Abstract
Harman and Lewis credit Kripke with having formulated a puzzle that seems to show that knowledge entails dogmatism. The puzzle is widely regarded as having been solved. In this paper we argue that this standard solution, in its various versions, addresses only a limited aspect of the puzzle and holds no promise of fully resolving it. Analyzing this failure and the proper rendering of the puzzle, it is suggested that it poses a significant challenge for the defense of epistemic closure.
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Notes
We could start with ‘S knows that p’ and proceed from this assumption to (1). To avoid nonessential objections we begin at the outset with (1).
There are different ways in which evidence can be misleading. For instance, there may be room for setting apart undermining from overriding misleading evidence (we thank Mikael Janvid for noting this). For this distinction in a different context see Pollock and Cruz (1999, p. 196) and Casullo (2003, pp. 44–45). This distinction sometimes collapses: there are cases where the known proposition is unlikely, and hence any evidence that calls the original evidence into question (undermining the evidence), automatically counts in favor of ~p (overriding evidence). Aside from these collapsed cases (which are covered by the argument) in what follows, we will use misleading evidence to mean evidence counting in favor of a false proposition. Counter-evidence and undermining evidence will mean evidence that counts in favor of the negation of what one believes. Undermining evidence is not dealt with here other than when it collapses into overriding evidence (i.e. it supports ~p).
The ways in which knowledge is undermined can vary. Contextualists and subject sensitive invariantists may say that encountering misleading counter evidence raises the standards of justification. Others might have other ideas. But the exact mechanism of knowledge defeat does not matter for present purposes. What does matter is that at t 0 a subject counts as knowing that evidence e’ is misleading. If it turns out that there is no plausible mechanism of knowledge defeat, so much the better for our argument. Nevertheless, contextualists who do not accept the assumption that at t 0 one knows that e’ is misleading are not susceptible to the arguments below. In this respect, if we are right, the comments made by Hawthorne (2004, p. 73, footnote 63) in relation to contextualism are defused, and contextualism is restored as a contender for resolving the paradox. Nevertheless, contextualists will have to deal with the drawback of admitting that at t 0 a subject will not know that p is true (and there seems to be little temptation in doing so—see footnote 28). Moreover, there is a further problem, briefly sketched in footnote 29. We do not however claim to have shown that contextualist cannot find a way to mitigate these challenges.
We take this opportunity to thank an anonymous referee of this journal for drawing our attention to this, as well as more thoroughgoing points which substantially improved our thinking about the puzzle.
Notice that evidence e’ does not have to undermine but merely weaken S’s justification for believing that p to a degree that would make S no longer count as knowing that p. It therefore only undermines the knowledge and not necessarily the justification or the evidence.
Harman only considers (a)-cases, nevertheless his careful (if somewhat confusing) formulation, leaves room for (b)-cases as well. See the quote above.
It might still be required for solving a related problem having to do with justification, specifically, with the question of whether someone is justified in believing that any counter evidence is misleading. Since we do not question justification closure, we do not address this problem.
Dan Holliday suggested the following analogy: Harman’s allowance of dogmatism as long as one has not encountered counter-evidence is similar to accepting racism as long as one doesn’t encounter people of a different race.
We borrow the term “epistemic reach” from Egan (2007, p. 8).
This account is based on the account of conditionals originally defended by Jackson (1979), according to which indicative conditionals have material implication truth conditions (what has become known as the horseshoe analysis). Indicative conditionals are true if either their antecedent is false or their consequent is true. Perhaps this is the place to mention that if in accordance with some theorist’s view, indicative conditionals have no truth conditions, the problem we are considering takes on a very different form. Note, however, that there is a way to formulate the same problem using disjunction (see the discussion of Hawthorne’s version of the problem below). Whether the problem in its conditional form is really different from the one in the disjunctive form is not an issue that we will take up here.
Although (9) is true, i.e. the conditional is known, in asserting it a subject represents herself as having different evidence than she actually has, and is therefore misleading her audience. Hers is unassertible knowledge (in Jackson’s technical sense).
Hawthorne substantially improves on Sorensen’s and Harman’s account by providing a formulation of this principle. He candidly admits, however, that a counterfactual (or subjunctive) characterization of this sort is problematic (see his 2004, footnote on p. 72).
Assuming that one cannot know a proposition irrationally, one loses knowledge even if one irrationally holds on to the disjunction.
In fact, since (12) and Hawthorne’s disjunction are equivalent, it’s hard to see how one might resist this reading.
Admittedly there is a complication here if we assume a deterministic world in which it is already determinately settled at t 0 that Doug will report to me at t 1 that the car is not in the parking lot. If the world is in fact deterministic, the antecedent of (9) is true at the outset, that is, at t 0. Hence, I believe falsely that he will not so report. And if we agree that one cannot have knowledge that depends on a false belief, I do not know (9) at t 0. This added complication would, then, cause trouble for Sorensen’s account and would further strengthen our case since there is no temptation whatsoever to say that in such cases (7) is not known at the outset.
The nature of this dependence is notoriously difficult to pin down, as difficult as it is to determine the proper relations between evidence and that which it supports. In light of this our strategy here is to show that, whatever the precise nature of the dependence in Gettier cases, the beliefs in the case under consideration bear it to each other.
False beliefs regarding the non-existence of undermining counter-evidence do not pertain to the evidence one does have for one’s belief. Thus Jim can know that Manchester United won despite his false belief that evidence to the contrary does not exist. But his justification for believing the conditional relies on the false belief that The Guardian did not report what it actually did. So in this case, as in the Gettier cases, once the falsity of his belief is revealed one would no longer be taken to have any justification for one’s belief. The false belief directly undermines Jim’s knowledge, as is made evident by the exposure test below.
There is a way to further simplify the case without changing any of its essential features. Say Jim read of the victory in the Guardian two days ago not hearing anything more of the game since then. He knows that they have reported on the game yesterday, and deduces from the knowledge of Manchester United’s victory that: If The Guardian reported yesterday that Manchester United had not won the game, then The Guardian’s report from yesterday and not of two days ago is mistaken. It is then more apparent that Jim’s knowledge of this conditional depends on (i).
If one believes that if p then it is highly probable that q and that if p then not-q, one ought in order to maximize consistency, believe that not-p.
A more direct way to reach the same conclusion runs as follows: Jim justifiably believes that The Times and The Guardian are highly reliable. Jim knows that The Times reported a Manchester United victory, and that The Guardian reported the outcome of the game. Hence, Jim believes that The Guardian too reported a Manchester United victory. He would be irrational in believing anything else given his evidence.
Thus even if he were to infer (12) directly from the belief that Manchester United won yesterday’s match, Jim would still have to rely on the false belief that the antecedent is false since he believes the consequent is false. The belief in Manchester United’s victory itself depends on no false belief since it is based on the evidence supplied by The Times’ report.
Thanks to Karl Karlander for this important point.
Russell (1948, p. 154).
Some might object that our argument perhaps relies on some vexed issues having to do with indicative conditionals. This, however, is not the case. Consider Hawthorne’s original example. This was a case of a junk disjunctive knowledge, not junk knowledge of conditionals. In conversation John Hawthorne said that he presented this example in disjunctive form to stay clear of the well known problems having to do with indicative conditionals. We take this opportunity to thank him for his advice regarding the argument of this section.
We may conclude that all ravens are black based on numerous observations of what appear to be black ravens, despite the fact that some of them were actually mock-ravens. Finding out that a few samples were not real ravens should not change one’s belief that all ravens are black nor the justification for this belief.
Notice that given his evidential situation Jim cannot remain neutral on these matters. Doing so would be irrational since Jim’s beliefs would be grossly disproportional to his evidence. This is perhaps the place to recall Sorensen’s account. The version of the problem that relates to justification and evidence is dealt with by the “junk” account for justification. Obviously when one encounters counter-evidence one can lose one’s justification. Rather than challenging his account (that relies on Harman’s observation) our argument relies on one having “junk” justification. Gettier’s examples are, of course, meant to challenge knowledge not justification.
We are not suggesting that we have supplied a completely general criterion distinguishing knowledge-undermining false belief and false beliefs that do not undermine knowledge. What we claim to have shown is that the present case is on a par with the central Gettier cases in which the false belief is an actual part of one’s justification and not just a tacitly assumed counterfactual, and is also essential to one’s justification in the sense that without it one would have none (unlike the case of a few false instances in one’s inductive base, instances which would not undermine one’s knowledge even if one knew the reason for which his belief is false).
In many, perhaps all, the examples proposed as counter examples to the principle of closure, the intuition against closure seems to be based on the observation that the original item of evidence—the way in which one comes to know a proposition—does not support one of the consequences of this proposition. The same feature is in play here, yet the present case has the added advantage of being immune to the counter claim, that if one does not know the consequence on the basis of proper derivation one loses the original item of knowledge. In the present case there is no temptation to say this. We agree, then, with the standard account about the subject’s epistemic state vis-a’-vis the original item of knowledge.
Notice that contextualists need to provide some reasons for why Jim does not know the original proposition and if so how this case differs from others where knowledge is not lost. After all no false beliefs are necessarily involved in knowledge of the original proposition. In other words, even though contextualist like Lewis (1999) can explain why at t 0 Jim does not know that if The Guardian reported a Manchester United loss, The Guardian is mistaken, it is harder in this case to see why Jim does not know that Manchester United won the game. Perhaps the complexity of the case muddles intuitions here, but on the face of it, it is not clear that contextualists hold the key to dissolving this problem. Cf. note 29.
Dogmatism, we therefore believe, is on a par with the problem of “easy knowledge”. The two issues involve similar problematic consequences of epistemic closure. Dogmatism in effect asks: How can one know on the basis of one’s actual knowledge-supporting evidence that counter evidence will be misleading? The problem of easy knowledge can be cast as the question: How can one know on the basis of one’s actual knowledge supporting evidence that this evidence is not misleading? Accordingly, a proper solution to any of these problems must be one that also addresses the other. We leave the full articulation of this line of argument for another occasion. Let us merely note that the close affinity between dogmatism and easy knowledge (which is a tough challenge for contextualism among other accounts of knowledge), is another reason for skepticism regarding the prospects of a distinctively contextualist solution for dogmatism. Again, although we believe this, we do not claim to have shown that contextualism is unable to resolve the puzzle. Doing so requires more extensive argument than we have space for here and would divert our present purpose. For more on “easy knowledge” see specifically: Cohen (2002, 2005), Hawthorne (2004) and Vogel (2000, 2007).
We are indebted to Hagit Benbaji, David Enoch, John Hawthorne, Dan Holliday, Mikael Janvid, Karl Karlander, Maria Lasonen-Aarnio, Krista Lawlor, Peter Pagin, and an anonymous referee for this journal for many helpful comments. We have also benefited from the responses of participants in the Philosophy of Science Seminar at Stockholm University.
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Sharon, A., Spectre, L. Dogmatism repuzzled. Philos Stud 148, 307–321 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9330-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9330-1