Abstract
Themes from Klein: Knowledge, Scepticism, and Justification is a collection of essays written to honor retiring philosopher Peter D. Klein, whose work has been and continues to be influential in the ongoing development of contemporary epistemology. Klein has done important work on skepticism, the Gettier problem, the structure of justification, defeasibility theory and defeaters, and his own hotly debated theories, including infinitism and his attempt to systematize what he calls “useful falsehoods.” Klein’s ideas have been influenced, he tells us, by twentieth-century predecessors such as Roderick Chisholm, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and A. J. Ayer. But the reader of Klein’s work will be struck not by whatever similarity it bears to what has come before, nor by the extent to which it departs from the past, but rather by its intellectual integrity. Neither a conformist nor a reactionary, Peter Klein marches to the beat of one drummer: his reasoning. This introduction provides a broad overview of Klein’s ideas on each of the book’s themes (knowledge, skepticism, and justification).
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Klein himself gives a useful runthrough of differences among theories of knowledge and theories of justification in his 1998a encyclopedia entry.
- 3.
- 4.
In the 1971 paper, this is given as a definition of “propositional knowledge.”
- 5.
In one later paper, Klein adds two additional conditions to avoid the interference of epistemic luck: S must be an ideal epistemic agent, believing all and only justified propositions for no other reason than that they are justified, and S must believe of each of these beliefs that it is justified (1984, 155–156). The final addition is intended to ensure that S is in fact an epistemic agent and not merely a very accurate machine, but the move is questionable, which may be why Klein prefers the 1971 paper (per email correspondence 2018). A more recent definition of a defeater appears in Klein 2017. Defeaters are discussed a bit more in the final part of this introduction. They are also discussed or refined in a number of the chapters in this book, especially Chaps. 9, 14, and 6, by Sharon Ryan, Matthew Kotzen, and Rodrigo Borges, respectively.
- 6.
One of Klein ’s favorite points of attack against etiology-of-belief views is their inability to identify which reliable process is relevant to the formation of any given belief, or what causal mechanism produces, in general, beliefs that q from beliefs that p (2012, 161). He divides etiology views into four prevalent approaches: “tracking theories , safety theories, reliabilism, and virtue epistemology ” (see 2017, 42 for details).
- 7.
Klein takes all causal/etiology views to be “naturalized” to varying degrees and his own view, by contrast, to be normative (1998b, 362).
- 8.
Contrary to this assumption, Sanford C. Goldberg, in Chap. 13, offers an externalist account of epistemic obligation.
- 9.
Knowledge that meets the minimally sufficient conditions for being knowledge is, according to Sosa, “animal knowledge.”
- 10.
Klein (2007b, 5) grants that Sosa’s non-normative knowledge is also a kind of knowledge, but Klein thinks that animal knowledge is not the properly epistemological kind. Note also that the sort of agency useful for thinking about Klein’s views does not entail doxastic voluntarism (6).
- 11.
Klein himself does not speak in terms of primitives or fundamentality within the epistemic. Defeasibility theory is nonetheless distinct from “reasons-first” views. See Sylvan and Sosa (2018) for a characterization of—and their disagreement with—the reason-firster.
- 12.
Unlike Bertrand Russell, Klein does not require that the falsity of a belief be logically impossible in order for the belief to be certain (Klein 1992, 62).
- 13.
- 14.
So too does Claudio de Almeida in Chap. 10.
- 15.
Taking Klein out of context makes it easy to read his response to the skeptic as dogmatic . For example, he admits in a 1986 paper to having defended (in Klein 1981) that “since many of our beliefs are in fact such that there are no defeaters, the Cartesian requirement of indubitability is in fact satisfied” (1986, 381n12). This indeed sounds dogmatic. But Klein has substantially revised his view of defeaters since writing Certainty (for an example, see 1995, 230n5). Klein (2017) suggests we can find his best answers to skepticism in Klein 1981, 1995, and 2004c.
- 16.
Doxastic justification is defined in the final section of this introduction.
- 17.
Note that if we counted the truth of the skeptical hypothesis among things we know, reflection would not so easily move us to reject it.
- 18.
Compare infinitism to foundationalism , according to which some beliefs (foundational ones) arrive with “justificational juice” that pours or is poured into other beliefs.
- 19.
When there is a tether, it can vary in strength: our reasoning for believing p can be more or less resistant to defeat (Klein 1985, 107).
- 20.
Klein believes that “it is a contingent fact that our justified beliefs tend to be true” (2017, 41).
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- 22.
Klein does say that “[d]oxastic justification is parasitic on propositional justification” (2007b, 8), but he does not explicitly demand that the reasons necessary for propositional justification be all-things-considered reasons. Suppose you have some memories of seeing blackbirds and some memories of seeing bluebirds. Willfully ignoring your blackbird memories to focus only on your set of bluebird memories does not mean you are justified in believing the proposition “All birds are blue.” But the definition of propositional justification given above would allow that you could be doxastically justified in believing “All birds are blue” on the basis of your bluebird memories if your blackbird memories have understandably slipped your mind. Sometimes we forget. In more recent work, Klein avoids the ambiguity by referring to a single set of reasons R available to S that contains “all and only (1) the propositions that are the content of S’s beliefs and also (2) the propositions that are rational extensions of S’s beliefs” (2017, 47), but p (the proposition R supports) is a rational extension of S’s beliefs, so the newer definition is problematic.
- 23.
The prohibition on reasoning in circles, even very large ones, is something he in most places takes for granted, although he does provide an argument in Klein 2003 (85).
- 24.
Klein’s own proposal for reconciling infinitism and foundationalism appears in Klein 2014. The thought-string metaphor, again not to be confused with the tether between belief and truth, should not be taken too seriously, beyond what it is used to illustrate here. For one, Klein does not think of justification as something that is transferred along a chain of beliefs, so these strings are not “conductors”, so to speak, of justification. Furthermore, the beliefs in a chain of justification should not be understood as contiguously connected; reasoning does not cause beliefs on Klein’s view.
- 25.
Klein points out that Paul Moser used the term before him and John Post first characterized the position (1998c, 919n1).
- 26.
Peijnenburg & Atkinson’s chapter (Chap. 12) and Matthew Kotzen’s chapter (Chap. 14) are a testament to the relevance of Klein’s ideas to a generation informed by what we could call the “formal turn” of epistemology in recent decades.
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Fitelson, B., Braden, C. (2019). Introduction. In: Fitelson, B., Borges, R., Braden, C. (eds) Themes from Klein. Synthese Library, vol 404. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04522-7_1
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