Relying on Others: An Essay in Epistemology

228 Pages·2010·1.257 MB·English

by  Sanford C. Goldberg

Relying on Others
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Relying on Others
An Essay in Epistemology
Sanford C. Goldberg
1
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Contents
Acknowledgments vi
Introduction 1
1. Testimony and Individualist Epistemology 10
2. Orthodox Reliabilism and the Epistemic Significance
of Testimony 36
3. Process and Environment in Testimonial
Belief-Formation 56
4. Epistemic Reliance and the Extendedness Hypothesis 79
5. Objections to Extended Reliability 105
6. If That WereTrueI Would Have Heard about it by
Now 154
7. Reliabilism as Social Epistemology 185
Bibliography 200
Index 213
Acknowledgments
Let’s start with the obvious: we rely heavily on others for most
of what we take ourselves to know about the world. Ours is
the age of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, and of information
that is disseminated with the click of a button, through social
networks or across the world, by way of the Internet. We have
seen a proliferation of sources that disseminate information in this
way, and we have come to enjoy an increasing number of new
technologieswhich make accesstothese sourcesaconstant partof
our daily lives. Nor should we forget the more traditional avenues
through which others serve our informational needs: in our daily
conversations, through the more traditional media (print, radio,
TV),andineducationalsettings(wherewelearnfromteachersand
books). Insofar as we acquire our knowledge throughany of these
routes, we are relying on others in the sense that will be the topic of
this book.
I have been thinking about this topic a great deal over the
past decade or so. In this time I have come to think that, while
contemporary epistemology (theory of knowledge) has begun to
acknowledge the scope of this reliance—here I note the renewed
attention paid to ‘‘testimonial knowledge,’’ the knowledge we get
through others’ say-so—contemporary epistemology has failed to
cometotermswiththenatureofthisreliance,oroftheknowledge
that results. I say that ‘‘contemporary epistemology’’ has failed
to come to terms with this. Here I have in mind even those
epistemologicaltheoriesthatwouldappear bestsuitedtodoingso:
so-called ‘externalist’ theories of knowledge and justification.
As an avenue into this topic, I offer the following (thumbnail
and cartoonish!) history of the topic. Modern epistemology began
with Descartes who, sitting alone in his dressing-gown by the
fire, thought he could ascertain all that he knew and justifiably
acknowledgments vii
believed, merely by inspecting the structure and content of his
beliefs. Thus was born the ideal of epistemic autonomy: each of
us must seek knowledge as an isolated individual, and any reliance
on others must be vindicated by using only those materials one
has at first hand for oneself. This ideal arguably runs through
Hume and several others involved in the Enlightenment project,
and, though there have been some sources of resistance along
the way (e.g., Thomas Reid), this picture dominated until very
recently.Buttwodevelopmentsinmid-tolate-twentieth-century
epistemology challenged this picture, and chipped away at the
viability of the ideal of epistemic autonomy. The first was the
recognition that the world is more centrally implicated in our
knowledge than Cartesian epistemology supposed. In particular,
knowledge requires not merely that our beliefs be true, but also
thatwearriveatthetruthinawaythatisnotoverlydependenton
luck or good fortune. Many epistemologists concluded from this that
how epistemologically well-off one’s beliefs are—whether they
amount to knowledge or justified belief—can depend on ‘world-
ly’ conditions whose obtaining cannot be discerned in armchair
self-inspection.Thusbegantheso-called‘externalist’revolutionin
epistemology. But while externalist epistemology repudiated the
sort of epistemic autonomy that can be manifested by an indi-
vidual sitting in her armchair, nevertheless it continued to hew
to the ideal of epistemic autonomy in another sense. In partic-
ular, it continued to regard the individual knowledge-seeking subject
as the focal point of epistemology. This brings us to the second
development in twentieth-century epistemology. This came in
the form of an acknowledgment of the pervasiveness of our epis-
temic reliance on others, and a corresponding recognition of the
meagerness of the materials that a subject has for vindicating that
reliance. This insight is owed primarily to those working in the
epistemology of testimony from the late 1970s through the early
1990s:A.Coady,M.Welbourne,and(asacritic)E.Fricker.With
this recognition in place, the way was thus paved for a thorough
repudiation of the ideal of epistemic autonomy: not only does
viii acknowledgments
the individual knowledge-seeker depend on the compliance of
the world, what is more this dependence includes an ineliminable
dependence on other knowledge-seekers. Interestingly, few mainstream
epistemologists have drawn this lesson: even those who accept
the insights of externalist epistemology continue to focus on the
individual subject in isolation from other members of her knowl-
edge community. Everyone (externalists included) recognizes, of
course, that a subject’s knowledge often depends on the antics
of other knowledge-seeking subjects. But in accounting for this
dependence, virtually all theories (externalist included) relegate
other knowledge-seeking subjects to the background, and treat
them as just so many more pieces of the external world’s furni-
ture. Herein lies my book’s main ambition: to establish that this
is the wrong way for epistemologists generally, and for externalist
epistemologists in particular, to react to the news of our pervasive
epistemic reliance on others.
While I have been aided in my thoughts on these matters
by a great many people over the years, I am especially grateful
here to those who have helped me think through the particular
issues I discuss in this book. I owe a special debt of gratitude
to a few friends, colleagues, and teachers who have given me
a great deal to think about from the outset of this project to
its completion. In this connection I would like to express my
profound thanks to Alvin Goldman, Peter Graham, and my col-
leaguesJennifer Lackey andBaron Reed. I cannot imagine having
written this book without the stimulation I got from the many
conversations I have had with them. Several others have given
me extensive and very helpful feedback on earlier versions of
the manuscript—far more than I deserved—and for this I would
like to thank John Burgess, John Greco, Wayne Riggs, the M&E
Reading Groupofmyownphilosophy department atNorthwest-
ern (whose members read an earlier version of this manuscript in
the summer of 2009), a reading group at St Louis University, led
by John Greco and Joe Salerno and three anonymous referees for
Oxford University Press. This book would be significantly worse
acknowledgments ix
off were it not for their feedback, and I am grateful to them for
this.
I would also like to express my gratitude to the audiences of
varioustalksatwhichIhavepresentedsomeofthematerialinthis
book.TheseincludetalksatBowlingGreenStateUniversity(May
2004); the ‘‘Epistemology of Liberal Democracy’’ Conference in
Copenhagen, Denmark (November 2008);a conference on Social
EpistemologyattheUniversityofStirling,Scotland(August2007);
Grand Valley State University (September 2008); the Waterloo
Graduate Student Philosophy Conference (April 2009); the Uni-
versityofChicago(May2009);theBledEpistemologyConference
(June 2009); the Summer School Workshop at the University
of Cologne, on ‘‘Reliabilism and Social Epistemology’’ (August
2009); Wayne Riggs’s Epistemology Seminar at the University of
Oklahoma (December 2009),with whom I discussed the firstfour
chapters of an earlier version of this book over Skype; and the
University of Michigan at Flint (January 2010).
Further thanks belong to a variety of people from whom
I have benefitted through conversations and email exchanges.
With apologies to the many people I have surely forgotten to
mention, these include Fred Adams, Jonathan Adler, Ken Aizawa,
Robert Audi, James Beebe, Jason Bridges, Jessica Brown, Tony
Brueckner,Fabrizio Cariani, AlCasullo,Matthew Chrisman, E.J.
Coffman, Allan Collins, Juan Comesan˜a, Marian David, Ryan
Doran, Frank Do¨ring, Igor Douven, David Ebrey, Carl Ehrett,
David Finkelstein, Miranda Fricker, Richard Fumerton, Mikkel
Gerken, Emily Given, Thomas Grundmann, David Henderson,
Terry Horgan, Peter Hylton, Jasper Kallestrup, Mark Kaplan,
Klemens Kappell, Tim Kenyon, Hilary Kornblith, Jon Kvanvig,
Igal Kvart, Chris Lepock, Peter Lipton, Ronald Loeffler, Peter
Ludlow, Jack Lyons, Seth Mayer, Alan Millar, Nenad Miscevic,
Ryan Muldoon, Matthew Mullins, Brendan Neufeld, Nathan
Oaklander, Erik Olsson, Duncan Pritchard, Wlodek Rabinowicz,
Dani Rabinowitz, Lance Rips, Joe Salerno, Fred Schmitt, Joe
Shieber,ErnieSosa,AndrewSpear,FinnSpicer,JanSprenger,Josef