Abstract
According to a version of Infallibilism, if one knows that p, then one’s evidence for p entails p. In her Fallibilism: Evidence and Knowledge (2018, OUP), Jessica Brown has recently developed two arguments against Infalliblism, which can both be presented in the form of a dilemma. According to the first dilemma, the infallibilist can avoid scepticism only if she endorses the claim that if one knows that p then p is part of one’s evidence for p. But this seems to come at the cost of making infelicitous claims. According to the second dilemma, the infallibilist cannot make sense of the phenomenon of defeat unless she rejects closure. In this paper, we argue that the infallibilist has the conceptual tools to resist both dilemmas.
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Notes
Henceforth, unless stated otherwise, we will use “Infalliblist” to refer to someone who endorses Infalliblism*.
The “normic” evidential support defended by Smith (2016) is another example of a non-probabilistic evidentialist account.
Note that Explanationist Evidential support remains silent on many issues including what evidence is.
For cases in which e explanatory supports p while p being unlikely on the evidence see Lutz (2020: 2638–2639).
One might worry that, if one’s evidence e entails p, then p can’t be a sufficiently good explanation for e. Crucially, when Explanationist is taken together with E = K, this seems to entail that knowledge that p doesn’t require justification for p: after all, once you know p, p is part of your evidence that entails p. While we have no space to address this issue here, note that a more sophisticated formulation of Explanationism is one which includes a total evidence requirement: S has justification to believe that p iff S has total evidence E, and p is the best sufficiently good explanation for e, where e is a subset of E (McCain and Moretti, 2021, 86). So take the case where I know that p in virtue of some evidence e other than p which, given E = K, I know to be true. The explanationist will say that p is the best sufficiently good explanationion of why e. However, note that, although once you know p, p is also part of your total evidence, so your total evidence E entails p, this is compatible with the idea that p is the best suff good explanation for e.
Of course whether the Infallibilist Explanationist is able to do this depends on whether they can show that maximal (explanationist) evidentialist support can be obtained relatively easy for everyday propositions. This is something we don’t have the space to investigate here.
This view is compatible with, though by no means entailed by, Fratantonio’s (manuscript) Foundational Evidentialism, which distinguishes between two different types of knowledge, inferential and non-inferential. While inferential knowledge requires belief based on evidence that makes p sufficiently likely, non-inferential knowledge doesn’t. Such a view is compatible with the idea that misleading evidence against p can thus easily defeat knowledge of p in many inferential cases, although it doesn’t do so in cases of non-inferential knowledge.
Brown (p. 128) also classifies Lasonen-Aarnio (2010, 2014) as being committed to level-splitting, but like Brown (p. 144), Lasonen-Aarnio denies the assumption inherent in level-splitting that a body of evidence can be partitioned into two parts, the first-order evidence and the higher-order (cf Lasonen-Aarnio 2019).
The case closely follows one given in Hawthorne, Isaacs, and Lasonen-Aarnio (forthcoming).
At numerous places in the book Brown herself makes remarks that are along the very same lines (e.g. pp. 104–105).
Consider, for instance, views that think of evidence in terms of seemings. One might hold that whenever it seems to a subject that p, the proposition it seems that p is part of her evidence. Or, perhaps it is these seeming-states themselves, and not propositions about them, that are part of the evidence. The assumption needed, then, is that one can have misleading evidence about how things seem—something one would expect friends of defeat to be sympathetic to. Assume that it seems to Samantha, of each of S1–S9, that they have alibis, and it seems that Lucy doesn’t. These seemings (or propositions about them) support the proposition that Lucy is the thief. However, Alex then tells Samatha that she is prone to be confused about how things in fact seem to her and, as a result, Samatha gains evidence that not all of the relevant seemings (or propositions about them) are part of her evidence.
Presumably, what is at issue is not just having some piece of evidence supporting the proposition that it’s not the case that my evidence supports p but rather, the total evidence supporting the proposition that it’s not the case that my evidence supports p.
Defeat-based counterexamples to closure can be given both for single- and multi-premise closure.
What about justification? On Lasonen-Aarnio’s view the notion of justification is inherently problematic as there is no status that can carry the theoretical burdens commonly assigned to it (for instance, being a necessary condition on knowledge, being present in evil demon cases, and being systematically lost in putative cases of defeat).
Note that it is not altogether clear whether this position falls in the “friends” or “opponents” of defeat camp. Brown characterizes opponents of defeat (including Lasonen-Aarnio) as attacking the idea that “one’s epistemic status with respect to a proposition can be revised by acquiring a defeater…” (Brown, pp. 105–106). But reasonableness is surely an epistemic status.
Brown briefly considers the following alternative account of Tertiary norms: one ought to manifest one’s disposition to conform to the primary norm. But the problem here is that one cannot manifest a disposition to conform to a norm unless one does conform—for instance, one cannot manifest a disposition to conform to a knowledge norm for belief unless one in fact knows. By contrast, a subject can manifest the most knowledge-conducive dispositions even if she fails to know. Indeed, Lasonen-Aarnio (forthcoming b) argues that this is the case with victims of systematic defeat.
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Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jessica Brown, Kevin McCain, and Luca Moretti for useful discussion. This research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AH/T002638/1).
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Fratantonio, G., Lasonen-Aarnio, M. Refuting two dilemmas for infallibilism. Philos Stud 179, 2643–2654 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01782-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-022-01782-w