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Knowledge and the Many Norms on Action

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Abstract

If there is pragmatic encroachment in epistemology, whether a person knows that p can vary with normative facts about her actions—including facts that do not bear on the truth or likelihood of p. This paper raises an underappreciated question for defenders of pragmatic encroachment: which of the many norms on action are distinctively connected to knowledge? To the extent that contemporary defenders of pragmatic encroachment address this question, they do so by citing norms of ‘practical rationality.’ I show that this approach can only be made to work on the assumption that all immorality involves some form of incoherence. I then suggest a pluralist strategy for pragmatic encroachers who seek to answer my question without making this heavyweight metaethical assumption: they should agree that multiple distinct norms on action play a difference-making role in epistemology. I close the paper by sketching three ways in which pragmatic encroachers might pursue this strategy.

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Notes

  1. Cases like these were made famous by De Rose (1992, 913). I borrow the formulation in Schroeder (2012, 266–267).

  2. Some pragmatic encroachers might deny that these particular cases illustrate pragmatic encroachment. Some, for instance, might resist the suggestion that Hannah’s memory is knowledge-level evidence in Low Stakes. Others might resist the notion that a person could gain or lose knowledge solely in virtue of moving from one choice scenario to another. See, e.g., Ross and Schroeder (2014), Locke (2017) and Schroeder (2018a).

  3. Fantl and McGrath (2002, 77), for instance, focus on whether an agent is “rational to prefer as if p”; in their (2007, 559), they instead foreground the condition of being “rational to act as if p.” Locke (2014, 43; cf. Hawthorne 2004, 30) draws attention to whether it is acceptable to “premise” a proposition in the situations where one is disposed to do so.

  4. You might worry that any knowably imprudent plan must involve practical incoherence, and so that the case as presented is impossible. For more on this worry, see Sect. 4.2.

  5. Compare Fantl and McGrath (2007, part I), Hawthorne and Stanley (2008, introduction).

  6. Some might suspect that, although there is something problematic about Naomi’s character, there is nothing problematic about her relying on the proposition that the post office will be open tomorrow. To see why this is wrong, imagine a variant of the case: suppose that Naomi is given enormously strong evidence that the post office will be open tomorrow. (Say, for instance, that its manager swears on his life that he will be there tomorrow.) In this new version of the case, if Naomi chooses not to wait in line, at least one moral problem with her dissipates. It’s no longer appropriate to morally criticize her for running risks. Nevertheless, her character remains reprehensible. So, when Naomi relies on an insufficiently supported proposition, she generates a distinctive moral problem, which cannot be understood solely in terms of her problematic character. I discuss this objection in more depth in my (2017, 651). Thanks to an anonymous referee for encouraging discussion here.

  7. For defenses of moral encroachment, see Pace (2011), Fritz (2017), Moss (2018), Basu and Schroeder (2019), and Bolinger (2019). Whether Naomi’s case is an apt illustration of moral encroachment depends on the details of the best moral-encroachment view. (See footnote 2 for the same point about pragmatic encroachment.) Just as I’ve set aside questions about how to precisify pragmatic encroachment, I’ll set aside questions about when and how moral facts make a difference for knowledge; I pursue these questions in more depth in my “Moral Encroachment and Reasons of the Wrong Kind” (2019). Thanks to an anonymous referee.

  8. It may be worth flagging a change in my terminology. In my (2017), I used the term ‘pragmatic encroachment’ to pick out views on which knowledge is sensitive to facts about what matters to the agent. On that pattern of usage, moral encroachment would be an alternative to, rather than a variety of, pragmatic encroachment. Here, I use the term ‘pragmatic encroachment’ more broadly, so that moral encroachment is simply a variety of pragmatic encroachment.

  9. Brown (2013) notes a similar distinction.

  10. See especially Introduction and Ch. 5.

  11. For a recent study that also surveys a great deal of the relevant literature, see Rose et al (2019).

  12. See Schroeder (2018a, 3–3.1, b) and Fantl and McGrath (2009, 76n21).

  13. See Fantl and McGrath (2002, 2007), Hawthorne and Stanley (2008) and Roeber (2018b).

  14. See Worsnip (2020, sec. 3).

  15. Hawthorne and Stanley (2008) sketch a practical condition that is both necessary and sufficient for knowledge. (A) is one way to interpret this condition, but for the reasons in the main text, it is not the most promising interpretation.

  16. See footnote 6 for further discussion.

  17. This is one way to interpret Fantl and McGrath’s claim that “If you know that p, then p is warranted enough to justify you in ϕ‐ing, for any ϕ.” (2009, 66). But, for the reasons showcased in the main text, it is not the most promising interpretation.

  18. Suppose, for any given way of precisifying ‘rely on,’ the bylaws of the Clean White Shirt Group forbid Kayla to rely on the proposition that there is a clean white shirt in her dresser, and that they do because of the weakness of her epistemic position.

  19. It might be more precise to speak of one “flavor of normativity” or one “family of norms,” given that there may be multiple distinct norms of practical coherence, or multiple distinct norms of prudence. In the main text, I omit this complication for ease of exposition.

  20. The language of ‘rationality’ or ‘practical rationality’ predominates, for instance, in Stanley (2005), Weatherson (2005), Fantl and McGrath (2002, 2007), Hawthorne and Stanley (2008), Ross and Schroeder (2014) and Locke (2015).

  21. Scanlon (1998, 25–30) and Broome (2007) argue in favor of using ‘rationality’ to pick out a property closely associated with coherence. Some simply stipulate that they will use ‘rationality’ in this way; see, for instance, Kolodny (2005, 509–510) and Southwood (2008, 9–10).

  22. Korsgaard (1996, ch. 3) defends such a view.

  23. This case is from Gibbard (1999, 145).

  24. Or, better yet, responding to the balance of one’s possessed or available reasons (see Lord (2018) and Kiesewetter (2017) respectively for defenses of this view). I’ll set this complication aside.

  25. See Bratman (1987, ch. 2) and Broome (1999). For a response, see Schroeder (2005).

  26. Note a related proposal: one ought to be such that (when one intends the end, one also intends the necessary means. Defenders include Broome (1999), Hill (1973), Gensler (1985) and Wallace (2001).

  27. In fact, the problem is worse; it’s plausible that there is a exceptionless requirement to avoid incoherence. In other words, rules of practical coherence are strict (Broome 1999) or stringent (Schroeder 2009, 233). But it’s difficult to say what could count against incoherence so powerfully that it generates an exceptionless requirement.

  28. This proposal can be found in Kiesewetter (2017), Kolodny (2005, 2007) and Lord (2018).

  29. For criticism, see Staffel (2019).

  30. McPherson (2011, 233).

  31. Hampton (1998, 85ff).

  32. See, for instance, Korsgaard (1996).

  33. See, for instance, Southwood (2008).

  34. Grimm (2015) and Hannon (2019) both draw on Craig to develop impurist theories of knowledge that might be developed so as to make room for a pluralism of the sort that I discuss in Sect. 5.1.

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Acknowledgements

For helpful discussion of this paper, I’m grateful to Justin D’Arms, Michael Hannon, Brian Kim, Declan Smithies, and an audience at the Ohio State University. Special thanks to Tristram McPherson, whose thoughts were invaluable at every stage of the drafting process.

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    James Fritz

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Fritz, J. Knowledge and the Many Norms on Action. Erkenn 87, 1191–1210 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00238-z

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