Believing That I Don’t Know
When S knows P, there are no important truths about the situation she lacks, but is the truth that she knows P itself an important truth about the situation? If it were, then in order to know P, she would have to believe that she knows it.
This is not a requirement, however. The kind of importance relevant to assessments of knowledge is importance with respect to the subject’s having adequate information, where both intellectual and practical considerations can play a role in determining what counts as adequate. The truth that S knows P, however, need not strike us as being important for either her role as an inquirer about P or her role as an agent who might rely on P. There may be some special situations in which we expect her to have this meta-belief, but not in general. She can have adequate information about P and hence know P without necessarily being aware that she knows it.
More intriguing for the theory of knowledge are cases in which we believe something to be true but readily admit we don’t know it. Beliefs outside our areas of expertise are commonly like this. I believe that a sidereal day is shorter than a solar day, but my expertise in astronomy is shallow enough that I wouldn’t be comfortable representing myself as knowing this. And even within one’s area of expertise, beliefs about complex issues are frequently of this sort. If I am a meteorologist with a specialty in hurricanes, I may believe that the hurricane now forming in the Atlantic will pass north of the Leeward Islands, because I have studied the predictive models and they all agree on this, but given the complexity of factors affecting the paths of hurricanes, I may be reluctant to claim knowledge.
The knowledge stories of contemporary epistemology are typically third-person stories in which the storyteller has information that the subject of the story lacks. By contrast, when I report that I believe but don’t know P, I am gesturing at an autobiographical story, one in which I am simultaneously storyteller and subject of the story. There is thus no possibility of the storyteller being aware of information that the subject lacks.
Even so, there is nothing puzzling about such reports. When I acknowledge that I believe but don’t know P, I am commenting on my lack of surrounding information. My focus is not so much directly on P—I think I have that right—as on neighboring truths. I realize that my grasp of the overall situation in which P is true is sketchy enough that there are many gaps in my information, some of which may well be important. I am thus reluctant to claim knowledge.1
It is not as simple, however, for other accounts of knowledge to explain why such reports are so common. Consider reliability theories. To believe P is to believe that P is true, and thus insofar as I am aware that I believe P, I tend to think that reliable processes have produced my belief. But then, if knowledge is basically a matter of having reliably produced true beliefs, when I believe P and am aware of my belief, my default assumption should be that I know P. This isn’t my default assumption, however.
There is an analogous issue for justification theorists. When I believe P and am aware that I believe it, I ordinarily think that I have better reasons to believe it than either to disbelieve it or to withhold judgment on it. But insofar as justification is thought to be the key ingredient that lifts true belief into the category of knowledge, it again seems as if my default assumption should be that I also know P, but it isn’t.
Reliability and justification theorists may be able to come up with ways of explaining why reports of the form “I believe but don’t know P” are common,2 but there is no need even to search if knowledge is understood in terms of true belief plus adequate information. There is an immediately obvious explanation. When I believe P and am aware that I believe it, I am pressured, given the nature of belief, to think there is nothing amiss with my belief —it is true, reliably produced, justified, etc.—but I am in no way pressured to think that there are not other important truths about the situation of which I am unaware.