We can see epistemology as a branch of the philosophy of mind. If we try to leave epistemology out of the philosophy of mind, we arrive at a radically impoverished conception of the nature of mind.
—Timothy Williamson (2000, p. 41).
Abstract
I argue against traditional virtue epistemology on which knowledge is a success due to a competence to believe truly, by revealing an in-principle problem with the traditional virtue epistemologist’s explanation of Gettier cases. The argument eliminates one of the last plausible explanation of Gettier cases, and so of knowledge, in terms of non-factive mental states and non-mental conditions. I then I develop and defend a different kind of virtue epistemology, on which knowledge is an exercise of a competence to know. I show how the account, while circular, is not viciously so. It explains both how knowledge is a mental state, as well as the relationship between knowledge and justification, including justified false beliefs and Gettier cases. Moreover, although direct virtue epistemology is compatible with many views on the nature of belief, it can explain how knowledge might be metaphysically more fundamental than belief as well.
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Notes
Of course they accept that we can say some platitudes, such as that necessarily, if \(S\) knows that \(p\) then \(S\) believes that \(p\). But they deny that we should be trying to explain why they hold. See, e.g., Williamson (2000, p. 31).
Throughout this paper I will only be concerned with the question of what the proper metaphysical explanation of knowledge is, not with questions concerning explanation of the concept of knowledge. I am here interested in the nature of knowledge and in virtue of what it obtains, not in the nature of our concepts of knowledge or in virtue of what we have them.
There are important questions here about how or whether one should distinguish mental states and activities, but this is not the place to discuss them. One might argue against virtue epistemology on the grounds that knowledge is a state rather than an activity. [Chrisman (2012) pursues this approach.] My own view is that all properly mental “states” are actually activities, because only if we conceive of the subject as engaging in mental activities can we understand why perceiving, thinking, and so on are attributable to the subject in the distinctive way that they are. However, it would take me too far afield to further discuss or defend this view. [See my Miracchi (2014) for discussion.] In what follows I will use the term “state” without distinguishing between states and activities.
Thanks to Eliot Michaelson for suggesting this terminology.
There are other live strategies which I cannot address here. Some maintain, for example, that justified true belief just is knowledge (e.g., Hetherington (1999, 2001); also see Weatherson (2003) for a defense of this approach), while some maintain that a “no defeaters” approach along the lines of Lehrer (1965) and Klein (1971, 1976) also solves the Gettier Problem (e.g., Lycan 2013). I will not present arguments against these approaches in what follows, restricting my focus to indirect virtue epistemology. However, the arguments presented do apply to a number of related theories, including the “indirect” proper functionism of Plantinga (1993) and Bergmann (2008).
Indirect virtue epistemology is a powerful theory that is attractive for a number of reasons. See Greco and Turri (2011) for an overview. It traces back to Aristotle but in its current form was first proposed and developed by Ernest Sosa and subsequently defended in various forms by Greco (2001, 2009, 2010, 2012), Turri (2011), and others. Other notable virtue epistemologists who hold a significant variation on virtue epistemology are McDowell (1994), Roberts and Wood (2007), Kelp (2013), Pritchard (2010), and Riggs (2003). I will not discuss any of these theories here except for Pritchard’s.
This characterization is intended to roughly match Sosa’s (2007) account of animal knowledge, and Greco’s (2010) account of knowledge. Some virtue epistemologists characterize the relevant virtue as a competence to form true beliefs (Greco 2010, p. 12), while others characterize it as a competence to believe truly. Because the latter is more general (including both competent true belief formation and retention), I work with it as the formulation here. All of the arguments presented should go through on either formulation.
The reader may notice that not all of these conditions are independent. (iii) implies (ii) and (iv) implies (i)–(iii). I specify IVE in this way only for ease of exposition.
Gettier (1963, pp. 122–123).
This Gettier case is a variation on one that Chisholm gives in his (1966, p. 23).
I will not be concerned here with fake barn cases, which are more contentious. In Goldman’s original case (Goldman 1976) the subject, Henry, is in an area that is full of fake barn facades. If Henry had seen one of these facades, he would have (falsely) believed that it was a barn. As it happens, however, he sees a real barn and believes on the basis of his perceptual experience that it is a barn. Many have the intuition that Henry’s belief is true and justified, but that he fails to know. See Sosa (2010) for defense of the claim that subjects actually know in fake barn cases. My view is that such subjects fail even to be justified because hostile environmental conditions deprive them of the relevant epistemic competences.
It is useful here to establish some common terminology. Thus I will use “competence” to discuss Greco’s view even though he uses “ability”. It should make no difference to the arguments presented.
There are many questions to raise about this explanation, not least of which is why it is that Smith’s competence does not at least partially causally explain his believing truly. Perhaps if he had not exercised that competence, he would have exercised a different one which would have resulted in his believing falsely on the matter. Nevertheless, granting an intuitive account of causal relevance that gets the Ford case right, it is clear that the account gets other cases wrong. See Greco (2009) for other counterexamples.
Of course, there is no uncontested inference from the obtaining of certain counterfactuals to the existence of a causal relation, but such counterfactuals seem to be quite good evidence for such a relation. The case also fits Sosa’s clarification of what he means by the subject’s believing truly being causally due to her competence. Absent an explanation of why the purportedly knowledge-constituting causal relation fails to obtain in this case, it should be taken to be a counterexample.
Greco gives another account (2009, 2010) which appeals to explanatory salience in order to explain success due to competence. I do not discuss this proposal because I think there are decisive problems with it, of which Greco is now aware and which have led him to abandon the view and develop the one under consideration here. See his (2012) for discussion.
Since Greco is trying to explain Gettier cases, and so how justified true belief may come apart from knowledge, he needs to specify a way in which the subject’s competence to believe truly is involved in the acquisition of true beliefs that is distinct from the one relevant to competence possession and exercise (and thus justification). Although Greco does not explain how this type is determined, it should be clear that, on an intuitive account of the relevant way the competence is involved, the account fails to deliver correct predictions.
See Turri (2011) for a similar proposal.
Of course the correct analysis of dispositions is a matter of considerable contention. Note however that the other conditions that make trouble for theories of dispositions clearly do not apply in this case. Annette’s disposition to believe truly is not “reverse-cycle finked”: she does not lose the disposition in conditions that are normally stimulus conditions of its manifestation, such as where a live wire is made to go dead whenever it would be touched by a conductor. Her disposition is not masked, as when a fragile object is prevented from breaking by being wrapped in packaging. These examples of troublesome cases are from Choi and Fara (2012), who take reverse-cycle finking, masking, and mimicking to be the three main difficulties for accounts of dispositions. They attribute the mimicry example to Lewis (1997).
The same worry arises for Turri (2011)’s proposal, which leaves “manifestation” as primitive.
Thanks to Daniel Singer for suggesting that I provide such a procedure.
It should be clear that the difficulty for IVE posed by Double Trouble does not depend in some way on other purported difficulties for virtue epistemology regarding testimony and credit [see e.g. Lackey (2007, 2009)]. Double Trouble is the straightforward result of applying our procedure to Double Play. The rules of the procedure for developing systematic Gettier cases have nothing to do with the particularities of knowledge on the basis of testimony. (Thanks to Jessica Brown for suggesting that I discuss this.)
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pushing me to clarify this point.
Williamson (2000) notes this usage (see Ch. 2). I think we merely differ on whether or not this sense of “mental” is reasonable. Note that this construal of “mental” will also likely classify perceptual tracking (which constitutively involves ocular movements) and many other intuitively “mental” states and activities as non-mental. This seems to me to be harmless terminology as long as the stipulated meanings are kept in mind.
While my claim that knowledge is a mental state is more narrow than Williamson’s, the considerations presented in favor of it lead to a conclusion that is far more general. For those who think Gettier cases are species of the larger class of deviant causal chain cases, the foregoing suggests the plausibility of an achievement-first virtue-theoretic study of achievements, in any domain. This, I think, is exactly right, and is the subject of my Miracchi (2014, Ch. 2).
I think we actually have good reason to be optimistic. Egan (2013), among others, has proposed that computational explanations are explanations of the processes that underlie competent performance. If that is so, then direct virtue epistemology brings knowledge cleanly within the domain of phenomena explicable by a flourishing scientific research program.
Although Williamson (2000) says a good deal about the nature of evidence (in defense of the claim that one’s evidence just is what one knows), he says surprisingly little about knowledge-level justification. Moreover, by imposing a certain kind of method-relative sensitivity requirement on knowledge on which, necessarily, if \(S\) knows that \(p\) via method \(M\), then in all nearby possible worlds if \(p\) is false then does does not believe \(p\) via \(M\) (pp. 154–155), he precludes the kind of account developed below.
To use Sosa’s terminology, a shot may be adroit, even if it fails to be apt, and the same competence can be responsible for both kinds of shots. See, e.g., Sosa (2007, p. 22).
For proponents of the first approach, see, e.g., Bergmann (2008), Burge (2010, 2011), Greco (2010, 2012), Plantinga (1993), Schellenberg (2013), Sosa (2007). For proponents of the second, see, e.g., Millar (2008), Williamson (2000). Williamson takes this approach with respect to methods. The safety condition he puts on knowledge requires methods that are only used to acquire knowledge.
It is often supposed that if a competence or capacity is fallible, then there must be a non-factive mental state in common to the two cases. See Burge (2005) for defense of this claim. Here I show that this is not so for the case of knowledge. For more general arguments to this effect, see Miracchi (2014, Ch. 2).
Probably competences to know will be much more fine-grained, but I simplify here for the sake of exposition.
The operations of these mechanisms typically will have functional, and perhaps computational, specifications. I am using the word “cognitive” in a broad way to include, e.g., perceptual mechanisms and other mechanisms that are the object of study for cognitive science. I here leave it open whether some bodily and not just brain mechanisms are cognitive mechanisms.
For ease of exposition, I am representing the threshold as a real number \(n \in (0,1]\), but I need not make any commitments about how close to 1 \(n\) must be, whether the threshold for the epistemic domain is the same as for other domains (e.g. baseball), or whether the threshold is determinate. (I think it is probably indeterminate.) I also need not make any commitments about whether the threshold is context-sensitive. E.g., if subject-sensitive invariantism (Stanley 2005) is true, then \(n\) will vary with practical interests.
While I need not commit to a particular view of probability here, I am supposing that appeal to objective conditional probabilities is less contentious than appeal to objective unconditional probabilities (see Hájek (2007) for defense of this claim), and I am supposing that some kind of non-frequentist realist account of them is in the offing. I am also supposing that such probabilities are true at particular times. Changes in, e.g., causal regularities over time might result in either the acquisition or loss of competences to know by changing whether or not the proficiency condition is met.
This is true even if it turns out that the proficiency condition is not sufficient for establishing competences to know. I remain neutral here on whether, once the manifestation conditions and basis of a competence are fully specified, the conditions articulated above are sufficient for possession and manifestation of competences to know, or whether probability is too weak a notion to play the needed role here. However, I should note that it is crucial to the project that competences not turn out to be so sophisticated as to themselves require propositional knowledge, as Stanley (2011) claims skills do. Then the account would be viciously circular. If competences are dispositions as Sosa and Greco claim, then this worry is avoided.
Note that this condition need hold only “for the most part” in order to allow that competences may be fallible.
Those familiar with the debate on perception between disjunctivists and non-disjunctivists will see applications of this proposal to perceptual experience. I am currently developing such an account.
There are further positive features of direct virtue epistemology’s account of justification which I do not have room to discuss here. For example, like indirect virtue epistemology, it can explain the positive epistemic status of justified belief without incurring a regress problem. It navigates between the “raft” and the “pyramid” by appeal to competences, for which the question of justification does not arise [see, e.g., Sosa (1980)]. Another upshot of direct virtue epistemology is that, again like IVE, it can explain how it is possible for a person who fails to know to be better justified than someone who knows. A subject’s degenerate exercise of competence may nevertheless be an exercise of a much more reliable competence than that of another person who manifests her competence. In this case we may still say that the former is better justified than the latter because the competence she exercises is more likely to produce knowledge.
It is worth pointing out that direct virtue epistemology as defined in Sect. 3 is neutral on the question of whether knowledge even entails belief. Given that there is some contention about whether this is so, this is all the better for direct virtue epistemology. For recent discussion in experimental philosophy, see e.g., Myers-Schulz and Schwitzgebel (2013), Buckwalter et al. (2013), and Rose and Schaffer (2013). For earlier challenges to the claim that knowledge entails belief, see Radford (1966) and Black (1971). My view is that philosophers’ discussions of belief do not pick out a unique kind, but rather many interesting phenomena worthy of study.
Williamson (2000), does make a suggestion along the lines developed here: “If believing \(p\) is conceptualized as being in a state sufficiently like knowing \(p\) ‘from the inside’ in the relevant respects, then belief is necessary for knowledge, since knowing \(p\) is sufficiently like itself in every respect, even though knowledge is conceptually prior to belief” (p. 3). This suggestion, however, is almost too vague to be helpful: why should another mental state be sufficiently like knowing “from the inside”? What are the “relevant respects” of similarity between beliefs that are not knowledge and those that are knowledge?
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for suggesting I address this question explicitly.
Direct virtue epistemology of course disagrees with IVE about the structure of epistemic competences and how they explain knowledge. This disagreement thus suggests a much more general disagreement about the structure of competences in general and how they explain the achievements that they are invoked to explain. Whereas the traditional approach aims to explain achievements in terms of indirect competences—competences to succeed where success falls short of the achievement in question—the foregoing suggests that achievements in general must be explained by competences to achieve, which have two kinds of exercise, those that are constitutively achievements and those that are constitutively failures.
See Greco (2010, pp. 42–46) for further discussion.
Note that justified false beliefs and Gettier cases also have the same positive epistemic status for the same reason.
There are all sorts of cases where two phenomena are mutually dependent in a non-mysterious way. For example, in order to dance a foxtrot (and many other dances), there must be a leader and a follower. To be a the leader in a foxtrot is to lead one’s follower; to be a follower in a foxtrot is to follow one’s leader. There is no way of specifying the roles of the dancers without appeal to the other, and we need not establish one rather than the other as fundamental.
By “natural causation” I mean here causation of the sort that can occur between causal relata regardless of the agential properties (if any) of those phenomena.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Bob Beddor, Selim Berker, Matt Benton, David Black, Rodrigo Borges, Jessica Brown, Herman Cappelen, Andy Egan, Megan Feeney, Will Fleisher, Jonathan Ichikawa Jenkins, Nico Kirk-Giannini, Peter Klein, Stephanie Leary, Brian McLaughlin, Ricardo Mena, Eliot Michaelson, Jennifer Nagel, Kate Nolfi, Carlotta Pavese, Ted Poston, Pamela Robinson, Blake Roeber, Susanna Schellenberg, Daniel Singer, Ernest Sosa, Jason Stanley, Kurt Sylvan, John Turri, and Peter van Elswyk.
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Miracchi, L. Competence to know. Philos Stud 172, 29–56 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0325-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-014-0325-9