Anti-luck virtue epistemology

Journal of Philosophy

Volumn 109, Issue 3, 2012, Pages 247-279

  Pritchard, Duncan ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 84869145733     PISSN: 0022362X     EISSN: 19398549     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.5840/jphil201210939     Document Type: Article

References (73)

1. Consider this passage from one of the main overviews of contemporary theory of knowledge: "Why not say that knowledge is true belief? The standard answer is that to identify knowledge with true belief would be implausible because a belief that is true just because of luck does not qualify as knowledge." Matthias Steup, "The Analysis of Knowledge," in Edward N. Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2006), online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-analysis/index.html, section 1.2.
2. Consider, for example, this passage from an influential contemporary introduction to epistemology: "This was just the point of the Gettier counter-examples; nothing in the tripartite definition excluded knowledge by luck." Jonathan Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (New York: Blackwell, 1985), p. 134.
3. See, for example, this passage in a recent survey of epistemology: "Knowledge, then, requires factual belief. However, this does not suffice to capture the nature of knowledge. Just as knowledge requires successfully achieving the objective of true belief, it also requires success with regard to the formation of that belief. In other words, not all true beliefs constitute knowledge; only true beliefs arrived at in the right way constitute knowledge. "What, then, is the right way of arriving at beliefs?... We might begin by noting that sound reasoning and solid evidence seem to be the way to acquire knowledge. By contrast, a lucky guess cannot constitute knowledge. Similarly, misinformation and faulty reasoning do not seem like a recipe for knowledge, even if they happen to lead to a true belief." David Truncellito, "Epistemology," in Bradley Dowden and James Fieser, eds., Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2007), online at http://www.iep.utm.edu/epistemo/, section 2.c.
4. Strictly speaking, we should be relativizing this principle - and the safety principle offered below - to the actual basis for the agent's belief in p, since otherwise it will be susceptible to "grandmother"-style counterexamples (see Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (New York: Oxford, 1981), p. 179). In what follows for ease of expression I will take such relativization to be assumed.
5. Ibid., chapter 3. See also Fred Dretske, "Epistemic Operators," this journal, lxvii, 24 (Dec. 24, 1970): 1007-23;
6. Dretske, "Conclusive Reasons," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, xlix, 1 (May 1971): 1-22;
7. Alvin Goldman, "Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge," this journal, lxxiii, 20 (Nov. 18, 1976): 771-91.
8. For some recent texts which sympathetically explore the sensitivity principle, see Sherrilyn Roush, Tracking Truth: Knowledge, Evidence, and Science (New York: Oxford, 2005);
9. Kelly Becker, Epistemology Modalized (New York: Routledge, 2007);
10. Tim Black and Peter Murphy, "In Defense of Sensitivity," Synthese, cliv, 1 (January 2007): 53-71;
11. Black, "Defending a Sensitive Neo-Moorean Invariantism," in Vincent Hendricks and Duncan Pritchard, eds., New Waves in Epistemology (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), pp. 8-27.
12. This is, of course, one of the two cases offered by Edmund Gettier, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?" Analysis, xxiii, 6 (June 1963): 121-23.
13. nd ed. (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977), p. 105.
14. That what we care about when it comes to ascriptions of knowledge is the modal closeness of the error rather than the probability of the error accords with some of the recent empirical literature on subjects'judgments about risk and luck. For it seems that subjects assign far more risk to an event that is modally close than to one that is modally distant even when they are fully aware that the two events have an equal probability of occurring. For a survey of the relevant empirical literature on risk and luck and its relevance to epistemology, see Pritchard and Matthew Smith, "The Psychology and Philosophy of Luck," New Ideas in Psychology, xxii, 1 (April 2004): 1-28.
15. For discussion of some of the other problems facing sensitivity, see Williamson, op. cit, chapter 7; and Pritchard, "Sensitivity, Safety, and Anti-Luck Epistemology," in John Greco, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Skepticism (New York: Oxford, 2008), pp. 437-55.
16. This case is due to Ernest Sosa, "How to Defeat Opposition to Moore," Noûs, xxxiii, Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives, 13: Epistemology (October 1999): 141-53.
17. For a key defense of the safety principle, see ibid. Similar principles have been advanced by Steven Luper, "The Epistemic Predicament: Knowledge, Nozickian Tracking, and Skepticism," Australasian Journal of Philosophy, lxii, 1 (March 1984): 26-50;
18. Luper, "Indiscernability Skepticism," in Luper, ed., The Skeptics: Contemporary Essays (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003), pp. 183-202;
19. R M. Sainsbury, "Easy Possibilities," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, lvii, 4 (December 1997): 907-19;
20. Williamson, op. cit, chapter 5; and Pritchard, "Resurrecting the Moorean Response to the Sceptic," International Journal of Philosophical Studies, x, 3 (August 2002): 283-307;
21. Pritchard, Epistemic Luck (New York: Oxford, 2005);
22. Pritchard, "Anti-Luck E pistemo logy," Synthese, clviii, 3 (October 2007): 277-97.
23. Earlier versions of the safety principle did not make this feature of the principle explicit, and this gave rise to the objection that safety cannot simultaneously deal with both the Lottie and the Ernie cases. For a clear statement of this objection, see Greco, "Worries about Pritchard's Safety," Synthese, clviii, 3 (October 2007): 299-302.
24. For a response in line with the account of the safety principle put forward here, see Pritchard, "Anti-Luck Epistemology."
25. For further discussion of this point, see Pritchard, "Safety-Based E piste mo logy: Whither Now?" Journal of Philosophical Research, xxxiv (2009): 33-45;
26. n ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).
27. For further discussion of some of the problems facing the safety principle, see Ram Neta and Guy Rohrbaugh, "Luminosity and the Safety of Knowledge," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, lxxxv, 4 (December 2004): 396-406;
28. Juan Comesaña, "Unsafe Knowledge," Synthese, cxlvi, 3 (September 2005): 393-402;
29. Greco, op. cit; and Avram Hiller and Neta, "Safety and Epistemic Luck," Synthese, clviii, 3 (October 2007): 303-14.
30. I offer a fuller defense of the safety principle in Pritchard, "There Cannot Be Lucky Knowledge" to which Stephen Hetherington responds in "There Can Be Lucky Knowledge," in Steup and Turri, eds., op. cit.
31. Although I have opted for the safety principle over the sensitivity principle here as the best way of thinking about the anti-luck condition, I am sympathetic to the idea that there is a way of thinking about the sensitivity principle such that it is equivalent to the safety principle, although it should be noted that the sensitivity principle, so conceived, would be a very different beast to that put forward by folk such as Nozick. For more on this point, see Pritchard, Epistemic Luck, chapter 6. For a more general discussion of the relative merits of the safety and sensitivity principles, see Pritchard, "Sensitivity, Safety, and Anti-Luck Epistemology."
32. While most (if not all) epistemic internalists will accept this claim, there is a significant group of internalists who maintain that we should not define epistemic internalism in this "accessibilist" fashion. See especially Earl Conee and Richard Feldman, Evidentialism (New York: Oxford, 2004).
33. For discussion of this issue, see Pritchard, "Evidentialism, Internalism, Disjunctivism," in Trent Dougherty, ed., Evidentialism and its Discontents (New York: Oxford, 2011), pp. 235-53.
34. For more general discussion of the epistemic externalism/internalism distinction, see the papers collected in Hilary Kornblith, ed., Epistemology: Internalism and Externalism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2001).
35. For more discussion of the chicken-sexer example, see Linda Zagzebski, Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge (New York: Cambridge, 1996),
36. sections 2.1 and 4.1; Robert Brandom, "Insights and Blindspots of Reliabilism," The Monist, lxxxi, 3 (July 1998): 371-92;
37. On Greco's agent-reliabilist view, for example, epistemic virtues are essentially the same as cognitive abilities as we are understanding this notion here. See, for example, Greco, "Agent Reliabilism," Noûs, xxxiii, Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives, 13: Epistemology (October 1999): 273-96;
38. Greco, Putting Skeptics in Their Place: The Nature of Skeptical Arguments and Their Role in Philosophical Inquiry (New York: Cambridge, 2000). (Indeed, the account of cognitive abilities that I offer is largely inspired by Greco's work in this regard.) In contrast, some commentators have explicitly distinguished epistemic virtues and cognitive abilities, most notably Zagzebski, op. cit.
39. This case is due to Alvin Plantinga, Warrant: The Current Debate (New York: Oxford, 1993), p. 199.
40. Even if, as is arguably the case, epistemic externalism fares better in this respect when it is cast along virtue-theoretic lines. For a recent detailed defense of an externalist rendering of virtue epistemology in light of internalist objections, see Greco, Achieving Knowledge: A Virtue-Theoretic Account of Epistemic Normativity (New York: Cambridge, 2009), part one.
41. Note that I say "creditable" rather than "of credit." These two notions clearly are not the same - for example, one's cognitive success could be creditable to one's cognitive agency without being at all of credit to one (perhaps the cognitive success is the result of an inquiry that one ought not to be pursuing because, say, there are epistemically more desirable inquiries that one should be focusing on instead). Unfortunately, one often finds these two notions equated in the literature - see, for example, Greco, "Knowledge as Credit for True Belief," in Michael DePaul and Zagzebski, eds., Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology (New York: Oxford, 2003), pp. 111-34
42. this has generated a fair amount of confusion. For further discussion of this point, see Pritchard, Alan Millar, and Adrian Haddock, The Nature and Value of Knowledge: Three Investigations (New York: Oxford, 2010), section 2.4.
43. Note that there is an alternative reading of the "because of" in play in this version of virtue epistemology that has been put forward by Sosa. See his A Virtue Epistemology: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume I (New York: Oxford, 2007),
44. Reflective Knowledge: Apt Belief and Reflective Knowledge, Volume II (New York: Oxford, 2007). I comment on this alternative reading below.
45. The most prominent defender of strong virtue epistemology in the recent literature has been Greco. See, especially, his Achieving Knowledge, but also "Knowledge as Credit for True Belief" and "The Nature of Ability and the Purpose of Knowledge," Philosophical Issues, xvii, 1 (September 2007): 57-69. Whether Greco intends to offer an analysis of knowledge in these terms is not so clear, however. In the introduction to Achieving Knowledge, for example, he claims that he is merely offering necessary conditions for knowledge, although elsewhere - in chapter five of that same book for instance - he does express his view as offering necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge. In any case, many have read him as a proponent of strong virtue epistemology even if in the final analysis this is not his settled view.
46. Strong virtue epistemology also seems to possess another key attraction, which is its ability to account for the distinctive value of knowledge. See, for example, Sosa, A Virtue Epistemology, chapter 4;
47. Greco, "The Value Problem," in Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard, eds., Epistemic Value (New York: Oxford, 2009), pp. 313-21.
48. For critical discussion of this claim, see Pritchard, "Knowledge, Understanding and Epistemic Value," in Anthony O'Hear, ed., Epistemology (Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures) (New York: Cambridge, 2009), pp. 19-43;
49. Pritchard, "The Value of Knowledge," Harvard Review of Philosophy, xvi, 1 (2009): 2-19;
50. Pritchard, Millar, and Haddock, The Nature and Value of Knowledge, chapter 2.
51. For an overview of the issues in play here, see Pritchard, "Recent Work on Epistemic Value," American Philosophical Quarterly, xliv, 2 (April 2007): 85-110;
52. Pritchard and Turri, "The Value of Knowledge," in Zalta, ed., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012), online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-value/.
53. 30For example, Zagzebski's (Virtues of the Mind) neo-Aristotelian version of virtue epistemology incorporates an internalist conception of epistemic virtue along broadly these lines. See also Sosa, who argues for a version of virtue epistemology which maintains that all human knowledge requires a reflective perspective. See Sosa, Knowledge in Perspective: Selected Essays in Epistemology (New York: Cambridge, 1991);
54. Sosa, Reflective Knowledge.
55. For more discussion of this point, see Pritchard, "Greco on Knowledge: Virtues, Contexts, Achievements," Philosophical Quarterly, lviii, 232 (July 2008): 437-47;
56. Jonathan Kvanvig, "Responses to Critics," in Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard, Epistemic Value, pp. 339-51.
57. See also Pritchard, "Virtue Epistemology and Epistemic Luck, Revisited," Metaphilosophy, xxxix, 1 (January 2008): 66-88.
58. This case is adapted from one offered by Jennifer Lackey, albeit to demonstrate a slightly different point. See Lackey, "Why We Don't Deserve Credit for Everything We Know," Synthese, clviii, 3 (October 2007): 345-61.
59. Despite being counterintuitive, this view of the epistemology of testimony - known as reductionism - is not without its adherents. See, for example, Elizabeth Fricker, "Critical Notice: Telling and Trusting: Reductionism and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony," Mind, civ, 414 (April 1995): 393-411.
60. Note too that opting for a different construal of the "because of" relation is of little help here. Sosa opts for a reading of this relation that understands it on the model of the manifestation of a power rather than in explanatory terms. See his A Virtue Epistemology and Reflective Knowledge. So, for example, while it might be correct in the explanatory sense to say that the glass broke because I threw it on the floor, it is also correct to say that it broke because it was fragile, where this involves the alternative "power manifestation" reading. As noted above (see footnotes 32 and 34), Sosa is committed to ascribing knowledge in the Barney case, contrary to intuition, and this is a direct result of the kind of strong virtue epistemology that he puts forward (it is, after all, undoubtedly the case that Barney manifests the relevant cognitive powers in acquiring his true belief). Sosa also struggles with the Jenny case, since it is far from clear why her cognitive success should be credited to her cognitive powers, specifically. As a result, he argues that such cases display a kind of "distributed" knowledge, where the cognitive success is creditable to more than one agent (in this case, Jenny and her informant). I discuss Sosa's proposal in detail in Pritchard, "Apt Performance and Epistemic Value," Philosophical Studies, cxliii, 3 (April 2009): 407-16.
61. One potential problem for strong virtue epistemology which I have not engaged with here is the way in which the causal explanatory reading of the "because of" relation might require the view to endorse a fairly radical form of contextualism about knowledge ascriptions. For more discussion of this point, see Greco, "What's Wrong with Contextualism?" Philosophical Quarterly, lviii, 232 (July 2008): 416-36,
62. Pritchard, "Greco On Knowledge."
63. One perennial epistemological issue that I have not explored here is how anti-luck virtue epistemology - or, for that matter, anti-luck epistemology or virtue epistemology - fares when it comes to the problem of radical skepticism. Since this is a problem for all theories of knowledge, it ought to be uncontentious to put such an issue to one side for our purposes. That said, I do think that anti-luck virtue epistemology is potentially better placed to deal with this problem than rival views. On the one hand, anti-luck epistemology seems to get a victory over the skeptic that is too easy, since our beliefs that we are not, say, brains in vats will very easily satisfy the relevant modal condition if the skeptical possibility in question is indeed remote. On the other hand, strong virtue epistemologies seem to intensify the skeptical problem, since it is hard to see how our truly believing that we are not the victims of skeptical hypotheses (assuming these beliefs are true) could be because of our cognitive abilities. (For more discussion of this point, see Pritchard, "Radical Scepticism, Epistemic Luck, and Epistemic Value," Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, lxxxii, 1 (June 2008): 19-41.) By treading an intermediate path between these two views, anti-luck virtue epistemology might thus be able to avoid the pitfalls that they each face. The development of this anti-skeptical line will need to be left for another occasion, however.
64. See Edward Craig, Knowledge and the State of Nature: An Essay in Conceptual Synthesis (New York: Oxford, 1990).
65. Interestingly, although Craig's proposal has been highly influential within contemporary e pistemology, there are in fact relatively few published discussions of it. For some notable exceptions, see Melissa Lane, "States of Nature, Epistemic and Political," Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, xcix, 2 (1999): 211-24;
66. Bernard Williams, Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Genealogy (Princeton: University Press, 2002);
67. Neta, "Epistemology Factualized: New Contractarian Foundations for Epistemology," Synthese, cl, 2 (May 2006): 247-80;
68. Greco, "The Nature of Ability and the Purpose of Knowledge";
69. Greco, "What's Wrong with Contextualism?";
70. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (New York: Oxford, 2007);
71. Fricker, "Scepticism and the Genealogy of Knowledge: Situating Epistemology in Time," in Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard, eds., Social Epistemology (New York: Oxford, 2010), pp. 51-68;
72. Martin Kusch, "Testimony and the Value of Knowledge," in Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard, eds., Epistemic Value, pp. 60-94;
73. Klemens Kappel, "On Saying that Someone Knows: Themes from Craig," in Haddock, Millar, and Pritchard, eds., Social Epistemology, pp. 69-88.