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Justification as the appearance of knowledge

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Abstract

Adequate epistemic justification is best conceived as the appearance, over time, of knowledge to the subject. ‘Appearance’ is intended literally, not as a synonym for belief. It is argued through consideration of examples that this account gets the extension of ‘adequately justified belief’ at least roughly correct. A more theoretical reason is then offered to regard justification as the appearance of knowledge: If we have a knowledge norm for assertion, we do our best to comply with this norm when we express as assertions only beliefs that appear to us to be knowledge. If we are doing our best, there is little point in further sanctions. So a norm of knowledge for assertion would lead to a secondary norm of justified belief as the appearance of knowledge, marking a point at which our assertions may be corrected but should not be blamed.

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Notes

  1. Previously proposed, but not defended, in Reynolds (1998, pp. 533–534, 2002, pp. 151–152).

  2. Smithies (2011) suggests that justified belief is subjectively indiscriminable from knowledge, which sounds close to what I am suggesting, but he endorses a cognitive account of indiscriminability: “the subject in question cannot know that he instantiates the one state while also knowing that he does not instantiate the other”. The claim that justified belief is subjectively indiscriminable from knowledge is apparently treated as a substantive assertion about the relation of the two, rather than an attempt to give a reductive account of epistemic justification.

  3. On some views beliefs that, as it were, transcribe the content of an associated appearance are said to be prima facie justified, regardless of the type of appearance involved (Huemer 2007) or at least prima facie justified if the appearance is a perceptual appearance (McDowell 1994; Pryor 2000). That is not the sort of appearance I have in mind.

  4. See Bar-On (2004), for discussion of such views, and endorsement of a well worked out “avowals” view of self-knowledge.

  5. Conee and Feldman argue that we have more confidence in the justified beliefs and that they seem to us more likely to have been supported by a good source. But this seems awfully thin for justification (Conee and Feldman 2001, pp. 69–72).

  6. See Smithies’s distinction between high confidence and belief (Smithies 2011).

  7. This view of justification thus allows that the knowledge version of the lottery paradox and the justification version should have parallel answers (Nelkin 2000).

  8. David Lewis expresses a similar view, as have others (Lewis 1999, pp. 439–440).

  9. Please note that this comment is very limited in its aims. It seeks merely to defuse Cartesian skeptical hypotheses as an apparent counterexample to my thesis, not to suggest, let alone argue for, any particular response to Cartesian skepticism itself.

  10. For those who agree with Williamson’s account of what an assertion is, that is a speech act governed by the knowledge norm, this is the question whether we should make assertions or perhaps should instead share information through some other speech act, not governed by the knowledge norm.

  11. A curious case of respect for age: “About 1910 (aged 25) I passed, near Coton in Cambridgeshire, a pair of girls about 8 or 9. One had the face of an angel. Before they were out of ear-shot, angel-face said: I was going to say “bugger” when I saw the old man” (Littlewood 1986, p. 162). Also interesting is Littlewood’s reaction on seeing a kindred norm of respect apparently being violated by Hardy, who was then very youthful looking: “In my first year, Dons lunched at the same table as undergraduates, and I once innocently happened to sit next to a block of them. Presently I heard what was apparently an undergraduate chaffing the infinitely venerable Henry Jackson, with great elegance and verve on both sides” (Littlewood 1986, p. 120). We would think less of Littlewood’s respect for the relevant social norms if he didn’t find this incident remarkable, precisely because we judge whether people are reacting appropriately to the way things appear, not merely to the way they are, and it appeared to him that an undergraduate was engaged in insufficiently respectful conversation with an elderly Don.

  12. Williamson allows that we may reasonably believe that we know, without knowing, and holds that it is reasonable to assert in those circumstances, though still in violation of the norm if we don’t really know (Williamson 2000, p. 256). If “reasonable to believe” is understood in the way I recommend for ‘justified belief’, that is, it is reasonable for S to believe p if and only if it appears to S to be knowledge that p, then this suggestion is equivalent to my proposal. Williamson suggests however that what it means is “highly probable on the evidence” and here I am avoiding talk of evidence and the corresponding notion of probability. In discussing a different case he comments that “it is quite reasonable for me to believe not just that there is snow outside but that I know that there is; for me, it is to all appearances a banal case of perceptual knowledge” (Williamson 2000, p. 257). His use of “appearances” rather suggests my own view, but it seems likely to be a matter of speaking loosely, since he evidently thinks the probabilistic inferential relation to evidence is the correct literal characterization.

  13. Of course philosophical theorizing on these very topics may make philosophers atypical, as inclined to give variant answers to protect our theories, or to be just a little uncertain about the customs from being pushed about by the winds of argument, or even just by others’ confident claims. If so, we may become unreliable as sources of information about our own customs. But I shall follow the usual (philosophical) custom and hesitantly assume that we are entitled to rely on our carefully considered intuitions, as at least normally an independent check on philosophical theory.

  14. It has been suggested that the evidence whether we have such norms would be “linguistic” evidence (Stanley 2005; Douven 2006). This seems much too narrow, unless one is considering, not whether we have such a norm, but merely whether such a norm is essential to the speech act of assertion. Whether we have a norm of knowledge for assertion would be discovered by considering observations and intuitions of what we do, or would, or should, say, and feel about so saying, in a wide variety of perceptual and cognitive situations. This evidence seems to be much more various and less obviously linguistic than, say, intuitions about sentences’ being grammatical, or utterances being phonemically acceptable, or about whether a described speech act counts as an assertion.

  15. Douven (2006, pp. 473–476) suggests that we may so speak because most assertions that satisfy the “rational to believe” norm that (he thinks) really applies will also be such that we know them and it might be less persuasive to note that we don’t actually know them. We do sometimes say, in questioning an assertion, “Why do you think so?”. That presupposes that it is rational to think so, rather than that one knows it. But on the knowledge view it makes sense to ask about a necessary condition of knowledge, if we mean to cast doubt on the assertion. If knowledge is the norm of assertion then by asserting one represents oneself as knowing, and therefore also represents oneself as reasonably believing. But if rational belief is the norm, one doesn’t represent oneself as knowing by asserting, so it is not so natural to ask how one knows. Compare “why are you so certain?” A mere assertion wouldn’t indicate any great degree of certainty, so it would be quite consistent to reply that one wasn’t certain, unless something about one’s tone of voice in making the assertion suggested certainty. The similar explanation of the Moore paradoxical sentences seems even less plausible, since on the suggestion that we are speaking loosely, taking ‘knows’ as a rough stand-in for ‘rationally believes,’ the Moore paradoxical sentence should merely seem unusual, not paradoxical. Douven acknowledges this, but sets it aside with some comments about how we often find it difficult to make a distinction between pragmatic infelicities such as he claims and inconsistencies such as the knowledge account claims. However, Douven’s suggestion that maybe we’re getting it wrong in our impression of what’s going on, although not obviously false, isn’t very convincing as an account of our systematic reaction to these cases. Other things equal, regularity in correct responses seems more likely than regularity in mistakes.

  16. In order to make a connection between belief and assertion in a similar context, Douven (2006, p. 453) adopts a suggestion he finds in Williamson (2000, p. 255) and Adler (2002, p. 74), to the effect that belief just is (sufficiently like) internal assertion. The proposal in the text maintains the dissimilarities, in a way that seems to me easier to defend than the assimilation.

  17. Norms governing belief will thus not immediately apply to assertions and vice versa. For example, a norm of tact applies to assertions, not to beliefs, precisely because the beliefs are not accessible to others and so cannot cause the interpersonal problems that the corresponding assertions would cause.

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to Arizona State University for a sabbatical leave during which the first draft of this paper was written. Thanks to my students at ASU, to the audience of an American Philosophical Association Colloquium in April 2010, and especially to Stewart Cohen, Bernard Kobes, and Michael White for helpful comments on earlier drafts.

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Correspondence to Steven L. Reynolds.

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Reynolds, S.L. Justification as the appearance of knowledge. Philos Stud 163, 367–383 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9820-4

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