framing job is really live. I still face the question, what should I do about this situation? Paksima is asking not to be required to work with Shen, and she's citing grounds of her own personal safety.

I don't think anyone would take very seriously the idea that this should be my response: "Paksima, punching people in the face is a criminal matter, not an academic one. You should take your concerns to the RCMP; if and when Shen is convicted of criminal assault, I'll take the allegation into consideration, but unless and until that happens, I'm going to assume that nothing improper has happened. To do otherwise wouldn't be fair to Shen."

This hypothetical response is ludicrously callous; but it is exactly analogous to a widespread idea about what universities should do about sexual assault. If you think I shouldn't ignore unproven allegations about getting punched in the face, then it's hard for me to see why you shouldn't think the same about unproven allegations about sexual assault.

None of this is to deny that there are difficult questions to ask about what procedures should govern just what steps should be taken, given particular bodies of evidence. Returning to the case of sexual assault, I do think that if a university knows that a student is sexually assaulting other students, he should be expelled. But I don't think it's at all a trivial matter to put institutional frameworks in place to investigate allegations and establish appropriate responses. That is to say, I don't think it's an easy matter to figure out what appropriate sexual assault policies are.

I also want to emphasize that punitive actions are only one part of what should be covered in a sexual assault policy. A sexual assault policy that focuses only on what standards of proof would justify what kind of punishment does so at the neglect of the victims it is meant to protect. Victims of assault may need many things other than a procedure that might eventually punish their attackers. And many of the things universities can do to support alleged victims are non-punitive, and so do not require at all a high standard of proof. (I don't punish Shen by letting Paksima work in a different group, or referring her to medical services, based only on her allegation.) So another part of a university sexual assault policy—one even further disconnected from questions about law enforcement—should set out such non-punitive guidelines for how to care for alleged victims. A few such policies that come to mind are flexibility about classroom assignments, an ability to make changes to living arrangements, and access to counselling. No doubt there are many more things to add to this list.

Knowing about Sexual Assault, Having Enough Evidence, and the Contextualist Fallacy

Last week I wrote an op-ed in the Vancouver Sun about university sexual assault policies. One of the things I tried to do there was to draw a connection between some of the questions in that area and my own research into knowledge and contextualism. I tried to make the case that a kind of contextualist fallacy lies behind some attitudes about university sexual assault policies. I still think that's plausible and interesting, although there are certainly competing possible explanations. But a tweet I received in response definitely commits the contextualist fallacy.

The contextualist fallacy is the failure to attend to the context-sensitivity of language, allowing for the construction of a superficially apparently-valid argument that is in fact fallacious. For example, the word 'now' is context-sensitive. Sometimes when it is used, it refers to 9:47 am Monday, Jan 18. (In fact, that's the time that word refers to when I utter it right now.) Here is a true sentence:

1. It is before 10:00 Monday right now.

Actually, although it is before 10:00, it's not very far before 10:00, when I have to teach. So I'd better come back and finish this post later.

On leaving sexual assault to the RCMP

This week many of my colleagues and I published an open letter concerning sexual assault policies at UBC. In the letter we write that it's clear to us that in at least some recent cases UBC has failed to do enough to protect its students.

One response I hear pretty often to this kind of discussion is that it shouldn't be a university's place to deal with sexual assault at all. The thought is that criminal matters are best left to law enforcement. I have never had any sympathy for this idea, but it seems to enjoy wide currency, so I thought I'd say just a couple of things about it.

While it's important for criminal charges to be pressed against perpetrators of sexual assault, there are many reasons it's often difficult for victims to do so. For one thing, it is very difficult to protect one's own privacy when making a criminal complaint, and not all victims of sexual assault may want their attackers to go to jail for it. For another, there is often insufficient physical evidence to proceed to criminal charges or convictions. But this doesn't mean that in such cases there's not sufficient evidence to be very confident that misconduct has occurred. I think people manage to confuse themselves into this argument: you shouldn't take any action unless you know that some wrongdoing has occurred; the only possible way to know that some possible wrongdoing has occurred is for this to be proven in a court of law; therefore, you shouldn't take any action unless wrongdoing has been proven in a court of law. Once that argument is written down it's clearly unsound: universities know lots of things that couldn't be proven in a court of law.

What does it even mean to accuse universities of 'handling criminal matters'? Is the idea that universities are handling the role of law enforcement? They're clearly not; universities don't send rapists to prison, for instance. Is it that universities treat as relevant whether certain criminal actions such as rape have occurred? I take it to be obvious that the aims of a university are at odds with having serial rapists as students. I doubt I need to spell out that reasoning; so of course the university should respond to some criminal actions, like rape. "Just leave it to the RCMP" means the same thing as "ignore wrongdoing that you know about unless it's been proven in a court of law." This is inconsistent with our responsibilities of care.

I think this Title IX page contains some good thoughts and resources—obviously things aren't exactly the same in Canada, but some of the same considerations apply.

It's also worth pointing out that universities face many decisions other than whether to expel students. There are lots of questions about how to respond to allegations of sexual assault that come in at earlier levels. Should a professor move a student into a different discussion section in response to unproven allegations of assault? Can different dorm accommodations be found? Not all the things that should be covered in university policy are or should be punitive. Universities are communities, and we have a responsibility to protect our students. "Just leave it to law enforcement" doesn't cut it.

Evidence for presuppositions

One of the things evidential challenges do is to question what grounds we have for our antecedent beliefs. Indeed, that's one of the main things they do. Maybe it's common knowledge that we all believe that p, but we haven't thought much about why we all believe that p. This is just the sort of case where it might make sense to stop and wonder whether p—which is mutually recognized to be something we believe—is actually supported by our evidence.

I think that this observation undermines a claim Michael Blome-Tillmann makes in his book Knowledge & Presuppositions. The key idea there, as in his earlier paper of the same title, is to embrace a Lewisian from of contextualism about 'knows', but where Lewis's 'Rule of Actuality' is replaced by a 'Rule of Presupposition'—that which is consistent with the presuppositions in a conversation is not properly ignored. Ad Michael characterizes conversational presuppositions in terms of dispositions reflective of mutual belief.

Michael considers (p. 99) this dialogue:

A: I know that animal is a zebra.
B: How do you know that it isn't a mule cleverly painted to look like a zebra?
A: Hmm, for all I know it is a painted mule. So I was wrong. I didn't know that it is a zebra after all.

In a strategy unlike the canonical one (supposing that final A's self-attribution of error is mistaken), Michael thinks that A's final response is wholly correct, and that the initial utterance is false. He thinks that the painted mule hypothesis is relevant, even at the start of the conversation. Here's why:

[B] does not pragmatically presuppose that the animals are not cleverly painted mules—neither before nor after asking her first question. Since B asks whether A can rule out that the animal is a cleverly painted mule, B is clearly not disposed to behave, in her use of language, as if she believed it to be common ground that the animal is not a cleverly painted mule. For if she were so disposed, she would certainly not have asked that very question. (100)

This seems to me simply to be wrong, for the reason laid out in my opening paragraph. Asking whether p is ruled out by evidence seems to me wholly consistent with thinking it to be common ground that p.

(Although I think it's independent, this point points to the same conclusion, and has an argumentative similarity with, the one I press against Michael's view in this paper.)

The Certainty Norm of Assertion

In a well-known paper, Jason Stanley argues against the knowledge norm of assertion, in favour of a certainty norm of assertion. As Jason notices, knowledge-denying Moore-paradoxes like (1) aren't the only Moore-paradoxes in town; certainty-denying conjunctions like (2) seem similarly paradoxical:

1. Jason works at Yale but I don't know that Jason works at Yale
2. Jason works at Yale but it's not certain that Jason works at Yale

Jason thinks that knowledge doesn't entail certainty, and so a knowledge norm of assertion can't explain what's wrong with assertions of (2). Instead, he opts for a certainty norm of assertion, that's meant to explain both.

The argument I thought I remembered from the paper was that the certainty norm was strictly stronger than the knowledge norm. The certainty norm explains (2) in the obvious way (just like the knowledge norm explained (1)); and it explains (1) by invoking the entailment of knowledge by certainty. If I don't know that Jason works at Yale, it's not certain, so I can't assert the first conjunct. But today I read the paper again, and that's definitely not the argument. Certainty, in the sense Jason discusses, does not entail knowledge.

The relevant notion of certainty here is 'epistemic certainty', according to which 'one is certain of a proposition p if and only if one knows that p (or is in a position to know that p) on the basis of evidence that gives one the highest degree of justification for one's belief that p'. (p. 35) Since certainty does not entail knowledge, on Jason's view, it is not quite clear to me how a certainty norm explains the infelicity of (1). Of course one can't know both conjuncts in (1), but I don't see why why one couldn't have certainty in both conjuncts. Here is Jason's attempt to deal with the issue:

Consider the proposition that there are no large Jewish elephants in my bedroom. This may have been an epistemic certainty for me five minutes ago, even though I did not know that there were no large Jewish elephants in my bedroom. I did not know that there were no large Jewish elephants in my bedroom, because I did not believe it, and I did not believe it simply because it didn't occur to me ever to entertain that possibility. Nevertheless, in this case, if I had entertained the propsition that there are no large Jewish elephants in my bedroom, I would have known it. The reason this counterfactual is true is because it is an epistemic certainty for me that there are no large Jewish elephants in my bedroom. So the fact that a proposition is an epistemic certainty for a person does not entail that the person knows that proposition. If a proposition is an epistemic certainty for a person at a time, then it does follow that the person is in a *position to know* that proposition. Being in a position to know a proposition is to be disposed to acquire the knowledge that the proposition is true, when one entertains it on the right evidential basis. Since epistemic certainty entails possession of this dispositional property, utterances [like (1)] are odd. (p. 49)

The thought seems to be that if something is certain, then if one asserts it, one must know it. But it doesn't follow from his explanations of these notions that this must be so—couldn't something be asserted without being entertained on the right evidential basis? Suppose for instance that p is certain for me, but I don't know p because I am ignoring my overwhelming evidence for p, and basing my belief that p on some bad evidence. Couldn't it be, in this case, that it's also certain for me that I don't know p? I think it seems plausible that I might—my evidence, which, suppose, includes some sort of introspective access to the source of my belief—might overwhelmingly establish that I don't know that p. But if so, the certainty norm predicts that 'p but I don't know that p' should be assertable.

External Factors and Evidential Symmetry

I'm thinking about the relationship between factive reasons and internalism.

A certain gumball machine has two possible modes. In mode A, it delivers blue gumballs with 90% probability, and red gumballs with 10% probability; in mode B, those proportions are reversed. (The probability for each gumball is independent.) Every morning, a fair coin is flipped to determine in which mode it will remain for the duration of the day. Vibhuti knows all of this. She begins our story with an epistemic probability of .5 for proposition h.

h: the machine is in mode A.

Now two of Vibhuti's friends who have been to the gumball machine today come along. Tunc tells her that he bought a gumball, and it was blue. (This is evidence in favour of h.) Eric tells her that he bought a gumball, and it was red. (This is evidence against h.) Tunc and Eric are equally (and highly) honest and reliable (and Vibhuti knows this). The evidential situation looks entirely symmetric, so Vibhuti's evidential probability for h looks still to be .5.

But certain approaches to evidence might disrupt this apparent symmetry. Suppose it turns out that Eric is lying, but Tunc is telling the truth, and indeed, reporting something he knows. (We've stipulated that this is unlikely, but not that it's impossible.) The lie is skillful, and Vibhuti isn't suspicious; she very reasonably takes both of their assertions at face value. Let's also take on board the following epistemic assumptions (if only to see where they lead):

1. Testimony almost always puts one in possession of knowledge of the fact that the testimony occurred.
2. Testimony at least sometimes puts one in possession of knowledge of the fact testified.
3. E=K.

(Note that I am not assuming a reductivist approach to testimony; there's no claim that the knowledge from 2 typically or ever is based on the knowledge from 1.)

Given these assumptions, it looks like we may not get Vibhuti's case as symmetrical after all. Although she has some evidence in favour of h and some against it, it isn't all symmetrical. For it looks like her relevant evidence is the following:

• Tunc says he got a red one.
• Tunc got a red one.
• Eric says he got a blue one.

The first and third on this list look to be symmetrical for and against h. But the strongest item here counts unambiguously in favour of it. You might think that the second swamps the first in evidential relevance—that sort of seems right—if so, then we could just look at this list:

• Tunc got a red one.
• Eric says he got a blue one.

Here we have one piece of evidence in each direction, but the first item, which counts in favour of h, looks stronger than the second. So it looks like there's going to be some pressure against the idea that Vibhuti's evidential probability in h is .5; it seems like it should be higher than .5.

So how, if at all, could E=K (and really, the challenge applies to a broader range of views: anyone strict enough to demand true evidence, but lax enough to allow testimonial contents sometimes to be evidence) accommodate the apparent evidential symmetry in cases like this? I see four options.

1. Deny that one can ever get the contents of testimony as evidence, because we don't really know the things we're told, even when we're told by people who know. (Skepticism about testimony.) This might be more palatable than it seems if accompanied with some kind of contextualism about both 'knows' and 'evidence'.
2. Deny that one can ever get the contents of testimony as evidence, because not all knowledge is evidence—maybe only direct or basic knowledge counts as evidence. (E=BK)
3. Deny that in particular cases like this one can get knowledge via testimony. If one friend is lying to you, then you're in a skeptical situation where testimony is unreliable. (But will this solution be general enough?)
4. Admit everything I've said about what evidence Vibhuti has, but argue that, for purposes of evidential probability, the situation is symmetrical after all. (The relationship between evidence and evidential probability is complex; I'm really working with something of a 'black box' for the latter—must we suppose that the black box delivers the assymetrical verdict in a case like this?)

Maybe there are more, I'm not sure.

Factoring Views about Having Reasons

I have been thinking about Mark Schroeder’s very interesting paper, “Having Reasons”. He argues against a ‘factoring account’ of having a reason for action, and he also argues that epistemologists have been misled by assuming a parallel factoring account of evidence.

I have three reactions.

1. Schroeder is unclear about what exactly the commitments of the factoring account are; I think he may slide between a stronger and a weaker reading of it. This isn’t disastrous for his own project, because he wants to reject both readings, but I think it’s important to keep them separate (in part because of (2) below).
2. The stronger reading is pretty plausibly false (though maybe not just for the reasons Shroeder says) but the weaker reading is pretty plausibly true (despite his arguments).
3. Epistemologists have not been misled by assuming (a strong form of) the factoring account.

I’ll try to defend (1) in this post.

What is the factoring account? Schroeder first introduces it via an analogy:

When someone has a ticket to the opera, that is because there is a ticket to the opera, and it is in her possession—she has it. Similarly, if one has a golf partner, this can only be because there is someone who is a golf partner, and one has him. But here, it is not like there are people out there who have the property of being golf partners, and one is in your possession. Rather, being a golf partner is simply a relational property, and the golf partner you have—your golf partner—is simply the one who stands in the golf partner of relation to you. 

A factoring account of having opera tickets is true. There is an opera ticket, and moreover, one has it. A factoring account of having golf partners, however, is to be rejected. What exactly is wrong with this view? Schroeder says it’s a commitment to the implausible claim that “there are people out there who have the property of being golf partners, and one is in your possession.” But of course, strictly speaking, there are people out there who are golf partners, and one of them is mine. I agree with Schroeder that there’s an important contrast between these cases, but I don’t think he’s quite articulated what it is. I think it has to do with grounding. What makes it the case that I have an opera ticket is the existence of this thing the opera ticket, combined with me standing in a suitable relationship to it. But the existence of the golf partner, combined with my relationship to her, doesn’t make it the case that I have a golf partner. On the contrary, it is my having her as a golf partner that makes it the case that she is a golf partner. The relationship, not the object, is relatively fundamental here; the existence of the golf partner—though genuine—is derivative.

So distinguish these claims:

• Weak Factoring: Any time S has R as a reason, there exists a reason R, and S stands in a suitable having relation to R.
• Strong Factoring: What it is for S to have R as a reason is for there to exist a reason R, and for S to stand in a suitable having relation to R.

As the names imply, Strong Factoring implies Weak Factoring, but not vice versa. If what I said about golf partners is correct, Weak Factoring does not get at the intuitive contrast between opera tickets and golf partners. The analogue of Weak Factoring is true of golf partners. (Contra the letter of Schroeder's text, any time one has a golf partner, there really is someone who is a a golf partner that one has.) I don’t think Schroeder is at all clear about this; he writes at times as if ‘the Factoring Account’ is just Weak Factoring. (i.e., “[T]he Factoring Account has two major commitments. In any case in which it seems that there is a reasons someone has to do something, whatever is the reason that she has must be just that: (1) a reason for her to do it, and (2) one that she has.” p. 58)

The distinction makes an important difference when it comes to thinking about the views one might have about reasons. For example, here is a possible view one might have about reasons: R=K. (A proposition is among a subject’s reasons if and only if the subject knows that proposition.) This view counts as a Weak Factoring view—any time you have knowledge, there is some knowledge, and moreover, you have it. But it is not a Strong Factoring view; the extinct of the knowledge ontologically depends on your having the knowledge. It is more like golf partners than opera tickets.

“Weak Factoring” is probably a misnomer, really—the view in question isn’t a kind of factoring at all. It’s a mere entailment claim. So when Schroeder’s argument against what he calls ‘The Factoring View’ takes the form of counterexamples to Weak Factoring, he’s really making a much more radical claim than anything we should call the rejection of a factoring treatment of having reasons. He's rejecting the mere entailment from having a reason to there being a reason.

(His counterexamples are cases where a subject acts on a reasonable but mistaken belief—like Bernard Williams’s subject who takes a sip of the liquid in his glass because he falsely believes it’s a martini. I don’t think these are counterexamples, for reasons I won’t go into right now.)

Introspective and Reflective Distinguishability

Mooreans, including neo-Mooreans, think that we know lots of ordinary stuff, and that we also—maybe on this basis—know the denials of extraordinary skeptical scenarios. Duncan Pritchard defends a particular disjunctivist brand of neo-Mooreanism, according to which, in cases of successful perception, one has reflective access to factive reasons of the form I see that p, and perceptual knowledge based on such reasons. So for instance, when one looks at red wall under ordinary circumstances:

• One sees that the wall is red.
• One has reflective access to the fact that one sees that the wall is red.
• One knows that the wall is red on the basis of the fact that one sees that the wall is red.

Since Duncan also accepts a closure principle on knowledge, he accepts:

• One knows that the wall isn't a white wall illuminated by red light.

Like all forms of Mooreanism, Duncan's view is in tension with certain skeptical intuitions. For example, it is in tension with this intuition:

(S) One can't tell by introspection that one is faced with a red wall rather than a white wall with red light.

As Duncan puts it,

If, in the non-deceived case, one has reflective access to the relevant factive reason as epistemological disjunctivism maintains, then why doesn't it follow that one can introspectively distinguish between the non-deceived and deceived cases after all, contrary to intuition? ... In short, the problem is that it is difficult to see how epistemological disjunctivism can square its claim that the reflectively accessible reasons in support of one's perceptual knowledge can nonetheless be factive with the undeniable truth that there can be pairs of cases like that just described [ordinary perceptual cases and corresponding deceptions] which are introspectively indistinguishable. (21)

(Duncan defines 'introspective indistinguishability' as the inability to know by introspection alone that the cases are distinct. (p. 53))

If I wanted to be a neo-Moorean of broadly Duncan's style (something I might well want to do), I'd just deny S, along with the many other skeptical intuitions that come out false on this view. But Duncan doesn't want to go that way; as this passage indicates, he considers S and claims like it to be 'undeniable truths'. (On p. 92 he even says that disjunctivists in particular are "unavoidably committed to denying that agents can introspectively distinguish" between the relevant cases.) I confess I don't see why it's so important to hold on to this particular skeptical intuition while happily rejecting others, such as the intuition that an ordinary person at the zoo doesn't know that she isn't looking at a cleverly disguised mule.

How does Duncan go about resolving the tension between his disjunctivism and S? By leaning on the 'by introspection' qualifier. He does think that, if one in the good case, one can reason thus, resulting in knowledge of the conclusion: "I have factive reason R. Only in the good case would I have factive reason R. Therefore, I'm in the good case." But, he says, this is consistent with intuitions like S, which are about introspective abilities. And while one may be able to tell by introspection what reasons one has, one cannot tell by introspection that factive reasons obtain only in the good cases. This is something one can come to know by a priori reflection, but not by introspection. (And maybe the same goes for the epistemic standing of the inference from the two premises to the conclusion.)

This is ultimately a much milder concession to skeptical intuitions than at first it appeared. Although he preserves the letter of his interpretation of the claim that we can't introspectively distinguish the good cases from the bad cases, he does so by pointing out that "introspectively" is a stronger qualifier than one might have realised. He does think (p. 95) that one can reflectively distinguish between good and bad cases, where reflective distinguishability is the ability to know distinct base on a combination of introspection and a priori reasoning.

So two thoughts. First the smaller one: is it really right to exclude a priori reasoning from the considerations that establish 'introspective distinguishability'? It's very hard for me to even make sense of just what that constraint is. (In The Rules of Thought, Ben and I argue that we can't divorce any kind of thought from a priori reasoning.) Consider these two cases: (1) I am presented in ordinary circumstances with a blue ball. (2) I am presented in ordinary circumstances with a black ball. Given the way my perceptual faculties work, we should consider these cases to be distinguishable in the relevant sense if any are. But is it clear that I can know them to be distinct without using a priori reasoning? It's not like the proposition that they're distinct is made available to me directly via introspection. Instead, I have introspective access to how one case looks, and to how another case looks, and I observe that they're different. From this I infer, using something like Leibniz's law, that they're distinct.

Second, supposing Duncan is right about introspective distinguishability: maybe this just shows that the worry wasn't properly articulated in the first place. I submit that someone motivated by the kinds of skeptical pressures that would drive someone to say that you can't tell good cases and bad cases apart by introspection, isn't going to feel better if you allow a priori reasoning along with introspection. The key skeptical intuition in the first place was just that it shouldn't be that easy to tell the good cases and the bad cases apart. And there's no getting around it: that's just an intuition that disjunctivists need to deny. Once we come to appreciate this fact, I'm not sure how important it is to conform to the letter of certain idiosyncratic statements of the intuition.

Pritchard on pragmatics of knowledge ascriptions

I'm working on a review of Duncan Pritchard's book Epistemological Disjunctivism. I'll probably try out a few ideas here over the next couple of months. I want to start out by focusing on something from near the end of the book—§8 of Part III. Here, Duncan is trying to deal with what he considers to be a challenge to the particular form of neo-Moorean disjunctivist response to the skeptical paradox he's been developing. The salient element of the view is that, contrary to skeptical intuitions, one does typically know that e.g. one is related in the normal way to the world, rather than being a brain in a vat. This, even though one lacks the ability to discriminate perceptually between being related in the normal way to the world and being a brain in a vat.

The challenge Duncan considers in this section is that Moorean assertions like "I know I'm not a brain in a vat" seem conversationally inappropriate. As he puts it earlier in the book,

[T]here appears to be something conversationally very odd about asserting that one knows the denial of a specific radical sceptical hypothesis. That is, even if one is willing to grant with the neo-Moorean that one can indeed know that one is not, say, a BIV, it still needs to be explained why any explicit claim to know that one is not a BIV (i.e., 'I know that I am not a BIV') sounds so conversationally inappropriate. Call this the conversational impropriety objection. (115)

The answer Duncan gives to this challenge in §8 ("Knowing and Saying That One Knows") is that the Moorean claims in question, in the contexts under consideration, generate false conversational implicatures to the effect that one has the relevant discriminatory abilities:

[I]n entering an explicit knowledge claim in response to a challenge involving a specific error-possibility one is not only representing oneself as having stronger reflective accessible grounds in support of that assertion than would (normally) be required in order to simply assert the target proposition, but also usually representing oneself as being in possession of reflectively accessible grounds which speak specifically to the error-possibility raised. (142)

I tend to be suspicious of pragmatic explanations for infelicity that don't come along with systematic explanations. Grice tells nice stories about how his maxims predict particular implicatures, given various contents asserted. What is Duncan's explanation for why first-person knowledge assertions implicate that one has the perceptual capacity to discriminate the state of affairs claimed to be known from alternatives that have been mentioned? Let's take an example, adapted from one of Duncan's (p. 146 -- one of his "unmotivated specific challenge" cases):

• Zula: [looking at some zebras in the zoo] There are some zebras over there.
• Asshole: They look like zebras. But who knows? Maybe they're cleverly disguised mules.
• Zula: I know that they're zebras.

Duncan's view is that Zula last utterance is true but unassertable—unassertable because it implicates falsely that Zula can discriminate perceptually between zebras and cleverly disguised mules. But why does it implicate that, if it doesn't entail it? I can't see how any of Grice's maxim's would generate the implicature in this case. Without some kind of story about where the implicature comes from, the suggestion that any impropriety comes down to pragmatics looks suspiciously ad hoc.

Notice also that certain predictions of the pragmatic explanation do not seem to be borne out. Since Duncan's story depends essentially on the implicatures involved in Zula's assertion, it does not extend to knowledge attributions that Zula doesn't assert. For example, it does not extend to Zula's unasserted thought in this case:

• Zula: [looking at some zebras in the zoo] There are some zebras over there.
• Asshole: They look like zebras. But who knows? Maybe they're cleverly disguised mules.
• Zula: [thinking to herself] What an asshole. I know that they're zebras.

Zula's thought won't mislead Asshole or anybody else, so Duncan's story can't show why it's inappropriate. But it seems intuitively problematic in the same way her original assertion is. Similarly, there seems to be impropriety about Moorean assertions in third-personal contexts where one won't mislead. Suppose that you and I know full well that Zula can't tell the difference between a real zebra and a fake zebra; we also know full well that she is looking at a real zebra right now. Consider this:

• Zula: [looking at some zebras in the zoo] There are some zebras over there.
• Asshole: They look like zebras. But who knows? Maybe they're cleverly disguised mules.
• Me: [to you, out of earshot of Z and A] Zula knows that they're zebras.

My assertion seems problematic in the same way Zula's original one does; but I do not mislead anyone. (We could also consider, for this point, a version of the first-personal case where it is stipulated to be common knowledge that Zula lacks the discriminatory ability in question.)

Here is one more observation about the case. Suppose nobody says anything about knowledge, as in this variant:

• Zula: [looking at some zebras in the zoo] There are some zebras over there.
• Asshole: They look like zebras. But maybe they're cleverly disguised mules.
• Zula: They are zebras.

Insofar as I can feel the force of Duncan's suggestion that Zula's original final utterance—'I know that they're zebras—implicates that she has special abilities to rule out fakes, I think the same applies here. But if so, I think that this may show that even if Duncan has identified something wrong with the knowledge assertion, he hasn't identified everything wrong with it. For we have no inclination whatsoever to think that Zula speaks falsely in asserting, even in the face of the skeptical challenge, that there are zebras. The case is very different for her self-ascription of knowledge. The intuition is not merely that she shouldn't say she has knowledge; it's that she doesn't. (Indeed, I think the intuition is that it'd be fine for her to assert that she doesn't have knowledge.) Since there seems to be a special phenomenon about knowledge ascriptions, the pragmatic story will only work if it is particular to knowledge ascriptions. But I don't think it is; once the challenge has been made, an outright assertion of the proposition that was challenged does—so far as I can tell, in exactly the same way a bare knowledge ascription does—in some sense convey that one has the ability to answer the challenge.

More thoughts on more central elements of Duncan's very interesting book to follow. I started here for the simple reason that  it was freshest in my mind when I finished the book today.

More on the well of knowledge norms

Dustin Locke has published a response to my Thought article, "Knowledge Norms and Acting Well". My paper (draft here) argued that lots of counterexample-based arguments against knowledge norms of practical reasoning take a problematic form: generating a case where it seems like S knows that p, but where it seems like S is not in a strong enough epistemic position to phi. These verdicts together tell us nothing interesting unless we assume some story about the relationship between p and phi; but defenders of knowledge norms needn't and shouldn't accept many such relationships.

For example, in Jessica Brown's widely-discussed surgeon case, it is thought to be intuitive that before double-checking the charts, (a) the surgeon knows that the left kidney is the one to remove; but (b) the surgeon ought not to operate before double-checking the charts. This is only a problem for the idea that one's reasons are all and only what one knows if the proposition the left kidney is the one to remove would, if held as a reason, be a sufficient reason to justify operating before double-checking the charts. But why should one think that?

Dustin resists my argument at several points. I'm not sure what to say in response to many of them; I think they're helpfully clarifying the sources of disagreement, but they don't make me feel any worse about my point of view. For example, Dustin seems to be happy to rest on certain kinds of very theoretical intuitions, like the intuition that the surgeon isn't justified in using the proposition that the left kidney is the bad one as a reason that counts in favour of removing the left kidney immediately. I don't have this intuition, and I wouldn't want to trust it if I did. I feel pretty good about intuitions about what actions are ok in what circumstances, but deeply theoretical claims like these don't seem to me to be acceptable dialectical starting places.

In what I found to be the most interesting part of his paper, Dustin also constructs a version of Brown's surgeon case where, if one assumes that (a) a Bayesian picture of practical rationality is correct and (b) practical reasons talk translates into the Bayesian talk by letting one conditionalize on one's reasons, we can derive the intuition mentioned above. I think that both of these assumptions are very debatable, but I also think that the case Dustin tries to stipulate is more problematic than he assumes. He offers the following stipulations:

1. The surgeon cares about, and only about, whether the patient lives.
2. The surgeon has credence 1 that exactly one of the patient's kidneys is diseased, and a .99 degree of credence that it is the left kidney.
3. If the surgeon performs the surgery without first checking the chart, she will begin it immediately; if she first checks the patient's chart, she will begin the surgery in one minute.
4. The surgeon has credence 1 that were she to check the chart, she would then remove the correct kidney.
5. If the patient has the correct kidney removed during the operation, then there are the following probabilities that he will live, depending on how soon the surgery begins: (5a) If the surgery begins immediately and the correct kidney is removed, there is a probability of 1 that the patient will live; (5b) If the surgery begins in one minute and the correct kidney is removed, there is a probability of .999 that the patient will live.
6. If the patient has the wrong kidney removed during the operation, then the probability that he will live is 0.

(This list is quoted directly.) I have two worries. First, Dustin also says of the case that "it's quite plausible that the surgeon knows that the left kidney is diseased", and assumes that she does. But this requires a very substantive epistemological and psychological assumption about the relationship between credence and knowledge. It is not at all innocent to assume that knowledge is consistent with non-maximal credence like this. For lottery-related reasons, Dustin is probably committing himself to the denial of multi-premise closure here. (Indeed, for reasons like the ones Maria Lasonen-Aarnio has emphasized, he may very well commit himself to denying single-premise closure.) That's not a completely crazy thing to end up being committed to, but I think it substantially mitigates the rhetorical force of an argument against me here. Similarly, there are probably good reasons to deny that the surgeon outright believes that the left kidney is diseased under these circumstances, either for conceptual/metaphysical reasons (see e.g. Brian Weatherson's "Can we do without pragmatic encroachment" or Roger Clarke's "Belief is credence one (in context)" or for psychological reasons (e.g. Jennifer Nagel's "Epistemic anxiety and adaptive invariantism"). If any of these views are right, the Dustin is committing to knowledge without outright belief.

My second worry concerns stipulation number 1: this is a surgeon who cares only about the life of the patient. From a realistic point of view, this is a very strange surgeon. According to Dustin's stipulations, the surgeon cares nothing at all about any of the following: whether she follows hospital procedure; whether she sets a good example for the students observing; whether she acts only on propositions that she knows; whether she is proceeding rationally. These strong assumptions are not idle; if we allow that she cares about any of these things, the utility calculus will not require her to go without checking, even when she conditionalizes on the content of her knowledge that the left kidney is diseased. (Suppose she cares about whether she acts only on that which she knows, and that she doesn't know whether she knows; then there is a substantial risk of the negative outcome of acting on something she doesn't know.) But these very strange assumptions will make our intuitions harder to trust. When we try to imagine ourselves in her position, we naturally assume she cares about the ordinary things people might care about. Stipulating that she only cares about one thing—not even mentioning the many other things we have to remember to disregard—makes it very hard to get into her mindset. So I'm inclined to mistrust intuitions about so heavily-stipulated a case.

Diary of a Narcissist

This is a recent diary entry by Reginald, a confused narcissist. 

Dear Diary,
I am perturbed. As you know, I've long thought that, if I'm not perfection itself, I must at least be the next best thing to it. I thank Providence every day for so far elevating me above the common man. It is no exaggeration to say that hitherto, I have counted myself among the very most beautiful and significant people in the world. But today I received a terrible shock. While searching the internet for further discussions of me, I happened across a paper by a philosopher called David Kaplan. What I found there shook my deepest convictions to the core. Kaplan argues that certain words—'demonstratives' or 'indexicals', he calls them—are context sensitive; that is to say, the referent of these terms can vary according to the conversational context in which they're used. My first thought, on reading this, was that it seemed like an interesting and plausible semantic claim. The referent of the word 'that', for example, is simply whatever it is at which my flawless finger happens to be pointing when I speak.
But that isn't all.^[*] It's one thing to recognise the general semantic framework—it's quite another to make particular entries in the list of context-dependent terms. Among Kaplan's list of context-dependent terms are the very dearest and most important to me! He includes on his list, for example, such touchstones as 'I' and 'me'! Can you imagine, diary? I—Reginald the all-right—dependent on such contingencies as conversational contexts? Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that anyone would so trivialise me. Needless to say, I am deeply shaken. Can I really accept that I am so unimportant? That there is nothing special about me, but rather than I'm just whoever happens to be speaking in a given conversation? The thought terrifies me. Tomorrow I shall read works by Gareth Evans and Christopher Peacocke to see if they might restore me to the glory I thought I deserved.
Fondly,
Reginald

'Knows' contextualism derivative from 'believes' contextualism?

Here's Brian Weatherson:

[B]elief ascriptions and knowledge ascriptions raise at least some similar issues. Consider a kind of contextualism about belief ascriptions, which holds that (L) can be truly uttered in some contexts, but not in others, depending on just what aspects of Lois Lane’s psychology are relevant in the conversation:

(L) Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is vulnerable to kryptonite.

We could imagine a theorist who says that whether (L) can be uttered truly depends on whether it matters to the conversation that Lois Lane might not recognise Clark Kent when he’s wearing his Superman uniform. And, this theorist might continue, this isn’t because ‘Clark Kent’ is a context-sensitive expression; it is rather because ‘believes’ is context-sensitive. Such a theorist will also, presumably, say that whether (K) can be uttered truly is context-sensitive.

(K) Lois Lane knows that Clark Kent is vulnerable to kryptonite.

And so, our theorist is a kind of contextualist about knowledge ascriptions. But they might agree with approximately none of the motivations for contextualism about knowledge ascriptions put forward by Cohen (1988), DeRose (1995) or Lewis (1996). Rather, they are a contextualist about knowledge ascriptions solely because they are contextualist about belief ascriptions like (L). Call the position I’ve just described doxastic contextualism about knowledge ascriptions. It’s a kind of contextualism all right; it says that (K) is context sensitive, and not merely because of the context-sensitivity of any term in the ‘that’-clause. But it explains the contextualism solely in terms of the contextualism of belief ascriptions.

I think that the kind of view Brian describes is very interesting and worthy of more attention than it's gotten. But I'm puzzled by his characterization of it. How is it that the knows-contextualism is explained by the belief-contextualism here? Belief-contextualism is a view about the word 'believes', which does not typically occur in knowledge attributions, the subject of knows-contextualism. So how could belief-contextualism explain knows-contextualism? In what sense is the theorist in question "a contextualist about knowledge ascriptions solely because they are contextualist about belief ascriptions"?

One might motivate knows-contextualism in a way reliant on belief-contextualism. It might look something like this: belief-contextualism is true. Therefore, for some situation, there are two contexts C1 and C2 such that in C1, 'S believes p' expresses a truth for that situation, and in C2, 'S believes p' expresses a falsehold for that situation. In some such C1, 'S knows p' also expresses a truth for that situation. In all contexts, 'S knows p' expresses a truth only if 'S believes p' expresses a truth. Therefore, in C2, 'S knows p' does not express a truth. Therefore knows-contextualism is true.

That argument gets the job done, but it doesn't seem at all like it must be motivating the combination of views Brian discusses. Why should one run through a metalinguistic principle about the relation between 'knows' and 'believes'? It seems to me to be at least as plausible that the corresponding views about 'believes' and 'knows' are motivated in parallel by considerations about propositional attitude ascriptions in general. I agree with Brian that someone who thinks (L)'s content depends on context for these kinds of reasons is also likely to accept the same for (K). But I don't think there's any reason to think the resulting knows-contextualism is in any sense derivative from the belief-contextualism. It's just that the same kinds of data motivate both views.

Williamson on Apriority

Here's an argument with the conclusion that there's no deep difference between cats and dogs.

The Dogs and Cats Argument. Although a distinction between cats and dogs can be drawn, it turns out on closer examination to be a superficial one; it does not cut at the biological joints. Consider, for example, a paradigmatic cat, Felix. Felix has the following properties: (i) he has four legs, fur, and a tail; (ii) he eats canned food out of a bowl; (iii) humans like to stroke his back. Now consider a paradigmatic dog, Fido. Fido has all three of these properties as well. For instance, Fido also has four legs, and fur, and a tail, and when he eats, it is often served from a can into a bowl. And humans like to stroke Fido's back, too. In these respects, Fido and Felix are almost exactly similar. Therefore, there can't possibly be any deep biological distinction between them.

I'm sure you'll agree that the dogs and cats argument is terrible. Put a pin in that and consider another argument.

In his contribution to Al Casullo and Josh Thurow's forthcoming volume, The A Priori in Philosophy, Timothy Williamson argues against the theoretical significance of the distinction between the a priori and a posteriori. The thesis of the paper is that "although a distinction between a priori and a posteriori knowledge (or justification) can be drawn, it is a superficial one, of little theoretical interest."

It's a somewhat puzzling paper, I think, because it's not at all clear how it's broad argumentative strategy is supposed to support the conclusion. Williamson does not, for instance, articulate what he takes the apriority distinction to be, then argue that it is theoretically uninteresting. Instead, he identifies certain paradigms of a priori and a posteriori knowledge, then emphasizes various similarities between them. For example, he argues that the cognitive mechanisms underwriting certain a priori judgments are similar in various respects to those that underwrite certain a posteriori judgments. Then he spends most of the rest of the paper arguing that these are not idiosyncratic features of his particular examples. But why is this supposed to be relevant?

Williamson writes:

The problem is obvious. As characterized above, the cognitive processes underlying Norman's clearly a priori knowledge of (1) and his clearly a posteriori knowledge of (2) are almost exactly similar. If so, how can there be a deep epistemological difference between them?

But I do not find this problem at all obvious. The argument at least appears to have the structure of the terrible dogs and cats argument above. The thing to say about that argument is that identifying various similarities between two things does practically nothing to show that there aren't deep differences between them. There are deep biological distinctions between cats and dogs, but they're not ones that you can find by counting their legs or examining how humans interact with them. Similarly, Williamson offers nothing at all that I can see to rule out the possibility that there is a deep distinction between the a priori and a posteriori, but it is not one that is manifest in the cognitive mechanisms underwriting these judgments. For as Williamson himself later emphasizes, there's more to epistemology than cognitive mechanisms. If apriority lives in propositional justification—which is where I think it lives—then there's just no reason to expect it to show up at this psychological level. That doesn't mean it's not a deep distinction.

That Williamson's argument needs to be treated very carefully should also be evident from the fact that prima facie, it looks like it has enough teeth to show that the distinction between knowledge and false belief is not an epistemically deep one—a conclusion that everyone, but Williamson most of all, should reject. For the cognitive processes underlying cases of knowledge are often almost exactly similar to those underlying false beliefs. Should this tempt us to ask how, then, there could be a deep epistemological difference between them? I really don't see why.

Knowledge and Modals in Consequents of Conditionals

Modals interact in a characteristic way with conditionals. Suppose it’s next Wednesday morning, and I haven’t checked the news in a while. Consider:

1. Obama probably won the election.
2. If Romney won Ohio, Obama probably won the election.

Assuming that the last time I looked at the polls, they looked roughly as they do now, (1) is true in my mouth Wednesday morning, and (2) is false. When I say (1), I say something like, ‘most of the epistemically nearest worlds are worlds in which Obama won’. When I say (2), I restrict the worlds I’m looking at: paying attention only to those worlds in which Romney won Ohio, most of the epistemically nearest of them are Obama-winning worlds. I knew going in that the winner of Ohio is likely to win overall, whichever candidate that is. (But I know it’ll probably be Obama.) So (3) is true in my mouth Wednesday morning:

3. If Romney won Ohio, Romney probably won the election.

Let’s suppose that as a matter of fact, Romney did win Ohio, contrary to my evidence. Still, since I haven’t gotten the bad news yet, my evidence still favors Obama’s having won the election. So when I say (1), it’s true. So is (3). If we look naively, this will appear puzzling. It looks like a counterexample to modus ponens, for the following are all true (not assertable by me Wednesday morning, but true):

• Romney won Ohio.
• If Romney won Ohio, Romney probably won the election.
• Obama probably won the election.

Call the inference from X and a sentence of the form "if X, Y" to Y, naive modus ponens. Naive modus ponens leads us wrong in this case.

The solution to this puzzle, of course, is that modals and conditionals interact in a subtler way than is recorded in the surface grammar of (3). The ‘probably’ modal takes wide scope; “if p, probably q” says that, restricting attention to the p worlds, q is probable. Relatedly, I can’t perform naive modus tollens on my probability conditional: Obama probably won; if Romney won, then Obama probably didn’t win; therefore, Romney didn’t win.

The same goes for ‘might’ and ‘must’. Suppose I have seen election results for every state except Ohio, and I know for certain that the winner of Ohio won the election. Then I may truly say:

4. If Romney won Ohio, Romney must have won the election.
5. If Obama won Ohio, Obama must have won the election.

It doesn’t follow from the fact that Romney did win Ohio that I’d express a truth if I said “Romney must have won the election”. Indeed, it’s false—for all I know, Obama might have won. Sentence (4) says that, of all the Romney-winning-Ohio worlds, he wins the election in them.

This is all very different from the way that conditionals interact with non-modal claims. Suppose I truly say to myself:

6. If the carpenter was here today, the picture is on the wall.

Suppose also that the carpenter was there then (the place and time where I said (6)). This entails that the picture was on the wall. Or if the picture is not on the wall, the truth of (6) entails that the carpenter wasn’t there. In other words, with non-modal consequents, you can perform naive modus ponens and modus tollens on conditionals.

Knowledge patterns with the modals. Suppose you’re trying to decide whether to trust someone. I might truly say:

7. If he’s lying, you know he’ll just deny everything later.

This can be true even though (a) he is lying, and (b) you don’t know that he’ll deny everything later. For all you know, he’s honest, and will confirm everything. Indeed, you know that you don’t know he’ll deny everything later. But you can’t reason from this known fact and (7) to the conclusion that he isn’t lying. So naive modus ponens and modus tollens are mistakes here, just as in the cases of the obvious modals like might, must, and probably.

I think this is pretty decent evidence in favor of views like mine that treat ‘knows’ as either something a lot like a modal or a literal instance of a modal. I say, broadly with David Lewis, that ‘knows p’ is an evidential quantifier: it says of a given set of worlds that one’s evidence eliminates all the not-p worlds. When it appears in the consequent of a conditional, it’s very natural to restrict the set with the antecedent. So “If X, S knows p” says, first restrict your attention only to the X worlds; S’s evidence eliminates the not-p worlds that remain.

Sider, structure, reduction, and knowledge first

This is a continuation of yesterday's post. Yesterday I identified what seemed to me to be a problem for the way that Ted Sider wanted to explain why various macro-level things are more privileged—basically, they're said to be more joint-carving. But as I said yesterday, I just don't see that they are.

I suspect, however, that one can get something quite a bit like Sider's picture here if one is willing to add a bit more structure. The prospects for a reasonable purely physical story about chemical objects and properties seem reasonable. It doesn't seem hopeless to try to give a reasonably simple definition of molecule or magnesium or valence in purely physical terms. So if we assume the (absolute) fundamentality of physics, we can run the story Sider wants for why we refer to molecules instead of molecules-or-cucumbers, or even molecules-before-2013-and-regions-of-space-afterwards, because the physical definition of molecule is significantly simpler than these more bizarre properties. (In the former case, a purely physical definition will be insanely complex, as in the case of pig; in the latter, it will still be not insanely complex, but more complex than that for molecule.)

This is basically just a way of expressing the familiar idea that chemistry somehow reduces to, or emerges from, physics. But if we buy into Ted's general ideas, we can add this: it is part of the objective structure of the world that chemical properties are related to physical properties in this way. The 'book of the world' will give us the chemical on top of the physical (and the chemical is objectively privileged over the schmemical).

Now what happens when we go up another level? It's pretty natural to suppose that cell biology relates to chemistry as chemistry does to physics. So --- and here's where the picture I'm describing departs from Ted's --- when adjudicating between which objects we refer to in our discourse about cell biology, objects with reasonably simple definitions in chemical terms --- not physical terms --- are privileged over ones that don't. We don't always go back to the most fundamental; we just go back to the more fundamental domain that is appropriate for the matter at hand. Often, but not always, the simpler definition is the more fundamental theory will correspond to the simpler definition in the ultimately fundamental theory; when it doesn't, I think we should go with the less fundamental one. (It's having a better chemical account that makes a particular referent of 'cell' the preferred one, not having a better physical account.)

The reason I'm interested in this, besides the fact that it's interesting, is that I'm leaning in this kind of a direction as a way of making sense of what the 'knowledge first' attitude is. (Yes, I'm reading metaphysics, but it's in the service of epistemology, I swear!) I understand it as a metaphysical thesis: knowledge is a more fundamental state than has been traditionally recognized. In the terms of this broad way of thinking about theorizing about the world, knowledge shows up at a more fundamental level than one might have thought.  (Compare a 'life first' theorist, who thinks that the attempt to define life in biological terms is a mistake; life's home is really at the chemical level—we need to invoke life to understand, say, combustion.) How early should knowledge appear? Presumably, people could differ about this. If you wanted to, you could think that knowledge was perfectly fundamental; knowledge is as basic as quarks or whatever. You'd oppose any kind of reduction of knowledge to anything. This doesn't sound very plausible, but you could say that if you wanted to. My suspicion is that knowledge will be an important theoretical term from the basics of intentional psychology.

Christoph Jäger on knowledge, contextualism and assertion

Christoph Jäger argues in a recent Analysis paper that contextualism and the knowledge norm of assertion are jointly untenable. Here’s my reconstruction of Jäger’s argument. (My numbering will differ from his.) Suppose that Keith has hands and the usual epistemic access to them. Also, Keith is a contextualist. For some two contexts, C-LOW and C-HIGH,

1. In C-LOW, “Keith knows that he has hands” is true.
2. In C-HIGH, “Keith knows that he has hands” is false.
3. In C-HIGH, Keith may appropriately state his contextualist theory.
4. In C-HIGH, “Keith knows his contextualist theory” is true.
5. In C-HIGH, “Keith knows that in C-LOW, ‘Keith knows that he has hands’ is true” is true.
6. In C-HIGH, “Keith knows that he has hands” is true.

But (6) contradicts (2), so something is wrong. Jäger says that it’s either contextualism or the knowledge norm that has to go. The first two premises are standard contextualist fare. A modest closure principle is invoked in the step from (5) to (6)—but it looks fine. The move from (3) to (4) follows from Jäger's version of the knowledge norm of assertion, which I do not contest. There are two action points here: the moves to lines (3) and (5). We consider them in turn.

Why should we accept (3)? Jäger introduces the set-up thus:

Consider a conversational context in which the contextualist states his theory. Such contexts are paradigmatic epistemology or 'philosophy classroom' contexts in which sceptical hypotheses are salient and taken seriously.

This appears to me to be mere assertion; why should classroom contexts be skeptical ones? I know that David Lewis said they were, but David Lewis said a lot of silly things in that paper. This just isn’t a commitment of contextualism per se. Contextualism is a linguistic thesis, made on the basis of, among other things, facts about linguistic use. If we were really taking skepticism seriously, we would not help ourselves to such facts. Some contexts in which epistemology of this sort is being performed—this one, for instance—are not very skeptical at all.

Actually, I think, there is a deeper problem for Jäger’s claim to (3). Contextualism is a controversial theory; lots of smart people think it’s wrong. It’s a theory that I accept, but I don’t think the acceptance here is a kind of outright belief, and I don’t think my statements of contextualism are appropriately regarded as assertions—as attempts to transmit knowledge. But the kind of “appropriate stating” at issue in (3) would have to be assertions in order for a knowledge norm of the latter to put any pressure on the move to (4). It’s far from obvious that anyone in ordinary contexts (let along skeptical ones) should go around asserting that contextualism is true. (And I say this as a contextualist! I think contextualism looks like the best theory. That doesn’t make it a thing to assert in ordinary contexts.)

So there are two pretty serious problems with premise (3). Now let’s set aside those problems for the purpose of further argument, and consider line (5). The inference from (4) to (5) is supposed to follow directly from the content of the contextualist theory. Jäger writes:

[Someone denying this step] would have to argue that the contextualist can legitimately deny [(5)], i.e. deny that he knows when he asserts his theory, in CHigh, that there are low-standards contexts in which (it is true to say that) he knows that he has hands. The claim that there are such quotidian contexts, however, is a cornerstone of classical, anti-sceptical forms of contextualism.

I don’t feel the motivation here at all. Contextualism the linguistic thesis does not entail that Keith or anyone knows that he has hands; it doesn’t even entail that Keith or anyone has hands. (Obviously.) It is consistent with the truth of contextualism that you and I are brains in vats. So even if we became convinced that we could have high-standards knowledge of contextualism—say, because we have introspective access to meaning, and that access is more resistant to skeptical scenarios than perceptual knowledge—we could still abandon Jäger’s ship at the step to line (5). Sure, Keith knows-HIGH that contextualism is true; that doesn’t mean he knows-HIGH that he knows-LOW that he has hands—even granting whatever intra-context closure principle you want. We’d get that he knows-HIGH that in C-LOW, he’d be invoking a relatively weak standard if he said “I know I have hands”. It doesn’t follow that he knows whether he’d meet it.

So there are lots of ways to resist this argument.