Abstract
Reasons rationalize beliefs. Reasons, when all goes well, turn true beliefs into knowledge. I am interested in the relationship between these aspects of reasons. Without a proper understanding of their relationship, the theory of knowledge will be less illuminating than it ought to be. I hope to show that previous accounts have failed to account for this relationship. This has resulted in a tendency to focus on justification rather than knowledge. It has also resulted in many becoming skeptical about the prospects for an analysis of knowledge. The skepticism is misplaced and the tendency can be fixed without sacrificing any insights. The solution is to see how good reasons (in a sense to be articulated) are apparent (in a sense to be articulated) to the knowing subject. Once this claim is unpacked, we see that it is an illuminating analysis of knowledge in terms of distinct but intimately related aspects of epistemic assessment. It helps us see the value of knowledge (over and above true belief) and it affords us a unified, “reasons-first” metaepistemology. The resulting picture is neither a familiar kind of internalism or externalism.
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Notes
Before getting started I should mention that I like to put my point in terms of reasons, though for my purposes it would also be ok to put the points I make in terms of evidence.
Non-foundationalists say that reasonableness always requires having further reasons. Foundationalists deny this. I will remain neutral until later in the paper.
As opposed to the facts, in which case we would be considering its sufficiency as an objective normative reason. More on objective normative reasons and their relation to subjective normative reasons below.
Some readers may worry that this is inconsistent with out tendency to attribute knowledge to small children and animals. I disagree, although the point will have to be made in a different paper.
Perhaps better, a (rather than the) connection between justification and truth. Justification is already connected to truth in the minimal sense that your justification is something that makes it rational for you to regard something as true. The problem is that your justification needs another connection to truth for you to have knowledge; this is the upshot of the Gettier problem. Another way of voicing the concern is that we have two different truth-connections and they seem to both be interesting but not like two different aspects of a single interesting thing.
Cf. Putnam (1975).
Kirkham (1984) embraces the consequence.
One might object that the anti-Gettier condition is meant to be the connection between justification and truth, so it isn’t a mere aggregate. My concern is that the connection just seems like another dimension of assessment entirely. I take it this is the worry that the comments about JTB + analyses being ad hoc and unilluminating are gesturing toward.
It is sometimes argued that knowledge is more explanatorily powerful than mere rational true belief because it is more robust in the fact of new evidence and hence less likely to be lost after one learns more (Williamson 2000: Chapters 2,3). However, rational beliefs with no factual defeaters are even more robust to new evidence, but knowledge is still more interesting.
See fn. 12.
Putting it this way runs afoul of the reasons-first order of explanation. There is a more cumbersome way of making the same point that does not: if the world were as the subject rationally takes it to be (where rationality is determined by the balance of subjective normative reasons), then her subjective normative reason would be an objective normative reason.
Though see (Schroeder 2021, p. 69) for a possible lapse into his earlier view.
Strictly speaking, these are her justifiable beliefs. I ignore the subtlety here to streamline exposition.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for making clear the importance of driving this point home.
Ballantyne (2015) makes much of this point.
Rosenberg (2002) has a proposal that is similar in this respect, although relativist in a way mine isn’t.
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Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank Beth Barker, Regina Hurley, Jennifer Lackey, Nate Lauffer, Kathryn Pogin, Baron Reed, Tamler Sommers, Justin Zacek and two (incredibly helpful) anonymous referees for comments and helpful conversations. Most of all, thanks to Sandy Goldberg, for reading what must have been a dozen drafts over several years, and (somehow) getting contagiously excited each time he read a new one.
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Paulson, S. Good reasons are apparent to the knowing subject. Synthese 202, 15 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04242-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-023-04242-y