Abstract
Stewart Cohen argues that basic knowledge is problematic, as it implies that subjects can acquire knowledge or justified beliefs about certain matters in ways that are supposedly too easy. Cohen raises two versions of the problem of easy knowledge, one involving the principle of closure and the other track-record style bootstrapping reasoning. In this paper I confront the problem of easy knowledge from the perspective of epistemological disjunctivism about perception. I argue that disjunctivism can do a better job than dogmatism at responding to the version of the problem involving closure. I also argue that while disjunctivism would permit subjects to bootstrap their way to justified beliefs about the reliability of their perceptual powers, the disjunctivist can distinguish in a principled manner between this sort of bootstrapping and instances of it that we should agree are objectionable.
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Notes
Discussions devoted to the problem or aspects of it include (Bergmann (2004, 2006), Chap. 7), Black (2008); Cohen (2002, 2005, 2010); Douven and Kelp (2013); Markie (2005); Neta (2005); Pryor (2004), (Sosa (2009), Chap. 10), Titelbaum (2010); Van Cleve (2003); Vogel (2008); Weisberg (2010) and White (2006).
Given that token beliefs and token grounds for beliefs fall under multiple types, and that the reliability of a given ground for a given belief will vary depending on the way those beliefs and grounds are typed, a restriction to relevant types is necessary (cf. Conee and Feldman 1998). I won’t provide an account of relevance here, though I assume that some such account can be provided.
For example, when they discuss the bootstrapping version of the problem of easy knowledge Van Cleve (2003) and Neta (2005) interpret the claim that perception is reliable as a claim about the reliability of perceptual grounds, whereas Markie takes it to concern the reliability of our faculty of perception (2005, p. 411).
My formulation of epistemological disjunctivism is indebted to McDowell (1982, 2011, 2013), and to Pritchard (2012). Epistemological disjunctivism is distinct from another theory in the philosophy of perception that also has a claim to be called disjunctivist, namely, naïve realism. According to naïve realism veridical experiences have mind-independent objects as constituents. The naïve realist thus affirms that subjects who suffer from hallucinations undergo a different kind of experience from subjects who enjoy veridical experiences (cf. Martin 2002, 2004, 2006). Naïve realism is motivated by considerations related to the metaphysics and phenomenology of perceptual experience while epistemological disjunctivism is motivated by epistemological ones, and the relation between the two theories is not a simple one. While it is natural for someone who holds naïve realism to hold epistemological disjunctivism (Fish 2009, p. 24), some metaphysical theories of perceptual experience that reject naïve realism may also be compatible with epistemological disjunctivism (Logue 2011, Sect. 2).
An alternative view is that the content of a perceptual experience is a state of affairs (McDowell 2013, p. 145). Nothing of significance in what follows will hang on which of these alternatives is adopted.
There is bound to be some restriction on what properties of an object can figure in the content of a perceptual experience. Since color, shape, and location in egocentric space are the most obvious perceptible qualities of objects, they are the ones that figure in my illustration.
If in a good case I have reflective access to a conclusive reason to believe that something is F, then not only can I come to know that it is F on this basis, I can also deduce, and thereby come to know, that I am in a good case and not in a corresponding bad one. But this raises the question: if I can know, in this way, that I am in a good case rather than a bad case, how can it be that I cannot introspectively distinguish between being in the good case and being in the bad one? Pritchard helpfully answers this question by drawing a distinction between “favoring epistemic support” and “discriminatory epistemic support” (2012, pp. 79–80). Any evidence for p is evidence that counts in favor of the truth of p, and in doing so constitutes favoring epistemic support for p. However, not all favoring epistemic support is discriminating support, or support that is tied to a capacity to discriminate that p has obtained rather than an alternative incompatible proposition. The distinction between favoring and discriminatory epistemic support is well motivated independently of disjunctivism. For instance, I have some evidence that the creature I see on my tree is a cardinal rather than a holographic projection of a cardinal, but I do not have this evidence in virtue of an ability to discriminate between cardinals and cardinal-holograms. Rather, it is due to my background knowledge, e.g., that cardinals are common in my neighborhood and that no one has reason to project a hologram of a cardinal onto my tree. By invoking the distinction between favoring and discriminating support, we can say that when I’m in a good case, my perception of something as F provides epistemic support for knowing it is F rather than that it merely appears to be F that is favoring support but not discriminatory support. This is why I can then deduce (and thereby come to know) that I’m in a good case rather than the corresponding bad case and yet be unable to introspectively distinguish between the good case and the bad case (ibid., 97).
For more comprehensive discussions of disjunctivism, see the sources cited in note 4.
This account is consistent with that of McDowell (2011), as I understand it (see especially pp. 39–42).
This is parallel to the claim that if my perceptual state presents to me a red sphere in front of me, then there is a red sphere in front of me.
I think this is true even of subjects who know they are hallucinating. Even when one knows that some aspect of one’s experience is hallucinatory, it still seems phenomenologically correct to say that one’s experiential state appears to present that aspect as a feature of one’s environment.
Pritchard claims that it’s also possible for there to be considerations that the subject is not actually aware of (say, because of negligence) but that she ought to be aware of that prevent her from acquiring knowledge on the basis of a genuine perceptual experience (2012, p. 30).
Again, color properties are a plausible candidate for inclusion in a set of perceptible properties of objects, and I’ll be focusing on an example involving them in Sect. 3.
This formulation is due to Hawthorne (2004).
Pritchard claims that when a subject explicitly claims to know that p in response to a challenge that raises a specific error-possibility, she generates the conversational implicature that she can perceptually discriminate between it’s being the case that p and the scenario asserted in the error-possibility (2012, pp. 143–146). Therefore, on his view it would be conversationally inappropriate for the father to explicitly claim he knows that the table is red, even though it is true that he knows this. So far this does not speak to Cohen’s case, since the father does not explicitly assert “I know the table is red.” But if one were to add that it is conversationally appropriate to use a certain premise in responding to a skeptical challenge only if it would be conversationally appropriate to explicitly claim to know the truth of that premise, then one could derive the conclusion that when the father asserts (4) in response to his son’s challenge he makes an assertion that is conversationally inappropriate. While this conclusion is not incompatible with my view, I do not rely on any assumptions about what is conversationally appropriate.
Pritchard makes the point in relation to Dretske’s zebra case (2012, p. 98). If a subject knows that a certain animal is a zebra in virtue of seeing that it is a zebra, and deduces that the animal is not a cleverly disguised mule, then the subject knows it is not a mule in virtue of seeing it is a zebra. Seeing that the an animal is a zebra is sufficient evidence for knowledge that it isn’t a cleverly disguised mule because it excludes this possibility, and so Transmission is not violated.
Notice that it is a priori knowable that if one sees (or otherwise perceives) something as F, then it is F. This is significant since it enables us to accept ground-basic knowledge while still understanding why it might look plausible that in order to know some proposition one must first know that the ground on the basis of which one knows it is reliable. The intuitive support for this principle is the thought that in order for it to be rational for a subject to base her belief that p on a certain ground she must not be “in the dark” as to whether that ground reliably indicates that p. But the disjunctivist can say that there is a sense in which a subject can have ground-basic knowledge that p without being completely in the dark about whether her ground reliably indicates that p. Since it is an a priori truth that perceiving something as F entails that it is F, a subject who bases her belief that x is F on the reason provided by a genuine perceptual state of it as F will be in a position to know, by reflection alone, that the ground of her belief is a perfectly reliable indicator of its truth. The fact that she is in a position to know this by reflection alone provides a sense in which it isn’t simply an accident from her perspective that her ground is reliable. But the fact that she is able to know by reflection alone that the ground for her belief that p is reliable does not entail that she is required to actually form the belief that it is in order for her to know that p.
This vitiates Bergmann’s response to the bootstrapping problem. Bergmann contends that bootstrapping reasoning is only bad when the subject is in a questioning/doubting situation, that is, a situation in which, prior to forming a belief in the conclusion, she is or should be questioning the reliability of the source at issue (2006, p. 198). Roxanne is not in a questioning/doubting situation, however, and yet her reasoning is still bad.
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Stuchlik, J. Epistemological disjunctivism and easy knowledge. Synthese 192, 2647–2665 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0683-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0683-7