Abstract
Here is a definition of knowledge: for you to know a proposition p is for you to have an outright belief in p that is correct precisely because it manifests the virtue of rationality. This definition resembles Ernest Sosa’s “virtue theory”, except that (a) on this definition, the only virtue that must be manifested (at least to some degree) in all instances of knowledge is rationality, and (b) no reductive account of rationality is attempted—rationality is assumed to be an irreducibly normative notion. This definition is compatible with “internalism” about rationality, and with a form of “pragmatic encroachment” on the conditions of rational outright belief. An interpretation is given of this definition, and especially of the sense of ’because’ that it involves. On this interpretation, this definition entails that both safety and adherence are necessary conditions on knowledge; it supports a kind of contextualism about terms like ‘knowledge’; and it provides resources to defend safety, adherence, and contextualism, against some recent objections.
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Notes
For an account of the nature of full or outright beliefs, see Wedgwood (2012a).
For this approach to characterizing this sort of explanatory connection, see Wedgwood (2006).
For an interesting contemporary discussion of this distinction within epistemology, see Turri (2010).
An anonymous reviewer for this journal raised the issue of a belief that results from the operation of two different dispositions—one of which is rational, while the other is not. The question here is whether (a) both these dispositions are causally necessary parts of a single sufficient causal explanation, or (b) each of these dispositions is sufficient by itself (so that we have a case of causal overdetermination). I am inclined to think that in the former case, the belief is not a case of believing rationally, but in the latter case, it is a case of believing rationally. So, more precisely, what is required for believing rationally is that the agent must manifest rational dispositions, and the manifestation of these rational dispositions must be a sufficient explanation of the agent’s having the belief. But it is not required that this should be the only sufficient explanation of the belief.
For my most recent statement of my arguments for internalism about rationality, see Wedgwood (2017, Chap. 7).
It is also compatible with the mixed view that I have defended—“Coherentism for enduring beliefs, foundationalism for mental events [of belief formation or belief revision]”; see Wedgwood (2012b, p. 286).
A further complication with these explanations is that even given this presupposed background of normal conditions, the regularities or laws of nature that underlie the explanation need not be strictly deterministic. So, it is enough if—within the relevant domain of close possible worlds—any case in which background conditions are normal, and in which the explanans holds, is also a case in which there is a sufficiently high chance of the explanandum’s also holding. To keep things simple, however, I shall ignore this complication in this discussion.
The problem of identifying the relevant range of cases is akin to what Conee and Feldman (1998) have called the “generality problem” for reliabilist theories of knowledge. If my account of knowledge is combined with a substantive theory of rationality, this theory of rationality should help to identify the relevant range of cases. The theory of rationality will supply a way of specifying the dispositions that are manifested in rationally-held beliefs; and the relevant cases must be similar with respect to the dispositions of this kind that are manifested in them.
Compare the claims that Williamson (2000, p. 100) about how to interpret a “reliability” condition on knowledge.
More recently, Sosa (2015) has distinguished between two kinds of belief—“functional belief” and “judgment”, where a “judgment” involves an act of “affirmation” that is intentionally aimed at the truth—and has argued that “aptness of judgment entails safety of affirmation” (79). However, Sosa (2015, p. 80) still explicitly claims: “an affirmation can be apt without being safe, without being one that would be true if made”. This is what I am denying here: my claim is that no kind of belief can be “apt” without also being in a way “safe”.
Christoph Kelp, the editor of this volume, has raised the following objection: “What if all of this is set up by a powerful demon who sees to it that (i) Sarah gets false testimony about who gets the job and (ii) that all propositions in the range of similar propositions that Sarah might rationally infer from it are true at the relevant nearby worlds?” But in this case, the agent’s circumstances are wildly abnormal. So, there are other cases, which are equally normal, where the demon has a slightly different plan, and so sees to it that all (or at least most) of the propositions that Sarah might rationally infer from this false proposition are false. Thus, introducing manipulative demons into the case will not make it safe in the relevant way.
This is how I would answer the objection of Lackey (2008, p. 34), that any version of the virtue theory that is strong enough to rule out the Gettier cases will also incorrectly rule out beliefs that are based on casual testimony. On my version of the theory, the force of ‘because’ in the formula ‘correct because rational’ is exhausted by the safety and adherence conditions that I articulate here, and it seems clear that beliefs based on casual testimony, if they are rationally held, can meet both the safety and adherence conditions.
Admittedly, according to some views, outright belief and high credence are not similar states at all (as an anonymous reviewer for this journal has reminded me). Elsewhere (Wedgwood 2012a), I have argued that there is a certain kind of credence—“practical credence”, as I called it—such that outright belief and high practical credence are indeed extremely similar states. Unfortunately, however, I do not have space to repeat these arguments here. For present purposes, I hope that the reader will simply grant the assumption that outright belief and some sort of high credence are similar in the relevant way.
This is how this version of adherence escapes the objections of Bird (2003).
DeRose (1995, p. 34) says that for one to know p, one’s “belief as to whether p is true” must “match the fact of the matter as to whether p is true, not only in the actual world, but also at the worlds sufficiently close to the actual world.” While this formulation is not exactly wrong, it is misleading. This formulation suggests that this condition could be met because the relevant domain of close worlds includes some worlds at which p is not true, and at all such worlds, one believes that p is not true. But in fact, knowing p does not require believing that p is not true at close worlds where p is not true. (There are plenty of propositions—such as existential propositions like ‘There is a spider in this room’—that are much easier to know than their negations!) According to my proposal, what is required is that, at every case in the relevant domain of cases, (a) the case’s target proposition is true, and (b) one either believes or at least has high credence in that proposition. So, in fact, the relevant domain must not contain any case where the case’s target proposition is not true.
An anonymous reviewer for this journal has asked whether it might not be coherent to suppose that an omniscient God knows all truths, even though there is no answer to the question, “How does God know?” But many theological accounts of omniscience have attempted to answer this question. (For example, perhaps God knows because he is infallibly aware of his own will and of his omnipotence; or perhaps God’s omnipresence makes him omni-percipient; or perhaps our limited minds cannot grasp the truth about how God knows....) At all events, a theologian who explicitly claims that God knows everything even though there is absolutely no answer at all to the question “How does God know?” does seem to me to verge on incoherence.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented to the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford in November 2016, and to a conference on Epistemology in Bled, Slovenia, in June 2017. I am grateful to the members of those audiences, to the editor of this volume, Christoph Kelp, and to an anonymous referee for this journal, for extremely helpful comments.
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Wedgwood, R. The internalist virtue theory of knowledge. Synthese 197, 5357–5378 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1707-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-1707-x