When Is True Belief Knowledge?: 38 - Rilegato

Foley, Richard

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0691154724 ISBN 13: 9780691154725

Casa editrice: Princeton Univ Pr, 2012

Riassunto

A woman glances at a broken clock and comes to believe it is a quarter past seven. Yet, despite the broken clock, it really does happen to be a quarter past seven. Her belief is true, but it isn't knowledge. This is a classic illustration of a central problem in epistemology: determining what knowledge requires in addition to true belief.


In this provocative book, Richard Foley finds a new solution to the problem in the observation that whenever someone has a true belief but not knowledge, there is some significant aspect of the situation about which she lacks true beliefs--something important that she doesn't quite "get." This may seem a modest point but, as Foley shows, it has the potential to reorient the theory of knowledge. Whether a true belief counts as knowledge depends on the importance of the information one does or doesn't have. This means that questions of knowledge cannot be separated from questions about human concerns and values. It also means that, contrary to what is often thought, there is no privileged way of coming to know. Knowledge is a mutt. Proper pedigree is not required. What matters is that one doesn't lack important nearby information.


Challenging some of the central assumptions of contemporary epistemology, this is an original and important account of knowledge.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Richard Foley is professor of philosophy and vice chancellor for strategic planning at New York University. He is the author of Intellectual Trust in Oneself and Others,
Working Without a Net: A Study of Egocentric Epistemology, and The Theory of Epistemic Rationality.

Dalla quarta di copertina

"This engaging and imaginative book proposes an original and strikingly simple account of propositional knowledge, and offers an ingenious, many-sided argument for preferring it to alternatives already abroad. It makes many interesting and unexpected moves along the way."--Ernest Sosa, Rutgers University

"Going against the grain, Foley argues that knowledge does not require justified belief and that the pedigree of a true belief has nothing to do with whether it counts as knowledge. His impressive defense of this view is a singular achievement. He shows that his account can easily accommodate cases that might appear problematic, and that it offers more intuitive explanations for a variety of epistemic phenomena than available alternatives. Beautifully written, carefully argued, and a pleasure to read, this book will be required reading for everyone in epistemology."--Hilary Kornblith, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Dal risvolto di copertina interno

"This engaging and imaginative book proposes an original and strikingly simple account of propositional knowledge, and offers an ingenious, many-sided argument for preferring it to alternatives already abroad. It makes many interesting and unexpected moves along the way."--Ernest Sosa, Rutgers University

"Going against the grain, Foley argues that knowledge does not require justified belief and that the pedigree of a true belief has nothing to do with whether it counts as knowledge. His impressive defense of this view is a singular achievement. He shows that his account can easily accommodate cases that might appear problematic, and that it offers more intuitive explanations for a variety of epistemic phenomena than available alternatives. Beautifully written, carefully argued, and a pleasure to read, this book will be required reading for everyone in epistemology."--Hilary Kornblith, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Estratto. © Ristampato con autorizzazione. Tutti i diritti riservati.

WHEN IS TRUE BELIEF KNOWLEDGE?

By Richard Foley

Princeton University Press

Copyright © 2012 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-15472-5

Contents

Chapter 1 An Observation.............................................................3Chapter 2 Post-Gettier Accounts of Knowledge.........................................6Chapter 3 Knowledge Stories..........................................................9Chapter 4 Intuitions about Knowledge.................................................12Chapter 5 Important Truths...........................................................19Chapter 6 Maximally Accurate and Comprehensive Beliefs...............................32Chapter 7 The Beetle in the Box......................................................41Chapter 8 Knowledge Blocks...........................................................46Chapter 9 The Theory of Knowledge and Theory of Justified Belief.....................51Chapter 10 The Value of True Belief..................................................59Chapter 11 The Value of Knowledge....................................................65Chapter 12 The Lottery and Preface...................................................70Chapter 13 Reverse Lottery Stories...................................................73Chapter 14 Lucky Knowledge...........................................................78Chapter 15 Closure and Skepticism....................................................81Chapter 16 Disjunctions..............................................................86Chapter 17 Fixedness and Knowledge...................................................88Chapter 18 Instability and Knowledge.................................................91Chapter 19 Misleading Defeaters......................................................95Chapter 20 Believing That I Don't Know...............................................99Chapter 21 Introspective Knowledge...................................................102Chapter 22 Perceptual Knowledge......................................................106Chapter 23 A Priori Knowledge........................................................110Chapter 24 Collective Knowledge......................................................113Chapter 25 A Look Back...............................................................121Chapter 26 Epistemology within a General Theory of Rationality.......................124Chapter 27 The Core Concepts of Epistemology.........................................134Notes.................................................................................137Index.................................................................................149

Chapter One

An Observation

Someone glances at a clock that is not working and comes to believe it is quarter past seven. It in fact is quarter past seven. Her belief is true, but it isn't knowledge. Out of this classic example comes a classic philosophical question: what must be added to a true belief in order to make it into a plausible candidate for knowledge?

The answer is to be found in the observation that whenever someone has a true belief but does not know, there is important information she lacks. Seemingly a modest point, but it has the capacity to reorient the theory of knowledge.

For this observation to be philosophically useful, information needs to be understood independently of knowledge. The everyday notions of knowledge and information are intertwined, but every philosophical account has to start somewhere, helping itself to assumptions that can be revisited if they lead to difficulties. I begin by assuming that having information is a matter of having true beliefs.

Substituting true belief for information, the core observation becomes that when someone has a true belief but does not know, there is some significant aspect of the situation about which she lacks true beliefs—something important that she doesn't grasp or doesn't quite "get." Knowledge is a matter of having adequate information, where the test of adequacy is negative. One must not lack important true beliefs. One knows that a red ball is on the mat in the hallway if one believes that this is so, the belief is true, and there is no important gap in one's information.

Information comes in various sizes and shapes, however. The red ball on the mat in the hallway has a precise circumference. It has a definite weight. It is made of rubber. The rubber is a certain shade of red. The mat likewise has its specific characteristics. So does the hallway. Its ceiling is of a certain height. Its walls are covered with black walnut paneling. There is a mahogany door leading outside. There are historical truths about the situation as well. The black walnut paneling was installed last year. The ball was bought two months ago at a Target store in Brooklyn. These historical truths are connected with yet others. The rubber making up the ball came from a tree grown on a rubber plantation in Kerala, India, which also grows tea. There is also negative information. The ball is not made of steel and is not larger than a standard basketball. There is not a bicycle in the hallway. Nor is there a truck or an oak tree. The hallway does not have a linoleum floor.

There is no end to the truths associated with there being a red ball on the mat in the hallway. They radiate out in all directions. Nor is this unusual. Every situation is lush, brimming over with truths.

The information we have is by comparison arid. No one, no matter how well informed, is in possession of all truths about a situation. If the number of such truths is not infinite, it is at least mind numbingly vast. Our grasps of situations are inevitably partial. Not all partial grasps are equal, however. Sometimes the information we lack is important, but sometimes not. If not, we know.

Whether a true belief counts as knowledge thus hinges on the importance of the information one has and lacks. This means that questions of knowledge cannot be separated from questions about human concerns and values. It also means that there is no privileged way of coming to know. Knowledge is a mutt. Proper pedigree is not required. What matters is that one not lack important nearby information.

This is getting ahead of the story, however. The best way to get a handle on this way of thinking about knowledge and to see how it reorients the theory of knowledge is to contrast it with received views.

Chapter Two

Post-Gettier Accounts of Knowledge

Before leaving her office, Joan always places her laptop on the corner of her desk. Unbeknownst to her, the laptop has just been stolen and is now sitting on the corner of a desk in the thief's apartment. Joan believes that her laptop is on the corner of a desk, and in fact it is, but she doesn't know this.

On Tuesday evening Mary went to sleep at 11 p.m. as is her habit, unaware that she had been given a sleeping potion that would cause her to sleep thirty-two hours instead of her usual eight. When she awakes in her heavily curtained and clockless bedroom on Thursday morning, she believes it is about 7 a.m., because this is the hour at which she regularly wakes. It is 7 a.m., but she nonetheless doesn't know this to be the case.

Jim has bought a ticket in a lottery of a million tickets. The winning ticket has been chosen but not yet announced. Jim believes that his ticket is not the winner and he is correct, but he lacks knowledge.

Examples such as these, which can be multiplied indefinitely, create an agenda for the theory of knowledge, that of identifying what has to be added to true belief in order to get knowledge. One tradition says that what is needed is something like an argument in defense of the belief, a justification to use the term of art. In an influential 1963 article, however, Edmund Gettier used a pair of examples to illustrate that justification on its own is not enough, and as a result the question became what has to be added to justified true belief in order to get knowledge?

There has been no shortage of answers. Many have suggested that what is needed is a special kind of justification. The justification has to be nondefective in the sense that it must not justify any falsehoods, or it has to be indefeasible in that it cannot be defeated by the addition of any truth.

A rival tradition maintains that justification-based approaches are misdirected. Since we often are not in a position to defend what we know, something less explicitly intellectual than justification traditionally understood is required to understand knowledge, in particular, something about the processes and faculties that produce or sustain the belief.

Again, there has been no shortage of proposals. One popular idea is that for a true belief to count as knowledge, it must be reliably generated. A second idea is that in close counterfactual situations, the subject's beliefs about the matter in question would track the truth. A third is that the belief must be the product of properly functioning cognitive faculties. There are also important variants of each of these ideas.

All these proposals assume that what needs to be added to true belief in order to get knowledge is something related to true belief but distinct from it—nondefective justification, indefeasible justification, reliability, truth tracking in close counterfactual situations, proper functioning, or whatever. My suggestion, by contrast, is that whenever an individual S has a true belief P but does not know P, there is important information she lacks.

What has to be added to S's true belief P in order to get knowledge? More true beliefs. Especially more true beliefs in the neighborhood of P. In particular, there must not be important truths of which she is unaware, or worse, ones she positively disbelieves.

A merit of this view is that there is a straightforward way to test it. If S has a true belief P but does not know P, then according to the view it ought to be possible to identify a proposition Q such that (i) Q is an important truth and (ii) S does not believe Q.

Why does Joan not know that her laptop is on the corner of a desk, and Mary not know that it is 7 a.m., and Jim not know that his lottery ticket is not the winner, even though their beliefs are true? They lack key true beliefs about the situations in question. Joan isn't aware that her laptop has been stolen and that the desk on which it now sits is that of the thief; Mary isn't aware that she is just waking up from a drug-induced sleep; and Jim isn't aware which ticket has won the lottery.

This in brief is the idea I will be developing, but I want first to take a step back to look at the role of examples such as these in the theory of knowledge.

Chapter Three

Knowledge Stories

Contemporary theory of knowledge is driven by stories. The practice is to tell a tiny story, use it to elicit an intuition about whether the subject has or lacks knowledge, and then draw a moral for the theory of knowledge.

Some of the stories are stripped-down versions of familiar situations. Others depict unusual circumstances, such as my story about Mary and her drug-induced sleep. Still others are beyond unusual—for example, stories about brains in vats.

Sartre once remarked that in writing philosophy the aim is to discourage multiple interpretations, whereas in writing fiction the aim is precisely the opposite, to create texts that resist a single interpretation. Whether fiction or philosophy must have such aims is debatable, but the remark is instructive for the small fictions of contemporary epistemology. The stories are created in hopes of fixing upon some point or other about knowledge, but the stories are incomplete and hence open to different interpretations as well as to expansions that potentially blunt the intended point. The sparely told stories common in epistemology are especially susceptible. The fewer the details, the more room there is for interpretation and retelling.

Such stories can nonetheless be useful, but need to be treated warily. More on this later. For now the points to note are that contemporary theory of knowledge is driven by stories in which the subject has a true belief but seems to lack knowledge; the scenarios I sketch above (of Joan, Mary, and Jim) are themselves examples of such stories; these stories, mine included, make use of the common literary device of providing the audience with information that the subjects of the stories lack; and finally, the stories are told in a way to suggest that the missing information is important.

Consider a stock case from the literature. George is touring farm country and is charmed by the picturesque old barns he is seeing. He stops his car on the side of the road to spend a moment gazing at the latest barn he has happened across. Unbeknownst to him, the local tourist board has populated the region with highly realistic facades of old barns, and up until now he has been seeing these facades, not real barns. By chance, however, he has stopped in front one of the few genuine old barns remaining in the area. As he stares out of his car window, he believes that he is looking at an old barn and he is. Yet, there is a pull upon us, the audience listening to the story, which makes us reluctant to concede that his true belief rises to the level of knowledge.

Why is this? Is it because the justification he has for his belief is defeasible, or because the processes that have caused him to have this belief are unreliable at this locale, or because his belief would not track the truth in close counterfactual situations? All these may well be the case, but the best explanation is the most obvious. He lacks important true beliefs about the situation. He is unaware that there are numerous, highly realistic barn facades in the area and unaware as well that on his tour up until now he has been seeing these facades instead of real barns.

The post-Gettier literature is filled with little stories about individuals who have true beliefs but seem to lack knowledge. All these stories can be understood in the same way. Each is an attempt to draw attention to some aspect of the situation about which the character of the story lacks true beliefs and to suggest that this aspect is in some way important. To the degree that we the audience are convinced that the missing information is in fact important, our intuition is that the character has a true belief but does not know.

I need now to take another step back and look at the role that intuitions such as these play in the theory of knowledge.

Chapter Four

Intuitions about Knowledge

Intuitions about whether someone knows something vary from person to person and occasion to occasion. Epistemologists react differently to this variation. Many ignore it. Some use it to question whether the ordinary concept of knowledge is coherent. Still others try to impose uniformity by dismissing recalcitrant cases as ones in which the subject lacks "real knowledge" or insisting on such high standards of knowledge that little can be known.

My approach is not to be dismissive of intuitions about knowledge but at the same time to concede that they can be puzzling and even jumbled. Appealing to them is thus a messy and inconclusive business. They can be useful but only as starting points, not rigid constraints.

Besides, regarding knowledge intuitions as hard data to which theories have to conform makes for a timid epistemology. It invites questions of whose intuitions are supposed to matter. All those with the concept of knowledge? Philosophers? Some other group? It also suggests that the working procedure for epistemology ought to consist of surveying the intuitions of the relevant group, thereby collecting data as representative as possible. Few philosophers conduct such surveys, however, and with good reason. A philosophical account of knowledge ought to be made of loftier stuff.

What kind of "stuff"? It is more important to provide a framework that can be used to explain how and why intuitions arise than to conform to a set of favored intuitions, and more important still that the framework can be used to engage the various philosophical questions and puzzles that arise about knowledge, from why knowledge is valuable and what its relationship is with justified belief to whether it can be acquired by luck and why it is we are so often willing to admit that something we believe to be true is nonetheless not something we know. This in any event is my project.

There are limitations as to what can be expected of any such project, however, and not just because the intuitions are not uniform and the puzzles difficult. There are also distinct species of knowledge, which require special treatments.

There is knowledge of people, places, and things; one knows Mike Bloomberg, Greenwich Village, and various Internet sites. There is also knowledge of concepts, knowledge, for example, of what valid and sound arguments are and what an irrational number is. In addition, there is knowledge of subject areas; one knows American baseball and New York City politics. Knowledge how is yet something different—for example, knowing how to fix a faulty electrical switch or how to convert centigrade readings to Fahrenheit. There is knowledge of facts as well, some scientific (the boiling point of water is 212°F), others geographical (Accra is the capital of Ghana), still others historical (Thomas Jefferson was the third president of the United States), and many others personal (one is six feet tall).

Nor is knowledge always restricted to humans. Dogs are said to know that their owners are approaching and birds that a storm is due. Even body parts are sometimes said to know; the liver knows when to excrete bile. Knowledge is also attributed to machines; my laptop knows when to shut itself down to prevent overheating.

Some of these attributions are no doubt metaphorical. No matter. My focus is on knowledge of facts and specifically knowledge of facts by individual human beings as opposed to collective human knowledge. Such knowledge may be linked with other kinds. It may even be the ground for some, but there are challenges enough in providing an account of it, because even within this category, there is striking variation, especially with respect to the amount of information required.

Often the presupposition is that broad and deep information is required for knowledge, but sometimes only scanty information seems necessary. A contestant on a quiz show is asked the date of the Battle of Marathon. She recalls from her high school world history course that it took place in 490 BCE, but does not remember that the Greeks won the battle or even that the adversaries were the Greeks and Persians. Still, it may seem as if she at least knows the date.

Why such variation? Because in order to have knowledge, one must have adequate information, where the test of adequacy is that one not lack important surrounding truths. In some circumstances, however, most of the surrounding truths do not strike us as being especially critical in order for the subject to "get" the important aspects of what is going on. Hence, it may not seem to matter much whether she believes them. In other circumstances, however, a great many of the surrounding truths seem to matter. Intuitions about how much information is needed for knowledge thus vary from situation to situation. Moreover, the tiny knowledge stories common in epistemology can be told to exploit this malleability.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell'edizione

• Editore: Princeton Univ Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2012
• Lingua: Inglese
• ISBN 10: 0691154724
• ISBN 13: 9780691154725
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 153
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile
• Persona responsabile: non disponibile