Heeding misleading evidence

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 103, Issue 2, 2001, Pages 99-120

  Conee, Earl ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER   (United States)

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EID: 52549087584     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1010393112675     Document Type: Article

References (18)

1. In Gilbert Harman's book Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973) he attributes the original puzzle of this sort to Saul Kripke (p. 148).
2. Gilbert Harman Thought (ibid.)
3. Carl Ginet ('Knowing less by knowing more', Midwest Studies in Philosophy, vol. 5 (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1980) pp. 151-161) have offered versions of this sort of answer.
4. Data may be states of affairs that are immediately apprehended, or they may be self-attributions of properties conceptualized in certain ways, or they may be something else entirely. Data as understood here are whatever fills a certain epistemic role, the role of giving primary indications of truth values. All we require is that this is a workable idea of what a person's evidence is.
5. A full account of the relevant evidence would not be brief. Smith would have to have memories in support of his location of the rain on the Olde Quadd, memories in support of the chiming he hears being a reliable signal of noon, and numerous conceptual memories assuring him of his having adequate competence in applying the concepts involved in (R).
6. Carl Ginet, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Op. cit., pp. 156-157.
7. Roy Sorensen, 'Dogmatism, junk knowledge, and conditionals', The Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 153 (1988) pp. 433-454.
8. Roy Sorensen, The Philosophical Quarterly, Ibid., p. 448.
9. James Cargile, 'Justification and misleading defeaters', Analysis, vol. 55, no. 3 (1995) pp. 216-220.
10. James Cargile, Analysis, Ibid., p. 217.
11. James Cargile, Analysis, p. 217. Ibid.
12. James Cargile, Analysis, Ibid., p. 218.
13. While seeing the rain, Smith might have considered various sorts of possible evidence against (R), sorts of evidence as much like Jones's immanent testimony as we like. The evidentialist account allows that Smith could know by inference from (C) that any such item of evidence is misleading.(E) allows that Smith's knowledge of (C) can survive all of these purely contemplative encounters with possible instances of its antecedent. This is another sort of persistence of knowledge of a conditional through "encounters" with instances of its antecedent. It is plausible to attribute a capacity for such persistence to Smith's knowledge of (C) in our example. The evidentialist view is not committed to disputing that.
14. Whether or not the view really allows knowledge to survive the existence of evaded defeating evidence depends in part on how the view answers the question - familiar from defeasibility solutions to the Gettier problem - of when the sheer existence of such evidence acts as a defeater to knowledge.
15. James Cargile, Analysis, Op. cit., pp. 218-219. In Cargile's view, knowledge is not always preserved by inference from known premises, because the justification that is needed to know something justifies in relation to an issue context. If the issue context of an inferred proposition differs from that of the known propositions that are known to imply it, then the inferred proposition may not be known via such an inference.
16. This is my rendition of a question raised by Stewart Cohen (in correspondence) about an evidentialist solution to the puzzle. I am grateful for this question and for the rest of the extensive correspondence.
17. This explanation relies on an asymmetric epistemic dependency relation among reasons. To account for the justification to Smith, at t2 of (2), rather than (3), the explanation uses the fact that (3) depends on (R) in a way that (R) does not depend on (3). A coherentist who denies the existence of such asymmetric support relations (or denies their justificatory relevance) seems unable to account for the fact that it is the members of the combination - (1), (2), not-(3), and not-(R) - that are justified for Smith at t2. Ignoring this dependency appears to leave no good reason to deny that Smith would be equally reasonable in believing at t2 the propositions - (R), (1), (3) and not-(2). Since in fact this would be an unreasonable refusal to defer to compelling counterevidence, an inability to account for this constitutes an objection to any such form of coherentism.
18. I am grateful to James Cargile, Stewart Cohen, Richard Feldman, epistemology discussion group participants at Brown University, and colloquium participants at UC Davis for helpful comments on previous drafts of this work.