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Epistemic Gradualism and Ordinary Epistemic Practice: Responce to Hetherington

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This paper responds to Stephen Hetherington's discussion of my ‘Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?’ (2004). The Infallibilist skeptic holds that in order to know something, one must be able to rule out every possible alternative to the truth of one’s belief. This requirement is false. In this paper I first clarify this requirement’s relation to our ordinary practice. I then turn to a more fundamental issue. The Infallibilist holds – along with many non-skeptical epistemologists – that Infallibility is epistemically superior to the epistemic position attained when we have (what we ordinarily call) knowledge. This is false, too, as our ordinary practices show. Ordinary epistemic appraisal does not concern our standing on a scale of evaluation which has Infallibility at its apex. For this reason, even if gradualism is correct, it does not show how Infallibilist skepticism can arise out of our ordinary practice.

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Notes

  1. Paul Edwards, “Bertrand Russell’s Doubts about Induction,” Logic and Language, first series, Antony Flew, ed., Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1951.

  2. “Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?” The Philosophical Quarterly, 54: 215, April 2004, pp. 232–251.

  3. “Scepticism and Ordinary Epistemic Practice”, Philosophia, 34: 3, 2006, pp. 303–310

  4. The published version of this passage, reprinted above, does not faithfully reflect my original manuscript because of errors introduced during the copy-editing process. It should read (with corrections in italics),

    ... If you take there to be no reason to suspect that a certain possibility of error obtains, then it would be unreasonable, regardless of the practical setting, to deny knowledge to people on account of the fact that they do not have specific evidence against that possibility. Likewise, if you take there to be good reason to suspect that a certain possibility of error obtains, then it would be inappropriate, regardless of the practical setting, to attribute knowledge to people unless you thought that they had decisive specific evidence against the possibility in question.

    By “possibility of error,” I mean any possibility which is incompatible with p or with the person’s knowing that p.

  5. Goldman, Alvin. ‘Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,’ in Essays on Knowledge and Justification, Pappas and Swain, eds., Cornell University Press, 1978, pp. 120–145. The example is reported to be from Carl Ginet.

  6. Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge, Oxford University Press, New York, NY: 2002, chapter 2.

  7. “The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge,” p. 48, Dretske, Perception, Knowledge, and Belief, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Certain common expressions might seem to favor the gradualist approach. For instance, we commonly say such things as, “I don’t know her as well as he does,” “Student X knows modal logic better now that he’s finally taken a course in it,” and “John knows how to play chess well.” However, these examples – and all plausible examples of which I am aware – concern what we might call acquaintance, know-how, understanding and other forms of knowledge whose relation to propositional knowledge is quite unclear. I am not aware of any example of ordinary usage which clearly supports the gradualist account of propositional knowledge. (Hetherington’s examples in this regard strike me as forced and unnatural. Consider, for instance, “I do know that I locked my office door. It is true, though, that if I go back to check on whether I locked it, I will improve that knowledge slightly” (Good Knowledge, Bad Knowledge, p. 2).) For these reasons, the linguistic data are not probative, unless it can be shown that acquaintance, know-how and the rest all depend upon propositional knowledge in such a way that the gradualism which they display must be regarded as derivative from gradualism in the underlying propositional knowledge. In addition, the case will not be closed until some account is given of why we do not commonly talk about propositional knowledge in the way gradualism would predict.

  8. Establishing these points is the main burden of “Is Fallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?”. Hetherington does not disagree with this aspect of my argument.

  9. I am grateful to Ram Neta for this example.

  10. This conception of knowledge is disputed by Williamson (Knowledge and Its Limits, Oxford University Press, 2000, esp. chapters 1–3) and McDowell (“Knowledge and the Internal,” in Meaning, Knowledge and Reality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). In my “On Williamson’s Arguments that Knowledge is a Mental State” (Ratio (new series), vol. XVIII no. 2, June 2005, pp. 165–75), I argue that Williamson’s arguments against this conception fail.

  11. See, for instance, p. 307.

  12. As this argumentative strategy should make clear, Hetherington is wrong to say that what motivates my view is a commitment to absolutism, the view that knowledge does not come in degrees or kinds. One could accept a view such as the one I defend here and also accept a gradualist story. What one would have to deny is the idea – in itself inessential to gradualism – that Infallibility is the highest degree on the scale of epistemic evaluation. My fundamental commitment is consequently to the claims (1) that we have no clear idea what’s meant by “epistemic superiority” except in relation to our ordinary practices, and (2) that these practices do not treat Infallibility in the requisite way.

    My argument for the first claim perhaps warrants further discussion. Here’s another way to put it. If talk of ‘epistemic superiority’ is to have any content at all, there must be a scale that is relevant to the ranking of epistemic positions as epistemically better or worse. But what scale is that? What epistemic position is at its apex? What is the relation of that position to the position(s) we are content to regard as adequate for knowledge in ordinary life? Saying, “It’s the scale of epistemic evaluation,” does not provide any guidance for answering these questions. To determine what scale is the relevant one, we have to appeal to two facts. (1) The position we occupy when we have (what we ordinarily call) knowledge lies somewhere on the relevant scale. (2) The kind of assessment we engage in when we carefully and conscientiously consider in ordinary life whether a given person knows a given thing aims at locating the person’s position on the relevant scale. So, for instance, consider an ordinary sort of case in which we conclude that evidential position E1 is better than E2, but that neither is adequate for knowledge because knowledge requires something better than either. I claim (A) that this sort of assessment is an instance of epistemic assessment, and (B) that the scale on which we are placing the positions in this sort of assessment is the scale of epistemic superiority. Consequently, what we ordinarily regard as an improvement (or not) when we are being careful and conscientious reveals the terms in which epistemic positions are to be evaluated as epistemically better or worse and the basis for doing so. The ideal(s) which govern our ordinary assessments of whether people know things thus reveal what the ideal epistemic position is.

    It might be worried that because our ordinary practices only concern whether people have (ordinary) knowledge and not whether they have attained any better position, an investigation of our ordinary practices begs the question at hand; as it might be put, “Of course Infallibility will not appear any better than knowledge, in relation to assessments of that sort.” However, if we accept that the scale on which epistemic positions are located in evaluations of relative superiority (below the position of knowledge) is the scale of epistemic superiority, and that this scale concerns a uniform dimension, then our ordinary judgments regarding what does, or does not, constitute improvement on this scale will reveal what the ideal epistemic position is. (I am grateful to Stephen Hetherington for raising a version of the objection addressed here.)

  13. Elusive Knowledge, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 74 no. 4, 1996, p 553.

  14. This is argued in “Is Infallibility an Epistemological Shortcoming?” pp. 248–9.

  15. That it might be so explained was urged on me by Ram Neta.

  16. I am grateful to Mark Kaplan and Jonathan Weinberg for helpful conversations and to Ram Neta and Stephen Hetherington for comments on a draft of the paper.

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Leite, A. Epistemic Gradualism and Ordinary Epistemic Practice: Responce to Hetherington. Philosophia 34, 311–324 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-006-9030-z

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