More on Sensitivity and Closure

Traditionally, sensitivity theorists deny closure.  In the last post I suggested that some anti-sceptical beliefs (e.g. I am not a BIV) which are often taken to be non-sensitive, are in fact sensitive, when the sensitivity condition is parsed so as to take into account belief-forming methods. This though doesn’t mean that there might not be some, more elaborately contrived, beliefs in which closure would fail, even given a version of sensitivity that takes into account belief-forming methods.

But closure failure could be avoided if we adopted a disjunctive account of knowledge, whereby knowledge is either sensitively formed true belief, or belief that is soundly inferred from a sensitively formed true belief.  Oftentimes disjunctive explanations (or disjunctive proofs) are seen as being less explanatory than non-disjunctive counterparts (as they are less unifying), but there is some virtue in this disjunctive account of knowledge.  It does justice to the holistic nature of our beliefs.  Beliefs, taken individually, may lack sensitivity or responsiveness to the world, but may constitute knowledge because of the way they are apperceptively integrated into a wider whole, of which some parts are appropriately responsive to the world.  It is well-known that coherentist constraints on knowledge, taken on their own, leave out the important thought that beliefs that constitute knowledge must in some sense be responsive to reality (“frictionless spinning in the void” and all that); but modal constraints on knowledge, taken on their own, may also leave out the important role that coherence-making relationships have with respect to knowledge.  It may be that both kinds of consideration must be built into an account of knowledge, but that neither can be understood in terms of the other.  In which case, a disjunctive account of knowledge would be in order.

Sensitivity and Closure

Kelly Becker, in his book Epistemology Modalized, gives a nice modal account of knowledge:

S knows that p iff:

1. p is true
2. S believes that p
3. S’s belief that p is formed by a belief-forming process or methodw that produces a high ratio of true beliefs in the actual world and throughout close possible worlds (reliability condition).
4. If p were false, S would not believe that p via the methodn S actually uses in forming the belief that p (sensitivity condition). (Epistemology Modalized, p.88)

Methodsw are individuated very narrowly, but not so narrowly as to include specific belief contents.  Specific belief contents are however included in methodsn.  Becker individuates a methodw as the narrowest specific-content-neutral method or process that is causally operative in belief formation.  An example of a methodw might be forming beliefs about which people are in the vicinity based on quick looks in at least dim lighting.  A methodn on the other hand might be something like If what I am looking at now has short legs and floppy ears (and such and so other features) then it’s a dachshund.

Becker also makes a serious and interesting case against closure under known entailment, and he takes it, as epistemologists generally do, that sensitivity is incompatible with closure:

The sensitivity component of our theory somehow predicts this result – I do not know not-[sceptical hypothesis] because, if it were false, I would believe it anyway. (Epistemology Modalized, p.120)

But in fact, it isn’t clear that his account of sensitivity is incompatible with closure.  Take a standard BIV case.  I believe I am not a BIV, yet 4 holds: if I was a BIV I would not believe that I was not a BIV via the methodn I actually use in forming the belief that I am not a BIV.  My method, after all, involves coming to know ordinary propositions about the world around me by interacting with it, and inferring from these ordinary propositions that I am not a BIV.  Since brains in vats cannot employ the same kinds of methods that embodied humans do, my belief that I am not a BIV is sensitive according to Becker’s analysis.

Semantic Inferentialism and the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism

My Philosophy Compass article ‘Semantic Inferentialism and the Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism’ now looks like it’s been published online.  Plantinga’s evolutionary argument against naturalism has provoked a huge literature since it first began being discussed, but none of the prominent responses to it have, to my mind, been convincing.  In this paper however, I argue that semantic inferentialists, of the Brandomian sort, aren’t subject to the kind of considerations that motivate the argument.  Enjoy!

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/phc3.12062/abstract

Safety, Sensitivity and the Value of Knowledge

Epistemologists who wish to provide a modal analysis of knowledge are divided over whether the safety or the sensitivity condition offers a correct necessary condition for knowledge.  The two are usually parsed in (something like) the following way:

Safety: S’s belief p is safe iff in nearly all (if not all) nearby possible worlds w in which S forms a belief p using the same belief-forming methods as the actual world, p is true.

Sensitivity:  S’s belief p is sensitive iff in the closest possible world in which S forms her belief using the same belief-forming methods as the actual world and in which p is false, S does not believe p.

Sosa suggested the following scenario, which has been influential in encouraging philosophers to favour safety over sensitivity:

On my way to the elevator I release a trash bag down the chute from my high rise condo.  Presumably I know my bag will soon be in the basement. But what if, having been released, it still (incredibly) were not to arrive there? That presumably would be because it had been snagged somehow in the chute on the way down (an incredibly rare occurrence), or some such happenstance. But none such could affect my predictive belief as I release it, so I would still predict that the bag would soon arrive in the basement. My belief seems not to be sensitive, therefore, but constitutes knowledge anyhow, and can correctly be said to do so. [‘How to Defeat Opposition to Moore’: 145-6]

Now, I’m not convinced that the condo owner really has knowledge in this case—as opposed to a true, justified belief, or knowledge of some closely related proposition, such as that it is highly probable that the bag is in the basement—and I also think that examples with the same structure as Sosa’s offer some evidence against the safety condition and in favour of sensitivity.

For instance, I once went to meet my supervisor on the fifth floor of our building, only to discover that his office was not there: he had moved to the sixth floor.  Two things strike me about this.  Firstly, it seems to me perfectly reasonable to hold that I didn’t have knowledge that he was on the fifth floor, even when this was true and I was justified (and safe) in believing it.  I was not properly connected to the facts: when the justified, true (and safe) belief became a justified, false belief, I was oblivious to the change.  Secondly, and relatedly, it is often thought that we value knowledge resides (at least in part) to its connection to felicitous action.  A mere true belief is, all things being equal, less valuable than knowledge because the vagaries of the world ensure that it has a tendency to turn into a false belief.  Known propositions are the sort that allow us to successfully navigate our environment, and false beliefs will (in ordinary circumstances) lead us to behave infelicitously (e.g. by going to the fifth rather than the sixth floor).  The thought here is that there are many scenarios akin to the one above, and, hence, sensitivity seems to be a necessary condition for the sort of belief that allows a person to successfully navigate her environment.

More on whether understanding requires knowledge

In the last post I suggested that understanding needn't be factive, and hence isn't a species of knowledge.  I also suspect that understanding needn't be doxastic (viz. doesn't require belief).  Take for instance a historian of science who understands phlogiston theory, but doesn't take it to be true.  There's a retort here: sure enough the historian of science doesn't believe phlogiston theory, but there is something she is required to believe about phlogiston theory in order to have understanding; i.e. that such and such is what people took phlogiston theory to be, that "phlogiston theory" denotes such and such propositions, or whatever.  Certainly, in most ordinary cases of understanding, beliefs of this sort will be involved, but these might only be a contingent feature of ordinary cases of understanding, not essential to understanding itself.  Imagine a whimsical wizard implants in a person S's mind a grasp of some such theory $\Gamma$.  This person, being epistemically cautious, whilst having a conceptual grasp of $\Gamma$, forms no beliefs about its origin, its truth, whether anyone else believes $\Gamma$, or whatever.  It seems coherent to imagine someone who understands $\Gamma$ without having any beliefs about it (other than trivial ones such as "I grasp $\Gamma$").

Is Misunderstanding a Species of Understanding?

I take it that something of the sort Kvanvig says about understanding is correct:

The central feature of understanding, it seems to me, is in the neighborhood of what internalist coherence theories say about justification. Understanding requires the grasping of explanatory and other coherence-making relationships in a large and comprehensive body of information. One can know many unrelated pieces of information, but understanding is achieved only when informational items are pieced together by the subject in question.  [Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding: 192]

and

[U]nderstanding requires, and knowledge does not, an internal grasping or appreciation of how the various elements in a body of information are related to each other in terms of explanatory, logical, probabilistic, and other kinds of relations that coherentists have thought constitutive of justification. [ibid.: 192-3]

(My own view actually differs slightly from Kvanvig's in that I want to take understanding as fundamental and explain explanation in terms of it, rather than the other way around, but this is tangential to what I'm talking about here.) So, for example, someone who misunderstands evolutionary theory might think that humans evolved from chimpanzees, while someone who understands evolutionary theory will hold that both humans and chimps evolved from a common hominid ancestor. Broadly speaking then we might think that there are four states a person can be in: (i) understanding; (ii) misunderstanding; (iii) befuddlement (when a person's beliefs in a particular domain are largely incoherent); and (iv) simple non-understanding (when a person doesn't have any beliefs about a particular domain, coherent or otherwise). In this case, it seems that misunderstanding is a species of understanding: the person who beliefs that humans evolved from chimps grasps coherence-making relationships between a body of propositions. Now, a dissenter might just define understanding as the factive kind, but at the very least, misunderstanding shares all the distinctive features of understanding, while lacking factivity, and so the two are naturally grouped together as cognate phenomenon. If this is right, understanding is not a species of knowledge because truth is not a necessary condition for understanding.