Abstract
The appealing idea that knowledge is best understood as a kind of achievement faces significant criticisms, among them Matthew Chrisman’s charge that the whole project rests on a kind of ontological category mistake. Chrisman argues that while knowledge and belief are states, the kind of normativity found in, for example, Sosa’s famous ‘Triple-A’ structure of assessment is only applicable to performances, end-directed events that unfold over time, and never to states. What is overlooked, both by Chrisman and those he criticizes, is a whole range of projects, those like friendship, health, marriage, and sobriety, where the end is not distinct from our pursuit of it. I suggest that such ‘inner projects’ are in fact stative achievements and thus provide a different sort of model for thinking about knowledge as an achievement. Reconceiving the project along these lines also helps to solve another outstanding problem, the charge that being an achievement is not necessary for knowledge because some knowledge, especially testimonial knowledge, is come by with little or no effort.
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Notes
At least, they count as ‘animal’ knowledge. The story for ‘reflective’ knowledge is more complicated, requiring the apt belief itself be aptly noted. (Sosa 2007, 32)
Sosa’s version of the achievement program, like most, takes its promise to be reductive in character. The structure of performance normativity provides the recipe for saying what a belief needs, beyond truth, to count as knowledge. Despite the continuing allure of such programs, one need not take the achievement insight in these terms. One who supposes that either the skillfulness involved or the requisite sense of ‘in virtue of’ cannot be adequately explained in ‘knowledge’-free terms might reject the reductive ambitions while still claiming to supply the promised insights. The ‘direct virtue theory’ of (Miracchi 2015) provides another live example of how such a ‘knowledge-first’ achievement view might go.
He might equally have pointed out that much ‘belief maintenance’ talk, of the sort that introduces imperfective aspect (‘I was believing/maintaining my belief when...’), looks on its face to be clumsily expressed stative predication (‘I believed until...’).
The discussion here draws heavily on Lockhart’s (2015) discussion of ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ projects in Kirkegaard and Kant, here retitled ‘outer’ and ‘inner.’
The goals of inner projects are thus what Rödl (2010) helpfully calls ‘infinite ends’ in contrast to the ‘finite ends’ of outer projects.
A possibility of difference made clear by Thompson (2008, pp. 93–5).
Thus this shift, one might suspect, is accompanied by a shift in the kind of practical reasoning deployed by the agent, from straightforward instrumental reasoning to something richer, and richer in the way that the specificationism of Kolani (1962) or Wiggins (1976), the infinite ends of Rödl (2010), or the maiutic ends of Schmidtz (1994) are trying to get at. Relatedly, Graham (1980) suggests that the stative character of Aristotelian energeiai is important because states can play a kind of buck-stopping role in chains of practical reasoning.
Aristotle would insist on appropriate feelings as well, but I ignore this here and the yet further difficulties about temporality they bring with them.
This is to side, in an older interpretive dispute, with Graham (1980). Mourelatos (1993), agreeing, suggests the helpful ‘autotelic’ to contrast with atelic activities and heterotelic performances. Those who are more sympathetic to the opposing idea that energeia are processes or activities will not yet allow that any stative achievements have been produced, but only stretches of ‘staying happily married,’ ‘maintaining one’s health,’ and ‘remaining sober’ which so count. The category of achievements would still not be confined to performances.
Thanks are due to an anonymous referee for pressing this reaction and supplying some of the example demurral strategies here.
This is the interpretive suggestions of Lockhart (2015).
Shifting to the model of inner projects should discourage the idea that the ‘because’ here is causal, avoiding the inevitable examples, like that offered by Miracchi (2015), which combine traits of Gettier cases with those of Davidson’s (1980, p. 79) climber. It also recognizes Boyle’s (2011, p. 17) point that in standard explanations of the form ‘S believes p because S believes q,’ both explanans and explanandum must be present-tensed.
The moral case also looks to help with another lurking problem with taking states like heath and sobriety as models. Knowledge and belief are incredibly granular, as granular as their propositional objects, but sobriety is not similarly granular nor even really one state in a space of related states but a single sort of life-organizing principle. The arrow analogy at least had going for it the thought that one’s quiver and the supply of targets might be indefinitely large. Now at least we have the prospect of another inner project with proposition-like complexity.
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Rohrbaugh, G. Inner Achievement. Erkenn 80, 1191–1204 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9719-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-014-9719-5