Contextualism, Intellectualism, and Ignorant Third Persons

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

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

Asserting Kp v p

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is infallibility supposed to be?

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

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

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

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

Could there be Reductive Knowledge First?

Timothy Williamson has famously defended these two claims:

(1) Knowledge cannot be analyzed

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

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

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

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

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

Elusive There

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

Hawthorne against contextualist 'inappropriate'

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

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

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

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

Counterfactuals and Knowledge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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