Abstract
In When is True Belief Knowledge? (2012) Richard Foley proposes an original and strikingly simple theory of knowledge: a subject S knows some proposition p if and only if S truly believes that p and does not lack any important information. If this view is correct, Foley allegedly solves a wide variety of epistemological problems, such as the Gettier problem, the lottery paradox, the so-called ‘value problem’, and the problem of skepticism. However, a central component of his view is that whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on the importance of the information that one has or lacks. My paper raises doubts about whether there is a non-circular way to distinguish important information from unimportant information. I argue that there is no way to distinguish important information from unimportant information without ultimately making reference to knowledge; thus, Foley’s new theory of knowledge does not achieve its goals.
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Notes
Foley recognizes that a vast number of truths are associated with any particular situation, so even the most well-informed person would not have all truths about a situation. Whether a true belief counts as knowledge thus hinges on whether the missing information is important (5).
To support this claim, Foley provides the example of a quiz show contestant who recalls the date of the Battle of Marathon from her high school history course, but does not remember that the Greeks won the battle or even that the adversaries were the Greeks and Persians. Often many surrounding truths do not strike us as being important in order for the subject to have knowledge. How much information is needed for knowledge varies from situation to situation (14–15).
Whether or not a true belief is important can be influenced by intellectual and practical considerations, such as what is at stake. This opens the door for views like subject-sensitive invariantism and contextualism; however, Foley doesn’t take a definitive stance on this issue (see 21–30). Whether or not his view must imply some version of contextualism depends on whether there is a plausible invariantist treatment of adequate information.
In a nutshell, here’s how he resolves these three worries: the victim in a Gettier scenario will lack some important truth that prevents her from knowing (as illustrated by the case of Joan’s stolen laptop); the lottery ticket holder does not know that she has lost, despite her overwhelming statistical evidence, because she is not aware which specific ticket is the winner (72); knowing p is usually more valuable than merely truly believing p on the assumption that true belief is valuable and that one has at least as much (and usually more) of this valuable commodity when one knows p than when one merely believes p (67).
See also Clayton Littlejohn (2012).
This point can be strengthened. The proposition < ticket T543 is the winner > only closes a gap in S’s information because it entails < S’s ticket is not the winner >. This raises the question of why <ticket T543 is the winner > is important given that S already has the important piece of information < S’s ticket is not the winner >.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this point.
If you are not convinced that this is a genuine case of knowledge, just change the example to one in which I know that I’ll likely enjoy dinner.
Thomas Kelly (forthcoming) has pursued a similar line of argument to reject the Uniqueness Thesis, which says that a body of evidence justifies at most one propositional attitude toward any particular proposition.
According to Foley, there are various aids to help us identify the kind of truths we think a person must be aware of to have adequate information. In particular, gaps in our information may sometimes be explained by reliability accounts, proper function accounts, tracking accounts, justification accounts, and complex links with human concerns and values. This makes his view more ecumenical than its competitors, for he does not fixate upon a particular shortcoming (i.e. an unreliable method, a failure at truth-tracking, etc.) and try to build an entire theory of knowledge around it. However, reliability, truth tracking, etc. are just frequent accompaniments of knowledge and not prerequisites (none of these merits may be required to explain why somebody knows something); moreover, it is unclear how appealing to these considerations will allow Foley to escape the worry raised by my examples.
On page 20 Foley says he isn’t interested in dealing with the ‘hard cases’; however, he is referring to cases in which there is a dispute about whether someone knows something, not cases in which it is clear whether someone knows but unclear whether the information is important (as in the cases I’ve constructed).
For example, Keith Lehrer presents the example of Mr. Truetemp, a man who (unbeknownst to him) has a device implanted in his brain that accurately reads the room temperature and causes a spontaneous belief about that temperature. Such a man has true beliefs about the temperature, and his belief-forming process is reliable, but he does not know what the temperature is in the room. This is supposed to be a problem for process reliabilism, but if the defender of reliabilism can simply dismiss this as a “borderline case”, then Foley’s view has no advantage here.
References
Foley, R. (2012). When is true belief knowledge?. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
James, W. (1896). The will to believe. New World, 5, 327–347.
Kelly, T. Forthcoming. How to be an epistemic permissivist. In M. Steup and J. Turri (Eds.) Contemporary Debates in Epistemology.
Littlejohn, C. (2012). Review: When is true belief knowledge? Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews.
Williams, B. (1973). Deciding to believe. In Williams (Ed.) Problems of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Ackowledgments
I am grateful to Nathan Ballantyne, Chris Cowie, Helen Marsh, and the audience at the Edinburgh Epistemology Conference in 2013. This paper was written while I was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
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Hannon, M. Is Knowledge True Belief Plus Adequate Information?. Erkenn 79, 1069–1076 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9593-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9593-6