The Likelihood of Knowledge PDF
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THE LIKELIHOOD OF KNOWLEDGE PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES SERIES Editors: WILFRID SELLARS, University of Pittsburgh KEITH LEHRER, University of Arizona Board of Consulting Editors: JONATHAN BENNETT, Syracuse University ALLAN GIBBARD, University of Michigan ROBER T STALNAKER, Cornell University ROBERT G. TURNBULL, Ohio State University VOLUME 38 ROBERT G. MEYERS Department of Philosophy. SUNY at Albany. U.S.A. THE LIKELIHOOD OF KNOWLEDGE KLUWER ACADEMIC PUBLISHERS DORDRECHT / BOSTON / LONDON Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Meyers, Robert G., 1937- The likelihood of knowledge. (Philosophical studies series; v. 38) Bibliography: p. Includes indexes. 1. Knowledge, Theory of. I. Title. II. Series. BD161.M43 1987 121 87-32398 ISBN-13: 978-94-010-7809-2 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-009-2905-0 DOl: 10.1007/978-94-009-2905-0 Published by Kluwer Academic Publishers, P.O. Box 17, 3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland. Kluwer Academic Publishers incorporates the publishing programmes of D. Reidel, Martinus Nijhoff, Dr W. Junk and MTP Press. Sold and distributed in the U.S.A. and Canada by Kluwer Academic Publishers, 101 Philip Drive, Norwell, MA 02061, U.S.A. In all other countries, sold and distributed by Kluwer Academic Publishers Group, P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrecht, Holland. All Rights Reserved © 1988 by Kluwer Academic Publishers Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1988 No part of the material protected by this copyright notice may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the copyright owner For R. with love TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION ix CHAPTER 1: KNOWLEDGE AND CERTAINTY 1. Three Conditions of Certainty 1 2. Modal Accounts of Certainty 4 3. The InfaIIibiIist's View of Certainty 9 4. Direct Knowledge and Infallibility 14 CHAPTER 2: CERTAINTY AND FALLIBILISM 19 1. Possible Mistakes About Necessity 19 2. Incorrigibility of the Cogito 27 3. Certainty and the Cogito 31 CHAPTER 3: CERTAINTY AND SENSATIONS 36 1. The Fallibilist Argument 36 2. Standard Objections 40 3. Are Basic Propositions Incorrigible? 45 CHAPTER 4: THE NATURE OF JUSTIFICATION 51 1. Theories of Justification 51 2. Abilities and Reasons 56 3. Proof and Justification 61 4. The Nature of Justification 68 5. Alternative Explanations 71 6. Social-Aspect Cases 77 CHAPTER 5: JUSTIFICATION AND THE GETTIER PROBLEM 86 1. The Gettier Problem 86 2. Causal and Defeasibility Theories 88 3. Evidence and Truth 96 4. Some Counterexamples 98 CHAPTER 6: PERCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE AND PHYSICAL OBJECTS 106 1. Perception and the Given 106 2. Recognition and Perceptual Knowledge III 3. Further Restrictions 118 4. Inferential and Non-Inferential 122 viii TABLE OF CONTENTS 5. Abilities and Justified Belief 125 6. Direct Perception of Physical Objects 128 CHAPTER 7: FOUNDATIONS AND COHERENCE 134 1. Experience and the Coherence Theory 134 2. The Nature of Coherence 137 3. Circularity and Coherence 142 4. Reliability and Coherence 149 CHAPTER 8: SKEPTICISM AND RATIONALITY 155 1. Knowledge and Certainty 156 2. Dire-Possibility Arguments 160 3. The Problem of the Criterion 163 4. Internalism vs. Externalism 168 5. Rationality and Justification 171 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 179 INDEX OF NAMES 183 INDEX OF SUBJECTS 185 INTRODUCTION It is convenient to divide the theory of knowledge into three sets of problems: 1. the nature of knowledge, certainty and related notions, 2. the nature and validi ty of the sources of knowledge, and 3. answers to skeptical arguments. The first set includes questions such as: What is it to know that something is the case? Does knowledge imply certainty? If not, how do they differ? What are the con ditions of knowledge? What is it to be justified in accepting something? The sec ond deals with the ways in which knowledge can be acquired. Traditional sources have included sources of premisses such as perception, memory, in trospection, innateness, revelation, testimony, and methods for drawing conclu sions such as induction and deduction, among others. Under this heading, philosophers have asked: Does innateness provide knowledge? Under what con ditions are beliefs from perception, testimony and memory justified? When does induction yield justified belief? Can induction itself be justified? Debates in this area have sometimes led philosophers to question sources (e.g., revela tion, innateness) but usually the aim has been to clarify and increase our understanding of the notion of knowledge. The third class includes the peren nial puzzles taught to beginning students: the existence of other minds, the problem of the external world (along with questions about idealism and phenomenalism), and more general skeptical problems such as the problem of the criterion. These sets of questions are related. Discussions about other minds and the ex ternal world always end up about acceptable sources, and questions about ac ceptable sources end up presupposing answers to the first set of questions even if these have not been thoroughly examined. The questions also differ in the in terest they generate. The puzzles in the third class seem to engage our interest more immediately. (That is doubtless the reason they are taught to beginning students.) They also seem to be more theoretical and less practical. Questions about the nature of knowledge and certainty also tend to be theoretical and of less practical consequence than questions about sources. The reason is not hard to see. If sources are viewed as ways acquiring justified beliefs, critical discus sion of sources will presumably improve our doxastic habits and make us more efficient knowledge seekers (and perhaps even better and more tolerant people). In fact, philosophic discussions of the sources of knowledge going back to an cient times have had a far-ranging impact on how we think about mathematical knowledge, religious beliefs and our legal notions of proof and evidence. The present book deals mainly with the first set of questions. In this, it is very much a product of the post-Gettier era which started with Gettier's paper in ix x INTRODUCTION 1963 (Gettier, 1963). Until the 20th century, most philosophers took knowledge to be certainty and had precious little to say about it. (See Locke, Essay, IV, i-iii, for perhaps the best "classical" discussion.) About 1900, with growing suspicions that very little of what we know is certain, they came to distinguish knowledge and certainty, although they were still rather casual about the nature of knowledge. For the most part, it seems to have been taken to be true justified belief (see, e.g., Lewis, 1946, ch. 1; Ayer, 1956, ch. 1;, and Chisholm, 1956). Most of the attention was directed on phenomenalism, other minds and, in general, defending a more or less strict version of empiricism. Gettier's counterexamples to the true-justified-belief account changed this by redirecting attention to the central and neglected problem-the nature of knowledge without certainty. It also brought a new professionalism to epistemology: the practitioners were no longer satisfied with vague generalities but insisted on testing rival accounts by appeal to difficult examples. (On the debit side, out siders thought epistemology was just becoming more scholastic and seem to have continued talking in generalities.) Whatever merits this book has it owes to the hundred or so philosophers who have struggled with this problem. Although they have usually given up in despair (or gone on to easier problems), they have produced the best philosophic literature outside of philosophy of language in the past 100 years. In the chapters that follow, I defend a version of fallibilism without skep ticism, knowledge without certainty and foundations without givenness. The theory is not a complete account of knowledge (I do not discuss the a priori or memory in detail), but the various theses of the book do form a definite picture of knowledge: it is a provisional and hence uncertain result of interaction with the world through mechanisms that are continuous with those in the rest of the animal world. The first part of the book (chapters 1-3) defends the claim that standard ac counts of knowledge with certainty ("absolute certainty") fail and offers an alternative account. I then argue that nothing is certain in this sense, neither necessary truths, the proposition that I exist nor reports of sensations. In chapter 4, I turn to the more positive task of explaining knowledge without certainty. The problematic concept in knowledge is that of justifiedness. (I assume throughout, as most epistemologists do, that knowledge also implies true belief.) In general, the theory I defend holds that there are two conditions under which a proposition is justified for a subject: first when he has ajustifica tion for it, and, second, when it results from a reliable mechanism. The first is the condition for inferential knowledge and the second for non-inferential knowledge. Roughly, to have a justification, one must be able to offer a justify ing argument for the belief. Chapter 4 discusses the sense in which one must "have" a justification and some of the conditions that must hold for an argu ment to be justifying. I argue that it lies in being able to provide an argument for the belief, not in the causal ancestry of the belief. Chapter 5 discusses additions that might be made to the theory to deal with Gettier-type counterexamples. The INTRODUCTION xi other central notion, that of a reliable mechanism which characterizes non inferential knowledge, is discussed in chapter 6. The theory itself might be called an ability theory of knowledge since it takes justifiedness to rest on having certain types of abilities. In the case of inferential knowledge, it is the ability to defend the belief adequately and eliminate rival ac counts of the evidence; to defend it beyond a reasonable doubt, as I express it in chapter 4. In the case of non-inferential knowledge, the abilities are recogni tional and do not involve the ability to provide reasons. The central notion here is that of reliability and the ability to distinguish things of one type from confus ing instances. The theory is thus reliabilist in its account of perception, but not of inferential knowledge. The emphasis here, I argue, is on the quality of one's arguments and the truth of certain background beliefs rather than on causal antecedents. The theory is also foundationalist, although I argue that it is not committed to the notion of the given. Chapter 7 explains the notion of coherence and tries to show exactly what is wrong with a non-foundational theory of justification. One feature of the theory is that knowledge depends on the truth of certain presuppositions. I argue in chapter 8 that we cannot show in a non-circular way that these presuppositions are true, but that this does not show that we do not have knowledge, as the skeptic holds. Knowledge thus has an "externalist" dimension-there must be a concordance between our beliefs and the world even though we cannot show without making further assumptions that this con cordance obtains. Several people helped shape the final product by reading earlier versions, in particular, Richard Grandy, Timo Airaksinen, Claudia Murphy, Kenneth Stern and James Tedeschi. lowe a special debt to Keith Lehrer who is the very model (a paradigm, as we used to say) of an editor: helpful, insistent, encouraging. I also want to thank the graduate students who have been subjected to various parts of the book over the years, doubtless wondering where it was all going. William Schwarz of the Computing Center and various members of the Graphics Department of SUNY at Albany provided assistance with the typeset ting as did Michael Sattinger. Finally, I would like to thank my wife, Rosalie, for her constant encouragement and ability to find errors, and my four children, for having to bear with a father who makes too many distinctions.
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