I'm finishing off my review of Foley's new book. Thought I'd post some initial thoughts here. My overall impression is that it's a bold attempt to introduce a new way of thinking about knowledge and that Foley's turn might be fruitful. It's really hard to say at this stage because it's difficult to determine the implications of the account he offers. Here, I raise some problems that I think arise for a version of his view. It might be that if he modified his views only slightly, none of these problems would have come up. Foley's account is that if your belief about p doesn’t
constitute knowledge, it’s either because it doesn’t fit the facts or because
there is some important truth that you’re missing. What’s needed to ‘turn’ a true belief into knowledge is just
more true belief. Knowledge is
true belief plus adequate information (where adequate information is understood
in terms of true belief).
How
does Foley’s approach handle lottery propositions? If somebody believes correctly
that her ticket is a loser, we don’t credit her with knowledge. What’s
missing? Billy believes that his ticket, #345, lost after the drawing was
held, but he won’t know that it lost simply on the basis of his correct beliefs
about the set up of the lottery and the probability of losing. Foley says that
his ignorance is due to some important gap in his information. For example, he
doesn’t have this bit of information—ticket #543 was the winner (72).
Is this approach preferable to, say, an
approach on which there’s a sensitivity condition or a safety condition? That’s not clear. The paper announces that #543 is the
winner. If Billy reads that and he knows that his ticket is #345, he’ll know
his ticket lost. What if the paper didn’t announce the winning number but
simply announced that Billy’s ticket lost. If he reads that, he should know he lost. If that’s sufficient, what important
truth was Billy initially missing?
The important piece of information he’s missing can’t be that his ticket
lost. He’d have that information
if he believed the true proposition that his ticket lost. He has that belief, so he has that
information. Maybe the important
truth he’s missing is not a truth about the outcome of the lottery but a truth
about what it says in a paper. If
he already has the information that he’d get from the paper, what does the
information about what it says on the page add? What role does the paper play? One thought might be that the paper is run in such a way
that beliefs formed on the basis of that paper are sensitive or safe. The need
for sensitive or safe belief would explain the need to consult the paper, but
Foley’s account denies that there’s any general sensitivity or safety
condition. On these approaches, there’s an explanation as to why Billy needs to
look at the paper. On Foley’s, I don’t see why this should be.
Rationality and Justification
On
Foley’s account of knowledge, rationality and justification don’t seem to be
necessary for knowing p. A virtue of this approach, he says, is
that:
It frees the theory of knowledge from
the dilemma of either having to insist on an overly intellectual conception of
knowledge, according to which one is able to provide an intellectual defense of
whatever one knows, or straining to introduce a nontraditional notion of
justified belief because the definition of knowledge is thought to require this
(126).
I don’t think that this dilemma is all
that serious. Many plausible
accounts of justification have been offered that would preserve the link
between knowledge and justification that don’t lead to an overly intellectual
conception of either knowledge or justification. It seems we have some independent reason to think that
knowledge and justification do go together. Suppose you know (p
or q). Suppose you justifiably
believe ~p, but don’t know that ~p. Suppose you infer q.
It doesn’t seem that it follows that you know q because q isn’t derived
from known premises. It does seem,
however, that there’s something going for your belief about q because it’s derived from premises
either known or justified. Why not
think of q as justifiably
believed? To accommodate the
intuition that there’s something going for the belief, it’s tempting to think
of it as justified. To think of it as justified, however, I think we’d want to
say that it came from justified beliefs.
To say that, we’d want to say that you didn’t just know (p or q), but
that you justifiably believed it. Assuming that there is a connection between
knowledge and justification helps us make sense of what’s happening in cases
that have this shape.[1]
Suppose
that you take a true-belief pill. The pill induces scores of new true
beliefs. Depending upon which pill
you take, you might suffer from one of two side effects. First, it was found that some users
would form a false belief incompatible with every true belief that they formed
as a result of taking the pill.
While they moved towards an accurate and maximally comprehensive set of
beliefs, they also acquired a comprehensive set of false beliefs. I don’t think
that their new beliefs constitute knowledge. The problem is familiar from
attempts to formulate omniscience in terms of knowing all the truths. There are no important truths that you
lack. The problem is that there are too many falsehoods. Giving you more truths won’t help you
dig out. (Yes, there’s a sense in
which you would be aware of which falsehoods were false. If ‘awareness’ is
cashed out in terms of true belief, you will believe truthfully that the
falsehoods are false. The trouble is that you will also seem to be aware of the
truths as being false.) Second, it was found that some users would form further
true beliefs. For each first-order
belief formed by taking the pill, the subject believed that that belief was one
that the subject could not rationally accept. It seems that if you correctly believe of your own attitude
towards p that it’s irrational for
you to have that attitude, you don’t know p. Adding in further true beliefs about
the power of the pill only makes you seem crazier.
To
handle these cases, Foley can say that there’s a minimal condition of
rationality or consistency required for knowledge. If it was robust enough to deal with the problem cases, it
would seem to require something akin to a familiar sort of rationality or
justification requirement on knowledge (e.g., something like an internalist
view on which all justifiably held beliefs are backed by internally available
grounds).
In
Chapter 20, Foley discusses cases in which we admit that we’re not in a
position to know something. Some
philosophers think that if you appreciate that you’re not in a position to know
p, you can’t then rationally believe p.
Foley thinks that there’s nothing at all puzzling about believing what
you concede you don’t know. He’s
right, I think, that reports of the form ‘I believe p, but I don’t know it’ are common (101). Still, there are puzzles
lurking here. We often say ‘I believe p’
as a way of hedging. It’s a way of expressing that we don’t take on the
commitment to the truth of p typical
of outright or full belief. What
about cases of full belief in which you concede you don’t know? Consider, ‘Dogs bark but I don’t know
that they do’. Here, the speaker
expresses the belief that dogs bark and concedes that he doesn’t know that they
do. This strikes many of us as
irrational. Can you know the proposition
expressed? To know that dogs bark,
there would have to be no important truths that you were missing. The second conjunct is true iff you
don’t know that dogs bark.
Assuming you believe correctly that dogs bark, the second conjunct
couldn’t be true unless there’s some important truth that you were
missing. Foley’s account explains
why you can’t know both conjuncts.
Foley’s
account nicely handles this sort of case, but what cases of the form, ‘p, but my evidence doesn’t
show/establish that p’? It doesn’t seem that you can know that the
proposition this expresses is true.
Why can’t you know that this is so? It’s perfectly consistent, so its status as unknowable isn’t
down to the fact that it’s necessarily false. If it’s not known, it has to be because there’s some important
truth that you’re missing. I can’t
think of what truth that might be.
One could argue that this is unknowable on the following grounds:
To know the conjunction, you’d have to
know both conjuncts. To know p, you’d
have to have evidence that establishes p. If you have that evidence, the second
conjunct is false and the conjunction is not known. If you lack that evidence,
you don’t know the first conjunct and the conjunction is not known. The
conjunction is not knowable.
I don’t think this explanation is
available to Foley because he wouldn’t want to say that knowing p requires having evidence that
establishes p. One could offer a different style of
explanation:
To know the conjunction, you’d have to
know both conjuncts. To know p, you can’t be irrational in believing p.
Believing the second conjunct makes believing the first conjunct
irrational. You can’t know the
conjunction without believing the second conjunct. The conjunction is not knowable.
On neither approach to explaining why
the conjunction is unknowable does it seem that there is an important truth
that you’re missing. On the first, you don’t satisfy an evidential requirement
that Foley thinks isn’t required for knowledge and can’t be satisfied simply by
having more true beliefs. On the second, your problem has to do with violating
a requirement that says, in effect, that knowledge of p requires that you’re not irrational in believing p.
Remedying that defect requires believing less or finding new evidence.
It’s not a matter of missing some important truth.
Foley’s account of knowledge has
paradoxical implications. Consider
Sartwell’s (1991) view that knowledge is merely true belief and consider the
following:
(*) You
don’t know (*).
Suppose (*) is false. If it is, you
know (*). You can’t know (*),
however, if (*) is false. So, the supposition is false. Since you followed the
reasoning thus far, you must be tempted to conclude that (*) must be true. If
you believe (*) on the basis of the reasoning just sketched, however, and (*)
is true, Sartwell’s account implies that (*) is known. This contradicts (*). Either way, on Sartwell’s view, (*)
generates a contradiction. To
avoid generating the same contradiction, Foley has to avoid saying (*) is
known. On his view, your belief
about p constitutes knowledge so long
as p is true and there’s no important
truth that you’re missing. For
reasons just sketched, you might believe (*) and it might seem (*) is true.[1] What important truth might you be
missing that explains why you don’t know (*)? I can’t think of one.
Your problem doesn’t seem to be due to some lack of information.
[1] I owe this example to Brian
Weatherson. He discusses its significance for various theories of knowledge and
for the norms of assertion on his blog, Thoughts,
Arguments, and Rants (http://tar.weatherson.org/2009/11/19/your-favourite-theory-of-knowledge-is-wrong/).
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