Abstract
In his “Common knowledge” (2016) and The Transmission of Knowledge (2021), John Greco proposes a novel account of hinge propositions. Central to it is the idea that they are items of common knowledge – that is, of knowledge that is already present in the system, freely available to anyone, without having to figure it out by oneself or having to be taught it by others. As such, they are not subject to any quality control at all. Furthermore, they figure in a subject’s cognitive economy as items of procedural, mostly tacit knowledge, which is operative in the execution of actions and various cognitive tasks. After introducing the basics of Greco’s account, I consider it from a systematic and historical perspective and argue that, while instructive, it is wanting in several respects. Whereas some, among the myriad hinges Wittgenstein considers in On Certainty (1969), may be known, there is no need to make them the content of a different kind of knowledge. Furthermore, we cannot have (evidential) justification and, a fortiori, knowledge of at least some other propositions that Wittgenstein considered as hinges. In passing, I also show that Greco’s account aligns much more with G. E. Moore’s ideas about the epistemic status of his truisms in “A defence of common sense” (1925) and the premises of his celebrated “Proof of an external world” (1939), than with Wittgenstein’s account of hinges and their epistemic significance in On Certainty.
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Notes
By “knowledge economy” I mean the production, the presence, and transmission of knowledge. Greco too thinks of items of knowledge as either produced (by experience or reasoning), or as transmitted (by testimony), or else, as already present in the knowledge system, freely available to anyone. In this sense knowledge items are like goods in an economic system, since they are either produced (like artifacts), or passed on (like goods passed on through selling or legacy), or else, freely available to anyone (like air, for Greco, which is at subjects’ disposal without their having to produce or in inherit it).
In particular, it includes “Every human being has parents”, “Cats don’t grow on trees”, “Motor cars don’t grow out of the earth”, which are all cases of easy knowledge in my opinion. The hard cases we hold in common are “The earth has existed for a long time (before my birth)”, “What has always happened will happen again”; “There are physical objects”. A mixed case is “The earth is a body on whose surface we move. [Easy knowledge on my account]. And it no more suddenly disappears or the like than any other solid body”, where the second conjunct is inferred from “Physical objects do not suddenly disappear out of their own accord” and “The earth is a physical object”. The first premise is a ‘hard’ hinge, to use Greco’s terminology; or a de jure or transcendental hinge, to employ the more common terminology in use among hinge epistemologists. Cf. fn. 4.
In the hinge epistemology literature, it is common to distinguish between de facto (or local) and de jure (or transcendental/universal) hinges (Moyal-Sharrock 2005, Chaps. 5, 7; Coliva and Palmira 2020, 2021; Boncompagni 2021). For some hinge epistemologists, only the latter are hinges properly so regarded, as they are the only ones which need to stay put in order for our inquiries to be possible; whereas the former are more like well-entrenched, commonsensical beliefs, that may be called into question without thereby forcing us to give up on our inquiries. At most, de facto hinges function as norms in the sense that they may be used to gauge a subject’s cognitive well-functioning, and/or their level of acculturation within a specific community.
Cf. fn. 2. Greco’s favorite examples are: “Every human being has parents” (OC 211); “Motor cars don’t grow out of the earth” (OC 279); “Cats do not grow on trees” (OC 282). As I claimed in the main text, these hinges seem to be known in an easy way; that is, through repeated experience, memory, inference, and testimony. A different case can be made for “The earth existed long before my birth” (OC 233), but, as I will argue, this hinge proposition does not support Greco’s own account in terms of common knowledge.
This proposition is not itself a hinge either for me or for Wittgenstein. Rather, it is an empirical proposition.
In my previous work on hinge epistemology, I have tended to restrict the propositions that count as hinges to those that play such a presuppositional role in our inquiries; namely hinges+. As we saw in fn. 2, 4, some hinge epistemologists prefer to distinguish between de facto (or local) and de jure (or transcendental or universal) hinges. Hinges+, as understood here, align with de jure (or transcendental) hinges, as referred to by these hinge epistemologists. My terminology, however, does away with the connotations carried by “transcendental” and “de jure”, which may be problematic. For instance, “the Earth has existed for a very long time” is not as general and universal, with respect to empirical inquiry, as “there are physical objects”. It is not, therefore, a condition of possibility of any empirical inquiry. Nor is it a law, either of physics or of a legal system. Still, it is a condition of possibility of at least many empirical inquiries, and, in that sense, it plays a normative rather than an empirical role. Also, it cannot be epistemically supported by evidence, for that evidence owes its justificatory role to the prior assumption of such a hinge. By “hinge+” I therefore refer to those hinges that play such a role and are not derived from or grounded in experience and/or testimony. Hinges + should not be confused with Pritchard’s (2015) notion of über hinge, which is the “hinge” – if one is inclined to so regard it – that we cannot possibly be massively mistaken. Hinges + have a more specific content, as we have seen by looking at some examples.
This is the well-known property of “transmission failure” (for an account, see Wright 1985 and for a distinction between different kinds of transmission failure, see Coliva 2015, chapter 3) that many inferences involving hinges, and, in particular, hinges+, as conclusions have. In Coliva (2010a), I consider at length the distinction between inferences that merely allow us to draw out a conclusion which is implicit in their premises, and inferences that offer epistemic support for the conclusion. In Coliva (2012, 2015, 2020, chapters 2-3) I also consider at length the distinction between transmission failure and the principle of closure for knowledge/justification under known entailment. On most hinge epistemology accounts, when hinges – and especially hinges+ – figure as conclusions of inferences, knowledge/justification of the premises does not transmit to the conclusion. That is, the inference does not epistemically support the conclusion, which in fact needs to be presupposed for the premises to be known/justified in the first place. Only some hinge epistemologists, however, also think that that involves a failure of Closure (for opposite views on the matter, see Coliva 2015, 2022; Wright 2014, Pritchard 2015).
For a review of the various version of hinge epistemology Coliva (2022, chapter 1, 2). See also Coliva, Moyal-Sharrock and Pritchard (2023) for an exposition and comparison between the authors? versions of hinge epistemology. see Coliva (2022, chapter 1, 2). See also Coliva,Moyal-Sharrock and Pritchard (2023) for an exposition and comparison between the authors? versions of hinge epistemology.
The example is mine.
Some fulfill the former, though. For there are cases in which an item can enter the knowledge- economy only based on a subject’s testimony. This is the case, for instance, when we must trust a witness of a crime to include within the system the information that the crime was committed by a given person. In that case, testimony is subject to a more thorough quality check, aimed at establishing whether the witness is sincere and knowledgeable with respect to the crime under investigation.
On the role of trust in the acquisition of hinges, see Coliva (2023).
In fact, now there are human beings that have a modified genome, with DNA replaced from a third subject; there are also human beings who have been originated in a lab; and there are cloned animals, that in a sense don’t have two biological parents. Furthermore, kids allow for the possibility that cats grow on trees, or out of plants, when they make use of imagination, and it may well be that in the future it will be possible for animals to grow out of trees. Notice that Wittgenstein was very interested in these possible changes.
For a reconstruction of the influences and borrowings on this issue between Wittgenstein and Malcolm, see Coliva (2010b, chapter 1).
See Coliva (2010b, chapter 2) for a development of this point.
See Coliva (2010b, chapter 2) for a development of this point.
For instance, one could tweak the Gricean account by stating that it is pragmatically infelicitous to assert what, as a matter of fact, is most often a tacit presupposition of our epistemic practices.
I will return to the issue of theoretical unity in § 5.
Personally, I think Greco is right about the fact that “There are physical objects” is hardwired, but not about the hinges mentioned in OC 153, 211, 282. With “What has always happened will happen again”, it could be either way.
See Greco (2021, pp. 123–124) for the details of his virtue-theoretic account of generated and transmitted knowledge.
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Coliva, A. Hinges in the knowledge economy. on greco’s common and procedural knowledge. Synthese 201, 149 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04130-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04130-5