Tiegue Rodrigues
Claudio
valcarenghi
mssilva77
Rafael
fmmuller
KK pressure, reflective knowledge and epistemic defeasibility
Don’t you love it when a philosopher is out of his depth and yet manages to sound like one who knows exactly what he’s talking about? It’s a disconcerting sight, isn’t it? Let me give you an instance that wow’ed me recently.
Thirteenth-century philosopher Siger of Brabant was clearly way out of his depth when he wrote the following:
Finding truth presupposes the ability to solve any objection or dubitation against the proposition accepted as true. For if you do not know how to solve the objections that may arise, you are not in possession of the truth, since in that case you have not assimilated the procedure of finding truth and thus will not know whether or when you have arrived at truth.
My source for this is Risto Hilpinen’s “Knowledge and Conditionals” (Philosophical Perspectives 2, Epistemology, 1988, ed. by James Tomberlin). (Thank you, Prof. Hilpinen, for this nugget!) He uses the quotation to illustrate the motivation for a defeasibility condition of knowledge. It’s a very narrow use of at most the first sentence in the passage. If you’re anything like me, you get vertigo by looking at a passage like that. There’s an epistemological abyss under Siger’s feet, and it’s a safe bet that he was unable to see past the first few meters into that dark, deep conceptual pit. He’s clinging to some primal intuition(s) about knowledge and hovering nonchalantly above the treacherous implications that lurk in the shadows.
I’d be curious to know how much epistemology our Fsophonistas see in Siger’s remark.
The title of this post identifies some of the topics that seem to me encapsulated in the quotation. But the conceptual connections are dizzyingly glossed over by Siger, left largely uncharted by Hilpinen, and I, too, can’t avoid being somewhat cryptic here. Still, I hope here is a useful clue: Readers of Ernest Sosa’s recent work may notice the striking resemblance between the quotation from Siger and some of Sosa’s claims about “reflective knowledge”. (Siger is not, to my knowledge, among Sosa’s references.)
Which, by the way, leads me to this shameless plug: Three of the papers in the Synthese issue that I’m editing with Stephen Hetherington discuss Sosa’s version of that Sigerian view – papers by Heather Battaly and Baron Reed, followed by Sosa’s replies to those two critics. (I’ll keep you posted on the publication.)
Claudio, 
lucas, and 1 other are discussing. 
Chris 2:26 pm on March 13, 2011 Permalink |
The thesis is that finding truth (knowing) entails knowing how I came to know.
Now, knowing how I came to know entails knowing that I know.
So, according to that thesis, knowing P entails knowing that one knows that P. That’s the reason why you got vertigo by looking at that passage, Claudio?
Or maybe the problem is that he is also assuming that knowing that one knows entails defeating any possible defeater?
Claudio 7:03 pm on July 26, 2011 Permalink |
Hi, Chris,
Sorry about the belated response.
That is a tight conceptual knot indeed. I think there are a number of problems there, including the two that you mention.
First, some measure of preliminary charity must, of course, go into parsing “finding truth” as *knowing*. (Obviously, lunatics routinely find truth, but it’s often not *known truth*. We tend to think that they *chance upon* truth.) Like you, I don’t think Siger is thinking of “finding truth” as merely believing veridically.
Second, some more charity will have to go into parsing “assimilating the procedure of finding truth” with *knowing how one knows*. (Is this any help, Lucas?)
Third, the passage is a clear endorsement of the KK Thesis, as you point out. But there’s this bewildering connection between knowing that you know and the overriding of “the objections that may arise” — which covers both Peter Klein’s “overriders” (propositional counterevidence in the agent’s mental life) and his *defeaters* (truths not in the agent’s belief system). Was Siger using a defeasibility condition in an argument for the KK Thesis? That’s how I tend to understand what he is trying to do. And I can’t see how a defeasibility condition can plausibly be used for that purpose. (That’s a major part of the vertigo, right there.)
Fourth, the connection between knowing that you know and knowing how you know is murky at best. Maybe the latter implies the former, as you suggest, a plausible enough assumption. But the converse implication seems highly doubtful. And I think Siger is putting forward the view that, if you don’t know how you know, then you don’t know that you know. (This connects with Lucas’ point in his second post below.)
Fifth, there is a war in epistemology over whether every conceivable objection is an overrider of one’s justification (or knowledge). Mooreans would insist that only justified overriders are allowed in the game. (That tends to rule out global skeptical hypotheses.) Even if you think the Mooreans have been on the ropes, there is exciting discussion there.
Sixth, there’s Luis’ point below. It is highly doubtful that, if I’m unable to defeat every possible objection to my knowing that P, then I don’t know how I know that P. But, assuming that knowing how one knows implies knowing that one knows, the sting in Luis’ point depends, at a minimum, on the following assumption: it is not obvious that knowing that one knows that P implies being able to defeat every objection – even every justified objection – to one’s knowing that P. Siger denies this assumption.
Luis Rosa 4:07 pm on March 16, 2011 Permalink |
Yeah, taking for granted that ‘finding truth’ in that passage means ‘knowing’, he is saying that knowledge is undefeasible, since, according to his remarks, when you know that P you are able do defeat any possible defeater for your belief that P. That thesis is in plain conflict with our ordinary attributions of knowledge, where we don’t suppose the knower to be “water-proof” over the proposition known.
The passage says that:
I know that P -> my belief that P is undefeasible
Which entails:
It is not the case that my belief that P is undefeasible -> I don’t know that P
These two conditional are explicit in the passage, in this same order. Further he says that in cases where I cannot defeat the possible defeater for my belief, it is so because I don’t know how I came to know, which is a plainly false thesis. Let us suppose I know that every blog is a website or part of a website, and I know also how I came to this belief (by inductive argument, say). Now John, which is a reliable and trustworthy web-expert, says to me that there is a blog which is neither a website nor part of a website. In this case, I cannot defeat John’s testimony, but that does not mean it is so because I don’t know how I came to know that every blog is a website or part of a website.
=]
Claudio 8:08 pm on August 8, 2011 Permalink |
Luis,
You may like to know that Peter Klein is on your side there. In his book on _Certainty_ (1981), chapter 2, section 12, Klein discusses — and refutes — the following principle: “[F]or all propositions (x,y) if y is a defeater of S’s justification of x, then, if S is justified in believing x, then S is justified in rejecting y.” According to him, “[s]everal defeasibility theorists have claimed this”. Marshall Swain is identified as being one of them. I think we can add Siger of Brabant to the list.
Luis Rosa 2:41 pm on August 13, 2011 Permalink |
Very nice Cláudio. In particular, I would like to find out a valid argument, based on solid epistemic principles, proving the following principle (where ‘DJ’ stands for ‘defeasible justification’:
(DJ) S may justifiably believe that P even if there is evidence E such that, if S have access to E, then S no longer justifiably believes that P
I would like to make a new post on this, with clear connections with the problem of dogmatism and defeasibility you brought to us this semester.
lucas 1:18 pm on May 27, 2011 Permalink |
I think there’s a lot of epistemology in siger’s remark!
But i’m a bit confused about how to understand it. What does it mean to ” assimilate the procedure of finding truth “?
lucas 1:46 pm on May 27, 2011 Permalink |
I was thinking about siger’s criptic remark. It seems to me that’s he talking about the old problem of the criterion. Because you must assimilate the procedure of finding the truth ( i.e, judge by the right criterion and know that this is the right criterion), you must know that you know, and because you must know that you know, you must be able to solve any objection ( in past, present and future) to your knowledge claim.