Abstract
Reliabilism is a theory that countenances basic knowledge, that is, knowledge from a reliable source, without requiring that the agent knows the source is reliable. Critics (especially Cohen 2002) have argued that such theories generate all-too-easy, intuitively implausible cases of higher-order knowledge based on inference from basic knowledge. For present purposes, the criticism might be recast as claiming that reliabilism implausibly generates cases of understanding from brute, basic knowledge. I argue that the easy knowledge (or easy understanding) criticism rests on an implicit mischaracterization of the notion of a reliable process. Properly understood, reliable processes do not permit the transition from basic knowledge to understanding based on inference.
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Notes
Sosa’s (Sosa 2007) distinction between animal knowledge and reflective knowledge manages to legitimize and yet somewhat denigrate reasons-less knowledge all at once.
Tyler Burge’s (2010) book, Origins of Objectivity, makes, in my view, an utterly convincing case for basic perceptual warrant, once and for all quashing the commonly held ideas that objective perception is constituted either by some mental, perhaps inferential, construction upon sense data, that objective perception is achieved only through some top-down cognitive processing involving internalized, theory-laden criteria for objective representation, including individuation criteria, and that only propositional reasons can provide empirical warrant. The book will become the standard by which all other philosophical accounts of perception are judged. I say more about it below.
In his book, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding, Jonathan Kvanvig (2003) characterizes understanding as grasping how one’s beliefs cohere, which seems consistent with the sort of understanding briefly indicated herein.
Even if you wouldn’t, I would! Safety theory, contextualism, subject sensitive invariantism, and contrastivism all aim to uphold the closure principle while achieving anti-skeptical results. Contrastivism, in my view, at least rightly notices the problem of ‘cheap knowledge’ ((Schaffer 2007), 238), for instance, that one is not a BIV, and aims to avoid that consequence. The other theories wear the possibility of knowledge that radical skeptical hypotheses are false as a badge of honor. Let me be the one to cry “Foul! How could we know that?”
When I first drafted this paper, I thought up this example just because it is colorful. In the meantime, our department administrator tells me that, since having built a high wall to keep her cats, Chuck and Lucy, in the yard and safe from predators, only roadrunners have gotten in!
One might worry that the first element of my solution to the easy knowledge problem—that processes must be truth-conducive throughout close worlds—raises another version of the generality problem: We cannot assess a process for reliability until we know the range of close worlds through which is must be truth-conducive ((Comesaña 2006), 30). A few notes on this. First, I am not attempting a full-blown solution to every formulation of the generality problem. Relatedly, my point above was only that actual-world truth-conduciveness is not sufficient for reliability. I never said what does constitute sufficiency, though I will say more below to distinguish cases where even truth-conduciveness throughout very close worlds is not sufficient from cases where it is. Third, I don’t think there is, or needs to be, a clear answer here. Reliability comes in degrees, and we shouldn’t seek an exact characterization. Hence the more robust the truth-conduciveness—the larger the range of worlds through which it produces mostly true beliefs—the more reliable the process.
There is, of course, much more to be said about process individuation, but for now I want just to forestall one potential misinterpretation. The actual natures of objects and properties that figure causally in the formation of a token belief ought not be treated as part of the content of the process. (This in no way contradicts the externalist thesis that causal contact with certain kinds of objects or properties is necessary for thinking thought-types with specific contents.) For example, when Henry forms the true belief, in fake barn country, that he sees a barn, we ought not characterize the process as forming beliefs about barns that are caused by barns (even though thinking barn thoughts may require having had some such causal contact with barns). Suppose (contra the original fake barns case) that Henry would believe of almost anything he sees in the countryside that it’s a barn. The process through which he forms beliefs about barns is obviously unreliable, but if a process is to be individuated by reference to the actual nature of the object that causes a token belief, it would imply several different processes for Henry, depending on what he’s looking at: forming barn beliefs caused by barns; forming barn beliefs caused by fake barns; forming barn beliefs caused by large animals; forming barn beliefs caused by minivans, etc. On this kind of individuation, the first of these is reliable (while the rest are pretty worthless), but that is surely the wrong result.
Another example, one that’s utterly non-epistemic. I reliably hit a thigh-high, inner-half fastball coming at less than 85mph. Reliably, if I hit a thigh-high, inner-half fastball coming at less than 85mph, I don’t strike out. Does that mean that I reliably don’t strike out? Not if most pitches are not thigh-high, inner-half mediocre fastballs. The point of these analogies is to make clear that I’m not playing fast-and-loose with the notion of reliability.
Notice that I didn’t say Henry believes that that’s a barn. Indexicals create trouble for sensitivity, taken in the usual way, as a property of particular beliefs: If it were false that that is a barn, Henry would not believe that that is a barn, because that wouldn’t be a fake if it were not a barn. It wouldn’t be anything. The thought underlying the sensitivity diagnosis is that Henry would mistake a fake for the real thing—if whatever barn-looking thing he sees [not necessarily that] weren’t a barn, he’d believe it [whatever barn-looking thing he sees/would then be seeing] is a barn. I’m not sure how big a problem this is, but this isn’t the place for further discussion.
Is it right to say that Henry’s process is reliable because, even though in this environment it often produces false beliefs, it produces mostly true beliefs in the actual world (and nearby worlds)? Before I said that Johnny’s Jr.’s process is unreliable, even though it in fact produces mostly true beliefs. So in the case of Henry, I am distinguishing ‘local environment’ from ‘actual world’—the former contained in the latter—but I elide the distinction when talking about Johnny, Jr., insofar as I appear to be saying that Jr.’s process produces actual world true beliefs because it does so in his local environment. This could make big trouble for me, for if being consistent on this distinction required me to say that Johnny’s Jr.’s process is unreliable because, even though it produces true beliefs in his local environment, it produces many false beliefs in the actual world, it would undermine the motivation proffered for modalizing reliability, that is, for the appeal to non-actual possible worlds to explain Jr.’s unreliability.
Happily, I’ve made no such mistake. The crucial difference is that Johnny Jr., by stipulation, never gets out of his yard. So in actuality his process always produces true beliefs. I stipulate, similarly, that Henry has been around and will continue to get around (even if no such stipulation was intended originally). His presence-of-barns identifying process doesn’t work in this particular place on the countryside, but it actually works. If that doesn’t convince, then one more stipulation. Junior would only use his “Tracks! Must’ve been a roadrunner nearby lately” process in his own yard, perhaps because he thinks only the sand in his yard is suitable for the required “discriminations”. This is surely an unreliable process, even though impeccable in the actual world, which for all intents and purposes extends no further than Jr.’s backyard. In sum, that he’s near this hillside has nothing to do with how Henry’s forms barn beliefs, whereas being in this yard is a crucial causal antecedent to Jr.’s beliefs.
And S would know that q if she correctly inferred it from what she knows. See Dretske (Dretske 1970) for further considerations in favor of the idea that epistemic operators such as ‘knows that’ do not always penetrate to conclusions.
My thanks to participants at the Bled Conference, 2011, especially Chris Kelp, Jack Lyons, and Adam Morton, for suggesting to me that I don’t take the route of simply denying that one can achieve second-order knowledge, even when one has higher-grade knowledge, which was another option. I could then have said S does not know that she knows—does not know the closure premise—while maintaining the intuitive thought that if one knows that one knows that p and that p entails q, one is in position to know q. But I don’t want to reject the possibility of second-order knowledge. After all, in many cases second-order knowledge does not seem all that difficult to achieve, perhaps easier than the higher-grade knowledge, or understanding, exemplified in the cases discussed herein.
Interestingly, as one reads Burge’s discussions of perceptual constancies (see 343 ff.), in particular lightness constancy (351 ff.) and color constancy (410), one begins to wonder whether Cohen’s original example can even get off the ground. To make a long story short, it may very well be that our automatic “calculations” of distal causes reliably determine, just by looking, whether the redness of the table is due to its color or to ambient lighting. Obviously, I’ve set aside this possibility in order to take the easy knowledge problem head-on.
Of course, these matters are obviously complicated, and seem to cry out for a criterion of basicality. That’s a project for science—which types of objects and properties do our processes reliably represent mediated (non-epistemically) only through proximal causes (e.g. 2-d retinal stimulation), and which ones are theoretically embedded? Likely candidates for the former are body, shape, size, color, distance, contour, boundary, etc. Provided we have conceptual resources to think and describe these properties, which of course we do, beliefs based thereon can be counted as basic. Perhaps beliefs involving concepts like chair, car, house, etc., are not then properly basic but require explicit background knowledge and are mediated by background belief. This wouldn’t impugn the main line of thought herein. Our processes for producing basic belief pick up on objective, distal features of the environment, not subjective features of consciousness, and they do so directly and automatically, not inferentially. But those processes are designed to discriminate features within our environment; they’re inept in discriminating global environments.
For example, S can know in a non-basic way that the table is not white but deceptively lit, after a thorough investigation of possible sources of deception, and she can know that this entails that she’s not deceived by an evil demon, without being able to know that she’s not deceived by an evil demon.
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Becker, K. Basic Knowledge and Easy Understanding. Acta Anal 27, 145–161 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0139-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-011-0139-8