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Against global method safety

  • S.I. : The Epistemology of Ernest Sosa
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Abstract

The global method safety account of knowledge states that an agent’s true belief that p is safe and qualifies as knowledge if and only if it is formed by method M, such that her beliefs in p and her beliefs in relevantly similar propositions formed by M in all nearby worlds are true. This paper argues that global method safety is too restrictive. First, the agent may not know relevantly similar propositions via M because the belief that p is the only possible outcome of M. Second, there are cases where there is a fine-grained belief that is unsafe and a relevantly similar coarse-grained belief (with looser truth conditions) that is safe and where both beliefs are based on the same method M. Third, the reliability of conditional reasoning, a basic belief-forming method, seems to be sensitive to fine-grained contents, as suggested by the wide variation in success rates for thematic versions of the Wason selection task.

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Notes

  1. The basic idea can already be found in Sosa (1996: pp. 276–277). The phrase ‘safety condition of knowledge’ was introduced in Sosa (1999a: p. 142). Luper-Foy (1987a: p. 9, b: p. 234) briefly mentioned the safety condition a few years before (Sosa 1996). Yet Luper-Foy mistook the safety condition for the contrapositive of the sensitivity condition which, in its bare-bone form, says: if p were not true, S would not believe that p. The safety and the sensitivity conditions are subjunctives. Material conditionals allow contraposition but subjunctives do not contrapose (cf. Sosa 1999a: p. 146). Williamson (1994) is another early proponent of safety. He argued that the epistemic theory of vagueness relies on something like the safety principle to posit a sharp dividing line between the cases to which a gradable predicate such as ‘bald’ applies and the cases to which it does not apply.

  2. Nozick (1981: p. 179) uses the grandmother case to show that the sensitivity condition of knowledge must be method-relativized. The same arguments that speak for the method-relativization of the sensitivity condition also speak for the method-relativization of the safety condition.

  3. See, for instance, Pritchard (2005: p. 156, p. 168) and Sosa (2002: pp. 267–269, 2007: p. 26). The safety condition comes in different strengths. Some require that there be no false beliefs in any close world, others requires that there be no false beliefs in all very close worlds and in most close worlds.

  4. Goldman (2002: p. 38) distinguishes between processes and methods. A process is a part of a person’s fundamental cognitive architecture while a method is something that is learned, typically by cultural transmission. I use ‘method’ to cover both processes and methods. McGinn (1984: pp. 536–537) appears to have been the first to introduce the distinction between local and global reliability of methods.

  5. Goldman (1986: p. 45). In a recent paper, Goldman (2008: p. 91) explains the distinction as follows: “‘Local reliability’ does indeed focus on the particular target belief, and invokes a counterfactual relation between that belief and the truth of its content…. Global reliability requires the generic reliability in the causal process, i.e., its reliability across the entire domain to which the process applies.” Goldman requires both local and global reliability of methods. For a belief to qualify as knowledge, according to Goldman, it must result from a globally reliable method that is counterfactually reliable for the case at hand, where this means that there is, under the circumstances, no relevant alternative to the method’s yielding a true belief.

  6. This is how Goldberg, Graham (2014), and Henderson and Horgan (2006, 2007) use the local/global distinction. Goldberg (2010: p. 52) writes: “Beliefs formed in Fake Barn Country are globally reliable, since they are formed through a process that would produce a preponderance of true beliefs in normal contexts; yet these beliefs are locally unreliable since the process in question would not produce a preponderance of true beliefs in contexts relevantly like the present one.”

  7. The reliability of a method can be understood as a high truth-ratio among its actual applications or among its counterfactual applications. The former interpretation is used by probabilistic reliabilism (Kvart 2006); the latter interpretation underlies modal reliabilism. Here I will focus on modal reliability.

  8. There is an analogous distinction among sensitivity accounts of knowledge. The method-relativized sensitivity condition reads: S's belief that p is sensitive if and only if p were not true and if S were to use the same method as in the actual world to arrive at a belief as to whether p, then S would not believe that p. Nozick (1981: p. 179) and Dretske (1971) argue for local method sensitivity. Dretske proposes that S's belief that p qualifies as knowledge just in case S believes p because of reasons he possesses that would not obtain unless p were true. In other words, S's reasons—the way an object appears to S, for example—are a reliable indicator of the truth of p. Adams and Clarke (2016: p. 69) and Becker (2007: p. 88) endorse global method sensitivity. Becker’s global reliability of methods condition reads: “S’s belief that p is formed by a belief-forming process or methodw that produces a high ratio of true beliefs in the actual world and throughout close possible worlds.” Methodsw are widely individuated methods. Yet Becker’s method-relativized sensitivity condition reads: “If p were false, S would not believe that p via the methodn S actually uses in forming the belief that p.” Methodsn are narrowly individuated methods.

  9. Among the proponents of global method safety are Brown (2000: p. 125), Manley (2007: pp. 403–404), Miščević (2007: p. 60), Pritchard (2009: p. 34, 2010: pp. 57–58, 2012: pp. 256–257), Sainsbury (1997: pp. 908–909), Weatherson (2004: p. 377), and Williamson (2000: p. 182).

  10. See Bernecker (2011: p. 138), Ginet (2010: p. 270), Goldberg (2015: pp. 277–278), Hiller and Neta (2007: pp. 307–308), and Lackey (2006: p. 288).

  11. Pritchard (2017: p. 71). See also Pritchard (2012: pp. 256–257). For a critical discussion of Pritchard’s globalized safety condition, see Hirvelä (2017).

  12. Brown (2000: pp. 125–128, 2004: pp. 126–129) was the first to discuss this problem. See also Hiller and Neta (2007: p. 312) and Pryor (2004: pp. 71–72).

  13. A critic might object that if Carl’s belief that that is a barn is de re, so is his belief whereupon he is driving by a structure used for storing grain, hay, or straw or for housing livestock. The thought would be that it is the speaker’s intention as opposed to the way a belief is expressed that determines whether it is de dicto or de re.

  14. I owe this suggestion to an anonymous reviewer.

  15. It could be that the fan is less interested in the scores of games than in how many points a given team gets out of a game. In soccer, a win counts for three points, a draw counts for one point, and a loss is zero points.

  16. Note that I am not committed to saying that it is impossible to generate knowledge on the basis of unreliable or unsafe testimony. See Goldberg (2005).

  17. In my mind, global method safety is neither necessary nor sufficient for knowledge. Knowledge requires (in addition to truth, belief, and method reliability) that there be an explanatory relation between the content of p and the fact that by using method M the agent comes to believe that p.

  18. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing this objection.

  19. What Goldberg calls the extendedness hypothesis is the thesis that the method used in testimonial belief-formation should be individuated externally. Broncano-Berrocal (2014) and Grundmann (2018) argue for the external individuation of all belief-forming methods, not just testimony. Sosa (2007: p. 27) and Pritchard (2018: pp. 3073–3074, n17) endorse, in passing, the idea that methods are externally individuated. Bogardus and Marxen (2014) criticize Broncano-Berrocal’s account of method individuation.

  20. This case is inspired by Harman’s (1973: pp. 143–144) famous assassination example.

  21. The concept of a normative defeaters is endorsed by Goldberg (2017), Goldman (1979: p. 20), Harman (1973: pp. 143–144), Lackey (2008: p. 45), Meeker (2004: pp. 162–163), and Pollock (1986: p. 192).

  22. See Wason (1966, 1968). I owe this suggestion to Peter Baumann.

  23. According to Lackey (2009), S can know that p without deserving credit for truly believing that p.

  24. See Sosa (2010: pp. 473–474, 2011: pp. 92–93, 2015: pp. 77–81). Sosa considers it to be an advantage of his distinction between three grades of knowledge that it can arbitrate between conflicting intuitions we have as to whether Albert in Broken Calculator and Carl in Fake Barn De Re do or do not possess knowledge.

  25. Ancestors of this paper were presented at a conference on safety-based accounts of knowledge at the University of Bonn in October 2013, the 1st Veritas Conference at Yonsei University in June 2014, a colloquium talk at the University of Erlangen in June 2015, a Southern California Epistemology Workshop at UC Irvine in May 2016, and the 2nd Leuven Epistemology Conference in December 2016. I am grateful to these audiences for challenging questions. For comments on previous drafts, I am grateful to Peter Baumann, Michael Blome-Tillmann, Sandy Goldberg, Peter Graham, Daniel Immerman, Maura Priest, Duncan Pritchard, and three anonymous reviewers. This work has been supported by an Alexander von Humboldt Professorship award.

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  1. Department of Philosophy, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, 92697, USA

    Sven Bernecker

  2. Department of Philosophy, University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923, Cologne, Germany

    Sven Bernecker

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Bernecker, S. Against global method safety. Synthese 197, 5101–5116 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-018-02008-5

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