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Stakes, withholding, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledge

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Abstract

Several authors have recently endorsed the thesis that there is what has been called pragmatic encroachment on knowledge—in other words, that two people who are in the same situation with respect to truth-related factors may differ in whether they know something, due to a difference in their practical circumstances. This paper aims not to defend this thesis, but to explore how it could be true. What I aim to do, is to show how practical factors could play a role in defeating knowledge by defeating epistemic rationality—the very kind of rationality that is entailed by knowledge, and in which Pascalian considerations do not play any role—even though epistemic rationality consists in having adequate evidence.

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Notes

  1. The term ‘pragmatic encroachment’ is apparently originally due to Jonathan Kvanvig, in a blog post on June 12, 2004 entitled ‘Pragmatic aspects of knowledge?’. See http://el-prod.baylor.edu/certain_doubts/.

  2. These two cases are adapted from Stanley (2005). In Stanley’s original cases, the subjects self-ascribe knowledge, which creates a complication for whether this is best interpreted in a contextualist framework. I have eliminated this complication from my version of the cases.

  3. In conversation, Stewart Cohen has suggested to me that the important difference between epistemic and practical rationality is that epistemic rationality is ‘categorical’, whereas practical rationality is ‘hypothetical’. The case of Dr. Maria illustrates that the issue of pragmatic encroachment cross-cuts the ‘categorical’/‘hypothetical’ distinction.

  4. Note that both Fantl and McGrath (2010) and Hawthorne and Stanley (2008) appear to deny this possibility.

  5. See, in particular, the extensive discussion of such theories in Shope (1983).

  6. See Schroeder (2010b) for further discussion.

  7. Insofar as rationality can be connected to reasons, it is connected to subjective reasons, sometimes referred to as reasons that agents have, as opposed to reasons that there are, but which no one has. So I intend, here. See Schroeder (2008) for discussion.

  8. The principle of Generalized Sufficiency can be thought of as a natural generalization of Sufficiency from a two-option case to a multiple-option case, and so it is convenient to use in comparing the three options of believing p, believing ~p, and withholding with respect to p. In fact, however, I am now inclined to think that there are reasons to believe that there may be substantive tradeoffs in deciding between Sufficiency and Generalized Sufficiency. But I don’t believe that any of the points I will be making in this paper turn on these tradeoffs.

  9. Compare Shope’s (1983) survey of attempts to appeal to the sufficiency or conclusiveness of reasons in attempts to analyze knowledge, which is one of the main places I know of where the concept of sufficiency has been put to work in epistemology. Conclusive reasons accounts of knowledge can be thought of as motivated by the correlation between ‘ignorant’ and ‘apparent’ cases in which knowledge is defeated, and propose (roughly) that for a true belief to be knowledge, the reasons for which it is held have to be sufficiently good to make it rational, even were the subject to learn more true things. A number of such accounts were offered in the literature, and they typically shared the feature that the appeal to sufficiency is effectively discharged by being understood in terms of whether it would still be rational (or ‘justified) for the subject to believe, were she to be better-informed. In contrast, if we can appeal to a categorical concept of sufficiency, then it is possible to defend a view in this family that does not suffer from conditional-fallacy problems. See Schroeder (2010b) for elaboration.

  10. In this section and to follow I will be referring to ‘reasons to withhold’ that are not evidence. If the principle of Generalized Sufficiency is correct, then this is the right way of talking. If, however, the principle of Sufficiency is correct, it would be more accurate to speak of reasons not to believe p that are not evidence that ~p. Intuitively, however, the explanation of why there have to be epistemic reasons not to believe p that are not evidence that ~p has something important to do with the possibility of withholding. For this reason, and because I think the issues discussed here are orthogonal to which of Sufficiency or Generalized Sufficiency is correct (or perhaps they are compatible), I will stick to talk about reasons to withhold.

  11. Thanks to Stewart Cohen for discussion of this point.

  12. Shaffer (2006) offers cases which exploit the same features diagnosed here as an objection to Hawthorne (2004) and Stanley (2005), although he acknowledges in a note that they may not raise a problem for the view of Fantl and McGrath (2002), which is more closely related to the one offered here.

  13. I’ve been writing as if both the costs of type-1 error and the costs of type-2 error can be epistemic reasons for and against withholding, respectively. But nothing I’ve said rules out the possibility that some costs of type-1 error are epistemic reasons to withhold, but no costs of type-2 error are ever reasons agaisnt withholding. Whether the principle of General Evidentialism is correct, and not just the principle of Special Evidentialism, turns on whether there are epistemic reasons against withholding, and hence on whether the costs of type-2 error are really epistemic reasons not to withhold.

  14. On the picture provided by Generalized Sufficiency, reasons against an alternative need to be interpreted as reasons for the other alternatives.

  15. Compare chapter 7 of Schroeder (2007).

  16. Note particularly that on the plausible assumption that it is always true that Err2 < Err1 p , for all p, it follows that it is never rational to believe p without evidence—even though strictly speaking there may be epistemic reasons to believe p that aren’t evidence (namely, Err1~p ). This is an attractive result, because it confirms the characterization from Sect. 1.2 that believing p is epistemically rational just in case the evidence for p is adequate.

  17. Compare Owens (2000).

  18. Compare Williams (1973), Bennett (1990), and Hieronymi (2006).

  19. Compare D’Arms and Jacobson (2000a, b); Rabinowicz and Rønnow-Rasmussen (2004); Schroeder (2010a).

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Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Jake Ross, Stew Cohen, Jason Stanley, Jeremy Fantl, Matthew McGrath, Josh Dever, Michael Bratman, Kritika Yegnashankaran, Eric Wiland, and John Brunero. Thanks also to audiences at Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, and to an audience for a related paper at the first annual Saint Louis Area Conference on Reasons and Rationality, as well as to an extraodinarily helpful blind referee for that paper for the European Journal of Philosophy. This paper was written under the support of a grant from the Advancing Scholarship in the Humanities and Social Sciences initiative at USC.

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Schroeder, M. Stakes, withholding, and pragmatic encroachment on knowledge. Philos Stud 160, 265–285 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-011-9718-1

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