Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to refute the widespread view that challenging a knowledge-claim always raises the original standards of justification–a view often associated with contextualism. To that purpose the distinction between undermining and overriding defeaters will be used. Three kinds of challenges will be considered that differ in their degree of specification. In all three kinds of challenges, the rising standards of justification model fails to capture the dialectic of justification in the case of undermining defeaters. At the end, the skeptical challenge will more briefly be given a similar analysis.
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Notes
Following Lewis, the rise in standards of justification consists in an expansion of the range of relevant alternatives, often called error possibilities, that the subject must be in a position to eliminate in order to count as knowing (paraphrasing (DeRose 1995 n. 11) who presents and criticizes Lewis’ rules of accommodation from (Lewis 1979) in Sect. 3, 7–13). Lewis singles out knowledge and specifies rules for ignoring and eliminating alternatives in his later paper (Lewis 1996). However, precisely how to order the alternatives as close or distant to the actual circumstances is not explained by any account to the knowledge of this author. Until this is done, eliminating error possibilities remain a poor measure of strength of justification (or anything else). See Sect. 3 below.
For example, if one demands indefeasible justification for knowledge, one could still allow degrees beneath that, perhaps unreachable, level and that challenges raise these required degrees.
(Cohen 2000, 95–6 and 98). He adds the qualification that the standard is stricter “in some sense”. The paper contains a further qualification in note 4, but these unspecified qualifications are here ignored for dialectical purposes.
Strictly speaking according to contextualism, the fellow traveler still knows that the flight has a layover in Chicago, according to the lower standards she herself employs in the conversation the couple overheard where error possibilities concerning the itinerary has not become salient in the conversation. Contextualism formulates this point in a meta language where these different scenarios and corresponding standards thus employ different senses of “know”. See note no. 9 below.
If justification is a relation R with at least two relata, the evidence E and the proposition (or belief that) P, then an undermining defeater can defeat E, i.e., show that ¬E holds, or accept E but deny that E stands in R to P – i.e., show that ¬R holds (as the skeptic does, see Sect. 4). However, sometimes by defeating E one may override P, as in the case of an inductive inference concerning the color of swans: the observation of a non-white swan overrides the generalization that all swans are white. In those cases we have, thus, instead found an overriding defeater.
Truth conduciveness is the criterion of justification according to this author. Using the notion of justification to evaluate the epistemic performance of the maker/asserter is of secondary importance. Many accounts of justification (and defeasibility) do not separate this criterion from the latter desideratum(?) or clarify their relative priority. The truth conduciveness of the justification of P is independent of whether the error possibility or undermining defeater is known to the maker/asserter. This author is grateful to an anonymous referee for pressing the author on these points.
Although relying on an itinerary that is vulnerable to such undermining defeaters is presumably more truth-conducive than consulting oracles.
The contextualist analysis of this scenario in its own terminology is given in note 4 above. This analysis thus has the counterintuitive consequence that there is one sense of knowing about the flight on the basis of the itinerary without assessing the latter. If truth conduciveness is a criterion of justification, then it is difficult to understand how the itinerary can serve as the basis of the knowledge-claim in a justificatory sense without any assessment of the itinerary. In an externalist analysis the itinerary can of course serve as the cause of the belief that P, but how does it work in Cohen’s internalist version? By contrast, the objection raised in the main text is that the undermining defeaters regarding the itinerary defeat any attempt at justification, and thus knowledge, based upon the itinerary that does not meet these challenges. If these ensuing challenges are not met, the original knowledge-claim was thus never sufficiently justified according to the original standards. Thanks to an anonymous referee for demanding clarification of these points.
The term “space of reasons” is coined by Sellars. In (McDowell 1994) the term is contrasted with the “realm of natural law”. With a partly different aim in mind, Adler notes the irrelevance of such considerations for epistemology “contextualists overlook that withdrawal [of assertion] requires an evidential, or other epistemic, reason. Differences in costs or risks cannot play this role” (Adler 2006, 284).Stanley claims that “knowledge is conceptually connected to practical interests” in (Stanley 2005, 89), which makes the difference with the point in the main text a terminological one – especially if we focus upon the case of justification rather than knowledge since justification does not figure as a constituent of knowledge in his account (ibid, vii). Moreover, since champions of the RSJM do not follow Stanley suite concerning the conceptual connections between knowledge and practical interests, his account is of no immediate help to them. In fact, in his talk at the Bled Epistemology Conference in May-June 2007, Cohen said that the role of high stakes rather is to make error possibilities salient. However, it is not clear how and which error possibilities are thereby selected.In addition to this main point, further more tentative remarks can be given. The challengers are interested in whether the airplane stops in Chicago since they need to act upon the information and in high stake cases it may not solely be knowledge, or even good justification, that always is of relevance, but perhaps foolproof rules, rather than rules of thumb, for action. The time interval at the disposal of the agents is one practical factor that might motivate the choice of such strict rules, whereas this practical factor is something we can ignore in our epistemological examination of the defeating force of this undermining defeater. Another practical factor to consider for the couple is how trustworthy the fellow traveler is, which we can ignore in an epistemological examination of the defeating force of that undermining defeater. That the fellow traveler reads itineraries poorly does not mean that they constitute bad sources of justification, but makes her untrustworthy as a guide for their choice of action.
Besides, this argument presents a bad example of practical reasoning insofar as an agent in high stake situations is required to consider all error possibilities and not only specific ones. Such a demand opens up for an unlimited investigation only stopping short by missed opportunities or complete paralysis.
(Williams 2001, 150).
Indeed, the title of one of Cohen’s papers is “How to Be a Fallibilist” (Cohen 1988).
As Williams can be interpreted as claiming in the book cited in note 13.
As Cohen mentions in other contexts (Cohen 1999, 67 and 2000, 103–4).
Suggestions how to override and undermine the skeptical argument are discussed in a manuscript by this author “Internalism, Evidentialism and the Skeptical Challenge”. One way of finding an undermining defeater to Premise 1 that is suggested in that paper, would be to investigate further into the underdetermination that the skeptic claims to hold between H and ¬H. As it stands, the skeptical hypothesis is a mere sketch and it remains for the skeptic to work out the details. The more elaborated that a theory of evidence and justification becomes, the more elaborate the skeptical hypothesis that targets it will have to be. It may be the case that the skeptical hypotheses cannot be elaborated sufficiently. In the course of elaboration, the skeptical hypothesis may be saddled with empirical consequences, and thereby defeaters, that ¬H lacks – like evidence for the conspiracy of the mad scientists and the necessary technology for envattment etc. ¬H would thereby cease to underdetermine H with respect to the evidence. In order to avoid that outcome, the skeptic may then be forced to resort to parasitic permutations of the targeted theory of justification that would not pose a skeptical threat to us – like proxy functions. Instead of being incompatible rivals, proxy functions of H would rather be reformulations of H. Any theory of evidence and justification that we eventually arrive at must allow a certain amount of underdetermination of course, since all theories are underdetermined, but we may still save the theory from being underdetermined by skeptical hypotheses that actually challenge our purported knowledge of the external world.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to Dugald Murdoch, Paul Needham, Levi Spectre, Jan Willner, Jonas Åkerman and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. An earlier version was also read at the Bled Epistemology Conference in May 2007. This author is grateful to the participants for the ensuing discussion, especially Stewart Cohen, Steven Luper, Michael Tooley and Marcus Willaschek. Work on this project was funded in part by the DFG-project “Defeasibility and Discourse Dependence” at the University of Frankfurt am Main.
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Janvid, M. Defeaters and Rising Standards of Justification. Acta Anal 23, 45–54 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0019-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-008-0019-z