Abstract
Belief is considered a kind of performance, which attains one level of success if it is true (or accurate), a second level if competent (or adroit), and a third if true because competent (or apt). Knowledge on one level (the animal level) is apt belief. The epistemic normativity constitutive of such knowledge is thus a kind of performance normativity. A problem is posed for this account by the fact that suspension of belief seems to fall under the same sort of epistemic normativity as does belief itself, yet to suspend is of course precisely not to perform, certainly not with the aim of truth. The paper takes up this problem, and proposes a solution that distinguishes levels of performance norrmativity, including a first order where execution competence is in play, and a second order where the performer must assess the risks attendant on issuing a first-order performance. This imports a level of reflective knowledge that ascends above the animal level.
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Notes
This is the celebrated Gettier problem, with a vast literature.
True, we could perhaps, just barely, make sense of an extended sort of “motivation” even in those cases, as when a nearby torch fools the thermostat into activating the air conditioner even when the room is already cool. It still in some broad sense has a reason for performing as it does, a “motivating reason.” Despite the non-trivial resemblance, nonetheless, this is clearly a metaphorical extension, if only because of the vastly greater complexity involved in human motivation.
A shot might manifest an archer’s competence without its accuracy doing so. The shot with the two intervening gusts is a case in point. How does that shot manifest the archer’s competence? By having at the moment of release an angle, direction, and speed that would take it to the bull’s-eye, in relevantly normal conditions.
Just as its being true that p entails its being true that it is true that p, so one’s bringing it about that p may entail that one brings it about that one brings it about that p, assuming such iteration always makes sense.
Even if performances do not have the automatically induced aims just suggested, we still retain an account of why knowledge is better than merely true belief, since apt performances, in general, are as such better than those that attain success only by luck. So, beliefs provide just a special case of that general truth. This account still depends of course on our view of knowledge as apt belief, belief that manifests the relevant competence of the believer in reaching its aim of truth.
In fact proper reflective knowledge will always guide or help to guide its corresponding animal belief. Proper reflective knowledge will after all satisfy requirements of coherence, which means not just logical or probabilistic coherence of the respective belief contents, but also the mutual basing relations that can properly reflect such coherence among the contents. Cross-level coherence, from the object to the meta, and conversely, is a special case of such coherence, and it imports “guidance” of the animal belief by the relevant meta-beliefs (or, in other words, basing of the former on the latter). It bears emphasis that the meta-aptness of a belief, which we have found to be an important factor in its epistemic evaluation, requires ascent to a good enough perspective concerning the first level potential attitudes among which the subject must opt (whether he opts with full conscious deliberation or through a less explicit procedure). Coherence among first-level attitudes is not enough. The subject must ascend to a level wherein he assesses relevant risk, whether in full consciousness or less explicitly, and opts on that basis. Included in that analysis is perforce some assessment of one’s relevant competence(s) and situation, and this must itself be performed adequately, if it is to yield a fully creditable first-level performance. Its assessment as thus fully creditable is moreover fully epistemic. For it is an assessment as to whether belief is the proper response to one’s situation rather than suspension of belief.
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This paper keynoted the first Midwest Epistemology Workshop, and was also delivered in Taiwan as the first of three Soochow Lectures in Philosophy. Copyright by Ernest Sosa.
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Sosa, E. Knowing full well: the normativity of beliefs as performances. Philos Stud 142, 5–15 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9308-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-008-9308-z