A Look Back
I have repeatedly urged caution about the practice, common in contemporary epistemology, of using tiny stories to elicit intuitions about knowledge, but I have resisted taking the next step and declaring a “pox” on the entire practice. Perhaps in part out of conservatism or even sentimentality—I too was trained in the practice—but also, I trust, for less complacent reasons. I have been trying to illustrate that there is a project worth doing that makes use of stories and the intuitions they produce, but it is a project in which the constant refrains are “not so fast” and “not so sure.”
Not so fast and not so sure because it is not enough to spin out little stories and then ask what the intuitions about them are. The stories have too few details; there are too many ways to expand them; they not infrequently describe circumstances far removed from the ordinary; and storytellers can shape them to encourage the reactions they seek. Intuitions about the stories are not clean data. Nor are they even uniform. They vary from person to person and occasion to occasion. Moreover, when they conflict, the complexity of factors affecting them can make it difficult to resolve the dispute.
My strategy, therefore, has been to go up a level where the aim is to explain knowledge intuitions as opposed to relying on them as data. Rather than huffing and puffing about which intuitions are correct, the spirit is ecumenical. The task is more about shedding light on what is causing the conflicting intuitions than choosing among them.
I have also been guided by a yearning to keep things simple when it comes to theorizing about knowledge, and in particular to keep in mind that the primary aim of inquiry is to acquire truths, especially ones that matter. It would be convenient if there were a mark that announced to us when we have succeeded in uncovering truths. We could then declare beliefs with this mark as the winners, the ones worthy of the accolade “knowledge.” It is such a mark that Descartes and other prominent figures in the history of epistemology sought, but that history teaches us that there are no such marks. Beliefs do not wear truth on their sleeves. The lesson of the brain-in-a-vat is that no matter how carefully and thoroughly we deploy our capacities, there can be no assurances that the resulting beliefs are true, nor even assurances that they are mostly true. We thus have no choice but to live with intellectual uncertainty, to live without guarantees that our opinions have the property we most seek. We are working without a net.1
But if there can be no question of equating knowledge with beliefs that are branded with a mark of their own truth, let’s make things simpler. Let’s not insist that knowledge be a vessel that contains a desideratum related to true belief but distinct from it—something to do with its justification or pedigree, for example. Let’s instead say that knowledge is a matter of having enough true beliefs and then get on with the enterprise of attempting in our fallibilistic ways to determine what is true and what is not.
I’m aware of how provocative this view is. It stands in opposition to a long venerable tradition in epistemology. Although I have acknowledged that when true beliefs rise to the level of knowledge, they usually have many of the merits that the tradition holds most dear, I have insisted that these merits are frequent accompaniments of knowledge, not prerequisites. If S has a true belief P and there is no important gap in her information, then except in a few unusual situations in which knowledge may be blocked, she knows P. Nothing more is required.
In the final two chapters, I sketch some of the ways in which this approach to knowledge fits within a complete epistemology.