Abstract
According to the safety condition, a subject knows that p only if she would believe that p only if p was true. The safety condition has been a very popular necessary condition for knowledge of late. However, it is well documented that the safety condition is trivially satisfied in cases where the subject believes in a necessary truth. This is for the simple reason that a necessary truth is true in all possible worlds, and therefore it is true in all possible worlds where it is believed. But clearly, all beliefs concerning necessary truths do not amount to knowledge. The safety theorists have attempted to deal with the problem caused by necessary truths by restricting the safety condition to purely contingent truths and by globalizing the safety condition to a set of propositions. Both of these solutions are problematic. The principal aim of this paper is to develop a version of the safety condition that is able to deal with cases featuring necessary truths.
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Notes
Roland and Cogburn (2011) have argued that safety conditions are unable to deal with cases featuring necessary truths.
In his later work Pritchard (2015) has rejected the significance condition.
Pritchard (2012) no longer thinks that knowledge can be analysed solely in terms of the safety condition but has added a separate virtue-theoretic condition to his analysis.
Note that “being presented with a barn-shaped object” can be interpreted along internalist lines, as a barn-shaped being present to one’s consciousness, or along externalist lines as a barn-shaped object being present in one’s (physical) environment. Given Pritchard’s claim that the basis should be understood externally I take it that he has the later interpretation in mind.
See Clark and Chalmers (1998) for the extended mind hypothesis.
Perhaps Pritchard could claim that BOWL OF FRUIT and THERMOMETERS are actually cases of knowledge since they feature only evidential epistemic luck, which is compatible with knowledge possession. By executing such a maneuver, Pritchard would concede that his theory gives unintuitive verdicts regarding certain cases. However, there is reason to doubt that Pritchard would be inclined to make such a move, since he thinks that the barn façade case features environmental luck, which is knowledge undermining, and the BOWL OF FRUIT case is very similar to the barn façade case. Furthermore, even if THERMOMETERS did feature evidential luck, we cannot infer from this fact alone that it does not feature a knowledge undermining luck also.
A ‘case’ is a subject-centred possible world. Here after I will refer to cases as possible worlds for the sake of simplification.
Of course Williamson could provide independent reasons for thinking that the relevant differences are big in cases like WATER, while they are not big enough in the barn façade case. An anonymous referee objected that Williamson could claim that the cases differ not just with respect to knowledge but also in the causal structure of how the subject gained a true belief. According to the referee “in the bad case in WATER, what’s in the glass is causally influenced by a mental state of a third party that simply isn’t present in the good case; whereas in the barn case, whether one is looking at a barn or a façade doesn’t depend causally on any such thing.” However, there is reason to doubt whether such differences are epistemically relevant. Luper (2006, pp. 164–165), for instance, has argued that whether the fact that one is in a good case or bad case depends on someone else’s mental states, or on non-agential features of the case, does not make a difference to the epistemic state of the subject.
See Williamson (1994, pp. 231–234) for similar safety-style reasoning.
The version of the generality problem that inflicts SAFETY is concerned with the question how the method of belief formation that the subject uses in the actual world should be individuated. Since the extension of safe beliefs will vary greatly between different ways of individuating methods of belief formation, as we have seen, a SAFETY-based theory of knowledge is radically incomplete without a solution to the generality problem.
In what follows I will use the terms “competence” and “virtue” interchangeably.
Greco (2016) advocates a version of the safety condition that is relativized to the subject’s cognitive virtues. He motivates the safety condition by arguing that the satisfaction of a properly formulated virtue-theoretic condition entails the satisfaction of a properly formulated safety condition.
Epistemologists, such as Carter (2016), Gaultier (2014), Greco (2007), Littlejohn (2014), Turri (2016) and Pritchard (2012), who think that knowledge requires the satisfaction of both a virtue-theoretic condition and a safety condition, should be inclined to accept SAFETY\(^{V}\) as a necessary condition for knowledge. I (forthcoming) have argued elsewhere that virtue epistemologists should reject the idea that in cases of knowledge the cognitive success that the subject attains is creditable to the subject’s cognitive abilities and embrace SAFETY\(^{V}\) instead.
Ball has recently proposed that “a subject S’s belief that p is safe if, and only if, S could not easily have believed a false answer to the question Q to which p is saliently an answer” (2016, p. 60). He recognizes that the safety condition should be relativized to a question to which the proposition believed in the actual world is an answer. However, he does not commit himself to any view as to how the relevant question is to be determined nor does he define the safety condition in detail. While his view lacks some details that the view offered here possesses I take it that his view is compatible with the account I propose and able to deal with cases featuring necessary truths.
But could we not claim that Sofia’s subject matter of inquiry is “are there any apples in the bowl?” If that was her subject matter of inquiry she could not easily have ended up with a false belief in her inquiry and hence would satisfy the proposed safety condition (I would like to thank an anonymous referee for raising this objection). In order to make it salient that Sofia’s subject matter of inquiry is restricted to this very particular question we would have to add a lot of details to the case. It could not, for instance, be the case that Sofia is about make a fruit salad, since in that case she would be interested in finding fruits. Crucially, if we fill in the missing details of the case so that Sofia’s subject matter of inquiry cannot be thought to be “what is in the bowl”, but is saliently “are there any apples in the bowl” there is pressure to think that Sofia gains knowledge in the case after all. Greco (2012, p. 23), for example, has argued that cases of environmental luck, such as the barn façade case, do not seem to be cases of ignorance if the practical task that the subject sets out to complete is restricted in such a way that the subject is guaranteed to form a true belief in completing the task. Greco emphasizes that most knowledge claims are not so narrowly associated with a specific task, and hence in most contexts of knowledge attribution the subject in the barn façade county does not have knowledge.
The difference between the field of propositions F and subject matter of inquiry Q is that F is comprised of propositions that the subject could form a belief in by exercising the epistemic virtue that she uses in the actual world to form her belief and Q is comprised of the propositions that are possible answers to the question that the subject aims to answer.
See also Karjalainen and Morton (2003).
See Dretske (1970, p. 1016) for the case.
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank audiences at Uppsala, Tampere and Helsinki where this paper was presented. Thanks also to Matti Eklund, Jani Hakkarainen, Sebastiano Moruzzi, Jaakko Kuorikoski, Markus Lammenranta, Tuukka Tanninen, Peter Schulte and two anonymous referees at Synthese whose comments helped me improve this paper.
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Hirvelä, J. Global safety: how to deal with necessary truths. Synthese 196, 1167–1186 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1511-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1511-z