It seems incredible that we could not somehow use our faculties to gain access to knowledge of our own reliability.
—from the last page of Sosa’s Reflective Knowledge
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Later I consider a weaker form of KRel in which knowledge of the reliability of a source is merely a corequisite, not a prerequisite, for having knowledge by means of that source.
All the issues I discuss here arise in the same form if we substitute ‘justification’ for ‘knowledge’ in the statement of KRel.
As pointed out by Titelbaum (2010), easy knowledge by bootstrapping presumably also involves closure, as it involves acquiring justified beliefs through inference from justified premises.
To distinguish basic knowledge so defined from basic knowledge in the more standard sense of knowledge not derived from any other knowledge, Sosa calls it hierarchically basic knowledge (p. 228). Hierarchically basic knowledge is normally what I shall mean by ‘basic’ knowledge in the rest of this essay.
Here I am assuming that R is made justified enough to count as knowledge by the simple fact of LR without the subject’s having to infer R from LR or anything else—in which case R is a piece of basic knowledge in the standard sense. But an epistemology that held that R must be inferred from LR would also generate the current problem, so long as it did not impose the KRel requirement and thus allowed R to be basic in Cohen’s sense.
Since a parallel principle holds for justification, there is a parallel problem of easy justification.
What follows is meant to be isomorphic to the example of Roxanne and her gas gauge in Vogel (2000).
“No funny business” is my encapsulation of what Sosa formulates variously by saying your situation is relevantly unproblematic (p. 219), your situation permits taking the appearance of red at face value (p. 220), perceptual conditions are not misleading (pp. 225–227), there is nothing fishy going on, and your situation is propitious for taking color experience at face value (p. 231).
Sosa sometimes says that things presupposed need only be “quasi-known,” but what is “quasi” about the knowledge is its belief component, not its epistemic status.
In his chapter on Reid (especially pp. 62–67), Ernie argues that transitions from circumstances to beliefs, such as our envisioned transition from LR to belief in R, reveal “implicit commitments” about the general reliability of the subject’s faculties, whether we call them beliefs or not. Perhaps they also betoken commitments as to specific reliability. Basic knowledge epistemologies might still say that subjects can get knowledge of R regardless of whether these commitments have any epistemic status. It is at this point that I think Sosa needs to have a normative requirement in play; he needs to rebuff the suggestion that the commitments, though indeed made, are epistemically optional as far as getting knowledge of R goes.
I have put ‘and’ where Ernie has ‘or’, since both types of reliability knowledge would seem obtainable from basic knowledge. Whichever way we put the consequent of (b), it will be contradicted by (c), which says we cannot obtain either type of knowledge about the reliability of p’s source from p.
Chisholm’s version of (b) is actually somewhat different: his particular starting points are not just particular things known, but particular bits of second-order knowledge to the effect that we have knowledge of various particular things.
Sosa actually draws two distinctions in this part of the book: one between animal and reflective knowledge, the other between reason-based and non-reason-based competences (pp. 235–239). I am not clear on how the distinctions are related. I take him to say that reason-based competences do carry presuppositions as to their reliability, that animal knowledge does not carry such presuppositions (or at least need not “endorse” its own reliability), and yet that animal knowledge comes under the heading of the reason-based. I assume I am mistaken about one of these three attributions, probably the third. The important point, however, is that there is a mode of knowledge that does not carry presuppositions; this mode can play the role of K1 in what follows.
It would be plausible that we do have closure if animal knowledge were simply reliably formed belief.
The footnote about “primed correlates” on p. 226 makes me suspect, however, that Sosa’s NFB is meant to be stronger than either of ~(W & RL) and ~(~R & LR) and not reachable by closure.
Gewirth proposed that all clear and distinct perception gives Descartes initially is psychological certainty. He then went on to define a higher grade of certainty, metaphysical certainty, that one possesses with respect to p if one is psychologically certain that any reasons for doubting p are false, and he claimed that the only reason for doubting the contents of c and d perceptions would be that God is a deceiver. All this being stipulated, it would follow that upon attaining a c and d perception that God is no deceiver, one becomes metaphysically certain of everything of which one was before only psychologically certain by means of c and d perception. This would be an example of a two-levels theory of knowledge under my abstract characterization. It seems to me that Gewirth’s higher grade isn’t worth very much, being compounded out of a lower grade that is nothing more than psychological conviction.
Perhaps not; there are cases in which e confirms h without confirming weaker propositions entailed by h, but I am not sure whether the present case is an instance of this possibility.
References
Chisholm, R. (1973). The problem of the criterion. Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press.
Chisholm, R. (1977). Theory of knowledge (2nd ed.). Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Cohen, S. (2002). Basic knowledge and the problem of easy knowledge. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 65, 309–329.
Gewirth, A. (1941). The cartesian circle. The Philosophical Review, 50, 368–395.
Pollock, J. (1974). Knowledge and justification. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Pryor, J. (2000). The skeptic and the dogmatist. Nous, 34, 517–549.
Reid, T. (1785/2002). In D. R. Brookes (Ed.), Essays on the intellectual powers of man. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press.
Sosa, E. (2009). Reflective knowledge. Oxford, MS: Clarendon Press.
Titelbaum, M. (2010). Tell me you love me: Bootstrapping, externalism, and no-lose epistemology. Philosophical Studies, 149, 119–134.
Vogel, J. (2000). Reliabilism leveled. The Journal of Philosophy, 97, 602–623.
White, R. (2006). Problems for dogmatism. Philosophical Studies, 131, 525–557.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Van Cleve, J. Sosa on easy knowledge and the problem of the criterion. Philos Stud 153, 19–28 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9647-4
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-010-9647-4