A Social-Cognitive Approach to Epistemology by Jeremy AB Lent

Knowing by Example: A Social-Cognitive Approach to Epistemology by Jeremy A. B. Lent A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Philosophy) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor Elizabeth S. Anderson, Co-Chair Professor James M. Joyce, Co-Chair Associate Professor Maria Lasonen-Aarnio Professor Richard L. Lewis Professor Peter A. Railton TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I. Mysterious Knowledge 1 II. Foundation of Trust 20 III. Trouble from Within 55 IV. Trouble from Without 95 V. Beyond the Armchair 137 VI. Social-Cognitive Epistemology 169 BIBLIOGRAPHY 186 ii CHAPTER I: Mysterious Knowledge 1.1 A Puzzle The verb “know” and its cognates are among the most commonly used words in the English language: According to the Corpus of Contemporary American English, “know” is the 49th most common English word, the 10th most common verb, and the most common mental-state verb (Davies and Gardner 2010). Yet some of our “know”-related linguistic habits are quite puzzling—in particular, our habits surrounding “know-that” constructions, such as “I know that ‘know’ is the 10th most common English verb.”1 A particularly striking set of puzzles became widely recognized—at least among philosophers and linguists—in the wake of Edmund Gettier’s 1963 paper, “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Until that point, not many philosophers or linguists had put much effort into charting how we use the word “know” in everyday life, let alone developing a general theory about those uses. Gettier took as his foil the theory that when we think about knowledge, we think of something roughly like “a true belief for which the believer has sufficient justification”.2 (By calling a belief “justified”, Gettier and 1 “Know-that” is to be distinguished from “know-how” (e.g., “I know how to search the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA)”) and “know-of” (e.g., “I know of the COCA,” or “I know the editors of the COCA”). Except where otherwise noted, when I use “know” and its cognates, I’ll be referring strictly to “know-that”. 2 Despite the lore among epistemologists, it’s not clear how many pre-Gettier philosophers actually endorsed such a theory. For instance, Russell (1948: pp. 170-71) shows clear signs of disagreeing with the “justified true belief” analysis. 1 other philosophers seemed to imply their belief that they would have held the very same belief, had they been in the believer’s shoes.) To demonstrate that knowledge is not equivalent to justified true belief, Gettier posed two now-infamous hypothetical scenarios. In each of them, a believer has a clearly well- justified true belief, yet many of us (Gettier included) are strongly inclined to deny that this believer knows the fact in question. Here, for the sake of tradition, are Gettier’s two cases: Smith and Jones have each applied for a certain job. Smith has strong evidence that Jones will get the job and that Jones has ten coins in his pocket. (Suppose that the president of the company assured Smith that Jones would be selected, and that Smith recently counted the coins in Jones’s pocket.) Smith infers the following proposition from the latter evidence: “The person who will get the job has ten coins in his pocket.” But unknown to Smith, he and not Jones will get the job. Also, unknown to Smith, he himself has ten coins in his pocket. (ibid., p. 122) Smith has strong evidence that Jones owns a Ford: Jones has at all times in the past within Smith’s memory owned a car, and always a Ford. Smith has another friend, Brown, of whose whereabouts he is totally ignorant. Smith thinks of the city Barcelona quite at random, and constructs the following proposition: “Either Jones owns a Ford, or Brown is in Barcelona.” Smith realizes the entailment of this proposition from his belief that Jones owns a Ford, and he proceeds to accept it on the basis of this entailment. But in fact, Jones does not own a Ford: He is merely renting one right now. And as it happens, Brown is in fact in Barcelona. (ibid., pp. 122- 23) Epistemologists promptly busied themselves trying to give an account of knowledge—that is, a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a belief to count as knowledge—which excludes both of Smith’s (justified, true) beliefs but which doesn’t exclude any beliefs (real or hypothetical) which we intuitively do regard as knowledge. (So, for instance, the account shouldn’t deny that we can know what our own names are, or that the derivative of sin(x) is cos(x), or that Ann Arbor is located in the Eastern Time Zone.) Many accounts were proposed which did apparently exclude each of Smith’s beliefs from counting as knowledge. But for each one, some philosopher devised a hypothetical counterexample, involving either (1) a belief which satisfies all the account’s conditions but 2 which doesn’t seem to be knowledge, or (2) a belief which fails one or more of the conditions but which does seem to be knowledge. In the course of this “Gettier game,” dozens of hypothetical cases were constructed involving a true belief which is quite plausibly justified, but which many of us would hesitate to label as knowledge. And today, more than 50 years since Gettier’s paper, there is no account of knowledge which has garnered anything near a consensus among philosophers. In fact, some have abandoned the project of giving non-circular necessary and sufficient conditions as hopeless. For instance, Williamson (2000) proposes that our concept knowledge corresponds to a mental state whose exact nature cannot be expressed in any more-basic terms (at least not of our language). Meanwhile, we’re left with a mountain of often-fanciful hypothetical cases where our willingness (or not) to ascribe knowledge to a particular believer doesn’t seem to fit any detectable, exceptionless pattern. 1.2 A Hypothesis This state of affairs raises quite a puzzle: Why do we humans use the words “know” and “knowledge” in the exact ways that we do? Why, for instance, does it seem wrong to ascribe knowledge to the protagonists in Gettier’s cases and others like them? 3 If some account proposed in Gettier’s wake had succeeded in capturing all of our judgments about knowledge, then perhaps we’d have a good lead on answering the puzzle: We could take the conditions for knowledge in the successful account and, if it weren’t already obvious, try to piece together why humans might have developed a word sensitive to those conditions. However, no account 3 Several recent empirical studies (e.g. Starmans & Friedman 2012) have provided evidence that the apparent philosophical consensus on Gettier’s cases, and others like them, is not shared by a significant proportion of non- philosophers. In Chapter 5, I’ll return to these apparent differences in knowledge ascription patterns between philosophers and non-philosophers, and propose an explanation for them. 3 seems to have succeeded in capturing all of our judgments (or at least those of philosophers) about knowledge. Thus, even if we can determine why humans might have developed a word sensitive to the conditions of an existing account, it will still be a puzzle why we do (or don’t) ascribe knowledge in the cases which the account doesn’t account for. To illustrate: Suppose, counterfactually, that our concept of knowledge was fully captured by the “justified true belief” account. Then we’d still want to ask why humans developed a word specifically to alert each other to the presence of justified true belief, rather than just true belief. Presumably, it’s important to recognize when other people have true beliefs: for purposes of social coordination, for predicting others’ actions (and the consequences of them), etc. But what’s the added value in recognizing that (roughly) we would have believed the same way someone else did had we been in their shoes? What are we thereby at least potentially alerting each other to? Perhaps the reader can begin to see a possible explanation here. But now remember that the “justified true belief” account doesn’t fully capture our knowledge ascription practices. Thus, even if we could determine why humans might have developed a word synonymous with justified true belief, that wouldn’t answer the puzzle we actually have before us. In fact, I believe I’ve found a way to explain why our word “know” functions in all the apparently puzzling ways it does. In essence, my hypothesis is this: Our evolutionary ancestors developed a word which, through linguistic or “memetic” evolution, came to be understood (at least implicitly) by speakers and listeners to convey at least three messages: (1) a given person K is certain of the truth of a particular proposition p (e.g., “The new berries we found are safe to eat”); (2) the speaker is certain of the proposition’s truth too; and (3) the speaker would advise 4 anyone in a position similar to K’s to do the same sort of thing K did in being certain that p (roughly, to “follow K’s example”). 4 My proposal is that our modern-day verb “know” is the descendant of this ancestral word, and that an understanding of the messages it conveys has been transmitted, at least implicitly, through each generation. I’ll spell out the details of this hypothesis in (hopefully not too excruciating) detail in Chapter 2. (For now, I offer this brief statement of the hypothesis as a compass for my reader, so he or she can have a sense of where we’re headed.) After laying out the hypothesis, I’ll spend the rest of Chapter 2 showing how it can account for several potentially puzzling features of our knowledge ascription practices—that is, our uses of the word “know”—among both philosophers and non- philosophers.

Load more