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Why purists should be infallibilists

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Abstract

Two of the most orthodox ideas in epistemology are fallibilism and purism. According to the fallibilist, one can know that a particular claim is true even though one’s justification for that claim is less than fully conclusive. According to the purist, knowledge does not depend on practical factors. Fallibilism and purism are widely assumed to be compatible; in fact, the combination of these views has been called the ‘ho-hum,’ obvious, traditional view of knowledge. But I will argue that fallibilism and purism are incompatible. The best explanation for fallibilism requires one to reject purism, while maintaining purism should lead one to reject fallibilism. It follows that the orthodox view of knowledge is deeply mistaken.

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Notes

  1. Reed (2002) and Brown (2018) discuss how to formulate fallibilism precisely.

  2. Some theorists argue that infallibilism need not entail skepticism. I will return to this issue shortly.

  3. One might characterize purism more broadly as the view that epistemic concepts (not just knowledge) are free from practical concerns (Kim 2017), but I will focus specifically on knowledge.

  4. New evil demon cases suggest that truth conduciveness is not the best or only way to understand ‘purely epistemic’ factors (see Cohen 1984), but I will set this complication aside. As cited above, the literature on (im)purism seems to characterize epistemic factors in terms of their truth conduciveness.

  5. I am interested in knowledge, so I set aside the semantic thesis that practical factors are relevant for determining the meaning of ‘knows’ in a conversational context.

  6. See Rysiew (2001, 2007), Bach (2005, 2010), Brown (2006, 2008, 2012), Nagel (2008), Lackey (2010), Pritchard (2010), Reed (2010, 2012) and Gerken (2017).

  7. Williams (1991) defends this interpretation of Hume, and Williams (1978) defends this interpretation of Descartes.

  8. Lewis (1996) claims to defend a version of contextualism is that both infallibilist and non-skeptical. It is doubtful, however, that he avoids the perils of skepticism (see Hannon 2017a: 134–136 for an overview). Further, we might question whether his view is really infallibilist. According to Lewis, ‘knowledge’ requires one to rule out all relevant alternatives (hence, he says it is infallibilist); but what counts as ‘all’ depends on the context. Lewis allows that in some (low-standards) situations one may ‘know’ that p even though one is in a fairly weak epistemic position. For this reason I doubt Lewis’s view is true to the spirit of infallibilism.

  9. Brown (2018) convincingly argues that infallibilists can avoid skepticism only at the cost of problematic commitments concerning evidence and evidential support. In particular, Brown says the infallibilist is committed to two things: a factive, non-psychological conception of evidence on which knowledge is sufficient for evidence; also, the infallibist must claim that if one knows that p, then p is part of one’s evidence for p. This opens up the infallibilist to two objections: first, it is typically infelicitious to cite a known proposition as evidence for itself; second, the infallibilist view of evidence allows two subjects who are intuitively equally justified in believing some claim are not in fact equally justified (see Chapters 2 and 3 of Brown’s book). Brown therefore concludes that infallibilists must choose between skepticism or give up invariantism.

  10. Stanley uses the label “intellectualism” rather than purism.

  11. The literature on this topic tends to focus specifically on what is at stake for an individual, but all sorts of practical factors can presumably make for the presence or absence of knowledge. Thus, the focus on ‘stakes sensitivity’ is misleading. For a defense of the view that ‘practical factors’ include more than just what is at stake, see Anderson (2015), Turri et al. (2016), Pinillos (2016), Gerken (2017) and Roeber (forthcoming).

  12. Brian Kim (2017: 2) distinguishes these options.

  13. The classic defenders of impurism are Fantl and McGrath (2002, 2007, 2009), Hawthorne (2004) and Stanley (2005). This view is also called ‘practicalism’ (Grimm 2011) and ‘pragmatism’ (Roeber forthcoming). I avoid the labels ‘subject-sensitive invariantism’ (Hawthorne 2004) and ‘interest-relative invariantism’ (Stanley 2005) for reasons that will become apparent.

  14. Earlier statements of this idea can be found in Williams (1973: 146) and Sosa (1988: 152). Contemporary defenders of this view include Greco (2008), Henderson (2009), McKenna (2013) and Hannon (2019).

  15. See Heller (1999), Greco (2008) and Henderson (2009) for a defense of this claim.

  16. See Kvanvig (2009: 344), Kappel (2010), Kelp (2011) and Rysiew (2012).

  17. See Williams (1978: 46) and Grimm (2011: 726–727).

  18. For a defense of the knowledge norm of assertion, see Unger (1975) and Williamson (2000).

  19. For a defense of the knowledge norm of practical reasoning, see Hawthorne (2004) and Hawthorne and Stanley (2008).

  20. It would likely be too overwhelming to proceed in probabilistic terms, and we rarely know probabilities with enough precision to arrive at anything very definite on this basis, and we ultimately have to actually do some particular thing and not just probably do it.

  21. I take this argument from Grimm (2011: 728).

  22. BonJour (2010) claims this problem vexes all types of fallibilism, not just purist fallibilism. He argues that fallibilists cannot specify what level of justification is required for knowledge, nor can they explain why any level of justification that is less than fully conclusive would have the significance that makes knowledge valuable. Elsewhere I have explained why appealing to practical considerations will solve these problems (2019), so I will not recapitulate the details of my view here. What matters for the purpose of this paper is that the purist has no explanation for why less than perfect justification would be required for knowledge.

  23. Insofar as one thinks that justification, evidence, or reliability is required for knowledge, and that these things come in degrees, the purist will face the challenge of explaining why purely epistemic considerations could lead on to think that less than maximal evidence, infallible justification, or perfect reliability would be enough for knowledge. It is possible that this worry for purism will not arise on certain alternative frameworks, such as Williamson’s (2000) knowledge-first epistemology. More specifically, these threshold worries might not arise for anyone who rejects scalar models of justification, evidence, or reliability (or simply rejects that we should understand knowledge in these terms). If that is right, than perhaps my argument can be taken as a reason to think some alternative framework is correct. I remain neutral on that issue.

  24. In Judgment and Agency, Sosa does not say that purism has to go if we reject fallibilism; but he does say that we need to understand how a threshold is set, and that it is hard to see how this could be understood except through pragmatic encroachment.

  25. This is intended to capture both ‘interest-relative invariantism’ (Stanley 2005) and ‘subject-sensitive invariantism’ (Hawthorne 2004).

  26. Contextualists and relativists have focused on the practical interests of attributors, evaluators, and third parties in determining the truth conditions of knowledge claims (see DeRose 2009; MacFarlane 2005; Greco 2008; Henderson 2009), but some impurists have said these practical interests bear on knowledge itself (see Grimm 2015; Hannon 2017b).

  27. See Schaffer (2006), Russell and Doris (2008), Reed (2010), Brown (2014) and Anderson (2015) for versions of this objection.

  28. See Grimm (2015) and Hannon (2017b) for this sort of view.

  29. See the Oxford English Dictionary.

  30. Sosa (2015) likewise distinguishes between occasion-relative encroachment (i.e. determined by the passing interests of the subject) and the need to relativize to a more general domain.

  31. In particular, this proposal seems compatible with ‘high-standards’ classical invariantism (Kelp 2011), ‘moderate’ classical invariantism (Kusch 2011), contextualism (Greco 2008), and sensitive invariantism (Grimm 2015).

  32. Practical factors are the only factors that could explain fallibilism, but I am not suggesting that one who takes practical factors into account must be a fallibilist. You might think the essential nature of knowledge (or the semantic core of our concept of knowledge) is revealed by purely epistemic considerations, and yet practical considerations could still play an important role in your epistemology because they explain and justify the procedures we follow in daily life. More specifically, the idea is that we recognize that for practical purposes we cannot entertain skeptical doubts, but from a purely epistemic perspective we come to realize that we really know little, if anything, about the world around us (see Stroud 1984). In other words, practical considerations explain why it is appropriate in the context of everyday life to say that people have knowledge, but this just reflects the “practical exigencies” of action rather than the true conditions for knowledge.

  33. Elsewhere I have argued that accounts of knowledge that proceed in abstraction from practical considerations are implausible because they mark the end of any contact with the practical requirements that explain why we have a concept of knowledge in the first place (Hannon 2019). But here I remain neutral on that issue.

  34. In contrast, Grimm (2011) rejects purism on these grounds.

  35. BonJour (2010) provides these explanations.

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    Michael Hannon

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Hannon, M. Why purists should be infallibilists. Philos Stud 177, 689–704 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-018-1200-x

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