Suppose somebody has a false intuition about an a priori matter. Is she justified in believing its content? Many plausible answers, of course, will begin with "it depends...". On what does it depend?
Ernie Sosa thinks that among the things upon which it depends is whether the false intuition derives from "some avoidably defective way"; such errors constitute "faults, individual flaws, or defects." (I think Sosa means these two quoted bits to be approximately equivalent, or at any rate, to apply together in the relevant cases.) Sosa thinks this is what is going on when somebody follows her strong inclination to affirm the consequent, inferring from q and (if p, q) to p. By contrast, "the false intuitions involved in deep paradoxes are not so clearly faults, individual flaws, or defects. For example, it may be that they derive from our basic make-up, shared among humans generally, a make-up that serves us well in an environment such as ours on the surface of our planet."
So Sosa's line is that false intuitions do not justify when they derive from faults, flaws, and defects, but do justify when they derive from our basic make-up and are generally shared among humans. I'm suspicious that this distinction will hold up to scrutiny. I think there may be an equivocation on the relevant kinds of 'faults,' 'flaws,' and 'defects' going on. In one sense, of course, one is flawed by virtue of being incorrect; beliefs are supposed to be true, so if one goes wrong, that constitutes some sort of defect. This, of course, cannot be what Sosa has in mind. Instead, he seems to be imagining flaws as deviations from some sort of imperfect but generally effective strategy for getting around in the world. This is, perhaps, the more ordinary sense of a defect. My computer, even when it is working properly, will occasionally crash; a tendency to crash constitutes a defect only when it is not working properly. And maybe there is a good reason why humans ought to have tendencies to accept, for instance, naive set theory.
The problem for this line is that there is also plausibly sound reason for humans to have tendencies to commit more obvious errors, like affirming the consequent. Given the environments we face, having a tendency to affirm the consequent will help us to recognize patterns and confirm hypotheses; inductive reasoning generally looks a bit like affirming the consequent. Similarly with other standard errors; they derive from heuristics that are generally helpful.
So we face a dilemma for upholding Sosa's distinction. Do we say that these errors — these false judgments arising from generally good heuristics — constitute defects or not? If not, then they are relevantly like Sosa thinks the intuitive premises involved in deep paradoxes are. If so, what makes them so, and why should they not apply also to the cases of the paradoxes?
Consider three people. First, the possible über-rational being who looks at me the way the fallacious gambler now looks to me. She describes us both as defective; as failing to live up to the standards of rationality. She can see that I am not tempted by one particular error (the gambler's fallacy) — but also that I regularly commit another (fallacy X), and have some attraction to a third (naive set theory). Second, myself: I think of the fallacious gambler as defective, but of myself and my peers, I think our attraction to naive set theory as nondefective; my more ignorant peers who have not studied philosophy, I even consider justified. (We will suppose I have Ernie's views.) Third, the gambler himself, who accepts his characteristic fallacy and naive set theory alike, and sees no defect in any of us. He considers himself justified in both cases.
All parties agree that the gambler is wrong; he proceeds in a defective way inconsistent with intuitive justification. But Ernie thinks I'm importantly different from him. Ernie thinks that I am not defective, but merely have some tendencies to affirm falsehoods that derive from my general human nature. Our rational superior, presumably, thinks of me as defective in just the same way as the gambler, but to a lesser degree. Does Ernie give any reason we should think her wrong about this?
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
Concepts and Survey Results
I'm thinking about a point that Ernie Sosa has made in response to survey-based experimental philosophy challenges. As we all know, some critics have argued that certain experimental results challenge traditional armchair philosophy. In particular, for example, Weinberg, Nichols, and Stich found that there seemed to be a systematic divergence of epistemic intuitions depending upon the ethnic background of the subjects studied: students of East Asian descent were more likely than students of European descent to, for instance, describe Gettier cases as cases of knowledge.
Here's a line that Ernie has pressed a few times now:
(That's quoted from his contribution to the recent Stich and His Critics volume.)
As I'd understand it, the core suggestion here is this: maybe there's no real disagreement here; some group of subjects say that such and such 'is a case of knowledge,' while philosophers and other subjects say that such and such is not a case of knowledge, and there's no genuine disagreement, because the former subjects don't mean knowledge by 'knowledge'.
So here's my question. (One question, anyway. I have a few more.) What does any of this have to do with concepts? As I understand it, it's a question about meaning and reference: what does the word 'knowledge' refer to in a given subject's mouth? One can run a little detour through concepts if one wants: word meanings are concepts; the concepts are different; so the word is ambiguous. But what, if anything, does this 'conceptual ascent' contribute? I rather suspect that it does more to distract than to help. Steve Stich's response to Sosa emphasizes concepts in a way that looks to me largely irrelevant:
But Fodor's theory of concepts is not a theory of word meanings. What bearing does it have on whether there might be an Asian-American idiolect in which 'knowledge' means something other than knowledge? (I do mean this as a serious question; I'm less fluent in Fodor than I'd like.)
To my mind, the sort of view that Ernie needs to be worrying about is not Fodor's but Burge's. More on that in a future post, I think. For now, just this question: is anything usefully gained by thinking about Sosa's suggestion here in terms of concepts?
Here's a line that Ernie has pressed a few times now:
And the disagreement may now perhaps be explained in a way that casts no doubt on intuition as a source of epistemic justification or even knowledge. Why not explain the disagreement as merely verbal? Why not say that across the divide we find somewhat different concepts picked out by terminology that is either ambiguous or at least contextually divergent? On the EA side, the more valuable status that a belief might attain is one that necessarily involves communitarian factors of one or another sort, factors that are absent or minimized in the status picked out by Ws as necessary for “knowledge.” If there is such divergence in meaning as we cross the relevant divides, then once again we fail to have disagreement on the very same propositions. In saying that the subject does not know, the EAs are saying something about lack of some relevant communitarian status. In saying that the subject does know, the Ws are not denying that; they are simply focusing on a different status, one that they regard as desirable even if it does not meet the high communitarian requirements important to the EAs. So again we avoid any real disagreement on the very same propositions. The proposition affirmed by the EAs as intuitively true is not the very same as the proposition denied by the Ws as intuitively false.
(That's quoted from his contribution to the recent Stich and His Critics volume.)
As I'd understand it, the core suggestion here is this: maybe there's no real disagreement here; some group of subjects say that such and such 'is a case of knowledge,' while philosophers and other subjects say that such and such is not a case of knowledge, and there's no genuine disagreement, because the former subjects don't mean knowledge by 'knowledge'.
So here's my question. (One question, anyway. I have a few more.) What does any of this have to do with concepts? As I understand it, it's a question about meaning and reference: what does the word 'knowledge' refer to in a given subject's mouth? One can run a little detour through concepts if one wants: word meanings are concepts; the concepts are different; so the word is ambiguous. But what, if anything, does this 'conceptual ascent' contribute? I rather suspect that it does more to distract than to help. Steve Stich's response to Sosa emphasizes concepts in a way that looks to me largely irrelevant:
There is a vast literature on concepts in philosophy and in psychology (Margolis and Laurence 1999; Murphy 2002; Machery forthcoming), and the question of how to individuate concepts is one of the most hotly debated issues in that literature. While it is widely agreed that for two concept tokens to be of the same type they must have the same content, there is a wide diversity of views on what is required for this condition to be met. On some theories, the sort of covert ambiguity that Sosa is betting on can be expected to be fairly common, while on others covert ambiguity is much harder to generate. For Fodor, for example, the fact that an East Asian pays more attention to communitarian factors while a Westerner emphasizes individualistic factors in applying the term ‘knowledge’ would be no reason at all to think that the concepts linked to their use of the term ‘knowledge’ have different contents (Fodor 1998).
But Fodor's theory of concepts is not a theory of word meanings. What bearing does it have on whether there might be an Asian-American idiolect in which 'knowledge' means something other than knowledge? (I do mean this as a serious question; I'm less fluent in Fodor than I'd like.)
To my mind, the sort of view that Ernie needs to be worrying about is not Fodor's but Burge's. More on that in a future post, I think. For now, just this question: is anything usefully gained by thinking about Sosa's suggestion here in terms of concepts?
Thursday, November 18, 2010
Against Contrastivism
A conversation last night with Yuri and Andy helped me to get clearer on the argument I was trying to press in my last post. Here's the much more succinct way to make the point. It's an argument against forms of contextualism that put relevant alternatives into the proposition expressed by knowledge attributions.
Suppose I'm in a nonskeptical conversation, talking about Henry, who is standing in front of a barn. I have no reason to suspect any funny business, so I say, sensibly enough:
(K) Henry knows that he is standing in front of a barn.
Here are are three pretty plausible claims:
(1) If there isn't any funny business going on, my utterance of K is true.
(2) If it turns out that (unbeknownst to me) Henry is in fake barn country, (looking at the only real barn) my utterance of K is false.
(3) My sentence (K) expresses the same proposition, whether or not it turns out that Henry is in fake barn country.
If you think all of these things, then you can't think that the proposition I express builds in the relevant alternatives. Either the possibility that <the thing Henry is standing in front of is a fake barn> is relevant, or it's not, but it's his environment, not my context, that makes it relevant.
So if you want a Schaffer-style extra-argument-place approach to knowledge, this provides a reason not to let that argument place be one for a set of relevant alternatives. You might instead be a function from subject's situations to sets of relevant alternatives.
Yesterday I also included a parallel argument relying on pragmatic encroachment sorts of cases. I think it's a good argument too, but this one proceeds on less contentious premises.
Suppose I'm in a nonskeptical conversation, talking about Henry, who is standing in front of a barn. I have no reason to suspect any funny business, so I say, sensibly enough:
(K) Henry knows that he is standing in front of a barn.
Here are are three pretty plausible claims:
(1) If there isn't any funny business going on, my utterance of K is true.
(2) If it turns out that (unbeknownst to me) Henry is in fake barn country, (looking at the only real barn) my utterance of K is false.
(3) My sentence (K) expresses the same proposition, whether or not it turns out that Henry is in fake barn country.
If you think all of these things, then you can't think that the proposition I express builds in the relevant alternatives. Either the possibility that <the thing Henry is standing in front of is a fake barn> is relevant, or it's not, but it's his environment, not my context, that makes it relevant.
So if you want a Schaffer-style extra-argument-place approach to knowledge, this provides a reason not to let that argument place be one for a set of relevant alternatives. You might instead be a function from subject's situations to sets of relevant alternatives.
Yesterday I also included a parallel argument relying on pragmatic encroachment sorts of cases. I think it's a good argument too, but this one proceeds on less contentious premises.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Are 'epistemic standards' contrast classes?
Suppose you agree with Jonathan Schaffer that 'knows' takes an extra argument place, and that variation in what fills this slot explains the context-sensitivity of 'S-knows-that-p' attributions. Knowledge relates, say, a subject, a proposition, and, let's call it, the 'epistemic standard'. Nothing yet is assumed about what sort of thing that is. Schaffer thinks the epistemic standard is a contrast class, or, equivalently, a question. So "George knows he has hands" can express either of these three-place knowledge relations, depending on the context:
(1) K (George, <George has hands>, {<George has hands>, <George is not the sort of creature who has hands>, <George has lost his hands>})
(2) K (George, <George has hands>, {<George has hands>, <George is deceived by an evil demon into thinking he has hands>})
We could disambiguate in English, saying, "George knows he has hands rather than stumps", to get something like (1), or "George knows he has hands rather than being deceived by an evil demon into thinking he has hands" to get (2).
Identifying the epistemic standard with contrast classes does much of the work that a contextualist might legitimately seek -- for instance, it disambiguates the sentence above into a modest one and one inconsistent with skeptical intuitions -- but I think there might be a few reasons to prefer something different. Here are two related challenges to contrastivism that are not, I think, general challenges to the shifty variable approach.
Gettier cases. Suppose Henry's in fake barn country, but you and I don't have any reason to think that's so. (Neither does he.) I say to you, "Henry knows that he's looking at a barn." My sentence is ambiguous; what's the shifty epistemic standard? We can get an anti-skeptical reading with a contrast class of, e.g., barns and silos. But the antiskeptical reading in this case is very counterintuitive. To get the skeptical reading, which is the standard one, we need the contrast class to include fake barns. But given our situation, it's quite mysterious how the fake barn possibility got to be part of the semantic content of my sentence. (Compare the possible world in which everything seems exactly the same to all three of us, but Henry is in real barn country.)
Low-Attributor, High-Subject Bank Cases. Hannah and Sarah are desperate to get to the bank before Monday, and they have good but not great reason to think they can go tomorrow. You and I don't know and don't care how important it is to them; I say to you: "Hannah knows the bank will be open tomorrow." Here are two representative possible contrast classes: {<bank open tomorrow>, <bank not open Saturdays>}; {<bank open tomorrow>, <bank recently changed its policy and will be closed tomorrow>}. The latter is needed for the skeptical reading, which is the intuitive one; but what about me and my context could make it the case that this skeptical possibility is relevant? Again, compare the corresponding low-subject stakes version, which seems just the same to me.
Now I'm a good semantic externalist. So don't take me to be arguing that in each case, the intrinsic similarity entails sameness of semantic content. The argument can't go that directly. Nevertheless, in the relevant cases, it does look to me pretty strange that fake barns should appear in my content only if Henry happens to be in fake barn country, or that the policy-changing case is part of my content only if Hannah and Sarah's stakes are high. Intuitively, these features to which I'm blind are relevant to the truth of the knowledge attributions, but they are not relevant to their truth conditions.
Contrary to contrastivism, the subject is not irrelevant; the subject's practical and environmental features do play some role in determining what alternatives are relevant. This, to me, suggests that we might not want to put the relevant alternatives themselves into the semantics of my sentence. Don't make epistemic standards contrast classes; we can let the shifty epistemic standard be something else. Here's a modest suggestion: epistemic standards are functions from situations to contrast classes. A given standard tells you, for any situation the subject might be in, which possibilities are relevant. The speaker's context fixes the standard; the standard and the subject's situation fix the relevant alternatives. So speaker and subject are both 'relevant'.
Notice, by the way, that you don't have to go along with the encroachment stuff to prefer this treatment to Schaffer's. The Gettier case provides, I think, a less contentious way of motivating just the same point. If you're one of those contextualists who is motivated in part by denying pragmatic encroachment, then you should think that no standard will deliver different alternatives for situations that differ only in stakes. (So you'll explain away intuitions about bank cases.) But unless you're also willing to explain away intuitions about Gettier cases, you should still have the standards be sensitive to the subject's environmental situation.
(1) K (George, <George has hands>, {<George has hands>, <George is not the sort of creature who has hands>, <George has lost his hands>})
(2) K (George, <George has hands>, {<George has hands>, <George is deceived by an evil demon into thinking he has hands>})
We could disambiguate in English, saying, "George knows he has hands rather than stumps", to get something like (1), or "George knows he has hands rather than being deceived by an evil demon into thinking he has hands" to get (2).
Identifying the epistemic standard with contrast classes does much of the work that a contextualist might legitimately seek -- for instance, it disambiguates the sentence above into a modest one and one inconsistent with skeptical intuitions -- but I think there might be a few reasons to prefer something different. Here are two related challenges to contrastivism that are not, I think, general challenges to the shifty variable approach.
Gettier cases. Suppose Henry's in fake barn country, but you and I don't have any reason to think that's so. (Neither does he.) I say to you, "Henry knows that he's looking at a barn." My sentence is ambiguous; what's the shifty epistemic standard? We can get an anti-skeptical reading with a contrast class of, e.g., barns and silos. But the antiskeptical reading in this case is very counterintuitive. To get the skeptical reading, which is the standard one, we need the contrast class to include fake barns. But given our situation, it's quite mysterious how the fake barn possibility got to be part of the semantic content of my sentence. (Compare the possible world in which everything seems exactly the same to all three of us, but Henry is in real barn country.)
Low-Attributor, High-Subject Bank Cases. Hannah and Sarah are desperate to get to the bank before Monday, and they have good but not great reason to think they can go tomorrow. You and I don't know and don't care how important it is to them; I say to you: "Hannah knows the bank will be open tomorrow." Here are two representative possible contrast classes: {<bank open tomorrow>, <bank not open Saturdays>}; {<bank open tomorrow>, <bank recently changed its policy and will be closed tomorrow>}. The latter is needed for the skeptical reading, which is the intuitive one; but what about me and my context could make it the case that this skeptical possibility is relevant? Again, compare the corresponding low-subject stakes version, which seems just the same to me.
Now I'm a good semantic externalist. So don't take me to be arguing that in each case, the intrinsic similarity entails sameness of semantic content. The argument can't go that directly. Nevertheless, in the relevant cases, it does look to me pretty strange that fake barns should appear in my content only if Henry happens to be in fake barn country, or that the policy-changing case is part of my content only if Hannah and Sarah's stakes are high. Intuitively, these features to which I'm blind are relevant to the truth of the knowledge attributions, but they are not relevant to their truth conditions.
Contrary to contrastivism, the subject is not irrelevant; the subject's practical and environmental features do play some role in determining what alternatives are relevant. This, to me, suggests that we might not want to put the relevant alternatives themselves into the semantics of my sentence. Don't make epistemic standards contrast classes; we can let the shifty epistemic standard be something else. Here's a modest suggestion: epistemic standards are functions from situations to contrast classes. A given standard tells you, for any situation the subject might be in, which possibilities are relevant. The speaker's context fixes the standard; the standard and the subject's situation fix the relevant alternatives. So speaker and subject are both 'relevant'.
Notice, by the way, that you don't have to go along with the encroachment stuff to prefer this treatment to Schaffer's. The Gettier case provides, I think, a less contentious way of motivating just the same point. If you're one of those contextualists who is motivated in part by denying pragmatic encroachment, then you should think that no standard will deliver different alternatives for situations that differ only in stakes. (So you'll explain away intuitions about bank cases.) But unless you're also willing to explain away intuitions about Gettier cases, you should still have the standards be sensitive to the subject's environmental situation.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Contextualism, Indexicalism, and Constrastivism
One of the questions I've been thinking about lately (unrelated to most of my recent blog posts) concerns the best linguistic implementation of contextualism about 'knows'. I've committed myself to contextualism in a couple of papers, but so far I have tried to avoid a commitment to any particular semantic treatment of 'knows'.
I take it the minimal commitment of contextualism starts with something like this: statements of the form 'S knows that p' can express different propositions in different conversational contexts. And to this, presumably, we add that the context-sensitivity of these sentences derives from the 'knows' -- it's not enough that various singular terms (the 'S's') or statements of propositions (the 'p's') are sometimes context-sensitive. But this leaves open some choices for what to do with 'knows'.
One choice is to treat 'knows' as an indexical, which refers to different relations in different conversational contexts. Call this "indexicalism." The other choice is not to treat 'knows' as an indexical, suggesting that something about it generates context-sensitivity in some other way. (It is unfortunate that 'non-indexical contextualism' has been used as a name for a different view, which is not a contextualist one by the standard of the previous paragraph.) Jonathan Schaffer has argued for a version of contextualism of this latter type. Schaffer's view, 'contrastivism,' is that 'knows' univocally picks out a three-place relation, relating a subject, a proposition, and a contrast class. The contrast class is often left implicit in sentences of the form 'S knows that p', and so it is filled in tacitly; since different contexts will suggest different ways of filling it in, 'S knows that p' ends up expressing different propositions in different contexts. (Schaffer uses his terms differently, too; he calls my indexicalism 'contextualism'.)
Schaffer's isn't the only way of being a contextualist who doesn't treat 'knows' as an indexical. Contrastivism is only one example of a view of this kind -- this kind of view needs a name! I really want to use 'non-indexical contextualist'... do y'all think I could reclaim that label? I think the view I'm describing is extremely well deserving of that name... Anyway, whatever you want to call it, there are lots of things besides contrast classes that might be arguments for 'knows'. I rather suspect that a view of this sort is correct, and one of my projects at the moment is to articulate such a view and explain why it might be preferable to any other form of contextualism.
So we have at least three different forms of contextualism on the table:
I'm curious as to whether these exhaust the options for the contextualist. They do if the only ways that 'S knows p' can be relevantly context-sensitive are for 'knows' to be an indexical, or to take an extra argument place supplied by context. Anybody see any more choices here?
I take it the minimal commitment of contextualism starts with something like this: statements of the form 'S knows that p' can express different propositions in different conversational contexts. And to this, presumably, we add that the context-sensitivity of these sentences derives from the 'knows' -- it's not enough that various singular terms (the 'S's') or statements of propositions (the 'p's') are sometimes context-sensitive. But this leaves open some choices for what to do with 'knows'.
One choice is to treat 'knows' as an indexical, which refers to different relations in different conversational contexts. Call this "indexicalism." The other choice is not to treat 'knows' as an indexical, suggesting that something about it generates context-sensitivity in some other way. (It is unfortunate that 'non-indexical contextualism' has been used as a name for a different view, which is not a contextualist one by the standard of the previous paragraph.) Jonathan Schaffer has argued for a version of contextualism of this latter type. Schaffer's view, 'contrastivism,' is that 'knows' univocally picks out a three-place relation, relating a subject, a proposition, and a contrast class. The contrast class is often left implicit in sentences of the form 'S knows that p', and so it is filled in tacitly; since different contexts will suggest different ways of filling it in, 'S knows that p' ends up expressing different propositions in different contexts. (Schaffer uses his terms differently, too; he calls my indexicalism 'contextualism'.)
Schaffer's isn't the only way of being a contextualist who doesn't treat 'knows' as an indexical. Contrastivism is only one example of a view of this kind -- this kind of view needs a name! I really want to use 'non-indexical contextualist'... do y'all think I could reclaim that label? I think the view I'm describing is extremely well deserving of that name... Anyway, whatever you want to call it, there are lots of things besides contrast classes that might be arguments for 'knows'. I rather suspect that a view of this sort is correct, and one of my projects at the moment is to articulate such a view and explain why it might be preferable to any other form of contextualism.
So we have at least three different forms of contextualism on the table:
- Indexicalism. 'Knows' is an indexical; which epistemic relation it expresses depends on the conversational context. As far as I can tell, no one has actually seriously defended this view, even though it's often taken to be the standard claim of contextualism.
- Contrastivism. Jonathan Schaffer's view. 'Knows' univocally expresses a ternary relation Kspq, relating a speaker, a proposition, and a contrast class. This last is often filled in by the conversational context.
- Non-contrastivist extra-argument-place views. (I guess we need a name for this one too.) 'Knows' univocally expresses a ternary relation Kspx, where x is something other than a contrast class, and is often filled in by the conversational context. Until we get more specific, we might think of x as standing generically for an 'epistemic standard'.
I'm curious as to whether these exhaust the options for the contextualist. They do if the only ways that 'S knows p' can be relevantly context-sensitive are for 'knows' to be an indexical, or to take an extra argument place supplied by context. Anybody see any more choices here?
Friday, November 12, 2010
The Knowledge Norm of Practical Reasoning
For reasons exactly like the ones outlined in the previous post, these two claims are importantly distinct:
(1) If S knows p, then S can appropriately rely on p in practical reasoning.
(2) If S knows p, then p is warranted enough to justify S in phi-ing, for any phi.
I argued a couple of weeks ago that (1) is not strong enough to establish pragmatic encroachment. I suggested then that this was a problem for Fantl and McGrath; the discussion with Jeremy in the comments thread is part of what helped me to see the distinction between (1) and (2) more clearly. If their argument proceeded from (2), rather than (1), my argument doesn't apply. However, in light of the important distinction between these two claims linking knowledge and action -- I won't speak for anybody else, but this is a distinction I certainly hadn't been thinking clearly about before recently -- we should, if relying on claims like (2), proceed carefully, distinguishing arguments for (2) from arguments for (1).
I gave in my most recent post, linked at the top, an argument against a strictly weaker principle than (2). If that argument was right, then (2) is false. Let phi be an action that, for accidental reasons concerning the background environment, is only justified if S has some super-knowledge access to p. The example from that post was, let phi be the assertion that p, and let the background be such that S has promised, in a morally weighty way, not to assert p unless S knows that she knows that she is absolutely certain that p; let p be known, but the higher condition not be met. Then S is not justified in phi-ing, under the circumstances, even though she knows p, and even though, were p better warranted, she would be.
But maybe that argument went a little too quick. For maybe it's question-begging to assume, as I did, that one can know p without being in the super-epistemic position, under the circumstances described. Maybe the act of promising collapses that distinction. If so, then my argument against (2) can be resisted. Indeed, it's sort of the point of (2) that the 'standards' for knowledge raise to as high a level as one might need in any given circumstance.
But -- and here's the main point of this post -- one can retain (1) without collapsing that distinction. That's another respect in which (1) is interestingly different from (2).
(1) If S knows p, then S can appropriately rely on p in practical reasoning.
(2) If S knows p, then p is warranted enough to justify S in phi-ing, for any phi.
I argued a couple of weeks ago that (1) is not strong enough to establish pragmatic encroachment. I suggested then that this was a problem for Fantl and McGrath; the discussion with Jeremy in the comments thread is part of what helped me to see the distinction between (1) and (2) more clearly. If their argument proceeded from (2), rather than (1), my argument doesn't apply. However, in light of the important distinction between these two claims linking knowledge and action -- I won't speak for anybody else, but this is a distinction I certainly hadn't been thinking clearly about before recently -- we should, if relying on claims like (2), proceed carefully, distinguishing arguments for (2) from arguments for (1).
I gave in my most recent post, linked at the top, an argument against a strictly weaker principle than (2). If that argument was right, then (2) is false. Let phi be an action that, for accidental reasons concerning the background environment, is only justified if S has some super-knowledge access to p. The example from that post was, let phi be the assertion that p, and let the background be such that S has promised, in a morally weighty way, not to assert p unless S knows that she knows that she is absolutely certain that p; let p be known, but the higher condition not be met. Then S is not justified in phi-ing, under the circumstances, even though she knows p, and even though, were p better warranted, she would be.
But maybe that argument went a little too quick. For maybe it's question-begging to assume, as I did, that one can know p without being in the super-epistemic position, under the circumstances described. Maybe the act of promising collapses that distinction. If so, then my argument against (2) can be resisted. Indeed, it's sort of the point of (2) that the 'standards' for knowledge raise to as high a level as one might need in any given circumstance.
But -- and here's the main point of this post -- one can retain (1) without collapsing that distinction. That's another respect in which (1) is interestingly different from (2).
Assertability and Norms of Assertion
Here's a crazy thesis that nobody holds:
(1) If S knows that p, then S is permitted to assert that p.
There are boring counterexamples to (1). For instance, there are cases in which I am morally forbidden from asserting things that I know. This, of course, shows nothing interesting about the relationship between knowledge and assertion. So to capture the content of the interesting claim in the neighborhood, we move from (1) to something subtler and less crazy; maybe something like one of these:
(2) If S knows that p, then no epistemic shortcoming in S can explain why asserting that p would be inappropriate.
(3) If S knows that p, then S is in a strong enough epistemic position to assert that p.
(4) If S knows that p, then improving S's epistemic position won't put S in a position to assert p.
Maybe (2)-(4) are equivalent to one another; I'm not sure. They do a better job than (1) does at rendering certain kinds of cases of knowledge without assertability irrelevant. But they, too, are subject to conclusive refutation in a way orthogonal to the knowledge norm of assertion. My argument against (1) concerned cases in which I'm morally prohibited from asserting something, even though I know it -- maybe telling the Nazis where the Jews are hiding or something like that. But there are also cases in which I'm morally prohibited from asserting something, even though I know it, where a failure in my epistemic position plays a role in explaining the prohibition. There are boring cases like this. For instance, suppose that I've made a promise to assert that p only if I know that q. (Maybe promising by itself is insufficient for the relevant duties; stipulate that we're talking about a promise that carries serious moral weight.) Now suppose I know p, but don't know q. It's impermissible to assert that p, even though I know p -- and even though a deficiency in my epistemic position plays a role in explaining why p is unassertable. These cases, too, show that (2)-(4) don't get to the heart of the matter.
And it won't help to relativize the claims about strength of position to p, either. That is, these attempts at the knowledge norm face the same problem:
(5) If S knows that p, then S is in a strong enough epistemic position with respect to p to assert that p.
(6) If S knows that p, then improving S's epistemic position with respect to p won't put S in a position to assert p.
(7) If S knows that p, then p is, for S, warranted enough to justify S in asserting that p.
For take the special case of the sort of example given above where q is a proposition about S's epistemic position with respect to p. For instance, suppose I've promised not to assert p unless this condition is met: I know that I know that I'm absolutely certain that p. Suppose also that I know p, but don't know that I know that I'm absolutely certain that p. Under the circumstances, p is unassertable, because my epistemic position with respect to p isn't strong enough. But that doesn't show us anything interesting about the knowledge norm of assertion, if the latter is meant to be understood as showing something interesting distinctively about assertion.
What the knowledge norm of assertion suggests is that there's a special way that assertions can fail qua assertions. It says that if S knows p, then an assertion that p doesn't fail in this particular way. It doesn't provide any sufficient conditions for not failing in some other way, even when you build in all of these conditions about S's epistemic position.
Therefore, none of (1)-(7) are closely related to:
(Norm) Knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion.
This post has gone on long enough for now, but I'll close by just asserting that many attempts to argue against the knowledge norm of assertion really look like arguments against some or all of (1)-(7); this is a mistake. I've argued that (1)-(7) are definitely false, for boring reasons that don't have anything to do with assertion in particular. If all you have is a case along with intuitions about what is known and what is unassertable, and why it's unassertable or under what circumstances that unassertability would be rectified, then you don't have anything strong enough to speak directly to (Norm). To evaluate (Norm) via the method of cases, you'd need to have intuitions about whether the assertion suffers from a particular kind of failure qua assertion. These, I think, we rarely have at any kind of pretheoretic level.
(1) If S knows that p, then S is permitted to assert that p.
There are boring counterexamples to (1). For instance, there are cases in which I am morally forbidden from asserting things that I know. This, of course, shows nothing interesting about the relationship between knowledge and assertion. So to capture the content of the interesting claim in the neighborhood, we move from (1) to something subtler and less crazy; maybe something like one of these:
(2) If S knows that p, then no epistemic shortcoming in S can explain why asserting that p would be inappropriate.
(3) If S knows that p, then S is in a strong enough epistemic position to assert that p.
(4) If S knows that p, then improving S's epistemic position won't put S in a position to assert p.
Maybe (2)-(4) are equivalent to one another; I'm not sure. They do a better job than (1) does at rendering certain kinds of cases of knowledge without assertability irrelevant. But they, too, are subject to conclusive refutation in a way orthogonal to the knowledge norm of assertion. My argument against (1) concerned cases in which I'm morally prohibited from asserting something, even though I know it -- maybe telling the Nazis where the Jews are hiding or something like that. But there are also cases in which I'm morally prohibited from asserting something, even though I know it, where a failure in my epistemic position plays a role in explaining the prohibition. There are boring cases like this. For instance, suppose that I've made a promise to assert that p only if I know that q. (Maybe promising by itself is insufficient for the relevant duties; stipulate that we're talking about a promise that carries serious moral weight.) Now suppose I know p, but don't know q. It's impermissible to assert that p, even though I know p -- and even though a deficiency in my epistemic position plays a role in explaining why p is unassertable. These cases, too, show that (2)-(4) don't get to the heart of the matter.
And it won't help to relativize the claims about strength of position to p, either. That is, these attempts at the knowledge norm face the same problem:
(5) If S knows that p, then S is in a strong enough epistemic position with respect to p to assert that p.
(6) If S knows that p, then improving S's epistemic position with respect to p won't put S in a position to assert p.
(7) If S knows that p, then p is, for S, warranted enough to justify S in asserting that p.
For take the special case of the sort of example given above where q is a proposition about S's epistemic position with respect to p. For instance, suppose I've promised not to assert p unless this condition is met: I know that I know that I'm absolutely certain that p. Suppose also that I know p, but don't know that I know that I'm absolutely certain that p. Under the circumstances, p is unassertable, because my epistemic position with respect to p isn't strong enough. But that doesn't show us anything interesting about the knowledge norm of assertion, if the latter is meant to be understood as showing something interesting distinctively about assertion.
What the knowledge norm of assertion suggests is that there's a special way that assertions can fail qua assertions. It says that if S knows p, then an assertion that p doesn't fail in this particular way. It doesn't provide any sufficient conditions for not failing in some other way, even when you build in all of these conditions about S's epistemic position.
Therefore, none of (1)-(7) are closely related to:
(Norm) Knowledge is the constitutive norm of assertion.
This post has gone on long enough for now, but I'll close by just asserting that many attempts to argue against the knowledge norm of assertion really look like arguments against some or all of (1)-(7); this is a mistake. I've argued that (1)-(7) are definitely false, for boring reasons that don't have anything to do with assertion in particular. If all you have is a case along with intuitions about what is known and what is unassertable, and why it's unassertable or under what circumstances that unassertability would be rectified, then you don't have anything strong enough to speak directly to (Norm). To evaluate (Norm) via the method of cases, you'd need to have intuitions about whether the assertion suffers from a particular kind of failure qua assertion. These, I think, we rarely have at any kind of pretheoretic level.
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