Abstract
How should intellectualists respond to apparent Gettier-style counterexamples? Stanley (Know how, 2011a, Ch. 8) offers an orthodox response which rejects the claim that the subjects in such scenarios possess knowledge-how. I argue that intellectualists should embrace a revisionary response according to which knowledge-how is a distinctively practical species of knowledge-that that is compatible with Gettier-style luck.
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Notes
This distinction is closely related to Glick’s (2011) distinction between ‘weak’ versus ‘strong’ intellectualism.
An anonymous referee for this journal suggests that the first example is not a good one because the expressibility assumption is now widely rejected. I agree that many philosophers would now reject this assumption but I also think that many other philosophers still appear to accept it (if only implicitly), as suggested by the fact that objections to intellectualism often seem to rely on this assumption (for related discussion see Stanley 2011b, pp. 214–215).
An anonymous referee for this journal worries that this claim is only plausible if it is restricted to complex actions. I agree that it is less obvious that this claim extends to basic actions, although some philosophers have tried to argue that it will. For example, Hunter (2012) suggests that because all actions take time then all actions must involve parts or phases and that this “means that performing an action always requires being ready to perform the next part or phase when the time is right” (p. 72) which he takes to be part of what it is to for an action to be guided. And, as Setiya (2012) discusses, it seems plausible that even basic intentional actions have to be guided by one’s intention to perform that action. But, more importantly, none of the points I want to make in this section would be adversely impacted if we simply reinterpreted all of my claims about intentional and guided actions as being restricted to complex actions.
This kind of claim is most famously associated with Frankfurt (1978) but it is important to stress that I am not committing myself here to his full view on which guiding one’s Φ-ing is not only necessary but sufficient for Φ-ing intentionally. Also Frankfurt takes his view to be inconsistent with a causal account of intentional action. However, as Setiya (2007, fn. 19) notes all that follows from Frankfurt’s view is that intentional actions are not to be explained in terms of prior causes but it could still be that the notion of guidance is itself a causal notion. Furthermore, the weaker necessity claim endorsed above is consistent with the idea that an intentional action must have certain kinds of prior causes.
Hunter also endorses the much stronger view that this is all that there is to an action being a guided action. Or, in Hunter’s preferred terminology, I take his view to be that S’s Φ-ing is an action of Φ-ing iff S possesses sufficient guidance dispositions as S Φs. Hunter uses the term ‘action’ here as a term for Φ-ings that manifest one’s agency (where that means that they are not merely things that happen to one and are not mere consequences of one’s actions) but which need not be intended or done for a reason, and in that sense are not intentional actions. My use of the term ‘guided action’ can be taken as being more or less equivalent to Hunter’s use of the term ‘action’ and I am only endorsing the claim that S’s Φ-ing is a guided action of Φ-ing only if S possesses sufficient guidance dispositions as S Φs. Also Hunter (following Frankfurt 1978) wants to use his ideas on guidance to support a non-causalist view of action but the mere idea that possessing certain guidance dispositions is a necessary condition of guiding one’s Φ-ing is consistent with either a casual as well as a non-causal view of guided action (see fn. 7 above for related discussion).
These premises are plausibly logically weaker than the original premises because the notion of an intentional action is arguably more demanding than that of a guided action. For example, it is often assumed that an intentional action must be done for a reason, but there are cases in the action literature that are plausibly examples of doings that are under an agent’s guidance but are not done for a reason, see Hunter (2012, p. 67).
Stanley (2011a, fn. 4) offers a different response, suggesting that when Bob flies a plane he will not fly it intentionally on the grounds that this scenario is analogous to cases where S Φ’s as a result of S’s intending to Φ but S fails to Φ intentionally because of a deviant causal relation between S’s intention and S’s success in action. But this line of response is very implausible because no such deviant causal chains need be involved when Bob flies, see Cath (2011, pp. 129–130) for discussion.
Setiya (2012) is well-aware of this kind of worry and tries to address it. I do not find Setiya’s response to this worry to be very convincing but the point here is simply that it is a weakness of Stanley’s response that it rests on such a contestable assumption without providing any defence of it.
See Bengson and Moffett (2011b, pp. 172–173) for a different kind of putative counterexample to the ability thesis.
One way in which [V] looks to be too weak is that it does not require that if one is in a state of knowing how to Φ then one is in a state that could possibly guide oneself in successfully and intentionally Φ-ing, rather it only requires that one is in a state that could guide some possible agent in successfully Φ-ing. Bengson and Moffett take that to be a virtue of [V] but for reasons that I don’t find compelling (see, fn. 14 below). The other way in which I think [V] is too weak is that it only requires that there be at least one possible world in which σ guides a subject in successfully and intentionally σ-ing. This seems too weak to my mind because I think it is plausible that knowledge-how states are states that, in the right circumstances, are reliable guides to action.
In what follows I will largely ignore this subtlety but, following Hawley (2003), I think knowledge-how states are best thought of as holding relative to sets of circumstances. That is, rather than simply knowing how to Φ one always knows how to Φ-in-circumstances-C1 or Φ-in-circumstances-C2 etc. where the hyphens here should be read as modifying the action that one knows how to perform (compare Whittle 2010, p. 3). And I think this idea can be used to avoid certain putative counterexamples to GN. For example, Bengson and Moffett (2011b, pp. 170–171) present a case where Louis “knows how to find the nth numeral, for any numeral n, in the decimal expansion of π. He knows the algorithm and knows how to apply it in a given case. However, because of principled computational limitations, Louis (like all ordinary human beings) is unable to find the 1046 numeral in the decimal expansion of π”. Bengson and Moffet claim that Louis knows how to find the 1046 numeral in the decimal expansion of π but that he is not in a state that can guide himself in performing that action as is shown by the fact that he is unable to perform that action in any normal circumstances. And this is one reason why Bengson and Moffett would reject GN in favour of [V]. But I think this motivation disappears once we specify the relevant actions here more carefully. Louis knows how to find-the-10 46 -numeral-in-the-decimal-expansion-of-π-in-circumstances-where-he-has-much-greater-computational-powers, but that is an action that he is also able to perform. And Louis is unable to find-the-10 46 -numeral-in-the-decimal-expansion-of-π-in-circumstances-where-he-has-his-current-computational-powers, but that is also something that he does not know how to do. Perhaps in most conversational settings one could only legitimately assert the unqualified knowledge-how ascription and not the unqualified ability ascription. But I think that merely reflects the fact that knowledge-how ascriptions and ability ascriptions are often assigned different modal parameters, see Stanley (2011a, Ch. 5, Sect. 3).
I develop a view of knowledge-how which supports this argument in Cath (ms).
As Hookway (2006) notes the “features that have been taken to be characteristic of knowledge have been backward-looking: they have concerned the history of the candidate belief or the kind of justification”.
Kumar (2011) claims that cases like Hannah show that belief states are not essentially action-guiding states (at least not in the way that knowledge-how states are) and, on this basis, concludes that intellectualism is false. But I think this argument fails. For while Hannah might show us that true belief in general is not an essentially action-guiding state, that conclusion is consistent with the claim that there is a distinctive species of true belief that is an essentially action-guiding state.
Gibbons (2001) calls this character ‘Bobby’ not ‘Harry’ but (with apologies to Gibbons and also Bobby) I thought it would be clearer to use a different name here given that we already have a Bob in our story.
It is worth noting that are two distinct respects in which Harry’s belief fails to satisfy the right-hand-side of GB. As noted above, Harry’s belief state cannot guide him (reliably or otherwise) in intentionally performing the relevant actions but it also cannot guide him in reliably performing the action (intentional or otherwise). Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for this journal for asking me to clarify this issue.
The fact that the content of Charlie’s true belief could not have easily been false means that it will be classified as a non-luckily true belief by Pritchard’s (2005) well-known modal anti-luck condition: (AL) S’s true belief is non-lucky iff there is no wide class of nearby possible worlds in which S continues to believe the target proposition, and the relevant initial conditions for the formation of that belief are the same as in the actual world, and yet the belief is false. But this just reflects a well-known problem with Pritchard’s analysis which is that it cannot handle luckily true beliefs which have contents that are true in most or all nearby worlds in which the relevant initial conditions hold. As Pritchard (2012) and Hiller and Neta (2007) discuss it is natural to think that the solution to this problem will involve moving to idea that the method by which one formed one’s true belief could not have easily led one to a false belief with some relevantly similar (but perhaps not identical) content. In which case, we would replace AL with something like: S’s true belief is non-lucky iff there is no wide class of nearby possible worlds in which S believes some relevantly similar proposition, and the relevant initial conditions for the formation of that belief are the same as in the actual world, and yet the belief is false. See Hiller and Neta (2007) for concerns about this move.
It is worth mentioning that in making the metaphysical claim that there are two distinct kinds of knowledge-that I am not thereby committed to the semantic claim that ‘knows’ is ambiguous, see Glick (2011, Sect. 7) for a very helpful discussion of this kind of point. Similarly, Sosa (2007, p. 24) in relation to his well-known distinction between two different kinds of knowledge-that writes: ‘Animal knowledge is essentially apt-belief, as distinguished from the more demanding reflective knowledge. This is not to say that the word “knows” is ambiguous. Maybe it is, but distinguishing a kind of knowledge as “animal” knowledge requires no commitment to that linguistic thesis.’
As Carter (2012, p. 760) writes: “Stanley’s strategy of reply to Cath…counts against the efficacy of Cath’s counterexample just as much as it would support a distinction between knowledge-wh and knowledge-that….”.
Similarly, Hawthorne (2002, p. 253–254) considers related cases involving knowledge-that ascriptions and he distinguishes four different theoretical stances one might take towards these ascriptions, only one of which involves treating these ascriptions as false.
Perhaps the moral of cases like the lucky light bulb II is that knowledge-where ascriptions are sometimes used to refer to something like the kind of practical knowledge-that states with which I have identified knowledge-how. Partly for ease of exposition, I have been speaking as if all, and only, ‘S knows how to Φ’ sentences ascribe states of practical knowledge-that. But one might want to question both assumptions. What really matters for the spirit of the proposal I have given is that there is a genuine distinction to be made between practical versus theoretical knowledge-that states and that the subjects in the Gettier-style cases for knowledge-how possess the former kind of knowledge. The further question of how exactly we track this distinction in language is an important question, but one is not automatically committed to any particular answer to it just by endorsing the existence of this practical/theoretical distinction, again see Glick (2011, Sect. 7) for an excellent discussion of related issues.
This is a good point at which to consider the following interesting worry raised by an anonymous referee for this journal: It seems very hard to hear knowledge-that attributions as being compatible with upstream luck but if knowledge-how is a kind of knowledge-that, that is compatible with such luck, shouldn't it be easy to attribute this knowledge using sentences of the form ‘S knows that p’? One thing to say here is that, as Stanley (2011a, p. 180) and Hawthorne (2000, 2002) both discuss, there are case where knowledge-that ascriptions seem to be compatible with upstream luck. However, one might still worry that the same is not true with respect to claims like NKT1. Assuming that NKT1 is not intuitively correct, one thing to note is that this presents a prima facie problem for Stanley’s position. This is because given his story about this being a context where we are only interested in whether Charlie has a relevant true belief then he should predict that both KH1 and NKT1 will seem to be true to us. This is important as it shows us that the non-intuitiveness of NKT1 does not present any special problem for the revisionary intellectualist. And I also think the non-intuitiveness of NKT1 does not present any direct challenge to the revisionary intellectualist. This is because it doesn’t follow from the claim that knowledge-how states are a distinctive kind of knowledge-that state that whenever an ascription of the form ‘S knows how to Φ’ is true in a given context then some corresponding ascription of the form ‘S knows that w is a way for S to Φ’ will be either true, or intuitively appear to be true, in that same context. At most I think it follows that knowledge-that ascriptions must sometimes be used to ascribe the kind of true belief states that I am identifying knowledge-how with, and I think that the examples discussed by Stanley and Hawthorne suggest that this is the case.
In this discussion Stanley also suggests that a state of knowing how to fly has greater value than the true belief state of a Gettierized pilot like Bob. And, in support of this claim, Stanley (2011a, p. 243) appeals to the fact that “We would not be as happy with Bob as our pilot as we would with someone trained by a skilled flight instructor even if we were antecedently assured that their beliefs about how to fly the plane are the same.” Perhaps what Stanley wants to claim here is that a state of knowing how to fly has greater value than Bob’s true belief with respect to the value of being a guide to action. But if that is the idea I fail to see how Stanley has provided any support for it. For any tendency we might have ‘in the wild’ to choose Joe (recall Bob’s non-Gettierized twin) over Bob as our pilot can be explained by the fact that finding out that a pilot’s training involved faulty simulators and lucky accidents would usually be a good reason to question whether they are a reliable pilot. But if one were really certain that, despite the oddities involved in his training, Bob was just as reliable a pilot as Joe then one would not have any good reason to prefer Joe over Bob. Of course, in any real life scenario one would never be certain of such a thing. But that just goes to show that facts about which pilot we would choose in real life should be given little weight when considering what the right thing is to say about a hypothetical case where the fact that Bob is as reliable as Joe is just an implicitly stipulated feature of the case. On the other hand, it is undeniable that Joe’s belief state has greater all things considered value. After all, the different etiological properties of Joe’s belief confer greater epistemic worth on it. But this difference only supports an argument for Bob’s not knowing how to fly if having a belief that possesses these etiological properties is assumed to be a necessary condition of knowing how to fly, and that is the very assumption which is under dispute. In which case, merely pointing to this difference does not support an argument for Bob’s failing to know how to fly.
Suppose Stanley is right and claims like KH1 are literally false and intuitions that they are true merely reflect the pragmatics of knowledge-how ascriptions. If this were true it would show us that we are subject to a kind of “semantic blindness” when we intuit that these knowledge-how ascriptions are true. But then it is not unreasonable to suppose that the same kind of semantic blindness might also be at work when we have the intuition that knowledge-how is a precondition of intentional action. This shows us that even if a revisionary intellectualist was forced to agree with Stanley that KH1 is literally false, they could still have a very substantial disagreement with him about the nature of the kind of states that are a precondition of intentional action. The revisionary intellectualist would claim that the kind of states that are a precondition of intentional action are just the kind of guiding true belief states that we have in mind when we assert the false claim that Charlie knows how to change a light bulb. And this kind of revisionary intellectualist could support their position by appealing to how plausible it is that a subject like Charlie possesses the ability to intentionally change a light bulb.
In Cath (MS) I address both issues in the context of offering a view of knowledge-how which endorses both the intellectualist claim that knowledge-how states are knowledge-that states and the Rylean claim that they are dispositional states. In this discussion I explore two different responses to the Jodie case (see above) each of which appeals to recent work on dispositional accounts of the propositional attitudes by Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (2013) and Schwitzgebel (2002). I am no longer attracted to the ‘seeming analysis’ of knowledge-how which I offered in Cath (2011) although I do think that seemings will play an important role in characterizing the dispositional profile of knowledge-how states.
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Acknowledgment
I would like to thank an anonymous referee for this journal for their helpful suggestions as well as audiences at various venues including the University of East Anglia, the University of St Andrews, and “The Gettier Problem at 50” conference at the University of Edinburgh.
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Cath, Y. Revisionary intellectualism and Gettier. Philos Stud 172, 7–27 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0263-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-013-0263-y