Abstract
Almost everyone will grant that knowledge is often transmitted through testimony. Indeed, to deny this would be to accept a broad-ranging skepticism. Here is a problem: Knowledge seems to be transmitted right along side lots of garbage. That is, besides transmitting genuine knowledge, we manage to transmit lots of beliefs that are irrational, superstitious, self-deceiving, and flat out false. So how is that possible? How is it that the very same channels manage to transmit both knowledge and garbage together? Call this “the garbage problem”. Part One of the paper explicates the problem in more detail and argues that the problem seems unsolvable by some familiar approaches to testimonial knowledge. Part Two presents and begins to defend a solution. The general idea is to treat the garbage problem as a generality problem.
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Notes
As endorsed by, for example, Jennifer Lackey (2008). Lackey emphasizes the distinction between being a reliable speaker and being a reliable believer, and endorses a reliable speaker condition on testimonial knowledge. As Lackey points out, numerous philosophers endorse a reliable believer condition in virtue of requiring that, in cases of testimonial knowledge that p, the speaker knows that p.
Cf. Goldberg (2010).
Adapted from Nozick (1981).
Adapted from Sosa (1999).
Conee and Feldman (1998).
Two comments are in order here. First, the relevant notion of “practical task” is not opposed to theoretical tasks. Rather, purely theoretical tasks are here conceived as limit cases of practical tasks. For example, a team of mathematicians might have the “practical task” of construction a mathematical proof. Second, there is quite a bit of room for flexibility regarding which practical tasks are relevant. On one dimension, we might consider whether it is only the practical tasks of the hearer, those of the speaker and hearer together, some broader group of persons. On another dimension, is it only actual practical tasks that matter, possible tasks, typical tasks? For considerations along these lines see Greco (2012a), especially Sect. 5.
The relevant notion of epistemic community is further developed in Greco (2015) and Greco (forthcoming).
Here we assume that Pete’s only source of information about the bridge pilings is visual perception under present conditions.
For helpful comments, thanks to audiences at Edinburgh University, Saint Louis University, the University of Missouri, Saint Louis, and the conference on Epistemic Dependence on People and Instruments, the Autonomous University of Madrid, 2016, and especially to Sandy Goldberg, Jon Kvanvig, Luis Pinto de Sa, and Eric Wiland.
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Greco, J. The transmission of knowledge and garbage. Synthese 197, 2867–2878 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02090-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02090-3