Knowledge Stories
Contemporary theory of knowledge is driven by stories. The practice is to tell a tiny story, use it to elicit an intuition about whether the subject has or lacks knowledge, and then draw a moral for the theory of knowledge.
Some of the stories are stripped-down versions of familiar situations. Others depict unusual circumstances, such as my story about Mary and her drug-induced sleep. Still others are beyond unusual—for example, stories about brains in vats.
Sartre once remarked that in writing philosophy the aim is to discourage multiple interpretations, whereas in writing fiction the aim is precisely the opposite, to create texts that resist a single interpretation. Whether fiction or philosophy must have such aims is debatable, but the remark is instructive for the small fictions of contemporary epistemology. The stories are created in hopes of fixing upon some point or other about knowledge, but the stories are incomplete and hence open to different interpretations as well as to expansions that potentially blunt the intended point. The sparely told stories common in epistemology are especially susceptible. The fewer the details, the more room there is for interpretation and retelling.
Such stories can nonetheless be useful, but need to be treated warily. More on this later. For now the points to note are that contemporary theory of knowledge is driven by stories in which the subject has a true belief but seems to lack knowledge; the scenarios I sketch above (of Joan, Mary, and Jim) are themselves examples of such stories; these stories, mine included, make use of the common literary device of providing the audience with information that the subjects of the stories lack; and finally, the stories are told in a way to suggest that the missing information is important.
Consider a stock case from the literature. George is touring farm country and is charmed by the picturesque old barns he is seeing. He stops his car on the side of the road to spend a moment gazing at the latest barn he has happened across. Unbeknownst to him, the local tourist board has populated the region with highly realistic facades of old barns, and up until now he has been seeing these facades, not real barns. By chance, however, he has stopped in front one of the few genuine old barns remaining in the area. As he stares out of his car window, he believes that he is looking at an old barn and he is. Yet, there is a pull upon us, the audience listening to the story, which makes us reluctant to concede that his true belief rises to the level of knowledge.1
Why is this? Is it because the justification he has for his belief is defeasible, or because the processes that have caused him to have this belief are unreliable at this locale, or because his belief would not track the truth in close counterfactual situations? All these may well be the case, but the best explanation is the most obvious. He lacks important true beliefs about the situation. He is unaware that there are numerous, highly realistic barn facades in the area and unaware as well that on his tour up until now he has been seeing these facades instead of real barns.
The post-Gettier literature is filled with little stories about individuals who have true beliefs but seem to lack knowledge. All these stories can be understood in the same way. Each is an attempt to draw attention to some aspect of the situation about which the character of the story lacks true beliefs and to suggest that this aspect is in some way important. To the degree that we the audience are convinced that the missing information is in fact important, our intuition is that the character has a true belief but does not know.
I need now to take another step back and look at the role that intuitions such as these play in the theory of knowledge.