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Anti-intellectualism, egocentrism and bank case intuitions

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Abstract

Salience-sensitivity is a form of anti-intellectualism that says the following: whether a true belief amounts to knowledge depends on which error-possibilities are salient to the believer. I will investigate whether salience-sensitivity can be motivated by appeal to bank case intuitions. I will suggest that so-called third-person bank cases threaten to sever the connection between bank case intuitions and salience-sensitivity. I will go on to argue that salience-sensitivists can overcome this worry if they appeal to egocentric bias, a general tendency to project our own mental states onto others. I will then suggest that a similar strategy is unavailable to stakes-sensitivists, who hold that whether a true belief amounts to knowledge depends on what is at stake for the believer. Bank case intuitions motivate salience- but not stakes-sensitivity.

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Notes

  1. See e.g. Blome-Tillmann (2009: 246).

  2. See e.g. Lewis (1996) and Blome-Tillmann (2009) for further discussion.

  3. Hawthorne (2004) seems to be the only one to endorse it.

  4. See Hawthorne (2004).

  5. See below for references.

  6. See e.g. Stanley (2005) and Fantl and McGrath (2009) for proponents of such a view. Knowledge may be seen as depending on other practical factors beyond what is at stake (such as time constraints). See e.g. Shin (2014). I am focusing on stakes effects because they are most familiar. What I have to say about stakes should straightforwardly carry over to other putative practical determinants of knowledge.

  7. See Hawthorne (2004) for pertinent discussion of skeptical puzzles and e.g. Fantl and McGrath (2009) for knowledge-action principles.

  8. As indicated, I don’t want to address the empirical issue of whether these intuitions are real. Note, however, that at least similar intuitions have been confirmed in a range of recent studies. See e.g. Schaffer and Knobe (2012), Nagel et al. (2013) and Buckwalter and Schaffer (2015). Earlier studies failed to confirm the effects. See Schaffer and Knobe (2012: Sect. 2) for an overview. See the more recent studies for candidate accounts of this divergence.

  9. One way to respond to bank case intuitions is to deny that Hannah’s epistemic position remains the same throughout the cases. See e.g. Pinillos (2011: 682f) and Dinges (2016). I will grant that Hannah’s epistemic position remains the same for the purposes of this paper. My goal here is to investigate whether salience- and stakes-sensitivity can help to explain bank case intuitions. I don’t want to show that there are no other candidate accounts.

  10. Blome-Tillmann (2008: 31), for instance, endorses these intuitions with respect to a third-person case pair featuring a zebra and the possibility of it being a painted mule. Corresponding experimental studies are hard to come by. Intuitions about third-person cases have so far been tested only in Feltz and Zarpentine (2010). They didn’t find relevant difference regarding our intuitions about these cases. However, they didn’t find relevant differences regarding our intuitions about first-person cases either. These latter differences have been confirmed in subsequent studies with improved methodology (see footnote 8). It seems reasonable to expect similar results for methodologically improved third-person cases. But this will have to be investigated further.

  11. See e.g. DeRose (2009) for a defense of contextualism, MacFarlane (2005) for relativism, Brown (2006) for a warranted assertability maneuver and Nagel (2010a, b) and Gerken (2013) for psychological accounts.

  12. See e.g. DeRose (2009: Sect. 2.7) for how contextualists deal with third-person cases, MacFarlane (2005: Sect. 4.1) for how relativists do so and Brown (2006: 425–427) for a pertinent warranted assertability maneuver. Gerken (2013: Sect. 5.2) describes his view in a way that is entirely neutral between first- and third-person cases. Nagel’s account will be discussed in more detail below. It will become obvious that the account as a whole also applies to first- and third-person cases. I will argue though that salience-sensitivists can isolate one particular aspect of Nagel’s account (namely, the appeal to egocentric bias) to plausibly underwrite their position.

  13. See e.g. Tversky and Kahneman (1973) for a general account of the availability heuristic and e.g. Slovic et al. (1982) for the kind of distorting influence Hawthorne has in mind.

  14. See Nagel (2010b).

  15. See e.g. Cohen (2004: 489), MacFarlane (2005: 214), Williamson (2005: 226), Stanley (2005: 101) and Schaffer (2006: 92f) for this latter observation.

  16. Note that Hawthorne presents the availability account only as an account of the appropriateness of knowledge denials in third-person cases. He offers a different account for the inappropriateness of knowledge ascriptions. This account does appeal to salience-sensitivity (and is further based on the knowledge norm of assertion and the factivity of knowledge). See Hawthorne (2004: 160). Again, we need not dwell on the viability of this account. The important point for our purposes is just that the availability account makes it redundant. For an increased assumed likelihood of error explains why we don’t ascribe knowledge just as much as why we deny knowledge.

  17. See Schaffer (2006: 93) and Wright (2011: 107) for the same assessment. See also DeRose (2012: 706ff).

  18. See Wright (2011) and Kim (2015) for further attempts to deal with third-person cases on behalf of anti-intellectualism. Wright (2011: 108) effectively suggests a warranted assertability maneuver, according to which the knowledge denial in ERROR3rd seems correct because it should “be understood as claiming that Bill does not have sufficient information to settle the question of whether the bank’s hours have changed.” We have seen already why such accounts are problematic. Kim’s (2015: 5) proposal saddles the anti-intellectualist with the view that “the truth of knows-whether assertions depends upon the context of utterance but the truth of knows-that assertions does not.” It may be possible to make this result palatable, but at least on the face of it, it seems like a bitter pill to swallow.

  19. See also Nagel (2008: 292).

  20. See e.g Fantl and McGrath (2009: Sect. 3.1.3), Sripada and Stanley (2012: Sect. 5), Pynn (2014: 129f) and Shin (2014: Sect. 7). Nagel (2012) herself suggests a problem with her account: it predicts that subjects in ERROR should not only fail to have knowledge, their perceived levels of justification and confidence should also be lowered. According to Nagel, though, empirical results do not support this prediction. We will see below that this is in line with salience-sensitivity.

  21. I am not saying that Nagel used “epistemic egocentrism” in the way defined by Royzman et al. She presumably had the more general notion in mind. But since the studies she mentions support epistemic egocentrism only as defined by Royzman et al., the issue should be rectified. To be sure, the main difference between the position suggested here and Nagel’s own account is not supposed to lie in different ways of implementing egocentrism. As indicated before, the main difference is that Nagel’s account doesn’t entail salience-sensitivity, while my account crucially does.

  22. For more on the so-called “spotlight effect,” see e.g. Kenny and DePaulo (1993), Gilovich and Savitsky (1999), Savitsky et al. (2001), Epley et al. (2002) and Gilovich et al. (2002).

  23. Merely attending to the possibility may not suffice for salience. As indicated, maybe readers must also take the possibility seriously. This wouldn’t seem to be a problematic constraint. Readers who don’t take the error-possibility seriously presumably don’t share the intuitions about the cases. Note that the fact that readers (unlike Hannah and Bill) can rule out the possibility of changed opening hours doesn’t entail that they don’t take this possibility seriously; at least not on the notions of taking something seriously that the salience-sensitivist might want to employ. According to salience-sensitivity, the possibilities we take seriously are precisely the ones that we have to rule out. Hence, being able to rule out a possibility must be compatible with taking it seriously.

  24. See Alexander et al. (2014).

  25. See Nagel (2012). Nagel’s studies show slight differences in justification levels, but they could be due to effects such as those described in Pinillos (2011: 682f) and Dinges (2016). Compare footnote 9.

  26. See Nagel (2010a: footnote 18) for this worry (and a candidate response that differs from mine).

  27. See Nagel (2010b: 304f) and Alexander et al. (2014: Study 4 and Conclusion) for further discussion on how to surmount egocentrism in bank case assessments. Alexander et al. present data going somewhat against the egocentric story, Nagel mentions potentially more favorable results. All authors admit that the available data are inconclusive and, at the moment, I have nothing to add to this (except for maybe further incentives to carry out the relevant experiments).

  28. See e.g. Hawthorne (2004: 166f).

  29. Empirical support for these intuitions is a bit harder to find than for the corresponding salience cases, but see Sripada and Stanley (2012), Pinillos (2012), Pinillos and Simpson (2014) and Gao (2015: 102f). See Buckwalter (2014), Buckwalter and Schaffer (2015) and Turri (2017) for less favorable results.

  30. Once more, it must be noted that there are scarcely any empirical studies on the relevant third-person cases. Compare footnote 10.

  31. See e.g. Fantl and McGrath (2009) and Brown (2013: 244ff).

  32. Fantl and McGrath (2009: 56) mention this idea. As indicated, I think Stanley’s (2005: 102f) account is most plausibly interpreted in terms of egocentrism too.

  33. Fantl and McGrath (2009: 56) and Nagel (2010a: 425) gesture towards accounts of the latter sort. See also Buckwalter and Schaffer (2015: 222), who mention Loewenstein and Small (2007) for pertinent psychological results.

  34. See Buckwalter and Schaffer (2015: 222) for a similar suggestion.

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Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jie Gao, Dirk Kindermann, Jennifer Nagel, Jonathan Schaffer, the reading group Sprachphilosophie Berlin (most notably Emanuel Viebahn and Julia Zakkou), the members of the Forschungskolloquium in Hamburg, audiences in St Andrews and Cambridge and an anonymous referee for very helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

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  1. Philosophisches Seminar, Universität Hamburg, Von-Melle-Park 6, 20146, Hamburg, Germany

    Alexander Dinges

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Dinges, A. Anti-intellectualism, egocentrism and bank case intuitions. Philos Stud 175, 2841–2857 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0984-4

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