Knowledge Blocks
Fanciful stories about circumstances far removed from those in which we typically make ascriptions of knowledge have to be handled with care. The stories themselves are underdescribed, and the intuitions they elicit are various and malleable. Such stories can nonetheless be instructive, as the beetle in the box illustrates. In any remotely normal situation, when S has a true belief P but does not know P, there are important truths she lacks, but in the beetle case there are no such truths and yet she seems not to have knowledge. Why? Because there is so little significant information to be had about the box that it is not possible for anyone to have adequate enough information to know that there is a beetle inside.1
Consider a modification of the story that makes it, if possible, even stranger. The new story begins the same as the original—there is beetle inside a sealed box; S looks at the outside of the box but cannot see into it; there is nothing distinctive about its weight; it makes no special sound when shaken; no one else has looked inside it; no tests have been performed on it; none ever will be—but in this version the beetle crawls out of the box for a few seconds once every million years and then crawls back in for the next million years. The last such appearance was five hundred thousand years ago, prior to the arrival of modern humans, and the next appearance will be five hundred thousand years hence, when who knows whether humans will be around to witness the event.2
Suppose, moreover, S believes all this; that is, she believes not only that there is a beetle in the box but also that the beetle momentarily appears outside of the box once every million years, with the last such appearance being five hundred thousand years ago. She thus has a bit more information than in the original version of the story. Nevertheless, the intuition is still likely to be that she is not in a position to know that there is a beetle in the box, and the explanation is the same. There is too little information available for anyone to know. Knowledge is still blocked.
Suppose the beetle comes out every ten thousand years instead of every million years. Does this make a difference? What about every thousand years or every one hundred or even every ten? As one retells the story to shrink the intervals between the beetle’s appearances, the information potentially available to S and others at some point begins to look more like ordinary situations where one can know something without having witnessed it firsthand.
Without having looked inside her friend’s suitcase, S can know that it contains a pair of binoculars if she is aware that her friend is on her way to Cape May, her friend is an avid bird-watcher, Cape May is a well-known bird-watching locale, the spring bird migrations have just begun, her friend had talked just the night before about which binoculars to take with her, a pair of binoculars was laid out on the bed along with the clothes she was taking, her friend is a careful packer, and so forth.
Similarly, if the appearances of the beetle become frequent enough, there will eventually be enough information potentially available that knowledge will no longer be blocked. Whether S knows there is a beetle in the box will then depend, as usual, on whether she possesses enough of this information or whether there are instead important gaps in her information.
Are there other ways in which knowledge can be blocked? Perhaps. It may be possible to dream up other strange situations in which we feel unease about granting that the subject knows even if there is no significant gap in her information. Situations in which there is something bizarre going on with one of the core components of knowledge (belief, truth, surrounding truths) are especially likely to make us uneasy.
On the other hand, there are always alternatives to introducing knowledge blocks. One is simply to live with the unease and insist that the subject does have knowledge despite there being an initial pull in the opposite direction. If the situation is bizarre enough, this need not be even much of a stretch. In addition, because knowledge stories are thinly described, it is always appropriate to consider what they look like when some of the details are filled in, because once details are added, our reactions to the stories may well be different.
Recall the story of Sally whose beliefs are maximally accurate and comprehensive. If knowledge is a matter of having adequate information, it would seem that she has all sorts of knowledge that ordinary humans lack. Yet, it is possible to imagine circumstances in which her beliefs, albeit maximally accurate and comprehensive, are so strangely acquired we may feel some reluctance to grant she knows. As discussed in chapter 6, however, when we consider these circumstances in more detail, it may emerge that her beliefs, being maximally accurate and comprehensive, must also have other merits, such as being at least minimally coherent or minimally tied to experience or produced by minimally reliable processes. If so, this may reassure us about her knowing. Her beliefs may not be coherent or tethered to experience or reliably produced in quite the ways that coherentists, foundationalists, and reliabilists favor, but they are at least minimally coherent, minimally tethered to experience and produced by minimally reliably processes. Moreover, they are as accurate and comprehensive as possible.
Then again, assume a worst-case scenario for the adequate information view. Assume that all such arguments fail, and hence it is possible for Sally’s beliefs to be maximally accurate and comprehensive and yet not meet even minimal standards of reasonability, reliability, and the like. Assume also that some observers will have an intuition that under these conditions Sally does not have knowledge. It is at this point in a spirit of ecumenicism that blocking conditions can be introduced. They are a concession to the reality that intuitions about extreme cases are tenuous and apt to be diverse. Thus, the fallback position: insofar as there is a pull against knowledge despite the fact that Sally has a true belief P and lacks no important information about P, it is because something is interfering with the normal requirements of knowledge. In particular, it may be that some minimal standard is not being met. In the beetle case, it was minimal standards of information. Here in this Sally case, it may be minimal standards of coherence, reliability, or connectedness to experience.
This might be regarded as a retreat from the view that knowledge is a matter of having adequate information if there were some compelling, higher-level theory of blocking conditions, but there is not, only after-the-fact invocations of them as our imaginations soar and we concoct ever more extraordinary stories in which something is affecting one of the core conditions of knowledge in such extreme ways that intuitions about these cases are likely to vary.
In any event, however intriguing these cases at the borderlines of imagination may be, it is important to remember that they are at the borderlines. As such, they don’t affect the basic insight of the adequate information view, which is that in any remotely normal situation, when S has a true belief P but lacks knowledge, there are important truths she lacks.3