Abstract
This study provides a critical appraisal of Duncan Pritchard’s (Synthese 189:255–272, 2012) argument to the effect that ability to preserve certain eminently plausible transmission and/or closure principles for knowledge serves as a powerful adequacy test on alternative accounts of so-called Wittgensteinian certainties or hinge commitments. I argue that Pritchard fails to establish this claim—the transmission test does not favour his favourite conception over alternative conceptions premised on the idea that hinge commitments are not supportable via evidential-cognitive routes.
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Notes
Wittgenstein (1969).
Wittgenstein (1969, p. 183).
Rational support, I take it, can be safely replaced here with justification or warrant of a justificational/evidential variety.
Pritchard (2012, p. 260).
Following the led of Williamson (2000) and Hawthorne (2005), Pritchard pursues the strategy of avoiding counter-examples to epistemic closure principles spelled out in terms of recognized deductive relations by reformulating knowledge-closure in terms of competent deduction and adding a couple of hedge-clauses that make it in turn quite close to transmission principles expected to subsume exactly those cases in which conclusions are sure to be known in virtue of competent deduction from premises. Closure principles still “verbally” differ from corresponding transmission principles in that they do not require in their consequent that the conclusion \(q \) be known in virtue of competent deduction from \(p\) (it is only required, in the antecedent, that it be believed on the basis of competent deduction). Still, the thought seems to be that, in so far as deductive extendibility of knowledge underwrites epistemic closure principles such as \(Closure_{K}\), they hold if appropriate principles of transmission of knowledge across competent deduction hold. Now neither Williamson nor Hawthorne, whose formulation of \(Closure_{K}\) inspired Pritchard, is particularly specific about competent deduction. But see Tucker (2010, pp. 501, 517) for suggestions as to how to spell out the idea of competent deduction (here modified to cover rational support for knowledge). First, \(X\)’s deduction of \(q\) from \(p\) is said to consist in \(X\)’s acceptance of \(p/q\) as valid argument, given that it is indeed valid—\(X\)’s acceptance already involving inferring \(q\) from \(p\). Second, \(X\)’s deduction of \(q \)from \(p\) is said to be competent just in case: (i) \(X\) has and retains rational support \(R\) for \(p\) throughout the deduction; (ii) \(p\) evidentially supports \(q\); and (iii) \(X\) has no relevant defeaters. The category of competent deductions is thus designed to subsume exactly those deductive inferences that ensure epistemic support for conclusions on the basis of well-supported premises. As the clauses (i)–(iii), together with the definition of deduction as a valid inference of \(q \) from \(p\), already take care of the clause “\(X\) thereby comes to believe \(q \) while retaining her \( R\)-supported knowledge of \( p\)”, the following simpler formulation of the transmission principle would do: If X knows p in virtue of rational support R & X competently deduces q from p, then X knows q in virtue of R. I take it that other authors sympathizing with the general idea—Pritchard included—would recognize the rationale behind Tucker’s formulations but could still prefer to put less content into competent deduction itself, thereby having to explicitly mention the omitted clause (or something of the sort) in order to block counter-examples of the following sort: \(X\) knows \(p\) due to \(R\) and \(X\) competently deduces \(q\) from \(p\), yet \(X \) might not know \(q \) due to \(R\), because, due to irrationality on her part, \(X\) might not even come to believe \(q\), or \(X\) might already believe \(q\) on an epistemically faulty basis incompatible with \(X\)’s knowing \(q\). Cf. Hawthorne (2005, p. 29) and Silins (2005, p. 90)—who, however, focus on closure principles such as \(Closure_{K}\) rather than on transmission principles. Kvanvig (2008, p.467) adds the clause to the effect that \(X\) learns of no efficient defeater for q in the process of deducing q from \(p\) to block yet other potential counter-examples.
Cf. Pritchard (2012, pp. 261–263).
This interpretation I will challenge at a later stage, when I will take issue with Pritchard’s critique of Wright-style account.
It being allegedly odd to assert, e. g., “I have sufficient reasons to know that my leg is broken but/and I do not have sufficient reasons to know that there are bodies”, where the proposition that there are bodies obviously follows from the proposition that my leg is broken (given that my leg is a part of my body). I regard this sort of problem as spurious and hardly decisive—cf. Sherman and Harman (2011) for a good discussion—but as Pritchard does not treat it as the main or insuperable objection (eventually offering a story of his own to deflect it), I am happy to set it aside.
Wright (2012, p. 456), though, does make the point in the course of his discussion of externalist approaches to the problem of warrant-transmission failure.
Pritchard does not say so explicitly but we can extrapolate from the text that he would consider ad hoc Moyal-Sharrock’s view (2004) that what we so recognize as inferentially related to non-hinge commitments are not hinge commitments (qua hinges) but their propositional Doppelgängers.
Though note that Wittgenstein does not hesitate to speak here as if things “standing unshakably fast” were propositional beliefs.
I suspect that Pritchard’s principal objection applies primarily to Pritchard’s (2005) former externalistically-oriented self.
This strategy is not beyond dispute, though, considered in the broader dialectical context of Prichard’s discussion. First, his discussion of hinge-readings vis-à-vis radical sceptical challenges implicates that \(Closure_{K}\) might motivate premises of the sort If I know that I have a body (hands, etc.), then I know that it is not the case that I am a brain in vat, which, together with the premise that the consequent is false, entails that I do not know that I have a body (etc.). However, unlike knowledge-closure under recognized entailment, it is far from clear whether, eventually how, \( Closure_{K}\) could motivate that first premise. For some relevant arguments in this direction see Silins (2005), David and Warfield (2008), or Avnur (2012). Second, it might be argued that attempts to justify closure principles in terms of competent deduction blur, in effect, the vital distinction between the process of inference capable of producing rational conviction and static entailment relations holding (or not) between propositions. Sherman and Harman (2011) offer a searching critique in this spirit. On this view, plausible transmission principles can be interpreted as specifying conditions under which knowledge (rational support) is sure to deductively extend, while closure principles do not speak to this issue at all. The issues lurking here are worth addressing but I cannot go into that matter here.
How could we come to have justification that we are not merely undergoing a vivid and compact dream involving all these experiences we are currently having, other than by using some empirical method (e.g. pinching ourselves) whose capacity to provide sufficient grounds, however, depends on our having a warrant that the method has really been executed, hence that its execution has not been merely dreamt. So we would have to help ourselves to something we wanted to justify in the first place. And how could we justify that there is an external world other than by using some empirical method (having to do with perception), whose capacity to provide sufficient grounds seems to depend on our having a warrant that perception is by and large a reliable guide to external things and events, hence that there is an external world in the first place. Cf. Wright (2002, 2004a, b).
Alternatively, it could be said that p therefore q is not a cogent argument—one that makes it possible to come to a rational conviction in the truth of the conclusion in virtue of recognizing it to follow from warranted premises. For even if we grant that \(p\) is warranted, it is warranted only courtesy a prior and independent warrant for the conclusion \(q\). As is well known, the so-called liberals (or dogmatists) would reject both (1) and (2) for perceptual propositions. Cf. Pryor (2000, 2004, 2012) and Davies (2004).
The main line of argument is that, all things considered, we do epistemically better when we take a risk in placing trust in contingent hinges than when we avoid risk by suspending them: for (1) we are not epistemically worse off when hinge propositions turn out false, since in both cases we end up with no true (or only a few) true beliefs; but (2) we are epistemically better off when hinges are true. Accepting hinge propositions thus looks as a dominant strategy in the decision-theoretic sense. So, even if we, ex hypothesi, have no evidence/reasons in favour of their truth, we do have a reason–indeed, epistemic entitlement—to accept or trust hinge-propositions. For some pertinent criticism of Wright’s argument compare Jenkins (2007) and Pedersen (2009). The worry is that payoffs are under-described by Wright, since the sceptic would certainly point out that, in case hinge commitments turn out false, we might end up with no (or few) true beliefs plus a host of false beliefs! In that case, placing trust no longer looks like a strictly dominant strategy in the game-theoretic sense. For some suggestions as to how to modify the original argument see Wright (2014).
Pritchard (2012, p. 263) indirectly confirms this himself when imputing to Wright that he has an internalist take on knowledge.
Note, however, that nowhere in Wright (2002, 2003, 2004a, b, 2007, 2012, 2014) Wright explicitly discusses \(Closure_{K}\) and \(Transmission_{RK}\) respectively. Rather, he quite consistently focuses on closure (or transmission) framed in terms of warrant under (or across) recognized valid argument (one exception that I encountered is Wright (2007, p. 31), where, in the course of expounding problems for liberal/dogmatic views such as Pryor (2000, 2004), he discusses closure of knowledge under recognized entailment). This meshes well with Wright’s agenda of developing a stable diagnosis of and response to the most radical sceptical challenges that deny us any warrant with respect to cornerstones (consequently any warrant for propositions in their dependent regions of thought). Wright is also explicit—cf. Wright (2004b, pp. 177–178), Wright (2014, p. 239)—that while he doubts that plausible counterexamples can be found to Closure of inclusive warrant (covering disjunctively evidential justification as well as entitlement) under recognized valid argument (viz. no warrant for \(p\) without warrant of some sort for \(q)\), specific kinds of warrant may well fail to transmit across recognized valid argument, among relevant cases being those in which \(q\) expresses a cornerstone for \(p\)-type propositions in its dependent region of thought (one notorious candidate being the Moore-style proof of external world). Indeed, analysis of such transmission failures might reveal that some “standard” closure principles for specific kinds of warrants—in particular, evidential-justificatory warrant—also fail to hold unrestrictedly: if \(q\) is a cornerstone for \(p\)-type propositions, one may have evidential-justificatory warrant for \(p\) without having that kind of warrant for \(q\) (though, sticking to Closure of inclusive warrant, one may need to possess a default-entitlement for \(q)\).
Wright (2004b, p. 176) adopts himself the following strategy: if belief is tightly evidentially controlled - so that warrant for it, if any, would have to be of a justificational variety - let’s pursue the idea of hinge commitments as doxastic attitudes not so tightly controlled by evidence.
The same holds, mutatis mutandis, for Transmission \(_{RK.}\)
The same point applies even when we treat hinge commitments as trust-like attitudes, reserving the term “belief” only for “evidentially controlled” doxastic attitudes. Perhaps trust could eventually turn into full belief, yet, if the Wittgensteinian view is right, this transformation does not happen in the case of hinge commitments due to reasoning ourselves into them from known (warranted) non-hinge premises depending, for their epistemic status, on hinge-like commitments.
Now even if competent deduction involves forming of a belief in \(q\) on the basis of concluding it from \(p\) (cf. Tucker 2010)—so that the belief-clause drops out as redundant—we still do no have a counterexample to \(Transmission_{RK}\) or \(Closure_{K,}\) For, then, \(q, \)qua hinge, simply cannot be competently deduced from \(p\). So, one conjunct of the antecedent of \(Transmission_{RK}\) or \(Closure_{K}\) is again false.
Silins (2005, pp. 89–95) criticizes Wright on the ground that his account of warrant-transmission failure is incompatible with closure-principles à la \(Closure_{K}\), To apply specifically to cases involving cornerstone propositions, Silins’ counter-examples to Wright’s position would have to involve stipulations to the effect that it is co-possible that: (1) \(X\) knows \(p\), (2) \(X\) competently deduces \(q\) from \(p\) and (3) X believes q on that basis of competent deduction from p, where\( q\) is a cornerstone proposition. But, absent some independent argument, it is not clear to me why Wright (or anybody who urges a Wittgensteinian epistemic architecture) should allow that this combination of cases is possible if \(q\) is a cornerstone for \(p\)-type propositions.
For instance, once we shift attention to less qualified closure principles for knowledge under recognized entailment (as Wright occasionally does, e.g. in Wright (2007, p. 31)), the question arises immediately as to how Wright-style account can preserve such principles (given that Wright does not raise any worries about them in the context) without presuming that hinge-like commitments typified by cornerstones are knowable in some sense (as, e.g., Davies (2004) seems to presume). Here, I think, Wright faces an unpalatable dilemma: either (a) to deny unrestricted validity of such principles (but Wright does not seem inclined to compromise them) or (b) to show in what plausible sense hinge-like commitments could be said to be knowable (but it is far from clear how this could be done, as Pritchard argues—rightly in my view). But consider that Pritchard himself cannot play with this card, as (1) his own (propositional) reading of hinges as unknowable would compromise such unqualified closure principles, and (2) he implicitly follows the strategy of replacing unqualified closure principles vulnerable to counter-examples by more qualified closure principles spelled out in terms of competent deduction. The latter are supposed to be immune to counter-examples compromising the former due to being directly and plausibly underwritten (unlike the former) by the idea of deductive extendibility of knowledge that essentially involves the idea that the consequence \(q\) is to be believed on the basis of competent deduction from the premise \(p\). Given this particular dialectical background, Wright-style account fares no worse than Pritchard’s own. Or so I argued.
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Acknowledgments
My work on this study was supported by the research grant GPP401/12/P599 (Certainties and the sceptical problem) of the Czech Science Foundation. I would like to thank Martin Kusch for many helpful comments. My participation in his lively seminar devoted to Wittgensteinian epistemology was a direct impetus to write this study. I am extremely grateful to the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for making all this possible and for providing me with exceptional working conditions during my research stay at the MCMP at LMU in Munich and at the Philosophy Department of the University of Vienna.
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Koreň, L. Hinge commitments vis-à-vis the transmission problem. Synthese 192, 2513–2534 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0664-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0664-x