When attempting to determine whether the subject of an epistemology case has knowledge or mere true belief, many of us find that our judgments are influenced by whether the case explicitly describes a way in which the subject’s belief could have turned out to be false. Nagel uses the following cases to illustrate this phenomenon:

(a)  John A. Doe is in a furniture store. He is looking at a bright red table under normal lighting conditions. He believes the table is red. Q: Does he know that the table is red?

(b)  John B. Doe is in a furniture store. He is looking at a bright red table under normal lighting conditions. He believes the table is red. However, a white table under red lighting would look exactly the same to him, and he has not checked whether the lighting is normal, or whether there might be a red spotlight shining on the table. Q: Does he know that the table is red?

Whereas most of us are inclined to judge that John A. Doe (henceforth ‘A’) knows that the table is red when we consider case (a), many of us judge that John B. Doe (henceforth ‘B’) does not know that the table is red when we consider case (b).

Non-skeptical invariantists hold that A and B both know that the table is red, and that the intuition that B does not know that the table is red is misleading. Thus they are obliged to provide some explanation for why many of us have this misleading intuition. One explanation, offered separately by Hawthorne and Williamson, appeals to the psychological phenomenon known as the availability heuristic, a pattern of thought whereby one estimates an event’s probability on the basis of how easily one can recall or imagine events of that type occurring. The availability heuristic can lead to error, since some types of event are both very improbable and very easily brought to mind; e.g., stranger abduction. Hawthorne and Williamson’s idea is that if certain error possibilities come easily to mind when considering a case, then the availability heuristic can lead one to overestimate the likelihood that the subject of the case is mistaken. Since knowledge is, plausibly, incompatible with a sufficiently grave danger of error, this can in turn lead one to incorrectly judge that the subject does not know.

Nagel has two goals in this article: first, to argue that the preceding explanation based on the availability heuristic is not empirically or conceptually plausible (I will focus on Nagel’s empirical objections in what follows); second, to propose an alternative explanation that will also be congenial to non-skeptical invariantists, but that appeals to a different psychological phenomenon, epistemic egocentrism.

Nagel’s empirical case against the Hawthorne-Williamson explanation is very compelling. It consists of three objections, each of which is supported by careful discussion of empirical work in psychology that examines the conditions under which the availability heuristic, or heuristics in general, are deployed. The point of these objections is, roughly, that we should not expect the availability heuristic to be deployed in the situation in which a person considers case (b) and has the intuition that B does not know that the table is red.

First, for the Hawthorne-Williamson explanation to succeed, it must be the case that the possibility that the table is illuminated by a red spotlight is easily imagined when considering case (b), but far less easily imagined when considering case (a). Since the only difference between (a) and (b) is that (b) explicitly mentions the red spotlight possibility, the explanation depends on supposing that simply mentioning the red spotlight possibility makes it easy to imagine. But some possibilities are just difficult to imagine, even when they are explicitly mentioned.  Nagel discusses a study in which subjects were presented with an abstractly described and unusual scenario in which they contract a fictitious disease. These subjects did not overestimate the probability of their contracting the disease. Because the scenario was difficult to imagine, the availability heuristic did not kick in. So, the Hawthorne-Williamson explanation depends on the red spotlight possibility being easy to imagine once mentioned. But why think that? It is, after all, quite an unusual possibility.

Second, the Hawthorne-Williamson explanation assumes that provided the red spotlight possibility is easily brought to mind, people will overestimate its probability. But this overlooks the spontaneous discounting of availability: when there is an obvious explanation for why a certain type of event is present to a subject’s mind, such as a researcher explicitly mentioning it just before asking a question, subjects do not overestimate its probability. So we should not expect people who consider case (b) to overestimate the probability of the red spotlight possibility.

Third, and finally, Nagel notes that heuristics tend to weaken or evaporate when subjects are placed in a context where careful reflection is called for. But these conditions obtain in the epistemology seminar room, where the intuition to be explained is presumably most common. It is therefore unlikely that the availability heuristic can explain the intuition in the situations in which it is most commonly elicited.

Nagel’s own explanation for our differing intuitions with respect to (a) and (b) appeals to epistemic egocentrism, our tendency to implicitly assume that other people share more of our beliefs and concerns than they in fact do. In brief, Nagel’s explanation is this: when we read case (b) we falsely assume that B is, like us, concerned with the red spotlight possibility. But B does not bother to look up and check whether there is a red spotlight above the table. This indicates that B is in a distracted or careless state of mind that is in tension with supposing that B knows the table is red. Nagel offers this explanation as an empirical hypothesis, and she briefly sketches the kind of empirical work that would be required to confirm it.

Main authors discussed: Keith DeRose, John Hawthorne, Jason Stanley, and Timothy Williamson

Hawthorne and Stanley (2008) defend the Knowledge-Action Principle:

(KA) It is proper to treat p as a reason for action (for some p-dependent choice) iff you know p.

Mikkel Gerken defends the Warrant-Action Principle:

(WA) In the deliberative context, DC, S meets the epistemic conditions on rational use of (her belief that) p as a premise in practical reasoning or of (her belief that) p as a reason for acting (if and) only if S is warranted in believing that p to a degree that is adequate relative to DC (2).

Gerken takes WA to be an alternative to KA because he assumes (reasonably) that warrant does not suffice for knowledge.  He is using ‘warrant’ as a term that could cover ‘justification’ and ‘entitlement’ and believes that there can be warranted false beliefs and Gettiered beliefs.  He brackets the question as to whether anything known to be true has DC-adequate warrant, but notes that some examples of Jessica Brown’s cause trouble for (KA) on this front.  His discussion and this discussion will be focused the claim that something less than knowledge is needed for S to be in a position to treat p as a reason for action in such a way that this is epistemically proper.

Gerken argues that Gettier cases and cases of warranted but false belief cause trouble for KA but not for WA.  He also thinks the motivation for KA is problematic.  Hawthorne and Stanley offer some examples in support of (KA) such as this one:

Suppose, for example, that Hannah and Sarah are trying to find a restaurant, at which they have time limited reservations. Instead of asking someone for directions, Hannah goes on her hunch that the restaurant is down a street on the left. After walking around for some amount of time, it becomes quite clear that they went down the wrong street. A natural way for Sarah to point out that Hannah made the wrong decision is to say, “you shouldn’t have gone down this street, since you didn’t know that the restaurant was there (Hawthorne and Stanley 2008: 571).

Gerken thinks that our use of ‘knows’ in such contexts is often imprecise, so these examples offer little support to (KA).  He also notes that if we modify the details of the case, it seems we can use this sort of case against KA.  Rather than have Hannah act on a hunch, suppose she has exceptionally good evidence but mistakenly believes that the restaurant is where it’s been for years.  It seems reasonable for Hannah to go down the street although she does not know that the restaurant is there. This version of the restaurant-case appears to be a counter-example to The Knowledge-Action Principle. Hannah reasonably treats p as reason for acting although she does not know that p. Had Sarah complained, “you shouldn’t have gone down this street, since you didn’t know that the restaurant was there,” she would be unreasonable. Note that this verdict is based on a relevantly similar judgment about a case that is relevantly similar to the original version of the case (Gerken forthcoming: 5).

My initial reaction is similar to Gerken’s.  It would be inappropriate for Sarah to complain, upbraid, blame, etc… if she knows that Hannah’s belief was supported by the evidence.  However, that might be because Hannah should be excused for what she did and not because she rightly or permissibly reasoned from a false premise with regrettable consequences.  It isn’t clear that KA delivers us the wrong verdict.

(Just a quick sidenote.  Gerken thinks that Gettier cases cause trouble for KA, too.  Boiled down to its essentials, the idea is this.  In (some) Gettier cases, it seems proper for the subject to treat p as a reason for action when p is justifiably believed on the basis of good reasons but only accidentally connected to the truth.  KA delivers the verdict that it is impermissible to treat p as a reason for action in such cases, but that seems wrong.  Here, I think Gerken is on good ground.  Those who defend KA can say that you are merely excused for treating p as a reason for action when your belief that p is Gettiered, but I don’t feel the pull of the intuition that there’s something to excuse that is wrongful.  I’ll focus on the case of warranted, false belief from here on out.)

Gerken argues that it’s a mistake to classify cases of reasoning from false beliefs as merely excused. (One of the reasons this paper comes highly recommended.)    Suppose someone defend KA by saying that the subject should be excused if she has every reason to believe she knows p.  Gerken thinks that this is problematic:

Not all agents are capable of such higher-order thoughts … The more principled problem is that many subjects who may act or deliberate rationally on the basis of a warranted false belief are incapable of thinking the second-order thought. For example, a 30-month-old toddler may see a wax apple on the table and believe that there is an apple on the table. He may then use that belief as a premise in basic practical deliberation. Likewise, a chimp that sees a wax banana may falsely believe that there is a banana and act on the belief. But there are empirical reasons to suppose that 30-month-old humans and chimps cannot competently employ higher-order thoughts, such as I know that there is an apple on the table. If some subjects that may be rational in acting on a warranted false belief are incapable of forming the higher-order thoughts required for secondary propriety, the appeal to secondary propriety/excuse is less appealing (Gerken forthcoming: 11).

Those who defend KA might say two things here.  First, that there are two ways to show that blame isn’t fitting.  There is a distinction between excuses and denials of responsibility (or exemptions).  You offer excuses for wrongs committed by those that can be held responsible.  You offer denials of responsibility for individuals that lack the capacities that allow them to assume responsibility for their deeds.  It doesn’t follow from the fact that someone doesn’t meet the requirements that would allow them to assume responsibility for their deeds that their actions cannot be excused.  It doesn’t follow from the fact that they do not meet the conditions necessary for excuse that they must be held responsible for any breach of any norm.

Second, they can say that what matters is not whether the subject can form beliefs about the reasons and entertain propositions about what they can know but whether the reasons are there for them to make a reasonable judgment about what should be done, may be done, etc…  Somewhere between chimphood and voting age there may well be stages where children can be held accountable for their deeds where they may well not entertain propositions about what they know but may know various things, know various things about right and wrong, and if they have the sorts of reasons that put them in a position to know that they would act rightly, why not excuse them for their wrongful deeds?  Gerken anticipates this second response and raises the worry that it would force us to say that there can be warrants we have for beliefs in propositions we cannot entertain, grasp, or believe.

Perhaps the most promising thing to say in defense of KA is that the subject should be excused for treating p as a reason for action provided that the subject satisfies the requirements imposed by WA.  Gerken’s response:

[T]his approach is little but a collapse of the knowledge account into a warrant account, such as WA. It is compatible with a warrant approach to hold that the degree of warrant normally required for knowledge is what is normally required for action/practical reasoning. But a central reason for distinguishing between “warrant normally required for knowledge” and “knowledge itself” is this: In certain epistemically abnormal cases, the degree of warrant that would have met the warrant condition on knowledge in normal circumstances is insufficient for knowledge. In some such cases, the warrant may nevertheless be sufficient for rational action/practical reasoning. As mentioned, cases of warranted false belief and Gettier-style cases are paradigms of such epistemically abnormal cases. So, to say that knowledge is normally required for action/practical reasoning but that warranted belief will do in abnormal cases amounts to accepting a version of a warrant account compatible with WA (Gerken forthcoming: 14).

Although I think that there are ways to meet Gerken’s challenge, he has shown that it will be difficult to bring (KA) in line with intuitions about Gettier cases and cases of warranted, false belief.  The excuse maneuver that seems so tempting will be difficult to develop in a satisfactory manner.

There is much in this paper that I couldn’t cover because of space constraints, but I recommend it to those interested in debates about the epistemic norms governing action, assertion, and belief.

Reviewed by Clayton Littlejohn
University of Texas, San Antonio

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Hawthorne, J. and J. Stanley.  2008.  Knowledge and Action.  The Journal of Philosophy, CV, 10: 571-
90.

Main authors discussed: David Lewis and Jason Stanley

The fallibilist claims that it’s possible to know p even if your evidence for believing p does not entail p.  It seems that infallibilism entails scepticism because it seems that we don’t have infallible grounds for most of our beliefs about the external world.  Trent Dougherty and Patrick Rysiew defend fallibilism from David Lewis’ criticism and address Jason Stanley’s criticism of Rysiew’s earlier response to Lewis.

As Lewis (1996: 550) observed, overt statements of the fallibilist view seem contradictory.  Consider this concessive knowledge attribution (CKA):

(1)     I know that Harry is a zebra, but it might be that Harry is just a painted mule.

Lewis claims the second conjunct flatly denies what the first asserts.  Rysiew (2001) defended fallibilists from the charge that their view is contradictory, arguing that CKAs only seem contradictory.  In ordinary speech, he said, “It might be that ~p” pragmatically imparts that the speaker doesn’t know that p (2001: 493).

Stanley (2005) criticized Rysiew’s proposed defense because it didn’t offer any semantic account of epistemic possibility statements.  Rysiew agreed with Lewis that (1) captured the fallibilist’s view but claimed that (1) could express a truth.  The problem, according to Stanley,  was that given a standard treatment of epistemic modals Rysiew’s defense would fail.  Consider:

(EPk)     p is epistemically possible for S iff ~p isn’t obviously entailed by something S knows.

If (EPk) is correct, (1) entails:

(2)     I know that Harry is a zebra, but I do not know that Harry is not just a painted mule.

Since (2) must be false, it appears (1) must be false as well.

Dougherty and Rysiew (2009) offer a defense of fallibilism that builds on Rysiew’s (2001) earlier work and meets Stanley’s challenge to provide a semantic account of epistemic possibility statements on which (2) isn’t a consequence of (1).  Siding with Lewis against Stanley, they say that (1) does capture the fallibilist’s view.  Against Lewis, they insist that (1) can express a true proposition.  To explain how (1) could be true when it is agreed by all that (2) is false, they reject (EPk) and offer in its place this account of epistemic possibility:

(EPev)     p is epistemically possible for S iff ~p isn’t entailed by S’s evidence.

To explain why (1) seems defective, they give a pragmatic explanation.  If there are genuine reasons to doubt (i.e., reasons to doubt that do not arise simply from the recognition that there is some non-zero chance of having made a mistake), then it is acceptable to assert ‘It might be that ~p’, but inappropriate to ascribe knowledge to oneself given that there are genuine reasons to doubt.  According to Grice’s Maxim of Quality, you shouldn’t say what you believe you lack adequate evidence for.  To say that you know, you deny that you lack adequate evidence for your belief and this clashes with the claim that there are real reasons for doubt.  If, however, the reasons to doubt are simply that there is some non-zero chance of being mistaken it seems Grice’s Maxim of Relation recommends not introducing such chances into the conversation by asserting that it is epistemically possible that ~p  since these are not significant reasons for doubt (2009: 129).

Their pragmatic account may be sufficient to explain the oddity of CKAs, but note that to meet Stanley’s challenge they replaced (EPk) with (EPev).  They can’t do this without rejecting Williamson’s claim that evidence just is knowledge:

(E=K) S’s evidence consists of all and only the propositions known to S.

Their defense of fallibilism succeeds only if Williamson’s equation (E = K) is wrong.  They acknowledge this in a footnote saying, “that principle is sufficiently controversial that most would join us in assuming that the distinction between (EPk) and (EPev) is real” (2009: 127).

While (E=K) is controversial, I wish they had said more about the relation between (EPk) and (EPev) than just this.  There are two reasons that I think (E=K) needs to be revised.  According to (E = K) if you know p non-inferentially, you can then add additional propositions to your body of evidence via competent deduction.  That seems odd.  I think of inference as a way of applying old evidence to justify new beliefs and acquire new knowledge without having to acquire new evidence.  According to (E = K) if you know p and someone else fails to know p for purely Gettierish reasons, you have evidence they lack.  That seems odd, too.

If we revise (E=K) to accomodate these points, it seems we could still say that there is this connection between knowledge and evidence:

(IKSE)     If S knows p non-inferentially, p is part of S’s evidence.

If (IKSE) is true, immediate knowledge of p’s truth suffices for p’s inclusion in your evidence. While (E = K) might be controversial, (IKSE) seems far less controversial.  To deny it, you have to say that more is needed to get p into your evidence than just non-inferential knowledge.  (Remember that we want a non-sceptical view.  If we want a non-sceptical view, should we really insist that we need more than knowledge to get something into our evidence?  What would that be, superknowledge?)  If (IKSE) is true, a CKA of the form ‘I know p, but it might be that ~p’ would express a false proposition on Dougherty and Rysiew’s view if the speaker knew non-inferentially that p.

Let ‘p’ be the proposition that S has hands.  If S could assert truthfully that it is possible that she does not have hands (or that she’s a handless BIV), according to (EPev) S’s evidence does not include the proposition that she has hands.  (The only way that they could deny that S could assert this truthfully is if they say that whenever S knows she has hands she has evidence that entails that she has hands.)  It follows from the fact that her evidence does not include the proposition that she has hands and (IKSE) that she does not know that she has hands.  Perhaps they will just deny (IKSE), but (IKSE) is a consequence of:

(IJBSE)     If S is non-inferentially justified in believing p, p is part of S’s evidence.

If they deny (IKSE) they also have to deny that S can be non-inferentially justified in the belief that she has hands.  As a fallibilist, I’d prefer to retain (IJBSE) and (IKSE) if possible.

Reviewed by Clayton Littlejohn
Southern Methodist University