Abstract
According to robust versions of virtue epistemology, the reason why knowledge is incompatible with certain kinds of luck is that justified true beliefs must be achieved by the agent (Sosa in A virtue epistemology: apt belief and reflective knowledge, 2007, Reflective knowledge: apt belief and reflective knowledge, 2009, Knowing full well, 2011; Greco in Philos Studies 17:57–69, 2007, Achieving knowledge, 2010, Philos Phenomenol Res 85:1–26, 2012). In a recent set of papers, Pritchard (The nature and value of knowledge: three investigations, 2010a, Think 25:19–30, 2010b, J Philos 109:247–279, 2012, Virtue scientia. Bridges between philosophy of science and virtue epistemology, Forthcoming) has challenged these sorts of views, advancing different arguments against them. I confront one of them here, which is constructed upon scenarios affected by environmental luck, such as the fake barn cases. My objection to Pritchard differs from those offered until now by Carter (Erkenntnis 78:253–275, 2011, Pac Philos Q, 2014), Jarvis (Pac Philos Q 94:529–551, 2013) or Littlejohn (Synthese 158:345–361, 2006) in that it is based on the claim that cognitive performances may not be properly considered as achievements beyond the scope of the agent’s intentional action—an idea that confers more explanatory power on my argument, and contributes to stregthening links between knowledge and agency.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
Both Greco and Sosa are reluctant to such a reductive conceptual analysis (see Sosa 2011, p. 85 n13; Greco 2010, p. 4). However, their versions of virtue epistemology are still robust in that they believe, as we will later see, that an ability condition would fulfil the role required by a reliabilist theory of knowledge, allowing us to account for all cases of knowledge-undermining luck.
More recently, Sosa (2011, p. 93) has even claimed that we may simply get rid of the label of “knowledge” in the first, animal sense, and just call “brute animal cognition” the sort of judgment that Herny makes in BARN—a choice that, in his view, is merely terminological. Nevertheless, I would say that the label “knowledge” does make a significant difference since, by employing it, we would consider this sort of cognition as properly belonging to the field of epistemology, which is intrinsically normative. This is thus a choice that is far from being merely terminological.
An interesting digression could lead us to the question whether the products of biological evolution may be considered as achievements or not. In contrast to, for instance, geological states, biological organs may be said to have solved problems, accomplishing functions, which could perhaps imply that they achieve playing a certain role in the animal’s life. I will not pursue this possibility here.
I recognise Pritchard’s intuition that there is more value in those achievements where significant difficulties were overcome. However, I see no reason to deny that easy performances resulting in success are achievements, given that they may still count as manifestations of the agent’s abilities.
We may make attributions of abilities to bodily organs, but in that case we should be careful not to commit a fallacy by considering that, by the same token, those abilities may be attributed to the agent at the personal level. I think that the attributions of abilities to bodily organs would require a development of the idea of function along the lines I pointed out in note 4. However, as I said there, that is a point I will not pursue in this paper, where abilities will always be considered at the personal level.
Pritchard’s uses of ‘success’ and ‘ability’ do not seem to assume intention as their condition, as I think they should. In his account, ‘success’ just seems to be a trait of a performance in accordance with certain standards, even if it is unintentionally performed. And the way he employs ‘ability’ makes no reference to the intention of the agent, considering it just a matter of her reliability in some kind of performance. However, even if Pritchard assumed those two impoverished definitions explicitly (which would probably be quite a revisionary project itself), he would still have to introduce intention at some point. He seems to be aware of this, since he does recognize that achievements “involve certain motivational states on the part of the subject with regard to the success in question—in particular, that the subject is actively seeking to bring this success about” (2010a, p. 29). I have not seen him elaborating in print on this idea, but he would probably hold that he could do well by just assuming some weakened variety ICA as a third necessary condition for achievements. In the section on objections I will show why I think this alternative is misguided.
I will follow here Setiya (2008) influential restatement of Anscombe’s theses.
Those presuppositions are an important part of the unarticulated awareness the agent has of the scene where she is performing and the kind of task she is confronting. In a similar vein, Velleman (2009, pp. 19–20) claims that “What’s presupposed but generally overlooked in the standard picture of practical reasoning is the agent’s self-awareness—his implicit, unarticulated consciousness of the explicit thoughts that he is traditionally pictured as articulating on his way to choosing an action. His awareness of those thoughts is not made explicit in the series of statements by which the thoughts themselves are presented, and so it eludes philosophical consideration. When the agent’s awareness of his thoughts is left out of consideration, however, so is the rational structure of his thinking.”
It may be the case that performances that are not strictly voluntary could still count as achievements, if our requirements for voluntariness are higher or different than the ones for intentional action. Hieronymi (2006) for instance, has defended an account where responsibility does not depend on voluntariness. This could also be the case with the basic sense of intentional action I am employing here. And, just like Hieronymi’s notion of responsibility, an action being intentional in this basic sense could not imply that the agent is able to do it ‘just like that’, as the immediate effect of an act of will.
I am aware that even this downgraded notion of intention could be considered problematic for those worried about the risk of doxastic voluntarism. But this sort of concern affects virtue epistemological accounts in general, in both its robust and its modest forms, and is thus not a worry I would have to confront here. Be that as it may, I believe that this concern may be dispelled by considering belief formation as the result of an explicit act of judging. For instance, those worried about the idea that Barney is acting cognitively while forming his JTB may tweak the case imagining that he is told to put a check mark on a form, or push a certain button, whenever he thinks there is a barn in the field. That would certainly count as an intentional action.
It is easy to see that employing ICA together with strong virtue epistemology could be an interesting way to approach the problem of epistemic closure, but I will not pursue this idea here.
Let me recall this problem in a nutshell (I follow here Greco 2007, p. 59): reliabilism is the view that only beliefs produced by reliable cognitive processes may be considered epistemically justified. What is called ‘the generality problem’ is an effect of the fact that justification attaches to belief tokens, whereas reliability attaches to process types, and any belief token may fall under many process types. Therefore, we have to decide which type is the one implemented by the process token before we find out whether it is reliable or not. For example, Barney’s belief that there is a barn in the field may be considered to be produced by perception, visual perception, visual perception in broad daylight, etc., which are process types that vary in their degree of reliability. The challenge for reliabilism is to specify which level of generality is the appropriate one for purposes of evaluating the belief token in question.
Defenders of a modal account of luck would claim that the possibility of failure is so close in BARN that Barney may not be said to know even the coarse-grained JTB. I have independent reasons to resist such an account, mostly because I suspect that we have no clear notion of proximity between nearby possible worlds. However, I will not pursue this piece of criticism here, given that Pritchard’s argument against robust virtue epistemology is not particularly based on his modal account of luck, but on the independent notion of achievement.
Some clarification must be made at this point (and I owe to Ernest Sosa this suggestion). If I claim that the epistemologists’s intuition that Barney lacks knowledge ought to be explained by the fact that he was unaware that he was acting in some particular situation, I then have to explain too why do other descriptions of the same performance not seem to undermine his knowledge, even if they were also unknown to the agent. For instance: we could describe Barney’s performance as (b3): an attempt ‘to determine whether there is a barn in front of him in a wheat land’. Intuitively, the fact that Barney was unaware that he was in a wheat land does not undermine his knowledge that there is a barn in front of him. Why would his lack of awareness that he is acting in a fake barn county, (b1), aparently undermine his knowledge that there is a barn in front of him, (b), while his lack of awareness that he is acting in a wheat land, (b3), would not? My answer to this objection is that descriptions of his performance like (b3) do not affect the agent’s reliability. Barney would not be irresponsible to form his belief if he knew that he was in a wheat land, and he would probably not refrain from forming his belief. But he would certainly be epistemically reckless if he formed his belief being aware that he was acting in a fake-barns county, and would thus be praised for refraining to do it. The reason why many epistemologists have claimed that Barney simply lacks knowledge tout court is that the case was being ambiguously evaluated from different perspectives that affected the agent’s reliability. Imagine a world where fake barns were not confined to a particular county, but spread arround the world, appearing mostly in wheat lands, up to the point that, whenever you found a barn-looking object in a wheat land in this world, it would most probably be a fake one. I think that, even if there were no fake-barns counties in this world, most epistemologists would share the intuition that Barney’s cognitive performances in wheat lands would be affected by environmental luck. In that case, (b3) would probably produce the same confusing intuitions as (b1)—and I say “probably” because much more would have to be said on the idea of modal neighborhood beyond spacial proximity, at least in the case of perceptual knowledge, which is an inherently embodied process.
Sosa’s judgment is in fact about a kaleidoscope case, where an agent forms his belief in the right way but could very easily have been deceived by a demon. In this respect, Sosa claims that “in any particular instance, the exercise of that competence in its normal conditions would yield truth. This remains so even when there is a jokester in the wings” (2007, p. 108), and that would justify an attribution of “animal knowledge” to the perceiver of the kaleidoscope.
I believe Sosa’s proposal is also exposed to a different objection that could be dispelled with the help of ICA (or some similar principle applied to what Sosa considers as sub-intentional performances). Sosa’s view relies on the idea that brute animal cognition yields the most basic form of knowledge, animal knowledge, because the agent’s getting it right is a manifestation of her abilities. Nevertheless, if the agent’s forming a belief in such a way is an achievement, such a status ought not be attributed to the event that he formed a belief, but to her act of forming it, which would be that event only under some particular description. And this affects even those beliefs achieved at the sub-personal level, given that fulfilling some function is not something we could attribute to an event under any description whatsoever, but only under those descriptions that are explained by some evolutionary selection process. Nevertheless, this belongs to the issue I said earlier I would not consider here (see note 4).
The best way to show what is lacking from Carter’s approach is by considering the way he accounts for FORCE FIELD. Since this is a case I will introduce in the next section, I will return to Carter’s views there in order to illustrate my criticism (see note 23).
I owe this objection to J. Adam Carter.
Thanks to an anonymous referee of Synthèse for raising this issue.
I owe this suggestion to Duncan Pritchard.
Interestingly enough, we could perhaps claim that she achieved playing in public, or at least that she achieved overcoming her fears, if she managed to play in a situation where she merely thought she was being heard by people, even if in fact she was wrong about this. This is another good reason to believe that, in order to evaluate some success as an achievement, it is crucial to consider first the scope of the agent’s awareness of her own action, and only secondarily the agent’s objective reliability in her current conditions of performance.
I can now return to Carter’s views, as I said I would in note 18, to illustrate the piece of criticism I directed towards them: considering FORCE FIELD, Carter claims that “Holding fixed the total contribution of Archie’s archery abilities toward his goal of hitting a target with his shot, most nearby worlds are worlds where Archie, firing with the same skilful release as he does in the actual world (where he was successful) hits one of the force field targets instead, and so fails”; which, in his opinion, would explain why “that the shot he fired was successful (hit a target) is not primarily creditable to his archery abilities” (Carter 2011, p. 274). My point here is that there would certainly be an important difference between those many worlds where Archie fails to hit the target and those few where he succeeds—a difference besides the mere fact that Archie fails. Namely: that in most of those worlds where he fails he chooses a different target from the one he chooses in FORCE FIELD. But let us only consider those worlds where he still chooses the very same target: given that he is a proficient archer, his shot manifests his abilities, and that target is free of force fields, those are mostly worlds where he does hit his target. If we fix Archie’s target accross those possible worlds, as it is fixed in description (d2), he is still successful in most of them from both of Carter’s perspectives: the agent-focussed and the success-focussed one. Archie’s action is being ambiguously considered in Carter’s arguments, since he is taking it as an event, and not as the description of the event under which the agent intended it to happen. That is why, in my opinion, there is something Carter still needs in order to hit his target: to take the agent’s intentions into consideration.
It was suggested to me by an annonymous referee of Synthèse.
I owe this counterexample to Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, together with many other inspiring ideas for this paper.
I also owe this case to Duncan Pritchard.
That is, if Wimsatt and Beardsley are right in their famous criticism of ‘the intentional fallacy’ (1946).
References
Anscombe, G. E. M. (1957). Intention. Oxford: Blackwell.
Bratman, M. E. (1987). Intention plans and practical reason. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Bratman, M. E. (2007). Structures of agency: Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Broncano, F., & Vega, J. (2011). Engaged epistemic agents. Crítica, 43.128, 55–79.
Carter, J. A. (2011). A problem for Pritchard’s anti-luck virtue epistemology. Erkenntnis, 78(2), 253–275.
Carter, J. A. (2014). Robust virtue epistemology as anti-luck epistemology: A new solution. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly. doi:10.1111/papq.12040.
Chisholm, R. M. (1966). Theory of knowledge (1st ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Davidson, D. (1980). Essays on actions and events. Oxford: Clarendon.
Dreyfus, H. (2007). The return of the myth of the mental. Inquiry, 50.4, 65–352.
Frankfurt, H. G. (1978). The problem of action. American Philosophical Quarterly, 15, 157–162.
Gettier, E. L. (1963). Is justified true belief knowledge? Analysis, 23, 121–123.
Goldman, A. I. (1976). Discrimination and perceptual knowledge. Journal of Philosophy, 73, 771–791.
Greco, J. (2007). The nature of ability and the purpose of knowledge. Philosophical Issues, 17.1, 57–69.
Greco, J. (2010). Achieving knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Greco, J. (2012). A (different) virtue epistemology. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 85.1, 1–26.
Hieronymi, P. (2006). Responsibility for believing. Synthese, 161.3, 357–373.
Jarvis, B. (2013). Knowledge, cognitive achievement, and environmental luck. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 94.4, 529–551.
Lackey, J. (2006). Why we don’t deserve credit for everything we know. Synthese, 158.3, 345–361.
Littlejohn, C. (2014). Fake barns and false dilemmas. Episteme, 11.4, 89–369.
Mele, A. R. (1992). Springs of action: Understanding intentional behavior. New York: Oxford University Press.
Pritchard, D. (2008). Greco on knowledge: Virtues, contexts, achievements. The Philosophical Quarterly, 58.232, 437–447.
Pritchard, D. (2010a). Knowledge and understanding, part I. In D. Pritchard, A. Millar, & A. Haddock (Eds.), The nature and value of knowledge: Three investigations (pp. 3–90). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Pritchard, D. (2010b). Achievements, luck and value. Think, 25, 19–30.
Pritchard, D. (2012). Anti-luck virtue epistemology. Journal of Philosophy, 109, 247–279.
Pritchard, D. (forthcoming). Knowledge and understanding. In A. Fairweather (Ed.), Virtue scientia. Bridges between philosophy of science and virtue epistemology. Dordrecht: Springer
Setiya, K. (2008). Practical knowledge. Ethics, 118.3, 388–409.
Sosa, E. (2007). A virtue epistemology: Apt belief and reflective knowledge (Vol. 1). Oxford: OUP.
Sosa, E. (2009). Reflective knowledge: Apt belief and reflective knowledge (Vol. II). Oxford: OUP.
Sosa, E. (2011). Knowing full well. Princeton: PUP.
Sperber, D., Clément, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G., et al. (2010). Epistemic vigilance. Mind & Language, 25(4), 359–393.
Stanley, J. (2011). Know how. Oxford: OUP.
Velleman, J. D. (2009). How we get along. Cambridge: CUP.
Wimsatt, W. K., & Beardsley, M. C. (1946). The intentional fallacy. The Sewanee Review, 54(3), 468–488.
Acknowledgments
I am especially grateful to Teresa Bejarano, Fernando Broncano, Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, Adam Carter, Jesper Kallestrup, Timothy E. Kunke, Duncan Pritchard, Ernest Sosa, Jesús Vega and two anonymous referees at Synthese for helpful comments and discussion. I completed a first draft of this paper while I was Academic Visitor at the University of Edinburgh, and I am also very grateful to its School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences. Thanks also to the audience at the European Epistemology Network, hosted by the Autonomous University of Madrid in June 2014. Finantial support for this paper has come from the research project “Agencia, normatividad y racionalidad: la presencia del sujeto en la acción” (FFI2011-25131, Spanish Ministerio de Investigación e Innovación, 2012–2015).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Navarro, J. No achievement beyond intention. Synthese 192, 3339–3369 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0708-2
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0708-2