Abstract
In other work I have defended the claim that, when we rely on other speakers by accepting what they tell us, our reliance on them differs in epistemically relevant ways from our reliance on instruments, when we rely on them by accepting what they “tell” us. However, where I have explored the former sort of reliance at great length (Goldberg 2010), I have not done so with the latter. In this paper my aim is to do so. My key notions will be those of our social practices, the normative expectations that are sanctioned by those practices, and the epistemically engineered environments constituted by some of these practices. With these notions in mind, I will argue that one’s reliance on instruments, while relevantly different (epistemically speaking) from one’s reliance on other speakers, can nevertheless manifest a kind of epistemic dependence which epistemological theory can and should acknowledge.
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Notes
In Goldberg (2015) I offer an account of the mechanism by which something like this promise is made when one makes an assertion.
The concepts in (i) and (ii) are drawn from Goldberg (forthcoming a, forthcoming b). The concept in (iii) is being introduced here for the first time.
In fact, the point is more general than epistemic instruments, and holds for technologies generally. But in this paper I focus on epistemic instruments only.
Unless, of course, there has been some innovation relevant to our use of them, in which case we are entitled to expect that we will have been informed of this.
See Goldberg (forthcoming a) for a detailed presentation of the generation of the defeater.
Compare Palermos (2016).
Objection: the belief isn’t justified in any objective sense; at best it is justified only in a subjective sense. Reply: it is hard to see how this objection can be made without being committed to the implausible view that all false beliefs are unjustified. For if there are cases of false beliefs that are justified, then surely there are cases like the above in which the subject’s evidence was sufficiently good to justify. In that case, it would seem that the only way to resist this is to say that because the belief was false, it cannot be the case that the subject’s evidence was sufficiently good to justify (I thank an anonymous reviewer for indicating the need to address this point).
One implication of my analysis is noteworthy. We cannot tell, merely from the fact that an instrument was unreliable on an occasion on which one relied on it in belief-formation, whether one’s belief is justified or not. This will turn on whether the unreliability reflects an unmet expectation one was entitled to have of the designers and manufacturers of the instrument.
As a result, it may turn out the Gettier cases of the sort Russell described in the stopped-clock case are less common than previously supposed (some will find this implication unwanted; but for my part I regard this as a feature, not a bug). This will be so (according to my analysis) if, in addition to the social practices involving the design and manufacture etc. of epistemic instruments there are also practices regarding the maintenance of instruments—i.e., if we are entitled to expect that people wind their watches, or monitor their clocks for stoppage etc. If there are such practices, then even a stopped-clock case can be a case of one’s justification being defeated. A stopped-clock case will be a Gettier case, then, when there are no relevant expectations of maintenance. Difficult questions arise when we consider these cases in detail; I hope to return to this matter in future work.
This is the analogue, in the case of social practices, of a point that is often made in the epistemology of testimony literature, regarding the sort of evidence that one might have to justify belief in the credibility of testimony by a heretofore unfamiliar speaker. To see this, note that the social practices I have in mind concern those bound up with our use of epistemic instruments. The norms of these practices pertain to the interpretability and reliability of the instruments. Insofar as one is familiar with social practices, one is in a position to infer, regarding any particular social practice that is legitimate and ongoing, that it is highly likely that its norms are followed. Insofar as one is familiar with the practices regarding our use of epistemic instruments, one can apply one’s background knowledge about social practices generally, to conclude that the (interpretability and reliability) norms governing the practice of our use of instruments are likely to be followed. In this way, one’s familiarity with social practices can justify one’s belief that the reliability norms in play on an occasion on which one uses a given instrument are highly likely to be satisfied. The analogue with speakers is this: familiarity with various speech situations (used car salespeople are unreliable; people giving directions are reliable; etc.) can justify one’s belief that a particular person is reliable in what she tells one.
The problem of rational acceptance has an analogue in the first-person case: should one accept the current deliverances of one’s perceptual faculties? However, the particular nature of the problem differs when the source is something other than one’s own faculties, if only because—arguably—the question of whether to trust the source is different when the source is not one’s own basic cognitive faculties (but see Foley 2001; Zagzebski 2007, 2012; Goldberg (forthcoming b) for some potential qualifications to this claim).
These include assumptions about one’s environment, about the individuals from whom one “learns” the language, about the utterances that serve as one’s inputs, and so forth.
After my example is given, it should be clear how to think about epistemic engineering in connection with the problem of interpretation, though I won’t bother to illustrate the point here.
Of course, the situation is dynamic, since insofar as Ursula accepts many false statements over the course of the term, her background belief set will warp what she goes on to regard as plausible, leading her to regard other false claims as plausible, hence increasing the percentage of false claims she accepts. I disregard these complications above.
In Goldberg (2008) I defend a version of this sort of thesis as it pertains to very young children; and in Goldberg (forthcoming b) I develop a theory of epistemic justification that would be suitable for framing the claims to follow.
Obviously, knowledge requires other conditions being satisfied (e.g. truth and the anti-Gettier condition). I ignore this point here.
See Goldberg (forthcoming b).
See Goldberg (2008).
I thank an anonymous referee for indicating the need for making this point explicit.
I owe these examples to an anonymous referee.
Compare Goldberg (2008).
References
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Zagzebski, L. (2012). Epistemic authority: A theory of trust, authority, and autonomy in belief. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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With thanks to two anonymous referees for this journal, as well as Fernando Broncano-Berrocal, Adam Carter, Pascal Engel, Lizzie Fricker, John Greco, Bjørn Hallsson, Klemens Kappel, Chris Kelp, Jennifer Lackey, Ben McMyler, Jesús Vega, and many others in the audience at the Epistemic Dependence conference in Madrid, January 2016.
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Goldberg, S.C. Epistemically engineered environments. Synthese 197, 2783–2802 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1413-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1413-0