The purpose of
this paper is to show why Peter Klein’s “Useful false beliefs” of the type he
envisages are built in such a way that I would describe as structurally faulty.
This is to say that the structure
inappropriately allows certain instances that utilize false beliefs to be
epistemically useful for attaining knowledge.
First I will do my best to replicate Peter Klein’s proposal of the
structure that he describes that would determine a false beliefs as being
epistemically useful. I will also
provide the examples that he used that I would like to focus on. I will then articulate what I believe is the
most accurate incarnation of a structure of justification that is at a bare
minimum necessary for knowledge to be attained, characteristics of which are
not present in the Klein cases. I will
then explain what is meant by epistemic luck and show while there may be some
people that grant knowledge in the Klein cases, it would be hard to show how
some degree of epistemic luck isn’t had by the supposed knowledge-havers in
those same cases. I will then explain
Klein’s conjunct issue, how he addressed it and show that though it is
impossible for me to disagree with anything he says on this issue specifically,
there is a danger to the type of strategy being employed. Finally I will propose my own counter example
and show why they intuitively aren’t knowledge but still would count as
acceptable in Klein’s structure.
Peter Klein in
“Useful False Beliefs” espouses a claim that certain types of false beliefs
should be counted as useful for the production of knowledge. It is important to take careful note of the
requirements that are needed; there are seven of them. These characteristics expose an interesting
caveat in determining what could be allowed to be a facilitator of knowledge. He claims that since a false belief can play
an essential causal role in producing the cognition of the true proposition p
(of certain characteristics that he describes) the one who has this type of
false belief can be said to be knowledge having. His claim is that there are certain cases (he
produces four examples) where some people’s intuition would be that a person
uses a false belief to attain knowledge.
His structure is replicated here now:
The
belief that uf is a useful falsehood
to S (for acquiring knowledge that h) by producing a doxastically justified
belief that h iff:
1.
Uf is
false
2.
The belief that uf is doxastically justified for S
3.
The belief that uf is essential in the causal production of the belief that h
4.
Uf propositionally
justifies h
5.
Uf entails
a true proposition, t
6.
T propositionally justified h
7.
Whatever doxastically justifies the belief that uf for S also propositionally justifies
t for S
For the sake of clarification
certain terms will be described now.
Propositional justification is the type of justification in a case in
which a person has an “epistemically adequate basis” for the proposition
h. Propositional justification differs
from doxastic justification in that doxastic requires the person to actually
have an “appropriate causal pedigree” to attain the belief of the proposition.
I will now quote the two cases that
Klein uses in his paper that I would like to focus my contention on:
The Santa Claus Case. Mom and Dad tell young
Virginia that Santa will put some presents under the tree on Christmas
Eve. Believing what her parents told
her, she infers that there will be presents under the tree on Christmas
morning. She knows that.
The Ptolemaic Astronomer Case. The date is 2 September 1203; the place is
Oxford University. An astronomy class is
in session and the instructor, one of the most noted Ptolemaic astronomers of
the thirteenth century, is showing students how to calculate the relative
positions of the sun and planets both backward and forward in time using the
deferent and epicycle orbits of those bodies and their (then) current
positions. After carefully explaining
the method, he asks the students to determine whether Mars will be visible from
the earth 800 years later, supposing, of course, that it is not cloudy that
night, that both the Earth and mars still exist, and so on. The Students enter the (then) current
relative positions of the Sun, Mars, and Earth as they believe them to be
according to Ptolemaic astronomy and then they extrapolate using the method
they have just learned. They conclude
that, ceteris paribus, Mars will be
visible on 2 September 2003. On the
assumption that the assigned orbits and then-current relative positions of the
three bodies allow for sufficiently accurate extrapolations, the students know
that Mars will be visible on 2 September 2003, even though their beliefs are
based on false beliefs about the fixed position of the Earth and the orbits of
the Sun and Mars.
I
am a proponent of Reliability theories of justification. In “A Causal Theory of Knowing” Alvin Goldman
provides an Invariantist account of the structure of knowledge. This means that there is a fixed set of
conditions that a person must satisfy in order to know something. He argues that Smith’s proposition in the
Gettier cases (which can be found in that ever prevalent paper “Is Justified
True Belief Knowledge,” Gettier) the true fact that “Brown is in Barcelona” has
nothing to do with Smith believing his proposition. Goldman calls for an “Appropriate Causal
Connection” as a necessary condition for knowledge. He discusses certain epistemic tools that
must be employed to attain knowledge. I
am not going to replicate them here.
What I would like to add to this account of the structure of knowledge
is the requirement that the believer themselves must be of certain epistemic
right to come to any conclusion about themselves having knowledge. I could be said to trust a mechanic who is
reputable, that after working on the car tells me the inner chassis is behaving
appropriately (even if it is not) and from that I conclude that there is at
least one part of the car that is working appropriately. Having no knowledge of the inner workings of a
car I cannot be said to have knowledge on the matter. Knowledge is a bold claim, one that must
employ the best possible causal pattern.
Not only must the actual process of attaining and transferring
justification be reliable but also the state of the believer must be one that
it is permissible to claim knowledge having state. The belief states have certain requirements
to be allowed to be appropriate belief states that have the strength and appropriate
structure to support the weight of passing justification for the purpose of
knowledge. I argue that Virginia is in
a realm of an “inappropriate belief state.”
Since young Virginia is so gullible as to believe that Santa Claus exists
and is the one that puts presents under the tree she cannot be allowed to make
claims on the state of the presents at the bottom of the tree during Christmas
time nor can she claim or be said to have knowledge of her proposition that
someone is going to be put presents under the Christmas tree.
Epistemic luck is
what is acknowledged when someone comes to a true proposition through means
that were in any way accidental, coincidental, or fortuitous. According to the Incompatibility Thesis using
any amount of epistemic luck is incompatible with an appropriate procedure to
attain knowledge. I would like to focus
specifically on an aspect that is present in every instance of epistemic luck,
namely the lack of ‘control’ of the believer over the consequences. Clearly Virginia had no logical control over
the process of knowing that someone was going to put presents under the tree
because under her auspices it would be Santa Claus putting present and not her
parents that were putting presents. She
was lucky that the future events that were out of her control, as fate would
have it, retroactively determined that her proposition that someone is going to
put presents under the tree was accurate and knowledge inducing. Though prima
facie it seems counterintuitive to claim that the Ptolemaic Astronomers
could employ luck and be that lucky as to be accurate so many
years later, the same argument can be said for the astronomers in the Ptolemaic
Astronomy Case.
Gettier type
epistemic luck is exposed when Gettier employs two principles in his cases. The two principles are the Fallibilism
Principle and the Closure Principle.
Fallibilism states that a person can be doxastically justified in
believing a proposition p, and p can be false.
The closure principle states that if a person is doxastically justified
in believing a proposition p and p entails q, and that person comes to believe
q on the basis of deducing it from p, then that person is doxastically justified
in believing that q. The cases are too
similar to the Klein cases in the following way: the supposed knowers were not
in the appropriate position to make a claim on a knowledge having state (Smith
does not have the Experiential Realism to make a conclusion about the
whereabouts of Brown if he is to assume he has a legitimate claim as to whether
he is knowledge-having about the whereabouts of Brown). Likewise Virginia’s Experiential Reality
value is not at a level that one could claim knowledge. Perhaps at time ‘0’ when Virginia makes her proposition
p: someone is going to put presents
under her tree we would be obliged to grant her knowledge. But after careful examination of the case we
must strip her of her knowledge having state.
We are able to determine that she is employing a justification pattern
that elucidates the fact that the conclusion was ironically an inherent
coincidence. This is a unique area of
epistemology that Peter Klein has discovered but one cannot say that someone so
inappropriately positioned can come to claim that they have knowledge otherwise
you would be guilty of attributing knowledge in cases where there was luck
involved.
Earl Conee and
Richard Feldman in their article entitled “Evidence” espouse the belief that
evidence justifies necessarily. They
call for a certain type of evidence, the specifics about the requirements to
count as evidence, I do not feel is important to discuss here. What is important is to note that an evidence
requirement includes what I would term “Experiential Realism.” That is to say that during the course of your
life you learn that there are many things you are ignorant about. That is due to the state of your experiences
or lack thereof. Clearly young Virginia
has not experienced enough Christmas’s if she would so easily accept the claim
that Santa Claus is going to put presents under the Christmas tree into her
justification set!! Infalliblism is a
theory of justification that stipulates that the justification entails the
truth of the proposition for which it is justification. That is to say that the justification will
never be wrong. I am proposing a
justification of a weaker sort that merely depends on an appropriate causal
process and a requirement that the person utilizing the justification is of a
certain acceptable level of Experiential Realism. I am assuming the Ptolemaic Astronomers were
the authoritative astronomers of the time and their strategies were considered wise
and intuitively deemed appropriate.
Perhaps it would seem then that one should grant them knowledge; had you
been judging their knowledge-having-capacity at the time of their prediction in
1203. With the benefit of hindsight we
are able to determine that the Ptolemaic Astronomers clearly had no clue as to
the inner workings of the universe and therefore employed at least some level
of epistemic luck in getting to their conclusion. They cannot be said to have knowledge. Only certain circumstances allow for a person
to justify and have a claim on knowledge*.
Klein acknowledges
that there could be the objector who recognizes that the false belief that is
supposedly useful is really a component of a conjunct that includes the true
belief that is the proposition and therefore the false belief is no longer
useful but rather merely harmless. Klein
acknowledges the conjunction exists but contends that this is a unique scenario
and the reason why the false belief is in fact useful is because it is
essential in order for the believer to have gotten to the knowledge state. It is impossible for me to not grant
that. While the anonymous referee contended
that a counterfactual argument is not useful in addressing the
conjunct/harmless falsehood issue, I do not endorse that view. In fact I have no point of contention with
Klein on this issue.
I merely wish to
warn the epistemological community of the danger of what Klein’s thesis
postulates. By allowing Klein’s
structure you are allowing people who are clearly unqualified to claim to
attain knowledge of a certain thing to claim a knowledge-having-state. Additionally Klein is allowing an
unacceptable amount of epistemic luck to play a role in the knowledge having. By analogy we are looking to create a type of
net that only catches the appropriate fish.
By changing the net he is catching inappropriate fish (in addition to
the appropriate fish) that were caught through the utilization of the new
component of the net.
Counter Example:
The Egyptian God Case.
Mom and Dad tell young Metit of ancient Egypt that the will of the Sun
God makes the sun and the lunar cycle behave in its normal pattern (Sun rises
in the East, sets in the West, and is followed by the Moon). Believing what her parents told her, she
infers that the lunar cycle will behave in its normal pattern tomorrow. She does not know this.
Relevant Common Features of Counter Examples:
1.
The believer (Metit) has no Experiential Realism
in regards to complex nature of the premise being supposed
2.
The path to knowledge includes some level of
epistemic luck
*One
should not assume that I am endorsing a theory of skepticism here. I believe that epistemic luck is incompatible
with knowledge of the sort we are after.
The Skeptic has been refuted before me by philosophical geniuses and I
do not wish to attempt to recreate their arguments here, as that is not the
point of this paper.
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