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Justification, knowledge, and normality

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There is much to like about the idea that justification should be understood in terms of normality or normic support (Smith in Between probability and certainty, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016; Goodman and Salow in Philosophical Studies 175: 183–196, 2018). The view does a nice job explaining why we should think that lottery beliefs differ in justificatory status from mundane perceptual or testimonial beliefs. And it seems to do that in a way that is friendly to a broadly internalist approach to justification. In spite of its attractions, we think that the normic support view faces two serious challenges. The first is that it delivers the wrong result in preface cases. Such cases suggest that the view is either too sceptical or to externalist. The second is that the view struggles with certain kinds of Moorean absurdities. It turns out that these problems can easily be avoided. If we think of normality as a condition on knowledge, we can characterise justification in terms of its connection to knowledge and thereby avoid the difficulties discussed here. The resulting view does an equally good job explaining why we should think that our perceptual and testimonial beliefs are justified when lottery beliefs cannot be. Thus, it seems that little could be lost and much could be gained by revising the proposal and adopting a view on which it is knowledge, not justification that depends directly upon normality.

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Notes

  1. Littlejohn (2012), McDowell (1998: 395), Praolini (2019) and Williamson (2013) also defend views on which doxastic justification requires truth.

  2. An anonymous referee raised the reasonable concern that describing views like Sutton's as ‘too externalist’ might needlessly annoy card-carrying externalists. The authors of this paper understand this concern. One of them is a card-carrying externalist, one who thinks that Sutton was right when he said that a belief is justified iff that belief constitutes knowledge. Because of this, this author is frequently told that his view, unlike reliabilist views, is ‘too externalist’ to merit serious consideration. We hope that readers won’t be bothered by the casual use of this talk of a view being ‘too externalist’ when they know that one of the authors talking this way is frequently a target of this kind of criticism. For what it is worth, this author likes the accounts sketched in §4 because he sees the need for a more subjective, more internalist mode of epistemic evaluation. He prefers to think of this kind of evaluation as more concerned with rationality than with doxastic justification, but he is happy to go along with the idea that justification should be understood as something like rationality and something that depends primarily upon features of the thinker’s mental life.

  3. This objection is heard often in conversation. See Gerken (2018) and Huemer (2006) for similar ideas in print. Note that on Huemer’s view even standard reliabilists face the problem. Since the views proposed here are compatible with Huemer’s idea that justification supervenes upon an individual’s non-factive mental states, we need not worry too much about whether his charge against standard reliabilism is warranted.

  4. See also Goodman and Salow (2018). We focus on Smith’s more detailed account. In Sect. 4 we suggest endorsing Goodman and Salow’s account of knowledge, not their account of justification.

  5. More precisely: \({\text{E}}\) normically supports \(p\) iff for any E-world at which \(p\) is false, there is a more normal E-world such that \(p\) holds at all E-worlds at least as normal as it. See Smith (2016, §7.1, §8.1). The simpler version will do for our purposes.

  6. There are alternative proposals as to why it is not appropriate to punish on the basis of statistical evidence alone. In these debates, many of us want to follow Adler (2002) and Buchak (2013) in saying that it would not be proper to punish or hold someone responsible if it were not proper to believe that they were guilty. On Smith’s proposal, the lack of justification for the relevant beliefs about guilt is chalked up to the fact that the thinker does not have the right kind of evidential support. See Moss (2018) for the claim that further, non-epistemic factors are involved and Gardiner (2018) for a response.

  7. The preface was first introduced into the literature by Makinson (1965). For further support for the idea that there can be justified or rational inconsistency, see Christensen (2004), Easwaran and Fitelson (2015), Foley (1992), and Worsnip (2016). For dissenting views, see Adler (2002), Evnine (1999), Leitgeb (2017), Pollock (1986), Roush (2010) and Ryan (1991).

  8. See Bird (2007) for a defense of this view. We shall consider similar proposals below. For our purposes, subjects are ‘internally alike’ when they are in the same non-factive mental states (e.g., the one seems to see what the other sees, seems to remember what the other remembers, believes what the other knows, etc.). On this way of thinking about things, you might have an internal duplicate who has recently been envatted but would not have an internal duplicate on Twin Earth if the thinkers located there have propositional attitudes with different contents. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.

  9. This assumes that one’s evidence holds at some world in the actual world’s system of spheres, hence at the very least that it is consistent. Pleading that one’s evidence is inconsistent in the case would not help, however, as inconsistent evidence provides normic support for any proposition whatsoever.

  10. An anonymous referee raises an interesting question here: does knowability in the relevant range of cases correlate with the true value of Blackstone’s ratio? Recall that Blackstone’s ratio is a purported measure of the relative disvalue of jailing the innocent and letting the guilty go free, which Blackstone himself put above ten to one: “It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer” (2001 [1763]). The suggestion, we take it, is that there is a true value of Blackstone’s ratio and that it correlates with structural constraints on knowability. For instance, one might think that one known error defeats ten items of knowledge, that is, that if one knows that there are k errors in a set of n internally alike propositions then one knows at most n-10k propositions in the set. Now suppose we adopt the idea defended by Moss (2018) that one should convict only the known guilty and let others go free. The structural constraint would then mean in cases like Judicial Review one should let out up to ten guilty people, but no more than ten, for each known innocent, in line with Blackstone’s original ratio. While we don’t immediately see why knowability would be so constrained, the proposal is worth exploring. Elsewhere we have explored another way of relating something like Blackstone’s ratio with norms of judgement in these cases. Littlejohn (2017) and Dutant and Fitelson (MS) defend a view on which what’s rational to believe depends on the probability that the thinker’s belief would amount to knowledge. The relevant probability threshold can be thought of capturing the relative disvalue of jailing somebody whose guilt is unknown versus that of letting those known to be guilty go free. The two approaches are not incompatible. One of the authors of this paper vacillates between the probable knowledge proposal and the straightforward knowledge norm. Because he still defends the view from his (2012) that innocent people are owed compensation whenever wrongfully convicted, he prefers the externalist accounts of just conviction that Moss defends, but he sees the virtue of characterising some more subjective notion to understand when an agent or a jury rationally comes to the conclusion that someone is guilty.

  11. Compare Holliday’s (2015) “RS∀∃” relevant alternatives models for knowledge. On these models, for each proposition there is a set of alternatives relevant to whether one knows it (rather than there being one set of alternatives that is relevant for each proposition to whether one knows it).

  12. That does not mean that Normality* rules out defeat: had the doctor said that some individual answer was false, their report would have been part of the evidence relevant to that answer.

  13. See Smith’s (2016: 144) discussion of weakening the consequent.

  14. While we frame our discussion in terms of knowledge we note that we would be equally happy for it to be framed in terms of what one is in a position to know. While we think that it’s not rational to believe Moorean absurdities, we acknowledge that some authors (e.g., McGlynn 2013) think that it would be fine to believe \(p\) whilst believing that \(p\) is not something we can know.

  15. See Smith (2016, chp. 7) on safe support. \({\text{E}}\) safely supports \(p\) at world w iff all E-worlds close to w are \(p\) worlds. It follows that if \({\text{E}}\) includes \(p\) then it safely supports p.

  16. See Stalnaker (2015) for an opposing view. Note that even if, like Goodman (2013), one adopted a model of knowledge that blocks improbable knowing, one would still fall short of the principle that if one knows, one’s evidence supports the hypothesis that one knows. On Goodman’s models, knowing is compatible with it being significantly likely (though not more likely than not) that one doesn’t know.

  17. A related puzzle is raised by Dorst (2019). If one’s body of knowledge includes \(p\) but not Kp, it looks like it can be augmented with ~ Kp and still support \(p\). If so, it would support conditionals of the form “If I don’t know \(p\) then \(p\)”, which Dorst deems “abominable”. Dorst’s preferred solution is to deny the antecedent and endorse the KK principle: if one’s body of knowledge includes \(p\) then it also includes Kp. As we said above, we think KK is too strong. We think the proposals sketched in the next section offer a more promising path to account for the infelicity. For instance, provided Moorean pairs of beliefs cannot be rationally believed (more on this below), the conditionals are “junk” in Sorensen’s (1988) sense that one cannot come to rationally believe the antecedent without losing rational belief in the conditional. (Given the mild assumption that if it’s rational to believe “If I don’t know \(p\) then \(p\)” it’s rational to believe “I know p” for the latter is equivalent to the material implication corresponding to the conditional, namely “I know \(p\) or \(p\)”.).

  18. See Jenkins (2006), Ball (2013), Greco (2014), Stalnaker (2015), Dutant (2016) and Goodman and Salow (2018) for accounts along those lines. Views of that kind are sometimes put forward to vindicate the KK principle (Greco, Stalnaker, Goodman and Salow). This is controversial, however. In addition to Williamson’s (2000) criticisms of the principle, readers should consult Goodman (2013, Sect. 3) who argues that normality conditions on knowledge are plausible independently of KK and Carter (2018) who argues that the account does not support the KK principle.

  19. Bird (2007) doesn’t frame the view in terms of internal duplicates but rather in terms of subjects sharing their mental (incl. factive) states before forming the target belief. Littlejohn (2018) discusses some difficulties preface cases present for these views when they’re combined with E = K and related accounts of evidence (e.g., that evidence consists of basic knowledge). Conditionalising on such evidence can make it hard to see how each belief in the relevant inconsistent sets can be justified. This problem is similar in some ways to the problem that Praolini (2019) raises for epistemologists who accept certain closure principles.

  20. Note that while this view handles Eye Exam and Judicial Review reasonably well, it will have to deny that knowledge is sufficient for justification if there are cases of improbable knowing (Williamson 2014) or cases in which knowing is compatible with an insufficiently high probability that one knows (as e.g. in Goodman 2013). For a defence of ‘unreasonable knowledge’, see Lasonen-Aarnio (2010). In Littlejohn and Dutant (forthcoming), we defend a view of rational belief and the defeat of rationality on which ex ante rationality is characterised in terms of the probability of being in a position to know. We think that this approach provides a much more straightforward account of higher-order defeat and negative self-appraisal defeat (i.e., the defeat associated with judgments about what can be known, what can be rationally believed, what the evidence supports) than more familiar truth-centric approaches to rationality.

  21. Lenzen (1978) and Stalnaker (2006) use the idea as an account of belief rather than justified belief (though their notion of belief is idealized). Dutant (forthcoming) puts forward a related account on which justification to believe \(p\) doesn’t merely require that \(p\) is known at some epistemically possible case but that \(p\) is known at all epistemically possible cases that are “best” along some dimension. On all these proposals Moore-paradoxical pairs of beliefs cannot be justified. On the Rosenkranz, Lenzen and Stalnaker proposals the result requires the luminosity of justification, for substituting ~ K~K for J in Jp → ~J ~ Kp gives us ~ K~Kp → ~~K ~ K~Kp. On Dutant’s proposal that follows from factivity alone, since no matter what the best epistemically possible cases are they are not cases where one knows \(p\) and that knows that one doesn’t know \(p\).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Alexander Bird, Branden Fitelson, Dan Greco, John Hawthorne, Francesco Praolini, Sven Rosenkranz, Sherri Roush, Bernhard Salow, Martin Smith, and Tim Williamson for discussing these issues with us. We would also like to thank an anonymous referee for this journal for their helpful comments.

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Littlejohn, C., Dutant, J. Justification, knowledge, and normality. Philos Stud 177, 1593–1609 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-019-01276-2

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