Abstract
Fricker (2006a) has proposed that a hearer’s knowledge that p acquired through trusting a speaker requires the speaker to know that p, and that therefore testimonial knowledge through trust is necessarily second-hand knowledge. In this paper, I argue that Fricker’s view is problematic for four reasons: firstly, Fricker’s dismissal of a central challenge to the second-handedness of testimonial knowledge is based on a significant misrepresentation of this challenge; secondly, on closer scrutiny an important distinction Fricker wants to draw is compromised by her account of trust; thirdly, Fricker’s conception of trust is at odds with our natural understanding of this notion; fourthly, the reasons Fricker cites in support of her view are not sufficient to single out her view as the correct one, since rival views can also accommodate the relevant data.
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Notes
Several theorists endorse this principle. See, e.g., Ross (1975), Burge (1993, p. 486), McDowell (1994), Welbourne (1994), Reynolds (2002), Audi (1997, p. 410). For criticism of SHTK, see Lackey (1999, 2008), Graham (2006), and Carter and Nickel (2014). I will be discussing Lackey’s challenge in detail in what follows.
Only apparently, because S may maliciously tell H that p even while knowing p to be false, and so without actually aiming to inform H of the truth of p. On Fricker’s account of tellings, which in this respect dovetails with a common usage of ‘telling’, tellings can be false.
This account as stated in Fricker (2006a) seems to differ from Hinchman’s, who thinks that whether S tells H that p depends on H’s recognition that S intends H to gain an entitlement to believe p, rather than merely on S’s intention that this happen (see Hinchman 2005). However, in other work Fricker insists that a successful telling requires H’s recognition, thus bringing her account closer to Hinchman’s (Fricker 2002, p. 376).
Although it is controversial whether the two locutions should be interchangeable, I will assume them to be so in the present context of criticizing Fricker’s view.
Fricker is rightly adamant that this argument only spells out the epistemic grounding relations between beliefs that can be attributed to the hearer, and does not necessarily illustrate the actual inferential process a hearer goes through in order to acquire belief that p. Consequently, the hearer’s knowledge of p may be based on the grounding argument even though the hearer does not consciously perform the inference from the argument’s premises to its conclusion.
See Fricker (1987, 1994, 1995, 2002, 2004, 2006b) for details of her reductionist view. Note that Fricker thinks that the reductionist picture only applies to epistemically mature humans. By contrast, testimonial knowledge possessed by those who have yet to reach epistemic maturity (e.g. small children) cannot be reduced to non-testimonial justification (Fricker 1995). Following Fricker (2006a), I will only discuss testimonial transactions involving hearers who are epistemically mature.
Some background: Lackey (1999) proposed several cases in which allegedly a hearer acquires testimonial knowledge that p from a speaker who doesn’t know that p. In her (2008), Lackey dropped all cases except for Creationist Teacher (probably because they are weaker cases) and added a new one called Consistent Liar. I will only discuss Creationist Teacher as it is Lackey’s central case and the one most discussed in the literature. I will not discuss Consistent Liar, since it would be unfair to object to Fricker for not accommodating a case that was published after her (2006a) was. Nor will I discuss Peter Graham’s case of testimonial knowledge from non-knowledge (Graham 2006), as it is simply a version of Creationist Teacher tweaked to avoid the objection that the textbook author, not the teacher, is the source of testimony—an objection that is not relevant to my discussion.
One part of Lackey’s multi-pronged response to Fricker (in Lackey 2008, pp. 98–102) is that in an intuitive sense, the pupils trust Stella. But Lackey misses the dialectically stronger point I’ve made here, that even by Fricker’s own idiosyncratic conception of trust, the pupils trust Stella. So Fricker’s own view—and not just arguments independent of her views—stands in tension with her objection that the knowledge acquired by the pupils is not gained through trust.
Fricker might try to reply by conceding that the pupils trust Stella, that they gain knowledge of p, yet maintain that their knowledge is not acquired by trust. But this looks mysterious. If one is already committed to the view that trust (as conceived by Fricker) accounts for testimonial knowledge, what else could account for the pupils’ knowledge in this case, where trust is patently present? If this line of response is viable, Fricker bears the onus of providing a satisfactory account of when, in the presence of trust, knowledge is acquired by this trust and when it isn’t. On pains of begging the question this account cannot simply appeal to whether the speaker knows or doesn’t. The viability of this reply on Fricker’s behalf also depends on her providing an adequate account of how to distinguish cases where knowledge is gained in the presence of trust but not by trust, and when it’s gained in the absence of trust, i.e. merely by being an audience to testimony. I am grateful to an anonymous referee for raising this point.
Thanks to Elia Zardini for his help in developing this objection.
One might resist the thought that you believe this counterfactual on the grounds that it is not entailed by your belief in the biconditional Burattino knows that p just in case p. While it’s true that there is no relation of entailment between the biconditional and the counterfactual, this is far too strong a requirement. It is sufficient that in this case your evidence provides adequate (though perhaps non-entailing) justification to believe the counterfactual. We could also stipulate, without loss of effectiveness, that you have observed the correlation between Burattino’s nose shrinking and his knowledge many times in the past. This would serve as an adequate basis for believing the counterfactual. Note that even with the aid of this observational evidence you are still treating Burattino as an instrument on this occasion, since your acceptance of his testimony depends on the fact that his nose shrinks. In other words, adding the evidence from past observations of the bizarre correlation is compatible with the fact that you wouldn’t believe him outright without the additional evidence of his nose shrinking. Thanks to Tim Button and Branden Fitelson for discussion of this point.
Although Fricker does not discuss this in detail, there is some textual evidence suggesting that she thinks of belief in the counterfactual that constitutes trust as prior to the actual utterance, when she writes ‘But her [H’s] belief about S which constitutes her trust, antecedent to her utterance, is something like this: S is such that not easily would she assert that p, vouch for the truth of p, unless she knew p.’ (600, my emphasis). I’m not sure if this is always a good way to think about this belief; after all, one would want to allow that a belief concerning the content of someone’s utterance might be formed after the speaker has uttered that content, since the speakers’ trustworthiness (as Fricker acknowledges when she localises trust to specific tellings) can vary depending on the topic they speak of and on what they say. Be that as it may, we can easily adjust the Burattino example to accommodate the view that trust must be antecedent to the utterance. We just need to assume that you are aware of the following contingent fact about Burattino: his nose shrinks just in case the content he is about to assert is something he knows, and you have seen his nose shrink just before he asserted p. Thanks to an anonymous referee for raising this issue.
One might object that upon hearing Burattino and observing his nose shrink you might not form a belief in the trust-constituting counterfactual, but rather form a belief in a different counterfactual, such as Burattino’s nose would not have shrunk unless he knew that p. But this objection is not compelling, because belief in the trust-constituting counterfactual need not be occurrent—it must merely be something the hearer would assent to, if she considered it. And clearly, the hearer who hears Burattino’s assertion, sees his nose shrink and knows of the bizarre correlation between the latter and Burattino’s knowledge of what he asserts would assent to the trust-constituting counterfactual. Fricker’s insistence that the Grounding Argument gives an epistemic, not a psychological, account of how testimonial belief is justified dovetails with this point—the hearer need not explicitly consider any of the premises of that argument, including the content of the trust-constituting belief which is a premise in that argument. But, importantly, she would assent to this content if she considered it.
More evidence for this view: in an introductory list of the distinctive features of trust, Hawley (2014) includes the fact that ‘[p]ractical reasons to trust can outstrip the evidence’, which suggests that trust is distinct from belief. Even Annette Baier, who in her groundbreaking (1986) claimed that one cannot decide to trust, later conceded that trusting is something we may decide to do (Baier 1992, p. 123). On the reasonable assumption that one cannot believe at will, this puts pressure on doxastic accounts of trust. For one dissenting voice, however, see Pamela Hieronymi’s doxastic account of trust that seeks to explain away these non-doxastic phenomena (Hieronymi 2008).
Note that insisting that H’s trust must be antecedent to S’s telling (see footnote 14) doesn’t provide an escape route from the objection raised in this section, since this involves cases where H trusts the speaker but does not hold the belief which Fricker deems trust-constituting, either before or after the telling. Thanks to an anonymous referee here.
‘This is the distinctive mechanism involved in the spreading of knowledge through trust in telling, and in testimony more broadly’ [my italics]. (601)
Along similar lines, one might argue that ’trust’ is just a label, and that we could do without this in evaluating Fricker’s account. So the failure of Fricker’s view of trust to accommodate key cases which the dominant view in the literature on trust is capable of preserving would be irrelevant. On this view, any talk of ’H trusting S’ is to be reinterpreted as H believing the counterfactual S wouldn’t assert p unless S knew p. The worry with this line is that, as the cases above show, belief in this counterfactual does not capture what we think of as trusting someone’s testimony. And insofar as this is taken as reason to deem the cases irrelevant, we lose sight of the natural subject matter we are meant to theorise over.
I take ‘purporting to know’ and ‘representing oneself as knowing’ to be equivalent in this context, so I will use them interchangeably.
Fricker might reply that she is simply assuming this to be the case. But, while this thesis is a natural companion to the knowledge norm of assertion and a component of the ‘knowledge-first’ epistemology championed by Williamson (2000) and endorsed by several contemporary philosophers, knowledge-first epistemology and the knowledge norm of assertion are by no means uncontroversial views. So at the very least, Fricker’s views would be dialectically effective only for those who share this kind of view (for arguments in favour of rivals to the knowledge norm, see e.g. Douven 2006; Lackey 2007. For a recent critical study of ‘knowledge-first’ epistemology, see McGlynn 2014).
I am assuming this fallibilist view of justification for the purposes of this argument. Those who disagree can point to an alternative proposal to Fricker’s which also satisfies the entailment requirement, as we will see.
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Acknowledgments
For helpful discussion on the themes of this paper, I am grateful to Tim Button, Branden Fitelson, Lauren Garrett, Peter Hartl, Giacomo Melis, Ulrich Stegmann, Paula Sweeney, Stephan Torre, Matthew Townsend, Elia Zardini, and to participants of the Knowledge from Non-Knowledge Symposium at the University of Cambridge and of the Basic Knowledge Workshop X at the Northern Institute of Philosophy, University of Aberdeen.
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Luzzi, F. Is Testimonial Knowledge Second-Hand Knowledge?. Erkenn 81, 899–918 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9774-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-015-9774-6