DEFINING KNOWLEDGE
Knowledge is not simply justified true
belief, but it is justified true belief justifiably arrived at.
Robert Fogelin
Before analyzing
knowledge, we need to make a pre-philosophical analysis of the meanings of the
concept-word ‘knowledge’. Although one can find a variety of definitions in
dictionaries, there are at least three main meanings or concepts of knowledge
usually selected by epistemologists.
The first concerns ability knowledge, often called knowing how (to do something). It is the
knowledge one has of swimming, bicycling, walking, speaking a language, playing
the violin, cradling… Even animals have this kind of knowledge: a bird knows
how to make a nest. The form is: “the living being a knows how to perform the activity x.” This procedural kind of knowledge is for us less relevant, not
only because it is shared with animals, but because it is usually devoid of
conscious awareness. It often appears after a process of automatization: one
thinks about the movements one makes in cycling only in the beginning; soon one
learns to make them automatically, without any conscious awareness. But in some
cases, it is innately established. Consider the sequence of movements a human
being makes when crawling. Are you able to specify the exact, true sequence?
The second selected sense is acquaintance knowledge. In order to have
it, one needs to be personally acquainted with a person or a thing. Examples
are given by sentences like “I know Mary”, “I know Paris”, ”I know Niagara
Falls”. However, one cannot have this type of knowledge relative to something
one has no personal acquaintance with. I cannot say that I know Moscow or that
I know China, because I was never in these places. All I can say is that I know
some facts about Moscow and some other facts about China. Of course, I can say
that I know Aristotle, but this is an extended sense of the word. I do not mean
that I was ever introduced to this philosopher. It is an indirect way to say that
I have studied his philosophy. The form of knowledge by acquaintance is “I know
x”, where x is a singular term like Mary or China. (French has different
verbs for this type of knowledge, namely, ‘connaȋtre’ as opposed to ‘savoir’,
which is also the case with other Romance languages, e.g., Spanish: conocer vs.
saber. In German: wissen vs. kennen.)
The third and by far most important sense of
knowledge is that of propositional knowledge.
It is also called knowing-that, because very often (though not always) in its
verbal expression, after the verb ‘to know’ comes the preposition “that”, and
after the preposition “that” comes a declarative sentence expressing a
proposition that can be true or false, which is essential to this kind of
knowledge. Examples are “I know that 7 + 5 = 12”, “I know that the Eiffel Tower
is located in Paris”, “I know that neutrinos have no electrical charge”.[1]
Propositional knowledge is fundamental to us, because most of our sciences,
most of our culture, and even our everyday knowledge is of this type. When
epistemologists speak of analyzing knowledge they are usually referring to
propositional knowledge. It has a complex nature that will be analytically
deciphered in a satisfactory way in the course of this chapter.
A well-placed question here would be: is
there enough semantic proximity between these three types of knowledge to
justify the use of the same word ‘knowledge’ to classify them? I think the
answer is ‘yes’. One characteristic of knowing-how is that in humans it is
usually learned and that in the process of learning we begin by becoming aware
of the sequence of things to be done, for example, the right physical movements
made in cycling or swimming. There must be some knowing-that at first, even if
afterwards these movements become automatic and we lose any awareness of them.
(Another example: When people learn to touch type they at first learn the keyboard,
but with experience they are able to find the keys without looking at the
keyboard but cannot state the sequence of letters.) Hence, knowing-how is often
a result of knowing-that. Concerning knowledge by acquaintance, it is
associated with propositional knowledge, since it entails the latter. If I know
Mary or if I know Paris, this entails that I know a good number of true
propositions or facts about that woman and that city. Finally, it is important
to remember Russell’s view, according to which acquaintance knowledge would be
the primary form of knowledge (Russell 1912, Ch. V). We must first have some
kind of sensory-perceptual acquaintance with empirical things in order to reach
a basis for forming propositions detached from the existence of the facts they
should represent.
Traditional definition of knowledge
A further point
is how to analyze propositional knowledge. Plato seems to have been the first
person to make this kind of analysis. According to him (propositional)
knowledge is true belief with a logos, a reason[2].
Understanding the ‘reason’ as a justification, we come to the definition of
knowledge as justified true belief that has passed through the whole history
of philosophy until it was challenged by Edmund Gettier in a famous short
article (1963). This traditional, standard or tripartite definition of
knowledge is intuitive. You cannot know that the statement p is true
without believing in its truth, and if you believe in its truth usually you
have some kind of justification: A school-boy who professes to know that
Columbus discovered America not only believes in the truth of this claim, but
must also be able to tell us something in order to justify this statement.
Before going into the details of this definition, I will consider more closely
each of these three conditions.
Consider first the condition of truth. We
cannot properly say that we know the false. Anna cannot know that the moon is
made of Swiss cheese. It is true that we can say that the old Greeks knew that
the Gods lived on Mount Olympus or that we once thought we knew things that
turned out to be false. But in both cases the verb ‘to know’ is not used in its
literal sense. This is shown when we replace the word ‘knew’ in those sentences
by the literal expression, which is ‘believed to know’.
Concerning the condition of belief, it is
important to see that a belief is an attitude towards a proposition. A
proposition (or thought) is what is said by a declarative sentence. The two
declarative sentences “Arminius defeated the Romans” and “The Romans were
defeated by Arminius” are different, but they say the same, that is, they
express the same proposition. Consequently, if we believe in its truth, we
believe in the truth of the proposition expressed by them.
One cannot know that something is true
without believing that it is true, except in a deranged state of mind in which
the degree of belief is distorted by feelings. One case is that of stress: in
an oral exam a nervous student does not believe he knows, but he often answers
questions correctly. Another case is that of wishful thinking: an elderly
English lady believed the impostor Tom Castro was her long lost son, despite
all evidence to the contrary.[3]
However, these are not the kind of beliefs
meant in the traditional definition of knowledge as justified true belief. Our
proper epistemic beliefs must be grounded on some positive probability of truth
that we rationally give to a proposition; they must be rational beliefs.
In this epistemically relevant sense, beliefs not only come in degrees, but we
are even able to find words approximately corresponding to these degrees: if
the probability is 1 or above 0.9, we often use words such as ‘certainty’,
‘conviction’, ‘confidence’; if it is around 0.7 or 0.8, we use the words
‘opinion’ or ‘standpoint’; if it is somewhat higher than 0.5 we use words like
‘hunch’, ‘inkling’, ‘suspicion’; if it is around 0.5 we use the word ‘doubt’ or
‘hesitation’ (or ‘suspension of belief’), and if it is below 0.5 we use the
word ‘disbelief’. Disbelief is the belief that a proposition is false, which is
the same as belief in the negation of the proposition.
When we feel ourselves able to see our
degree of belief as proper to knowledge, we say that we are certain of
its truth. Certainty is the key-word here. But what is the criterion for
certainty? To this, I would suggest that the answer must be pragmatic: it must
be a probability high enough to have the expected relevant practical
consequences, acknowledging that this relevance might change with the context.
If my friend asks me if I closed the door of my apartment as I left it, I
answer that I know for certain that I closed the door, since I do this by habit.
But if a policeman asks me if I know that I closed my door, I have to be more
cautious, answering that I really do not know, though I believe I did.
Another objection to the condition of belief
is a well-known counter-example offered by Colin Radford (1966):
Jean is a French-Canadian who claims not to
know any English history. He is given a verbal quiz on English history. He
answers questions hesitantly, but gets many answers right. One question asks
the date of Elisabeth I’s death. Jean says, I’d just be guessing, but, um, lets
say, 1603. This is the correct answer. Suppose in fact that Jean did learn this
answer, along with many others long ago in school and that his present “guess”
is based on a vague memory that in fact traces back to his learning the date of
Elisabeth I’s death.
The suggestion is
that Jean knows the date of Elisabeth I’s death without believing it. Although
this counter-example has embarrassed many, I think that in a real case we would
see in Jean’s answers a serious problem of likelihood. As admitted, he does not
get all answers right… Thus, in the same way as he said 1603 he could perhaps
someday say 1613… He is right in saying that he is just guessing. What he has
is a belief with a probability that is somewhat higher than 0.5, enough to be
called a good hunch, but not enough to guarantee knowledge. He does not have
knowledge, not because he lacks belief, but because he lacks the certain degree
of rational belief required for knowledge. In a similar way, if an experienced
psychiatrist says she can recognize a schizophrenic patient just by looking at
him, she is resorting to hyperbole. She only believes, since she lacks the
level of rational belief that this case requires for knowledge.
Finally, there is the condition of justification.
Most knowledge-claims clearly require justifying evidence. I know that the
Apollo XI mission landed on the Moon, because I saw it in the film they
transmitted back to the earth. I know that ‘The Fate knocks at the door
symphony’ was composed by Beethoven, because I have read about the composition
of this work. I can say that I know that my car is at the university, because I
remember leaving it in the parking lot an hour ago. We can all call these
epistemically acceptable justifications good or reasonable.
However, not all justifications are good in this sense. I cannot justify my
statement that a person will die soon, just because I read this in the life
line on her palm. I cannot justify my statement that I flew to the moon last
night only because I dreamed that I was on the moon. We can define a good or
reasonable justification as something that is prima facie acceptable by
the majority of people belonging to the epistemic community to which the
knowledge-claimer belongs. (One can imagine different societies, where reading
the life line in a person’s palm and the dream that one has flown to the moon
are very good justifying evidence of the expected life of a person and of a
real visit to the moon.) Finally, the fact that a justification is good or reasonable
does not mean that it produces true belief: it can be good and produce false
belief. The Newtonian gravitational law, for instance, was considered perfectly
justified in the nineteenth century, and all the contemporary epistemic
community of physicists would have agreed with the truth of this law. However,
after Einstein presented his general theory of relativity, Newton’s
gravitational law came to be considered strictly speaking false, since this law
has been shown to be merely approximately true. Moreover, compared with the
justifications given for general relativity theory, the justification for
Newtonian gravitational laws has turned out to be deficient as well.
Formulating the standard definition symbolically
Symbolic logic
has allowed us to formulate the traditional definition of knowledge
symbolically. Calling ‘p’ a proposition in question, ‘a’
a knowledge-claimer, ‘B’ his or her belief in the truth of p,
‘K’ the knowledge-operator, and ‘E’ the justifying
evidence for the truth of p given by a, we can say that: (i) that
aKp → p (If a knows p, then p is true); (ii) aKp → aBp (if a knows p, then a believes in the truth of p); (iii) aKp → aEBp (if a knows p, then a has justifying evidence for the truth of p). Combining these three conditions, the traditional or standard
or tripartite definition of knowledge can easily be formalized as:
(i) (ii) (iii)
aKp = p & aBp & aEBp
We can call (i) the
condition of truth, (ii) the condition of belief, and (iii) the condition of
justifying evidence or justification. Each of them should be considered
necessary, and the conjunction of the three should be seen as a condition
sufficient to establish knowledge. It is true that we can simplify the
definition by excluding the condition of belief, since it is repeated in the
condition of justifying evidence (which it is a justification for a belief in
the truth of p) and write: aKp = p & aEBp. This would be more
economical, though less transparent.
Important exceptions are so-called basic
propositions, which offer justifications like “I have headache” or,
maybe, “I am seeing a blue sky” and “~(p & ~p)”. We know the truth of these
statements because they impose themselves on us in a non-inferential way,
assuming that expected adequate conditions (I am not being induced to believe
that I have a headache… I am looking at the sky outdoors on a sunny day…) are
all fulfilled. We can formalize the knowledge claim of such basic propositions
simply as:
aKp = p & aBp
At least from the
usual perspective , knowledge of basic propositions does not need
justification, because they are self-justifying in the sense that they have
what we see as a non-cognitive, non-doxastic evidential source.
Evidentialist
versus reliabilist theories of justification
What is the
nature of epistemic justification? There are two main competing theories: reliabilism
(Armstrong 1973; Goldman 1979, 1986, 2010, 2015) and evidentialism
(Feldman & Conee, 1985, 2004). Reliabilism emerged in the eighties mainly
in opposition to reliabilism. In what follows, I will present some arguments
favoring evidentialism against reliabilism. But I will first try to make a fair
summary of each theory.
Evidentialism is the view endorsed by the
philosophical tradition. It is intuitive, since it seems that there is no
justification without some kind of evidence. It can be generally defined as
follows (Mittag 2017):
[EJ] An epistemic agent a is justified
in believing that p in time t iff the evidence E that a
has for p supports his belief in p.
Richard Feldman
and Earl Conee noted that evidence is necessary to justify belief, suspension
of belief, and disbelief (1985). For them, evidence must be any information
relevant for the truth or falsity of a proposition. This can be beliefs that
are used as evidence for other beliefs or simply experiences that are direct
evidence for beliefs, for instance, in perception. Thus, my evidence for the
belief that my car is at the university can be my visual memory of having left
the car in a parking lot, which is another belief. But my evidence that I am
seeing my car in front of me should be simply the experience of perceiving my
car in front of me. For these authors, evidence must be mental states in the
knower’s mind, even if he is unable to have introspective awareness of them.
This means that their theory is internalist, since internalism requires that
the justification of a belief is after all internal to the believer. Important
is here the support relation. Evidence must be able to support the
belief corresponding to it, giving it a probability higher than 0.5 (which as we saw, in the case of epistemic certainty
should be near to 1.0). A final point is that we need to select at least three
kinds of evidence: (i) evidence that is ‘before our minds’ (I am seeing the
blue sky), (ii) evidence that is stored in memory, but that is able to be
actualized when necessary as a way to support the belief, (iii) evidence that
is stored in memory, but that is unable to be actualized, though still linked
to the believer in order to support it.
The competing view is so-called reliabilism.
The most successful reliabilist theory to date is Alving Goldman’s
process-reliabilism. According to him, a justified true belief must be produced
by a reliable causal cognitive process, which can be defined as an
empirical mechanism that makes the truth of the belief probable, that is, with
a probability greater than 0.5. Considering that empirical justifications can
usually be defeated or overridden by other competing reliable cognitive
processes, Goldman defines justified belief in a broad way as (1979):
(RG) The belief of a in p in t is justified iff it is (i) causally produced by a reliable
cognitive process, and (ii) there is no reliable cognitive process accessible
to a so that if applied it would
result in the negation of a’s belief
in p.
Goldman adds that there are conditional and non-conditional
reliabilist processes. Conditional reliabilist processes have beliefs as inputs
and beliefs as outputs (these output beliefs are what we usually call non-basic
beliefs). Non-conditional reliable processes are those that have experiences as
inputs and beliefs as outputs (these output beliefs are what we used to call
basic beliefs).
Goldman’s reliabilist theory of
justification is externalist, which means that the believer does not need to be
able to have any awareness of the causal process that leads to his belief. Some
of his examples seem to show the appeal of his theory. Mary reads in a magazine
called Gossip that her favorite Hollywood couple is divorcing (2015:
35-36). After one week she still thinks that her favorite couple will divorce,
but she has forgotten where she learned this. However, since this process of
belief acquiring and belief retention is reliable, Mary is justified in her
belief that the couple will divorce. Another example (1968): Goldman knows that
Lincoln was born in 1808, but he does not need to be able to justify this
knowledge. Indeed, we all know a lot without remembering the evidential
sources, things like telephone numbers, passwords, historical dates, equations.
The evidential sources can be completely forgotten. Moreover, animals and small
children know a lot, but they would not be able to justify, even for
themselves, their knowledge (1968, 1978, 1986). It seems that a reliabilist
theory of justification has the advantage of demanding only the existence of
those reliable cognitive processes that lead to these different instances of
knowledge, without demanding any actual or possible introspective evidential
access. This is why reliabilism is considered a so-called externalist
theory of epistemic justification. Even if internally often accessible, what
really matters is the causal process that originated the belief, even if this
causal process is only externally accessible. This is the case of Mary. She
knows about the impending divorce, which can be acknowledged by a third person.
But its evidential origin is completely forgotten by Mary.
Defending evidentialism
Although I agree that there must be a causal cognitive process
generating belief, I do not agree that in itself this is what accounts for
justification. To see this, we need only re-examine Goldman’s examples from the
evidentialist perspective, showing that for all these examples we can find
decisive internal evidence, even if we admit that these internal evidences must
in the perceptual case cope with externally given evidences, that is, evidences
belonging to the external world and, therefore, following natural laws and able
to be interpersonally observed. Thus, I inductively know that the fixed
memories of my telephone number or of my password or of an historical date,
which have the property of returning to my memory when I try to call them up,
are correct. But how? Well, I know these things because I have already checked
the truthfulness of my memory numerous times in objective (potentially
intersubjective) ways, for example, giving my telephone-number to a friend,
storing the password in my computer, or recalling correctly to others the date
of the French Revolution, and this is a kind of experience often subject to
interpersonal checks. These examples are justifying evidence! Once one begins
to fail in such checks, e.g. because of Alzheimer, they cease to be considered
evidence. All these things can be presented as evidence for the trustworthiness
of memorized information, without the need for recourse to historical sources
of justification.
There are also many cases of
knowledge in which the agent isn’t able to give any justification at all, but
that are behaviorally recognized as cases of knowledge by a third person. For
instance, I know that a child is able to identify her mother’s face, because
she always smiles as she approaches the child, and I know that a dog senses
that his owner is arriving because he hears the sound of the car and he runs to
the front door. These behaviors are complex evidence that we arrive at as a
third person by means of reliable evidence that gives us real beliefs producing
verifiable behaviors by ourselves and consequently by children and animals.
Consequently, these behaviors are also complex evidence by analogy that the
baby and the dog have mental states that work for them as evidence like ours,
which like ours justify their beliefs. The baby recognizes the visual evidence
of her mother’s face, and the dog applies the evidence of the sound of the car
as the inductive warrant of the arrival of his owner. These are actual reasons
for their beliefs. The point buried in the discussion is that it is by means of
third person (internal) reconstruction of internalist justifying
evidence of others that we conclude that they know, even if they are unable to
be reflexively aware of what they are really doing. Internal justifying
evidence or evidence of evidence come first.
Consider, finally, the following
intriguing case. Henry loves meat and always eats all kinds of meat when he
goes to a restaurant. One day by mistake he enters a vegetarian restaurant
called ‘Food for Thought’, and when he asks for meat the waiter tells him that
the last thing they would do in this restaurant would be to serve meat. Upset,
he leaves the restaurant. Many years later he receives a call from a friend
inviting him to have dinner in a beautiful restaurant called ‘Food for
Thought’. Although he had this incident stored in his long-term memory, he
fails to recall the name of the restaurant and, based on his knowledge of the
fact that most restaurants serve meat, he immediately agrees. Later, informed
that it is a vegetarian restaurant, he remembers the incident and rejects the
choice. At first view, it seems that there is a problem for the evidentialist
here. Henry should already in the beginning reject the invitation, since he has
evidence that it is a vegetarian restaurant in his long-term memory. I think
the change of opinion only shows the diversity and limits of the relevant
justifying evidence. At first, the knowledge that most restaurants serve meat
was evidence for the view that ‘Food for Thought’ would serve meat. Later, the
information that ‘Food for Thought’ was a vegetarian restaurant triggered
Henry’s memory of the earlier mistake, which now serves as the justifying
evidence for the conclusion that this is the wrong restaurant for him. The
example speaks for access evidentialism, questioning the possibility (iii).
There is, however, some plausibility in (iii), when we consider unconscious
justifications. A woman can be unconsciously justified in her belief that she
could be loved by someone based on reasons she is unable to retrieve (this is
what some call ‘women intuition’).
We can justify our point
further, turning on its head an example often used by reliabilists against
internalists. The example is the following: suppose I am a brain in a vat with
my afferent and efferent nerves linked to a super-computer on the planet Omega,
and that the program of this super-computer gives me the impression that I am
looking at this screen now. The internalist justification, they say, fails,
because the evidence is a kind of forgery: I am not writing a real sentence in
a notebook in a room situated in a city on a planet called Earth. The only way
to show that this internalist justification fails, they say, is externalist.
People from the planet Omega, for example, the programmers of the
super-computer, know on external grounds that my justification is based on
false evidence, since the evidence is only electronic patterns produced by the
program running in the super-computer. The point, however, is the same as
above. People from the planet Omega only know that (from their perspective) my
justification is inadequate because they have their own internalist
justification for their judgments based on their own internal evidence. They
know that my evidence is insufficient because they have access to a much larger
information set, able to overthrow it. In conclusion: the original mechanism of
justification is always internalist. The fact that others can have reasons to
reject my justification does not change this state of affairs.
Another controversial
suggestion from Goldman is his rejection of foundationalist and coherentist
theories as non-historical “current time-slice theories”, which take account
only of the actual justification of beliefs (2010: 144; 2015: 26). Moreover, he
understands his externalism as including external “justifiers” and external
“truth-values” (2010: 145). But if the external justifiers could really be
incorporated, justification would not be probabilistic, but infallible.
Reliabilism hides a persistent
lack of explanatory power. The role of the input, which we might call
justifying evidence, is underscored in this theory. Goldman’s theory focuses on
the causal cognitive reliable process but has nothing relevant to tell us about
the process. If it is a reasoning process, it can fairly belong to what we call
evidence, for instance, when someone makes a mathematical calculation, the
evidence for the result extends itself through the whole procedure. Moreover,
what we typically call ‘reliable’ is not a psychological process, but own
evidence, and it is the evidence that makes the psychological process relevant,
insofar as it retains the evidential information (e.g., “I still remember the
address”). We say, “Tutankhamun really lived, because we have reliable evidence
of his existence”, but we do not say “Tutankhamun existed because there are
reliable causal cognitive processes that make probable the belief in his
existence”. Even if I do not intend to deny the existence of these causal
processes, it is curious that we usually have nothing to say about them when we
present a justification. It also seems that it is not by means of a causally
reliable process, but rather by means of reliable justifying evidence (that may
include a reasoning process) that we measure the probability of a belief.
Moreover, there are many causal processes involved, and it is because we are
able to detect reliable evidence that we have the thread to find the relevant
causal process, and not the other way around.
I conclude that evidentialism
is the best way of giving a fundamental role to evidence, and that this
evidence must make itself reliable by cognitively causing belief. Evidence and
evidential processes work causally, of course. And although they must be
internal, in any perceptual case they are only able to be reliable insofar as
they are seen as corresponding to external evidence. We can summarize these
conclusions in the following definition of justification:
[EJ*] An
epistemic agent a is justified in believing that p in t iff
p is for a at t causally supported by some reliable
evidence E (which can be another belief or an experience), and if there
is for a no
counter-evidence able to defeat the reliability of E for p in t.
This is an easy way to preserve the many advantages of evidentialism
without having to sustain the deficiencies of reliabilism.
Gettier’s problem
Now we will consider
the pain in the neck of contemporary epistemology: the so-called Gettier
problem. In 1963 Gettier presented two cases in which the three conditions of
the tripartite definition of knowledge seem to be satisfied, although there is
in fact no knowledge, rendering this condition insufficient. The result was a
flood of articles and books, either trying to add a fourth condition to the
tripartite definition of knowledge, or trying to offer a substitute for it, or
even claiming that a definition of knowledge is impossible. All this work
created a new sub-field of epistemology called ‘analysis of knowledge’. I will
first explain Gettier’s problem, and then I will show how it can in my view be
successfully answered.
There are many counter-examples of Gettier’s
type. I will choose one of them. Suppose that yesterday Professor Stone said to
Mary that he would be at the University this morning in order to hold a
doctoral examination. Now, since Professor Stone is an extremely correct
professional (hard as stone), Mary has a very good justification to believe
that he is at the University now (10 a.m.). Moreover, when Mary says that she
knows that Professor Stone is at the University, he is indeed at the
University, which makes her statement true. Hence, we see a justified true
belief. Nevertheless, in fact Mary does not know it! And, the reason is that
Professor Stone’s three teenage children were involved in a severe car accident
last night and he has cancelled all his appointments today in order to stay with
his children in the hospital. However, by mere coincidence, Professor Stone
briefly returned to his office at the University to fetch some documents and
then hurry back to the hospital. Since the justification given by Mary does not
have anything to do with what makes the proposition true, we reject her
knowledge claim. However, even though the three conditions of the traditional
definition are satisfied, they do not constitute taken together a sufficient
condition of knowledge, which means that there is something wrong with the
traditional definition as we have understood it.
Path to a
solution
It is often said that the paths to the false are many, while the path to
the truth is only one. The first time I read about Gettier’s problem the real
answer seemed obvious: the justifications given in these counter-examples to
the classical definition, though good, were not adequate, because none of them
was able to make the proposition true. Since I felt that this answer was too
intuitive not to be noticed, I went through the literature on Gettier’s
problem, searching for someone who had said something similar. And indeed, I
found what I was looking for.
As far as I know, the first attempt to
develop this insight appears in Robert Almeder’s papers, written in the
Seventies. And a later attempt appeared in a book written by Richard Fogelin,
published in 1994. The answer was there, though incomplete and more complicated
than it seemed at first view. I was not the only author to see things in this
way. Here is a passage in an old introductory text from Brian Carr and D. J.
O’Connor with which I am in full agreement (1984: 81):
For a justified belief to
constitute knowledge it would appear that there should exist a connection
between the truth of the proposition believed and the grounds on which it is
believed. The reason why the proposition is true must not be independent of the
facts asserted in the propositions constituting the grounds for the belief. Or
to put it in different terminology, those justified true beliefs which
constitute knowledge are those in which it is not just a coincidence that the
believer is right but where the belief has been arrived at on the basis of
facts which are relevant to the truth of the belief.
Further, they
notice that it is a flaw of traditional analysis that it allows the three
conditions to be independently satisfied. This flaw in the standard analysis
can be eliminated, they write, “not by adding some fourth condition to the
other three, but by insisting that these three previously recognized conditions
should not be independently satisfied.” (1984: 82). And they conclude, though
still in need of clarification, this straightforward effective way to solve
Gettier’s problem should be further developed: “It is somewhat surprising, therefore,”
they comment, “that it is not a response to the Gettier problem which has found
much support in the considerable literature on the subject.” (1984: 82)
Now, the next pages are dedicated to the
development of this program. I will first discuss Robert Almeder’s and Richard
Fogelin’s solutions, which have different focuses. Then I will develop what
seems to me a sufficiently complete conservative analysis of the idea of
knowledge as justified true belief, able to answer Gettier’s problem without leaving
unsolved difficulties behind.
Almeder’s and Fogelin’s attempts
As I noted, a
first step in the right direction was made earlier by Robert Almeder (1974).
His solution emerged from the perception that in Gettier’s examples the
justification given by a has nothing
to do with what makes the proposition p
true. Consequently, what the traditional definition needs is to show the right
relationship between the condition (iii) of justification and the condition (i)
of truth. According to Almeder, this relationship should be one of entailment.
The justification must entail the truth of p.
Using => to symbolize entailment, we can formulate Almeder’s version of the
traditional definition as:
aKp = p & aBp & aEBp & (E => p).
There is, however,
a serious problem with Almeder’s solution. The requirement of entailment is too
strong. The solution works well for formal knowledge, when the justification is
deductive. In this case, the justificational evidence allows us to make the
proposition true by means of something like entailment. But it does not work
with empirical justification, since this justification has an inductive form
and cannot have the strength of entailment. We do not wish to have a solution
that precludes empirical knowledge.
A more hopeful solution is that of Richard
Fogelin. This author avoids the attempt to establish a precise logical relation
between conditions (iii) and (i). All he demands is that justification E makes
proposition p true for us. Consequently, his version of the traditional
definition of knowledge can be informally stated as:
a knows p
=
(i)
p is true
(ii)
a believes that p is true.
(iii)
a has a justification E for her belief that p is
true.
(iv)
a’s justification E makes p true.
This would not be
a great contribution if Fogelin had not considered a more important point. As
he writes, person a has a certain
body of information by means of which she comes to her justification E for p. We, however, have more information than a possess, and based on a wider
informational set, we see that the grounds given by a do not justify p. Then
he concludes (1994: 23):
I think that this double
informational setting – this informational mismatch between the evidence
possessed by a and the evidence we
are given – lies at the heart of Gettier’s problem.
Indeed, we know
that Mary in the above example does not know that Professor Stone is at the
University now because we are aware of information that she lacks, namely, that
there was a car accident the night before and he cancelled his appointments at
the University in order to be at the hospital.
Almeder suggested the necessity of
establishing a relation between the condition of justification and the
condition of truth, even if he does not
give us the right logical relation. Fogelin introduced a third person, whom we
could call the knowledge-evaluator s, who will judge whether the
justification given by knowledge-claimer a makes the proposition p true or not,
in the first case deciding that a knows p and in the second case
denying a’s knowledge of p. But Fogelin does not explain how this
conclusion is arrived at. That is: in this aspect Almeder’s solution is too
stringent, while Fogelin’s solution is too loose. The establishment of a more
precise and therefore more adequate relationship between the condition of
justification and the condition of truth is the problem that will occupy us
now.
Perspectival definition of knowledge
We can summarize Fogelin’s
view as follows. In Gettier’s examples there is a mismatch between what we
could call the informational background of knowledge-claimer a and the informational background of
knowledge-evaluator s (who often
represents a community of ideas, but can instead be the same a at a later time). Knowledge-evaluator s is better informed. Because of this
difference, knowledge-evaluator s
does not accept the justification given by a
for the truth of p, even if the
knowledge evaluator has his own sufficient reasons to assume the truth of p.
For instance: Carl (knowledge-evaluator s), who is speaking with Mary, met
Professor Stone some minutes ago, and he told him about the accident. He knows
that by chance Professor Stone is at the University now, but he is also
informed not only about the accident, but also about Professor Stone’s decision
to cancel his activities at the University today. As Carl hears Mary’s
statement p = “Professor Stone is at
the University now”, and he hears as justification the information that
yesterday Professor Stone told her that he would hold a Ph.D. exam in this
morning, Carl refuses to accept Mary’s justification, because he knows that it
is completely inadequate as a way to make the proposition p (that Professor
Stone is at the University now) true, and consequently he rejects Mary’s
knowledge claim. He would accept Mary’s justification and the consequent
knowledge-claim if she said she had met Professor Stone in the corridor of the
University, or if she said she had seem Professor Stone’s car parked where he
always left it, since these justifications would be consistent with Carl’s
informational set.
This insight can be made more precise in the
form of what could be called a perspectival definition of knowledge[4]
(Costa: 2011, 2014). This definition requires a revision of the condition of
truth (i) and of the condition of justification (iii) of the traditional
definition of knowledge.
I begin by reconstructing the condition of
truth. It is common to consider the condition of truth as the truth-value of
the proposition independently of any epistemic agent. This is, however, an
illusory fata morgana. It is the illusion that we can give any actual use to
the absolute truth-value of a proposition. Only God, the infallible
knower, would be able to tell us the ultimate truth value of any or almost any
proposition. But since our communication with the infallible knower is as
unverifiable as his own actual existence, we are fated to remain in the dark
about this. Indeed, if the absolute truth-value of p were demanded, we
would not be able to know anything, since the ultimate truth-value of our
propositions would always remain beyond our reach. Of course, we might have the
normative concept (a Kantian idea) of absolute truth, and we pragmatically
proceed as if we had reached the final truth when we accept something as true,
but we are painfully aware that this final truth can always vanish in thin air
when it bumps into some obstacle along the way.
For such reasons, the only way to understand
the condition of truth is to relativize what real epistemic agents are be able
to determine as truth. In order to get this in the traditional definition, we
demand that the knowledge-evaluator s must offer a set of reasons
(equivalent to justifying evidence) for truth, each element of the set being
evidence sufficient for the acceptance or non-acceptance of p’s truth, a set that we might call the justifiability
body of evidence E* for p or
E*p. Assuming that the knowledge-evaluator is rational, either he has a
body of evidence in which each piece of evidence is considered sufficient to
make the proposition true, or he has a body of evidence in which each piece of
evidence is considered sufficient to make the proposition false (it would be
unreasonable to have evidence sufficient for the truth and also for the falsity
of p in the same set). An instance of the first case (the only one that
interests us) makes the point clear. If p
is the statement “The earth is round”, s can have accepted this as evidence
for p: E1 = “We have authentic photos of the earth taken from telescopes in
outer space”, E2 = “Ships sailing
away from us always seem to eventually disappear below the horizon, beginning
with the hull”, E3 = “There are many
stories of circumnavigation of the earth”. Each of these justifications is for
s sufficient to warrant the truth of p. If p = “The earth is round” and E*p is
the body of evidence for p, this set is made up of{E1, E2, E3}. Calling the
sign ‘~>’ an attribution of probability able to give certainty (that is, of
1, for the cases of formal evidence, or at least sufficiently near to 1, for
cases of empirical evidence), which could be called the probability of epistemic
acceptance[5],
we can rewrite the condition of truth p (i) as E*p & (E*p ~> p) or (i’). Indeed, if s has an E*p
and from any evidence belonging to E*p (assuming his rationality) he is
able to derive the certainty of p, then he must accept the truth of p.
In other words:
(i) E*p & (E*p ~> p)
After making explicit
what was hidden in the condition of truth, we move to condition (iii), the
condition of justification, which we hope to be able to link with the new
formulation of the first condition. The condition of justification must be
written so:
(iii) aBEp & (E ∈ E*p).
This condition of
justification requires that the evidence given by any knowledge-claimer a either
belongs to a pre-existent E*p accepted by the knowledge-evaluator s
at t or can be accepted by s at t as belonging to an extended
form of E*p, which includes E. With the help of these few formal
devices, and adding to s the time of evaluation ‘t’, we get the
following epistemic equivalence, establishing the conditions that must be
fulfilled for s’s attribution of knowledge to the knowledge-claimer a;
(1) stK
[aKp] = stK
[E*p & (E*p ~> p)] & aBp & [aBEp & (E*p ∈ E*p)].
Here we can clearly see how the condition of justification is related to the
condition of truth. If an s has an E*p that gives him certainty
of the truth of p, and the justifying evidence E given by a
is such that it belongs or is able to belong to the s’s E*p, then the
justification is not only good but also epistemically adequate.
Gettier’s cases are based on good justifications that are not epistemically
adequate, since they lack the expected relation to E*p.
It is important to see the role of ‘t’,
which is the time of the evaluation. It is essential because the E*p that s gives to a belief can vary from time to time. For instance: When
Columbus discovered the New World, he claimed p = “I discovered the sea route
to India”. Most evaluators accepted this sentence as true in 1492. But ten
years later, the relevant informational set of people had changed. Columbus continued
to believe he had discovered the sea route to India until his death in 1506,
although around this time most evaluators would have judged his claim false.
They would not have accepted his justifications as sufficient to make the
proposition true, based on the increasing amount of information showing that he
had in fact discovered a new continent.
We see that the time of evaluation is
essential for the acceptance of epistemic equivalence from the evaluator’s
perspective. The next step is to place epistemic equivalence at the level of an
assumption. Since stK is
present on both sides of the equivalence, we can bring it to the background and
formulate the following definition:
(2) aKp
(for s in t) = [E*p & (E*
~> p)] & aBp & [aBEp & (E ∈ E*)].
Finally, if you
wish, since the condition of belief is repeated in the condition of
justification, we can elide it and get the shorter formulation:
(3) aKp
(for s in t) = E*p & (E*p
~> p) & aBEp & (E ∈ E*).
The point of any of
these formulations is to link the condition of justification to the condition
of truth in the appropriate way. In the case of the statement “The earth is
round”, if someone, as a knowledge-claimer, says that the earth is round
because of the many artificial satellites orbiting the earth, we, as the
knowledge-evaluators s, will accept this, even if we have not thoughts about
it, since we know that our knowledge allows its inclusion as an element of the
justifying corpus E*. Some examples will show that if this response is
well-understood it is seemingly flawless.
Consider now the Gettierian cases under the
light of the perspectival definition. Mary claims to know that Professor Stone
is at the University now. Since her justifying evidence E cannot belong to
Carl’s body of evidence for the truth of this claim, not even to its possible
extensions, as the evaluator of Mary’s knowledge claim, Carl rejects Mary’s
knowledge-claim.
Another example is that of Bertrand
Russell’s stopped watch. Suppose that at time t1 you look at your watch. It
shows 11:15 a.m. Then you look the church clock on the other side of the
square: it also shows 11:15 a.m. It seems clear that that you are
well-justified. But then, in the following moment you remember that your watch
was not working properly yesterday. You look at the watch again and see that it
has stopped. Probably it stopped last night at 11:15 p.m. Now, at first you had
good justifying evidence for a true belief, since the hands of our watches are
normally reliable. But after you noticed that something was very wrong with
your watch, you conclude that your evidence for the time was flawed and you
didn’t really know the time.
In this case the knowledge-evaluator is
yourself at a later moment. At time t1 you accept the usual justifying evidence
E you have given to yourself. But at time t2 you have the information that the
watch is not working and you come to the conclusion that E cannot belong to
your present E*, according to which only the time shown by the church clock
gives the right justification for your present knowledge that now it is 11:15
a.m. Your first evidence was good, since our watches are normally reliable, but
it was not adequate for knowledge, since it was unable to make p true, making
your first knowledge-claim a Gettier case.
A good perceptual example is the following.
Carol is visiting a region of the country she does not know. The driver of the car,
Mr. Smart, knows the region from living there a long time. After crossing a
bridge, Carol, glancing out of the car window, comments, “What a beautiful red
barn we see in this field!” This exclamation includes the knowledge-claim of p: “There is a red barn in this field”.
However, it is only by chance that what she sees is really a red barn – for
with the exception of this one, all the red barns in the vicinity are really
only barn façades, which were built for a film, although they are convincing
enough to fool even the most observant traveller. Although a satisfies the conditions of justified true belief as stated in
the traditional definition, for Smart, the knowledge evaluator, a does
not satisfy these conditions as demanded by the perspectival form. For in this
form, the knowledge-evaluator Smart needs to consider the reasons for belief in
the truth of p, which always arises
from a knowledge evaluator’s point of view. Now, since Smart lives in the
region and knows that Carol is not aware of the story of the fake barns, he
knows that Carol has identified the only true Barn by chance and that her
justifying evidence isn’t sufficient. In order to have justifying evidence that
could be incorporated into Smart’s body of evidence E* for p, Carol should give
evidence like the examination of all sides of the barn, or, for instance,
telling Smart that she already knew about the barn façades and that the only
real barn would be this one after the bridge.
The last counter-examples to be examined –
admitting that I am already testing your patience – are those of Gettier’s own
article. He gives two counter-examples to the traditional definition of
knowledge. In the first one, two persons, Smith and Jones, have applied for a
certain job. Since the president of the company has assured Smith that Jones
would be accepted, and since Smith knows that Jones has ten coins in his
pocket, Smith has the best evidence for the knowledge claim (a): “Jones will
gain the job and Jones has ten coins in his pocket”. Moreover, from (a) Smith
infers (b): “The man who will gain the job has ten coins in his pocket”.
However, against all expectations, Smith and not Jones gets the job.
Furthermore, by pure coincidence Smith also has ten coins in his pocket.
According to Gettier, Smith has a justified true belief that sentence (b) is
true, satisfying the traditional definition. But at the same time, it is clear
that he does not know the truth of (b), since he misleadingly infers it from
the false sentence (a).
Now, applying our perspectival definition of
knowledge to Smith’s claim, we can say the following. There must be a person s to evaluate Smith’s knowledge claim of
(b). This person, say, Meg, knows that Smith got the job, because, e.g. she has
seen the document of his approval E1, and also knows that Smith has ten coins
in his pocket, since she has counted the coins (E2).
Now, the E*p that s is disposed to accept as sufficient to make the conjunctive
statement (a) true is the justification {E3} constituted by the conjunction E1
& E2. Meg is disposed to extend her set, as far the justification given by
Smith is consistent with {E3}. For instance, Smith justifies (b) by saying that
he was informed that he has got the job and he has counted ten coins in his
pocket. But to her dismay, the justification Smith gives to (b) is completely
different; he says that (b) is true because (a) is true, using as justification
the knowledge claim that Jones has got the job and that Jones has ten coins in
his pocket. But this justification neither belongs to the body of
justifications acceptable by Meg as belonging to E*p nor as belonging to a
reasonable extension of E*p to be made by Meg. Meg would give the same negative
evaluation to Smith’s justification of (a) by reference to Jones’ justification
that the president of the company has told him Jones would get the job, even if
he is right in saying that Jones has ten coins in his pocket because he has
counted them: in order to be true, the conjunctive sentence (a) must have both
component sentences adequately justified.
A second and last counter-example given by
Gettier is more complicated, but it also exhibits no real difficulty. In case
Smith has strong evidence for the truth of (a) “Jones has a Ford,” since he has
always met Smith with this car, given lifts, etc. But about Brown, Smith knows
nothing. Then Smith constructs the three following sentences:
(b1) “Either Jones owns a Ford, or
Brown is in Boston”.
(b2) “Either Jones owns a Ford, or
Brown is in Barcelona”.
(b3) “Either Jones owns a Ford, or
Brown is in Brest-Litovsk”.
Smith is sure
that these three disjunctive statements are true, even if he has no idea about
where Brown is, since he uses the disjunctive syllogism to infer their truth
from the truth of (a).
But then Gettier adds the following. In
fact, Smith is now driving a rented car and by coincidence Brown is in
Barcelona. In this case (b2) is true. Smith has a justified true belief
regarding (b2), but he does not know (b2).
Our perspectival answer follows the same
path. In any real situation there must be an evaluator s who has more information than the knowledge-claimer a. This evaluator, Julia, knows that
Jones’ Ford is rented and that Brown is in Barcelona. She knows that (a) is
false because she is the person who rented the Ford to Jones, since he does not
have a car. This information serves as justification for her knowledge that (a)
is false, which constitutes this E*p and would not accept Smith’s
justification.
Regarding (b2), it is true because it is a
disjunctive sentence in which the first disjunct is false, but the second true.
And Julia knows that Brown is in Barcelona, say, because she went to the
airport with Brown (E1), and she later received a call from him (E2), so we can
say that Julia’s set of evidential justifications E* is made up of sufficient
conditions {E1, E2}. Now, in order to evaluate Smith’s knowledge claim of (a),
Julia asks Smith his justification for (b2). To her dismay he says that he
derived his knowledge from his knowledge that Smith owns a Ford. She cannot
accept Smith’s justification as belonging to her corpus of justifications E* {E1, E2} for (b2) or even as able to be
included in it, simply because she does not accept his justification for his
last statement, neither as belonging to her E* nor able to be assimilated into
it as its extension.
Objection of
relativism
At this point the following objection could be made: “Your perspectival
analysis of knowledge embraces epistemic relativism. The justification given by
a knowledge-claimer will be considered adequate for knowledge or not according
to the informational set of a knowledge-evaluator, which can always vary.
Hence, if the knowledge-evaluator changes, the evaluation of a knowledge-claim
can vary. Since there is no infallible knowledge-evaluator, knowledge is
relative to the knowledge-evaluator we arbitrarily chose.”
In order to answer this
objection, we need first remark that we should not transform an often-present
difficulty into an impossibility. Restricting ourselves to Gettierian cases, it
is easy to agree that the knowledge-claimer will be convinced when acquainted
with the more complete information available to the knowledge-evaluator. But
regarding a comparison between knowledge-evaluators – who can treat one another
as knowledge-claimers – things can turn out to be less obvious. We can defend
the view that there are indeed more privileged knowledge-claimers (or
knowledge-evaluators) and that the criterion to find them is to submit these
knowledge-claimers to a critical dialogical situation, similar to what
Habermas has called an ideal speech situation (ideale Sprachsituation)
(1976). This means that knowledge-claimers must be located in an interactive
speech situation in which the following conditions must be sufficiently
satisfied:
1.
the participants must have a truth-searching
commitment,
2.
they must
have similar rights of informational exchange and questioning,
3.
they must
have similar competence and capacity to evaluate information,
4.
they should
be subject to no pressure, neither external nor internal, except the pressure
of the best argument (…)[6]
Assuming that speakers satisfy this ideal to a sufficient degree, it is
reasonable to conclude that the balance will tend to fall upon the most
reasonable side.
For instance, according to
anthropologists, North American Natives colonized the region around 10,000
years ago, originally coming from Siberia. There is much evidence that they
originally came from Siberia: at that time there was a land bridge across the Bering
sea; there is no evidence of people living in America at a much earlier time;
moreover, DNA evidence has shown that Native Americans are genetically related
to populations that lived in Siberia. The explanation of the origins of the
Native Americans given by the Natives themselves is, however, very different:
in ancestral times supernatural spirits prepared the world for humans to live
there. Then the earth opened and their ancestors emerged from the subterranean
world of spirits. The anthropologists and natives can play the role of
knowledge-claimers or knowledge-evaluators, and (assuming that they are not
cultural relativists or social constructivists (see Boghossian 2006)), they
will inevitably disagree: the first believe to know p: “The natives originated
from earlier Siberian populations”, while the second believe to know q: “The
natives originated from the subterranean world of spirits”. Nevertheless, the
situation is very asymmetric. If a native comes to Harvard University and
studies anthropology, we can bet that – assuming that she has accepted the
conditions of a rational dialogical situation – in the end she will agree with
the anthropologist, coming to consider the story she learned as a child as
nothing beyond beautiful ancient mythology. The informational set of the
anthropologist, under the assumption of the best of our scientific and humanist
culture, can explain the informational set of the tribes, while the opposite is
not the case. Hence, they are not relative. Hence, we can consider that factors
such as a larger well-confirmed informational set, containing a higher amount
of more precise and varied scientific information, will be seen as advantageous
when examined by both sides, insofar as both sides sufficiently satisfy the
conditions of a critical dialogical situation.
Beside this, our truths, as well
as our knowledge of truths, are always relative to the best or privileged
knowledge-evaluator of a dialogical situation. We cannot, in this or any other
way sustain the ideal of finding indisputable absolute truth, proper to
absolute knowledge. The best we can do in this direction is to sustain absolute
truth and knowledge as a normative ideal, something similar to what Kant
called an ideal of reason, useful to make comparisons and to measure the growth
of our knowledge in a non-relativist way (Popper 1963: Ch. 10).
Comparing with some other attempts
Assuming the
perspectival account of knowledge, I will now explain and criticize a few
interesting attempts to answer Gettier’s problem.
Among the first ones, there was the attempt
to solve the problem by rejecting false justificatory evidence (Clark 1963). It
is false that Professor Stone would be at the University today to give an
examination. However, this answer does not work very satisfactorily. A
well-known example of true justifying evidence is the following. Mr. Nogot
tells Smith that he owns a Ford and even shows him a deed to that effect. Since
Nogot was always reliable and honest, Smith concludes p: “Someone in my office
has a Ford”. However, it is false that Nogot has a Ford. He is a compulsive
liar and is driving his sister’s Ford. Nevertheless, the conclusion p is true,
since there is another person in Smith’s office, Mr. Jones, who really does own
a Ford, and Smith does not know that. In this case the evidence is false.
However, one needs only to change the evidence a bit, applying an existential
generalization, in order to get true evidence, Thus, suppose that Smith uses as
justifying evidence for p the statement q: “Someone in my office told me that
he has a Ford, showing me a deed to that effect, and up to now has always been
reliable and honest with me”. Although the evidence given by statement q is
true, this is a Gettier’s case in which Smith has a justified true belief without
knowing that someone in his office owns a Ford. In a similar way, it is true
that Professor Stone told Mary he would be at the University to give a
doctoral exam.
One could try to refine the no-falsity
answer by considering that non-important falsity could be involved in the
justifying evidence, though it is difficult to see how we get this.
Nonetheless, the real shortcoming of the non-falsity solution is that it is too
coarse-grained. It does not contribute to explaining the difference between wrong
justifying evidence (“You are wrong in believing you saw a sheep on the
mountain”) and the justification that provides us with a Gettier’s case (“There
is indeed a sheep on the mountain behind a stone, but what you in fact saw was
only a large furry dog”). Our proposed solution shows the difference: when
someone believes he can see a sheep on the mountain, but there is actually no
sheep there, the false justification cannot be accepted in E*p, because
there is no E*p. But if someone believes he can see a sheep when he is
really only seeing a furry dog, even though there is indeed a sheep there, the
false justification cannot be accepted in E*p in a case where there is E*p.
A more interesting solution is that we need
to add a fourth condition, namely, that the justification must have no defeater (Lehrer 1965). The defeater
of the justification in our first given example was the fact that the children
of Professor Stone are in the hospital in a critical state and he decided to
cancel his activities at the university in order to be there. However, the
non-defeater condition is also insufficient, since any defeater can also be
defeated. For instance, suppose that the information regarding Professor Stone
is mistaken. Suppose it really applies, but to another professor also called
Stone, a botany professor from the department of biology in the next building,
who also is scheduled to give a Ph.D. examination today and has in fact
cancelled his activities in order to remain in the hospital. Concerning the Professor
Stone meant by Mary, he is actually in the department giving a Ph.D. exam. In
this case, the knowledge-evaluator will accept Mary’s claim of knowing that
Professor Stone is at the University now. This defeating of defeaters by new
defeaters can in principle continue indefinitely. In conclusion: Mary would
have to know all the truth in order to neutralize any possible defeater. Even
in a case where there were no defeater, she could only neutralize the
possibility of a defeater if she knew all truths.
Keith
Lehrer and Thomas Paxon (1969) tried to emend the no defeater definition by
defining knowledge as completely
justified undefeated true belief. The only way to explain a completely
justified true belief, however, is to see it as a belief that is ultimately
undefeated relative to the set of all truths (Pollock 1986). Yet, this means
that in order to know p, the knower must know all truths! Omniscience is
not, however, a human attribute. And this means that by taking this approach we
cannot reach a plausible solution to Gettier’s problem. The non-defeater
solution solves Gettier’s problem only by creating a greater one.
A very different attempt to solve Gettier’s
problem was to replace the condition of justification with the condition of appropriate causal connection suggested
by Alvin Goldman (1967). The intuition was clear: I know, for instance, that
Emperor Nero killed his mother because there is some appropriate causal chain
that begins with a fact and ends in my writing this sentence. I know there must
be a causal chain because I know that the facts of the world and our
consciousness of these facts must be causally related, even if I am only aware
of some few links of those causal chains. To see how it works against Gettier’s
counter-examples, consider again Mr. Nogot’s counter-example. He says he is the
owner of a Ford. But since he has no Ford, this cannot be the cause of the
knowledge that he is the owner of a Ford. The real cause of this knowledge
should be the fact that Mr. Jones, also employed in Smith’s firm, is the owner
of a Ford. If Smith has made the existential generalization based on the fact
that Jones has told him that he has a Ford, we would agree that he knows.
In this article Goldman manages to show that
some kind of causal connection is present in all cases of knowledge. This seems
plausible. But even if we admit its existence, there are serious problems with
his solution: there seems to be something wrong in divorcing knowledge from the
cognitive procedure of justification. More specifically, it seems that we
cannot find the links belonging to the appropriate causal chain without first
knowing the justifying procedure. Because Smith knows that the justification
for his knowledge that an employee in his firm owns a Ford is based upon the
fact that Mr. Jones told him he has a Ford, and we know that there is a correct
causal connection between Mr. Jones’ claim of knowledge and the fact that Mr.
Jones has a Ford and not the other way around. In other words, putting the
causal process before the justification is putting the cart before the horse,
since it is through the procedure of justification that we can find the
corresponding causal process. This is also valid for supposed external
justifications: it is because we know that there are many possible
justifications for my knowing that George Washington was the first president of
USA. Although I cannot remember when and where I learned this, I know that
there is an appropriate causal chain between this fact and my knowing and not
the other way around. Even if Goldman has shown us that there is no knowledge
without appropriate causal connections, and that the appropriate causal
connections are pointed out by the adequate justification, to put causal
connections in the place of justification is to fall into a petitio
principii.
Goldman rejected his causal theory ten years
later, influenced by the perceptual counter-example of Gettier’s type of the
barn façades (Ginet, 1975) that we have already considered, in which Carol
really sees a barn that luckily is the only real barn in a region of seemingly
real barn façades, a reason why her justification cannot be accepted. This
example seems to run against Goldman’s causal theory. Carol’s belief that the
barn-like structure is a real barn seems to be normally caused by the presence
of the barn in a normal perceptual process. Consequently, according to the
causal theory Carol should know that she was seeing a real barn.
Goldman’s response was to develop the new
theory of justification in terms of reliability that we have already discussed,
a theory that requires that a justified true belief must be produced by a
reliable causal cognitive process defined as an empirical mechanism that makes
the truth probable. Goldman also expects in this way to
answer Gettier’s problem. To the reliabilist understanding of justification,
the barn-facades are located in an unreliable environment regarding the
distinction between real barns and mere barn façades. This Gettier’s case is
not one of knowledge because Carol’s belief that she is seeing a real barn can
be demonstrated as unreliable. To be reliable, the barn-case demands the
exclusion of relevant alternatives. One of them is that it is not a barn
façade, which is left unconsidered. Hence, Carol’s justification is not
knowledge-producing, because it is unreliable (Goldman, 1988: 63).
To this response, we can object
that changing our justifying evidence by means of process reliability does not
seem to bring any real improvement, since in any case (also in the causal
theory) one could say that because of the special environment the knowledge
evaluator should demand a careful examination of all sides of the barn, even
its interior… in order accept Carol’s knowledge-claim that it is a real barn to
Smart’s E*p, excluding the alternative of a barn façade.
Moreover, Goldman’s
process-reliability explanation of justification, as much as his causal theory,
is open to the same objections presented against the non-defeasibility view of
justification: in order to know p, one needs to know that the reliable
process cannot be defeated by another reliable process, and in order to know
that it cannot be defeated, one would need to exclude all possible defeaters
and defeaters of defeaters, that is… one needs to have omniscience. Our answer
to Gettier’s problem solves this problem neatly: the required extended
knowledge remains within the extension of the informational set of the
knowledge-evaluator which constitutes his body of acceptable evidence E*p.
An attempt to define knowledge that is
similar to Goldman’s is Robert Nozick’s tracking theory.
According to Nozick, if someone is able to track correctly the truth of a
proposition p, this person knows that p is true. The way to find
the right track is the satisfaction of two subjunctive conditionals:
(i)
if
p were not true, a would not believe
in p;
(ii)
if
p were true, a would believe in p.
In
fact, under the circumstances of our Gettierian case, if Professor Stone were
not at the University, Mary would still believe he was there, conflating
against the subjunctive conditional (i).
However, considering (i), how do we know
that if Professor Stone were not at the University, Mary would still believe he
was there? The reason is given by the perspectival definition: Assuming that
Carl (s) accepts the evidence given by Mary (a) as making p true, namely, that
for Carl Mary knows p, then if p were not accepted by Carl as true, Mary would
not believe in p in a way that makes her know p. Moreover, assuming that for Mary
knowing p, p being true for Carl, it is to be expected that Mary would believe
in p.
Internalism and externalism again
An epistemic
justification is said to be internal when the epistemic agent is able to have
cognitive access to the justifying evidence or reasons for the belief in the
truth of the proposition. Ideally, the agent must be able to make discursively
explicit his justifying evidence. This is the rich standard case around which
the more limited cases are aggregated, going further until reaching those
borderline cases in which one does not know if the word ‘justification’ is
still appropriate. Vagueness inevitably belongs to the semantics of the word.
This is the case of the Gettierian examples we
gave and many others and the justifying evidence was all internal. In what
follows however, I will consider some borderline cases, showing that their
justification is internal and evidential in the proper sense of these words
and, furthermore, that they can serve as justifying evidence for our
perspectival definition of knowledge.
We begin with cases of memories in which the
original evidential link has been lost. For instance, how can I justify my
belief that my phone number is 035-216? I have a bad memory for numbers. All I
can say is that after I repeated this number many times it was finally anchored
in my long-term memory. If pressed to produce a justification, I could check my
memory, looking again at the note pad where I wrote it down. What about my
knowledge of my old telephone number 225-00-16? I have had this number
imprinted in my memory for many years. My old telephone is gone now and it is
impossible to check it. Nevertheless, I feel myself justified to affirm that
this was my telephone many years ago. However, I know by induction that
memories that always repeat themselves are usually correct. Moreover, in order
to test my memory I can write it down and later recall it and look to see if
the remembered number is the same one I wrote down. Furthermore, the telephone
number is associated with surroundings like the old apartment where I lived in
Rio de Janeiro, which agrees with my life history. The inductive justifying
evidence of such memories is sometimes confirmed. Some days ago there were a
quiz on television, where it was asked who was the president who forbade women
to wear bikinis on the beach in Brazil? I knew the answer: J. Q. This
reinforces my inductive belief in my old long-term memories. Repetitively
confirmed induction is the evidence that justifies our belief in our long-term
memories. But these are internal reasons, even if they are not the result of
direct introspection. Direct introspection is the case when I justify that my
car is at the university because I remember leaving it in the parking lot: the
memory of a perceptual experience. My conclusion is that cases in which I
remember my password or my telephone number or some historical facts are not
really different from the case where I know that my car is at the university. The
only difference is that in this last case the introspection of a perceptual
memory is what serves as evidence. The fact that once in my childhood I had an
introspective memory of the source of my knowledge that America was discovered
in 1492 does not change anything. It only serves to confuse our minds by
focusing on one kind of evidence, which is causally but not factually
necessary.
There are more difficult cases. It is said
that there are persons who can know with relatively great precision the sex of
a chick simply by feeling the animal. Closer consideration shows that there are
simple physical techniques that can be used to recognize the sex of a chick by
feeling it. Even if this requires practice, it already has the character of
cognitive (or pre-cognitive) internal justifying evidence, which, like most
such evidence, must indicate an external fact.
Another case is the knowledge we attribute
to animals. A dog hears the sound of its owner’s car and runs to the door,
where it stands barking. In fact, the dog knows its owner is there, but it does
not know reflexively, although we know that it knows. And the justification for
our knowing that it knows is through its behavior, added to induction by
analogy, considering that the dog is sufficiently similar in behavior to humans
able to have cognitions and feelings. This can lead to the mistaken conclusion
that the justification is external. Nonetheless, though made from a third
person perspective – our own – the justification remains internal, since we are
assuming that the dog runs to the door because it has taken as evidence of its
owner arriving the sound of his car. Another example of this kind is that of a
child who knows that she is in the presence of her mother. We know this by her
smile, by behavioral reactions. We justify this in the third person, knowing by
her behavior that she is justified in believing that she is in the presence of
her mother. She evidentially re-identifies her mother’s face and behavior.
Moreover, in both cases, as knowledge-evaluators, we know that if the dog and
the baby were able to have reflexive access to their cognitive processes, and
could linguistically express what is going on, they would say: “I know that my
owner is coming because I hear the sound of his car” and “I know that my mother
is with me because I recognize her face”. These justifying pieces of evidence
are ones we would immediately accept as able to be included in our justifying
body of evidence. We know that they have evidence able to make these propositions
true. Still a case to consider is that of generalizations. Scientific laws are
the inductive (mainly abductive) results of cumulative experience. But these
experiences, though having external counterparts, must as justifying evidence
be internally accessible.
A last but also important case is that of
testimony. When we are informed by reasonable and trustworthy people, even if
indirectly by means of radio, television, internet, books, or other media, we
accept information about things we are unable to actually experience.
Nevertheless, the testimonial origin has its own evidential grounds, which are
cognitively, that is internally, accessed. We only borrow the results, which
still makes justification an essentially cognitive phenomenon. These non-actual
third person pieces of evidence can also be accepted or rejected as belonging
to our body of evidence as knowledge-evaluators in conformity with the
perspectival definition of knowledge.
[1] One can find propositional knowledge
statements using words like ‘when’ or ‘whether’ in the place of ‘that’. But the
sentences can be paraphrased in ways that these words are replaced by ‘that’.
For instance: “Hank knows whether the bull is dangerous” can be replaced by
“Either Hank knows that the bull is dangerous or Hank does not know that the
bull is dangerous”. (See Feldman 2003: 9-10)
[2] As Socrates says in the dialogue Meno:
“true beliefs… are not worth much until one ties them down on account of the
reason why they are tied down… After they are tied down, in the first place
they become knowledge, and then they remain in place. (1997: 895) See also Theatetus
(1997: 223)
[3] See J. L. Borges tale, ‘Tom Castro, the
implausible impostor’, in his book, A
Universal History of Infamy. The tale is based on a real occurrence.
[4] The term was suggested to me by John Cottingham.
[5] A probability of acceptance can vary in
accordance with the context. In the exceptional context of a lottery, for
instance, the “I know that I will not win” remains below acceptance, even when
the probability of not winning is extremely high. The reason is in my view that
the probability required by this closed system must be 1.
[6] Complete
failures in the satisfaction of such dialogical conditions are catastrophic to
science: examples are Catholic dogmas that led to the condemnation of Galileo,
the Marxist genetics of Lysenko in the Stalinist USSR, and Nazi Aryan science.
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