Abstract
A direct implication of E=K seems to be that false beliefs cannot justify other beliefs, for no false belief can be part of one’s total evidence and one’s total evidence is what inferentially justifies belief. The problem with this alleged implication of E=K, as Comesaña and Kantin (Philos Phenomenol Res 80(2):447–454, 2010) have noted, is that it contradicts a claim Gettier cases rely on. The original Gettier cases relied on two principles: that justification is closed under known entailment, and that sometimes one is justified in believing a falsehood. In this paper I argue that E=K, contrary to what Comesaña and Kantin would want us to believe, is compatible with the agent being justified in believing a falsehood.
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Notes
Comesaña and Kantin (2010).
This is my reconstruction of Comesaña’s and Kantin’s main argument against Williamson.
cf. Gettier (1963).
Comesaña and Kantin (2010, pp. 499–500).
Weatherson (2012) has made a different point about Comesaña’s and Kantin’s claim that they “can’t think of any argument” in support of the claim that false beliefs are not part of one’s evidence. According to Weatherson, their claim suffers from a failure of imagination, for one can always think of an argument for p, namely God knows that p, therefore p. Comesaña and Kantin could say, I think, that this is an uncharitable reading of their claim and that they meant to say that they can’t think of any good argument in favor of the claim that no false belief is part of one’s evidence.
To see that, suppose S’s evidence set included r, r1, and r2. Suppose further that only r is in fact evidence for p and that, in spite of this, S’s belief that p is caused only by r1. In this scenario, S fails to know that p, even though he would have known that p if her belief that p had been at least partially caused by r instead of r1. The idea is that having the right reason is not sufficient for knowledge, knowledge requires that one “use” it in support of the target truth. Thus, one’s belief that p is doxastically justified by a reason r only if r is partially causally responsible for one’s belief that p. One is propositionaly justified by a reason r in believing that p even if r is not partially causally responsible for one’s belief that p. Doxastic justification entails propositional justification, but the converse is not true. cf. Korcz (1997) and Korcz (2010).
Shope (1983, p. 4) suggests a few plausible necessary conditions on a case C being a “Gettier case”: C is a Gettier case only if S has a justified true belief that p in C, S does not know that p in C and there is some false proposition, q, S is either justified in believing is true or at least S would be justified in believing that q in C. For the purposes of my discussion here, I will accept Shope’s partial characterization of a Gettier case. I offer a slightly different characterization in Borges (2017), where I discuss the Gettier Problem itself.
Williamson (2000, ch. 11).
I develop this distinction further in Borges (2015).
One might object that it is sometimes appropriate to say that S might have more warrant to assert that p than S* does. For example, when S has two conclusive arguments for p while S* has only one. However, since having a warrant to assert that p, on a knowledge-first kind of picture, requires that p have probability 1 on one’s evidence, strictly speaking S cannot have “more” warrant than S*, for 1 is the highest degree of probability according to the probability calculus. We can, however, accommodate the intuition that it is sometimes adequate for someone to say “S has more warrant to assert that p than S* does.” Sentences like “S has more warrant to assert that p than S* does” are easily understood as expressing something about the comparative degree of psychological certainty of S and S*. Those sentences express, in appropriate contexts, that both S and S* have a warrant for asserting that p, but S is more (psychologically) certain of p than S* is. Thanks to Peter Klein for discussion here.
That Williamson takes the reasonability of an assertion that p to vary with how probable “I know that p” is on one’s evidence is explicit in the following passage: “One may reasonably assert p, even though one does not know p, because it is very probable on one’s evidence that one knows p” (2000, p. 256). The locution “very probable on one’s evidence” should be understood as saying that it is reasonable for one to assert that p only if the evidential probability of “I know that p” on one’s evidence falls within some arbitrarily high range of values short of 1, say, .95 to .99. If the probability of “I know that p” on one’s evidence falls within that range, then one is in a position to assert that p reasonably. See Williamson (2000, p. 256 fn. 9) for a formalization of this account.
Williamson (2000, p. 10).
Williamson (2000, p. 252 fn. 6).
As I will suggest below when we discuss the knowledge norm of inference, a similar strategy can be used to address cases where, even though the agent inferred something from something else she does not know, it seems appropriate to say that she knows the inferred proposition.
Turri (2011) calls this view the “Express Knowledge Account of Assertion”.
Hence, it is false that ‘if knowledge of p requires warrant q then either q must be known or knowledge of p would be baseless.’ for, although knowledge of p does require warrant, this does not entail that this knowledge is baseless unless it is based on a known proposition q. One’s knowledge of p may be based on/warranted by experience e instead. My view is compatible with a type of foundationalism that takes experience to provide one with known propositions even though experience is not itself constituted by known propositions (and so is E=K). (See Williamson (2000, pp. 201–202) for discussion.) Thanks to a reviewer for Erkenntnis for discussion here.
This account may bear some relationship to Alvin Plantinga’s definition of “warrant” in Plantinga (1993) in the sense that my account, like his, entails that all things being equal, believing truly in virtue of having a warrant w is sufficient to give you knowledge of that truth. I say “may” because I am not sure I fully understand Plantinga’s account. I am sure of one thing, though: I do not want my account of “warrant” to be committed to anything like a theory of proper functioning. For criticism of Plantinga’s account of warrant and proper function, see the contributions to Kvanvig (1996), specially Klein (1996).
In a reply to Williamson’s statement of the Gettier Problem in Epistemic Logic in Williamson (2013a), Stewart Cohen and Juan Comesaña Cohen and Comesaña (2013) attack a couple of different ways in which one might distinguish between a strong and a weak sense of “justified.” I agree with Cohen and Comesaña that one should not argue for the distinction in the way they discuss in their paper. However, the way I am drawing the distinction is significantly different from the ways Cohen and Comesaña discuss in their paper. Unfortunately, replying directly to Cohen and Comesaña is beyond the scope of this paper. But see Williamson (2013b) for a principled reply to Cohen and Comesaña.
Thanks to a reviewer for Erkenntnis here.
Notice that the point here is that Gettiered subjects are r-justified. The point is not that r-justification is what turns true belief into knowledge according to the traditional analysis of knowledge. Quite the opposite, Gettier showed once and for all that knowledge is not r-justified true belief. Knowledge is (at least) w-justified true belief. The cases Gettier discussed did not touch this reading of the traditional analysis of knowledge, for their protagonist based his true belief on a falsehood and, thus, could not be w-justified. I am thankful to a reviewer for Erkenntnis for prompting me to address this issue here.
One might reasonably wonder whether my reply to Comesaña and Kantin yields, at the end of the day, the most plausible version of fallibilism one could have. I believe it does, but arguing for this claim would require a different (and much longer) paper, for it would demand that I compare the version of fallibilism I am offering here to other versions of falliblilism one finds in the relevant literature. Having said that, the present paper has, I believe, achieved it’s modest but important goal: showing that E=K is compatible with (a form of) fallibilism. This is true even if we have to postpone answering the related and important question of whether this version of fallibilism is, at the end of the day, in fact the most plausible version of fallibilism there is. Nonetheless, I do hope I will have the opportunity to tackle the latter issue in the future. I am indebted to another reviewer for Erkenntnis here.
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This research has been partially funded by the CAPES/Fulbright Commission and by a CAPES/FAPESP Post-Doctoral Fellowship Grant.
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Thanks to Claudio de Almeida, Juan Comesaña, Duncan Pritchard, and Ernest Sosa for their generous feedback on earlier versions of this paper. Thanks also to two referees for Erkenntnis for their helpful suggestions. Very special thanks to Peter Klein, who read way too many drafts of this paper. I hope the end product does some justice to Peter's infinite support and helpfulness. The research in this paper was partially funded by the CAPES/Fulbright commission through a doctoral fellowship, and by FAPESP through a post-doctoral research fellowship. I am very grateful for their support.
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Borges, R. E=K and The Gettier Problem: A Reply to Comesaña and Kantin. Erkenn 82, 1031–1041 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9857-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-016-9857-z