Abstract
We may usefully distinguish between one’s having fallible knowledge and having a fallibilist stance on some of one’s knowledge. A fallibilist stance could include a concessive knowledge-attribution (CKA). But it might also include a questioning knowledge-attribution (QKA). Attending to the idea of a QKA leads to a distinction between what we may call closed knowledge that p and open knowledge that p. All of this moves us beyond Elgin’s classic tale of the epistemic capacities of Holmes and of Watson, and towards a way of resolving Kripke’s puzzle about dogmatism and knowing.
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Notes
Pasnau (2017, pp. 121–126) argues that even God’s knowledge would at best be fallible, since God could not help but ask whether His knowledge really is knowledge. In this paper’s terms, this might be better interpreted as God’s knowledge being fallibilist—thanks to His viewing his knowledge in some fallibilist terms.
This will not involve entering into all of the suggestion’s aspects. Elgin discusses mainly understanding a domain of inquiry, rather than (as will be this paper’s topic) knowledge of a single state of affairs. The concept of knowledge cannot do justice to the reality of scientific progress, argues Elgin: for a start, knowledge entails truth, whereas scientific understanding does not. Actually, as I explain elsewhere (2011, Sect. 5.15), knowledge and understanding might not be so far apart in nature. But none of this matters for my argument here. Nor will I be arguing for the correctness of fallibilism as a stance. My aim is to expand upon this basic idea of Elgin’s (describing fallibilism as ‘a stance’—in the sense of ‘an active orientation toward … inquiry’), by investigating one associated explicative path that a fallibilist might follow. (I have offered defences of fallibilist thinking elsewhere: 2001, 2002, 2013.).
It is perhaps a virtue that Holmes himself would have scorned, since (as we will find) it involves self-questioning, and since Doyle, his literary creator, left us in no doubt as to Holmes’s intellectual arrogance. As I mentioned, Elgin regarded Holmes’s epistemic superiority—other than as a knower (given, she argued, how this was being conceived of by various representative forms of epistemological theory)—as reflecting significant deficiencies in knowledge’s nature, rather than in Holmes. As Elgin was interpreting the case, if Holmes lacks knowledge because he has various epistemic qualities not viewed by those epistemological theories as constitutive of knowing, then epistemology should be altered to be about such qualities, instead of remaining so much about knowledge; and, in any event, knowledge is thereby an attainment that is itself lessened in stature, given its ready availability to Watson and not Holmes. Even without engaging directly with Elgin’s Holmes/Watson argument, then, if we wish to maintain an epistemological focus on knowledge, we should take from her argument this potentially useful challenge: namely, conceive of knowledge in a more subtle way, a way that can do justice to Holmes’s superior intellect (if we could prevail upon him to set aside his intellectual arrogance). The conception to be presented in this paper should help in that respect.
We might ultimately want to defend a stronger—non-minimal—conception, such as ‘All knowledge is fallible’ or even ‘Necessarily, all knowledge is fallible.’ This paper’s discussion does not need to engage directly with any such stronger conceptions.
How often do people often actually utter or think concessive knowledge-attributions? I do not know. Nor does it matter, for our immediate purposes. Epistemologists discuss concessive knowledge-attributions with another question in mind: if a concessive knowledge-attribution was to be offered, would it be a coherent thought or utterance? If it can be, then knowledge-fallibilism passes at least this test of its own coherence – hence of its at least possibly being true.
But see Hetherington (2013) for an extended discussion of concessive knowledge-attributions.
What is the nature of this entailment? Is it conceptual? Is it metaphysical? Is it logical? I will treat it as conceptual, given how readily epistemologists characterize their project of understanding knowledge’s nature as being an exercise in conceptual analysis. And I will take it that conceptual entailments include a clarity component, rendering any denial of such an entailment clearly mistaken—clearly enough that the denial would cause conceptual confusion or consternation, for a start.
I talk here of ‘evidence’ to reflect (generically) an internalist focus, and of ‘any other justificatory means’ to do (generic) justice to an externalist’s approach. So, my aim is to be discussing (albeit generically) all kinds of justificatory component within the initially claimed knowledge. On the difference between epistemic internalism and epistemic externalism, see Conee and Feldman (2001), Bergmann (2006), Coppenger and Bergmann (2016), and Hetherington (1996: chs, 14, 15; forthcoming b).
Incidentally, this lack of a guarantee does not depend on p’s being only contingently true. Even a necessarily true p can be known fallibly. When this occurs, it reflects something of the means by which the (true) belief has been formed: for example, a false belief could have been formed instead of the (necessarily) true one that has actually been formed. Even one’s attending and responding only to one’s evidence, say, need not have resulted in one’s forming the true belief that p.
Moreover, recognising this previously unnoticed category of knowledge has epistemological benefits. Section 6 will describe one of them.
Does this make a questioning knowledge-state a higher-order knowledge-state? I do not think of it in quite that way. It is knowing while also asking whether one knows. So, this is not one’s knowing that one knows, for instance—a paradigmatic higher-order knowledge-state. It need not even be an awareness of one’s knowing. As far as the knower is concerned, it could amount simply to her asking whether she knows; it just so happens that she does this while in fact she does know.
On the general idea of an extended knowing-state, see Hetherington (2012).
For more on the proper basing relation, see Hetherington (forthcoming a).
I realise that this not a problem if we do not need to accept that there could be both open knowledge that p and closed knowledge that p. At this stage of the paper, I am relying on the foregoing (if programmatic) motivation for adding that distinction to our epistemology.
It might be asked whether I am being too dismissive too quickly of too much contemporary epistemology; after all, not all prominent sorts of theory of knowledge have been considered in this section’s argument. But I am not being ‘too dismissive’, because I am not arguing that existing theories could not be expanded to encompass this paper’s suggestion. I am not advocating an overthrow of traditional epistemology; I am noting simply some respects in which epistemology can be modified. [Still, for arguments that do develop reasons to be more deeply suspicious of some key aspects of contemporary epistemology, see Hetherington (2011, 2016a).] Moreover, I do not claim to have discussed all currently prominent sorts of theory of knowledge. Like Elgin’s, my approach is programmatic, talking about just some representative sorts of theory of knowledge.
It was through Harman (1973, pp. 147–149) that most epistemologists first became aware of this Kripkean puzzle.
Thanks to three referees from this journal, for their probing and extensive comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Hetherington, S. Some fallibilist knowledge: Questioning knowledge-attributions and open knowledge. Synthese 198, 2083–2099 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02194-w
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-019-02194-w