Abstract
This paper investigates ‘authoritative knowledge’, a neglected species of practical knowledge gained on the basis of exercising practical authority. I argue that, like perceptual knowledge, authoritative knowledge is non-inferential. I then present a broadly reliabilist account of the process by which authority yields knowledge, and use this account to address certain objections.
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Notes
I shall use locutions such as ‘x yields direct knowledge’ as shorthand for ‘we can gain knowledge directly on the basis of exercising x’.
More recently, it has received significant attention in philosophy of language (see n5 below). It is important that I’m concerned with what is sometimes called ‘practical authority’, such as a captain has over her soldiers. This is to be distinguished from what is sometimes called ‘epistemic authority’, which is the power to speak and be trusted on a certain subject. A doctorate degree in biology, for instance, might give you epistemic authority, insofar as it entitles you to speak and be trusted about certain biological subjects, without conferring any practical authority, such as the authority to command others. In pioneering work, Zagzebski (2015) appeals to the literature on practical authority to shed light on the notion of epistemic authority.
See Schwenkler (2015) for a helpful review of the literature on practical knowledge, along with a positive Anscombean account of the nature of the phenomenon.
Note that this is not meant as a reductive definition. That would require an independent characterization of the class of conventional means that define authority, which I am skeptical can be done.
Defenders of versions of KNA include Unger (1975), Slote (1979), Williamson (2000), DeRose (2002), Reynolds (2002), and Hawthorne (2004), among many others. Critics of the knowledge norm include Weiner (2005), Douven (2006), Lackey (2007), McKinnon (2013, 2015), Hill and Schechter (2007), and Schechter (2017).
My example of the captain is modelled after this case.
The other case is of someone writing something on a board without looking, discussed both earlier (p. 53) and immediately after (p. 82). The centrality of the builder case to the project of Intention has not been fully appreciated. It picks up the discussion about means from the previous section, and it is in turn picked up by much of the ensuing discussion, in particular at the end of §49, the section where Anscombe presents Aquinas’s definition of practical knowledge cited in my introduction (pp. 88–89). The example is crucial to Anscombe’s further ethical aims of providing a proper moral psychology [on this topic, see Schwenkler’s helpful introduction (2019)]. President Truman, after all, did not directly drop the atomic bombs, but he did have practical knowledge that they were dropped, having commanded this. However, as my aim is not Anscombe exegesis, I shall not pursue the point.
Here, I am disagreeing with Setiya (2016), who take practical knowledge to be merely a formal cause of intentional action. The example of the builder seems to me to make it clear that it is also the efficient cause of the thing known.
The knowledge is also the formal cause of the house by placing it in an instrumental order, making Anscombe’s special sense of the question ‘Why?’ applicable: e.g. ‘Why is the bathroom tiled thus?’ (Answer: ‘This tile is easy to clean’). This sense of the question is senseless for mere objects of nature, e.g. ‘Why is marble white?’.
For our purposes, it doesn’t much matter at this point whether the cognition at play always has the status of knowledge or a weaker state. I argue against the thesis that intentional action requires knowledge in Piñeros Glasscock (2019a), though I have become doubtful whether the thesis should be ascribed to Anscombe, as is universally assumed in the scholarship.
Perhaps not completely independent in the given example, since the status of a thing as a room or a wall is at least somewhat dependent on agents taking it to be such. But that is incidental. Consider the case of someone directing the placement of certain plants in a garden, and knowing, say, where the roses are on this basis.
It may call for a distinction along the lines Aristotle draws between craft knowledge (τέχνη) which concerns productions (ποιήσεις), and the knowledge associated with actions-proper (πράξεις) (EE/NE 6.5, 1140a24–b30) (Aristotle 1995). I discuss important differences between the two knowledges in Piñeros Glasscock (2019b).
Apart from the terminology, the definitions are the same as those influentially presented by Alston (1983). The main significant difference is that Alston recognizes two distinct ways in which knowledge might depend on other beliefs: “(a) having adequate evidence for the belief in question and (b) the belief in question having been arrived at by inference” (p. 75). However, Bird (2016) has convinced me that a belief is based on evidence just in case it is based on an inference where that evidence is used. So, I think (a) and (b) collapse into a single option.
Here and throughout the paper I shall assume the standard position—which I take to be correct—that we can have direct perceptual knowledge of ordinary material objects and the like (such as that a timer is going off). For an alternative, more restrictive view, see McGrath (2017).
I prefer ‘warranted’ (and cognates) to Alston’s ‘epistemized’ for stylistic reasons. I should also emphasize that my use of the term is meant to be consistent with knowledge-first views (Williamson 2000). For instance, following a suggestion by Williamson, one might hold that a knowledge state is warranted in virtue of being reliable, but hold also that the kind of reliability required for knowledge is defined in terms of knowledge (ib., p. 100).
Paul (2012) argues that knowledge of intentions is based on knowledge of decisions. Because decisions nearly always result in intentions, we have an entitlement to believe that we intend to do something when we decide to do so.
There are some complications about the nature of the acts in question and the difference between knowledge of ongoing and future action that, though important for Paul’s account of agential knowledge, are irrelevant for the application to authoritative knowledge.
‘Clash’ is DeRose’s (2002) term for the air of incompatibility associated with these sentences.
I thank a referee for pressing me on this point.
I am here taking a fairly standard view that belief is a disposition to judge and act on those judgments.
We saw this above in connection with knowledge that is required for concept possession.
Alternatively, if the grounds were a priori, one could argue, following Peacocke (2003), that we are entitled to form beliefs on the basis of these facts without the need of an inference.
For the record, I doubt that logical proofs that employ the classical universal introduction rule [using stipulative steps that employ so-called ‘arbitrary objects’ (Fine 1985, 1983)] can be reduced to different inferential forms. King (1991) attempts a reduction of the sort, but it suffers from well-known difficulties (Breckenridge and Magidor 2012).
Another way in which one might form a false belief is if one mistakenly uses one’s authority. For instance, the person performing the proof might use a variable that she is not permitted to use at that step of the proof (e.g. because it already has been given a referent).
The two central sources of inspiration for the view are Ernest Sosa’s virtue-theoretic account of knowledge in terms of competently formed judgment, developed over a series of writings (2015, 2010, 2007), and Gareth Evan’s account of the discriminative knowledge which, following Russell, he took to be a requirement for singular thought (1982).
My understanding of this first condition is where I am most indebted to Evans (1982, especially ch. 5), though his influence is also evident in the discriminating component of the second condition.
We could give graded conditions in terms of accuracy, and there are some advantages to this view, but for our purposes the non-graded account will suffice.
See Huemer (2013) for a helpful summary of work on conservatism.
See e.g. Goldman (1967).
As noted in n28.
The contrast shouldn’t be overemphasized, though. It would be hard for creatures like us either to keep the world on track without the help of our theoretical systems (e.g. checking that matters are going as they should), or keep track of the world without the help of our practical systems (moving around an object to better determine its nature as revealed by sight).
In the conventional cases, such as those of the artist, the father, and stipulative knowledge, the skills of the person in authority are the most fundamental, though even here uptake skills may be relevant, in light of the kind of failures we find in cases such as the baptism of John the Baptist, discussed below. We could easily imagine a similar case where a baptismal act fails on account of failure of competence on the part of an audience that fails to recognize the baptismal character of an act.
Perhaps it is better to treat this as a case where the bully has or gains de facto authority, even though it is illegitimate (cf. n5). If this is the right analysis of the case, then I hold that the bully can acquire direct knowledge on the basis of exercising authority (supposing the other features of the account are met). I should nonetheless register that my views on this matter are hesitant, and would be open to being convinced that the thesis should be broader in scope, encompassing forms of consciously exercised powers other than authority.
I thank an anonymous reviewer for forcefully pressing me on these points.
For such a general reply, see Alston’s (1983) response to what he calls the “Level Ascent” argument (pp. 80–91).
Or, at least, the agent will have good reason to think the systems are malfunctioning. There are three alternative ways to treat these cases: (1) treat them as cases of defeat, and, as many accounts of direct knowledge do, add an anti-defeat condition to the account; (2) treat them as cases of defeat, but argue that they amount to knowledge despite our intuitions to the contrary (as in Lasonen-Aarnio (2010)); or (3) argue, along the lines argued below for beliefs (b)–(d), that someone who forms beliefs in situations where they have good reason to think the systems are malfunctioning fails to form beliefs reliably.
This alerts us to a different problem: knowledge cannot be warranted by practical reasons (reasons, for instance, to do with desirability or worthwhileness). I agree that forming beliefs on the basis of such reasons is epistemically suspect (though see, e.g. Marušić and Schwenkler (2018) and Rinard (2017, 2018) for the contrary view). However, the question is besides the point here. On my account, the epistemic grounds for authoritative beliefs are exercises of authority rather than the reasons for exercising authority, which may of course be practical. To use a distinction familiar from ethical contexts: the former are backward-looking grounds, the latter forward-looking.
The most sophisticated treatment of this worry is by Langton (2004), targeting Velleman’s (2001) cognitivist account of intention. Note, however, that on Langton’s considered view (2009), an externalist account of knowledge may suffice to allay her initial worries. The present considerations are meant to support this view.
This is suggested by the sentences surrounding the quoted passage, where James speaks of “may”s and “maybe”s that are most naturally taken as epistemic (pp. 53–54).
I believe this falls short of being an epistemic injustice in Fricker’s sense (2007). This is because although Elizabeth incurs an epistemic harm, the primary way in which it is inflicted is not epistemic.
Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the Epistemology Colloquium at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, and at Yale University. I thank the participants for discussion and comments, especially David Bakhurst, Jeremy Butler, and Chirstine Sypnowhich. I also thank Jewelle L. Bickell, Maxime Lepoutre, and Christopher M. Cloos for comments, and Allison Piñeros Glasscock, Mike Deigan, Jo Demaree-Cotton, Eric Guindon, Mark Maxwell, Daniel Moerner, Jessie Munton, Paul Schilling, Tim Williamson, and Yuan Yuan for discussion. The paper was substantially improved by the comments of two anonymous referees. Finally, thanks especially to David Charles, Steve Darwall, Reier Helle, Jason Stanley, Gideon Yaffe, and Zoltán Gendler Szabó for comments and discussion on earlier drafts. Research on this project was supported by the University of Toronto-Mississauga Postdoctoral Fellowship Award Program, sponsored by their Philosophy Department and the UTM Office of the Vice-Principal, Research.
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Piñeros Glasscock, J.S. Authoritative Knowledge. Erkenn 87, 2475–2502 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00313-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-020-00313-5