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Antiluminosity, Excuses and the Sufficiency of Knowledge for Rational Action

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Abstract

According to a widely discussed view, knowledge plays a significant normative role in action: It is epistemically rational to treat p as your reason for action if and only if you know that p. As many philosophers have observed, however, this view clashes with the claim that knowledge is moderate and stable. For, granting that claim, there will be high stakes cases in which knowledge seems insufficient. To deal with such cases, some philosophers embracing the knowledge norm combine three independently plausible claims. First, they say that no non-trivial condition is luminous; second, they say that doing something while not being in a position to know that that is appropriate is bad (in high stakes cases); third, they say that in the high stakes cases in question, the subject knows but fails to be in a position to know that she knows (Williamson Philos Q 55:213–235, 2005). This paper argues that this account can overcome the main objections already raised in the literature, but that it still faces the apparently insurmountable challenge of providing a natural and helpful way of substantiating the second claim.

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Notes

  1. A strong sceptical approach is defended by Davis (2007) and a moderate one by Fassio (2018, 2021).

  2. Nagel (2008: 293; 2010: 422) explicitly grants this point. That is also implicitly assumed in (Williamson 2005). See Dinges (2021) for a recent discussion of these “doxastic” approaches.

  3. Another intuition in need of explanation is that, even assuming that Sarah knows, it intuitively seems inappropriate for her to claim knowledge. Nagel (2010a, 2010b: 422) explains this intuition by appealing to a pragmatic implicature (see also Rysiew 2001; Gerken 2017). For criticisms of approaches in terms of pragmatic implicature, see Dimmock and Hueveness (2014) and Dinges (2018a). A different approach appeals to the norm of assertion (Pritchard 2010; Vollet 2020b). In this paper, I leave this issue aside.

  4. Philosophers opting for a moderate and stable view of knowledge and rejecting the sufficiency of knowledge for rational action include Brown (2008), Reed (2010), Gerken (2017), Beddor (2020), Vollet (2020a, 2020b).

  5. A condition is trivial if and only if it always or never obtains (see Williamson 2000: ch. 4).

  6. Against Antiluminosity, see for example Cohen (2010).

  7. On the distinction between warrant and reasonableness, and the related notion of excuse, see Williamson (2000: 229–230, 256–257).

  8. Taking a clue from Williamson’s talk about “prudent human agents” (see below) Gao’s line of objection relies on a prima facie plausible way of substantiating Bad Ignorance, according to which it is bad to F while not being in a position to know that F-ing is appropriate (in high stakes cases) because one is thereby imprudent, that is, unreasonable, that is, blameworthy. If one rejects that way of understanding Bad Ignorance, one can escape Gao’s objection. But that is only at the price of undergoing a much stronger pressure to clarify how to substantiate Bad Ignorance.

  9. See also Hawthorne (2004: 520–522).

  10. As for Nagel, she invokes the egocentric bias, but in the context of a “doxastic” approach. For discussion of Nagel’s view, see Dinges 2018a, 2018b, 2021 and Vollet 2020a.

  11. I thank two referees for this suggestion.

  12. For reasons to doubt the claim that, in general, one has good reasons to check one’s first-order reasoning, see Kornblith (2012).

  13. According to Williamson, E = K. If you know that p, the evidential probability of not-p for you is 0 (see Williamson 2000: ch. 9 and ch. 10).

  14. See Fantl and McGrath (2009: 77–82) for a more thorough defense of a version of Safe Reason.

  15. Notice that whilst Safe Reason can be motivated independently from any infallibilist commitment, adopting the knowledge norm and Williamson’s infallibilist account of knowledge implies adopting Safe Reason. If S knows that p only if it is epistemically impossible (for S) that not-p, then it “it might be that not-p” is true (for S) only if S does not know that p. Therefore, S cannot know that p and that it might be that not p and necessarily violates the knowledge norm of practical reasoning if she premises “p” and “it might be that not p”.

  16. That is why Fantl and McGrath’s version of Safe Reason (Fantl and McGrath 2009: 77), stating that if p is a reason you have to F, then no weakness in your epistemic position stands in the way of justifying you in F-ing (for any F), is potentially problematic. As the present case illustrates, one must allow that a practical reason can make it that a weakness in your epistemic position prevents p from justifying you in F-ing (for any F) even if p is a reason you have (in the epistemic sense). See also Crisp 2005, Neta 2009, Ichikawa 2012 and Vollet 2022a for related considerations.

  17. Cannot we suggest that the prudential norm at issue is not “Sarah ought not to eat peanuts!”, but a sui generis general prudential norm, such as “You ought to check that p if the stakes are high on p!”? This supposed prudential norm would defeat (in high stakes cases) the permission issued by the epistemic norm of practical reasoning. The main problem with this suggestion is that postulating such a prudential norm makes the very idea of epistemic nom of practical reasoning superfluous (I discuss a similar suggestion appealing to good dispositions below). Reciprocally, what does motivate this sui generis prudential norm if knowledge is the epistemic norm of practical reasoning? Clearly, appealing to a sui generis norm does not constitute a helpful way of motivating Bad Ignorance (or Bad Ignorance*).

  18. For example, on some views, what you ought to do depends on what you believe you ought to do. Even so, if Antiluminosity is true, there has to be cases in which you believe that you ought to F while not knowing that you believe that you ought to F and, hence, while not knowing that you ought to F. See also Hawthorne and Stanley 2008 and Logins 2018.

  19. In this context, epistemic excuses as opposed to practical excuses have mainly to do with the subject’s epistemic position (see also Gerken 2011). This notion is not meant to suggest that the norm one is excused for violating is epistemic but that what excuses the violation is the subject’s epistemic position. In that sense, there are epistemic excuses in the moral and legal domains. Thanks to a reviewer for asking for clarification here.

  20. A similar move is available for perspectivalists or subjectivists to explain away cases in which you perspectivally/subjectively ought to F (for example, you ought to F because you believe that you ought to F) while you do not know that you ought to F (for example, you do not know that you believe that you ought to F).

  21. See, among others, DeRose 2009: 93, Williamson 2000: 257, Kelp and Simion 2017, Littlejohn (forthcoming), xxxx, Vollet 2022b.

  22. To express things as Fantl and McGrath (2002) do, we can assume that the best thing to do for Sarah (or what she ought to do) conditional on the fact that the cake does not contain peanuts is to eat the piece of cake.

  23. See Williamson (forth.) and Aarnio (2020) for the claim that excuses have to do with good dispositions.

  24. In Williamson’s view, a belief which does not amount to knowledge is somewhat bad in that it fails to reach its aim (see Williamson 2000).

  25. These considerations may lead one to replace the knowledge norm of action by a variable iterated knowledge norm of action. For a formal approach to the idea that, depending on the context, the epistemic norm of action requires various level of knowledge-iteration, see Schulz (2017).

  26. See Sosa (2009) for a structurally similar argument against the knowledge norm of assertion based on the infelicity of asserting, “p but I do not know whether I know that p”.

  27. See Gerken and Petersen (2020).

  28. See Fassio (2017) for the distinction between epistemic norm and regulation condition and Simion (2018) for the distinction between epistemic norm and norm with an epistemic content.

  29. See Fassio (2017) for such an argument that there is no need to invoke a sui generis epistemic norm of action.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the audience at the Metaethics Seminar (CAPHI, 2022), the GRÉ (Collège de France, 2022), and A. Logins, A. Mueller, M. Schulz, D. Fassio and two anonymous referees from Erkenntnis for their comments on earlier drafts.

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Swiss National Science Foundation, 169293, Jacques-Henri Vollet

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Vollet, JH. Antiluminosity, Excuses and the Sufficiency of Knowledge for Rational Action. Erkenn (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-023-00682-7

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