Abstract
It is a natural assumption in mainstream epistemological theory that ascriptions of knowledge of a proposition p track strength of epistemic position vis-à-vis p. It is equally natural to assume that the strength of one’s epistemic position is maximally high in cases where p concerns a simple analytic truth (as opposed to an empirical truth). For instance, it seems reasonable to suppose that one’s epistemic position vis-à-vis “a cat is a cat” is harder to improve than one’s position vis-à-vis “a cat is on the mat”, and consequently, that the former is at least as unambiguous a case of knowledge as the latter. The current paper, however, presents empirical evidence which challenges this intuitive line of reasoning. Our study on the epistemic intuitions of hundreds of academic philosophers supports the idea that simple and uncontroversial analytic propositions are less likely to qualify as knowledge than empirical ones. We show that our results, though at odds with orthodox theories of knowledge in mainstream epistemology, can be explained in a way consistent with Wittgenstein’s remarks on ‘hinge propositions’ or with Stalnaker’s pragmatics of assertion. We then present and evaluate a number of lines of response mainstream theories of knowledge could appeal to in accommodating our results. Finally, we show how each line of response runs into some prima facie difficulties. Thus, our observed asymmetry between knowing “a cat is a cat” and knowing “a cat is on the mat” presents a puzzle which mainstream epistemology needs to resolve.
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Notes
That is, where the context of utterance and the circumstance of evaluation don’t come apart.
An exception here is the truth-relativist about knowledge ascriptions, according to whom the epistemic position relevant to the truth of the knowledge-ascription is that of the assessor’s. See here MacFarlane (2005, 2008).
For example, if you already accept that bachelors are, in virtue of the meaning of ‘bachelor’, unmarried men, you are not going to have any further reason to accept this proposition when you hear that person A is a bachelor and is unmarried and male.
Of course, the orthodox view concerns what we know, and only indirectly how we attribute knowledge. However, and as will be relevant in what follows, (defeasible) evidence against the attribution patterns we’d expect in light of the orthodox theory is at least indirectly is at tension with the orthodox theory.
For a sustained recent discussion here, see Russell (2011).
An anonymous reviewer has pointed out that it is not certain that our examples of simple and uncontroversial analytic truths were perceived as such by the respondents. For instance, in response to “All vixens are female” someone could say: “Sounds right but I don’t really remember what a vixen is.” We agree that this is indeed a possibility, but we would like to make two points in response to this claim. First, the same comment could also be made about our list of empirical propositions. For instance, in response to the empirical truth “World War II occurred” someone could object say: “Sounds right but I don’t really remember what World War II was”. This just illustrates that one can never be sure how responds interpret a survey question. The second point, which is more important, is that what ultimately matters for the truth of our hypothesis is not whether our list of propositions were actually perceived as analytic or not; what matters is that they are analytic/empirical. We are not testing the hypothesis “Philosophers are more willing to acknowledge that they know p if p is perceived as an empirical truth than if p is perceived as an analytic truth.” The hypothesis we are testing is whether philosophers are more willing to acknowledge that they know p if p is an empirical truth than if p is an analytic truth (of the right kind). The only defense we can give for the claim that our test propositions are of the right kind is that they are based on standard examples given in textbooks and academic journals. No psychological measure can help us to determine whether a proposition is analytic or empirical. That said, the matter of whether a truth is perceived as analytic is of course relevant to what can be reasonably inferred from our hypothesis about the truth of orthodox theories of knowledge. We are sensitive to this point in the discussion section.
See Peterson, M. and Vasen, K. Knowledge According to 776 Philosophers (Unpublished).
As many readers of this paper know, the normal or (Gaussian) distribution is one of the most widely studied statistical distributions. It has a number of neat mathematical properties and looks like a bell curve. See e.g., Krickeberg (1965: 89) for a helpful introduction and discussion.
The choice of what counts as a negative or positive rank is arbitrary in this study. We simply decided to use non empirical propositions as the baseline for making comparisons. If we would have used empirical propositions as the baseline, the test statistics would have been reversed.
“U.S. President Obama is either above 6 ft tall or below 6 ft tall” was intended to be an analytic proposition. But it is of course possible that Mr Obama is exactly 6 ft tall. The correct formulation would have been: “U.S. President Obama is either less than 6 ft tall or at least 6 ft tall”.
Both these questions were about water: “Water is H2O” and “Water is water”. The second appeared closely after the first, which probably had unforeseen effects on the judgements reported by respondents.
As mentioned in Section 2, we also asked participants to provide information about gender, participation in prior research on this type, and which philosophical tradition they felt most closely affiliated with. 4 % said they had participated in similar studies before and 70 % were sure they had not; 78 % of respondents were male, and 70 % identified themselves as analytic philosophers. No statistically significant correlations were found.
This straightforward idea accounts for why Wittgenstein famously found it objectionable that G.E. Moore (1925/1939) tried to prove the existence of the external world by simply holding up his hands and saying “here is one hand, and here is another.” Moore, after all, could never have been more certain he had a hand than that there was an external world, and so the former cannot be appealed to as rational support for accepting the latter.
Cf. Wittgenstein’s remark in On Certainty that: “If a blind man were to ask me “Have you got two hands?” I should not make sure by looking. If I were to have any doubt of it, then I don’t know why I should trust my eyes. For why shouldn’t I test my eyes by looking to find out whether I see my two hands. What is to be tested by what?” (OC, §125).
As Pritchard (2012: 259) puts it, “Wittgenstein is thus offering us a challenging conception of the structure of reasons, such that our reason-giving practices presuppose a class of fundamental hinge commitments which are by their nature immune to rational evaluation. The upshot of this argument is that there cannot be a satisfactory rational way of terminating the regress of reasons, since at some point in the regress one will inevitably encounter those propositions which one is most certain of—the hinge propositions—and yet these propositions by their very nature cannot be rationally supported.”
Take, for instance, “Invisible objects aren’t visible.” For a competent user of English, what rational support could be offered in support of this proposition, such that we are more certain of the rational support than of the proposition itself?
After all, many empirical propositions will have the property of being such that there are other propositions of which we are more certain, and which we can appeal to rationally support these empirical propositions.
In OC §243 Wittgenstein remarks, ‘One says “I know’ when one is ready to give compelling grounds. “I know’ relates to a possibility of demonstrating the truth…But if what he believes is of such a kind that the grounds that he can give are no surer than his assertion, then he cannot say that he knows…”
Cf. Pritchard (2012) for a critique of this account of the structure of reasons, in light of transmission and closure principles.
See here Stalnaker (1978: 88–89).
For a helpful overview of Stalnaker’s account, see Pagin (2012).
See here Stalnaker (1978: 89).
In fact, this conclusion resonates well with (early) pragmatist epistemologies. For Dewey, for instance, knowledge is the result of specific inquiries performed to resolve specific problems (Burke 1994). In this sense, it is easy to see why analytic truths would fail to qualify as knowledge. For it is unclear which inquiries would be needed to come to know such truths and, in line with the Stalnakerian argument above, it is hard to see which specific problems they would help to solve (i.e., they are pointless). This is the reason why for Dewey mathematical truths do not qualify as knowledge, but are “postulates adopted because what follows from them” (Dewey 1938, p. 144; quoted in Putnam 2010, p. 41).
The Stalnakerian point aligns with Grice’s (1989) maxim of quantity.and, to some extent, the maxim of relation.
For instance, I might assert p on the basis of knowledge that p, while nonetheless being subject to moral criticism (perhaps p is offensive or cruel); or, alternatively, I might be criticized for asserting something misleading in that, while I know p and assert p, p conversationally implies q, and q is false. See here Grice (1957).
Williamson’s account can be contrasted with a weaker epistemic norms that govern assertion: the justification norm of assertion, according to which epistemic justification (e.g., rational support) is the relevant epistemic norm governing eistemically permissible assertion. See here Lackey (2007) and Douven (2006).
This is not to suggest that the speech acts are thereby not assertions. Rather, they are defective in that they fail to play a certain role that assertions as such aspire to—viz., the cutting down of live options.
Indeed, for Stalnaker, such utterances fail to be assertions. Here’s Stalnaker: “An assertion can be understood as a proposal to exclude from the possible situations compatible with the context those in which the proposition asserted is false” (Stalnaker 2004, 300). Cf. Milne (2012) for a helpful recent discussion here.
Of course, we grant that the empirical propositions included in the surveys will in fact be presuppositions of most conversational contexts. Even so, varying one’s interlocutors can create communication contexts where these empirical propositions are live, even among competent English speakers. But analytic truths, as such, are not live in conversational contexts with competent speakers. The fact that such propositions can never be live in this way renders them such that (at least, on the combination of the Stalnaker account and the knowledge account of assertion) they are unknowable (that is, on our modus tollens rationale), where as empirical propositions, despite their being presupposed in ordinary communication contexts, do not have this property. This difference could potentially explain a speaker’s differentiation in attributing knowledge. Note though, to be clear, that the modus tollens argument is not being defended in the context of this paper as sound. Our point in this discussion section does not depend on either the Stalnakerian account of the pragmatics of assertion nor the knowledge norm of assertion being true. Rather, what we offered was at least two separate philosophical rationales which would be at least consistent with results that, as we’ve argued, are at tension with orthodox thinking about knowledge and the patterns of attribution that would be expected in light of it. Thanks to an anonymous referee for requesting clarification on this point.
And, of course, this result would not be without its own problems. For one thing, consider that the very suggestion that the ascription variance captured by our results motivates ‘separate conditions’ for knowing simple analytic as opposed to empirical propositions would involve endorsing a proposal featuring more stringent conditions for knowing simple analytic truths. However, it is hard to see how more stringent conditions for knowing simple analytic truths would ever be satisfied; after all, as we discussed in Section 1, it is not clear how, if at all, one’s epistemic position could be increased with respect to such propositions. So a skeptical problem threatens this move.
The most obvious such story would attempt to maintain an orthodox account of knowledge and simply add that what explains individuals’ lack of willingness to attribute to themselves knowledge of analytic truths to the same extent as empirical truths is the Gricean maxim of informativeness. But on reflection it’s hard to see how this story gets off the ground. To appreciate the difficulty, consider that while a Gricean informativeness maxim makes good sense of why one should not assert a simple analytic truth—as it will not be informative—the communicative purpose in claiming self-knowledge of an analytic truth (i.e., as in self-ascribing such knowledge on a survey) is that of communicating whether one regards oneself as knowing the proposition in question. And this can be informative even if the simple communication of the analytic truth that features in the complement clause would not be.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
This is a conclusion drawn by e.g., Weinberg et al. (2001); their claim, however, is entirely based on studies concerning non-expert subjects (and their intuitions).
A related strategy would involve raising the threshold for expertise. Relevant intuitions are those of expert intuiters, and to be an expert intuiter more is needed than: (i) having a formal training in philosophy; (ii) following current events in academic philosophy (by subscribing to a mailing-list for academic philosophers); and (iii) holding a Doctoral or Master’s degree in philosophy. The tendencies we observed would be worrisome, so the objection goes, only if observed in a group consisting of prominent epistemologists (whatever that may mean), or preferably, given the language effect, very prominent epistemologists for whom English is their first language. This move, however, is tantamount to epistemic dogmatism — one narrows down the pool of experts to those who share or are willing to subscribe to one’s own intuitions — and parochialism— one narrows down the pool of experts to those speaking one’s own language. If this is what it takes to save content-independence, we decline. For apart from frustrating many able philosophers working outside epistemology and outside the Anglo-Saxon world, it would turn epistemology into quite a marginal phenomenon.
Such proper foundation view is also advocated by, for instance, Joshua Knobe (2003). For Knobe, however, the proper foundation isn’t so much philosopher’s intuitions as those of the philosophically untutored.
Thanks to the editor for raising this point.
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Carter, J.A., Peterson, M. & van Bezooijen, B. Not Knowing a Cat is a Cat: Analyticity and Knowledge Ascriptions. Rev.Phil.Psych. 7, 817–834 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0279-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-015-0279-7