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The KK-Principle, Margins for Error, and Safety

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Abstract

This paper considers, and rejects, three strategies aimed at showing that the KK-principle fails even in most favourable circumstances (all emerging from Williamson’s Knowledge and its Limits). The case against the final strategy provides positive grounds for thinking that the principle should hold good in such situations.

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Notes

  1. (Oxford University Press 2000).

  2. Williamson (2000, pp. 96–97) proposes quite a different strategy against the luminosity of feeling cold, intended to generalize to phenomenal states in general. I consider and reject that strategy and some variations elsewhere (Ramachandran 2009).

  3. So, if I am right, Williamson’s strategy would not be suitable against higher order KK-principles, such as e.g.: KKp → KKKp.

  4. I am not aware of this proposal in print, but I have come across it on two occasions when I have presented the paper at conferences and from a journal referee. So, I think it not un-worthwhile to show why the proposal fails.

  5. Of course, in denying (KKmargin) one is not denying that there is a margin for error for the corresponding embedded knowledge claims; that is, one may deny (KKmargin) without denying the much more compelling principle (Kmargin): (n)(Kp n  → p n+1). Why this disparity? Maybe Dokic and Égré’s distinction between perceptual and non-perceptual (KK-) knowledge gets purchase here.

  6. The reader should tolerate some looseness here: arguably, the proposition S knows at t k when she knows that Lincoln is President is different from the proposition she knows at t ~p when she knows that Lincoln is President. One could be more precise by replacing ‘p’ with ‘that Lincoln is President’ in certain places, but that would be rather cumbersome. The points to be made should be clear despite the laxity in the main text.

  7. As, indeed, I have done (Ramachandran 2006). Williamson has owned in correspondence that he had anticipated the following sort of counterexample to (KK) but that, for the purposes of Knowledge and Its Limits, he wanted to present an argument that did not appeal directly to safety.

  8. In our example, the move from adequacy to inadequacy arises from (is explained by) the occurrence of an event in the interval [t, t′], viz. the drilling. It is perhaps worth noting, even though it does not seem to have a bearing on the central points I make, that the shift from adequacy to inadequacy need not always stem from the occurrence of an intermediate event. Suppose I see Jones running in the park at noon. I have adequate grounds for believing just after noon that Jones is in the park; but, clearly, these grounds would not be adequate grounds at 3 pm, say, for my believing that Jones is in the park—regardless of what events actually took place in the meantime.

References

  • Dokic, J., & Egré, P. (2009). Margin for error and the transparency of knowledge. Synthese, 166, 1–20.

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  • Ramachandran, M. (2006). Williamson’s argument against the KK-principle. In J. Skilters, et al. (Eds.), Paradox: Logical cognitive and communicative aspects (pp. 157–164). Riga: University of Latvia Press.

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Acknowledgments

Research for this paper was supported by the University of Sussex Humanities Research Fund and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation: project FFI2010-15704. I have presented some of the ideas here in talks at the University of Granada, University of Witwatersrand, and to the Formal Epistemology Project at Leuven. Thanks to the audiences for valuable discussions. Special thanks to: Jan Heylen, Michael Morris, Adam Morton, Adam Reiger and Timothy Williamson for comments on earlier versions of the paper and/or central arguments. I am also grateful to the referees of this journal for constructive reports and suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, School of History, Art History and Philosophy, University of Sussex, Falmer, Brighton, BN1 9QN, UK

    Murali Ramachandran

  2. University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

    Murali Ramachandran

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  1. Murali Ramachandran
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Correspondence to Murali Ramachandran.

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Ramachandran, M. The KK-Principle, Margins for Error, and Safety. Erkenn 76, 121–136 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-011-9311-1

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