Abstract
In this paper, we propose a general constraint on theories of knowledge that we call ‘normalism’. Normalism is a view about the epistemic threshold that separates knowledge from mere true belief; its basic claim is that one knows only if one has at least a normal amount of epistemic support for one’s belief. We argue that something like normalism is required to do full justice to the normative role of knowledge in many key everyday practices, such as assertion, inquiry, and testimony. The view of normality we employ to flesh out this claim is inspired by experimental work on the folk notion of normality, which suggests that folk judgments of what is ‘normal’ are based upon both statistical averages as well as normative ideals within the relevant target domain. Adopting this notion of normality to set the threshold for knowledge results in a view upon which knowledge is routinely available on an everyday basis without being a merely trivial achievement. We explore several interesting consequences of this view, including the implication that the threshold for knowing may change as, e.g., the ease of availability of information in an epistemic community changes over time. The result is a ‘shifty’ view of knowledge which nonetheless retains more stability than standard contextualist or pragmatic encroachment approaches.
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Notes
Could a fan of the olympian approach simply deny that knowledge plays these normative roles in our lives? She could, but we think that this would take away much of the theoretical interest that knowledge invites. In other words, we hold that these everyday normative roles form a large part of the reason for being interested in knowledge and having a knowledge-concept in the first place.
A few authors have championed the claim that olympian approaches to knowledge are consistent with the role of knowledge in the sorts of practices we review here. Davis (2007) and BonJour (2010) both suggest that our knowledge attributions and our tendency to deem most assertions and actions acceptable might reflect a ‘loose’ or ‘approximate’ usage of ‘know’. Fassio (2018) similarly suggests that knowledge attributions may frequently be strictly speaking false, but warrantedly assertable. However, we’re still left with a pressing need to delineate the threshold at which a knowledge attribution or an acceptance of assertion/action is ‘close enough’. In other words, what is the threshold for ‘approximate knowing’? We hold that a pedestrian threshold is still needed in order to enable functional practices of assertion, action and so forth. Imagine a student who is told that only a perfect score in a course suffices for a passing grade, but that the professor will also grant course credit to those who are ‘close enough’. Then, the crucial information is clearly what counts as ‘close enough’. An ecumenical suggestion would thus be that readers committed to the views above may amend our claim in this section to ‘approximate knowledge must be pedestrian’, and approximate knowledge is what is really of philosophical interest in understanding everyday knowledge attribution and normative epistemic evaluation’. Yet, if most of the philosophical heavy-lifting is done by approximate knowledge anyway, this also raises the question what—on balance—really favors the olympian over the pedestrian approach.
Though Grimm and Henderson use normality to ‘indirectly’ fix the threshold for knowing (via stakes), their views will plausibly render similar thresholds to ours in practice, at least on a very large proportion of cases. We do think that there are many scenarios where the two types of view come apart, but an examination of such cases is best deferred until after our proposal has been presented in full.
A recent study by Wysocki (ms) basically confirms the findings of Bear and Knobe, but also adds some complexities about how statistical and evaluative considerations influence folk ascriptions of normality.
We won’t attempt here to discuss the specifics of said weighting; more empirical work will be needed before the folk notion of normality is fully understood.
We leave it open that a prescriptive account of knowledge might specify a precise lower bound, eliminating this vagueness.
And, of course, on a prescriptive approach to knowledge, one may simply specify that the ideal is to be weighted sufficiently to rule out a zero-valued normal.
A potential example: suppose hyper-intelligent alien species were discovered to exist. Including their epistemic states in the reference class that determines our ‘normal’ might shift the threshold for knowing into a range that is overdemanding for humanity.
This is one sort of case where our account potentially renders different verdicts than those of Henderson and Grimm mentioned earlier. An account which bases the knowledge-threshold wholly on the normal stakes of a community would suggest that the normal stakes for 14th century Europeans regarding plague-related propositions would raise the knowledge-threshold higher than it is for current Westerners (whose normal stakes are much lower, given the scarcity of bubonic plague cases and the availability of effective treatment with antibiotics within our present environment). A similar divergence would arise for other ‘high-stakes-low-average’ cases. Conversely, ‘low-stakes-high-average’ cases (like, for instance, a society of scholarly gentlepersons of leisure) would, if the threshold were fixed primarily or wholly by normal stakes in a community, result in a low threshold for knowing; our view would suggest a high threshold. Ultimately, however, we suspect that Henderson and Grimm would be open to the suggestion that both normal stakes and normal levels of epistemic standing have effects on how the threshold is set. Indeed, as an anonymous reviewer suggested to us, the two sorts of normality may interact—rising normal stakes will likely lead to rising normal levels of epistemic standing. As we note below, we are neutral on the effect of stakes, and so we are also amenable to a ‘hybrid’ view of some sort.
Normalism would fall under what Michael Hannon (2020) has recently labelled ‘pure(ish)’ epistemic views, by contrast with ‘purist’ views which deny a role for the practical in characterizing knowledge, and with standard ‘impurist’ views that both accept a role for the practical and hold that role to involve an individual subject’s practical situation. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for bringing this paper to our attention.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for prompting these clarifications. We have focused in this segment on the ideal corresponding to descriptive approaches to knowledge, which we take to be set by the attitudes of the folk. For prescriptive approaches to knowledge, the appropriate ideal is a matter of philosophical debate—and arguing for any particular standard is unfortunately out of the scope of this paper.
In contrast, certainty might be normal and therefore an appropriate normative standard for angels or god-like creatures. The normalist proposal thus has the plausible implication that god-like creatures should only assert that P if they are certain that P.
Assume for the sake of the example that present trains and trains one hundred years ago are equally reliable; in fact, modern trains are likely more reliable, but our intuition is that one still ought to ‘double-check’ with the electronic schedule before ceasing inquiry.
To reinforce this point, consider certain other practices of inquiry that now seem obligatory—for instance, looking information up (possibly using multiple sources) on the internet instead of in a decades-old printed encyclopedia, or getting updated news about a very volatile current event online rather than through a print news source. In general, given the easy availability of up-to-date information in our current epistemic environment, relying solely on print media seems to us to be (in many cases) not merely old-fashioned but plausibly epistemically impermissible.
But see Lackey (2008) for non-paradigm cases of testimony that do not involve assertions, e.g., reading someone’s secret diary.
More precisely, ascriptions of knowledge about the train departure time to S1 by people in his own epistemic community would be correct, while corresponding ascriptions to S2 by people in his own epistemic community would be incorrect.
Normalism implies that, in our own mouths, ‘S1 is deserving of criticism’ would be true, while the same utterance would be false for S1’s contemporaries. We admit that this may seem a bit counterintuitive—we are not strongly inclined to criticize S1, even from our contemporary perspective. We suspect that, in this particular case, a conflicting intuition arises from the ‘ought-implies-can’ principle; since there was no way for S1 to check a not-yet-invented electronic timetable or smartphone, S1 could not have improved her epistemic position to a level that is standard in our own epistemic community. We suspect that the ought-implies-can principle may trump other considerations in this case.
For very helpful comments on previous versions of the paper, we would like to thank two anonymous reviewers of Synthese as well as Steffen Koch, Alex Wiegmann, and the participants of the EXTRA.4 research colloquium on “Metaphilosophy and Experimental Philosophy” in January 2020. Joachim Horvath’s work on this paper was supported by an Emmy Noether grant of the German Research Foundation (DFG), project number 391304769. Jennifer Nado’s work on this paper was supported by a grant from the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, project number 13603718.
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Horvath, J., Nado, J. Knowledge and normality. Synthese 198, 11673–11694 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02823-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02823-9