Abstract
Pragmatic encroachment (PE) is the view that whether one knows a proposition is, at least in part, a function of one’s practical situation, such as the stakes given the truth or falsity of that proposition. PE seems to be entailed by a principle stating that properly treating a proposition as a reason for acting requires that one knows that proposition, combined with intuitive judgments that the epistemic demands for good practical reasoning increase as one’s practical situation becomes more practically demanding. I argue here that this argument conflates judgments that pertain to two different kinds of normative epistemic requirements: one that pertains to whether one knows a proposition, and another that pertains to whether one is acting on one’s knowledge in an epistemically responsible way, where one acts in an epistemically responsible way just in case one is able to provide reason to believe that one does, in fact, know what one is doing. I appeal to two main sources of evidence to support the view that we make judgments of epistemically responsible action: one that appeals to the way in which our epistemic vigilance makes us look for more reasons to accept information in different circumstances, and another that appeals to empirical results from experimental philosophy. I conclude that if a major argument for PE rests on a conflation of two different kinds of judgments then the case for PE is significantly diminished.
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Notes
PE goes by several different names in the literature, most notably “subject-sensitive invariantism” and “interest-relative invariantism”. As the details of individual versions of the view differ, I will take “pragmatic encroachment” to be the general theory concerning the relevance of practical, “non-traditional” factors in determining whether one has knowledge.
This is the contextualist approach, which states that the semantic value of a knowledge-ascription sentence depends on the context in which it is uttered. See, for example, DeRose (2009).
See, for example, Nagel (2008).
For my purposes here the notion of “p-dependency” is unimportant (see Stanley and Hawthorne 2008 for details if interested).
While RKP states that knowledge is both necessary and sufficient for appropriately treating a proposition as a reason for acting (given the constraint of p-dependency), this principle is sometimes separated into discussions of the necessity and sufficiency relationships. Brown (2008), for instance, labels the view that knowledge is necessary for appropriate practical reasoning NEC, and the view that knowledge is sufficient for appropriate practical reasoning SUFF. For the indirect argument to go through, the PE-proponent needs to at least accept SUFF; since several experimental results discussed below refer to RKP explicitly, however, I will continue to present the indirect argument as relying on it. Ultimately, however, my argument is neutral between RKP and SUFF.
The claim that one can know that p but still fail to meet some epistemic standard when reasoning on the basis of p might strike some as prima facie counterintuitive. However, I think that once we have a notion of epistemically responsible action on board these intuitions largely go away. I address this and related objections in detail in Sect. 5.
A note about what I am not doing. While the PE proponent is interested in defending a kind of theory of knowledge, I am not: my interest is in showing that the evidence used to support PE via the indirect argument better supports the view that normative epistemic requirements as they pertain to practical reasoning are not exhausted by knowing. This is not an argument that some specific theory of knowledge is better than PE, but only that the support for PE is significantly undercut. I will not here propose a conception of knowledge to take its place. Nor will I argue for or against the RKP; I do, however, address the ramifications of my argument for the RKP in Sect. 5.
Whether all of these assumptions are true is a matter of debate: we might, for instance, think that Sarah’s challenge in High Stakes changes some of these facts. I won’t pursue this line of argument here.
Fantl and McGrath (2009), while they ultimately argue that RKP is false, appeal to a principle of a similar type, what they call the knowledge-justification principle: (KJ) If you know that p, then p is warranted enough to justify you in \(\upphi \)-ing, for any \(\upphi \) (66). We could, then, derive PE if we accept KJ and that the demands for being warranted enough to justify one is \(\upphi \)-ing depends on the practical circumstances of the situation in which one \(\upphi \)’s.
Pinillos does not use the acronym PE; instead, he uses “FS-IRI”, or “folk-sensitive interest-relative invariantism.” For my purposes I take the difference between these views to be solely terminological.
Others, like that from Sripada and Stanley (2012), tested judgments both about the amount of evidence that a vignette subject would need to gather in order to count as knowing, as well as judgments about whether a subject had knowledge directly. Interestingly, while all of the evidence-gathering judgments elicited by Sripada and Stanley were consistent with PE, not all of the knowledge judgments were. See their Sripada and Stanley (2012) for details.
The notion of “substitution” that Pinillos appeals to here is from the work of Kahneman and Frederick (2002). Kahneman and Frederick argue that, as a result of employing representativeness and availability heuristics, people often answer a complex question as though it were a simpler question. The provide the following examples:
A person who is asked “What proportion of long-distance relationships break up within a year?” may answer as if she had been asked “Do instances of swift breakups of long-distance relationships come readily to mind?” This would be an application of the availability heuristic. A professor who has heard a candidate’s job talk and now considers the question “How likely is it that this candidate could be tenured in our department?” may answer the much easier question: “How impressive was the talk?”. This would be an example of the representativeness heuristic. (53)
Our vigilance does not seem to be limited to any particular kind of informational content. Haidt (2001), for example, argues that similar effects as those described above are observed when surveying people’s moral judgments, in particular. According to Haidt’s model (what he calls the “social intuitionist” model), moral judgments are made initially as quick, intuitive judgments, which are followed by slow moral reasoning when one is required to defend their judgments to others. We engage in moral reasoning in circumstances similar to those described in the epistemic vigilance literature: Haidt argues that we are more likely to scrutinize evidence that supports a view that conflicts with our moral judgments, that we are more likely to scrutinize moral judgments of those that we do not find trustworthy, and that we are likely to simply accept moral judgments if they are not relevant to us, or if it is made by someone we trust. Although Haidt’s conclusions are drawn with an eye to supporting his social intuitionist model of moral judgment, we can also see how they are accounted for by the general mechanisms that underlie epistemic vigilance, with one simply exercising one’s vigilance towards moral claims (for similar results concerning “justice inferences,” see Ham and Bos 2008).
Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting that I address this point.
Goldberg (2012) argues that there are important differences between the ways in which we rely on other people and the ways in which we rely on instruments as sources of evidence, namely that the former but not the latter can be conceived of as an extension of one’s belief-forming processes. This is not to say, however, that we cannot trust instruments as sources of evidence at all, just that the ways in which we rely on people and instruments are different.
Although it is true that the vast majority of experiment participants are unfamiliar with the details of various normative epistemic judgments, this is not to say that they do not still make those judgments. After all, I have argued here that our responsibility judgments are based in our epistemic vigilance, which, it has been argued, is a basic and fundamental aspect of ourselves as reasoners. And, despite the majority of laypeople being unfamiliar with the notion of epistemic vigilance, we are nevertheless still vigilant. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this concern.
If they were to matter, they would at most matter contingently, inasmuch as time constraints tend to lead to sloppiness with our belief-forming methods. There is, though, no inherent connection between being short on time and the reliability of a belief-forming process.
If an evaluation of one’s epistemic responsibility were an evaluation of one’s relationship towards p itself then the view I am defending here would threaten to collapse into PE, since, if evaluations that one is acting epistemically irresponsibly on one’s knowledge that p was an evaluation that one had failed in some way with regard to p itself, then it would seem that all instances of epistemically irresponsible action were then failures to know. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting that I address this explicitly.
I am assuming here the denial of the “KK principle”, namely the principle that if one knows that p then one knows that one knows that p. I take it that it is not controversial to deny this principle.
That I did enough epistemically to have knowledge but not to act in an epistemically responsible way can make sense of why you and I might argue about whether I should, in fact, have double-checked. In response to your chastising, for instance, I might plead that I did, in fact, know that your plane would arrive at 6, and thus wonder why you would think I did anything wrong at all. This is unlikely to appease you: you might still insist that, despite knowing, I really should have double-checked. Making sense of this exchange does not require that we abandon RKP: the normative epistemic failing that you’re accusing me of is one that pertains not to my knowledge, but to whether I acted on it in an epistemically responsible way.
Again, here one is expected to exercise one’s epistemic vigilance not towards another agent, but towards a non-agential source of evidence, namely the website one used to check the flight arrival time. And again, it seems natural to say that one can exercise one’s epistemic vigilance in this way, since the website is a source of evidence and one trusts it.
Defusing the indirect argument by rejecting the RKP is the strategy employed by Brown (2008).
One might wonder what kinds of experiments could be performed to test when one is evaluating an action as epistemically responsible or irresponsible. I take it that an experiment like that conducted by Pinillos (2012) is a good example, i.e. one in which participants are able to explain why they reported the judgment they did. If participant’s’ evaluations are consistently explained by judgments that do not pertain to knowledge, then this would be an indicated that participants are not making evaluations that they take to be reflective of a subject’s knowledge in the first place. Thanks to an anonymous referee for suggesting I address this point.
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Boyd, K. Pragmatic encroachment and epistemically responsible action. Synthese 193, 2721–2745 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0878-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-015-0878-y