Abstract
According to the usual way of understanding how true knowledge attribution works, it is not right to attribute knowledge of p to S unless p is true and S is justified in believing p. This assumption seems to hold even if we shun away from the idea that we can give an analysis of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions. I want to raise some suspicions on the correctness of this traditional picture. I suggest that justification is not always perceived as a necessary condition for true knowledge attribution, according to our pre-theoretical usage of standard epistemic terms. This is not to say that justification is never seen as an important requirement; sometimes it certainly is. Still, the full-fledged, traditional position on epistemic justification needs to be seriously qualified. Ultimately, I will contend that this result lends support to a rival epistemological standpoint — what we might dub a Moderate Peircean stance on epistemic matters.
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Notes
For arguments against the possibility of analyzing the concept of knowledge see in particular Williamson (2000); Williamson does identify several necessary conditions for knowledge, but no sufficient conditions.
Other deflationist accounts on justification can be found in Sartwell (1991, 1992), as well as in Hetherington (2001, 2007). The position I will adopt here, however, is less radical than theirs, and my arguments proceed along very different lines. In addition, people writing within artificial intelligence or epistemic logic tend to equate ‘knowledge’ with ‘true belief’ (cf. Halpern 2005), although arguably in such cases ‘knowledge’ is in fact a proxy for ‘information’. In any case, part of the goals of the present paper will be to build a bridge between the formal and informal traditions.
Someone can contend that, even assuming that sometimes we might be right to attribute knowledge to an agent in the absence of justification, there might still be some extra factor required for knowledge beyond true belief—some extra factor that has nothing to do with justification broadly understood (thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this point). As I am not attempting to provide an analysis of knowledge in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions, this is not a worry I need to address in this paper.
Some authors have proposed that, in the absence of concrete evidence in favor of lack of justification, we can assume that an agent’s beliefs are prima facie justified; cf. Pryor (2000) or (2004). Alternatively, Michael Williams has argued in favor of an attractive picture of justification by default; for this see also Brandom (1994). Thus we read, for example, “...[We] can see justification as exhibiting what Robert Brandom calls a ‘default and challenge structure’.... Epistemic entitlement is the default status of a person’s beliefs and assertions. One is entitled to a belief or assertion (which, remember, is an implicit knowledge-claim, unless clearly qualified) in the absence of appropriate ‘defeaters’; that is, reasons to think that one is not so entitled.” (Williams 2001, p. 149). In any case, Williams (2001) does not take his view to constitute an objection to the general claim that justification is always a necessary condition for knowledge.
Case (iii) from the preceding paragraph, in which the attributor suspends judgment on whether the agent has or does not have justification, raises a number of additional problems, but at the end of the day it can be assimilated to case (ii), with only minor modifications.
Cf. Stanley (2005).
Cf. MacFarlane (2005).
It should be recalled here that not all contextualists understand the practice within ‘the philosophy classroom’ along these lines; Michael Williams, for one, would certainly reject this interpretation, insofar as he does not take the skeptic to raise the standards, but to change the subject (2001, Chap. 16).
One can argue that there is a difference between stating that p is justified for S(at t), and stating that S has justification for p (at t). However, the difference (if indeed there is one) is not relevant for the present context of discussion, so I will gloss over it.
See footnote 18 for a more detailed account of how these notions relate to one another.
Peirce (1877).
On this see also Bilgrami (2000).
Where a belief is a ‘good’ candidate for acceptance/rejection if it is a belief a rational epistemic agent could accept/reject (i.e., if it is a belief one would be justified in accepting/rejecting).
In the light of this, here is a more detailed account of the formal tool used to capture the distinction between not having justification and being unjustified. A central assumption of moderate Peircean epistemology is that bona fide justification entails that some agent has reflected upon the proposition under consideration. Hence, we start by assuming:
-
(1)
\(J_{S}p \rightarrow R_{S^*}p\)
where ‘\(R_{S^*} p\)’ stands for ‘S* reflected on p’. From (1) it follows:
-
(2)
\( J_{S}p \leftrightarrow (J_{S}p \& R_{S^*} p)\), and therefore
-
(3)
\( {\sim } J_{S} p \leftrightarrow ((R_{S^*} p\, \& \, {\sim } J_{S}p) \vee {\sim } R_{S^*}p)\)
Now we can define
-
(4)
\( U_{S}p ={}_{df}.\, (R_{S^*}p\, \& \,{\sim } J_{S}p)\), from which we obtain
-
(5)
\(J_{S} p\rightarrow {\sim } U_{S}p\)
as well as all the compatibility relations between J and U discussed in Sect. 3.
-
(1)
But see footnote 10.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this objection.
Moreover, consider what happens if S* is wrong in (consciously) believing that p is not justified for S. In this case it makes sense to say that, even though S* is not ready to attribute knowledge to S, perhaps S* should be so ready. In other words, if S* falsely believes that p is not justified for S, it is not true that p is unjustified for S in the strong sense. Fortunately, ‘being or becoming aware of \(\varphi \)’ (as captured by operator ‘B’ from the previous section) is factive, so we do not need to worry about this problem. In any case, regardless of how wrong S* may be, to the extent that S* has considered the topic, p can no longer be neither justified nor strongly unjustified for S, as I have already pointed out.
For a different example, suppose that Juan formed a particular belief as a result of taking a pill, and suppose the belief happens to be true, as a matter of luck. Could it count as knowledge? (Thanks to David Etlin for raising this question). If I do not know anything about the fact that Juan took that pill, and Juan tells me something true in which I already believe (and suppose I do not have further reasons to doubt Juan’s epistemic credentials, generally speaking) then it is quite natural for me to say that Juan knows what he just told me. According to Moderate Peirceanism, in such circumstances I would have uttered a true sentence. At this point the objector would jump in and claim, “Oh, but Juan doesn’t really know it, does he?” All this shows is that it is of course correct to say that Juan does not know, from the vantage point of view of those who know that Juan took the pill. Once we are in a J-reflective stance, we cannot avoid passing judgment on S’s justification status regarding p, and hence we cannot avoid thinking that the knowledge attribution was a mistake, if p happened to be unjustified.
In Isaac Levi’s terms, the traditional epistemological framework would amount to a degenerate research program, in Lakatosian terms: almost 400 years later, we are still running in circles, wondering how to overcome evil demons of various types. See for instance Levi (1997).
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Acknowledgements
Previous versions of this paper have been presented at The First Congress of the Latin American Association for Analytic Philosophy (Mérida, Yucatán, April 2010); at TheXV Congress of the Argentine Philosophical Association (Buenos Aires, December 2010), and at SADAF International Workshop 2011 (Buenos Aires, August 2011). I am thankful to the participant for their questions and suggestions.
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Cresto, E. Knowledge attribution revisited: a deflationary account. Synthese 195, 3737–3753 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1282-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1282-y