CHAPTER 1. AN OBSERVATION
1. I am thus setting aside suggestions to the effect that the concepts of belief or truth be abandoned. See Paul Boghossian’s critique of the view that there are no truths, only truths relative to a particular way of thinking, in Fear of Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), chaps. 3 and 4. See my Working Without a Net (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), chap. 4, for an argument against the idea that the concept of belief should be discarded in favor of a concept of degrees of belief.
CHAPTER 2. POST-GETTIER ACCOUNTS OF KNOWLEDGE
1. Edmund Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 25 (1963): 121–23.
2. Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), 102–18; Ernest Sosa, “Epistemic Presupposition,” in Justification and Knowledge, ed. George S. Pappas (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1979), 79–92; and Ernest Sosa, “How Do You Know?” in Knowledge in Perspective, ed. Ernest Sosa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 19–34.
3. Robert Audi, The Structure of Justification (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Peter Klein, Certainty: A Refutation of Scepticism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981); Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); John Pollock, Contemporary Theories of Knowledge (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1986); and Marshall Swain, Reasons and Knowledge (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).
4. Alvin Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
5. Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
6. Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
7. For example, see D. M. Armstrong, Belief, Truth, and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); Fred Dretske, Knowledge and the Flow of Information (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981); David Lewis, “Elusive Knowledge,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996): 549–67; and Ernest Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective, esp. chaps. 13–16.
CHAPTER 3. KNOWLEDGE STORIES
1. See Alvin Goldman, “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976): 771–91; and Carl Ginet, “The Fourth Condition,” in Philosophical Analysis: A Defense by Example, ed. David F. Austin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988).
CHAPTER 4. INTUITIONS ABOUT KNOWLEDGE
1. Noam Chomsky, Rules and Representation (New York: Columbia University Press, 1980), 82.
2. David Lewis, “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” in Philosophical Papers, vol. 1 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983).
3. See, for example, Peter Unger, Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975 and 2002); Richard Fumerton, Epistemology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), esp. chap. 2; and Richard Fumerton, Meta-epistemology and Skepticism (Boston: Rowan and Littlefield, 1996).
4. See chap. 24 for a discussion of collective knowledge and its relation to individual knowledge.
5. Here is another such story. When asked to provide the decimal expansion of pi to five decimal places, S immediately responds, “3.14159.” S understands that pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference to its diameter, but she is otherwise largely ignorant of its properties (that pi is an irrational number, etc.) and its uses in geometry (that pi can be used to calculate the area of a circle via the formula A = πr2, etc.). Nevertheless, it seems as if she at least knows this much about pi: that its decimal expansion to five decimal places is 3.14159. For other such cases, see John Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 68–69; Crispin Sartwell, “Why Knowledge is Merely True Belief,” Journal of Philosophy 89 (1992): 167–80; and Sartwell, “Knowledge as Merely True Belief,” American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1991): 157–64).
6. There are other ways of making George’s ignorance of the facades at other locations look less significant. Suppose after gazing out the window for a moment, he gets out of his car, walks up to and around the barn, and observes it from all sides. In this telling of the story, he has more detailed information about this specific location, and it is this that makes his ignorance of the facades at other locations seem less important.
7. This is a point that coherence theorists emphasize in order to explain how their theory is compatible with simple observational and memory beliefs being justified. See, for example, Gilbert Harman, Change in View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986); and Keith Lehrer, Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974).
8. As the Marathon story illustrates, one way of narrowing the focus is to have the story revolve around a specific question and then to imagine circumstances in which it is important for the subject to know how to answer that question. Knowing how is towing knowing that behind it in its wake.
CHAPTER 5. IMPORTANT TRUTHS
1. More cautiously, their apparent disagreement. “Apparent” because contextualists maintain that knowledge claims are contextually dependent, and as a result it is possible for one person to assert that S knows P and another to assert that she does not know P and for both to be correct. For discussions of contextualism and related issues, see Stewart Cohen, “Contextualist Solutions to Epistemological Problems: Skepticism, Gettier, and the Lottery,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 76 (1998): 289–306; Cohen, “Contextualism Defended,” Philosophical Studies 103 (2001): 87–98; Keith DeRose, “Contextualism and Knowledge Attributions,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 913–29; Richard Feldman, “Skeptical Problems, Contextualist Solutions,” Philosophical Studies 103 (2001): 61–85; Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries; David Lewis, “Elusive Knowledge,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1996): 549–67; James Pryor, “Highlights of Recent Epistemology,” British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52 (2001): 95–124; and Peter Unger, “The Cone Model of Knowledge,” Philosophical Topics 14 (1986): 125–78.
2. This is all the more likely if the two stories are not told together. If told separately, the story about the toaster may strike listeners as a case of knowledge for the reasons cited above, but when told alongside the story about the air purification equipment (in the same performance, as it were), the intuitions invoked by the latter tend to get transferred to it, so that the gap in the foreman’s information about the malfunction in the toaster’s warning light seems more important. In effect, the reaction of listeners may now be, “The gap is significant because look at the implications of a similar kind of gap in the chemical plant case.” This is another example of how the context of presentation can influence the reactions that a knowledge story elicits.
3. Jason Stanley, Knowledge and Practical Interests (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). See also Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath, “Evidence, Pragmatics, and Justification,” Philosophical Review 111 (2002): 67–94; and Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries, chap. 4.
4. Brian McLaughlin first suggested to me that closeness be thought of as a component of importance.
5. For some other examples of narrow knowledge, see the discussions of introspective, perceptual, and testimonial knowledge in chaps. 21 and 22.
6. Where does this leave the dispute over whether knowledge claims are contextually dependent? Questions of contextualism on this approach hinge on whether there is a plausible noncontextualist treatment of adequate information. As the above discussion shows, there are challenges in providing such a treatment, but nothing in the approach per se precludes this.
CHAPTER 6. MAXIMALLY ACCURATE AND COMPREHENSIVE BELIEFS
1. A passage from the Aeneid, trans. Allen Mandelbaum, bk. 3, lines 576–91 (New York: Bantam, 1971), describing the cavern of the prophet Sibyl makes this point in a splendidly imaginative way:
When on your way you reach the town of Cumae,
the sacred lakes, the loud wood of Avernus,
there you will see the frenzied prophetess.
Deep in her cave of rock she charts the fates,
Consigning to the leaves her words and symbols.
Whatever verses she has written down
Upon the leaves, she puts them in place and order
And then abandons them inside her cavern.
When all is still, that order is not troubled;
But when soft winds are stirring and the door,
Turning upon its hinge, disturbs the tender
Leaves, then she never cares to catch the verses
That flutter through the hollow grotto, never
Recalls their place and joins them all together.
Her visitors, when they have had no counsel,
Depart, and then detest the Sibyl’s cavern.
2. See the related discussion in chap. 18.
3. See, for example, Goldman, Epistemology and Cognition, 106–9.
4. See Donald Davidson, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association 17 (1973–1974): 5–20; and Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge,” in The Philosophy of Donald Davidson: Perspectives on Truth and Interpretation, ed. Ernest LePore (London: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 307–19.
5. Or the point might be approached from the opposite direction, namely, a world in which Sally’s beliefs do not meet minimum standards of coherence despite being maximally accurate and comprehensive is not a world in which knowledge is possible; it is too chaotic for Sally or anyone else to have knowledge of it. See the related discussion in chap. 7.
CHAPTER 7. THE BEETLE IN THE BOX
1. John Hawthorne first pointed out to me the relevance of this kind of case.
2. James Pryor first suggested to me the idea of formulating the point here in terms of conditions that interfere with the basic conditions of knowledge.
CHAPTER 8. KNOWLEDGE BLOCKS
1. “Significant information” because as with any situation, there is no end to the number of truths associated with there being a beetle in the box. Since there is a beetle in the box, it is also true that there is either a beetle or a coin in the box; since the star Antares is larger than the star Spica, it is also true that (there is a beetle in the box and Antares is larger than Spica); and so on. As noted in chap. 6, however, not just any large collection of truths puts one in a position to know.
2. I owe this case to Paul Boghossian.
3. See related discussion in chap. 13.
CHAPTER 9. THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE AND THEORY OF JUSTIFIED BELIEF
1. Gettier, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?”
2. Chap. 26 sketches a theory of justified belief with a focus on responsible believing.
3. There are others who have repudiated the Gettier game. See, for example, Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Williamson’s “knowledge first” approach rejects the assumption that justified belief is an ingredient of knowledge. It instead makes knowledge into an ingredient of justified belief, the core assumptions being that one is justified in believing only that which is supported by one’s evidence and that one’s evidence is limited to what one knows. On this view, knowledge and justified belief are still conceptually married, only in the reverse direction, but once again, this is a forced marriage producing awkward results. For details, see Richard Foley, “Review of Timothy Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits,” Mind 111 (2002): 726–30.
CHAPTER 10. THE VALUE OF TRUE BELIEF
1. Bernard Williams, “Deciding to Believe,” in Problems of the Self (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1973); and John Searle, Intentionality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 8. See related views in Paul Boghossian, “The Normativity of Content,” Philosophical Issues 13 (2003): 31–45: David Velleman, The Possibility of Practical Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 16; Nishi Shaw, “How Truth Governs Belief,” Philosophical Review 112 (2003): 447–83; and Michael Lynch, True to Life (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004).
CHAPTER 11. THE VALUE OF KNOWLEDGE
1. See Marian David, “Truth as the Epistemic Goal, in Knowledge, Truth, and Duty, ed. Matthias Steup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Michael DePaul, “Value Monism in Epistemology,” in Steup, Knowledge, Truth; Ward Jones, “Why Do We Value Knowledge?” American Philosophical Quarterly 34 (1997): 423–39; Jonathan Kvanvig, “Why Should Inquiring Minds Want to Know? Meno Problems and Epistemological Axiology,” Monist 81 (1998): 426–51; Jonathan Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Stephen Maitzen, “Our Errant Epistemic Aim,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1995): 869–76; Crispin Sartwell, “Why Knowledge Is Merely True Belief,” Journal of Philosophy 88 (1992): 167–80; and Sartwell “Knowledge as Merely True Belief,” American Philosophical Quarterly 28 (1991): 157–64.
2. An exception, of course, is when P is a proposition about oneself.
3. Compare with Ward Jones, “The Goods and Motivation of Believing,” in The Value of Knowledge, ed. Adrian Haddock, Alan Millar, and Duncan Pritchard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 139–62.
4. Compare with Linda Zagzebski, “The Search for the Source of the Epistemic Good,” Metaphilosophy 34 (2003): 12–28.
5. See Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard, Value of Knowledge, for a discussion of some of these responses.
6. Compare with Ralph Wedgwood: “[T]he only acceptable explanation of why we should aim at knowledge must be grounded in the more fundamental principle that we should aim at getting to the truth.” Wedgwood, “The Aim of Belief,” Philosophical Perspectives 16 (2002): 267–97.
7. Wayne Riggs first suggested to me the usefulness of this way of framing the issue.
8. A sampling of other views on the value of knowledge (in addition to those cited earlier) includes Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990); John Greco, “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief,” in Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, ed. Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries; Wayne D. Riggs, “Reliability and the Value of Knowledge,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 64 (2002): 79–96; Ernest Sosa, “The Love of Truth,” in Virtue Epistemology: Essays on Epistemic Virtue and Responsibility, ed. Abrol Fairweather and Linda Zagzebski (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); and Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
CHAPTER 13. REVERSE LOTTERY STORIES
1. Fred Dretske first pointed out to me the significance of these stories.
2. Barry Loewer first pointed out this issue to me.
3. See chap. 6.
CHAPTER 14. LUCKY KNOWLEDGE
1. I owe this case to David Christensen.
2. Contrast with Ernest Sosa, “How to Defeat Opposition to Moore,” in Philosophical Perspectives 13 (2000): 141–54; and Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits. The assumption that knowledge cannot arise from luck leads Sosa and Williamson, among others, to propose a safety condition on knowledge, according to which one knows P only if one’s true belief P could not easily have been false. For other views linking knowledge to the absence of luck, see Greco, “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief”; and Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind.
CHAPTER 15. CLOSURE AND SKEPTICISM
1. For a general discussion of epistemic closure, see Hawthorne, Knowledge and Lotteries.
2. See esp. Fumerton, Epistemology, 12–32; Unger, Ignorance: A Case for Scepticism; and David Lewis, “Elusive Knowledge,” in Papers in Metaphysics and Epistemology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 418–45.
3. See the related discussion in chap. 26, and also Foley, Working Without a Net, esp. chap. 2.
CHAPTER 16. DISJUNCTIONS
1. I owe Ernest Sosa and Hartry Field for raising this issue.
2. Here is an analogous case from Ernest Sosa: S comes into a room filled with people and hears someone yell a threat; S can have enough information to know that someone in the room threatened her without being aware which person has done so.
CHAPTER 18. INSTABILITY AND KNOWLEDGE
1. I owe this case to Alvin Plantinga.
2. Another out of the ordinary element of the story here is the degree of external control over Sally’s states. It is a demon who alternatively causes Sally for two seconds to have beliefs as accurate and comprehensive as humanly possible and then for two seconds beliefs that are massively mistaken. Just as we may be reluctant to grant the status of belief to states that flip on and off at two-second intervals, so too we may think that only states with a minimal degree of freedom from direct external control qualify as genuine beliefs.
CHAPTER 19. MISLEADING DEFEATERS
1. See chap. 9.
2. Peter Klein, Certainty (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).
3. Again, see Klein, Certainty; also Klein, “Misleading Evidence and the Restoration of Justification,” Philosophical Studies 37 (1980): 81–89.
CHAPTER 20. BELIEVING THAT I DON’T KNOW
1. Assertions of the form “I believe P but do not know P” are thus to be contrasted with those of the form “I believe P but P is not true.” The former are both common and easy to understand, while the latter can seem paradoxical. There is no logical inconsistency involved in asserting the latter (it is not impossible for me to believe P and for P not to be true), but there is a pragmatic inconsistency. When I assert the second half of the sentence (“P is not true”), listeners are normally entitled to infer that I believe not-P, but this is at odds with what I am asserting in the first half of the sentence.
2. One possible explanation is that knowledge requires a high degree of confidence in the proposition’s truth, but in cases in which I am willing to admit that I believe but don’t know P, my degree of confidence in P falls below what is required for knowledge. Not all such cases can be accounted for in this manner, however. In a lottery, my degree of confidence that my ticket will not win can asymptotically approach 1.0 as the number of tickets in the lottery increases, and yet I may still believe that I don’t know that it will not win.
CHAPTER 21. INTROSPECTIVE KNOWLEDGE
1. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (London: Blackwell, 1974), § 246; II. xi (222).
2. See Tyler Burge on the infallibility of such beliefs, “Individualism and Self-Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy 85 (1988): 649–62.
3. See Crispin Wright on positive presumptiveness, “Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy of Mind: Sensation, Privacy, and Intention,” Journal of Philosophy 86 (1989): 622–34.
4. Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits); Roderick Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, 3rd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall), 1989.
5. Here is a related issue. Suppose at the current time t S has a true belief that at time t + n she will have a headache. Regardless of how much information she has at t, she will be in an even better position at t + n to know whether at that moment she has a headache. But isn’t this puzzling? After all, although she will at t + n have a true belief that she then has a headache, at the current time t she already has a true belief to this effect. The explanation, however, is that her current belief does not have the same content as the belief she will have at t + n, since it does not (and cannot) involve a special awareness of the characteristic unpleasantness of the headache. Thus, at time t + n she will have information about her headache that she cannot possibly now have (and that others also cannot possibly have). I owe Evan Williams and Tim Maudlin for raising this issue.
CHAPTER 22. PERCEPTUAL KNOWLEDGE
1. See chap. 5.
2. See the discussion in chap. 4.
CHAPTER 23. A PRIORI KNOWLEDGE
1. See, for example, Jason Stanley and Timothy Williamson, “Knowing How,” Journal of Philosophy 98 (2001): 411–44.
2. A related point is that understanding simple concepts involves understanding how to make relevant inferences involving them. Understanding the concept of red, for example, brings with it the understanding that if something is red, it is colored. If one doesn’t know how to make the most obvious and immediate inferences involving the concept of red, one doesn’t really understand the concept and hence cannot have beliefs involving it. See Paul Boghossian, “How Are Objective Epistemic Reasons Possible?” Philosophical Studies 106 (December 2001): 340–80.
CHAPTER 24. COLLECTIVE KNOWLEDGE
1. Note, however, that when nonexperts defer to experts, sometimes what they come to believe is that a particular sentence is true as opposed to the proposition expressed by the sentence. A nonexpert may accept that the sentence “Bosons but not fermions can occupy the same quantum state” is true because she has heard particle physicists endorse it, but if the nonexpert lacks the relevant training in physics, she will not be able to grasp, and hence will not believe, the proposition expressed by this sentence.
2. “The method of modern science is social in respect to the solidarity of its efforts. The scientific world is like a colony of insects in that the individual strives to produce that which he cannot himself hope to enjoy. One generation collects premises in order that a distant generation may discover what they mean. When a problem comes before the scientific world, a hundred men immediately set their energies to work on it. One contributes this, another that. Another company, standing on the shoulders of the first, strikes a little higher until at last the parapet is attained.” Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, ed., Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and Arthur W. Burks (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931–1958), 7.87.
3. C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
CHAPTER 25. A LOOK BACK
1. Richard Foley, Working Without a Net (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).
CHAPTER 26. EPISTEMOLOGY WITHIN A GENERAL THEORY OF RATIONALITY
1. One such question concerns whether it can be epistemically rational for an individual to believe propositions that she realizes are jointly inconsistent and hence cannot possibly all be true. It is sometimes assumed that the answer must be no, but notice that in many contexts it is rational to pursue a strategy that one knows in advance cannot possibly result in an ideal outcome. Think of betting and investment contexts in which it is often rational to prefer a moderate but necessarily flawed strategy to a possibly flawless but more risky one. Compare with the discussion of the lottery and preface in chap. 12. See also my Working Without a Net, esp. chap. 4.
2. The concept of epistemically rational belief is itself an instantiation of this template. Inserting the epistemic goal into the template for “goals of type X” results in the following: believing P is rational in an epistemic sense if it is epistemically rational for S to believe that believing P would acceptably satisfy the epistemic goal of S’s now having accurate and comprehensive beliefs. This instantiation is tautological, which for the sake of generality of the template is just what is called for.
3. For more details on this way of understanding justified belief, see Richard Foley, “An Epistemology that Matters,” in Essays in Honor of Philip Quinn, ed. Paul J. Weithman; and Richard Foley, “The Foundational Role of Epistemology in a General Theory of Rationality,” in Zagzebski and Fairweather, Virtue Epistemology.
CHAPTER 27. THE CORE CONCEPTS OF EPISTEMOLOGY
1. See Fumerton, Epistemology, chap. 2; and Mark Kaplan, “It’s What You Know that Counts,” Journal of Philosophy 82 (1985): 350–63, each of whom takes a different route to the same conclusion that knowledge is a secondary epistemic concept. For an opposing view, see Williamson, Knowledge and Its Limits.