Abstract
The notion of relevance plays a role in many accounts of knowledge and knowledge ascription. Although use of the notion is well-motivated, theorists struggle to codify relevance. A reasonable person standard of relevance addresses this codification problem, and provides an objective and flexible standard of relevance; however, treating relevance as reasonableness seems to allow practical factors to determine whether one has knowledge or not—so-called “pragmatic encroachment.” I argue that a fuller understanding of reasonableness and of the role of practical factors in the acquisition of knowledge lets us avoid pragmatic encroachment.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Or, any P-precluding alternative is relevant so long as it holds in the nearest world where P does not. Dretske, “The Case against Closure.” (2005). For Dretske, nearness is determined by facts about one’s physical environment; for David Lewis, nearness is a context-dependent metric of similarity among worlds, so nearness of worlds is not fixed once and for all by one’s physical environment.
For example Hiller and Neta, “Safety and Epistemic Luck.” (2007): You check your bank statement online, and it says you have some cash left in your account. Unbeknownst to you, a clever identity thief has been scheming to empty your bank account, but he has just won the lottery and so drops his plans. Your accounts are untouched. When you check your account online, it seems you know your account has cash in it. Not so on the proposed counterfactual test. In the nearest world where your account doesn’t have cash, that’s because the bank robber didn’t win the lottery (a very close world), so this alternative is relevant, and so on the proposed account of relevance you need evidence to eliminate it if you’re to know your account has cash. But it is odd to count this possibility of a clever electronic robbery as relevant, something you need to rule out if you’re to know your account balance. Perhaps probability could serve as a criterion of relevance, and only those alternatives that are highly probable (in some chosen sense of probability), count as relevant? Again a problem—we can find highly improbable defeaters sometimes worth worrying about. The chance that I hold the winning ticket in a fair lottery may be vanishingly small, yet this alternative seems to be the one that prevents me from knowing that I will lose the fair lottery. Further counterexamples confront other approaches to codifying relevance.
Ernest Sosa remarks:
What makes an alternative irrelevant? No answer is generally accepted, even among relevantists, and the notion of relevance remains obscure, no published account having yet much relieved this darkness. (I do not expect relevance theorists to disagree radically with this estimate; one thinker’s debilitating drawback is another’s challenging open problem, to be resolved in due course.) Sosa, “How to Defeat Opposition to Moore,” (1999, p. 142).
Rysiew, “The Context-Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions.” (2001).
I develop this view in Lawlor, Assurance: An Austinian Account of Knowledge and Knowledge Claims, (2013).
Hart, The Concept of Law (1997). Interestingly, Hart suggests a social dimension to the story of our necessarily incomplete knowledge of our aims: owing to the fact that we have the general aim of balancing our interests and the interests of others, we face unexpected tests of our understanding of our aims in particular situations where other’s interests become known. Of course, one might add that this is because we have an interest in balancing the interests of others against our own.
Ibid, p. 128. This is often the case, though not always. Hart notes that some rules are absolute.
Within tort law, for instance, Kantians argue that Kant’s doctrine of the equality of all free agents makes best sense of legal standards of care, as well as the asymmetrical duties that lie at the foot of tort theory. (Wright, “Standards of Care in Negligence Law”, 1995.) Consequentialists argue the law’s concern for equality is best served by attention to outcomes on a social scale. (Landes and Posner, The Economic Structure of Tort Law, 1987.) Rawlsians import a variety of themes from political theory into tort law. (Zipursky, “Rawls in Tort Theory: Themes and Counter-Themes”, 2004.) These competing theories color the content of the “reasonable person.”.
I say more about the reasonable person standard in “Epistemic Standards: Impersonal not Invariant” (forthcoming).
I favor this understanding because it makes clear that the influence on knowledge by practical interests is direct: practical factors are one of the relata of the knowledge relation. Some reject this construal of pragmatic encroachment: for instance, Weatherson rejects the idea that “there is an interest-sensitive constituent of knowledge” in favor of a weak sense of encroachment: there can be two subjects who differ only in practical factors and one of them knows while the other does not. Weatherson, “Defending Interest-Relative Invariantism” (2011). I believe that satisfying PE in my sense is sufficient to satisfy PE in this weaker sense, but not vice versa.
Semantic contextualism broadly construed lets us maintain what DeRose calls the “intellectualist view.” DeRose, The Case for Contextualism: Knowledge, Skepticism and Context (2009, vol. 1, chap. 6). Within the broad category of “semantic contextualism” there are views that hold that practical interests can control which knowledge relation one stands into the target proposition, and so affect which proposition one expresses with a knowledge claim. (Cohen, “Pragmatic Encroachment and Having Reasons”, 2019.)
The analogy is not mine—and I cannot recall where I first read or heard it.
Dretske (ibid).
“There is no criterion of practical rationality that is not derived from goodness of will.” Foot, Natural Goodness (2001, p. 11).
Reflecting on our truisms, it strikes one that what reasonableness is most akin to is what the virtue theorist calls “practical wisdom”—the virtue that includes an ability to weigh reasons of both a practical and a theoretical nature. The ability to judge reasons of all kinds is bound up with our problem of codification, as Hursthouse notes that moral theorists of all kinds appreciate that rules must be interpreted: “… Kant himself insists that we can have no algorithm for judgement, since every application of a rule would itself need supplementing with further rules.” Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (1999, 2:55). These remarks resonate with our earlier discussion of the problem of codification in the law.
Note that practical factors can make a difference among reasonable people, who may have different viewpoints on the same epistemic landscape. Reasonable people may have different levels of risk aversion, balance the risk of falsehood and the reward of truth differently. They may use different rules or heuristics are used to assess the evidence. See Rawls Justice as Fairness, p. 35 (2001). Rawls sees reasonableness as a central feature of political morality and practical rationality, and he acknowledges that because of the “burdens of judgment” reasonable people will disagree about what is fair, what is to be done, and how to live. Rawls is interested in the way these burdens affect our practical reasoning, but the limits he identifies apply equally to theoretical reasoning. But such differences among reasonable people do not mean that an increase in practical stakes suffices to make more alternatives relevant. To defend that claim, we would hold the reasonable person constant, and find a difference in what is relevant for the two different subjects. It is not clear that a single reasonable judge, with a given attitude toward risk, and given priors, etc., would judge the cases of Harley and Gregor differently, just because of the difference in their practical interests.
One might define pragmatic encroachment very weakly (see note 14 above) to mean only that there can be two subjects who differ only in practical factors and one of them knows while the other does not. This weak sense of encroachment will be satisfied in some instances—but even when this is so, it is not because it is sufficient that there is a difference in practical factors: the difference in practical factors has to be a difference that matters to a reasonable person. And for this reason it will not universally hold that a difference in practical factors is sufficient for a difference in the knowledge relation.
Note that we would modify this if our semantic account were different. The SSI account might say that the relevant alternatives are the possibilities that a reasonable person with the subject’s interests sees as defeaters.
I am here using Leiter’s distinction between minimal and modest realism. Leiter, “Objectivity and the Problems of Jurisprudence (Reviewing Kent Greenawalt, Law and Objectivity (1992).”
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this point.
References
Austin, J. L. (1946). Other minds. Supplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 20, 148–187.
Cohen, S. (2019). Pragmatic encroachment and having reasons. In B. Kim & M. McGrath (Eds.), Pragmatic encroachment in epistemology. London: Routledge.
DeRose, K. (1996). Relevant alternatives and the content of knowledge attribution. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 56(1), 193–197.
DeRose, K. (2009). The case for contextualism: Knowledge, skepticism and context (Vol. 1). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dretske, F. (1970). Epistemic operators. Journal of Philosophy, 67, 1007–1023.
Dretske, F. (2005). The case against closure. In M. Steup & E. Sosa (Eds.), Contemporary debates in epistemology (pp. 13–25). Oxford: Blackwell.
Foot, P. (2001). Natural goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gardner, J. (2001). The mysterious case of the reasonable person. The University of Toronto Law Journal, 51(3), 273–308.
Gardner, J. (2015). The many faces of the reasonable person. Law Quarterly Review, 131(563), 563–584.
Hart, H. L. A. (1997). The concept of law (2nd ed.). New York: Oxford University Press.
Hawthorne, J. (2004). Knowledge and lotteries. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hiller, A., & Neta, R. (2007). Safety and epistemic luck. Synthese, 158(3), 303–313.
Hursthouse, R. (1999). On virtue ethics (Vol. 2). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kompa, N. (2005). The semantics of knowledge attributions. Acta Analytica, 20(1), 16–28.
Landes, W., & Posner, R. (1987). The economic structure of tort law (1987). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lawlor, K. (2013). Assurance: An Austinian view of knowledge and knowledge claims. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Lawlor, K. (forthcoming). Epistemic standards: Impersonal, not invariant. In K. Walbridge, & C. Kyriacou (Eds.) Skeptical invariantism reconsidered. London: Routledge Press.
Lewis, D. (1996). Elusive knowledge. Australian Journal of Philosophy, 74, 549–567.
Rawls, J. (2001). Justice as Fairness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Rysiew, P. (2001). The context-sensitivity of knowledge attributions. Nous, 35(4), 477–514.
Rysiew, P. (2006). Motivating the relevant alternatives approach. Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 36(2), 259–279.
Sosa, E. (1999). How to defeat opposition to moore. Noûs, 33, 141–153.
Stanley, J. (2005). Knowledge and practical interests. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Travis, C. (2008). Occasion-sensitivity: Selected essays. New York: Oxford University Press.
Weatherson, B. (2011). Defending interest-relative invariantism. Logos and Episteme, 2(4), 591–609.
Wright, R. (1995). Standards of care in negligence law. In The philosophical foundations of tort law (pp. 249–76). http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198265795.001.0001/acprof-9780198265795-chapter-12.
Zipursky, B. (2004). Rawls in tort theory: Themes and counter-themes. Fordham Law Review, 72, 1923–1945.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to participants at Osnabruck University “The Epistemic Significance of Non-Epistemic Factors” conference July 2018, and at the University of Cologne “Rationality and Reasonableness” conference April 2018. Special thanks to Nikola Kompa, Andrea Robitzsch, Igal Kvart, Sven Berneker, Ram Neta, Michael Williams, David Henderson, Sandy Goldberg, Alex Guerrero, and Markus Kneer for comments and suggestions. Thanks also to anonymous Synthese reviewers who helped me improve the paper enormously.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Lawlor, K. Knowledge and reasonableness. Synthese 199, 1435–1451 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02803-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02803-z