Abstract
In a recent paper Jacob Ross presents two ingenious objections against the safety theory of knowledge: one against the claim that safe true belief is necessary for knowledge, the other one against the claim that safe true belief is sufficient for knowledge. While the first objection seems to go through there are problems with the second one: Its core issue is due not to problems of the safety theory but to peculiarities of the proposition used in the objection. Instead of showing that safety is insufficient for knowledge, Ross is really presenting an unknowable proposition.
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Notes
Ross’ objections work with the case of “meta-epistemic” beliefs (beliefs about the epistemic status of one’s beliefs). One might complain that these are very special kinds of beliefs: Even if Ross’ objections should go through, the safety theorist could simply restrict the scope of their theory and put meta-epistemic beliefs aside without losing much of the substance and interest of the theory. Safety theorists typically admit, for instance, that the theory doesn’t work well in the case of necessary truths, at least not without drastic changes to the safety account (from focus on individual propositions to kinds of “similar” propositions); if a restriction of the original safety account to contingent truths is fine, then why not also a restriction to beliefs that aren’t meta-epistemic? This response, however, seems ad hoc. Anyway, we can put this issue aside here because the aim of this paper is to focus on a different and more interesting problem with Ross’ critique of the safety theory.
It is unknowable, given Ross’ case. For the sake of simplicity of expression only, I am using the unconditional expression “unknowable” here. - It seems that Ross has thought of similar objections to his argument later (personal communication).
Since safety is the safety of some given belief and since safety requires the truth of that belief in the closest possible world, the actual word, we can simply use the term “safety” instead of “safe true belief”.
Nothing changes if we give up bivalence for r: For the same reasons why r cannot be believed falsely, it can also not be believed non-truly (be it falsely, indeterminately, etc.). Hence, we only needed to consider the alternative here that S believes truly that r. - We don’t even have to assume that knowledge requires belief because it’s part of Ross’ case that the subjects believes that r.
Ross notices at the end of his article that his objection against the sufficiency claim “appears to rule out a wide range of theories of knowledge” (Ross, 2018, 554). Ross mentions 7 such accounts of knowledge (justified-true-belief accounts, justified-true-belief-plus-X accounts, sensitivity accounts, reliabilist accounts, no-false-lemma accounts, defeasibility accounts and aptness accounts). Given that r is unknowable, this is an obvious limitation for all possible accounts of knowledge (not just a wide range of them).
If one were to deny truth-aptness for propositions like r, then our topic would change into a very different one. If one were to deny bivalence, one could still run the above argument (see fn.5). If one were to deny the equivalence scheme for truth, one would have to present and defend a different conception of truth, and one that would make a difference for what has been said above; I cannot think of any such conception. To give up on the factivity of knowledge strikes me as a rather desperate move very much in need of very good, independent motivation. The same holds even more strongly for the idea of giving up on classical logic. In contrast, it is quite uncontroversial that there are unknowable propositions (like r).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for this objection.
We could skip “belief” because it’s assumed in Ross’ case that the subject believes that r. The argument works even for those who hold that true belief is sufficient for knowledge (see, classically, Sartwell 1991).
References
Luper-Foy, S. (1987). “The Possibility of Skepticism”. in: Steven Luper-Foy (ed.), The Possibility of Knowledge. Nozick and His Critics (pp. 219–241). Totowa/ NJ: Rowman & Littlefield
Ross, J. (2018). Knowledge, Safety, and Meta-Epistemic Belief. Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 99, 550–554
Sartwell, C. (1991). Knowledge is Merely True Belief“. American Philosophical Quarterly, 28, 157–165
Sosa, E. (1999). How to Defeat Opposition to Moore. Philosophical Perspectives, 13, 141–154
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press
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Baumann, P. Safety and Unknowability. Philosophia 50, 1601–1605 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00507-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-022-00507-x