Abstract
Plausibly, how much is at stake in some salient practical task can affect how generously people ascribe knowledge of task-relevant facts. There is a metaphysical puzzle about this phenomenon, and an empirical puzzle. Metaphysically: there are competing theories about when and how practical stakes affect whether it is correct to ascribe knowledge. Which of these theories is the right one? Empirically: experimental philosophy has struggled to find a stakes-effect on people’s knowledge ascriptions. Is the alleged phenomenon just a philosopher’s fantasy?
I propose a new psychological account of when and why people’s knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to stakes. My hypothesis is motivated by empirical research on how people’s judgements are sensitive to their social context. Specifically, people’s evaluations are sensitive to their ‘psychological distance’ from the scenarios they are considering. When using ‘fixed-evidence probes’, experimental philosophy has found that what’s at stake for a fictional character in a made-up scenario has little or no effect on how participants ascribe knowledge to them. My hypothesis predicts this finding: the scenarios are too ‘psychologically distant’ to participants. Our empirical puzzle is resolved: the stakes-effect often present in the wild won’t be present in vignette studies. (This illustrates a widespread problem with X-phi vignette studies: if people might judge differently in other social contexts, we can’t generalize from the results of these experiments. That is, vignette studies are of doubtful ‘external validity’.) The hypothesis also resolves our metaphysical puzzle. It predicts that people do not ascribe knowledge in a way deemed correct by any of the standard philosophical views, namely classical invariantism, interest-relative invariantism, and contextualism. Our knowledge ascriptions shift around in the way that’s most useful for social beings like us, and this pattern in our judgements can only be endorsed by a genuinely relativist metaphysics for knowledge.
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Notes
Contextualists include DeRose (1992, 2009), Cohen (1999), Lewis (1996), Greco (2008: 432–5), Fricker (2008), Henderson (2011), Hannon (2013), McKenna (2013), and Blome-Tillmann (2014). ‘WAM-ing invariantism’ is the view that while “knows” always semantically expresses the same thing, people use the word to conversationally implicate a variety of other epistemic states, with results similar to contextualism; see §6.
Philosophers endorsing this notion of outright judgement include Harman (1986, chapters 3 & 5), Nagel (2010), Weisberg (2016), Holton (2014), Staffel (2013, 2019) and Friedman (2019). Occurrent partial belief is very different from ‘credence’, a dispositional notion defined in terms of betting behavior employed by decision theorists and formal epistemologists (Easwaran, 2011a, 2011b). Nor should occurrent partial belief be tied to the ‘epistemic’ or ‘evidential’ probabilities postulated by some philosophers (Williamson, 2000: chapters 9 & 10; Fantl & McGrath, 2009: chapters 1 & 7).
One might object that ‘perceptual choices’ are not outright judgements, but plans to press one button or the other. But one can judge that the dots are mostly moving to the left; and one can act on the basis of such a judgement, say by pressing a button. That’s how you’d approach a one-off instance of the task without time-pressure or reward. We’d need good reason to think things are different when people participate in studies concerning perceptual choice.
Standage et al. (2014 §4) argue that stakes also affect how evidence is encoded, and how it is then integrated.
DeRose (2009: 270–3) raises a case in which the subject acts on two practical questions separately but at once, using incompatible attitudes. Jane’s employer offers her a year’s free life insurance. She walks over to the benefits office to sign up—after all, you never know what might happen. On the way, Jane answers her cell phone. It’s one of Jane’s friends, asking whether she’s going to look for a different job in the near future. Jane says she won’t—she’ll still be working at the same place this time next year. She carries on walking to the benefits office for life insurance while occurrently judging that next year she will still be working at the same place, and thus assuming she won’t die in the meantime. She is able to keep separate the two settings in which the question arises as to where she’ll be in a year’s time. If Jane is asked why she is walking to the benefits office, she’ll revert to suspending judgement on whether she’ll be alive and working there this time next year. Jane is able to switch back and forth between calibrating to one practical task or the other, and thus the appropriate attitude to whether she’ll be working in the same place next year. This psychological ability is crucial to computationally efficient reasoning.
Shea et al. (2014) argue that the function of communicable metacognitive representations—presumably including knowledge ascriptions—is to improve complex cooperation. The suggestion is compatible with the concept of knowledge having evolved culturally rather than genetically (Shea et al., 2014: 191, Heyes 2018 chapter 7).
Nagel (2012: 186) anticipates claim (2). She suggests that “our own way of thinking” provides the “standard for evaluating the subject’s thinking”. There’s precedent for the idea that the mechanisms regulating one’s beliefs are central to evaluating the beliefs of others. Plausibly, the mechanisms regulating how we act play a role in evaluating the actions of others. According to Miller & Cushman (2013), we sometimes evaluate others morally by simulating acting in the relevant ways ourselves, and seeing how that would make us feel.
Turri et al. (2016) argue empirically that judgements about what someone should do (‘actionability judgements’) have a strong causal impact on our ascriptions of knowledge to them. According to (2), actionability judgements and knowledge ascriptions are instead sensitive to a common cause, namely one’s implicit standard for full belief, which is sensitive to the demands of the task one calibrates to. Turri et al. admit that their results can be well accounted for by such a common cause (2016: 220). They measure assertibility judgements rather than actionability judgements generally, which might be a special case (§8).
Nagel (2012) repudiates her (2010) psychological hypothesis, but still seems to be assuming classical invariantism. Considering possibilities of error makes us deny that more innocent subjects have knowledge. For example: if we consider the counterfactual possibility that the clock had stopped, then we judge that Wanda’s glance at the clock is not enough for her to know that it is 4:15 pm (Nagel 2012: 174–5). Nagel claims that we must reject these intuitions on the pain of general skepticism (p. 187). But that’s not right according to contextualism, nor the bolder relativism I favour (§9).
Nagel (2010) and Gerken (2017 chapter 12) argue that their hypotheses are well-motivated by existing psychological theories, but that’s been challenged vigorously. Dimmock (2019) criticises Nagel’s appeal to ‘egocentric bias’, and Dinges (2019: 121–5) criticises Gerken’s appeal to ‘attribute substitution’.
Nagel’s (2010) proposal is not designed to explain the X-phi results, and the prospects strike me as dim. Because it appeals to ‘egocentric bias’, Nagel’s theory implies that people with higher ‘need for cognition’ will show weaker stakes effects (Alexander et al., 2014). Philosophers have higher need for cognition than most people. So Nagel’s theory predicts that philosophers will show weaker stakes effects than ordinary people. That’s backwards: X-phi finds that ordinary people have stakes insensitive responses to vignettes, while many philosophers report stakes sensitive intuitions (§§7–8). It would be good to solidify this argument by testing whether need for cognition correlates with an individual’s stakes sensitivity, like Alexander et al. do for sensitivity to salient possibilities of error. Nagel (2012: 182–8) gives other reasons to doubt her (2010) hypothesis.
Could IRI weasel out of this indictment, claiming that talking to Hannah puts Bill in a high-stakes situation without him realizing? Then Bill doesn’t know, as per Hannah’s useful evaluation. (Stanley, 2005: 118–9 considers this manoeuvre.) This weaselling doesn’t solve the problem. Suppose that not much is at stake for Amy, and Bill tells her that the bank will be open on Saturday morning—he was there on a Saturday a couple of months back. Hannah eavesdrops. Hannah should still think Bill doesn’t know. But surely Hannah’s interests don’t trump Amy’s in defining Bill’s practical situation. The deep problem here for IRI is that people should be able to assess whether Bill knows using whatever standard is relevant to them. The next section brings this out by considering the useful knowledge ascriptions of both Hannah’s friends and Bill’s friends.
Even if CLT is not the right account of stakes effects, it may be the right account of other effects on information search and knowledge ascriptions. For example, Halamish and Liberman (2017) find that people underweight how annoying it is to sample marbles from two urns 100 times, when imaging doing it in a year’s time, or someone else doing it. Halamish & Liberman give a CLT explanation: when considering those psychologically distant scenarios, people represent the sampling process abstractly, rather than in concrete detail. That’s compatible with my proposal. However, they say CLT supports a general claim: “Psychological distance from a decision situation makes people construct larger data bases from which to draw conclusions.” (2017: 111.) If there is such a tendency, it must typically be swamped: surely people don’t expend more cognitive effort the less action-relevant a question is for them.
Many philosophers are attracted to principles like RKP:
(RKP) S can take p to be available as a reason for acting iff S knows that p.
(See Hawthorne & Stanley, 2008; Jackson, 2012.) An anonymous reviewer worries that my hypothesis predicts that people will accept counter-examples to RKP. That is: people would regularly make judgements of the form, “S doesn’t know that p but S should still act on p”, and, “S knows that p, but S shouldn’t act on p”, which they don’t. My hypothesis has no such consequence. Verdicts about whether S can take p to be a reason shift in lock-step with verdicts about whether S knows that p. Both are evaluated using an epistemic standard set by the task the judge calibrates to. (Considering what someone ought to do may often cause us to calibrate to their task—see the end of §8.)
I will assume that participants reading the high- and low-stakes versions of the vignettes attribute the same evidence to the characters. Nagel (2010: 429 n. 6, and p.c.) and Pinillos (2011 §4.3) challenge this assumption. They suggest that when participants read about a character in a high-stakes situation who nevertheless takes themselves to know, participants assume the character must have very strong evidence. If that’s right, then fixed-evidence vignette surveys would not show up any stakes-sensitivity in participants’ knowledge ascriptions.
Traditionalists should not gloat, for a related challenge arises for philosophers who rely on their own intuitions. Why rely on the intuitions one has in the seminar room, if one would give different verdicts in other, more engaged practical and social contexts?
Buckwalter & Schaffer (2015: 211–215) argue that Pinillos’ evidence-seeking study found a stakes effect on something, just not on knowledge. They asked participants high- and low-stakes variants of the following questions about knowing, guessing, or hoping:
How many times do you think Peter has to proofread his paper before he [knows/guesses/hopes] that there are no typos? ____ times.
They found the same patterns of response for “knows”, “guesses”, and “hopes”. Surely there is a common cause to the common pattern: people interpreted the three stimuli as asking the same question. Buckwalter & Schaffer say that participants answer how many times Peter has to proofread his paper, ignoring the subsequent words about knowing, hoping, or guessing. I say that in all three cases, participants answer the question about knowing. Participants will re-interpret the questions about hoping and guessing, because those questions are irrelevant and daft. First, what Peter hopes or guesses is of no import in the scenario. Second, Peter does not need to proofread his paper at all before he hopes or guesses it has no typos. The only sensible question in the vicinity is the one about knowing (or the equivalent one as to whether to act on the premise that there are no typos—see note 18). (Compare Dinges, 2019: 140–2.)
De Smedt and De Cruz (2015) argue that philosophical thought experiments typically don’t transport philosophers to the degree that reading science fiction does: thought experiment rarely cause strong emotions (though see FeldmanHall et al., 2012). I’ve claimed that philosophers—unlike survey participants—are transported enough by certain thought experiments to have stakes-sensitive intuitions about them. These claims are compatible, because it is easier to calibrate to a stranger’s task than to care about them. People usually give stakes-sensitive advice to a stranger asking for directions, even without a strong emotional reaction to their predicament.
Turri et al. (2016) use judgements about what someone should assert (e.g. write in their report) as their examples of judgements about what someone should do (‘actionability judgements’). I’ve given a functional reason to think assertibility judgements and actionability judgements have different effects on calibration, and thus on knowledge ascription.
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Acknowledgements
I thank the following for helpful conversations and feedback on earlier drafts: Anne Bosse, Andrew Cortens, Stephen Crowley, Chris Frith, Nat Hansen, Richard Holton, Brian Kierland, Rae Langton, Edouard Machery, Benjamin Marschall, Lucy McDonald, Jennifer Nagel, Ángel Pinillos, Baron Reed, David Rose, William Skylark, Jonathan Weisberg, and three anonymous referees for this journal. I would also like to thank the organizers and audiences at the Buffalo Experimental Philosophy Conference (2017), the Joint Session of the Aristotelian Society and the Mind Association (2017), the BARSEA epistemology workshop (2017), and the APA Central Division meeting (2016).
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Jackson, A. Are knowledge ascriptions sensitive to social context?. Synthese 199, 8579–8610 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03176-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03176-7