Abstract
In “Knowledge Under Threat” (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 2012), Tomas Bogardus proposes a counterexample to the safety condition for knowledge. Bogardus argues that the case demonstrates that unsafe knowledge is possible. I argue that the case just corroborates the well-known requirement that modal conditions like safety must be relativized to methods of belief formation. I explore several ways of relativizing safety to belief-forming methods and I argue that none is adequate: if methods were individuated in those ways, safety would fail to explain several much-discussed cases. I then propose a plausible externalist principle of method individuation. On the one hand, relativizing safety to belief-forming methods in the way suggested allows the defender of safety to account for the cases. On the other hand, it shows that the target known belief of Bogardus’s example is safe. Finally, I offer a diagnosis of a common error about the kind of cases that are typically considered potential counterexamples to the necessity of the epistemic condition: proponents of the alleged counterexamples mistake a strong condition that I call super-safety for safety.
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Notes
I will take for granted that Bogardus succeeds in defending the safety condition from the counterexamples proposed by the aforementioned authors. However, to illustrate what is the problem with the inference made by these authors, let us consider an analogous problem identified by E.J. Coffman in the debate on luck. Coffman (2009: 503) argues that the following thesis (which he calls the luck infection thesis) has blatant counterexamples: if it is by luck that S is positioned to φ, then it is by luck that S has φ-ed. For example, it can be by luck that Kobe Bryant has found a basketball to make a slam dunk, but once he has the basketball it is not by luck that he makes it. Analogously, from the fact that it is by luck that S is in a position to know that p it does not necessarily follow that S luckily knows that p, or in other words, from the fact that S was at risk of not being in a position to know that p it does not necessarily follow that S’s belief that p is formed unsafely. To see this, imagine that God flips a coin to decide whether to deprive Adam of vision entirely. Heads: God deprives Adam of vision; tails: God does not do anything. Thousandths of seconds after the coin lands tails, Adam looks at his watch and forms the belief that it is 8:00 am. On reflection, Adam was at risk of losing his good epistemic position before forming his belief. However, this does not mean that his belief is formed unsafely, because by the time he forms it, he is already in a good epistemic position and, intuitively, he can know that it is 8:00 am.
This definition of safe belief is based on Duncan Pritchard’s version of safety (2005: 163).
Bogardus is particularly interested in showing the truth of (1) and reviews, accordingly, a representative set of theories.
Here is a plausible explanation of why our intuitions about risk vary depending on the type of event: the threshold beyond which the proportion is large enough is a function of the significance of the event for the agent (I borrow the idea from Levy (2011: 18), who introduces it in his analysis of the concept of luck). We can be more specific: the more significant an event is for an agent, the smaller needs to be the proportion of close possible worlds in which it would occur to be risky for the agent. Say that there is 16 % probability that you die playing Russian roulette and 16 % probability that it rains. Since the possibility of dying is very significant for you (much more than the possibility of it raining), it is reasonable to say that you are at risk of dying when playing Russian roulette even though you would not easily die. However, we would not say that you are at risk (at least at an equivalent risk) of getting wet when strolling due to the rain.
The case is inspired by Robert Nozick’s grandmother case (Nozick 1981: 179). I have modified the original case in such a way that the target proposition could easily be false, as in Atomic Clock.
In Atomic Clock, the cause of epistemic risk is the isotope, which could easily stop the clock. In Grandmother, the source of epistemic risk is the bad condition of the grandson’s heart, which could easily collapse.
The case was originally introduced by Goldman (1976: 779). Epistemologists have paid more attention to another of Goldman’s cases, which is structurally equivalent to Redwood. In that case, an agent comes to know that the object in front of him is a dog when he looks at a dachshund despite the fact that he could easily have believed the same proposition when looking at a wolf (hence falsely). Goldman intends to show that the agent’s inability to discriminate wolfs from dachshunds does not prevent him from successfully identifying dachshunds as dogs: “[The agent’s] true belief fails to be knowledge if there is an alternative situation in which a non-dog produces the same belief by means of the same, or a very similar, appearance. But the wolf situation is not such an alternative: although it would produce in him the same belief, it would not be by means of the same (or a similar) appearance” (Goldman 1976: 779). By contrast, a situation with dachshund replicas would be such an alternative: a non-dog would produce the same belief by means of the same, or very similar, appearance.
Goldman (2009: 81) discusses a principle of individuation like (R3): “[A] possible construal of ‘bases’ would include specific external objects involved in the method of belief acquisition. The basis of belief in the dachshund case might be seeing the dachshund, and the basis of belief in the wolf case might be seeing the wolf” (instead of talking about methods of belief formation, Goldman talks, more generally, about bases of belief). In addition, Williamson (2009: 307) seems to assume a principle of individuation like (R3) but, at some point, he also seems to hold something along the lines of the proposal of this paper, (R4), see e.g. Williamson (2009: 325 fn.13).
The case is by Carl Ginet and appears in Goldman (1976).
See Sosa (2010: 465–7) for relevant discussion on this particular way of characterizing circumstances.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this point.
One might be concerned about the apparent structural similarity between Atomic Clock and Fake Barns. In Fake Barns, the prototypical features that allow Henry to identify an object as a barn are shared both by genuine and fake barns. This is partly the reason circumstances with barn replicas belong to the set of circumstances with respect to which Henry’s actual visual method is globally reliable (to belong to that set, the light conditions of the circumstances must be good as well, the distance must be appropriate, and so on). In Atomic Clock, one might argue, the prototypical features that allow Smith to read clocks are shared by the working and by the stopped clock (both read 8:22 am). Should then circumstances in which the clock is stopped be part of the set of circumstances with respect to which Smith’s actual method is globally reliable? The answer is negative. Smith’s actual method is truth-conducive because the clock is a reliable indicator of the time (according to Bogardus, it is the world’s most accurate clock). Consequently, circumstances in which the clock is stopped are not the kind of circumstances with respect to which Smith’s actual method is globally truth-conducive (or reliable).
I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting me this example.
The more specialized the context is (e.g. archery and musical competitions, philosophical contexts), the more salient and fine-grained these differences are.
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Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Fernando Broncano Rodríguez, Joan Pagès, Michele Palmira, Manuel Pérez Otero and the audience of the Workshop on the Naturalization of the Mind and Modality held at the University of Girona (December 2012) for valuable comments. I am especially grateful to an anonymous referee for thought-provoking comments and helpful suggestions.
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Broncano-Berrocal, F. Is Safety In Danger?. Philosophia 42, 63–81 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9467-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-013-9467-9