We argue, contrary to epistemological orthodoxy, that knowledge is not purely epistemicthat knowledge is not simply a matter of truth-related factors (evidence, reliability, etc.). We do this by arguing for a pragmatic condition on knowledge, KA: if a subject knows that p, then she is rational to act as if p. KA, together with fallibilism, entails that knowledge is not purely epistemic. We support KA by appealing to the role of knowledge-citations in defending and criticizing actions, and by giving a principled argument for KA, based on the inference rule KB: if a subject knows that A is the best thing she can do, she is rational to do A. In the second half of the paper, we consider and reject the two most promising objections to our case for KA, one based on the Gricean notion of conversational implicature and the other based on a contextualist maneuver.According to received tradition in analytic epistemology, whether a true belief qualifies as knowledge depends only on purely epistemic factors -factors that are appropriately "truthrelated." If my true belief that p qualifies as knowledge while yours does not, this must be because of some difference in our evidence regarding p, the reliability of the processes involved in our beliefs that p, our counterfactual relations to the truth of p, and so on. My true belief cannot count as knowledge, and yours not, simply because you have more at stake than I do in whether p. Raising the stakes may indirectly affect whether one satisfies the belief condition on knowledge (because of one's worrying about the costs of being wrong, for example), but it cannot otherwise make a difference to whether one knows; that is to say, stakes cannot affect whether one is in a position to know. If we think of purely epistemic factors as fixing a subject's strength of epistemic position regarding a proposition p, we can formulate the traditional idea that knowledge is purely epistemic as a supervenience thesis, which we dub "epistemological purism":
When should you engage with difficult arguments against your cherished controversial beliefs? The primary conclusion of this book is that your obligations to engage with counterarguments are more limited than is often thought. In some standard situations, you shouldn’t engage with difficult counterarguments and, if you do, you shouldn’t engage with them open-mindedly. This conclusion runs counter to aspects of the Millian political tradition and political liberalism, as well as some of the informal logic literature on argumentation. Not all misleading arguments wear their flaws on their sleeve. Each step of a misleading argument might seem compelling and you might not be able to figure out what’s wrong with it. Still, even if you can’t figure out what’s wrong with an argument, you can know that it’s misleading. One way to know that an argument is misleading is, counterintuitively, to lack expertise in the methods and evidence types employed by the argument. When you know that a counterargument is misleading, you shouldn’t engage with it open-mindedly and sometimes shouldn’t engage with it at all. You shouldn’t engage open-mindedly because you shouldn’t be willing to reduce your confidence in response to arguments you know are misleading. And you sometimes shouldn’t engage closed-mindedly, because to do so can be manipulative or ineffective. In making this case, the book discusses echo chambers and group polarization, the importance in academic writing of a sympathetic case for the opposition, the epistemology of disagreement, the account of open-mindedness, and invitations to problematic academic speakers.
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