Abstract
Contextualists and Subject Sensitive Invariantists often cite the knowledge norm of assertion as part of their argument. They claim that the knowledge norms in conjunction with our intuitions about when a subject is properly asserting in low or high stakes contexts provides strong evidence that what counts as knowledge depends on practical factors. In this paper, I present new data to suggest they are mistaken in the way they think about cases involving high and low stakes and I show how insensitive invariantists can explain the data. I exploit recent work done on the distinction between flouting a norm and being blamed for that violation to formulate a rigorous theory of rational expected blameworthiness that allows insensitive invariantists to explain the data cited.
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Notes
More recent work done on this distinction include (Williamson Forthcoming) and (Kelp and Simion 2017). These theorists, however, have not given a role to stakes in their calculation of blameworthiness and one of my primary contributions in the paper is to develop a systematic model of how stakes interact with judgments of blameworthiness.
This is just a rough description of truth relevance, for example, we might want to count the conjunction of two factors, each of which increase and decrease evidential probability but together cancel each other out, as a truth relevant factor itself. Furthermore, some theorists may want to claim that the notion of evidential probability itself is pragmatically encroached upon. If such is the case, they need another way to cash out the distinction between truth relevant and non-truth relevant factors. (For further discussion, see (Comesana2013)) I bracket these issues here and will go along with this natural way to understand the distinction between truth and non-truth relevant factors.
I assume that even in the high stakes scenario, the agent in question continues to sustain belief in the relevant proposition. Some philosophers have suggested that because the threshold of credence to sustain belief is sensitive to practical factors and so in the high stakes situations, the agent no longer sustains belief in the relevant proposition. Full discussion of this claim is outside the scope of this paper, but I am unconvinced that this adequately describes the phenomena. After all, we can make the psychologically plausible stipulation that the husband has a credence high enough for belief even when the stakes are high. Even after making this stipulation explicit, however, our intuitions of propriety are unchanged and stand in need of explanation. I will hence bracket this issue and assume that belief in the relevant proposition is sustained in the high stakes situation. See e.g. (Bach 2005; Nagel 2008) for further discussion.
This move is also dialectically problematic: Contextualists and Subject Sensitive Invariantists have often exploited this distinction between flouting the norm and being blamed for flouting it to respond to critics. For example, in response to Brown who claims that in Gettiered examples the subject can act or assert without flouting any norms, they have claimed that the intuition is explained by how the subject flouts the norm but does so blamelessly. (e.g. DeRose 2009 p. 93–95, Hawthorne and Stanley 2008 p. 587, and see Brown 2008 p. 171–4 for further discussion).
I thank an anonymous referee for pressing me to clarify my methodological commitments here.
One problem with this formulation is that it seems insensitive to the probability of outcomes occurring when calculating the difference in utilities given that we should be sensitive to the probabilities of outcomes occurring when we act. The solution might then be to calculate the difference in expected utilities instead of utilities. This, however, might not adequately capture the intuitive way we talk about stakes, where often raising the slight possibility of something terrible happening would make us describe the situation as a high stakes one. (See Anderson and Hawthorne (2019) for further discussion) Nevertheless, I share the intuition that we should consider probabilities when we act, and I believe I accommodate this intuition in my positive account of rational expected blameworthiness.
In HIGH BANK, DeRose can insist that the stakes that affect the meaning of ‘knows p’ in the sentence are not the stakes attached to the utterance of the sentence in which it is embedded, but simply the stakes attached to the simple ‘p’ or ‘knows p’. It would therefore be the high stakes attached to ‘p’ that modify ‘know that p’ in “I don’t know that p”, causing the denial of knowledge to turn out to be true. In JUDGE or PRESIDENT, DeRose can point out that since “I don’t know that p” is high stakes according to my construal, it is difficult for Antonio/Nikson to know that he does not know that p, thus making it improper to assert. Thanks to Abelard Podgorski for mentioning this to me.
Some may wonder about the implications of the thesis that one’s evidence is one’s knowledge on my proposal. Discussing E = K is outside of the scope of this paper, but I assume that it can be consistent with my proposal here. I discuss the implications of this in §4.
One may be puzzled why EB(φp) occurs twice in the final formula for rational expected blameworthiness. An anonymous reviewer points out that perhaps overall blameworthiness should just be proportional to the practical stakes alone and that EB(φp) should only come in when calculating rational expected blameworthiness. I think that this is mistaken. Recall that overall blameworthiness tracks the blameworthiness of an agent when the norm is indeed being flouted. It seems plausible to me that there needs to be an epistemic factor here. Consider an example outside of assertion: if, while reversing my car, I accidentally hit and seriously injure a young man, it seems how much blame I ought to receive depends on how much evidence I have that my actions would hurt the person in question. If he ran behind my car from my blindspot, it seems I should be blamed less than if I saw him in my rear mirror and assumed that he would move out of the way. Given that we are now interested not in how much one is blamed when flouting a norm but on the amount of risk once takes in flouting a norm, we then have to factor in one’s evidence again in calculating the rational expected blameworthiness. This is why, even if I would indeed be severely blamed for hitting someone while reversing my car (I assume this is so even in the good case), I might do nothing improper in trying to park and running the relatively low risk of hitting someone.
Regardless, even if EB(φp) only appears once in the final formula, it should make only minimal difference to my account. All I need is for our judgments of propriety to track both the stakes as well as our evidence that we are ignorant of the relevant proposition.
See also Schulz (2017) who endorses and provides a more formal statement of this view.
This is related to Greco’s (2013) Prodigality problem for the thesis that one’s evidence is one’s knowledge: given that one’s evidence is one’s knowledge, the evidential probability of a known proposition is 1. Adopting standard assumptions in decision theory, this would then allow the agent to make all sorts of wild bets based on known propositions. The problem is therefore a general one that afflicts any account of evidential probability that assigns known propositions the value of 1. As my account does not necessitate this view, I leave it open here whether the Prodigality Problem can be overcome.
See Reed (2002) for discussion on Fallibilist accounts of knowledge.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for pressing me on this point.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Abelard Podgorski, Bob Beddor, Philip Pettit, Yeo Shang Long and two anonymous referees for reading and providing invaluable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I'd like to thank Bob Beddor especially for encouraging me on this project and providing extensive discussion and feedback along the way.
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Yip, B. Assertion, Stakes and Expected Blameworthiness: An Insensitive Invariantist Solution to the Bank Cases. Erkenn 87, 1501–1519 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00259-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00259-8