Abstract
Jessica Brown argues against infallibilist views of knowledge as follows. (1) Infallibilism is committed to the sufficiency of knowledge for self-support: if one knows that p, then p is part of one's evidence for p. (2) This commitment is false: often one knows that p, but p isn't part of one's evidence for p. So (3) infallibilism about knowledge is false. I’ll respond by questioning the motivation for (2). Brown’s main line of argument in defense of (2) concerns the awkwardness of citing a proposition as evidence in support of itself. I’ll argue that this infelicity, while genuine, stem not from any particular view about knowledge, but from a probabilistic conception of evidential support. Given such a conception of evidential support, whenever E is part of someone’s evidence, E is evidence for E. This is no less awkward for the fallibilist than the infallibilist. I’ll argue that if we adopt a contextualist view of evidence, we can hold on to the independently attractive probabilistic conception of evidential support, while respecting the idea that there's something wrong with citing a proposition as evidence for itself.
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Notes
If this inequality doesn’t hold—if the probability of smoke given smoke isn’t greater than the prior probability of smoke—that can only be because the prior probability of smoke is 1. But then Smoke isn’t evidence for anything (relative to that prior probability function), since conditioning that prior probability function on Smoke leaves it unchanged. There are difficulties here, generally discussed under the heading of the “problem of old evidence”. (Zynda, 1995) My own view is that they’re not fatal to probabilistic conceptions of evidential support; in particular, I’m persuaded by Lange’s (1999) response.
See, e.g., Hasan and Fumerton (2016).
See, e.g., Pryor (2000) for a representative example.
See Drayson (2014).
See, e.g., McGrath (2018).
While the view that E = K is perhaps an extreme example of this tendency, there are plenty of contemporary epistemologists who reject E = K while still endorsing views of evidence that allow dubitable propositions to be evidence, on broadly anti-skeptical grounds. Pryor (2000) was already mentioned. Harman (2001) is another salient example.
See Greco (2017).
References
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Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford University Press.
Zynda, L. (1995). Old Evidence and new theories. Philosophical Studies, 77, 67–95.
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Greco, D. Self supporting evidence. Philos Stud 179, 2665–2673 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01784-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01784-8