Knowledge and Rationality
3
Knowledge and Rationality
All men by nature desire to know.
Aristotle, Metaphysics 1.1
1—Introduction
People’s mental lives constantly teem with activity. They experience sounds, shapes, and colors, they experience their own thoughts, desires, and pains, and they can simply see the truth of certain obvious propositions such as 2 + 2 = 4. People form, discard, maintain, and test beliefs. There are many things people know and many things they do not know. Some beliefs are quite reasonable, and some of them are unreasonable.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that tries to make sense out of knowledge, rationality, and justified or unjustified beliefs. The term epistemology comes from the Greek word epistēmē, which means knowledge. Accordingly, epistemology is the study of knowledge and justified or warranted belief. Actually, there are four major areas of focus within the field of epistemology. First, there is the conceptual analysis of key concepts in epistemology: What is knowledge? What is rationality, justification, or warrant? This first area of epistemology works hand in hand with the philosophy of language in that the focus of study is the clarification of important epistemological notions in order to be clear about what these concepts really are. The main focus of this chapter will be in this branch of epistemology. Chapter six attempts to spell out what sort of a thing truth itself is. Questions about the nature of truth, that is, questions about what truth itself is (as opposed to questions about how one knows that one has the truth) are really metaphysical and not epistemological questions, since metaphysics is the branch of study that investigates what kinds of things exist. But it is customary to look at the nature of truth in conjunction with the field of epistemology, and we will follow that custom by looking at theories of truth in the part of this book concerning epistemology, specifically, in chapter six.
Second, there is the problem of skepticism. Do people really have knowledge or justified belief? If people do have knowledge or justified beliefs in one area, say in mathematics, do they have it in other areas; for example, is there moral or religious knowledge? Can one know something if he is not 100 percent certain that he is not wrong about it? The problem of skepticism is discussed in chapter four and, in a different way, in chapter six.
Third, there is the question of the sources and scope of knowledge and justified belief. If people do in fact have knowledge and justified beliefs, how is it that they have these things? What are the different kinds of knowledge? Surely one’s five senses in some way are a source of perceptual knowledge about the external world. But are there other kinds of knowledge and sources for them beyond sensory perception? Is there also knowledge and justified beliefs about the past (memory), about one’s own inner mental states (introspection), about the thoughts, feelings, and minds of other persons, about logic, mathematics, metaphysics, morality, and God? What are the sources of these different types of knowledge?
Fourth, there is the question of criteria for knowledge or justification. Suppose that Jill has some belief that is warranted or justified for her, say the belief that there is an oak tree outside her window. What is it that confers warrant or justification on that belief? How does one belief or set of beliefs provide the basis for holding to another belief? Can things besides beliefs—for instance, experiences or the way people go about forming their beliefs—provide support for a justified belief? Or are other beliefs the only things that can support a given belief? These questions are the focus of chapter five.
Before turning to the topic of knowledge, one more preliminary remark about epistemology needs to be made. Traditionally, epistemology has centered its attention on questions like these: Can I know anything? What is it that I can know? How can I myself assess whether a belief of mine is actually justified? These kinds of questions have been called Socratic questions because they all, in one way or another, are questions we ask about ourselves. In other words, epistemology is concerned first and foremost with the first-person perspective, issues involved with an individual as an experiencing, believing, and knowing first-person subject. Insofar as the fields of psychology, biology, neurophysiology, and so on study humans from a third-person perspective, that is, as objects studied from the “outside” as it were, then to that extent these other fields of study leave out something essential to epistemology.
The remaining part of this chapter analyzes and clarifies two different notions: knowledge and rationality.
2—What Is Knowledge?
The following three sentences reveal three different types of knowledge:
Sentence (1) expresses what is known as knowledge by acquaintance. Here one knows something in that the object of knowledge is directly present to one’s consciousness. Dan knows the ball in front of him in that he sees the ball, he is directly aware of it, he knows it by sensory intuition. Here, the word intuition does not mean a guess or irrational hunch, but rather a direct awareness of something that is directly present to consciousness. People know many things by acquaintance or intuition: their own mental states (thoughts, feelings, sensations), physical objects with which they are acquainted by the five senses, and, some would argue, basic principles of mathematics. If one asks how people know that
or
the answer seems to be that people can simply “see” that 2 + 2 = 4 or that (C) must follow if (A) and (B) are accepted. What kind of seeing is this? Many believe that it involves an intuitional form of awareness or perception of abstract, immaterial objects and the relationships among them—numbers and mathematical relations or propositions and the laws of logic. Arguably, all of these examples of knowledge are cases of knowledge by acquaintance.
Sentence (2) involves what is called know-how. Know-how is the ability or skill to behave in a certain way and perform some task or set of behaviors. One can know how to speak Greek, play golf, ride a bicycle, or perform a number of other skills. Know-how does not always involve conscious awareness of what one is doing. Someone can learn how to do something by repeated practice without being consciously aware that one is doing the activity in question or without having any idea of the theory behind the practice. For example, one can know how to adjust one’s swing for a curve ball without consciously being aware that one’s stride is changing or without knowing any background theory of hitting technique.
Sentence (3) expresses what Bertrand Russell called knowledge by description or what is more typically called by philosophers propositional knowledge. Here someone knows that P where P is a proposition. For present purposes, a proposition may be defined as the content of a sentence or statement. Epistemology involves all three kinds of knowledge.
Ever since the time of Plato, philosophers have tried to offer an adequate definition of propositional knowledge (hereafter, simply called knowledge). In his dialogue Theaetetus, Plato offered (though he did not completely endorse) what is known as the standard definition of (propositional) knowledge. The standard way of stating this definition is to say that knowledge is justified true belief (sometimes called the tripartite analysis or alluded to as simply JTB). It will be helpful to analyze this definition further. If someone knows something, then what he knows must be true. It would make no sense to say that Jones knows that milk is in the refrigerator but that, nevertheless, it is false that the milk is there. So a necessary condition of knowledge is that what is known is true. But truth is not sufficient for knowledge. There are many truths that no one has ever thought of, much less known. And there are some truths that someone may think about but not know.
Besides truth, a second part of knowledge is belief. If Jones knows something in the propositional sense, he must at least believe it. It would make no sense to say that Jones knows that milk is in the refrigerator but that, nevertheless, he does not believe that milk is in the refrigerator. So belief is a necessary condition for knowledge. But mere belief is not sufficient for knowledge. People believe many things that they do not know to be true.
True belief is a necessary condition for knowledge. But is true belief sufficient for knowledge? No, it is not. The reason is that someone can believe things that are true but have no justification or warrant at all for those beliefs. It may be that one’s belief is true by simple accident. Suppose, for example, the following random thought pops into someone’s mind: It is raining right now in Moscow. Suppose, further, that the person believes this thought and, further, as a matter of sheer coincidence, it is actually raining in Moscow at that time. Then the person would have a true belief, but the person would not have knowledge of the proposition in question. Or suppose that the person said to himself, I will believe the first piece of graffiti on the bathroom wall, and the first thing he sees is the sentence “It is raining right now in Moscow.” Again, even if the sentence were true, the person would not have knowledge of the proposition.
What is missing in these cases? The person lacks justification or warrant for the belief in question. In chapter five, different theories of “justification” or “warrant” will be examined. It will become evident that some philosophers equate the two while others draw a distinction between them. But for now, it may simply be noted that justification (or warrant) for a belief amounts to something like this: one has sufficient evidence for the belief, one formed and maintained the belief in a reliable way (e.g., on the basis of his senses or expert testimony and not by palm reading), or one’s intellectual and sensory faculties were functioning properly in a good intellectual environment when he formed the belief in question. For present purposes, the main idea is that there is a big difference between a mere true belief and a true belief that has warrant or justification. And the traditional or standard definition of propositional knowledge is the view that knowledge is justified true belief. In other words, a person S knows that P if and only if
For a long time, the standard definition of propositional knowledge was more or less accepted as adequate by philosophers. And while there were a few counterexamples raised against the standard definition (e.g., by Alexius Meinong and by Bertrand Russell in the early 1900s) it was not until 1963 that the standard definition was subjected to severe criticism. In 1963 Edmund Gettier published a short paper that raised problems for the standard definition. Gettier’s paper presented two short counterexamples designed to show that while justified true belief may be necessary for knowledge, it is not sufficient. Since then, a host of similar counterexamples have been raised, and they are usually called Gettier-type counterexamples to the standard JTB definition of knowledge.
Here is one of Gettier’s original examples: Smith and Jones have applied for a certain job and Smith has strong evidence for the following proposition:
a. Jones is the man who will get the job, and Jones has ten coins in his pocket.
Smith’s evidence for (a) includes the fact that the company’s president has assured him that Jones would be selected and that Smith himself has counted the coins in Jones’s pocket ten minutes ago. On the basis of (a) Smith infers a new proposition that he now believes:
b. The man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.
Imagine further, says Gettier, that unknown to Smith, he himself gets the job and happens to have ten coins in his pocket. In this case, proposition (b) is true, Smith believes (b), and (b) is strongly justified for Smith. In short, he has justified true belief regarding (b), but surely, one would not want to say he knows (b). JTB may be necessary for knowledge but it is not sufficient.
Here is another example: Suppose Fred believes that his wife Betty is at work, and the basis for this belief is the fact that he has just seen her leave for work thirty minutes ago, she always goes directly to work every day, and she had told him as she left that she was going straight to work because she had a busy day ahead. However, suppose further that, in reality, Betty was fooling Fred and, instead of driving to work, she went to a clothing store to get Fred a new suit. On arrival at the store, Betty was kidnapped by her friends and taken to work for a surprise birthday party for Betty. In this case, Fred’s belief that Betty is at work would be a justified true belief, but it would not seem to be something that Fred knows.
Here is a final example: Suppose that the Dallas Cowboys are playing the Buffalo Bills in the Super Bowl for the second straight year. Suppose further that Harry is watching the Cowboys beat the Bills in the Super Bowl on television. As the game ends, he forms the belief that the Cowboys have just won the Super Bowl. However, unknown to him, the Super Bowl telecast has been stopped due to technical difficulties, and the television is showing a rerun of last year’s Cowboys victory instead of this year’s game. As a matter of fact, however, the Cowboys have just beaten the Bills for the second straight year, but the end of the current game has not been on television. In this case, Harry has a justified true belief that the Cowboys just won the Super Bowl, but it would not seem that he knows this to be the case.
What is going on here? In each case, the example tries to give a case in which justified true belief, while perhaps necessary, is nevertheless not sufficient for knowledge, that is, that the tripartite analysis is too weak or broad since it counts as knowledge in cases in which knowledge does not, in fact, obtain.
Several types of strategies (with different versions of each strategy) have been offered as responses to Gettier-type examples:
Strategy #1: Retain the standard definition and show that the Gettier-type examples do not work because the people in them didn’t really have justification, that is, it is still the case that knowledge = JTB.
Strategy #2: Accept the examples, hold that JTB is necessary but not sufficient for knowledge, and look for a fourth condition, that is, knowledge = JTB + ?.
Strategy #3: Accept the examples, abandon the tripartite analysis of knowledge but replace “justification” with something else to form a new tripartite definition of knowledge, that is, knowledge = ?TB.
Before examining the different strategies, something should be said briefly about justification and a related issue—the internalism-externalism debate. The topic of justification will be studied more fully later in this chapter and in chapter five. But for now a few preliminary remarks should suffice to understand the different strategies offered as responses to Gettier cases.
The term justification is usually associated with beliefs—it is a belief (e.g., that Smith did the robbery) that either is or is not justified for some person at some time. Furthermore, justification is a normative term of epistemic appraisal. If we say a belief is justified, we usually mean that we either have a right to believe it, that we ought to believe it, or that accepting the belief is an intrinsically good, rational thing to do. Often, it is reasonable to take a belief to be true, perhaps because there is good evidence or ground for the belief (and some would add that one must either actually be aware of this good evidence or ground or that one must both be aware of the evidence or the ground and see the connection between the evidence or ground and the belief one accepts on the basis of the evidence or ground). Jill’s belief that there is a tree before her may be justified on the grounds that she has certain sensory experiences (she has an appearance of a green and brown tree-shaped object). Jack’s belief that Smith did the robbery may be justified on the good evidence that he was there with a motive and with the stolen goods in his hands.
Some have argued that the normativity of justification should be understood in terms of faithfully fulfilling certain epistemic duties or rules, that is, cognitive rules that specify duties for obtaining rational, justified beliefs. Some of these rules may include “Obtain true beliefs and avoid false ones,” “Obtain rational beliefs and avoid irrational ones,” “If something appears red to you, then believe it is red until you have sufficient evidence to the contrary,” and so on. Finally, justification comes in degrees. A belief can grow in its justification for someone if his evidence or grounds for that belief grows. Likewise one can lose justification for a belief if he comes to believe things that defeat his belief in some way or another.
Justification is often closely related to a second issue: the internalist-externalist debate. Roughly, an internalist is one who holds that the sole factors that justify a belief are “internal” or “cognitively accessible” to the believing agent or subject. These factors are various mental states (experiences, sensations, thoughts, beliefs) to which the agent himself has direct access by simply reflecting on or being aware of his own states of consciousness. Justification is grounded in what is internal to the mind of and directly accessible to the believing subject. They are factors the subject can be aware of by simply reflecting on himself. For example, Ashley’s having a red sensation confers some justification on the belief that there is a red object in front of her and the red sensation itself is internal to her—it is a state of consciousness to which she has direct access. An externalist is one who denies internalism, that is, who affirms that among the factors that justify a belief are those to which the believing subject does not have or does not need to have cognitive access. For example, an externalist could hold that among the things that justify a belief is the causal process that caused the belief to be formed—light waves reflecting off of objects and interacting with the eyes and optic nerve in the right way—even though this causal process is entirely outside of the subject’s awareness.
So far, internalism was defined as the view that the sole justifying factors of a belief are those internal to the subject. And this is, indeed, the standard way of defining internalism. However, it is possible to make a distinction between strong and weak internalism. In order to appreciate this distinction, it will be useful to look for a moment at two different intellectual factors that have given rise to internalism.
The first is called a deontological view of justification, which centers on the notion, mentioned above, of fulfilling one’s epistemic duties. This view of justification pictures it as a matter of doing one’s best to form one’s beliefs according to certain epistemological rules; for example, “Form your beliefs objectively and carefully,” “If something looks red to you and you have no reason for thinking it is not red, then you may believe that it is, in fact, red,” “Proportion the strength of your beliefs to the strength of the evidence for them.” Having justification for a belief is a matter of doing one’s intellectual duty, of trying one’s best to follow the correct epistemological rules. If someone obeys the correct rules in forming and maintaining his beliefs, then he has done his intellectual duty, his beliefs are justified for him, and he is not to be held responsible even if his beliefs are, in fact, false. Having justified beliefs is a matter of fulfilling one’s intellectual duties and being intellectually responsible.
Second, if people have intellectual duties and responsibilities, if they can be guilty or innocent of carrying out those duties, then they must be free to do or not do their duties. That is, if one is to have justified beliefs, and since having justified beliefs amounts to doing one’s duty here, then one must be free to obey or disobey epistemic rules. Otherwise, one could not be held responsible for his intellectual behavior. Now one is not responsible for or free with respect to what happens outside of oneself. He can only control factors internal to him as a subject.
For example, as long as one has tried one’s best to pay attention to his sensations and beliefs and form justified beliefs on the basis of correct rules regarding them, then even if there is an evil demon outside him who tricks him into experiencing and believing in an external world that is not there, he can still have justified beliefs about that external world. He cannot control evil demons or other external factors, so they are not relevant to justification. Since justification is a matter of intellectual responsibility, and since responsibility requires freedom, and since internal factors are the only factors about which one is free, then an internalist view of justification is demanded. The deontological impetus to internalism leads to strong internalism—the view that the sole factors relevant to justification are internal ones, that internal factors are necessary and sufficient for justification.
A second intellectual factor also motivates internalism: the first-person perspective (see chap. 16). Here, epistemology in general, and justification in particular, are viewed as topics that essentially focus on first-person knowing and experiencing subjects. Thus epistemology is primarily a study of first-person issues, for example, how can I myself obtain justified beliefs? On this view, epistemology cannot be reduced to a third-person perspective that abandons the first-person standpoint. Now the first-person perspective is essentially one that involves factors internal to knowing and experiencing subjects, namely, experiences and beliefs. This impetus toward internalism leads to weak internalism: the view that internal factors are necessary but, most likely, not sufficient for justification. Weak internalism is compatible with some forms of externalism.
As with internalism, there is also a distinction between weak and strong externalism. According to strong externalism, no factors that contribute to a belief’s justification are internal to the agent. A philosopher could be favorable to this position if she wishes to avoid mind-body dualism (see chaps. 11–14) and if, as seems reasonable, internalism implies some form of dualism. According to weak externalism, at least some factors that contribute to a belief’s justification must be external to the agent.
In sum, there are different versions of internalism and externalism. Moreover, weak internalism and externalism are compatible with each other. The chapter will continue to use internalism and externalism for the strong versions of each unless otherwise indicated, because this usage is more common among philosophers.
As noted above, externalism in either form implies the denial of strong internalism. According to externalists, either part or all of what justifies a belief are factors external to the agent and to which the agent need have no access at all. Sally’s belief that a red object is in the room is justified for her by factors like these: the lighting was good, the object itself is what caused her to believe it is there, her belief was formed by reliable methods (say by her sensory organs and not by consulting a palm reader to tell her what was in the room), and so on. Note that for the externalist, Sally does not have to have access to or awareness of any of these justifying factors. She does not have to be aware (or even be able to be aware) of the lighting, of what caused her belief, or of what method she used to form it.
Now what exactly does the internalist-externalist debate have to do with justification? Simply this. Most philosophers have used justification in an internalist way. For them, justification means relying on internal factors. Thus, if a philosopher is a strong externalist, he or she will abandon the notion of justification altogether, replace it with something else, and form a new tripartite definition. Alternatively, a philosopher may retain justification and search for a supplementary fourth condition for knowledge. Applying this insight to the standard definition of knowledge allows the reader to understand the three types of strategies to follow. The best way to show this is to look at the strategies themselves.
2.1 Strategy #1: Retain the Standard Definition
Advocates of this view claim that knowledge is justified true belief but that the individuals in the Gettier-type examples fail to have justification. Why? Because even though they had some evidence for their true belief, it was not enough evidence to count as justification. On this view, what the Gettier examples show is that the amount of evidence required for justification should be elevated. Accordingly, one has justification for some belief only if that justification entails the truth of the belief. In other words, one cannot have a justified false belief. There is no justification for a belief unless the belief is true. Justification is such a strong thing that the evidence that justifies a belief entails the truth of that justified belief. Since the evidence for the people in the Gettier cases did not entail the truth of the proposition they believed—that evidence could be true but the supported belief false—they did not really have justification in the first place and that is why they did not have knowledge.
Few philosophers have accepted this solution to Gettier cases, and for a very good reason. It would severely limit the things that people know and would imply that people do not know most of the things they do in fact know. On this view there would only be two kinds of things people could know: their own immediate mental states and simple truths of logic and mathematics (called a priori truths). Arguably, the justification for Doug’s belief that he is in pain is simply his being in pain, and being in pain does, in fact, entail that the belief that he is in pain is true. One’s belief that 2 + 2 = 4 is justified by one’s simply being able to “see” that the proposition must be true once coming to understand what it says. Here, the evidence (one’s seeing that the proposition must be true upon understanding it) does entail that the proposition is true.
But on the view under consideration, most of the things people know would not count as knowledge: their knowledge of the past based on memory, or of the external world based on sensory experience, their knowledge of science, history, of the minds of others, ethics, religion, and a host of other things. In each of these cases, the factors that justify people’s beliefs and give them knowledge do not entail the truth of those beliefs. These factors could be true yet the belief they justify false. Consider a belief about the external world, say that there is a red object in front of someone. Suppose that the factor justifying this belief is one’s sensory experience—one’s being appeared to in a red type of way. Now having such a sensory experience does not entail that there is a red object. One could be hallucinating or, due to taking drugs or poorly functioning eyes, the object could be blue but appear red. So even though the factors that justify our true beliefs about the external world do not entail the truth of those beliefs (and the same point could be made about the other areas of knowledge), they still give people knowledge. For this reason, the view under consideration must be rejected.
2.2 Strategy #2: Supplement the Standard Definition
The second strategy accepts the Gettier cases, takes the tripartite definition to be a necessary condition for knowledge, and formulates a fourth condition. There have been a number of different candidates offered as the correct fourth condition. Two of them will be examined.
2.2.1 No Relevant Falsehood
According to the “no relevant falsehood” view, knowledge is justified true belief plus no relevant falsehood. To understand the idea behind this position, recall the Gettier case involving Smith, Jones, and the man who gets the job with ten coins in his pocket. What is it that goes wrong in this case? Note that Smith’s justified true belief (the man who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket) is true by accident, that is, its truth has nothing to do with Smith’s reasons for believing it. In fact, Smith infers this belief from the false belief that Jones is the man who will get the job. In light of this, some have suggested the following addition to the tripartite definition: the belief must not receive justification from a false belief. Since Smith’s belief violates this fourth condition, there is now an answer as to why he did not have knowledge.
Unfortunately, the “no relevant falsehood” view fails for at least two reasons. First, it is not a necessary condition for knowledge—one can still have knowledge and violate this principle. Suppose Gary knows that the stock market rose yesterday and his justification for this belief is four pieces of information: he heard it on the radio, read about it in the newspaper, had a friend report it to him at breakfast, and had his wife tell him she heard it on television. Now suppose that his wife did not really hear it on television but only thought she did. Then his belief would be (partly) based on a false belief. On the “no relevant falsehood” view, his belief would not count as knowledge, but surely he does, in fact, know this. Attempts have been made to fix this requirement, but none has succeeded. The problem is this. People often have many pieces of evidence for a belief that they know, and among their evidence is one or more false beliefs, yet they still have knowledge. How many false beliefs can one have and still have knowledge? What percentage of true versus false beliefs must one have? It is very difficult to say.
Second, the view is not sufficient for knowledge. One can have a justified true belief not justified by a relevant false belief and still fail to have knowledge. Alvin Goldman presents a case in which Henry is driving through the countryside and sees a normal-looking barn a few feet away. Since his senses are working fine, he has a justified true belief that there is a barn that he sees. However,
unknown to Henry, the district he has entered is full of paper-mache facsimiles of barns. These facsimiles look from the road exactly like barns, but are really just facades, without back walls or interiors, quite incapable of being used as barns. Having just entered the district, Henry has not encountered any facsimiles; the object he sees is a genuine barn. But if the object on that site were a facsimile, Henry would mistake it for a barn.
Henry has justified true belief about the barn, and his belief is not based on anything false. Yet he still doesn’t have knowledge. This example has suggested to some a different view of how to solve the Gettier challenge.
2.2.2 Defeasibility
The barn example suggests a shift in the fourth condition away from there not being a relevant falsehood to there not being a relevant truth that could defeat one’s knowledge. In Henry’s case, there is such a relevant truth (unknown to him), namely, that there were a number of facsimiles in the countryside. Had he known that, his knowledge that he was seeing the barn would have been defeated. This suggests the following fourth condition for the standard definition: there must be no relevant truth which is such that if the person believed it, it would serve as a defeater for his justification. Knowledge must not be defeasible (capable of being annulled or made void) in this way.
What should one say to this condition? It obviously handles the barn case. However, the main problem with this solution is that it is not a necessary condition for knowledge because one can have knowledge and violate the condition. Suppose Beth has reasons that justify her in knowing that her children are playing at school. However, unknown to her, a neighbor called her husband this morning and invited the children to skip school and go to Disneyland. Suppose further that her husband has been saying for some time that he was going to let the children do this some day soon. Finally, suppose that her children have a test that day at school and her husband turned down the invitation.
Does she know they are playing at school? It would seem so, yet there is, in fact, a truth that, if known to her, would defeat her justification for knowledge (that the neighbor had called to invite them to Disneyland). In this case, though, there is also a defeater for the defeater (her husband’s refusal). The condition under consideration fails to take into account the fact that people often know things with true but unknown defeaters because there are defeaters for the defeaters and there may be further defeaters of those defeaters and so on. Unless one stipulates an omniscience requirement (one knows all the truths available)—which would severely limit what people know—this condition fails.
The two views just considered are examples of internalist strategies since they make reference to relevant falsehoods or truths that the person either is or can become directly aware of in his own field of consciousness and, in this way, could serve as a defeater of knowledge. The next two positions can either be offered as supplements to an internalist view of justification (knowledge is JTB + ? where “justification” is ultimately understood in terms of some state internal to the agent) or as replacements of internalism (knowledge is ?TB where the internalist notion of justification is replaced with something external to the agent). We will primarily look at them as replacements for internalism, though what shall be said about them, with minor adjustments, could apply equally to these views understood as supplements to internalism.
2.3 Strategy #3: Readjust the Tripartite Analysis
2.3.1 The Causal Theory
The causal theory can be understood in one of two ways: (1) knowledge is JTB + suitably caused belief, or (2) knowledge is suitably caused TB. In the second case the internalist notion of justification is abandoned and replaced with the notion of being suitably caused. As mentioned above, this is the view we will examine. There are different versions of this position, but the basic idea can be stated according to an early formulation of the view by Alvin Goldman: a person knows that P if and only if his true belief that P was caused by the state of affairs consisting in P itself.
Returning to the Smith and Jones example, the thing that causes Smith to believe that the next man to get the job has ten coins in his pocket is not caused by the ten coins in the pocket of the person about which the belief is directed (Jones) but by the ten coins in his own pocket. Thus Smith fails to have knowledge because his true belief is not caused (and certainly not “suitably” caused) by the state of affairs involved in the belief. On the other hand, if a red object is before someone and is what causes him to truly believe that it is there and red, then we have an account of just how it is that the person knows this fact, or so say advocates of the causal theory. Note that it is being claimed here that one can have knowledge of the fact that a red object is there without being aware of the causal processes (e.g., the light waves interacting with my retinas) producing such a belief. Indeed, people in ancient times had sensory knowledge with no knowledge of the scientific facts about light waves.
As with the other views, the causal theory has been subjected to several criticisms. First, there are cases where one can know that P without P causing that knowledge and, thus, the causal view is not necessary for knowledge. For example, our knowledge that 2 + 2 = 4 is, arguably, knowledge about certain abstract objects (nonphysical objects that do not exist in space or time; see chap. 10), namely, numbers and the mathematical relations that obtain among them. But it does not seem to be correct to say that these nonphysical abstract objects cause our knowledge of them. Again, one can know that if tree A is taller than tree B and tree B is taller than tree C, then it must be the case that tree A is taller than tree C. But what is it that causes this knowledge? It is not the trees because the knowledge itself does not depend on any specific objects in space or time but on the logic of the relation called “taller than.” Another (more controversial) example is our knowledge of the future. Mike can know that his wife will shout for joy this afternoon when she comes home and sees the diamond ring he has bought her, but this fact cannot cause this knowledge because it does not exist yet.
Second, the causal view is not sufficient for knowledge. There are cases where the fact that P does cause one to have a true belief that P but, because it causes such a belief in an epistemically irrelevant way, no knowledge obtains. Suppose a short person is outside working on his car, and suddenly growing tired, goes inside and watches the evening news. Suppose further that, unknown to him, a certain internal disorder is what caused him to grow tired and come inside. Upon watching the news, he learns that most people who suffer this disorder are short, and since he is a hypochondriac, he concludes that he has the disorder he does, in fact, have. In this case he surely would not know he had this disorder, despite the fact that his having it causally contributed to his true belief that he did.
2.3.2 The Reliability Theory
The final view to be considered (and it has several different versions) is the position that knowledge is a true belief that is produced and sustained by a reliable belief-forming method. For example, people tend to increase their willingness to count as knowledge a belief based on someone else’s testimony to the degree that they consider the person to be reliable. Hope’s true belief that there is an object in front of her is knowledge if and only if it is produced by a reliable method, in this case, by her visual processes. Sue’s true belief that she had breakfast this morning is knowledge if and only if it is reliably produced by her memory mechanisms and powers. One does not need to have any awareness or even possible awareness of these mechanisms or their reliability; one’s beliefs must merely be formed by them. Since the beliefs in the Gettier case were not produced by reliable methods, no knowledge obtains.
Several objections have been raised against this view. First, how does one determine which processes are, in fact, reliable and just how reliable they have to be to give knowledge? Consider vision. How does one know the visual processes that contribute to the formation of perceptual beliefs are, in fact, reliable and know just how reliable they are? Their reliability varies greatly as circumstances inside and outside the knower change. If one is sick or drunk or if the lighting is poor or the object far away, the processes forming one’s visual beliefs are less reliable. Some argue that the only noncircular way to answer this is to fall back on an internalist view of justification. The reliability theories cannot say that reliable beliefs are those produced by reliable methods and reliable methods are those that produce reliable beliefs. This would be circular. The solution to this problem seems to involve the idea that people have a notion of justification that is independent of reliability and, further, that this notion of justification is the one related to knowledge. For example, people already know a number of visual experiences are justified before they ever consider visual mechanisms, and they identify the reliable ones as those that produce what they already have justification to believe. Reliability advocates could respond that in order for our true beliefs to become knowledge they simply have to be formed by a reliable method. People do not have to have any knowledge of those methods or even the possibility of such knowledge. But how can a process justify a belief, asks the internalist, if people have no idea whether that process is operating in a given case or whether it is fully or only partly reliable?
A second objection to the reliability theory is this: The reliability thesis is not sufficient for knowledge because one can have a true belief formed by a reliable method but still not have knowledge. Laurence BonJour presents such a case:
Norman, under certain conditions which usually obtain, is a completely reliable clairvoyant with respect to certain kinds of subject matter. He possesses no evidence or reasons of any kind for or against the general possibility of such a cognitive power or for or against the thesis that he possesses it. One day Norman comes to believe that the President is in New York City, though he has no evidence either for or against this belief. In fact the belief is true and results from his clairvoyant power under circumstances in which it is completely reliable.
Norman, it would seem, has a reliably formed true belief but no knowledge. This completes our survey of some (but far from all) of the different responses to Gettier counterexamples to the standard definition of knowledge. It is now time to state some lessons to be learned from these examples and to provide some final reflections about knowledge itself.
2.4 Final Reflections About Knowledge
First, even if one cannot solve the Gettier problems precisely, it is still reasonable to say that knowledge is at least true belief plus something that confers justification, warrant, or rationality on that belief. In this sense, knowledge presupposes truth. There could be truth without knowledge, but no knowledge without truth. Moreover, knowledge is a normative notion. Because it includes the notion of justification or warrant, it involves believing what one epistemically ought to believe, believing what it is right to believe, believing what it is intrinsically valuable or warranted to believe from an intellectual standpoint.
Second, when one tries to formulate a definition of knowledge or, more generally, when one investigates matters in epistemology, one does not start with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for something to count as knowledge. Instead, one starts with paradigm cases of knowledge: central, clear cases of where knowledge does or does not obtain. In evaluating the Gettier examples, we constantly appealed to cases that did or did not count as knowledge. We then move from these clear cases to the formulation of various definitions of knowledge that we then use to evaluate alleged cases of knowledge that are less than clear, that is, borderline cases. We start with clear cases of knowledge, formulate definitions and criteria for knowledge justified by those clear cases, and extend these definitions and criteria to less clear cases. In this sense, people already have knowledge and many examples of it before they ever start doing epistemology. This will be important to keep in mind in the next chapter, when skepticism is examined.
Third, does knowing something include knowing that one knows it? That is, must one know that he knows something before he can know it? It would seem not for at least two reasons. First, a farmer can know he owns a tractor without ever reflecting on whether he knows this, without ever asking himself what knowledge is or whether he has it. Knowing that one knows something would seem to require that someone have the concept of what knowledge is in that person’s mind and recognize that his knowledge—say, that he owns a tractor—satisfies that conception of knowledge. But it is obvious that many people never reflect on knowledge itself or on their own states of knowing. Nevertheless they still have knowledge. Second, if one can know something only by first knowing that he knows it, then this would lead to a vicious infinite regress. Why? Because one could not know that he knows something unless he already knew that he knew that he knew it and so on. Thus one must be able to know without first knowing that he knows.
However, if a person (1) does know something, (2) has at least an approximate understanding of what knowledge is, and (3) asks himself if he does, in fact, know something, then he can surely know that he knows it. In this way the study of knowledge does not make knowledge possible, but it does give insight into the intellectual status of what people know by helping them understand that they do have knowledge of the things they know.
Here is one final point about knowledge that will be developed in the next chapter. If someone knows something, it does not necessarily mean that the person has complete certainty about that thing. “Being completely certain” in this context means “is logically impossible to be mistaken about.” This is a pretty high standard for knowledge. It requires it to be logically impossible for someone to be mistaken about a claim before one can know the claim in question.
On this view, a test for a knowledge claim is this: If person S knows that P, then it is a logical contradiction to say that that S merely takes himself to know that P but P is false. Descartes thought that “I think, therefore I am” passed this test, and thus one could, indeed, know that one existed because it is contradictory to say, “I take it to be the case that I think, therefore I exist, but it is false that I exist.” On the other hand, at least at one stage of his argument (i.e., without having established the existence of God), Descartes did not think that one could know that the external, physical world existed. Why? Because the proposition I take it that I am seeing an external world, but there is no external world that exists is not a contradiction. It is logically possible, even though not plausible, that one is hallucinating the external world, merely dreaming about it, or being tricked about its existence by a demon, all while the external world is unreal.
Such a requirement for knowledge—complete certainty—is too stringent and eliminates as knowledge many things that we do, in fact, know. For example, Allison can know that her light is on even though this knowledge is not completely certain: The proposition Allison takes herself to know that the light is on, but in fact it is not is not self-contradictory. However, Allison’s knowledge that the light is on does not require that this proposition be self-contradictory. Thus one can have knowledge even though it is logically possible that one is mistaken. In fact, we sometimes contrast knowing something with knowing it with certainty, implying that there is a contrast between knowing with certainty and simply knowing. Thus simple knowing is still knowing even if it is not for certain.
3—Reason and Rationality
In addition to knowledge, rationality is a term of epistemological importance. In this section, we will look at different aspects of rationality, beginning with a list of three different notions often associated with the term.
3.1 Three Notions of Reason and Rationality
First, there is what can be called Aristotelian rationality. In this sense, Aristotle called man a rational animal. Here, rational refers to a being with ratio—a Latin word referring to the ultimate capacity or power to form concepts, think, deliberate, reflect, have intentionality (mental states like thoughts, beliefs, sensations that are of or about things). Humans are rational animals in that, by nature, they have this power of reason. Two things should be kept in mind here. First, other beings besides humans—angels and perhaps certain animals—have some rational abilities. Second, humans are rational even if through defect (e.g., being a defective newborn) they cannot exercise that power, because the power of reason is possessed simply in virtue of having a human nature. It is important to distinguish between having a power and being able to exercise or develop it.
A second sense of rational involves rationality as the deliverances of reason. Here, the faculty of reason is considered a source of certain items of knowledge and is contrasted with the sensory faculties. Thus, according to the traditional view known as rationalism (not to be confused with the view that there is no God or that belief in God is irrational), truths in logic (modus ponens, if P is larger than Q and Q is larger than R, then P is larger than R) and mathematics (2 + 2 = 4) can be known a priori. Roughly, a priori refers to the idea that justification for them does not appeal to sensory experiences, as would justification for an a posteriori claim (e.g., there is a tree in the yard). According to rationalism, some a priori truths are self-evident: upon simply understanding the proposition in question, one can see or feel a strong inclination to accept that the proposition is a necessary truth—it does not just happen to be true, but rather it could not possibly be false.
Finally, a third sense of rational is closely connected to justification or warrant. In this sense, to say that a belief (or, better, an episode of believing) is rational for some person S at some time t is to say that the belief has justification or warrant for S at t. It is this third sense of rational that will occupy our attention in the remainder of this section.
3.2 Rationality as Justification or Warrant
3.2.1 Rationality and Truth
Whatever else one should say about rationality, one thing seems to be of fundamental importance: Rationality has instrumental value as a means to the end of obtaining truth (see chap. 6 for more on the nature of truth itself). The claim that a belief is rational means, first and foremost, that we take it to be likely that the belief is true because it is rational. It is only if people think that rationality or epistemic justification constitutes a means to truth that they have any reason for thinking that rationality is cognitively important. Of course, one could still value rationality and not believe in truth in that one could hold rational behavior to be a means to cultural power, happiness, or something else. But if rationality is to be valuable precisely as something related to cognitive and intellectual excellence, then the existence of truth is a necessary condition for such value.
This insight suggests that there are two fundamental tasks for people as intellectual, knowing beings. These tasks are to obtain or at least try to obtain a set of beliefs that is such that one believes as many truths as possible and avoids believing as many falsehoods as possible, especially in regard to important truths and falsehoods. Now each of these tasks would be easy to accomplish in the absence of the other. One could believe as many truths as possible by just believing everything that popped into his mind, but in this case many false beliefs would be accepted in the process. Similarly, one could avoid believing as many falsehoods as possible by simply refusing to believe anything. But because both tasks are central to us as intellectual beings the need for rationality becomes evident. By learning to be rational and hold beliefs that are justified, people trust that they can increase their stock of true beliefs and decrease their number of false ones.
3.2.2 Rationality and Epistemic Values
When one thinks of rationality as justification or warrant for a belief, it is natural to think of rationality as being intellectually or epistemically valuable. In other words, there is a close connection between rationality and epistemic value: to have a justified belief is to have something of intellectual worth. How should one understand this connection between justification and epistemic value? Philosophers differ over this issue.
As noted earlier in the chapter, some thinkers hold to a deontological view of justification. The word deontological comes from the Greek word deon, which means “binding duty.” According to the deontological view of justification, there are certain epistemic duties or rules such that if one’s beliefs are formed, maintained, and based on (and structured among themselves in accordance with) those rules and duties, then they are justified. This means that one has an intellectual right to hold the belief—the belief is either permissible or obligatory to hold, given certain factors and the correct set of epistemic rules. Since epistemic rules are norms governing our reasoning, they state conditions under which it is either rational (permissible or obligatory) to hold a belief and conditions under which it is irrational (intellectually forbidden) to hold a belief. Here are some examples of epistemic norms: (1) If x looks F (e.g., red) to you and you have no reason for thinking it isn’t F (red), then you are permitted to believe that it is, in fact, F (red). (2) Try to obtain reasonable beliefs and avoid unreasonable ones. (3) Proportion your beliefs to the evidence; believe something if and only if there is good evidence to do so. (4) Other things being equal, suppose other people are like you in that they have certain mental states (e.g., pain) following certain stimuli (e.g., being stuck with a pin) that are similar to yours in analogous circumstances. (5) Accept beliefs that cohere well with your entire set of coherent beliefs.
Deontological understandings of rationality assume what is called doxastic voluntarism (doxastic means “having to do with beliefs” as opposed to, say, sensory experiences themselves)—the notion that people have at least some voluntary control over and choice about their beliefs, and thus they are intellectually responsible for choosing the right beliefs and avoiding a choice of unreasonable ones. Doxastic voluntarism is a controversial thesis, but it is important to keep in mind that it does not mean one has direct, immediate control over one’s beliefs. If someone offered you a million dollars to believe right now that a pink elephant was in your room, you could not do it if you wanted to. People’s beliefs usually just come to them. Upon looking at a red object, one simply finds himself believing it is red. Nevertheless, one could still have indirect control over a belief. Perhaps people cannot directly change their beliefs, but they may be free to do certain things (e.g., study certain evidence and avoid other evidence) to move themselves to a position to change their beliefs.
There are other, nondeontological views about rationality and justification. On these views, justification does not amount to following correct epistemic rules, but rather it involves exemplifying certain states of affairs that are intrinsically valuable (valuable in themselves). Here are some examples of such states of affairs: having beliefs formed by a reliable method or that are caused by the thing believed, holding more true than false beliefs, forming and maintaining beliefs by means of properly functioning sensory and intellectual faculties in an environment for which they were designed, having coherent beliefs, and so on. Here, justification is conceived of as forming and maintaining (and structuring) beliefs in such a way that people embody one or more of these intrinsically valuable states of affairs. But these states of affairs are not to be thought of as rules specifying duties. For example, according to some, a belief is rational if and only if it is formed by a reliable method, but there is no duty to “form or try to form your beliefs according to a reliable method.”
In sum, rationality in the sense of justified or warranted belief is connected to that which is valuable from an epistemological or intellectual perspective: either rules people are to follow in forming and maintaining their beliefs or states of affairs people either do or do not embody in forming and maintaining their beliefs. In chapter five we will look at an important aspect of justification: What structure should one’s set of beliefs have such that those beliefs do, in fact, have justification for that person?
3.2.3 Degrees of Rationality
In a certain sense, truth does not come in degrees nor does it change. The fact that 2 + 2 = 4 or that George Brett retired from baseball in 1993 are either completely true or completely false (both are true!), and their truthfulness does not change over time. By contrast, rationality comes in degrees and can change over time.
For any belief P, say the belief that God exists, there are three important cognitive postures we can take regarding P: we can believe P (as theists do), we can believe not-P (as atheists do), or we can withhold P (as agnostics do) and neither believe P nor believe not-P. Epistemologically speaking, a person should withhold a belief about P if P is counterbalanced for that person: P and not-P are equally justified for the person; neither position is more justified than the other. If one moves from withholding to believing P or believing not-P, his degree of justification can grow and change over time. For example, in a court of law, the evidence for a guilty verdict can grow in such a way that the belief of guilt becomes more and more (or less and less) justified. Moreover, one could have extremely good reasons to hold a person guilty at one time, but given the addition of new evidence, that belief could pass from being well justified to unjustified. Thus rationality, in contrast to truth, comes in degrees and can change over time.
One factor that affects whether and to what degree a belief is justified is the presence of defeaters for that belief. Suppose Smith has a belief that Q (e.g., that a statue is blue), and suppose that R (e.g., the way the statue looks to him) is a reason or ground Smith has for holding to Q. A defeater removes or weakens justification for a belief. There are at least two kinds of defeaters. First, there are rebutting defeaters, which directly attack the conclusion or thing being believed. In the case above, a rebutting defeater would be a reason to believe not-Q, that is, a reason to believe that the statue is not blue. An example would be a case where the museum director and a number of reliable, honest people assure you that the statue is gray. Second, there are undercutting defeaters. These defeaters do not directly attack the thing believed (by trying to show that it is false), but rather they attack the notion that R is a good reason for Q. Undercutting defeaters do not attack Q directly; they attack R and in some way undercut R as a good reason for Q. In the example above, an undercutting defeater would be evidence that there is blue lighting around the statue that makes everything in that room look blue. In the example, the undercutting defeater removes one’s reason for thinking that the statue is blue and the rebutting defeater gives one reason for thinking that the statue is not-blue. In different ways, defeaters can remove the justification for a belief.
In this chapter, the field of epistemology was introduced and different aspects of knowledge and rationality were examined. But do people really know or have justified beliefs about anything? This is part of the problem of skepticism, and to skeptical issues we now turn.
Chapter Summary
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that focuses on the study of knowledge and justified belief. Four major areas of epistemology are (1) the analysis of concepts like knowledge, justification, and rationality, (2) the problem of skepticism (do people have knowledge or justified beliefs?), (3) the sources and scope of knowledge or justified belief, and (4) the study of criteria for knowledge or justified belief.
There are three types of knowledge: knowledge by acquaintance, know-how, and propositional knowledge. Regarding the last, the standard definition of knowledge has identified it with justified true belief. Gettier-type counterexamples have been raised against the standard definition. Philosophers have responded to these examples in one of three ways: reject the examples and retain the standard definition, add a fourth condition to justified true belief, or replace justification with something else (reliability, being suitably caused) to form a new tripartite definition. Whatever one says about this debate, it seems reasonable to affirm this about knowledge: It is normative; people start epistemology with particular cases of knowledge and not with necessary or sufficient conditions for a definition of knowledge; and people do not have to know they know before they can know.
Rationality is another important epistemological notion. We use the term rational in three senses: Aristotelian rationality, the deliverances of reason, and rationality as justification or warrant. Regarding the latter, rationality is a means to truth, and it can be understood in terms of fulfilling certain epistemic duties or embodying certain states of affairs deemed intrinsically valuable from an epistemic point of view. Finally, rationality comes in degrees and can change over time, and one way this takes place is through the presence of different kinds of defeaters.
Checklist of Basic Terms and Concepts
a posteriori
a priori
Aristotelian rationality
causal theory
defeasible
defeater
deliverances of reason
deontological view of justification
doxastic voluntarism
epistemic duties or rules
epistemic value
epistemology
externalism
faculty of reason
Gettier-type counterexamples
internalism
intuition
justification
knowledge by acquaintance
knowledge by description
propositional knowledge
rationalism
rationality
rebutting defeater
reliability theory
self-evident
sensory faculties
skepticism
Socratic questions
standard definition of knowledge
strong externalism
strong internalism
tripartite analysis
undercutting defeaters
warrant
weak externalism
weak internalism