Chapter Learning Outcomes

Upon completion of this chapter, readers will be able to:

1. Identify the main types of knowledge, the relationships among them, and their distinguishing characteristics.
2. Evaluate analyses of concepts, in particular the traditional analysis of knowledge.
3. Assess the value of conceptual analysis, including its relevance to other topics in epistemology.
4. Explain the role of analysis in shaping the history of the field.

Introduction: Conceptual Analysis

Plato as depicted in Raphael’s The School of Athens (detail) via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Knowledge is the central concept of traditional epistemology. But what is knowledge? This is the most basic question about the central concept, and so the appropriate starting place. Answers traditionally come in the form of conceptual analysis: a set of more basic concepts out of which the analyzed concept is built, arranged to form a definition. The concept “square,” for example, is analyzable into components such as “four-sided figure,” “right-angled,” and “equilateral.” Our focus here is the analysis of knowledge. But we’ll also consider critiques of this focus, which yield useful insights and prompt new directions of inquiry. The chapter closes with a reflection on the value of epistemological conceptual analysis.

Kinds of Knowledge

Before undertaking analysis, our target concept needs refinement. “Knowledge” is an umbrella term, capturing a family of related meanings:

1. Ability (procedural) knowledge: knowledge-how (e.g., I know how to ride a bike.)
2. Acquaintance knowledge: knowing a person, place, or thing (e.g., Plato knew Socrates. He also knew Athens well.)
3. Phenomenal knowledge: knowing “what it’s like” to have a given experience (e.g., Stella knows what strawberries taste like.)
4. Propositional knowledge: knowledge-that (e.g., Everybody reading this chapter knows that it is about knowledge.)

What the first three have in common is that they require direct experience with their objects. I know how to ride a bike because I’ve had practice; I don’t know how to fly a plane, since I lack training—despite having memorized the manual. Plato knew Socrates and Athens because he studied under the man and lived in the city; Plato knew neither Homer nor London because he neither met the poet nor visited the place. Plato knew of Homer, and propositions about him, but nothing concerning London. Stella knows what strawberries taste like (having eaten them before), but not what it’s like to be a bat given her lack of batty experiences (see Box 1).

Box 1 – Nagel’s Bat

Thomas Nagel by Nagelt via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

In his influential 1974 paper “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” philosopher Thomas Nagel explains that for something to be conscious, “there is something it is like to be” that thing—“something it is like for” that thing to be (436). Thus, consciousness essentially has a “subjective character” in that it requires a first-person “point of view.” As such, no conscious state can be fully grasped or explained from the purely objective third-person perspective (nor from a God’s eye “view from nowhere”). From this, Nagel draws a metaphysical conclusion: that the mental cannot be reduced to the physical. More pertinent to this chapter is an important epistemological implication: that we cannot know “what it’s like” to have experiences that are radically unlike those we’ve actually had. He uses his now-famous bat example to illustrate:

Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. (438)

Whereas Eastern and some recent Western epistemology emphasize experiential knowledge (see Monica C. Poole on feminist epistemologies in Chapter 8 of this volume), traditional Western epistemology emphasizes propositional knowledge. Such knowledge can be expressed with a that-clause, which expresses a proposition: a statement or claim with a truth value (that is, something that is either true or false). The proposition that this chapter is about knowledge is true; the proposition that it’s about waterfall photography is false.

Propositional knowledge can be interpersonally communicated or acquired by evidence or argument. By contrast, experiential knowledge can be neither argued for nor linguistically transferred. Try as I might to describe the taste of strawberries, it’s not the same as knowing what they’re like. Someone who has never had the pleasure will still learn something new upon their first bite.

Despite the importance of experiential knowledge, we’ll explore the traditional approach in this chapter. For brevity’s sake, then, “knowledge” here refers to the propositional variety.

The Traditional Analysis

The most influential analysis of propositional knowledge derives from Plato (ca. 428–347 BCE). In his Meno dialogue, Plato’s character Socrates (modeled after his real-life teacher) argues that “knowledge differs from correct opinion in being tied down” by “an account of the reason why” ([ca. 380 BCE] 2009, 98a). Table 1 shows how this translates into modern parlance.

Figure 1 – The Traditional Analysis

Table 1 – Platonic to Modern Translation

Platonic Term	Modern Term	Abbreviation
Opinion	Belief	B
Correct	True	T
Account of the reason why (logos)	Justification	J
Knowledge	Knowledge	K

This translation yields the traditional analysis of knowledge, or “JTB” analysis: knowledge is “justified true belief.” On this account, there are three concepts that pairwise overlap, and knowledge is the convergence of all three (see Figure 1). Let’s consider each in turn.

A. Belief

Belief (specifically belief-that) means accepting the proposition as true (equivalently: assenting to the proposition, thinking that it’s true, agreeing with it, or holding it as an opinion/view). Belief can range from a slight leaning to moderate assurance to absolute certainty—the entire positive half of the confidence spectrum (see Jonathan Lopez on degrees of belief in Chapter 6 of this volume). Belief excludes both the negative half of the spectrum (disbelief, or belief that the proposition is false) and the neutral, halfway point (suspending/withholding judgment). Belief, disbelief, and suspension are the main doxastic attitudes (stances on the truth value of a proposition).

Figure 2 – The Doxastic Spectrum

On the traditional analysis, knowing a proposition requires believing it. If a truth you’ve never thought of is “out there” awaiting discovery, you don’t know that truth. If you are now thinking about it but form no opinion (suspension), you still do not know. This is why, when asked about the truth value in cases of suspension, the natural answer is “I don’t know.” And if you have settled your opinion against the proposition (disbelief), you again do not know it. Suppose I ask, “Do you know that Marie Curie led the underground railroad?” You won’t say, “Yes, I do know that.” Instead, you’ll deny it, perhaps offer a correction. This reaction is not best explained by what is actually correct but by what you believe is correct, since you would respond in the same manner if the question were instead about a matter on which you were convincingly misled (say, by reading a misprint in a seemingly trustworthy textbook).

Bringing these points together gives us a process-of-elimination argument. So far, we have determined that you lack knowledge of (a) propositions you have not considered, (b) propositions on which you suspend judgment, and (c) propositions you disbelieve. The only remaining candidates for knowledge are propositions you do believe, such as that Marie Curie did not lead the underground railroad but Harriet Tubman did.

A word of caution: people often speak loosely. Loose talk is language that is inaccurate by strict literal standards—such as metaphor, hyperbole, approximation, and ellipsis (word omission). This phenomenon sometimes causes mistaken evaluations of conceptual analyses, since the aim of analysis is the strict literal truth. Consider the expression “I don’t believe it; I know it.” A natural interpretation is that one doesn’t merely believe it, where “merely” is omitted to achieve brevity (and for rhetorical effect). We use such elliptical speech routinely. Consider: “She’s not good at math; she’s great!” But if she’s not even good, she’s not great, since greatness is a degree of goodness. Let’s rephrase: “She’s not just good at math; she’s great.” This illuminates what was previously disguised—that the “not” negates a lesser degree rather than goodness altogether.

B. Truth

Belief is one thing; truth is another. There are unbelieved truths (the earth was an oblate spheroid long before it occurred to anyone) and believed falsehoods (such as Ptolemy’s geocentric model of the universe). The problematic phrase “true for me” confuses this issue. Ptolemy’s view may have been “true for him,” but this merely means he accepted it, not that it was actually true.

Acceptance and truth can come apart because human opinion is not a perfect measure of reality. We are capable of mistakes. Acknowledging this is not a weakness but an expression of intellectual virtues (such as intellectual honesty and humility) that motivate inquiry, open-mindedness, and collaboration. Just as we sometimes recognize our own mistakes, we sometimes recognize that others are mistaken. The situation may require speaking up about this (in an appropriate fashion); in other cases, we should keep it to ourselves. Either way, prospective falsehood is why it’s a bad idea to believe just anything anyone says. We often need to reflect for ourselves and formulate beliefs independently. Between intellectual deference and autonomy lies virtuous inquiry. (For more on social dimensions, see William D. Rowley on social epistemology in Chapter 7 of this volume.)

Bust of Aristotle from the Ludovisi Collection. Photo by Jastrow via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

But what is truth? In Aristotle’s famous words, “To say of what is that it is not, or of what is not that it is, is false, while to say of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not, is true” ([ca. 350 BCE] 2009, 1011b). This is an ancient precursor to a popular modern starting point—the correspondence theory: a proposition is true if it corresponds to reality, and false otherwise. While there are alternative theories, it is possible to interpret them as different takes on “correspondence.” Details won’t matter here.

Only true beliefs can qualify as knowledge on the traditional analysis. Suppose you claim to know the answer to a trivia question. The answer is revealed and you got it wrong. Your friend exclaims, “See, you didn’t know it!” This reaction is perfectly natural because false belief isn’t knowledge. This explains why teachers often grade factual questions based on whether students give correct answers: their purpose in such cases is to test knowledge, and whether students answer correctly is such a test—precisely because of the truth condition on knowledge.

Again, loose talk skews intuition. Several books and a Weird Al Yankovic album are titled Everything You Know Is Wrong. Even Mark Twain purportedly quipped, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” However, Shakespeare’s King of Denmark had it right when he proclaimed, “what we know must be” ([ca. 1600] 1998, I.ii.98). For, if it ain’t so, you don’t really know it. At best, you merely think you know it. Knowledge is factive (entails truth), whereas belief is non-factive (possibly wrong).

C. Justification

We’ve seen that knowledge requires true belief. But even true beliefs can be unjustified. A justification is a good reason for belief (see Todd R. Long in Chapter 2 of this volume for theoretical accounts). On the traditional analysis, justification is necessary for knowledge. To understand why, suppose you are playing trivia again (apparently, you’re hooked):

Daedalus and Icarus by Antonio Canova. Photo by Livioandronico2013 via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

“What is the name of those tiny bumps on blackberries?”

Your guess: Choice D – Druplets.

Desperate to win, you rationalize: “Yeah, this has to be right.”

The answer is revealed, prompting your proud reaction: “See, I knew it!”

Your friend remarks, “No, you didn’t. You were just guessing!”

Your friend’s response is natural. Absent good reason, one does not know.

Plato offered an analogy. Consider the statues of the mythical inventor and sculptor Daedalus, which were said to be so realistic they could run away. Unless they were tethered down, you never knew where to find them. Mere true beliefs are akin to the untethered statues: they are sometimes found by sheer luck. Justification is similar to the tethering: it anchors true beliefs in good reasons, turning them into knowledge. Another oft-used analogy is that justification functions as a good road map to the desired destination (truth). Knowledge, like the successfully navigated journey, like the tethered statues, enjoys a kind of stability. This makes evident why justification plays a crucial role in the value of knowledge (see Guy Axtell in Chapter 5 of this volume on epistemic value).

Here, too, loose talk misleads: “The thermometer ‘knows’ the temperature”—but surely lacks justification. The justification condition is also dubious if inflated, as in Plato’s description. Knowledge doesn’t require “an account of the reason why” a belief is true so much as a reason that it’s true. One can know that a computer works but be clueless why. A reason-that need not be sophisticated. No argument or scientific demonstration is necessary. Just turn on the computer and see it working, recall this from memory, or be told by the technician testing it. Nor do good reasons have to be perfect. The concept good is weaker than perfect (maximally good). If perfect reasons were required, justification would be impossible (mere mortals are always subject to error). Tolerating imperfect reasons fits everyday judgments. In grade school, I had reason to believe Newtonian physics: I had testimony from trustworthy teachers and textbooks and no reason to suspect oversimplification. My belief was justified—a belief I now recognize as false given quantum mechanics and Einsteinian relativity. Justified beliefs can be false—a view called fallibilism about justification (to be distinguished from fallibilism about knowledge). For this reason, a separate truth condition on knowledge is not redundant.

Another challenge to the justification condition is the common attribution of knowledge to infants and (non-human) animals. Are such attributions mere loose talk? It’s unclear. Do infants and animals have a kind of weak justification? Difficult to say. Perhaps they know without justification. If so, we can distinguish two kinds of knowledge. Infants and animals have lightweight knowledge (true belief) but lack heavyweight knowledge—the kind we seek beyond mere correct opinion, where guessing and poor reasoning are precluded (Hawthorne 2002). The traditional analysis is meant to capture this heavyweight variety.

Counterexamples to the Traditional Analysis

Edmund L. Gettier III by DaveGettier via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Since justification seems to distinguish mere true belief from (heavyweight) knowledge, its addition completes the analysis—or so it seemed to many for 2400 years! The JTB analysis became Western philosophical heritage until Edmund Gettier (1927–2021) with his three-page article in 1963.

Gettier argued against the traditional analysis by counterexamples (examples that refute). His counterexamples are cases of JTB that aren’t knowledge. Since the original examples are intricate, we will consider more straightforward examples with the same gist. Such examples are called Gettier cases.

You’re driving through sheep country. Passing a field, you seemingly see a sheep and think, “There’s a sheep in the field.” Normally, this suffices for knowledge: you have a belief, a visual perception supports it, and there’s a sheep in the field. The kicker: you’re looking at a sheep-shaped rock, or a wolf in sheep’s clothing! There’s no way to tell from your angle. You have no reason to suspect. How is it true, then, that there’s a sheep in the field? Unbeknownst to you, there happens to be one out of sight, in some far-off corner of the field. Intuitively, you don’t know there’s a sheep.

Sheep in a Field by Sydney John Bunney via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

You may not initially share this intuition (I didn’t at first). Sometimes intuitions need to be massaged or pumped before they surface. Here’s an intuition pump. Consider a revised scenario: the real sheep has been removed. Since it was out of sight, you won’t be able to detect any change. So, for all you know, nothing has changed. This means your state of knowledge should be the same as before. But in the revised scenario, it’s clear you don’t know: a sheep you don’t know about can’t help you know there’s a sheep. Since your state of knowledge is untouched by the revision, you didn’t know in the first place.

Sheep-Shaped Amulet from Peru. Photo by Coyau via Wikimedia Commons.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing by SarahRichterArt via Pixabay. This work is in the public domain.

Thinkers had discovered this Gettier problem long before Gettier rediscovered it and made it famous, including the fourteenth-century Italian logician Peter of Mantua (Boh 1985). As early as the eighth century, the Buddhist philosopher Dharmottara devised a case: a desert traveler seeing a water mirage where there is real water underneath a rock has a justified true belief without knowledge (Dreyfus 1997). Spanning time and culture, such intuitions are widely and independently attested.

Revised Analyses

Alvin Plantinga by Jonathunder via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

Gettier never published a solution to his own problem, but he did prompt others to search for a fourth condition on knowledge. The idea is that knowledge is JTB plus some extra condition that rules out the problematic cases—JTB+ accounts. There’s insufficient space to review these proposals here. Suffice it to say that the extra condition remains elusive. Perhaps the problem is that JTB+ carves up knowledge such that the plus fails to match any natural concept. Cut out all the best-decorated pieces from a birthday cake; those portions may be nice. But the remainder has no identifiable shape.

Returning to Plato’s footsteps, it may be more promising to seek what distinguishes true belief from knowledge—a TB+ account. As Alvin Plantinga defined the term, warrant is that “elusive quality or quantity enough of which, together with truth and belief, is sufficient for knowledge” (1993, v). It follows that knowledge is sufficiently warranted true belief, yielding an sWTB account. Now our question shifts: What is warrant?

This shift has potential advantages. First, while the sWTB approach is compatible with JTB+ accounts, it is also compatible with abandoning the justification condition, as some prefer. So, sWTB may bypass this debate. Second, there’s a kind of unity to warrant that justification lacks. To see this, we need to explore the concept of epistemic luck: the kind of luck that affects one’s epistemic status.

Let’s take stock of the various forms of epistemic luck. Gettier cases are ones in which good luck cancels bad (Zagzebski 1994). In the sheep case, you’re unluckily misled by a sheep shape over here, but luckily this mistake is corrected by a real sheep over there. By contrast, lottery cases seem better construed as involving a single element of chance. Luck in Gettier and lottery cases doesn’t threaten justification. So, plausibly, the luck involved in acquiring truth via unjustified belief (e.g., pure guesswork) is yet another kind.

Matters aren’t so simple. Some epistemic luck contributes positively to knowledge. Suppose you read a newspaper and tell me all about it. I attribute knowledge to you. When I find out that you only read it because you luckily won a free subscription, I am not inclined to retract my knowledge attribution. This knowledge is founded on good epistemic luck, the kind which enables one to be lucky to know. Veritic luck is the knowledge-precluding kind, which includes all of the various forms identified in the previous paragraph: Gettier-luck, lottery-luck, and lucky guessing (Engel 1992). One fascinating aspect of warrant, unlike justification, is that warrant rules out all and only veritic luck.

Diana as Personification of Night by Anton Raphael Mengs via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

But what connection between belief and truth accomplishes this? What exactly are the conditions that secure warrant and exclude veritic luck, resulting in knowledge? We don’t have space to explore all candidates. I’ll mention one promising direction as an example, which draws the parallel between belief and action. Imagine an expert archer, Artemis (the Greek goddess of wild animals and the hunt, also known as the Roman goddess Diana). Her aim is perfect. Her release is perfect. The arrow is going to hit the bullseye—until Poseidon (the Greek god of the sea) mischievously slams his trident into the seabed, causing an earthquake, which shifts the target. A simultaneous gust of wind from the breath of Aeolus (the keeper of the winds) alters the arrow’s path, serendipitously correcting course. In this scenario, skilled Artemis sees success, yet her skill is not the reason for success. Whenever her success is instead attributable to skill, it is to her credit rather than luck. Similarly, perhaps knowledge is “credit for true belief” (Greco 2003). Knowledge is achieved when intellectual skill/excellence/virtue manifests in success (truth). So, knowledge is virtuously achieved true belief (Sosa 1980). From this observation originates virtue epistemology, the study of intellectual virtue and its relationship to knowledge.

Conclusion: Post-Gettier Epistemology

Fast-forward several decades. Thousands of pages of ink have been spilled on the fourth condition, warrant, veritic luck, the knowledge-yielding virtues, and so forth. Some believe they have the solution. Others continue to pursue new solutions. Perhaps you will be the one to find it! For now, there’s no agreed-upon answer. We live in a post-Gettier age: the problem no longer occupies center stage. Still, it inspired what came next.

Professor Timothy Williamson by Easyox via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

In the aftermath, some epistemologists came to suspect that knowledge is not subject to analysis—that no component can be added to (J)TB to get knowledge (Zagzebski 1994). If true, this doesn’t render knowledge mysterious. Some concepts are basic, and perhaps knowledge is one of them. Yes, knowledge may entail JTB, but this does not mean it can be divvied into neat chunks that seamlessly reassemble without remainder. This gave birth to knowledge-first epistemology, advocated most prominently by Timothy Williamson (2000).

Others abandoned concern with knowledge altogether. What Gettier (and lottery) cases reveal, they say, is that knowledge is a concept with quirks. Who cares whether one is Gettiered (or “lotteried”)? What matters is acquiring the truth, having good reasons, or achieving intellectual virtue more generally (e.g., understanding, open-mindedness, curiosity, humility). Thus, virtue epistemologists began investigating the intellectual virtues in their own right (Zagzebski 1996).

Whatever tack one takes, there is one remarkable thing on which we can agree: Gettier’s little paper permanently transformed the world of epistemology. It planted seeds in an ever-growing garden of fruitful new directions, producing some of the most fascinating work the field has seen: work on epistemic luck, epistemic value, intellectual virtue, and more. Thus, conceptual analysis, even when unsuccessful, reveals insight. Much of what follows in this book we owe in large part to that.

Further Reading

Engel, Mylan Jr. n.d. “Epistemic Luck.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/epi-luck/

Gettier, Edmund L. 1963. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (6): 121–3. https://fitelson.org/proseminar/gettier.pdf.

Graham, David A. 2014. “Rumsfeld’s Knowns and Unknowns: The Intellectual History of a Quip.” The Atlantic, March 27, 2014. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/03/rumsfelds-knowns-and-unknowns-the-intellectual-history-of-a-quip/359719/.

Hetherington, Stephen. n.d. “Gettier Problems.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/gettier/.

Plato. (ca. 380 BCE) 2009. Meno. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html.

———. (ca. 369 BCE) 2013. Theaetetus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1726/1726-h/1726-h.htm.

References

Aristotle. (ca. 350 BCE) 2009. Metaphysics. Translated by W. D. Ross. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/metaphysics.html.

Boh, Ivan. 1985. “Belief, Justification and Knowledge: Some Late Medieval Epistemic Concerns.” Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 6: 87–103.

Chisholm, R. M. 1966. Theory of Knowledge. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Dreyfus, George B. J. 1997. Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti’s Philosophy and its Tibetan Interpretations. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Engel, Mylan Jr. 1992. “Is Epistemic Luck Compatible with Knowledge?” Southern Journal of Philosophy 30 (2): 59–75.

Gettier, Edmund L. 1963. “Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?” Analysis 23 (6): 121–3.

Glanzberg, Michael. 2018. “Truth.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/truth/.

Greco, John. 2003. “Knowledge as Credit for True Belief.” In Intellectual Virtue: Perspectives from Ethics and Epistemology, edited by Michael DePaul and Linda Zagzebski, 111–34. New York: Oxford University Press.

Harman, Gilbert. 1968. “Knowledge, Inference, and Explanation.” American Philosophical Quarterly 5 (3): 164–73.

Hawthorne, John. 2002. “Deeply Contingent A Priori Knowledge.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (2): 247–69.

Hazlett, Allan. 2010. “The Myth of Factive Verbs.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 80 (3): 497–522.

Moon, Andrew. 2017. “Beliefs Do Not Come in Degrees.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (6): 760–78.

Nagel, Thomas. 1974. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Philosophical Review 83 (4): 435–50.

Plantinga, Alvin. 1992. Warrant: The Current Debate. New York: Oxford University Press.

———. 1993. Warrant and Proper Function. New York: Oxford University Press.

Plato. (ca. 380 BCE) 2009. Meno. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html.

———. (ca. 369 BCE) 2013. Theaetetus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1726/1726-h/1726-h.htm.

Radford, Colin. 1966. “Knowledge: By Examples.” Analysis 27 (1): 1–11.

Ryle, Gilbert. 1949. The Concept of Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Shakespeare, William. (ca. 1600) 1998. Hamlet. Edited by Sylvan Barnet. New York: Signet Classics.

Sosa, Ernest. 1980. “The Raft and the Pyramid: Coherence versus Foundations in the Theory of Knowledge.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy 5: 3–25.

Weatherson, Brian. 2003. “What Good Are Counterexamples?” Philosophical Studies 115 (1): 1–31.

Williamson, Timothy. 2000. Knowledge and its Limits. New York: Oxford University Press.

Zagzebski, Linda. 1994. “The Inescapability of Gettier Problems.” The Philosophical Quarterly 44 (174): 65–73.

———. 1996. Virtues of the Mind: An Inquiry into the Nature of Virtue and the Ethical Foundations of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The Basic Idea of Epistemic Justification

Bust of Socrates by Norto Mendez via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

In Plato’s Meno, the ancient philosopher Socrates (ca. 469–399 BCE) raised the most important question in the history of epistemology: what must be added to true belief for a person to know something? Socrates was asking about what epistemologists call epistemic justification, which is widely thought to be a requirement for propositional knowledge. And it’s not just any old requirement: epistemic justification provides a crucial “knowledge-contributing link” between a person and a person’s believing that a proposition is true. What this knowledge-contributing link amounts to is a matter of some controversy: debates among epistemologists are sometimes framed in terms of how correctly to interpret the truism that epistemic justification is “truth-conducive” (that is, justification makes the belief likely to be true).

To appreciate its importance, consider an example: suppose a police officer knocks on Kim’s door and informs Kim that her husband has been in a horrendous, massive automobile accident. Kim immediately finds herself believing proposition p: “my husband has escaped unharmed.” Kim believes p solely because she very much wants it to be true. Epistemologists agree that a belief based merely on wishful thinking isn’t knowledge. In this case, Kim doesn’t know that p, even if it happens to be true. What’s missing is a knowledge-contributing (i.e., epistemic) justification for believing that p is true.

But what exactly is epistemic justification? In Plato’s Meno (98a), Socrates says knowledge is true belief plus an account of the reason why. Socrates’s idea helps us see that epistemic justification is supposed to be what makes believing rational (i.e., pertaining to reasons) in the way that counts toward knowledge. When you have epistemic justification for believing a proposition p, you thereby have a knowledge-contributing entitlement or right or warrant or good reason to believe that p is true.

This focus on aiming at or getting at the truth distinguishes epistemic justification from other kinds of justification. Perhaps the immediate comfort Kim’s belief affords her gives her a “psychological” justification for believing p. Perhaps it’s in Kim’s best interest to believe p (in which case she has a “prudential” justification for believing p). Indeed, there may be many measures of the appropriateness of belief. Each measure has its particular standard for evaluation. The distinctive epistemic standard pertains to rationality with respect to the truth. Some notable approaches (discussed below) to explaining this epistemic standard include evidentialism, strong/modest foundationalism, coherentism, explanationism, infinitism, virtue responsibilism, virtue reliabilism, process reliabilism, and proper functionalism.

Epistemic justification (hereafter, “justification”) comes in degrees. What degree is required for knowledge? Although there is no consensus, most epistemologists think knowledge-level justification has a high standard, but not so high that we rarely have knowledge. After all, many point out, “knowledge” is a term in ordinary use, and ordinary people think we often know things such as “that’s a tree” (via tree-ish visual experience), “two plus three equals five” (by thinking through the equation), and “I had breakfast this morning” (via vivid memory experience). If this common sense is correct, then having knowledge-level justification for believing p doesn’t require that p is true. This is because our justification for believing many propositions the commonsense view says we know is consistent with the falsity of those propositions. For example, suppose a tree-ish visual experience is the source of Jane’s knowledge that p: “there’s a tree.” Because a realistic hallucination could mimic Jane’s visual experience, the character of Jane’s tree-ish experience doesn’t guarantee p’s truth. Therefore, the commonsense view implies fallibilism: it’s possible to be justified in believing a false proposition.

Two Approaches: Internalism and Externalism

Among epistemologists, the terms internalism and externalism are used in a variety of ways. Most fundamentally, internalists think the factors that make for justification entirely depend on what’s going on inside a person’s mind. In contrast, externalists think the relevant facts are settled by a person’s mental states plus factors outside the person’s mind. What’s at stake? Well, internalists usually take their view to entail that, given one’s mental states at a time, there’s a necessary fact settling which doxastic attitude (if any) one is justified in having toward any proposition at that time. Thus, if two people were somehow exactly alike mentally, then they’d be exactly alike justificationally. Externalists disagree, claiming that whether a person with a particular set of mental states justifiably believes p is contingent on factors external to the person’s mind. Accordingly, two people could be in exactly the same mental states and yet one’s belief that p could be justified, and the other’s belief that p could be unjustified. Below we will consider some illustrative examples.

Internalist Theories

Evidentialists accept the traditional view that justification is entirely a matter of one’s evidence, where evidence means an indication of truth to a person. Evidentialists tend to be internalists because evidence in epistemology consists, roughly, of information that can be used in thought. But since one can’t use in thought something that is outside one’s mind, evidentialists usually think of evidence as internal to the mind.

Because it’s plausible that only an indication of truth could yield a “good epistemic reason” to believe that a proposition is true, evidentialists say their view plausibly explains the link justification is supposed to provide between a person and their belief that a proposition is true. When a person’s overall evidence supports proposition p better than not-p, p is probable for that person (i.e., p is more likely to be true than false, given the information that person has to go on). And as evidentialists point out, when you are in that situation, it is epistemically rational for you to believe that p is true. Evidentialists, then, typically agree that justification is truth-conducive in the sense that a person’s justified beliefs are probably true given the person’s overall evidence. Nevertheless, evidentialists differ on many details, including the structure of justified beliefs.

A. Evidentialist Foundationalism

According to foundationalists, a person’s justified beliefs have a foundational structure similar to a well-built house or pyramid supported by a solid foundation. Accordingly, anyone who has justified beliefs has foundational beliefs that can “support” other non-foundational beliefs. A foundational belief (or basic belief) is a belief that is not formed on the basis of other beliefs. A non-foundational belief (or non-basic belief) is a belief that is formed on the basis of other beliefs. Any non-basic belief is thus “supported” by at least one basic belief.

Figure 1 – The Foundational Structure of Beliefs

Evidentialist foundationalists agree that justification has a foundationalist structure, and that all justified beliefs are supported by the person’s evidence; however, they differ about how basic beliefs and non-basic beliefs get their respective justification.

Strong foundationalists think all our justified basic beliefs are about our own mental states (e.g., “it seems to me that there’s a tree”) or simple logical matters (e.g., “”) and are justified because we’re “infallible” about such matters (i.e., we can’t be mistaken about them). We can tell they are true because the evidence of their truth is given to us transparently in the very experiences that elicit foundational beliefs.

One challenge for strong foundationalism comes from therapeutic psychology. We may often be correct about our own mental states, but therapists tell us this is not always so (think of the man in a therapy session who declares “I am not angry!” while white-knuckling his chair as his red, distorted face shakes with, well, anger!). Because we can be mistaken about our mental states, strong foundationalists need a principled way to distinguish the mental states that we cannot be mistaken about from the mental states that we can be mistaken about.

Modest foundationalists avoid this problem by claiming that our basic beliefs are any beliefs we have immediately upon having a non-doxastic experience (e.g., sensory experience). This view allows more beliefs to count as basic. To appreciate this point, note that ordinarily, as we’re walking around outdoors, we form beliefs such as “there’s a tree” immediately upon having a particular (tree-ish) visual experience. We don’t first think, “it seems to me that there’s a tree” and then think “if it seems to me that there’s a tree, then there’s a tree,” and then finally conclude “there’s a tree”; rather, upon having the visual experience we spontaneously believe “there’s a tree.” Modest foundationalists say that such a belief is psychologically basic, because one isn’t inferring it from other beliefs one has. Now, reflection reveals that we are certainly not infallible about propositions such as “there’s a tree.” After all, you might have a realistic dream or hallucination that mimics ordinary sensory perception; so, you might form a basic belief that “that’s a tree” even though it’s false.

Modest foundationalism thus faces a challenge: if we’re not infallible with respect to our basic beliefs concerning external objects such as trees, then what makes our basic beliefs about external objects justified? Surely not all beliefs formed spontaneously upon an experience are justified, for what about a person who spontaneously believes “I will die tonight” immediately upon a visual experience of an arrangement of tea leaves at the bottom of a cup? This belief seems epistemically no better than does Kim’s belief (see above) based on wishful thinking. Modest foundationalists, then, need a principled way to distinguish the epistemically proper responses to experience from the epistemically improper ones.

Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

There remains the question of how non-basic beliefs get their justification on the basis of justified basic beliefs. Cartesian foundationalism—named for the early modern philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650)—is a strong foundationalist view claiming that non-basic beliefs are justified only by deduction from justified basic beliefs (see Table 1 below on deduction and other forms of reasoning). Descartes insisted on this stringent requirement because he wanted a theory of knowledge implying that when one knows p, one is “epistemically certain” that p is true (i.e., your justification is so good, you can tell you couldn’t be wrong about p). To keep this requirement steadfastly in mind, Descartes constructed what became his famous evil demon hypothesis: suppose there were to exist an evil demon powerful enough to deceive you as much as you can be deceived. Only beliefs that could withstand such an evil demon’s deception would be epistemically certain for you. Accordingly, Descartes thought, non-basic beliefs can be justified only on the basis of deduction from perfectly certain basic beliefs, because proper deduction is the only form of reasoning that unfailingly guarantees a true conclusion on the basis of true premises.

A serious problem for Cartesian foundationalism is that propositions about external physical objects (e.g., “that’s a tree”) do not logically follow from propositions about our mental states (e.g., “it seems to me that that’s a tree”). Therefore, Cartesian foundationalism is inadequate to explain our commonsense view that we have a fair amount of knowledge about external physical objects.

Contemporary foundationalists (both strong and modest) avoid this problem by holding that non-basic beliefs can be justified not only by deduction but also by induction and abduction from one’s justified basic beliefs. Although properly done induction or abduction doesn’t guarantee the truth of one’s non-basic belief, it does plausibly give one a good epistemic reason to believe the proposition is true. For example, a contemporary (non-Cartesian) strong foundationalist might say that “there’s a tree” is, under usual circumstances, probably true when you reason to it from a belief about how things seem to you.

Word of caution: Some philosophers use the term “induction” to encompass any non-deductive form of reasoning, including abduction.

B. Pure Coherentism

Willard Van Orman Quine, a prominent defender of coherentism. 1975 passport photo via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Pure coherentism is the idea that one’s belief is justified just when it coheres well with all the other beliefs one has. Coherentists think of the structure of justified beliefs not like a house or pyramid supported by a foundation, but like a spider web in which the various nodes of the web are mutually supported by the whole web structure. Each belief in one’s set of beliefs depends for its justification on coherence relations among all of one’s beliefs. Accordingly, a belief is part of its own justification.

Coherentists propose various factors that make for coherence among beliefs (e.g., logical consistency among beliefs, probabilistic connections among beliefs, or a lack of unconnected subsystems of beliefs). One prominent coherentist idea is that given a person’s set of beliefs, there is some fact about the overall value of that belief system’s coherence. If believing proposition p would, when added to the person’s set of beliefs, raise the coherence value of the person’s overall system of beliefs, then believing p is justified for that person; otherwise, believing p isn’t justified.

Pure coherentists face several problems, including explaining how a belief could non-circularly be part of its own justification and explaining precisely what coherence relations are. But perhaps the most challenging is explaining how our experiences figure in justification. Recall that for pure coherentists, justification is entirely a matter of coherence relations among a person’s set of beliefs. However, it does seem possible to have a highly coherent system of beliefs even though some of one’s beliefs are way out of line with one’s experiences. Suppose I’m having an ordinary tree-in-front-of-me visual experience, but I believe there’s no tree in front of me. It seems possible for me to have a system of beliefs cohering well with my belief that there’s no tree in front of me; but in this case, in which I’m actually having an ordinary tree-ish visual experience, it seems I’m unjustified in believing that there’s no tree in front of me.

C. Explanationism

Explanationists think justification is a matter of which propositions provide the best explanations for a person. This view leaves open how to characterize justification’s structure. Some versions imply a hybrid of foundationalism and coherentism. One prominent version holds that justification pertains to the propositions that provide the best explanation available to the person of that person’s experiences. Suppose I’m a normal adult having a visual tree-in-front-of-me kind of experience. I have the concept “tree,” many times I’ve been in situations very similar to my current one, and the truth of my beliefs about the presence of trees has been confirmed many times when I’ve been in those situations. It’s plausible that the best explanation available to me of my overall experiences (including my current visual experience) includes the proposition p (“that’s a tree”) but does not, for example, include q (“that’s a cat”). Thus, I’m justified in believing p but not q.

Explanationists say their account of justification avoids the problems we’ve noted with standard forms of foundationalism and pure coherentism, while incorporating what makes them theoretically attractive. Unlike pure coherentism, explanationism includes experiences in the constitution of justification. An explanationist might say that the best available explanation for a person involves coherence, not just among one’s beliefs, but among the relevant explanation and propositions asserting the existence of one’s experiences. Experiences themselves can serve as foundations that stop a regress of justification. The main challenge for explanationists is to provide a plausible, principled account of what a best explanation available to a person consists in.

Box 2 – The Regress Problem

Thinking about the possible structure of justification led the first-century philosopher Agrippa to a famous argument for global skepticism about justification (and hence knowledge). This is known as the regress problem or the Agrippan trilemma. It can be summarized as a process-of-elimination argument:

Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360–270 BCE), founder of the Pyrrhonian school of skepticism to which Agrippa belonged. Image by Thomas Stanley via Wikimedia Commons. This photo is in the public domain.

1. For a belief B to be justified, the chain of reasons ultimately leading to B must have one of three possible structures:

1. 1. It is finite and linear.
   2. It circles back on itself.
   3. It is infinite.

2. We can rule out (c) because we don’t have an infinite number of reasons.
3. We can rule out (b) because circular reasoning is unjustified.
4. We can rule out (a) because the belief B* that is located at the bottom of B’s chain would lack justification, and therefore would be unable to justify the rest of the beliefs in the chain, which depend on B*.
5. Therefore, no possible structure can yield justification.

Some of the theories of justification can be viewed as proposed solutions to the regress. Foundationalists defend (a) by arguing that basic beliefs can be justified by experiences rather than further beliefs. Coherentists defend something like (b) by denying that it requires defective circular reasoning. Infinitists (see “Unconventional Theories” below) defend (c) by suggesting that our reasons may be potentiality (if not actuality) infinite.

Externalist Theories

Recall that externalists think justification depends not only on facts about a person’s mental states but also on factors external to a person’s mind. Accordingly, externalists think of justification in terms of causes, processes, or functions that tend to get a person onto the truth. Such causes, processes, or functions do not need to have their origins in a person’s mind, nor do they need to comprise evidence the person has to go on in thought (even if people usually have evidence when they satisfy externalist requirements for justification). Externalists say their theories are well-suited to explain the truth-conduciveness of justification (i.e., the link that justification is supposed to provide between a person and the person’s belief that a proposition is true). On typical externalist theories, a person’s justified beliefs are objectively likely to be true in the sense that justified beliefs are more often true than false.

A. Reliabilism

Alvin I. Goldman, who first introduced process reliabilism. University of Michigan News and Information Services Photographs, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. License: CC BY 4.0

Reliabilism is the idea that justified beliefs are reliably produced. Although there are multiple species of reliabilism, including “virtue reliabilism,” the most popular is process reliabilism, which holds that justification is a matter of having a belief produced by a reliable process type (i.e., a type of process that produces true beliefs more often than false beliefs). Vision is a general type of process resulting in many individual beliefs among many different people. If more beliefs produced by vision are true than false across all times and places, then “vision” plausibly counts as a reliable process type. The basic idea of process reliabilism is that a belief produced by a reliable process type is justified; otherwise, it’s unjustified.

We can appreciate why process reliabilism is externalist by considering an odd example. Suppose Pat and Nat happen to have the same mental states. Pat’s an ordinary human living in a world populated by physical objects, just as we take ourselves to be, but Nat is radically deceived by a powerful evil demon (see Descartes’s evil demon hypothesis above). It seems to Nat that they’re living in a world populated by physical objects, but in reality this is not the case. Now, because Pat and Nat have exactly the same mental states and are thus “introspectively identical,” a typical internalist theory implies that Pat and Nat are justified in believing the same propositions. However, according to process reliabilism as described above, Pat’s belief that p (“there’s a tree”) is justified, because it’s produced by a reliable process type (vision), whereas Nat’s belief that p is unjustified, because it’s produced by an unreliable process type (evil demon deception). For process reliabilists, then, whether a person’s belief is justified depends on contingent factors external to the person’s mind.

This example also illustrates a popular “new evil demon” objection to process reliabilism. It seems that if Pat is justified in believing “there’s a tree,” then so is Nat; after all, things seem exactly to Nat as they do to Pat. In believing “there’s a tree,” Pat and Nat are relying on exactly the same information. So, if Pat’s reasons are good enough for justification, then so are Nat’s.

Another challenge for process reliabilism is known as the generality problem. Pat’s belief that “there’s a tree” is an instance of many different process types, such as (a) sensory experience, (b) visual experience, (c) visual experience from 10 yards away, or (d) visual experience of a medium-size object in clear daylight from 10 yards away. These process types vary in reliability. Which process type is the relevant one that settles whether Pat’s belief is justified? The problem generalizes to all beliefs. Without a principled way to determine which process type is the relevant one, we can’t actually tell what process reliabilism implies about any instance of belief.

B. Proper Functionalism

According to proper functionalism, justification is a matter of having a belief resulting from proper cognitive function. When a heart functions properly, it pumps blood; similarly, according to proper functionalists, when our cognitive faculties function properly, they produce justified beliefs. But the epistemic story can’t be this simple, for something might function properly (as designed) but not function well. So proper functionalists need the notion of “good epistemic function.” Their solution is to add conditions pertaining to getting at the truth. The result is a theory like this: a person S’s belief B is justified if and only if the cognitive faculties producing B are (a) functioning properly, (b) aimed at truth, and (c) reliable in environments for which they were designed.

Alvin Plantinga, who introduced proper functionalism (initially about warrant rather than justification). Photo by WhiteKnight138 via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

To appreciate why proper functionalism is externalist, consider Cal and Mal. Suppose Cal’s cognitive system is designed by a god to produce belief B1 (“I’m holding a small round object”) when Cal is in mental state M1 (a tactile sensation like we have when holding a billiard ball), but not when he’s in state M2 (an olfactory sensation like we have when smelling a rose). In contrast, a powerful alien race has designed Mal’s cognitive system not to produce B1 when he’s in M1, but rather when he’s in M2. Now suppose Cal and Mal have the same mental states, both have belief B1, and both are in M2 but neither is in M1. Although Cal and Mal have exactly the same mental states, proper functionalism implies that Cal’s belief B1 is unjustified (because it isn’t the result of proper function given its design), but Mal’s belief B1 is justified (because it’s the result of proper function given its design, and, we may suppose, Mal’s cognitive faculties are truth-aimed and reliable). Thus, proper functionalism implies that justification is contingent on facts about the design of one’s cognitive system, which are external to one’s mind. On this view, as the table below shows, mental duplicates can differ in justification—a feature of externalism generally.

A challenge can be appreciated by adding to our example. Suppose the designers of Mal’s cognitive system discovered a glitch in consequences of their design: their cognizers would function according to design by reasoning as follows whenever they’re in M2:

1. “I’m holding a small round object.”
2. “If I’m holding a small round object, then goblins are living under my planet’s surface.”
3. Thus, “goblins are living under my planet’s surface.”

Caring greatly about reliable-belief formation but not wanting to fix the design glitch, the alien designers altered features of Mal’s planet so that, when cognizers are in M2, goblins usually are living under the planet’s surface. Consequently, when Mal reasons from (a) and (b) to (c), his belief that “goblins are living under my planet’s surface” is produced by cognitive faculties that are functioning as designed, truth-aimed, and reliable in environments for which they were designed. According to proper functionalism, then, Mal’s reasoning process is epistemically good, and his beliefs that (b) and that (c) are justified, even though, as we may suppose, he has no reason at all to believe (b) and (c). In this situation, it seems Mal has engaged in objectively bad reasoning even though all the conditions of proper functionalism are satisfied.

Unconventional Theories

Some unconventional theories have gained adherents in recent years. Infinitism is the idea that justification’s structure is neither foundationalist nor coherentist (nor a hybrid). Instead, infinitists argue that justification consists in an infinite number of appropriately structured, available reasons on which any justified belief rests. A major challenge is explaining how a human could have an infinite series of available reasons. A more radical departure from conventional theories is virtue responsibilism, which argues that justified beliefs are the result of intellectually virtuous character traits. Critics complain that, because such beliefs don’t need to be likely to be true or based in evidence, virtue responsibilism focuses on moral or pragmatic justification rather than epistemic justification.

Parting Thought

All theories of epistemic justification face reasonable objections or difficult challenges. So, which theory are we justified in accepting as the correct one, and why? The question may not feel pressing, but its answer is important for those of us who desire to live fully reflective lives of wisdom. Understanding epistemic justification might help us to (a) find flaws in skeptical arguments, (b) settle tricky cases about which beliefs to hold when there is substantial disagreement (as in religion, ethics, and politics), and (c) determine what makes knowledge more valuable than true belief. Knowing the truth about the nature of epistemic justification may not be easy, but the further readings below provide excellent ways to discover more about the nuances of views discussed in this chapter, as well as possible responses to the challenges each theory faces.

Further Reading

Epistemic Justification

Feldman, Richard. 2003. Epistemology (Chapters 4–5). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.

Watson, Jamie Carlin. n.d. “Epistemic Justification.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/epi-just/.

Internalism and Externalism

Poston, Ted. n.d. “Internalism and Externalism in Epistemology.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/int-ext/.

Evidentialism

Conee, Earl, and Richard Feldman. 2004. Evidentialism: Essays in Epistemology. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mittag, Daniel M. n.d. “Evidentialism.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/evidenti/.

Foundationalism

Hasan, Ali, and Richard Fumerton. 2016. “Foundationalist Theories of Epistemic Justification.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/justep-foundational/.

Coherentism

Murphy, Peter. n.d. “Coherentism in Epistemology.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/coherent/.

Olsson, Erik. 2017. “Coherentist Theories of Epistemic Justification.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2017/entries/justep-coherence.

Explanationism

McCain, Kevin. 2014. Evidentialism and Epistemic Justification. New York: Routledge.

Poston, Ted. 2014. Reason and Explanation: A Defense of Explanatory Coherentism. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Justification Defeaters

Senor, Thomas D. 1996. “The Prima/Ultima Facie Justification Distinction in Epistemology.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 56 (3): 551–66. https://doi.org/10.2307/2108382.

Sudduth, Michael. n.d. “Defeaters in Epistemology.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/ep-defea/.

Reliabilism

Goldman, Alvin, and Bob Beddor. 2015. “Reliabilist Epistemology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/.

Proper Functionalism

Bergmann, Michael. 2006. Justification Without Awareness: A Defense of Epistemic Externalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Boyce, Kenneth. n.d. “Proper Functionalism.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/prop-fun/.

Infinitism

Klein, Peter D., and John Turri. n.d. “Infinitism in Epistemology.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/inf-epis/.

Virtue Epistemology

Baehr, Jason S. n.d. “Virtue Epistemology.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/virtueep/#SH2a.

Battaly, Heather. 2015. Virtue. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Turri, John, Mark Alfano, and John Greco. 2017. “Virtue Epistemology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2018/entries/epistemology-virtue/.

Introduction

We all have many things going on in our minds, such as beliefs, desires, hopes, dreams, imaginary figures, knowledge, love, and hatred—to name a handful. Have you ever considered their source? How do they come to be part of the thinking process? How do they become ideas in our minds? Some philosophers attribute the source of our ideas to the senses, including the inward senses (such as emotions) and the five outward senses (sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch). We might sense the world directly or indirectly through the thoughts of others. Some philosophers even claim that all our ideas must come from our senses. This claim holds that each of us is born with a mind that is like a tabula rasa (Latin for a “blank slate” or “blank tablet”) on which nothing is written and to which we add contents through experience as we become exposed to the world. Knowledge that is dependent on experience, or which arises after experience, is called a posteriori (Latin for “from the latter”). Since a posteriori knowledge is empirical (based on observation or experience), this view is called empiricism.

Opposed to empiricism is rationalism, the view that reason is the primary source of knowledge. Rationalists promote mathematical or logical knowledge as paradigm examples. Such knowledge can be grasped, they claim, through reason alone, without involving the senses directly. They argue that knowledge accessed through reasoning is eternal (i.e., it exists unchanged throughout the past, present, and future). For instance, two plus three remains five. Rationalists are impressed by the certainty and clarity of knowledge that reasoning provides, and they argue that this method should be applied to gaining knowledge of the world also. The evidence of the senses should be in conformity with the truths of reason, but it is not a prerequisite for the acquisition of these truths.

Knowledge that is independent of (or prior to) observation and experience is called a priori (Latin for “from the former”). Rationalists maintain that reason is the basis of a priori knowledge. But where do we ultimately get the ideas on which reason is based, if not from observation or experience? Rationalists tend to favor innatism, the belief that we are born with certain ideas already in our minds. That is, they are “innate” in us. Potential examples include mathematical or logical principles, moral sense, and the concept of God. While innatists claim that such ideas are present in us from birth, this does not guarantee our immediate awareness of their presence. Reason is the faculty that enables us to realize or access them. In what follows, innate ideas thus serve as the foundation of a model for rationalism.

Rationalism’s Emphasis on A Priori Knowledge

Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) and German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), two important rationalist thinkers, support the existence of innate ideas and their realization through reason. They argue that the truths revealed by such ideas are eternal, necessary, and universal.

For Descartes, there are different modes through which we acquire knowledge: some ideas are innate, some are externally sourced, and others are constructed by us. Descartes gives the example of the idea of God as innate in us, as well as the idea of one’s own existence ([1641] 1985, Third Meditation). According to Descartes, innate ideas like truths of geometry and laws of logic are known through reason independently of experience, because experience gives us only particular instances from which the mind discovers the universal ideas contained in them. Therefore, they are a priori. Descartes’s innate ideas have been compared to the stored information in a book. The ideas are in us, though not always present to the mind. Once we start reading the book, the contents reveal themselves to us, just as reasoning reveals our innate ideas to us. In other words, it is only through careful “reading” (thinking) that we come to understand which ideas are innate and which come to us from elsewhere.

Portrait of Gottfried Leibniz by Christoph Bernhard Francke via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Leibniz  calls innate ideas “principles.” Like Descartes, Leibniz maintains that principles are accessed by reason. The universal nature of mathematical truths, for example, is not revealed by the senses. It is the faculty of reason that acquires universal truths from individual instances. Leibniz argues that a collection of instances based on the senses cannot lead us to necessary truths. At the same time, it is also clear that we can grasp many necessary truths, such as mathematics. Therefore, the mind is the source, which means these truths are there innately. However, innate ideas are not full-fledged thoughts for Leibniz: he holds that our minds are structured so that certain ideas or principles will occur to us once prompted by the senses, although they are not derived from the senses. Ideas and truths are innate in us initially as dispositions or tendencies rather than as actual conscious thoughts ([1705] 2017, Preface).

Opposing A Priori Knowledge by Rejecting Innate Ideas

The empiricist claim that all our knowledge comes from experience is in stark contrast to the concept of innate ideas. For empiricists, all knowledge is a posteriori, meaning acquired through or after experience. John Locke (1632–1704), a British empiricist philosopher, adopts two approaches to question innate ideas as the basis of a priori knowledge. Firstly, he shows that innate ideas are based on dubious claims; secondly, along with Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711–1776), Locke shows how empiricism is able to offer a better theory of knowledge through the a posteriori.

Portrait of John Locke by Godfrey Kneller via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Locke starts by questioning the “universal nature” of innate ideas. He opposes the claim that innate ideas are present in all of us by noting that sufficiently young children, and adults without the requisite education, lack a concept of God or knowledge of logical or mathematical principles. Therefore, it is baseless to say that innate ideas are universal. It is through experience and observation that we acquire such ideas. That is, they are a posteriori ([1690] 2017, Book I).

Here Leibniz defends the innatist view from Locke’s objection by showing how children and those without the requisite education are capable of employing logical and mathematical principles in their everyday lives without understanding what they are or being able to articulate them in words ([1705] 2017, Book I). A child, to use an example of my own, knows without any confusion that she cannot be sitting in both parents’ laps at the same time. Similarly, those without formal mathematical training could still know that two adjacent triangular cornfields separated by a fence on their longest side can make a square cornfield by removing the fence that divides them. Evidently, as Leibniz argues, general principles of logic and mathematics are innate. But this does not mean that all innate ideas are universally held. It is possible that we all have innate ideas yet some of us are unaware of them.

Locke further argues, however, that there can be nothing in the mind of which it is unaware ([1690] 2017, Book II). Having innate ideas without being aware of them is not a viable position for Locke. An idea first has to be experienced or thought. How else could it be “in” the mind? On this point Leibniz disagrees with Locke: it is possible to have a plethora of ideas in our minds without being aware of them ([1705] 2017, Preface). For instance, suppose you absorb a “tune” playing in the marketplace without being consciously aware of it. The tune is not readily accessible or transparent to your mind, in that you cannot recall it; however, it may be recognizable upon hearing it again. So, it must have been “in” you somewhere in some sense. Similarly, an innate idea could be in your mind, without you yet being aware of it. We are born with the facility to realize innate ideas when favorable conditions obtain later in life, such as the ideas of beauty, justice, and mathematical truths.

Locke’s reply is that the realization of ideas or capacities in the right circumstances is applicable to all ideas—not just those which are purportedly innate ([1690] 2017, Book I). He challenges innatists to produce a criterion to distinguish innate from non-innate ideas. Leibniz responds with such a criterion: innate ideas are necessary (they must be true, cannot be false), whereas non-innate ideas are merely contingent (possibly true, possibly false). We can distinguish truths that are necessary (and therefore eternal on Leibniz’s view) from contingent truths dependent on varying matters of fact ([1705] 2017, Preface).

Empiricism’s Emphasis on A Posteriori Knowledge

Locke claims to show how the mind, which is like a tabula rasa at birth, acquires knowledge. For empiricists, experience alone furnishes our mind with simple ideas, which are the basic elements of knowledge. Once shown that all ideas can come from experience, it would be redundant to additionally posit innate ideas. So, does a posteriori knowledge lead us to reject a priori knowledge? Let us find out.

For Locke, knowledge based on experience is easy to understand. He asks us to suppose that we have innate ideas of colors and that we can also see colors with our eyes. In this case, since we don’t need to rely upon both, we go with our senses, because it is easier and simpler to understand knowledge derived from sense experience than from knowledge derived from some source of which we are unaware ([1690] 2017, Book I, Chapter ii, Para. 1). Here Locke applies the principle of Ockham’s razor, which suggests that as far as possible we should adopt simple explanations rather than complicated ones. Simple explanations have the advantage of being less prone to error and more friendly to testing than complicated ones that do not add explanatory value.

The next question is whether a posteriori knowledge alone gives us adequate knowledge of the world. Let us take an instance of experiencing and thereby knowing a flower, such as a rose. As we experience the rose, its particular color, texture, and fragrance are the ideas through which we become aware of the object. But when we are not experiencing or sensing the rose, we can still think about it. We can also recognize it the next time we see the flower and retain the belief that it is sweet smelling, beautiful to look at, and soft to the touch. This shows that, in addition to sensing, the ability to form concepts about the objects we encounter is crucial for knowing the world. Experience also makes it possible for us to imagine what we have not directly experienced, such as a mermaid ([1690] 2017, Book III, Chapter iii, Para. 19). Such imaginings are made possible because we have directly experienced different parts of this imagined object separately. Conjoining these experiences in the mind in an ordered manner yields the imagined object ([1690] 2017, Book II, Chapter iii, Para. 5). Had we not experienced and thereby formed the concepts of a fish and a woman separately before, we would not be able to imagine a mermaid at present.

These considerations lead Locke to categorize all our sense experiences into simple and complex ideas. Simple ideas are basic and indivisible, such as the idea of red. Complex ideas are formed by the mind, either from more than one simple idea or from complex impressions ([1690] 2017, Book II, Chapters ii & xii). Complex ideas are divisible because they have parts. Examples include golden streets, an army, and the universe. My idea or concept of an object, whether simple or complex, can be ultimately traced back to its corresponding sense impressions.

Portrait of David Hume by Allan Ramsay via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Hume, another important empiricist philosopher, writes of ideas as the “copies” of “impressions.” Impressions are “vivid” and “lively” as received directly from sense experience. Hume also allows inward impressions, including jealousy, indignation, and so on. Ideas are mental copies of inward or outward impressions, rendering them “faint” or “feeble” (try comparing a perceptual experience with recalling it from memory) ([1748] 2017, Sections 1 & 2). Hume argues that where there are no impressions, there can be no ideas. A blind man can have no notion of color, according to Hume. One cannot be born with ideas that are not derived from any impressions. So, there are no innate ideas for Hume. However, he agrees that our tendencies to avoid pain, or to seek many of our passions and desires, are innate. Here I would argue that even these tendencies are based on our sense impressions and the corresponding ideas we form from those impressions. The mental inclination to repeatedly seek pleasure or avoid pain comes to us only after the first incident of exposure to either sensation.

In contrast to Descartes, even the idea of God falls under the a posteriori for Hume. Since none of us has experienced God directly, Hume argues, there is no impression of God available to us from which to form the corresponding idea. In Hume’s view, our imagination forms this idea by lavishly extending our experience of the good qualities possessed by people around us ([1748] 2017, Sections 1 & 11). Given that even the idea of God can be derived from sense impressions, this lends further support to the empiricist claim that all our ideas are a posteriori. Therefore, according to Hume, the rationalist claims for the existence of innate ideas and a priori knowledge are mistaken.

The Inadequacy of the Tabula Rasa Theory

A weakness of the empiricist’s tabula rasa theory can be exposed if we can show that not all our ideas are derived from corresponding impressions. However, this would not mean we must return to the rationalist’s theory of innate ideas, as we shall see. The plan is to explore a third alternative.

The presence of general concepts in our minds shows there is not always a one-to-one relation between ideas and corresponding sense impressions. For example, we see different instances of the color blue around us, and from these instances we form a general concept of blue. This general concept is not copied from one particular impression of blue, nor even from a particular shade of blue. We also have abstract concepts (such as justice, kindness, and courage), which are not traceable to corresponding sense impressions. In such cases, we experience different acts or instances of justice, kindness, and courage. But if these abstract concepts are copied from their particular impressions, then only these instances—and not the concepts themselves—would be in our minds. It follows that concepts are formed or understood rather than copied. Similarly, relational concepts (such as “on”-ness, betweenness, sameness, and the like) are realized not by copying the impressions involved. In fact, there are no impressions at all corresponding to these relational concepts. We instead receive impressions of particulars standing in such relations—the cat sitting on the mat, the English Channel flowing between the United Kingdom and Europe, one minus one equaling zero, and so forth.

In sum, the formation of general, abstract, and relational concepts in our minds shows that an uninterrupted flow of impressions would not constitute all the ideas we have. Instead, it requires that from birth the mind is at least partially equipped with a structure or architecture that enables it to make sense of the raw impressions it receives and to form concepts where there is no one-to-one correspondence between impressions and ideas. It challenges the authenticity of a tabula rasa. This takes us to a stage where we need to figure out the indispensable third alternative, which can facilitate a more complete knowledge of the world. This necessitates a crossover between the a priori and the a posteriori, or a reconciliation of the two.

Percepts-Concepts Combination

The immediacy and direct nature of sensations, impressions, and perceptions make them certain. Let us briefly unpack this idea. Consider whether we can ever be wrong about our sensations. It is commonly thought that while we can be wrong about what the world is like, we cannot be wrong about the fact that we are having particular sensations. Even if you are dreaming this very second, and there is no actual book before your eyes, you cannot deny that you are having certain sensations resembling a white page and black font in the shape of words. Therefore, our sensations are certain and we cannot doubt that they exist. However, it is possible that sometimes we are unsure how to characterize a particular sensation. For instance, you may see a flashy car and be unsure whether the color is metallic green or gray. So, you might get into confusion in describing your sensation, but that does not affect the certainty and indubitability of the sensation itself, of what is here and now for you.

German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) argues that for our perceptions to make sense to us, they should be received into concepts that exist within our minds.These structures of understanding allow our minds to process the impressions that we experience. Unless the manifold raw sensations we receive from experience are classified into different categories of understanding, we cannot make sense of them.

Immanuel Kant by Johann Gottlieb Becker via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

For instance, the mind should have the ability to recognize whether two sensations are similar or different, to say the least. Without this ability, we cannot make sense of experience. Or consider that we also perceive that objects are in space and time, stand in cause-effect relations, and belong to the categories of unity-plurality, assertion-negation, particular-universal, and the like. Here again, we are incapable of understanding any experience that is not processed through these categories. Kant argues, therefore, that space, time, causation, quantity, quality, and the like are represented to us in innate structures or concepts that our minds are fitted with prior to experience.

According to Kant, these categories are transcendental in the sense that they bridge the gap between mind and world. They are hidden structures, bridges, or concepts that occupy the otherwise blank slate and mold our way of thinking and experiencing the world. Of course, these concepts also require inputs, or percepts (the immediate objects of awareness delivered directly to us in perceptual experience through the senses). As Kant’s view is famously expressed, “Percepts without concepts are blind and concepts without percepts are empty” ([1781] 1998, 209).

So far, we have seen through various stages that rationalism and empiricism are incomplete. Kant’s transcendental idealism (as his view is called) strikes a balance, reconciling the two accounts. He combines sensory input and inborn concepts into a unified account of how we understand the world. Before we conclude the chapter with the final step in Kant’s approach, let us return to Descartes and Hume once again, the two philosophers who most influenced Kant.

Synthetic A Priori Knowledge

Descartes thinks that reason alone can provide certainty to all human knowledge. Intuition and deduction are tools through which the faculty of reason operates. Intuition is the capacity to look inward and comprehend intellectual objects and basic truths. Being a geometrician, Descartes thinks that deduction (the type of reasoning whereby the truth of the conclusion is guaranteed by the truth of the premises) should be used for gaining knowledge of the world, starting with the input of “clear and distinct” ideas. Since intuition is dissociated from the evidence of the senses, the truths it unfurls can be known a priori. The result is that substantial knowledge of the world can be acquired a priori ([1701] 1985).

According to Hume, there are two ways in which reasoning aims to gain knowledge of the world: through “relations of ideas” and through “matters of fact” ([1748] 2017, Section 4). Hume thinks that the method of deduction establishes relations between the ideas we have already acquired through experience (e.g., that a mother is a woman parent). These relations of ideas are the kind of truths that we find in logic and mathematics (for instance, the proposition that a circle is round). They are true by definition. Such truths are necessary or certain (their denials lead to contradiction). They are also known a priori, since they do not rely on how the world is. For this reason, relations of ideas and deduction do not yield substantive new knowledge of the world; the knowledge they impart is already understood by us (as the above examples show), even if our understanding is merely implicit within the premises of a deductive argument whose conclusion makes it explicit.

Matters of fact, for Hume, are based on observation and experience. Some of them are generalizations arrived at by induction from particular instances. Inductive truths are uncertain. They are at best probable, since they are dependent on how the world is. For instance, we have the experience of heat from fire so far; but we cannot be certain that this will be the case tomorrow also (maybe we will unexpectedly feel some other sensation like cold from fire). We expect that the future will resemble the past, but we cannot be certain about it. Matters of fact provide us with a posteriori truths, which are contingently true (their denials can be conceived without contradiction). Since matters of fact are not true by definition, they add substantive new information to our existing knowledge, unlike relations of ideas ([1748] 2017, Section 4).

A rationalist initially, Kant was influenced by the division in knowledge made by Hume. Only a combination of reason and experience can give us adequate knowledge, according to Kant. He begins by providing an account of relations of ideas, which he terms analytic truths. In sentences that express analytic truths, the predicate term is already “contained” in, or is the meaning of, the subject term. For example, in the sentence, “a circle is round,” the predicate “round” is contained in the subject, “circle.” To take another standard example, in “a bachelor is an unmarried man,” the predicate “unmarried man” is the meaning of the subject term, “bachelor.” We cannot deny such truths without contradiction. They are necessarily true, which means that they’re true regardless of how the world is. Since we do no need to examine the world to tell whether they’re true, analytic truths are knowable a priori ([1781] 1998, 146, 157).

Kant terms matters of fact synthetic truths: the predicate term is neither contained within nor is the meaning of the subject term. Synthetic truths are not true by definition. As such, it stands to reason that they are based on observation, and therefore must be a posteriori (although, as we will soon see, Kant argues that this is not the case for all synthetic truths). For instance, consider the proposition, “George the bachelor is a writer.” We have new information here about a particular person named “George” being a bachelor and writer, and experience is required to find this out. Since the opposites of synthetic truths are not contradictory, they are contingent ([1781] 1998, 147, 157).

Kant maintains that only synthetic truths are capable of providing substantive new information about the world. That said, our sense experiences do not passively enter our minds, but do conform to our innate mental structures to facilitate knowledge. Since these structures work independently of experience, they are a priori. These innate a priori structures of our minds—our concepts—are actively engaged in making sense of our experiences ([1781] 1998). They do so by discriminating and organizing the information received in experience. But again, the ability to perform this activity presupposes that the world which furnishes both the information and our concepts is itself structured in a way that enables intelligibility. The particular ways in which the world must be structured—its space-time and cause-effect relations, for example—yield substantive truths about reality. These truths hold not merely because of the meanings of words or the logical forms of sentences. They are synthetic. And since we arrived at this result by way of a priori reflection, Kant argues that we possess “synthetic a priori” knowledge of the world—a previously unrecognized category of knowledge, now to be added to the standard categories of synthetic a posteriori and analytic a priori knowledge. (See Table 1 below for a summary of these categories.)

There remains the question of how our concepts discriminate and organize the information received from the senses. These goals are achieved through acts of synthesis. By “synthesis,” Kant means “the act of putting different representations [elements of cognition] together, and grasping what is manifold in them in one cognition” ([1781] 1998, 77).

Kant explains three types of synthesis: the process starts with “synthesis of apprehension in perception,” passes through “synthesis of reproduction in imagination,” and ends with “synthesis of recognition in a concept” ([1781] 1998, 228–34). For Kant, apprehension in perception involves locating an object in space and time. The synthesis of reproduction in imagination consists in connecting different elements in our minds to form an image. And synthesis of recognition in a concept requires memory of a past experience as well as recognizing its relation to present experience. By recognizing that the past and present experience both refer to the same object, we form a concept of it. To recognize something as a unified object under a concept is to attach meaning to percepts. This attachment of meaning is what Kant calls apperception (Guyer 1987).

Apperception is the point where the self and the world come together. For Kant, the possibility of apperception requires two kinds of unity. First, the various data received in experience must themselves represent a common subject, allowing the data to be combined and held together. Second, the data must be combined and held together by a unified self or what Kant calls a “unity of consciousness” or “unity of apperception.” Kant concludes that because of such unity, all of us are equally capable of making sense of the same public object in a uniform manner based on our individual, private experiences. That is, we are in an unspoken agreement regarding the mind-independent world in which we live, facilitated by our subjective experiences but regulated by the innate mental structures given to us by the world. In sum, Kant’s theory makes possible shared synthetic knowledge of objective reality. In conclusion, by considering the debate between rationalists and empiricists culminating in Kant’s synthesis, this chapter has shed light on the issue of how we achieve substantive knowledge.

Box 1 – Kant’s Copernican Revolution in Epistemology

Astronomer Copernicus, or Conversations with God, painting ca. 1872 by Jan Matejko via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sums up his epistemology by drawing an analogy to the Copernican Revolution (the shift in astronomy from a geocentric to a heliocentric model of the universe, named after Nicolaus Copernicus (1473–1543), the sixteenth-century Polish mathematician and astronomer):

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all attempts to find out something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us. This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the observer revolve and left the stars at rest. Now in metaphysics we can try in a similar way regarding the intuition of objects. If intuition has to conform to the constitution of the objects, then I do not see how we can know anything of them a priori; but if the object (as an object of the senses) conforms to the constitution of our faculty of intuition, then I can very well represent this possibility to myself. Yet because I cannot stop with these intuitions, if they are to become cognitions, but must refer them as representations to something as their object and determine this object through them, I can assume either that the concepts through which I bring about this determination also conform to the objects, and then I am once again in the same difficulty about how I could know anything about them a priori, or else I assume that the objects, or what is the same thing, the experience in which alone they can be cognized (as given objects) conforms to those concepts, in which case I immediately see an easier way out of the difficulty, since experience itself is a kind of cognition requiring the understanding, whose rule I have to presuppose in myself before any object is given to me, hence a priori, which rule is expressed in concepts a priori, to which all objects of experience must therefore necessarily conform, and with which they must agree. ([1781] 1998, B xvi–B xviii)

Further Reading

Blackburn, Simon. 1999. Truth: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Critchley, Simon. 2001. Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Ellis, Addison. 2014a. “Idealism Pt. 1: Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/07/07/berkeley/.

———. 2014b. “Idealism Pt. 2: Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/08/11/idealism-pt-2-kants-transcendental-idealism.

Plato. (ca. 380 BCE) 2009. Meno. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html.

Russell, Bertrand. (1912) 2013. The Problems of Philosophy. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm .

Vernon, Kenneth Blake. 2014. “The Problem of Induction.” 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/05/26/the-problem-of-induction/.

References

Chomsky, Noam. 1975. Reflections on Language. New York: Random House.

Critchley, Simon. 2001. Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Descartes, René. (1641) 1985. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 1–62. Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

———. (1701) 1985. “Rules for the Direction of the Mind.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 7–77. Volume 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Ellis, Addison. 2014a. “Idealism Pt. 1: Berkeley’s Subjective Idealism.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/07/07/berkeley/ .

———. 2014b. “Idealism Pt. 2: Kant’s Transcendental Idealism.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/08/11/idealism-pt-2-kants-transcendental-idealism .

Guyer, Paul. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hume, David. (1748) 2017. Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Jonathan Bennett. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/hume1748.pdf .

Kant, Immanuel. (1781) 1998. Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Leibniz, G. W. (1705) 2017. New Essays on Human Understanding. Edited by Jonathan Bennett. http://earlymoderntexts.com/authors/leibniz .

Locke, John. (1690) 2017. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Jonathan Bennett. https://www.earlymoderntexts.com/authors/locke .

Plato. (ca. 380 BCE) 2009. Meno. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/meno.html .

Quine, W. V. 1951. “Main Trends in Recent Philosophy: Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” Philosophical Review 60 (1): 20–43.

Vernon, Kenneth Blake. 2014. “The Problem of Induction.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/05/26/the-problem-of-induction/ .

Skepticism and Its Scope

Skeptics, as we will use the term, deny knowledge. A skeptic need not deny that free will is real or that God exists but will deny that anyone knows whether either of these is the case.

Skeptics are a variety. Some have limited targets. Some deny only that we have knowledge of what is right and wrong. Others deny only that we have knowledge about the future. But some skeptics are more ambitious, casting the skeptical net more widely. Global skeptics deny that we can have any knowledge at all, and may even deny that we know whether skepticism is true. Such a radical skepticism is bound to elicit derision. It seems unrealistic, impractical, and perhaps even self-refuting. In fact, very few philosophers have been global skeptics. But even anti-skeptics have been enamored of the view, seeing it (and potential refutations of it) as a way of better understanding what it is to have knowledge in the first place.

Sextus Empiricus, a leading ancient Greek proponent of global skepticism in the Pyrrhonian school (founded by the Pyrrho of Elis). Image via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Our attention will be on one particular kind of skepticism—one that falls short of global skepticism while still denying that we know much of what we think we know—along with one particularly prominent style of argument in its favor. We will then consider two influential responses to this form of skepticism.

External-World Skepticism

You likely believe a great number of things—that you are presently on or near the surface of the earth; that you are human; that there are plants, animals, and other humans; and that their lives have likewise unfolded in close proximity to the earth. These unremarkable beliefs have something in common: you believe them based on sensory experience. You have likely seen, heard, or felt dogs, people, and even planets. On the basis of such experiences, you have come to believe a great number of things about such objects. You know of their existence through your experiences, but their existence continues unabated even when you are not experiencing them. They are, philosophically speaking, external objects, objects that exist in the external world (the world external to our minds). The skeptic we will consider denies that we can have knowledge of any such objects because all the available evidence of sense experience is compatible with no such objects existing. This form of skepticism is called external-world skepticism (hereafter “skepticism” for short).

Let’s start with the fact that experiences of an object are compatible with the non-existence of that object. We often have experiences of things that turn out not to exist. If nothing else, our dreams consist in experiences of objects, many of which do not exist. I may dream of a puppy and be sad to find when I wake that all my experiences of the puppy were figments of my dream. Experience alone does not entail that the things we experience exist.

René Descartes by Gérard Edelinck via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Now consider the following possibility. You have had a set of experiences for some years, all of which are perfectly coherent. When you have had experiences of puppies, you at least sometimes have further experiences of those same puppies, which have grown and developed in a way consistent with their being real animals. All your experiences perfectly mesh together, and nothing about those experiences suggests anything other than that they are the experiences of external objects. But what guarantees this to be so? What guarantees that you are not having a long, perfectly coherent dream rather than the life you take yourself to have led? French philosopher René Descartes (1596–1650) famously despaired of finding some evidence that could distinguish being awake from having such a dream ([1641] 1985, First Meditation).  We will call this hypothesis and others like it skeptical hypotheses. The skeptic contends that if you cannot eliminate such possibilities (the possibilities entertained by skeptical hypotheses), that if you cannot be absolutely certain of what you know, then you cannot know that the external world exists.

A properly crafted skeptical hypothesis is devious. You might conjecture that if your life to this point had been a dream, then you would not have felt pain and kept dreaming, knowing that pain typically wakes a sleeping human. But this alleged fact about the sleeping habits of human beings is itself something you have “learned” through experience. And it is experience itself that is being thrown into doubt. For all you know, this fact about the sleeping habits of human beings is no fact at all, but merely another figment of your dream. The skeptic claims that since experience is our only available source of evidence, and since experience cannot distinguish between being awake and dreaming, we cannot know we are awake. That is, we cannot know that the external world exists. Appeals to facts about the external world “learned” through experience will be powerless to help (Stroud 1984, 8).

Let’s represent this skeptical argument as follows:

16. Nothing in experience can eliminate the possibility that your life has been a long, perfectly coherent dream.

3. Therefore, you do not know that the external world exists.

This is a common style of skeptical argument. Other arguments in favor of skepticism have been put forward, and a staggering variety of responses to this argument (and other skeptical arguments) can be found throughout the history of philosophy. We will now turn our attention to two such responses from recent philosophers.

Box 1 – Famous Skeptical Hypotheses

Skeptical hypotheses are scenarios compatible with all possible evidence yet inconsistent with our ordinary beliefs. The possibility that all our experiences have been those of a long, perfectly coherent dream is one skeptical hypothesis, but others have occurred throughout the history of philosophy and even in popular culture.

Zhuangzi’s Butterfly Dream by Ike no Taiga via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Zhuangzi’s butterfly dream.

The Chinese Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zhou, also known as Zhuangzi (ca. 369–286 BCE), dreamed that he was a butterfly. Upon awakening, he considered the possibility that instead, he was in fact a butterfly dreaming he was Zhuangzi (2013, 18). No available evidence seems to be able to distinguish between his being a human dreaming he is a butterfly and his being a butterfly dreaming he is a human.

The evil demon.

Another skeptical hypothesis considered by Descartes ([1641] 1985, First Meditation). Here an evil demon with godlike powers uses those powers to deceive you in all your beliefs. What could you know if a near-omnipotent being wanted you to know nothing?

Hilary Putnam via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 2.5

Brain in a vat.

A skeptical hypothesis formulated by the contemporary American philosopher Gilbert Harman (1973) and popularized by the American philosopher Hilary Putnam (1926–2016). In this scenario, you are a disembodied brain suspended in a nutritive inside a vat while powerful computers overseen by scientists feed you experiences of an ordinary human life (Putnam 1981). The 1999 science-fiction movie The Matrix adapted the brain-in-a-vat scenario, with the protagonist managing (due to the intervention of others) to escape.

Moore against Skepticism

One important response to this style of argument comes from the British philosopher G. E. Moore (1873–1958), known for his commonsense approach to philosophical problems. Among his many philosophical accomplishments was to give several powerful responses to skepticism based on an appeal to common sense. We will look at two forms of this Moorean response to skepticism.

In his “Proof of an External World,” Moore claims to be able to demonstrate (contrary to the skeptical view) the existence of the external world—to prove that the world of ordinary objects and people has an existence outside of our experiences. He gives two such “proofs” to illustrate his general approach. Holding up a hand, he claims to know that he has a hand. Holding up his other hand, he claims to also know that he has a second hand. Since hands are ordinary objects existing beyond our experiences of them, Moore infers he has proven the existence of at least two external objects. Our knowledge of the external world is secured! (Moore [1939] 1963, 144).

George Edward Moore in 1914 by Ray Strachey, born Rachel Pearsall Conn Costelloe, via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

This may seem to have an air of trickery about it. The skeptic challenges us to prove that we are not dreaming, that our entire life has not been a long yet perfectly coherent set of experiences corresponding to nothing beyond them. Moore’s holding up of his hands and declaring himself to know he has hands seems to entirely ignore the challenge put before him by the skeptical hypothesis, and so to miss the point. However, Moore was not missing the point. His aim is to challenge a sometimes-unstated assumption in the skeptic’s argument. Consider our presentation of the skeptical argument again. Moore does not challenge the premise (P) but instead challenges the inference from the premise (P) to the conclusion (C). The skeptical argument, as presented, assumes that if you cannot prove that your life has not been a long, perfectly coherent dream, then you do not know all those things you normally take yourself to know on the basis of your experiences. That is, it assumes that if you cannot definitively eliminate the possibility that your life is a dream, then you do not know that you are awake or that anything beyond your experiences really exists.

Moore makes the following contentions: (a) that he can know that external objects exist even if he cannot definitively eliminate the possibility that he is dreaming; (b) that our ordinary practices of taking ourselves and others to know things do not require that we meet such skeptical challenges; and (c) that ordinary standards are the only ones that matter, and so they are the standards of evidence in play whenever we are faced with doubts (Moore [1939] 1963, 145). Moore advocates fallibilism about knowledge, the view that you may know something despite the possibility of being wrong. The fallibilist does not accept the requirement that skeptical hypotheses be definitively ruled out before we know that the external world exists. It may suffice if we can manage to establish that they are improbable.

Consider again Moore’s claim that he has a hand. He holds up his hand and claims that this is sufficient proof of its existence. He knows he has a hand because, well, there it is. Someone may doubt that he has a hand. Some such doubts may be reasonable or at least intelligible. If someone were to doubt that Moore had a hand because the light in the room was dim and perhaps Moore had held up a small statue rather than his hand, then Moore would accept the need to respond to this doubt. He could not count as knowing he has a hand if he is unable to show that what he held up was not a small statue. But there are clear ways of making such a distinction. He can look more closely at his hand in better lighting. He can touch his hand and see whether it feels like flesh or stone. There are any number of ways he could respond to this doubt and thus retain his title to knowledge (Moore [1939] 1963, 145).

But in the case of the skeptic’s doubts, no such responses are possible. This is by the skeptic’s design. The skeptical hypothesis is described so that there is no way to distinguish it from being awake. Many philosophers, of course, have tried to find such a distinction. Moore’s response, however, is simply to deny that such a doubt requires a response, and to deny that we must be able to distinguish the dream hypothesis from the ordinary hypothesis. We can know there is an external world because we can know we have hands. We can know we have hands because we can produce them when and if our title to knowledge of their existence comes into question. We cannot prove they exist in the strong sense demanded by the skeptic, but there is no obvious reason to think we must do so to count as knowing they exist (Moore [1939] 1963, 148). Fallibilism must be considered.

Moore is also known for another response to skepticism (Moore [1959] 1963). Here he considers what a skeptical argument does: it presents a series of claims which (according to the skeptic) force us to accept a skeptical conclusion. To illustrate his point, Moore borrows an example from fellow British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–1970):

Bertrand Russell in 1957 by Anefo via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

1. I do not know immediately that the pencil exists.
2. Its existence does not follow deductively (i.e., with certainty) from anything known immediately.
3. My belief in it then is based on “analogical or inductive” (non-deductive) reasoning.
4. What is so based is not “certain knowledge.”
5. Therefore, I do not know the pencil exists.

This pattern of argument is a familiar one. Premises (1)–(4) tell us that our knowledge of a pencil cannot be based directly on experience, or deduction from anything known on the basis of experience, since we might be dreaming all our pencil experiences. It is at best based on some other (non-deductive) type of reasoning, and beliefs based on these other types of reasoning do not count as “certain knowledge.” Hence, we cannot know that the pencil exists.

Moore notes that this argument does not establish its conclusion in the sense of showing that accepting it is the reasonable course. Arguments generally force us to choose between either accepting the premises (and therefore the conclusion) or rejecting the conclusion (by rejecting one or more premises). The choice, then, is between accepting some number of philosophical claims (given by the premises) or accepting our ordinary claim to knowledge (i.e., rejecting the conclusion). Moore maintains that, considered in this light, the reasonable choice is to reject the conclusion, hence to reject one or more premises, and to maintain our ordinary claim to knowledge.

Indeed, this understates the failure of the argument to make acceptance of the conclusion reasonable. You may not be able to identify exactly what is wrong with the premises, nor marshal any strong arguments against any one of them in particular, and yet you may reasonably maintain that some-premise-or-other–I-know-not-which is false rather than accept the conclusion that you do not know that pencils exist. It is quite reasonable to feel certain that pencils exist, more reasonable than to maintain that each and all of premises (1)–(4), a set of controversial philosophical claims, are true. If Moore is right, then a skeptical argument can only pit a set of philosophically motivated premises against our ordinary, commonsense claims to knowledge, but it can never declare victory. It will always be more reasonable to believe we know that pencils and other external objects exist than accept the difficult, abstruse, controversial premises of skeptical arguments.

The Contextualist Concession

Moore’s responses are defiant. He seeks to undermine skepticism by rejecting a key premise implicitly employed in the skeptical argument and even by undermining the power of such arguments to ever make it reasonable to accept their conclusion. Many philosophers, however, have found Moore’s responses unpersuasive. Canadian philosopher Barry Stroud (1935–2019) notes that much of the ordinary practice of taking ourselves and others to know things requires that those who know something be able to eliminate contrary possibilities (1984, 18). For instance, if I know that the yellow bird I see outside my window is a canary, then I must know it is not a goldfinch. This is how we normally regard claims to knowledge. Someone who claims to know that the yellow bird outside her window is a canary but who also admits that it might be a goldfinch would not be regarded as someone who knows that the bird is a canary. Likewise, when Moore says that he knows he has a hand but also admits he cannot eliminate the possibility that he is dreaming, many philosophers regard him as confused as well. In the normal case, we require that we be able to eliminate alternatives compatible with our current evidence. Why should things be any different when the alternative is a skeptical hypothesis?

The contextualist response attempts to split the difference. This response admits that, by our ordinary standards of knowledge, the dream hypothesis does not need to be ruled out. In ordinary life, we can know perfectly well that tables, chairs, trees, other people, and even G. E. Moore’s hands exist. But, at the same time, when skeptical doubts are raised, as they are in a philosophy classroom or while reading a philosophy book, then the standards in play shift and become more demanding. Indeed, they become demanding enough to vindicate skepticism. We can have knowledge of the external world, but only as long as some skeptic does not shift the standards of evidence and thereby deprive us of that knowledge. This is the contextualist response to skepticism. It concedes that skepticism is correct when we are operating under standards that would have us eliminate skeptical hypotheses but is incorrect when we are operating under the laxer standards of day-to-day life.

David Kellogg Lewis via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Contextualists differ in their understanding of when and how the standards for knowledge shift, and even what it means for there to be shifting standards for knowing. We will turn our attention to just one way of working out contextualism as found in the work of the American philosopher David Lewis (1941–2001). In his view, the standards in play are those in a conversation; shifts in those standards are due to changes in the conversation. The thought that conversations can set epistemic standards may seem strange, but before digging into the details of Lewis’s views, consider a simple example unrelated to knowledge. Amy, looking at a baby elephant standing next to a dog, may say, “The baby elephant is big.” She will be right. Compared to the dog, the baby elephant is big. But if she were to say again, “The baby elephant is big,” while it was standing next to an adult elephant, she would be wrong. Compared to the adult elephant, the baby elephant is not big. Whether or not the baby elephant counts as “big” depends on the context in which one makes the claim.

Of course, as the conversation moves along, what we should say about the baby elephant may as well. If Amy is at the zoo and her friend says, “The baby elephant is small,” while pointing out both the baby and adult elephants, then her friend says something true. Once the friend brings the focus of the conversation to the adult elephant, it would be daft of Amy to say again that “The baby elephant is big.” The conversation has changed what is needed for the sentence “The baby elephant is big” to count as true, and given the change, subsequent claims that “The baby elephant is big” will be false, even as prior such claims were true. (We will return to this example of Richard Feldman’s shortly.)

In a somewhat similar way, Lewis believes that the truth of attributions of knowledge varies with shifts in the conversation. In a conversation, a speaker may attribute knowledge to herself or to some other person (including someone who is not part of the conversation). It will be perfectly proper, given the state of the conversation, to ignore a wide range of possibilities during the conversation (Lewis 1996, 544). If you and I have a conversation about the safety of the drinking water in our hometown, we properly ignore many possibilities even as we must attend to others. If I claim to know the water is safe to drink, I must be able to eliminate the salient (that is, easily noticeable) possibilities, including the possibility that the water contains unsafe quantities of lead. Yet we also presuppose that a number of possibilities are false, for instance the possibility that the fluoride in our hometown’s drinking water may have been added by a secret cabal of aliens intent on stealing our bodily fluids. Still, my utterance of “I know the drinking water is safe” will express a truth if my evidence rules out the conversationally salient possibilities contrary to that claim. I must be able to eliminate, among other things, the possibility that there are unsafe levels of lead in that water. I need not eliminate the possibility of an alien conspiracy.

But exactly which possibilities may we properly ignore in a conversation? Lewis’s idea is that the range of possibilities that may be ignored shifts as the conversation progresses according to a variety of conversational rules. For the sake of exposition, I will consider only one such rule:

The rule of belief forbids conversational partners to ignore any possibility that one or more of those partners believe. (Lewis 1996, 555–6)

It is a poor conversationalist who simply ignores what her conversational partners believe. So, while you and I may ignore the possibility that aliens have put fluoride into the drinking water of our hometown, if another person joined our conversation—someone who believed precisely that—then we would no longer be able to ignore that possibility. We would now need to eliminate that possibility using the available evidence to know that our town’s drinking water is safe. Once our conspiratorially minded friend joined the conversation, our knowledge might dissipate unless we could eliminate his far-fetched theories.

In Lewis’s view, the basic contextualist response to skepticism is sound. In many conversations, skeptical hypotheses will be properly ignored. Suppose we are trying to determine whether the drinking water in our hometown is safe to drink. In that case, we may properly ignore the possibility that our town and the rest of the external world is merely a figment of a long, perfectly coherent dream. We may then take ourselves to know the water is safe to drink (or not safe to drink) without attending to that far-fetched possibility. Yet if a skeptical epistemologist were to join the conversation, one who took seriously skeptical hypotheses, we could no longer properly ignore that possibility, and thus we could no longer know that our hometown and the rest of the external world exists. Or at least we could not know such things unless we can use the available evidence to eliminate the various skeptical hypotheses that have become by the rule of belief a salient part of our conversation. We have already seen how challenging that can be. The outcome is that skepticism may yet be vindicated, but only when we take it seriously. In most of life, we take neither skepticism nor the supporting skeptical hypotheses seriously. Moreover, absent some shift in our conversation, it is entirely proper that we not take them seriously. Our knowledge of the external world is secure absent such shifts (Lewis 1996, 561).

One objection to this approach points to the way that contextualism treats the word “know” (Feldman 2003, 152–5). The contextualist response to skepticism holds that in contexts where skepticism is not an issue, proper use of the word “know” does not require us to eliminate skeptical hypotheses. Once the skeptical interlocutor challenges our title to knowledge, however, the standards have changed, and we must respond. But Richard Feldman notes that this is different from other words whose use varies from context to context. Return to the example of the baby elephant. If Amy calls a baby elephant big while comparing it to a dog, Amy will not see a need to revise her views when someone notes the baby elephant is not big compared to an adult elephant. Anyone who asked her to recant her view on those grounds would be misguided. Baby elephants are big compared to dogs but not big compared to adult elephants. The latter fact does nothing to challenge the former. But the skeptic does challenge our ordinary knowledge claims. I cannot simply dismiss the skeptical challenge, even if it is presented in response to my ordinary context claims about knowing. The skeptic maintains I am mistaken, and so I must respond. The person who claims Amy is wrong about the size of baby elephants is confused and can safely be ignored. Contextualism requires that the word “know” works like the word “big,” but it is not clear that it does.

Conclusion

Pyrrho of Elis by Girolamo Olgiati via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

As we have seen, skepticism is a considerable challenge, although there are also considerable responses. In closing, it is worth remembering that there are further arguments on both sides of external-world skepticism, not to mention many other forms of skepticism beyond the scope of this chapter. It is also worth noting that, while skepticism has a pessimistic connotation, those who count themselves skeptics of one sort or another tend to find significant value in it. The ancient Greek philosopher Pyrrho of Elis (ca. 360–270 BCE), for example, advocated global skepticism as a cure for the dogmatic certainty which he located at the root of the ills of life. Socrates, though (arguably) not a (global) skeptic, shared the conviction that true wisdom lies in recognizing what one does not know (Plato [ca. 390 BCE] 2009). In the modern era, Russell echoes similar sentiments when he writes of a “liberating doubt” delivered through the vehicle of philosophy ([1912] 2013). Let us close, then, with a passage from Russell linking the very purpose of philosophy to the value of doubt and the improvement of the self.

Further Reading

Bobro, Marc. 2018. “Descartes’ Meditations 1–3.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2018/08/04/descartes-meditations-1-3/.

Comesaña, Juan, and Peter Klein. 2019. “Skepticism.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/skepticism/.

DeRose, Keith, and Ted A. Warfield, eds. 1999. Skepticism: A Contemporary Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hickey, Lance P. “The Brain in a Vat Argument.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/brainvat/.

References

Chapman, Andrew. 2014. “External World Skepticism.” 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/02/06/external-world-skepticism/.

Descartes, René. (1641) 1985. “Meditations on First Philosophy.” In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 1–62. Volume 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Feldman, Richard. 2003. Epistemology. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.

Harman, Gilbert. 1973. Thought. Princeton University Press.

Lewis, David. 1996. “Elusive Knowledge.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (4): 549–67.

Moore, George Edward. [1939] 1963. “Proof of an External World.” In Philosophical Papers, 127–50. New York: Collier Books.

——— . [1959] 1963. “Four Forms of Skepticism.” In Philosophical Papers, 196–226. New York: Collier Books.

Plato. (ca. 390 BCE) 2009. Apology. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html.

Putnam, Hilary. 1981. Reason, Truth and History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Russell, Bertrand. (1912) 2013. The Problems of Philosophy. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/5827/5827-h/5827-h.htm.

Stroud, Barry. 1984. The Philosophical Significance of Skepticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zhuangzi. 2013. The Complete Works of Zhuangzi. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press.

Epistemic Value and the Value Problem

You need to go to Larissa, but you do not know the way. We can agree that someone who knows the way would be a good guide. But what about someone who has “a true opinion about which way was the right way,” but who hasn’t gone there and isn’t directly acquainted with the path? (Plato [ca. 380 BCE] 2015, 97b). In the Platonic dialogue Meno, Socrates asks his friend whether such a person with “right opinion concerning that which other people know . . . will not be a worse guide than one who knows” (97b). Meno concurs that this person would not be a worse guide because the conveyed belief, or guidance, would be essentially the same. But upon receiving this response, Socrates observes an oddity: if true belief can serve our practical purpose of successfully guiding action just as well, then why do we value knowledge over true belief? Indeed, why (and how) do we try to distinguish knowledge from merely true belief?

Bust of Plato from the Vatican Museum. Photo by Dudva via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

These searching questions leave Meno in the uncomfortable, perplexed state of mind the Greeks termed aporia. Meno now seems to be without resources to answer Socrates’s initial question about the nature of knowledge. But Socrates immediately offers Meno a way out. It seems correct that an assertion or transmitted belief, insofar as it is true, would serve practical ends as well as would knowledge. But for the testifier in our example, the belief lacks justification, and in sharing it that testifier would be “offering guesswork in lieu of knowledge” (98b). If we abstract from the single-iteration cases in which the belief happens to be true, we find that relying upon luck, guesswork, or weakly supported beliefs is quite unlikely to serve well. If so based, our own beliefs are not likely to “stay put” even for us. So, “True opinions, for as long as they remain, are fine things and do nothing but good. But they don’t hang around for long. They escape from a man’s mind, so that they are not worth much until one tethers them” with a logos or “account” (97e–98a).

Socrates does not say much about the nature of this logos. It might refer to the good reasons for a belief that an agent finds available upon self-reflection. It could also be something more like an explanation for why the agent reliably formed the belief—something that makes clear why it was more than extreme good luck that they came to hold this true belief, rather than some other false belief. But it is clear, firstly, that Socrates is talking about something like “justification” or “warrant,” to use terms debated in contemporary epistemology (see Chapter 2 of this volume, “Epistemic Justification” by Todd R. Long). Secondly, it is clear that he takes this “tethering” of the belief by a logos to provide what differentiates knowledge from true belief. Thirdly, he clearly maintains that the stability which results from such tethering affirms why we should value knowledge above merely true belief. Hence, Plato (ca. 428–347 BCE) is seen as a source of the traditional, “justified true belief” (JTB) analysis of knowledge (for more on the JTB account, see Chapter 1 of this volume, “The Analysis of Knowledge” by Brian C. Barnett).

John Dewey at the University of Chicago in 1902. Photo by Eva Watson-Schütze via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

The sufficiency of this traditional analysis has been challenged in recent years, and some have even questioned the necessity of reflective justification for knowledge possession. But we owe Plato for having vividly presented the concern about what we mean in attributing knowledge to someone, together with a question about why we value different epistemic standings as we do. While the value problem is approached in different ways by different epistemologists, facing these questions head-on has arguably added much depth to contemporary epistemological debates. It has helped the field to expand beyond a mere “spectator” theory of knowledge, which American philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) characterized as an account which makes the metaphor of vision primary, so that knowing is fundamentally a passive, or “beholding” relation between an individual “subject” knower and an external “object” known ([1929] 2008, 19). For as epistemologist Alvin Goldman points out, while a few decades ago epistemology and ethics were “positioned in opposite corners of the philosophical establishment, the former the epitome of ‘theoretical’ philosophy and the latter the epitome of ‘practical’ philosophy, with little contact made between them, today an active interest in both analogies and disanalogies between ethics and epistemology abounds” (2015, 132–3).

Important for appreciating the connection between ethics and epistemology is the concept of normativity. A normative task does not aim at description or causal explanation, but rather at assessment or guidance of some kind, according to values (norms) deemed pertinent to some practice (the value of art or particular artworks, for example), or the domain of discourse (ethics, politics, economics, epistemics, aesthetics, etc.). What has been discovered—or perhaps recovered—through recent interest in the value problem is that normative epistemology and normative ethics have important parallels. This is why duty, consequentialist, and virtue theories in ethics each have analogues in contemporary epistemological theories. The study of value (axiology)—in particular the study of epistemic value (epistemological axiology)—helps to highlight the similarities and differences of ethical and epistemic evaluation. Moreover, similarities or analogies imply something quite different from identity: their claim is weaker than the claim that we can reduce the one kind of value to the other. The value problem is best addressed by carefully distinguishing the kinds of value in play, rather than reducing value to a single kind. So, as Duncan Pritchard (2014) insists, to understand and respond to the problem we must first recognize that different kinds of value (epistemic, ethical, practical) are in play.

The claim of veritism (also truth monism or T-monism) is that truth is the natural “goal” or “aim” of belief (since belief is the acceptance of a proposition’s truth), and true belief is the fundamental epistemic good. While truth is, as in the traditional account, a condition on knowledge, the value of truth is not grounded in knowledge or anything else. Other epistemic states or standings (e.g., justification or warrant) are good as they promote the epistemic value of true belief. T-monism has many critics as well as defenders. Linda Zagzebski (1996), for example, argues that (externalist) reliabilism (a view introduced in Chapter 2 of this volume) offers an inadequate account of epistemological axiology, or epistemic value. Although Pritchard (2014) defends reliabilism and T-monism, he makes the useful methodological point that authors on both sides of the debate are sometimes guilty of confusing “epistemic value” (associated with truth or other epistemic ends) with “the value of the epistemic” (the instrumental value of holding true beliefs, knowledge, or understanding for realizing our moral or practical ends). Epistemic value does not imply value proper, or value for life (Pritchard 2014, 112).

Opposed to epistemic value monism is epistemic value pluralism. This axiological thesis denies the T-monist claim that the natural aim of belief is truth. The pluralist finds no clear hierarchy among epistemic goods, but rather an un–unified order of values. A Jamesian point often discussed as a challenge to T-monism is that “truth” as the fundamental epistemic good is ambiguous between a positive and negative good: “Believe truth! Shun error!” (James [1896] 2009, sec. VII, 18). Seen as prescribing how to conduct inquiry, these two commands are not the same. Instead of marching in lockstep they can sometimes come apart, leading to different prescriptions. As an example, think about beliefs derived from testimony. If I take my epistemic aim as acquiring as many true beliefs as possible (“Believe truth!”), then I should believe any claim made by any source of testimony (friends, books, media, etc.) and not worry that I will very likely acquire lots of false beliefs along with true ones. If I instead think I am a better epistemic agent to avoid false beliefs as much as possible (“Shun error!”), I will be far more cautious and risk-averse in what I come to accept.

William James in 1890 via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

This shows that the epistemic good of true belief is not as unified as it may at first appear. Further, if there is no single best way for agents to balance these two ideals of inquiry (the “councils” of intellectual courage and caution, as James describes them), then recognition of the range of ways to achieve a balance becomes an argument in support of the possibility of reasonable disagreement even among evidence-sharing epistemic peers (Kelly 2013).

Critics of veritism have either (a) maintained a value monism but elevated to final value status a different aim, such as understanding; or (b) jettisoned monism’s “primary aim” thesis in order to embrace “radical pluralism about both the nature of the epistemic and about epistemic value” (Pritchard 2016, 407). On this latter, pluralist view, “there is no base-level account of the epistemic available, and nor is there a fundamental epistemic good—i.e., fundamental in the sense that the epistemic value of other epistemic goods is reducible to the fundamental epistemic good” (407). Here we are presented with an array of the epistemically desirable—truth, knowledge, understanding, wisdom, justification, reliability, cognitive agency, explanatory power, and so on—but “with no straightforward hierarchy in play” (407).

The Ethics of Belief

The ethics of belief raises questions of our responsibility (praiseworthiness or blameworthiness) for how we conduct our inquiries and settle our beliefs. It is a broad and perhaps ambiguous phrase, which Andrew Chignell (2018) describes as referring to a cluster of questions at the intersection of epistemology, ethics, philosophy of mind, and psychology. Susan Haack (2001) defends an “overlap model” relating epistemic and ethical evaluation. On this model we should not reduce epistemic value to ethical values, but having first properly differentiated them, we can then go on to acknowledge a good deal of overlap or “traffic” between them. Moral responsibility is widely held to have an epistemic condition, the failing of which is the reason why not knowing something, when the ignorance is non-culpable, is generally an excusing condition for one’s wrongful action. Doxastic responsibility, the kind of responsibility someone has for what they believe, seems similarly to draw from the ethical side: although we lack the direct control over our beliefs that we often have over our actions, we have enough indirect control over how well or poorly we inquire that some portion of our beliefs are subject to moral evaluation.

Haack argues that the portion of our beliefs that are properly censured on moral grounds is substantially smaller than the full set of our epistemically unjustified beliefs. For there are numerous cases where one’s belief may lack epistemic justification, but where the agent is not vicious or blameworthy for believing something on scanty evidence. This may occur because the person’s believing something unjustifiably is due to “cognitive inadequacy” and does not involve willed ignorance, negligence, or the covert (self-deceptive) operation of hopes or fears. To demonstrate, Haack revisits the classic debate between the evidentialist W. K. Clifford (1849–1879) and the permissivist William James (1842–1910). The focus of James’s rebuttal of Clifford (highlighted in Table 1 below) was the latter’s bold, impermissivist claim:

William Kingdon Clifford by Leslie Stephen and Fredick Pollock via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Clifford’s principle: “It is wrong always, everywhere, and for anyone, to believe anything upon insufficient evidence.” ([1877] 1999, 77)

It is clear that the presupposed sense of “wrongness” in Clifford’s principle is an ethical sense. But the idea of doxastic responsibility, and (accordingly) of projects of guidance, also raise issues about “ought implies can” (control as a precondition of responsibility) and about the degree of control humans have over their doxastic attitudes. If all beliefs are completely involuntary, it would hardly make sense to speak of doxastic responsibility. That we are responsible for our actions does not mean we are responsible for our beliefs or that we can change them in the same way. This would likely be false. Differences over these issues help explain why debate over the ethics of belief often involves competing models of the relationship between epistemic, ethical, and pragmatic value. But Haack provides a quite helpful taxonomy of five models of the relationship between ethical and epistemic evaluation. It is worth reproducing the taxonomy verbatim:

1. that epistemic appraisal is a subspecies of ethical appraisal—henceforth, for short, the special-case thesis ;
2. that positive/negative epistemic appraisal is distinct from, but invariably associated with, positive/negative ethical appraisal—the correlation thesis ;
3. that there is, not invariable correlation, but partial overlap, where positive/negative epistemic appraisal is associated with positive/negative ethical appraisal—the overlap thesis ;
4. that ethical appraisal is inapplicable where epistemological appraisal is relevant—the independence thesis ;
5. that epistemic appraisal is distinct from, but analogous to, ethical appraisal—the analogy thesis . (Haack 2001, 21)

Susan Haack at the University of Miami in Spring 2005 by Atfyfe via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Haack’s taxonomy brings a good deal of clarity to an oft-muddled debate. Zagzebski’s early “pure virtue theory” is a clear instance of the special-case thesis. Clifford can be seen to presuppose the correlation thesis in coining the term “ethics of belief,” yet other evidentialists like Trent Dougherty (2014) criticize that thesis and appear to endorse the independence thesis instead. The overlap thesis is the most plausible, according to Haack. She argues that it helps to clarify and properly restrict the domain in which instances of believing may be judged on ethical as well as epistemic grounds. Clifford’s principle presupposes the correlation thesis: it assumes, Haack points out, that “whenever a person believes unjustifiably, his so believing is always also subject, all things considered, to unfavorable moral appraisal” (24). But, Haack argues, “there is, not an invariable correlation, but partial overlap, where positive/negative epistemic appraisal is associated with positive/negative ethical appraisal” (21). As she explains, “Unlike the correlation thesis, which requires that unjustified believing be always (at least prima facie) harmful and always something for which the subject may properly be held responsible, the overlap thesis_J requires only that unjustified believing sometimes causes (at least prima facie) harm and sometimes be something for which the subject may properly be held responsible” (25).

John Rawls in 1971. Photo by Alec Rawls via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Haack’s application of the overlap thesis to the ethics of belief functions by (a) restricting the domain in which instances of believing may be judged on ethical as well as epistemic grounds; (b) identifying circumstances that serve to exonerate individuals from unfortunate epistemic failures; and (c) distinguishing appraisals of character from epistemic and ethical appraisal, and role-specific responsibilities from those more generally appropriate to all of us. This approach arguably delivers an ethics of belief that is moderately permissivist and supportive of William James’s plea for a “spirit of inner toleration” ([1896] 2009, sec. X) and of what the political philosopher John Rawls (1921–2002) termed “reasonable pluralism” (1993, 4). Barring more specific objections, Rawls’s form of permissivism may align with Thomas Jefferson’s view in Notes on the State of Virginia : “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg” (1787, Query XVII, “Religion,” 285). This is an advantage in that we are not bound to over-easily associate disagreement with error or irrationality. The view also appreciates the holistic and trait-dependent reasoning that attends our deepest-held or “worldview” beliefs—the many different kinds of evidence and the many contextual factors including upbringing or early educational influences. These tend to weigh heavily upon reasoning in domains of controversial beliefs, such as morals, politics, philosophy, and religion. But another advantage is that this approach remains concerned (as was Clifford) with the many harms and injustices that us/them or ingroup/outgroup beliefs, as a prime example, inflict upon others. It remains what I call a permissive yet risk-aware ethics of belief (Axtell 2020).

This leads directly to our next topic, but the ethics of belief remains a topic of lively debate, so I conclude our discussion of it with a table describing the key issues and arguments between Cliffordian moral evidentialism and proponents of a more permissive ethics of belief, as James presented them in his famous 1896 paper “The Will to Believe.” James primarily intended to rebut Clifford’s principle, which appeared to demand agnosticism (withholding or suspending judgment) in a wide range of cases , and to rule out virtuous faith ventures including belief in a broad, philosophically stated “religious hypothesis.”

Recent Trends in Normative Epistemology

Study of the value problem and of epistemological axiology more generally has been part of a broader trend that includes the development in recent decades of social, feminist, performance, virtue, and vice epistemologies. These accounts themselves display numerous overlaps not just in what epistemological views they claim to supersede, but also in what they affirm as the proper scope of normative epistemology (see also in this volume Chapter 7, “Social Epistemology” by William D. Rowley, and Chapter 8, “Feminist Epistemologies” by Monica C. Poole). Authors associated with these trends have explored the relationship between knowledge and power, the relationship between individual and group knowing, and the relationship between coming to know and performing inquiry responsibly. This section highlights just three of the many important recent developments in normative epistemology: virtue epistemology, vice epistemology, and the emerging debate over epistemic paternalism within social epistemology.

Virtue epistemology is the philosophical study of the nature, identity, and epistemological significance of intellectual virtues. While such virtues may play a role in the analysis of knowledge (see Chapter 1 of this volume), virtue epistemology covers a range of recent approaches that grant characterological concepts (including specific habits, dispositions, or strategies which constitute excellences or “virtues” for agents engaged in inquiry) an important or even fundamental role in epistemology. Virtues such as intellectual humility have received a good deal of attention, along with open-mindedness and others .

While most “character epistemology” has focused on one particular class of character traits—virtues (whether in the broader “intellectual” or the more restrictive “epistemic” sense)—a good deal of interest has recently been shown in the complementary focus on intellectual vices , often directly informed by studies in social or cognitive psychology. Quassim Cassam’s Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political (2019) somewhat ironically mirrors the title of Zagzebski’s Virtues of the Mind (1996), noted for having spurred a great deal of initial interest in virtue or character epistemology. Cassam defines vice epistemology as “the philosophical study of the nature, identity, and epistemological significance of intellectual vices. Such vices include gullibility, dogmatism, prejudice, closed-mindedness, and negligence. These are intellectual character vices, that is, intellectual vices that are also character traits” (2016, 159).

Quassim Cassam at Senate House by Philafrenzy via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Given that our intellectual virtues and vices have social implications, character epistemology overlaps with social epistemology, which studies how social relationships and interactions affect the epistemic properties of individuals, groups, and collectives (see again Chapter 7 of this volume). These relationships may include existing or ideal divisions of labor in the search for knowledge and questions of power relations. Social epistemology raises socially significant questions both about our epistemic agency in the world and about the efficacy of our epistemic practices. Some of these questions involve the improvability of our habits of inquiry. Education, of course, offers the opportunity for such improvement, but there is controversy about the need and justification for more overt policies or interventions to correct for flawed or biased thinking.

“Paternalism” refers to actions or policies intended to aid others for their own good—but without their consent. Helmet and seatbelt laws, for example, require something of us for our own safety, and we aren’t free to just ignore them. But our inquiry and access to information can be similarly interfered with on the paternalistic ground that this is for our own epistemic benefit. Indeed, epistemic practices which have a paternalistic profile affect our private and public lives, often in ways of which we are not aware. Epistemic paternalism (EP) provides a rationale for such interferences; in its primary sense EP is a normative thesis, a thesis of advocacy for (or justifiable participation in) some specific interferences or limitations in the ways in which we might seek knowledge. Restricted access to information sometimes improves people’s reasoning and supports veritistic outcomes, as for instance in “blinded” scientific experiments, and in judicial rules prohibiting the disclosure of a defendant’s past criminal profile to a jury. But what entities are entitled to undertake a paternalistic practice, and in virtue of which features does such entitlement accrue to them? For example, are media sites like Facebook permitted to paternalistically tag or remove “fake news” or extreme content? Should they be expected to have policies to filter out certain potentially harmful content, and to remediate the ill-effects of “echo chambers” where biased and polarized ideologies are fostered?

The debate over justified EP at times leans on the interpretation of findings in psychology, which are often claimed to suggest intractable human irrationality, biases, and problematic heuristics (i.e., the shortcuts by which we make quick judgments, usually subconscious and automatic). But while biased reasoners might be one threat to the legitimacy of democratic practices, so might be certain censoring or coercive testimonial practices rationalized by the epistemic improvements they promise. So, paternalistic epistemic practices and their proper limits are today a topic of interest, at least where contemporary social epistemology and concerns for political legitimacy overlap. Alvin Goldman introduced and defended EP early in social epistemology’s emergence (1991). While epistemic paternalism may appear to suggest epistemic injustice, EP’s defenders think that intelligent interventions can in fact be a form of epistemic justice, insofar as applications of epistemic paternalism respect persons as actual knowers and facilitate their epistemic capacities.

Distinguishing between Epistemology’s Normative Projects

Alvin I. Goldman, who first introduced process reliabilism. University of Michigan News and Information Services Photographs, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. License: CC BY 4.0

Questions about epistemological axiology that interest many philosophers today—questions of what epistemic goals there are and why we value knowledge, understanding, and wisdom—were not always considered very central questions in epistemology. The traditional project of the analysis of knowledge (undertaken in Part I of this book) remains one of epistemologists’ primary tasks, but the turn to the study of knowing agents (rather than propositions known), and to collectives (rather than just individuals) broadens and transforms contemporary normative epistemology (hence this chapter opens Part II of the book—Expanded Epistemology). It requires us to rethink issues about how we inquire and how we should conceive the relationship between epistemic and moral evaluation. Thus, epistemologists are increasingly concerned with agency both of individuals and collectives, and with the role of particular virtues and vices (epistemic or moral) in inquiry. Contemporary normative epistemology also hosts lively debate over the importance of concepts of responsibility, reasonableness, willful ignorance, and epistemic justice/injustice. These and related concepts are important for projects of guidance aimed at addressing real-world agents and problems of diversity among beliefs—concerns discussed here under the ethics of belief. But these projects of guidance or amelioration (improvement of performance) involve human psychology and attention to the non-ideal agents we actually are. For these reasons, it is important to clearly distinguish the forward-looking concerns with guidance from the project of conceptual analysis of knowledge.

Further Reading

Bernal, Amiel, and Guy Axtell, eds. 2020 . Epistemic Paternalism Reconsidered: Conceptions, Justification, and Implications. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Carter, J. Adam, Duncan Pritchard, and John Turri. 2018. “The Value of Knowledge.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/knowledge-value/ .

Chignell, Andrew. 2018. “The Ethics of Belief.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/ .

Clifford, W. K. (1877) 1999. “The Ethics of Belief.” In The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, edited with introduction by Timothy J. Madigan, 70–96. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Dunn, Jeffrey. n.d. “Epistemic Consequentialism.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/epis-con/ .

James, William. (1896) 2009. “The Will to Believe.” In The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm .

References

Axtell, Guy. 2001. “Teaching William James’ ‘The Will to Believe.’” Teaching Philosophy 24 (4): 325–45.

———. 2020. “Well-Founded Belief and the Contingencies of Epistemic Location.” In Well-Founded Belief: New Essays on the Epistemic Basing Relation, edited by Patrick Bondy and J. Adam Carter, 275–304 . London: Routledge.

Battaly, Heather, ed. 2010. Virtue and Vice, Moral and Epistemic. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

——— , ed. 2019. The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology. London: Routledge .

Berker, Selim. 2013. “The Rejection of Epistemic Consequentialism.” Philosophical Issues 23: 363–87.

Carter, J. Adam, Jesper Kallestrup, and Duncan Pritchard, eds. 2016. “Intellectual Humility.” Special issue, Logos & Episteme 7 (4).

Cassam, Quassim. 2016. “Vice Epistemology.” The Monist 99: 159–80.

——— . 2019. Vices of the Mind: From the Intellectual to the Political. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chignell, Andrew. 2018. “The Ethics of Belief.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-belief/ .

Christian, Rose Ann. 2009. “Restricting the Scope of the Ethics of Belief: Haack’s Alternative to Clifford and James.” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77 (3): 461–93.

Church, Ian M., and Peter L. Samuelson. 2019. Intellectual Humility: An Introduction to the Philosophy and Science. Bloomsbury Academic.

Clifford, W. K. (1877) 1999. “The Ethics of Belief.” In The Ethics of Belief and Other Essays, edited with introduction by Timothy J. Madigan, 70–96. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books.

Dewey, John. (1929) 2008. “Escape from Peril.” In The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925–1953. Volume 4: 1929, The Quest for Certainty, ed. Jo Ann Boydston, 3–20. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press.

Dougherty, Trent. 2014. “The ‘Ethics of Belief’ is Ethics (Period): Reassigning Responsibilism.” In The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social, edited by Jonathan Matheson and Rico Vitz, 146–66. Oxford Scholarship Online.

Fairweather, Abrol, ed. 2014. Virtue Epistemology Naturalized: Bridges between Virtue Epistemology and Philosophy of Science . New York: Springer.

Fairweather, Abrol, and Owen Flanagan. 2014. Naturalizing Virtue Epistemology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Goldman, Alvin I. 1991. “Epistemic Paternalism: Communication Control in Law and Society.” Journal of Philosophy 88: 113–31.

——— . 2015. “Reliabilism, Veritism, and Epistemic Consequentialism.” Episteme 12 (2): 131–43.

Greco, Daniel, and Brian Hedden. 2016. “Uniqueness and Metaepistemology.” Journal of Philosophy 113 (8): 365–95.

Haack, Susan. 2001. “The Ethics of Belief, Reconsidered.” In Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue, edited by Matthias Steup, 21–33. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Jackson, Elizabeth. 2020. “Epistemic Paternalism, Epistemic Permissivism, and Standpoint Epistemology.” In Epistemic Paternalism Reconsidered: Conceptions, Justification, and Implications, edited by Amiel Bernal and Guy Axtell, 199–216. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

James, William. (1896) 2009. “The Will to Believe.” In The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy. Urbana, IL: Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/26659/26659-h/26659-h.htm .

Jefferson, Thomas. 1787. Notes on the State of Virginia. Electronic Text Center, University of Virginia Library. (Preserved by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine.) http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/toc/modeng/public/JefVirg.html .

Kelly, Thomas. 2013. “Evidence can be Permissive.” In Contemporary Debates in Epistemology, edited by Matthias Steup, John Turri, and Ernest Sosa, 298–311. London: Wiley-Blackwell.

Kelp, Christopher, and John Greco, eds. 2020. Virtue-Theoretic Epistemology: New Methods and Approaches. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Melis, Giacomo. 2016. “The Intertwinement of Propositional and Doxastic Justification.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2): 367–79.

Plato. (ca. 380 BCE) 2015. Meno. In Reason and Persuasion: Three Dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno, Republic Book I, translated by Belle Waring, commentary and illustrations by John Holbo, 211–63.

Pritchard, Duncan. 2007. “Recent Work on Epistemic Value.” American Philosophical Quarterly 44: 85–110.

——— . 2014. “Truth as the Fundamental Epistemic Good.” In The Ethics of Belief: Individual and Social, edited by Jonathan Matheson and Rico Vitz, 112–29. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

——— . 2016. “Epistemic Axiology.” In Epistemic Reasons, Epistemic Norms, and Epistemic Goals, edited by Martin Grajner and Pedro Schmechtig, 407–22. Berlin: DeGruyter.

Pryor, James. 2001. “Highlights of Recent Epistemology.” The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 52: 95–124.

Rawls, John. 1993. Political Liberalism . New York: Columbia University Press.

Roberts, Robert C., and W. Jay Wood. 2007. Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology . Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Robichaud, Philip, and Jan Willem Wieland, eds. 2017. Responsibility: The Epistemic Condition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Slote, Michael, and Ernest Sosa, eds. 2015. Moral and Intellectual Virtues in Western and Chinese Philosophy. New York: Routledge.

Vargas, Miguel Angel Fernandez, ed. 2016. Performance Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Vitz, Rico. n.d. “Doxastic Voluntarism.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://iep.utm.edu/doxa-vol/ .

Zagzebski, Linda T. 1996. Virtues of the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Preamble

Epistemologists have traditionally approached questions about the nature of knowledge and epistemic justification using informal methods, such as intuition, introspection, everyday concepts, and ordinary language. Whether in addition to or in place of these methods, formal epistemology utilizes formal tools, such as logic, set theory, and mathematical probability. The upshot is greater precision, increased rigor, and an expanded range of applications. This chapter focuses on the formal approach in its most prominent manifestation: Bayesianism, which begins by discarding the traditional view of belief as an all-or-nothing affair (either you believe a proposition or you don’t) and instead treats belief as admitting of degrees. These degrees are governed by how strongly a proposition is supported by the evidence. Evidential support is measured by probability, especially with the help of a famous result in probability theory, Bayes’s theorem (hence the term, “Bayesian”). Our aim here is to understand the basics of Bayesianism, its pros and cons, and an extended application to the epistemology of science. As we’ll see, the Bayesian framework is a natural fit for the scientific context. Very seldom does a single experiment change the opinion of the scientific community; the quest for scientific truth is hard fought over many experiments and research programs as hypotheses gradually gain or lose favor in light of a changing body of evidence. Bayesianism allows us to model this process, come to a more robust understanding of scientific knowledge, and use this understanding to settle some controversies over theory choice.

Degrees of Belief

You are probably more confident in some beliefs than others. You’ve probably said things like “I’m sure I turned the oven off,” which is to say your confidence is high, or “I have a hunch he might not be telling the truth,” which is to say your confidence is low. When you closely scrutinize your beliefs, you’ll find that they fall along various points in a spectrum—a hierarchy which can’t be captured simply by saying that you either believe or you don’t. Such all-or-nothing terms lump beliefs together into broad categories, masking important differences among their locations in the hierarchy.

Suppose instead you understand belief as “admitting of degrees.” This allows you to distinguish beliefs in which you have varying degrees of confidence: your degree of belief in a proposition is the degree of confidence you have in that proposition, which can be placed on a scale from to (expressed in decimal, ratio, or percentage form). A belief that has accrued significant evidential support receives a high “score” or degree, which would gradually diminish with decreasing support. Plausibly, the all-or-nothing standards of traditional epistemology can then be mapped onto degreed terms according to a thesis named after British philosopher John Locke (1632–1704):

The Lockean thesis: A belief (in the all-or-nothing sense) is rational when the rational degree of belief is sufficiently high (i.e., above some specific threshold). (Foley 1992)

Portrait of John Locke by Godfrey Kneller via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Given this thesis, an advantage of the degreed framework is that it provides the resources to distinguish and evaluate specific levels of belief in a way that also grounds the traditional epistemological standards. In what follows, we will focus on the degreed aspects, keeping in mind that translation back into traditional terms is always possible via the Lockean thesis.

Formal epistemologists often talk about degrees of beliefs as credences. For example, take the statement, “All bachelors are unmarried,” which is analytically true (true by definition) and therefore impossible to be false. A credence of this caliber would receive a perfect score of . Such a score represents absolute certainty. Just short of this are beliefs that are nearly certain but can, theoretically, be mistaken. For example, you’re probably nearly certain that the external world exists, although there’s a slight chance that you’re actually a brain in a vat and your experience of the world is being simulated. If so, you have a really high credence, perhaps , that you are not a brain in a vat. The further removed from absolute certainty, the lower the score a belief would receive. A score of is reserved for beliefs that can’t possibly be true, often because they are analytically false (self-contradictory)—for example, “The number is both even and odd.” This framework can make sense of statements like “I’m sure I set the alarm” and “There is a chance I’m getting that job” (perhaps after a bad interview). However, these sentences would, strictly speaking, be hyperbole, since they are neither tautologies nor contradictions—just highly likely and highly unlikely, respectively. There are, of course, slight leanings—propositions you barely believe or weakly reject. And in the middle, at credence, there are propositions on which you probably suspend judgment (have no opinion on one way or another), for example “The total number of people currently living on Earth is odd rather than even.”

Two Models of Degrees of Belief

The best way to understand how “scores” are assigned to beliefs depends on whom you ask and what your purposes are. The previous section treated credences as values on a scale from to . This scale aligns them with how we typically think of probabilities, which also fall between and according to a standard axiom of probability theory:

The probability of a proposition or event , represented by , is such that: .

Jacob Bernoulli (1655–1705), the mathematician who introduced the objective/subjective distinction in probability. Painting by Niklaus Bernoulli via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

More generally, formal epistemologists typically adopt probabilism: the view that credences should conform to probabilities. A significant upshot is that we can use the advantages of probability theory to talk and reason carefully about our beliefs. However, there are two ways to think about probability, which correspond to two ways to think about degrees of belief: objective and subjective.

An objective understanding of degrees of belief understands the “score” we’ve been talking about as a feature of the real (external, mind-independent) world. For example, if I asked for your degree of belief in a fair coin coming up heads, you’d likely say in , or  . This is grounded in the fact that the coin has one side that is heads (the desired outcome) out of the two possible outcomes for a single toss. Getting a royal flush in poker follows the same reasoning with larger numbers: there are four ways to do it out of possible poker hands ( in ). In general, the objective probability, hence the objective degree of belief one should have, is equal to the number of ways the desired outcome can obtain out of the number of all relevant possible outcomes:

John Stuart Mill (1806–1873), the philosopher who defended a “frequentist” view of probability as the “frequency” of an event in a reference class. Image via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

The denominator of this ratio is the size of the reference class (the set of all relevant possible outcomes). In the coin case, the reference class consists of two possible outcomes: heads and tails. In the card case, the reference class consists of all possible hands in a poker game. But matters aren’t always so clear-cut. For example, consider the event, “Your local sports team will win their next championship.” Would we consider all past and future games that the team has ever played? Should we only consider their past and future championship games? Of course, we can’t directly inspect future games at present. So, do we simply look at the past? If so, how far back should we go? Surely their victories and losses in the 1970s aren’t relevant to this year. Now consider what credence to assign a belief such as, “Napoleon’s conquest in Europe would have been successful had he never ventured into Russia during the winter.” Despite this being intuitively likely, it would be even harder here to decide where to start in assigning a reference class. This set of confusions is known as the reference class problem.

Augustus De Morgan (1806–1871), the mathematician among the earliest proponents of subjective probability. Image via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

A subjective understanding of degrees of belief avoids this problem by not tying your belief to the nature of the event in question. On this understanding, the score one attributes to a belief is a subjective probability: how confident you actually are in that belief being true, regardless of any features of the real, mind-independent world. This allows you to say things like “I’m sure my friend is going to be late” and “I’m sure my local sports team will win their next championship” without deciding on a reference class to use in a ratio.

Although the subjective interpretation allows us to expand the class of events or propositions we can sensibly assign probabilities to, it invites a host of other problems. One of the most prominent problems for the subjective understanding is the problem of the priors (the name for which will become apparent in the next section). Basically, if your subjective probabilities aren’t grounded in anything in the real world, they are just up to each individual person. Does this mean anyone can just set their subjective probabilities to whatever they want? Well, they could, but there are at least some constraints on what makes a set of subjective probabilities rational.

As with your beliefs in a traditional (non-degreed) framework, credences should not violate the laws of logic. For example, you shouldn’t believe two propositions that contradict each other. The degreed framework additionally requires us to respect the laws of probability.

Let’s say you decide to try out your hand at the racetrack and, as luck would have it, show up the day they’re racing Corgis (a Welsh dog breed). Before the races begin, you get to meet some of the racers. The first Corgi, Atticus, has cute little legs, is a little on the chubby side, but has a smile that convinces you that he will win the race. You decide he has an chance. The next Corgi you meet, Banquo, is half German Shepherd, is much taller and leaner, and hasn’t stopped staring into the middle distance in a determined fashion. You are now convinced that Banquo will win with a credence of . After meeting all the racers, and subsequently falling in love with all of them, you want everyone to win and therefore assign each a probability of . Assigning every contestant such a high probability is irrational. But why, especially on the subjective understanding?

A way to test whether any of your probabilities are irrational in the degreed framework is analogous to how you might evaluate beliefs in a non-degreed framework: you check for inconsistencies. In a non-degreed framework, the inconsistencies come in the form of logical contradictions among beliefs. In the degreed framework, inconsistencies arise when the probabilities you attribute to beliefs don’t respect the laws of probability (along with the laws of logic). One such law, finite additivity, maintains that if two propositions or events, and , are incompatible, their probabilities must be additive (the sum of their individual probabilities):

George Boole (1815–1864), the mathematician who defended objectivist probability. He also “logicized” probability by grounding it in logical relations among propositions. Image via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

, where and cannot both obtain.

An example of incompatible events is a normal coin landing both heads, , and tails, , on a single toss. Setting aside the negligible possibility of the coin landing on the edge, and each has a probability of . So, finite additivity implies that . In other words, the probability that either or obtains is , or certainty.

Return to the racing example. You can discover that assigning an subjective probability to all the racers is irrational if you are forced to “put your money where your mouth is.” Table 1 summarizes the pertinent information you would see displayed at a betting counter. The racetrack assigns each racer betting odds, which can be translated into the probability of winning.

Table 1 – Racetrack’s Betting Information

Racer	Betting Odds (). You stand to gain (the amount the bookie puts up) for every you bet.	Probability of Winning =	Expected Payout per Bet =
Atticus		()
Banquo		()
Cheddar		()
Dr. Waddle		()

For example, since Banquo is the favorite to win the race, the racetrack gives him “even odds” () to avoid paying out very much money. Atticus, though adorable, is less likely to win, so the racetrack gives him odds. Dr. Waddle, the least likely to win, will pay off the most if he can pull off the upset at . The way to read these betting odds is to understand them as hypothetical amounts that the bookie and yourself, respectively, put up. This means that if Atticus wins, you’ll receive the the bookie bet and get back the you bet. You can, of course, bet whatever quantity you desire. The betting odds simply set the ratio.

If a bookie overheard you saying all the Corgis are likely to win, with an chance each, she could try to take advantage of this by offering you the revised set of bets summarized in Table 2 below. The bookie arrived at her numbers using the same strategy as the racetrack. If you accept, as your credences suggest, you will be guaranteed to lose money. It will cost you to place bets on all the Corgis, but you will get back just since only one Corgi will actually win.

Table 2 – The Bookie’s New Offer

Racer	Subjective Probability of Winning	Betting Odds You Should Accept (Given Your Subjective Probabilities)	Expected Payout per Bet
Atticus
Banquo
Cheddar
Dr. Waddle

Another way to put the fact that you are guaranteed to lose is that you have had a Dutch book made against you. To avoid Dutch books, you need to adjust your credences to align with the laws of probability. It is rational to avoid Dutch books. So, according to the Dutch book argument, rational credences adhere to the laws of probability (Vineberg 2016).

Though the Dutch book argument begins to make subjective probability more palatable by placing some firm constraints on the probabilities you can rationally assign, some would object that these constraints are too demanding. This objection to probabilism in general (whether objective or subjective) is the problem of logical omniscience. At the beginning of the chapter, it was mentioned that all and only necessary truths, such as those of logic (e.g., or ), deserve a perfect score of :

when is necessarily true

and

when is necessarily false.

However, there are an infinite number of logical truths. Since human beings (individually and collectively) are finite, there are many logical truths that no person has ever thought about. Some of them are beyond our limited grasp, since there is no limit to how complex they can be. Even many simple logical truths aren’t recognized without studying logic. For a number of reasons, then, no human has the capacity to form a belief in every logical truth, making it impossible for us to assign to them all. By adopting the degreed framework, we are committed to saying our beliefs behave in accordance with the laws of logic and probability. But if there are many instances where they don’t, as we seem to have found, we should rethink this relationship.

In response, we might say that the laws of logic and probability are nevertheless standards for ideal rational agents , which can be viewed as a kind of theoretical limiting case for those of us in the messy real world. In this approach, we are engaging in idealization much like physicists do when they reason with their frictionless planes, complete vacuums, and perfect spheres. Still, the Dutch book argument doesn’t stop people from having ridiculous credences so long as they respect the laws of probability. Almost any credence (e.g., that your local sports team is likely to win the championship) can be made probabilistically consistent with other credences if they are adjusted to fit. Objective probability could appeal to features of the real world to settle the appropriate credence, but subjective probability does not have this advantage. We will return to this problem for subjective probabilism in the final two sections to see if it can be mitigated.

Bayes’s Theorem and Bayesianism

The previous sections introduced some of the critical ingredients for using Bayes’s theorem, a powerful theorem in probability theory established by Reverend Thomas Bayes (ca. 1702–1761).  This theorem gives you the rules to follow to update your credences based on incoming evidence. Bayesianism is a version of formal epistemology that gives Bayes’s theorem a central role in updating credences. After all, not just any way of updating is rational. For example, after watching a couple of news reports about airplane crashes in the same week, you might be tempted to lower your credence that air travel is safe to the point that you’re afraid to fly. Decreasing your degree of belief in the safety of air travel to this extent would be irrational because the evidence isn’t strong enough. After all, think of all the safe flights that occur on a regular basis compared to those that crash. To see how we might approach updating your belief in a rational way, let’s look at the components of Bayes’s theorem.

Thomas Bayes (purported identification by Terence O’Donnell) via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Bayes’s theorem is often stated as follows:

, where .

represents the probability of a hypothesis given evidence , where and are any two propositions or events. It tells you how likely makes . Because this probability is dependent or conditional on , it is referred to as a conditional probability.

The process of obtaining this probability is called conditionalization (or conditioning). Prior to conditionalization, one begins with a prior probability, . This is a kind of baseline or starting probability for , one that does not yet take evidence into account. After conditionalizing, one ends up with a posterior probability, .

Given these concepts, we are now in a position to understand the rule of conditionalization, which is a relatively intuitive proposal: whenever a person gains new evidence concerning hypothesis , the proper way to update one’s initial credence in —given by —is by conditionalizing on , then conforming one’s new credence to the result:

After gaining evidence , the updated credence is given by .

The importance of Bayes’s theorem is that it helps us put this into practice by giving us a precise means by which to calculate the effect of conditionalization. But before we can see how this works, we must first examine the other components of the theorem.

is the probability of obtaining the evidence given that the hypothesis is true. This component is often called the likelihood. It is sometimes described as the “explanatory power” of with respect to . Basically, it measures how well your hypothesis predicts the evidence. If a properly conducted and well-designed experiment yields as the expected result of , this value will be high.

is the probability of obtaining evidence . If the evidence is easily obtained by chance, it would not be a good idea to increase your confidence in the hypothesis. Bayes’s theorem accounts for this because if is large, it will decrease your posterior probability in virtue of being in the denominator of our calculations, rendering the ratio smaller.

Comparative Bayesianism

One way to use Bayes’s theorem is to calculate the right-hand expressions in the formula and plug in the values to get a number for , then update your credence accordingly. But sometimes it is difficult to find a value for . We can bypass this by using the theorem in a comparative fashion. If we want to use to choose between two competing hypotheses and , we only need to show that . Applying Bayes’s theorem to each side of the inequality, will appear on both sides and cancel out. The result is that:

when .

And if we start out neutral between and , so that , then those cancel too. The result is that:

when , for cases where .

In other words, given that all else is equal, we should adopt over  when the former better explains or predicts the evidence. So comparative Bayesianism gives us a probabilistic verification of a form of inference to the best explanation.

Note that where we have only a single hypothesis , we can still use the above comparative formulation to compare to (by substituting for and for ):

when , for cases where .

But we must be cautious not to drop out the in this way—except when comparing with another hypothesis that is equally likely. In other cases, can have a dramatic impact on the calculation. In fact, ignoring prior probabilities and focusing exclusively on the conditional probabilities is the notorious base-rate fallacy (so named because is sometimes called the base rate). Psychologists have identified this fallacy as a common source of many real-world reasoning mistakes, ranging from medical misdiagnoses to legal errors to discriminatory policies (Kahneman and Tversky 1973). To get a sense of how this fallacy operates in the medical context, try your hand at question 2 in the Questions for Reflection at the end of this chapter.

Box 1 – Ockham’s Razor

William of Ockham (ca. 1285–1347), the medieval Christian philosopher/theologian to whom the razor is credited. Image via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Ockham’s razor, which posits that “entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity,” serves as a guiding principle for choosing among competing hypotheses. The core insight is that we should stick to the simplest explanation consistent with the data, ensuring that any additional postulates aren’t superfluous. Since simplicity is an explanatory virtue (among others)—that is, it improves the quality of an explanation (other things being equal)—Ockham’s razor is closely related to inference to the best explanation.

The choice between a heliocentric or geocentric model of the universe shows how “the razor” plays out in a scientific context. The heliocentric model of the universe maintains that the planets orbit the sun. The geocentric model maintains that they orbit Earth. However, to account for observations, the geocentric model further stipulates that the planets exhibit “epicycles,” meaning that they move backward and forward via smaller loops within their orbits. These epicycles may be seen as an extra entity or postulate. Although the razor doesn’t eliminate the postulate with certainty , it renders the geocentric model less probable than the heliocentric model .

Copernicus’ Heliocentric Model by Scewing via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

The Geocentric Model by James Ferguson from the first edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica (1771) via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Adding a new entity/postulate is equivalent to adding a conjunct (an “and”) to the hypothesis, which (because of how probabilities are calculated) only works to drive down one’s credence. Mathematically, we can express this as the following probabilistic law:

when does not entail .

Consider the following example made famous by psychologists Kahneman and Tversky (1983). Linda is a recent university grad who studied philosophy. While at university, Linda regularly participated in activism related to racial injustice and climate change. Which is more probable?

1. Linda is a bank teller.
2. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

If you’re like most people, you will likely have chosen (b). However, (b) is the less likely option because no matter what probabilities you assign to each attribute—“bank teller” and “active in the feminist movement”—it will always be less likely for both attributes to appear together rather than either on its own. For an extended explanation and discussion of this example, see Berit Brogaard (2006). For more on Ockham’s razor, see Elliott Sober (2015 and 2016).

Application: The Epistemology of Science

Revising your credence in a hypothesis in response to evidence, specifically, empirical observations, is what science is all about. One of the reasons Bayesianism has been so influential is that it generalizes across many fields and scenarios. In this section, we will look at how one might use Bayesianism to assist in updating degrees of belief in scientific hypotheses.

Andrew Wakefield during a 2019 anti-vax march in Warsaw. Photo by Bladość via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Suppose you want to know whether vaccines cause autism, so you set out to do some research. After a half hour on Google, you find yourself in a vortex of misinformation. You come across the (in)famous 1998 Lancet article responsible for instigating the vaccine/autism misconception. In this article, Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his co-authors report a study in which children showed the onset of behavioral symptoms associated with autism within weeks of receiving the measles, mumps, rubella (MMR) immunization. On this basis, you accept an chance that vaccines cause autism, and form an credence that your child will develop autism if you let her receive the immunization . In other words, your initial estimate is that . However, you then learn that The Lancet retracted the article after the study had been repeatedly discredited. While anti-vaxxers continue to side with Wakefield, others insist that vaccines are safe and vital to public health.

What should you do? Determined to sort this out but unsure of your probability skills, an intriguing open textbook chapter about Bayesian epistemology catches your eye. Equipped with your new knowledge of Bayes’s theorem, you seek out some experiments to obtain the probabilities to input into the theorem. Fortunately, there are many such experiments to draw from. As an example, consider just one study done in Quebec (Fombonne et al. 2006).

The study reports that children were diagnosed with a condition on the autism spectrum. So, . The researchers report that this is consistent with the rate found in other epidemiological studies. They also calculate an average vaccination rate among children in the relevant age group, which yields . If vaccines cause autism, one might expect a higher-than-normal vaccination rate concentrated among the diagnosed with autism. To give anti-vaxxers the benefit of the doubt, suppose that (about ) were immunized. That is, .

Using Bayes’s theorem,

Putting it all together, this result suggests that the rational response to the evidence is to dramatically downgrade your credence in the hypothesis from the initial to less than . While we might not ever fully rule out the hypothesis, additional experiments could continue this downward slope until credences become vanishingly small. Even at , you would already be justified in believing that it is highly improbable that vaccines cause autism—in other words, justified in believing that it is highly probable () that vaccines do not cause autism. A corollary to this is that no matter how much evidence accrues, you will never be able to raise your credence to , or absolute certainty. This point generalizes: a Bayesian treatment of science best accords with fallibilism, the idea that one can have justification without certainty.

Our example also demonstrates that Bayesianism has some mechanism for correcting prior probabilities, since enough evidence will wash out erroneous priors. One might appreciate that we could have started off skeptical about the claim that vaccines cause autism, say with confidence, and our credence would still have decreased after seeing the evidence. In the short term, however, subjective Bayesianism would allow someone to believe in unrealistic priors until enough evidence comes in. Objective Bayesianism has the advantage on this front because it insists on having priors that cohere with the world before one gets on with the business of updating (though on the other hand, the objective view faces the reference class problem).

The vaccine case required us to appeal to observed rates and statistical calculations to determine the probabilities to input into Bayes’s theorem. However, it’s not always possible to put a number on the relevant values. Consider Einstein’s theory of general relativity, which postulates that mass causes spacetime to warp or curve, and that this curvature is the force of gravity. At the time of its publication in 1915, most scientists viewed this theory as a radical, unwarranted departure from the longstanding Newtonian theory of gravity. After all, Einstein had no empirical proof. On the other hand, his reasoning also seemed convincing, not to mention that he had been proved right once before when everyone else had it wrong (regarding his theory of special relativity in 1905). So, in 1915, it was perhaps reasonable to form a credence on the question of Newtonian gravity () vs. general relativity (). If so, then .

Portrait of Isaac Newton by Godfrey Kneller via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Albert Einstein, 1921, by Ferdinand Schmutzer via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Whereas predicts that light rays approaching the sun would travel a straight path, predicts that they would be warped by the sun’s gravity, taking a curved path. During the total solar eclipse in 1919, the famous Eddington experiment () strongly confirmed ’s prediction. In other words, , where the double inequality means “much greater than.” Of course, it’s hard to see how numerical values could be determined.

Comparative Bayesianism to the rescue! Given what we just determined—that and —the comparative version of Bayes’s theorem introduced in the previous section implies that . Hence, strongly supports over . Comparative Bayesianism tells us that after we learn Eddington’s results, we should significantly increase our credence in and decrease our credence in . Since those credences were previously equal, this means we will end up with . In other words, we should strongly believe over .

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944), English astrophysicist and astronomer. Part of the George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C. Image via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Illustration of spacetime curvature due to mass, as predicted by general relativity. Image by OpenStax University Physics via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 4.0

Of course, this conclusion is somewhat limited. Without numerical probabilities, Bayesianism cannot pinpoint a specific degree of belief in . Instead, comparative Bayesianism showed us how we are justified in choosing between two competing hypotheses. Further, comparisons can also usefully justify a “belief ranking” (e.g., belief is more probable than , which is more probable than ). Decision theorists use such rankings to explain which beliefs should be given greater weight in decision-making.

Evaluating Bayesianism

This chapter has demonstrated that Bayesianism provides us with a strong supplement or alternative to traditional epistemology. A degreed framework allows us to characterize our doxastic attitudes more precisely. The tools of probability avail us to a rich mathematical framework for evaluating credences. The most valuable of these tools is Bayes’s theorem, which meticulously prescribes how to refine our credences over time in light of new evidence. The result is a powerful framework, one which can provide a strong epistemological ground for scientific inquiry.

This chapter has also shown that Bayesianism is not without its weaknesses, including the reference class problem, the problem of the priors, and the problem of logical omniscience. These, however, may not be insurmountable and are, in fact, the hub of lively debate and research in formal epistemology. Though this chapter focuses on examples from science, it might be appreciated that the result is highly generalizable. If you are intrigued by the potential of Bayesianism, it would be fruitful to look through the suggested reading list to understand how it makes contact with other areas of philosophy.

Questions for Reflection

1. Create a sketch of what your own range of credences might look like. Use the continuum below to plot your credences for the propositions listed in (a)–(e). There are several benchmarks in the diagram to help guide your thinking.
   1. The scientific consensus is wrong about climate change.
   2. A nuclear strike will happen within your lifetime.
   3. Someone on a given crowded bus ( passengers) has the same birthday as you.
   4. The final match of the next World Cup (soccer) will feature at least one European country.
   5. The Talking Heads (a rock band) will reunite for one final album.
      
2. Let’s explore Bayes’s theorem and how it compares to your probability intuitions. Consider two claims:
   = You test positive for a given medical condition.
   = You have the medical condition.
   Suppose the test has a strong track record for detecting the condition when it’s actually present: . Also suppose about of the population has the condition: . Finally, suppose about one of every ten people who are tested tend to test positive: . Now answer the following questions:
   1. Using only your intuition (no calculations), how likely is it that you have the condition given that you tested positive? In other words, is is high, low, or roughly in the middle?
   2. Now plug the numbers into Bayes’s theorem to find a numerical estimate for .
   3. Compare your answers to (a) and (b). If you found your intuition to be far off course, what do you think is the reason for this? What led your intuition astray? Were you selectively focused on one particular aspect of the provided data? Is the error related to the base-rate fallacy (introduced in the Comparative Bayesianism section)?
3. Find your own example to demonstrate the use of comparative Bayesianism. Begin with a specific scientific or philosophical hypothesis in which your initial credence is . Describe any single consideration that seems to have some relevance to . According to comparative Bayesianism, how should learning about alter your credence in ? Explain step by step.
4. Is Bayesianism the way our brains “naturally” update beliefs? AI (artificial intelligence) researchers have had tremendous success by using Bayesian inference to approximate some human capabilities. Does this suggest we might have stumbled upon the algorithm our brain has been using all along? (See the paper in the Further Reading section by Robert Bain, “Are Our Brains Bayesian?”)
5. Mapping Out the Terrain: Below is a roadmap of the epistemological terrain. Like most areas of philosophy, you will find yourself at a choice-point. Each option has pros and cons, but it’s up to you to defend your position whichever way you go. You’ve read about the upshots of the degreed framework, but it would be intellectually responsible to have something to say about the problems that each position inherits. As an exercise, determine which of the problems you think are the most serious and decide which position you think is most defensible, all things considered. Write a mini-essay explaining your decision.
   
6. The House Always Wins: To get a better feel for Dutch books, it would be helpful to run through the following game. The example involves a roulette wheel, but for simplicity we will only consider bets that the ball will land on a number in the range and one of two green spaces ( and ), yielding a sample space (the set of all possible individual outcomes) of size .

First consider what would happen if you place bets on all options. Although you will win some of these, since you covered all options, more of them will lose, guaranteeing a net loss. So, this is a Dutch book.

Now look instead at what happens when you repeat single bets in sequence. Suppose you start out with and place (minimum) bets on the simplified roulette wheel. First pick a number you wish to bet on. To see whether you won, use a random number generator to generate one number at a time with a range of and assume and stand in for the two green spaces ( and ), respectively. Then repeat. For each win, use the space in the table below to record your gain or loss. Though you might win once in a while, in the long run you will lose your entire initial pot of money. Try it and see how long it takes to reach that point.

Table 3 – The House Always Wins

Event	Probability of Winning	Expected Payout per bet	Your pot of money ( per win, per loss) Initial amount:
			Remaining amount: ___
			Remaining amount: ___
			Remaining amount: ___

Further Reading

Basic Probability Theory

Brogaard, Berit. 2016. “‘Linda the Bank Teller’ Case Revisited.” Psychology Today (blog). November 22, 2016. https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-superhuman-mind/201611/linda-the-bank-teller-case-revisited .

Hacking, Ian. 2001. An Introduction to Probability and Inductive Logic, Chapter 6. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Metcalf, Thomas. 2018. “The Probability Calculus.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology. https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2018/09/23/introduction-to-the-probability-calculus/ .

Philosophy of Probability

Metcalf, Thomas. 2018. “Interpretations of Probability.” In 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology.  https://1000wordphilosophy.com/2018/07/08/interpretations-of-probability/ .

Bayesian Epistemology

Carneades.org. 2014. “Bayesian Epistemology.” YouTube video, 3.02. December 14, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YRz8deiJ57E&list=PLz0n_SjOttTdIqlgDjdNFfLUFVrl5j1J4 .

Talbott, William. 2008. “Bayesian Epistemology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/epistemology-bayesian/ .

Explanatory Considerations Related to Bayesianism

Sober, Elliott. 2015. Ockham’s Razors: A User’s Manual. New York: Cambridge University Press.

———. 2016. “Why Is Simpler Better?” Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/are-scientific-theories-really-better-when-they-are-simpler .

AI, Cognitive Psychology, and Bayesianism

Bain, Robert. 2016. “Are Our Brains Bayesian?” Significance 13 (4): 14–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2016.00935.x .

References

Foley, Richard. 1992. “The Epistemology of Belief and the Epistemology of Degrees of Belief.” American Philosophical Quarterly 29 (2): 111–21.

Fombonne, Eric, Rita Zakarian, Andrew Bennett, Linyan Meng, and Diane Mclean-Heywood. 2006. “Pervasive Developmental Disorders in Montreal, Quebec, Canada: Prevalence and Links with Immunizations.” Pediatrics 118 (1): 139–50.

Hájek, Alan. 2007. “The Reference Class Problem Is Your Problem Too.” Synthese 156: 563–85.

Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. 1973. “On the Psychology of Prediction.” Psychological Review 80: 237–51.

Moon, Andrew. 2017. “Beliefs Do Not Come in Degrees.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy  47 (6): 760–78.

Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. 1983. “Extensional versus Intuitive reasoning: The Conjunction Fallacy in Probability Judgment,” Psychological Review 90 (4): 293–315.

Vineberg, Susan. 2016. “Dutch Book Arguments.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/Dutch-book/ .

Wakefield, A.J., et al. 1998. “RETRACTED: Ileal-Lymphoid-Nodular Hyperplasia, Non-Specific Colitis, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder in Children.” The Lancet 351 (9103). https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(97)11096-0/fulltext .

Introduction: What Is Social Epistemology?

Human beings are social animals. We live in networks of interdependence. We depend on each other for many things—including the truth. True beliefs keep us from eating poisonous mushrooms, getting shocked by live circuits, and getting into car accidents. The need to transmit true beliefs is pressing because none of us individually can get all the true beliefs we need on our own. But we know that not everyone tells the truth. Therefore, our many-dimensioned dependence on each other for our beliefs raises epistemological questions. Social epistemology (SE) is the study of how social relationships and interactions affect the epistemic properties of individuals and groups.

Jennifer Lackey during a lecture at Amherst College in 2010. Photo by Rose Lenehan via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

This chapter will focus on two important issues in SE: the epistemology of testimony and peer disagreement. The epistemology of testimony is central to SE because, without what others tell us about the world, we would know very little about it. We would be almost entirely ignorant of history, science, and current affairs—not to mention the inner lives of others. Philosophers refer to this telling as testimony—whether it takes the form of speech, text, or something else (Lackey 2006).

Though there are many questions worth asking, the place to start is by wondering:

Under what conditions does testimony confer positive epistemic status on its content?

I will focus on our justification for believing testimony. However, we may hope that better understanding testimonial justification will help us understand testimonial knowledge as well.

Testimony is not the only way in which others affect what we believe. We can find out how the world is indirectly, by seeing whether others agree or disagree with us or with each other. For this reason, we seek out and value second opinions as a check on our fallible sources. But we sometimes seem to dismiss disagreement. Many of our strongly held beliefs—philosophical, religious, or political—are controversial, and we know it. This, too, presents an epistemological puzzle. To lead us into the epistemology of disagreement, we will ask:

What is the epistemically rational response to discovering that someone disagrees with us?

Epistemological questions about testimony and disagreement are core issues in social epistemology and will be the focus of this chapter. The following social epistemological issues will not be covered, but may still interest the reader:

Alvin I. Goldman, who first introduced process reliabilism. University of Michigan News and Information Services Photographs, Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan. License: CC BY 4.0

• Collective epistemology: We speak of groups as having intentions and beliefs. When are the beliefs of groups justified or knowledge?
• Agnotology: Sometimes individuals or groups have an interest in others being ignorant of some truth. How do propagandists, purveyors of fake news, and others exploit communication to render their targets ignorant?
• Epistemic injustice: Not all members of a communication network are treated equally. What are the epistemic consequences of these inequalities?
• Epistemic democracy: Can votes be construed as testimony about the best candidate or policy? Is collective opinion more likely to yield truth than individual opinion? Can democracy be justified on such epistemic grounds?

Oddly enough, Western philosophy has historically neglected social epistemology. Individual pursuit of truth has generally been held up as a check on the fallibility of social sources of information, whether in the classical or modern eras. Interestingly, outside of the West, especially in Indian philosophy, there has been lively development of social epistemology.

Social epistemology has taken on new urgency in light of the rapid changes brought on by new technology. Peer-reviewed research of the highest quality can be freely accessed in a matter of moments—as can conspiracy theories, radical manifestos, and celebrity medical tips.

Testimony as a Source of Knowledge and Justified Belief

What people tell us is critical for our understanding of the world. It furnishes us with beliefs, many of which we are sometimes happy to call “knowledge.” Still, how can this be when deception (or other error) can rarely be ruled out? Why think that beliefs based on the testimony of others are ever justified?

A. Reductionism

Portrait of David Hume by Allan Ramsay via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

One answer is that we learn that (some) testimony is worthy of belief. A spoken or written word is an artifact or event in the world. Perhaps testimony justifies belief by our learning that testimony correlates with truth. This seems to be what Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711–1776) had in mind when he wrote that our assurance of testimony “is derived from no other principle than our observation of the veracity of human testimony, and of the usual conformity of facts to the reports of witnesses” (Hume [1777] 1993, 74).

One way of understanding Hume is this: similar to how we’ve learned that smoke is caused by fire, we’ve also learned through observation that testimony tends to be true. Testimony is evidence only because we have inductive evidence based on other kinds of evidence (observation and memory, especially). In effect, testimonial justification reduces to other forms of justification.

We can formulate (testimonial) reductionism as follows: you are justified in believing some S’s testimony that p, if and only if:

1. You receive S’s testimony that p (you hear, read, or otherwise come to know about it and understand that S’s testimony means that p);
2. You have (broadly) inductive evidence based on observation for the reliability of S’s testimony that p; and,
3. p is not defeated by other evidence you have.

Thus, according to reductionism, we are justified in believing someone’s testimony only if we have testimony-independent evidence (e.g., sensation, introspection, or memories of sensation or introspection) for believing them.

Reductionism looks like a promising way of answering our question about the conditions of justified testimonial belief. It comports well with reflective common sense. If we know someone to be especially honest and knowledgeable about a topic, we have stronger than usual justification to believe their testimony. On the other hand, if we know someone is prone to lying, we are usually not justified in believing their testimony. Reductionism seems to justify a commonsensical level of skepticism about testimony—but not too much skepticism.

B. Objecting to Reductionism

Thomas Reid (1710–1796), Hume’s contemporary and fellow Scot, was critical of reductionism. Let’s consider two “Reidian” objections to reductionism.

Portrait of Thomas Reid by Sir Henry Raeburn via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

The first problem concerns the reliance of reductionism on individual observation. For reductionism, the only evidence anyone can rely on to justify believing testimony is their own observation. But how many of us can really reconstruct a good inductive argument from our own experience alone, relying on nothing that we have been told, for thinking that an individual’s testimony is likely to be true? For Reid, attempting this would be hopeless, claiming that, “most men would be unable to find reasons for believing the thousandth part of what is told them” (Reid [1764] 2000, 194). If Reid is right, reductionism implies that we are rarely justified in believing testimony. It doesn’t follow that reductionism is false, of course. Maybe we should be skeptics about most of what we are told. But most reductionists are not skeptics about testimony. Thus, Reid’s argument is a powerful objection to non-skeptical reductionism. Call this the not enough evidence objection (NEEO).

Another problem inspired by Reid concerns the beliefs of small children. This objection is called the infant/child objection (ICO). This objection proceeds from two observations. First, very young children lack many of the concepts adults have, and have far fewer experiences than adults on which to base their beliefs. Second, it is obvious that young children have justified testimonial beliefs. However, the cognitive innocence of very young children makes it very hard to see how, according to reductionism, they could have testimonially justified beliefs. So, the ICO urges, reductionism is false.

C. Non-Reductionism

Can testimony justify beliefs without being supported by non-testimonial evidence? Non-reductionists think so. Just as perceptual beliefs are justified without any inference, they argue, so are testimonial beliefs.

A way of stating (testimonial) non-reductionism is the following: you are justified in accepting some S’s testimony that p, if and only if:

1. You receive their testimony that p, and
2. p is undefeated.

Testimonial justification is therefore fairly straightforward. Having someone’s testimony that p at least to some degree justifies one in believing p.

An initial objection to non-reductionism is that it justifies gullibility (Fricker 1994). If non-reductionism involves a presumptive right to trust whatever you are told, all it takes to be justified in believing a proposition, after all, is for someone to tell you it is true. Granted, one must not have defeaters, but non-reductionism imposes no requirement that one be vigilant to the trustworthiness of testimony. Without such vigilance, available defeaters will be overlooked. However, a requirement that one monitor for trustworthiness would appear to invalidate the presumptive right to trust. Thus, non-reductionism licenses gullibility. The problem with Fricker’s objection, non-reductionists have replied, is that she seems to assume that monitoring must be to some degree conscious. However, they argue, there is no reason that monitoring could not be unconscious and automatic, from which it follows that one may still have a presumptive right to trust while not being gullible (Henderson and Goldberg 2006).

D. The Dialectic between Reductionism and Non-Reductionism

Non-reductionism suffers from two major theoretical disadvantages when compared to reductionism. Reductionism explains why it is that we are justified in relying on testimony in terms of a familiar sort of justification—(broadly) inductive justification. If reductionism is equally explanatorily powerful as non-reductionism, it looks like it will be a simpler theory, benefiting from Ockham’s razor. Furthermore, there is a phenomenalistic problem with non-reductionism. Other sources of justification share a compelling “presentation-as-true.” When we seem to perceive, introspect, remember, or intuit, it seems to us that it is true, even if we presently reject what seems to be true. Consider an optical illusion like the Müller-Lyer lines (Figure 1).

Figure 1 – The Müller-Lyer Illusion by Fibonacci via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

Sight presents the three lines to us as having different lengths, even if we believe—know, even—that they are the same lengths. Testimony seems to be different. It doesn’t “wear its truth on its sleeve” in the same way as other sources of justification. Even though we believe testimony “automatically” much of the time, it seems to be more like our conclusion that there is a fire when we see smoke. The best reply for the non-reductionist would be to offer an account of testimony as evidence which is both independently plausible and permissive enough to count testimony as a non-reducible form of evidence.

Setting aside fundamental questions about evidence, the most powerful argument for non-reductionism is that reductionism cannot avoid skepticism, via either the NEEO or ICO.

Can the reductionist say anything in reply to these objections? The issue is too complicated to deal with at length here. In my own view, the most promising reply to the NEEO appeals to inference to the best explanation. In brief, it may be that the reductionist can treat our experiences—especially of testimony, communication more generally, and other social interactions—as data, the best available explanation of which is that many individual cases of testimony are true. Such an approach to replying to the NEEO may also help in replying to the ICO if it could be argued that the very simple explanations available to young children justify believing testimony (Rowley 2016). Alternatively, the reductionist could argue that the reliability of testimony is tacitly confirmed while children learn that there are reliable associations between words, contexts of utterance, and truth (Shogenji 2006, 340).

Disagreement

Surprisingly, it is only in the last twenty years or so that philosophers have become especially interested in the epistemological significance of disagreement. Here, I will first say something about disagreement in general, laying out some basic concepts and highlighting an important role that disagreement plays in forming our views about the world. Then, I will point out a thorny philosophical problem that emerges.

The mere fact of disagreement is commonplace. If we interact with others, we encounter disagreement frequently. If you have any political beliefs at all, it will not be hard to find someone who disagrees. On the other hand, many of our disagreements arise and are resolved without much fanfare. Consider anything you’ve had to do in cooperation with someone else: a group project, fixing a car, or playing on a team. Different beliefs about goals, procedures, division of labor, and so forth, emerge and evolve over the course of collaboration. Some of these disagreements cause conflicts, some momentary, some lasting.

These disagreements offer us, as David Christensen puts it, “opportunities for epistemic self-improvement” (Christensen 2007, 187). We know we are fallible and limited in our first-hand evidence about the world. We value eyewitness accounts and expert opinion not only because they can inform us, but because they can correct us when we have a false belief. At least some of the time, the justified response to finding out someone disagrees with us is to adjust our beliefs to agree with the other person.

Of course, it isn’t always the case that we should abandon our belief that p when we find out that someone else believes p is false. If the best explanation of our difference of opinion is not that the other person has evidence I lack, but that they are ignorant, misinformed, biased, or mentally compromised (e.g., concussed, drunk, delirious, etc.), this probably does not justify my ceasing to believe as I do.

The upshot is that sometimes disagreement provides us with evidence about how the world is. It does this by giving us evidence about the beliefs other people have about the world. This changes our own body of evidence and what is justified for us to believe.

The importance of disagreement as a source of evidence is embodied in various practices in which we engage. Experts realize that second opinions can confirm or disconfirm our initial judgments. Academic peer review formalizes this check on our fallibility by risking the possibility that experts will disagree with the conclusions of authors of new work in their discipline. Another practice is creating “space” for disagreement. Where individuals are free and even encouraged to voice their disagreement, the group is less likely to fall into unjustified groupthink or other biases. This is one of the reasons there are usually academic freedom protections for students and faculty within universities. For similar reasons, the freedom to publicly disagree is usually legally protected in liberal democracies.

A. Peer Disagreement

Suppose we both have thermometers. Yours reads 30. Mine reads 70. What should we believe? If we add that we have carefully calibrated yours and found it very reliable, while mine isn’t, then it would seem that we should believe yours. But what if we have tested both and, until now, have found them to be equally reliable? It won’t do, in such a case, to appeal to our ownership of the thermometer—that is obviously irrelevant. If we have no other evidence about the thermometers or temperature (suppose you’re in a spacesuit and can’t feel the air for yourself), then it appears that we should suspend judgment about which thermometer is right.

Now imagine that these thermometers are in our minds—or rather—are our minds. Suppose you believe p and I believe p is false. If we both know you’re more likely to be right—say we know you to be intelligent, have given a sober, fair-minded consideration of all of the evidence, and so on, while I have only given a cursory reading of one source of dubious value—then it seems I should treat your belief about p as something like testimony. I should change my view and adopt yours. But what if we are both epistemic peers about p, and we know it? In other words, suppose we know that we’re equally epistemically situated with respect to p, and therefore equally likely to have the truth. If the analogy with thermometers holds, then it looks like we are justified only in suspending judgment about p once we find out about the disagreement. Put another way, we should conciliate—adopting an attitude closer to our peer’s attitude than our initial attitude (Elga 2007).

Conciliation seems like it explains the value of disagreement outlined above. Peer review is valuable because we find someone who is at least as likely to be right as we are and, if we find out that they disagree, we decrease our confidence and seek new evidence (or at least a reason to think that we aren’t peers after all).

However, there are a couple of things that should give us pause before simply agreeing that we should always conciliate when we find out that a peer disagrees with us.

The conciliatory response to peer disagreement—or conciliationism—seems to have serious skeptical consequences. Controversial beliefs are often central to our view of the world: they include political, religious, scientific, or philosophical beliefs. Yet for most of these beliefs, you either know about people who appear to be your peers or are experts with respect to these beliefs, and who disagree with you. Further, even if you don’t know of specific individuals who qualify, you are likely justified in believing that somewhere in the world, there is such a peer, if not an expert, who disagrees with you.

This suggests grounds for a limited sort of skepticism—but not an insignificant one. Do you believe that a god exists? Do you believe that there isn’t one? Chances are that there is someone you know who is as fair-minded, intelligent, and acquainted with the relevant arguments as you are (if not more so). If you encounter such a peer, it would appear that you have a reason to abandon your own belief (or weaken it). After all, what non-arbitrary reason do you have to prefer your judgment to that of your peer? The upshot is that we may have some powerful reasons for skepticism about a whole range of controversial propositions—reasons to either significantly weaken our confidence or suspend judgment altogether about propositions which may be quite important to us.

B. Resisting Skepticism

Are there ways of resisting this skeptical argument? We might call the (non-skeptical) view that sometimes (or frequently) it is justified to continue holding our original attitude in the face of peer disagreement in scenarios like the above the steadfast view.

Objection 1 (to the skeptical argument): Maybe peers aren’t that common. If you and I are just as likely to be right about p and I know this, then it looks like I am being arbitrary in continuing to believe as I do about p when I find out that you disagree with me. But how often is it that we know (or are strongly justified) that we are just as likely to be right as someone else? Perhaps the skeptical consequences can be avoided because real, known epistemic peers are rare.

This looks initially promising as a means of defending our controversial beliefs. There really aren’t that many ideal cases in which we and someone we disagree with are perfectly balanced in our disagreement about some p. However, a little more consideration shows that this response only goes so far. The more likely it is, on my evidence, that you and I are competent peers, the more evidence I get from finding out about your disagreement with me that your view is the correct one. Think of it this way: even if I justifiably believe my thermometer is more likely to be accurate than yours is, I cannot simply dismiss your thermometer’s reading. It is evidence. If it disagrees with my thermometer, it is some evidence that my thermometer is wrong. The closer your thermometer is in accuracy to mine, the stronger the evidence is that my thermometer is the one that is in error and the closer to suspending judgment I should come.

Objection 2 (to the skeptical argument): It might be thought that the argument for conciliation is self-defeating. Philosophers disagree about the correct response to peer disagreement. It looks like all an opponent of conciliation has to do to “win” the argument is continue to maintain their position. The “conciliationist” should follow their own advice and either come to agree with their opponent or continue to disagree with less confidence than before. If they still disagree after this initial conciliation, they should follow their advice again, and either agree with their opponent or become less confident than they were. Let this continue for a while and they will no longer be justified in believing conciliationism. So, it would appear that conciliationism defeats itself, so long as its opponent holds firm.

The main problem with this objection is that it doesn’t show that conciliationism is false. At best, it shows that it might be true and, yet, not justified for belief. Additionally, if the non-conciliating “peer” cannot give a good account of why they are not also conciliating, this may undermine the evidence that the conciliationist has for conciliating in the first place.

It is telling that even those who disagree with conciliationism in theory agree in practice that knowing about peer disagreement often calls for a kind of epistemic humility. Knowing about peer disagreement should make us less confident in the accuracy of our initial judgment—it should exert some degree of “skeptical pressure” on our beliefs. In my own view, it is vitally important to be aware that we do not form our beliefs—even our most cherished and important ones—in a vacuum, epistemically insulated from other minds. We are ever more interconnected than we have ever been. Awareness of disagreement is a tonic for the ills of the digital echo chambers in which each side of a controversy seems oblivious to the other—because digital filters, not the quality of the evidence, give the appearance of agreement on every side. Anyone who can’t find a disagreeing peer (or someone near enough) for their most cherished political, philosophical, and religious beliefs—would do well to get out of the narrow confines of such epistemically limiting social circles. Engage, and it won’t take long to find them.

Further Reading

Social Epistemology

Goldman, Alvin, and Cailin O’Connor. 2019. “Social Epistemology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/epistemology-social/.

Goldman, Alvin, and Dennis Whitcomb, eds. 2011. Social Epistemology: Essential Readings. New York: Oxford University Press.

Testimony

Adler, Jonathan. 2017. “Epistemological Problems of Testimony.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2017/entries/testimony-episprob/.

Gelfert, Axel. 2014. A Critical Introduction to Testimony. New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Green, Christopher. “Epistemology of Testimony.” In The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-testi/.

Lackey, Jennifer, and Ernest Sosa, eds. 2006. The Epistemology of Testimony. New York: Oxford University Press.

Disagreement

Christensen, David, and Jennifer Lackey, eds. 2016. The Epistemology of Disagreement: New Essays. New York: Oxford University Press.

Feldman, Richard, and Ted A. Warfield, eds. 2010. Disagreement. New York: Oxford University Press.

Matheson, Jonathan, and Brian Frances. 2018. “Disagreement.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/disagreement/.

References

Anscombe, G. E. M. (1979) 2008. “What is it to Believe Someone?” In Faith in a Hard Ground: Essays in Religion, Philosophy and Ethics, edited by Mary Geach and Luke Gormally, 1–10. Charlottesville, SC: Imprint Academic.

Burge, Tyler. 1993. “Content Preservation.” The Philosophical Review 102: 457–88.

Carey, Brandon. 2011. “Possible Disagreements and Defeat.” Philosophical Studies 155 (3): 371–81.

Christensen, David. 2007. “Epistemology of Disagreement: The Good News.” Philosophical Review 116: 187–217.

Coady, C. A. J. 1992. Testimony: A Philosophical Study. New York: Oxford University Press.

Elga, Adam. 2007. “How to Disagree about How to Disagree.” In Disagreement, edited by Ted Warfield and Richard Feldman, 175–86. New York: Oxford University Press.

Fricker, Elizabeth. 1994. “Against Gullibility.” In Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony, edited by Bimal K. Matilal and Arindam Chakrabarti, 125–61. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic.

———. 2017. “Inference to the Best Explanation and the Receipt of Testimony: Testimonial Reductionism Vindicated.” In Best Explanations: New Essays on Inference to the Best Explanation, edited by Kevin McCain and Ted Poston, 250–81. New York: Oxford University Press.

Goldberg, Sanford. 2008. “Testimonial Knowledge in Early Childhood, Revisited.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 76 (1): 1–36.

Goldman, Alvin, and Cailin O’Connor. 2019. “Social Epistemology.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2019/entries/epistemology-social/.

Graham, Peter J. 2006. “Liberal Fundamentalism and Its Rivals.” In The Epistemology of Testimony, edited by Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa, 93–115. New York: Oxford University Press.

Greco, John. 2012. “Recent Work on Testimonial Knowledge.” American Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1): 15–28. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23212646.

Henderson, David, and Sanford Goldberg. 2006. “Monitoring and Anti-Reductionism in the Epistemology of Testimony.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 72 (3): 600–17.

Huemer, Michael. 2011. “Epistemological Egoism and Agent-Centered Norms.” In Evidentialism and its Discontents, edited by Trent Dougherty, 17–33. New York: Oxford University Press.

Hume, David. (1777) 1993. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by Eric Steinberg. 2nd ed. Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett.

Kelly, Thomas. 2005. “The Epistemic Significance of Disagreement.” In Oxford Studies in Epistemology (Vol. 1), edited by Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne, 167–96. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———. 2010. “Peer Disagreement and Higher Order Evidence.” In Disagreement, edited by Richard Feldman and Ted Warfield, 183–217. New York: Oxford University Press.

King, Nathan L. 2012. “A Good Peer is Hard to Find.” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 85 (2): 249–72.

Lackey, Jennifer. 2005. “Testimony and the Infant/Child Objection.” Philosophical Studies 126: 163–90.

———. 2006. “The Nature of Testimony.” Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 87: 177–97.

———. 2010. “What Should We Do When We Disagree?” In Oxford Studies in Epistemology (Vol. 3), edited by Tamar Szabo Gendler and John Hawthorne, 274–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

———, ed. 2014. Essays in Collective Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Lyons, Jack. 1997. “Testimony, Induction and Folk Psychology.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 75 (2): 163–78.

Malmgren, Anna-Sara. 2006. “Is There a Priori Knowledge by Testimony?” The Philosophical Review 115 (2): 199–241.

Matheson, Jonathan, and Brian Frances. 2018. “Disagreement.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2019/entries/disagreement/.

Matilal, Bimal K., and Arindam Chakrabarti, eds. 1994. Knowing from Words: Western and Indian Philosophical Analysis of Understanding and Testimony. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Phillips, Stephen. 2019. “Epistemology in Classical Indian Philosophy.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2019/entries/epistemology-india/.

Plato. (ca. 390 BCE) 2009. Apology. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. The Internet Classics Archive. http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/apology.html.

Proctor, Robert, and Londa L. Schiebinger. 2008. Agnotology: The Making and Unmaking of Ignorance. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

Reid, Thomas. (1764) 2000. An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense: A Critical Edition, edited by Derek R. Brooks. Penn State University Press.

Rowley, William D. 2012. “Evidence of Evidence and Testimonial Reductionism.” Episteme 9: 377–91. https://doi.org/10.1017/epi.2012.25.

———. 2016. “An Evidentialist Epistemology of Testimony.” PhD diss., University of Rochester.

Shogenji, Tomoji. 2006. “A Defense of Reductionism about Testimonial Justification of Beliefs.” Noûs 40 (2): 331–46.

Weiner, Matthew. 2003. “Accepting Testimony.” Philosophical Quarterly 53: 256–64.

White, Roger. 2009. “On Treating Oneself and Others as Thermometers.” Episteme 6 (3): 233–50.

Introduction

This chapter’s title is plural—feminist epistemologies—because there is not one unified feminist epistemology. Indeed, feminist epistemologies value plurality: collaboration among multiple perspectives results in more complete, valid knowledge. One of the most significant contemporary philosophers contributing to feminist epistemologies is Patricia Hill Collins. Collins’s work established a paradigm for the past thirty years of feminist epistemology. In Black Feminist Thought, Collins wrote that epistemology “investigates the standards used to assess knowledge or why we believe what we believe to be true. Far from being the apolitical study of truth, epistemology points to the ways in which power relations shape who is believed and why” ([1990] 2000, 252).

Patricia Hill Collins during a conference in Brazil. Photo by Valter Campanato/Agência Brasil via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 3.0 BR.

Sometimes, this approach has been criticized as an inappropriate “pollution” of epistemology with political considerations, especially when practiced by philosophers who are people of color or women (or both). Responding to some of these critiques, Linda Martín Alcoff located feminist epistemologies in a long history of politically attuned epistemology. She identified several European male philosophers traditionally highlighted in the history of epistemology such as John Locke (1632–1704), Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), and Bertrand Russell (1872–1970), who openly avowed the political merits of their epistemological positions (1999, 73–74). Ultimately, feminist epistemologies do not separate epistemology from ethics or politics: inquiries about knowledge are considered in relation to inquiries into right and wrong, and power and oppression.

Published work in feminist epistemologies increased significantly during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and this chapter will focus on this contemporary period. However, feminist epistemologies are ancient, just like epistemology in general. Sometimes, there is an erroneous perception that feminist philosophy is a relative newcomer within philosophy. So that the contemporary focus of this chapter does not risk reinforcing that error, let us pause to highlight a few pre-modern contributions. Consider, for example, the second-century eastern Mediterranean text known as the Gospel of Mary, which fits into contemporary Hellenistic and Gnostic Christian philosophical traditions (King 2003). The Gospel of Mary engages with themes familiar to philosophers working in feminist epistemologies today, as do medieval and early modern contributors to the field—for example, Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179), Mary Astell (1666–1731), and (most significantly) Juana Inés de la Cruz (ca. 1651–1695). These include the limits of knowledge, the consequences of ignorance, the relationship between emotions and credibility, and, perhaps most pointedly, the refutation of opponents who claimed that these philosophers’ gender identities diminished their authority as knowers.

Portrait of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz by Miguel Cabrera via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

While a wide variety of ideas may be included under the umbrella of “feminist epistemologies,” there are several recurring themes that have been used to guide the structure of this chapter:

• All knowledge is situated knowledge: knowledge does not exist in a vacuum; all knowledge comes from someone and somewhere, and where you come from (your standpoint) shapes how you approach knowledge.
• Lived experiences are knowledge: real-life, first-person experiences contribute to knowledge, validate a knower’s credibility, and shape their standpoint.
• Power shapes knowledge: a knower’s relative position in hierarchies of social power contributes to greater knowledge or deeper ignorance.
• With knowledge comes responsibility: the knowledge one constructs has real consequences for real people, and a knower is personally accountable to one or more communities for how they “do knowledge.”
• Knowledge comes through collaboration: the most complete knowledge is created through “kaleidoscopic” dialogue and collaboration, reflecting multiple different standpoints. This includes dialogue in a literal, interpersonal sense, but incorporates a broader understanding of collaboration, where it is not limited to immediate, real-time social interaction.

Finally, this chapter focuses on feminist epistemologies, and it includes topics in feminist epistemologies that intersect with other significant conversations in epistemology such as queer epistemologies, crip (disability) epistemologies, critical race epistemologies, and postcolonial epistemologies. To adapt Audre Lorde’s maxim (1982), there are no single-issue epistemologies, because we do not live single-issue lives.

Situated Knowledge and Standpoint

Box 1 – Skepticism about Objectivity

Associate Justice Sonia Sotomayor by Steve Petteway from the Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

When Sonia Sotomayor was nominated to serve as one of the nine Justices of the US Supreme Court in 2009, the public dialogue during her confirmation hearings focused on a profoundly epistemological question: can—and should—judges be objective?

In a 2001 lecture at the University of California at Berkeley, Sotomayor had highlighted the value of a “wise Latina woman” whose judgments were informed by the “richness of her experiences.” Sotomayor noted: “Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see” (Sotomayor [2001] 2009). This speech resurfaced during her 2009 confirmation hearings. Critics objected that Supreme Court Justices should be “objective” and “neutral.” Defenders argued that everyone interprets facts and observations through the “lens” of their own experiences, and highlighted Sotomayor’s acknowledgment of this as a demonstration of honesty and responsibility.

This was a political debate about an epistemological question: can humans know something objectively? Is there a “view from nowhere”—could you perceive something in the world from a perfectly neutral vantage point? Or, should claims to “objectivity” be viewed with suspicion?

In the previous chapter, “Social Epistemology,” you encountered the concept of situated knowledge—knowledge “situated” in relation to the knower’s point of view (Haraway 1992, 313). In Paula Moya’s words, “all knowledge is situated knowledge”; nobody can “ascertain universal truths independent of a historically- and culturally-specific situation” (2011, 80). That does not mean there are no universal truths—only that we humans cannot perceive them with a “view from nowhere,” the kind of perspective often described as “objective.”

Donna Haraway and her dog Cayenne by Rusten Hogness via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

Situated knowledge is a foundational concept in feminist epistemologies. There are two related concepts to understand: social location and standpoint. Your social location is defined by how you experience misogyny, White supremacy, imperialism, religious persecution, class struggle, and other dynamics of power and oppression. Your epistemic standpoint is the perspective you have as a knower, informed by your social location. Situated knowledge means that a knower has a standpoint. A knower’s standpoint influences what they perceive, what they ignore, and how they interpret information. Philosophers often use “dominant” or “dominantly situated” to describe knowers who wield more social power and “marginalized” or “oppressed” to describe knowers who are relatively excluded from power.

Epistemological questions are ethical questions: questions about knowledge are inseparable from questions about justice. Sotomayor’s acknowledgment of her point of view is in alignment with feminist epistemologies. As Patricia J. Williams writes, abandoning the myth of objectivity and acknowledging one’s standpoint promotes “legal and social responsibility,” because “much of what is spoken in so-called objective, unmediated voices is in fact mired in hidden subjectivities and unexamined claims” that dehumanize one another (1991, 11). A “view from nowhere” is impossible; moreover, striving for it produces unreliable knowledge polluted with unacknowledged biases. However, acknowledging where you are coming from is epistemically virtuous: your knowledge is situated in a context, and you can be held accountable for it.

Changing Standpoints, Changing Knowledge

Standpoint and lived experience are central in feminist epistemologies, and connecting these two elements has led feminist epistemologies to key in on another vital question: how does your knowledge change when your standpoint changes? As you live through various experiences over the course of your life, your standpoint changes—certainly in small ways, sometimes in big ways. Exploring a few philosophers’ takes on how changes in standpoint relate to changes in knowledge will deepen and sharpen our real-world application of standpoint theories.

A. Gender

One important perspective is offered by Veronica Ivy (formerly known as Rachel McKinnon). Ivy is a professor of philosophy working on feminist epistemologies; she is also a transgender woman. In a recent article, she inquired: what happens, epistemically, when you undertake a gender transition?

After you transition, people treat you according to gender norms that differ from those you were socialized to align with when you were growing up. The social space you occupy is different after transitioning, and Ivy argues that this results in a different epistemic standpoint on familiar situations. You might have access to some new kinds of knowledge; you might also be blocked or hindered in access to other kinds of knowledge you were easily able to access before (2015, 436). Consider the following excerpt from Ivy’s article (Box 4).

Box 4 – Veronica Ivy on “What-It’s-Like” Knowledge & Experience

Veronica Ivy (formerly known as Rachel McKinnon) by Veronica Ivy via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 3.0

Turning to a real-world example, many men are at least somewhat aware that women often feel unsafe walking home alone at night, particularly after dark. They may even have some understanding why women experience this fear. But they tend to lack the “what-it’s-like” experience that women tend to have. And lacking that “what-it’s-like” has epistemic effects. For example, many men aren’t aware that many women choose to wear footwear on walks home at night in which they can more easily run if they need to.

Now consider a trans woman who transitions in her 20s. I’ve spoken to many trans women who transitioned in their 20s or 30s who’ve had the experience where pre-transition they had no real concern about walking home on a particular route at night. But post-transition, they were acutely afraid of that same route, and they changed their behaviors accordingly. What was taken to be known—that women experience fear and concern about walking home alone in the dark—took on a new depth of understanding when the same agent occupied the social identity and position of a woman being confronted with walking home alone in the dark. (Ivy [formerly McKinnon] 2015, 436)

Ivy described her changing perspective on misogyny pre- and post-transition: “Changing my social identity and location to being a woman changed my situatedness and it changed how I struggle against subtle forms of misogyny and sexism. This changed, and began to sharpen, my ability to even perceive such instances as instances of sexism” (2015, 436). There is a clear difference between hearing about an experience “secondhand” and experiencing it yourself. Ivy experiences “what-it’s-like” to be treated as women are treated in social spaces—an experience that she had not had pre-transition—and this leads her to a more acute perception of misogyny, sexism, and violence against women. This speaks to multiple topics in feminist epistemologies including standpoint, lived experience, and a topic we will discuss later in this chapter: power-based ignorance.

B. Disability

While Ivy’s experience might be unfamiliar to some, experiencing a change in ability is nearly universal: as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson wrote, “most of us will move in and out of disability in our lifetimes,” through illness, injury, or simply aging (2016). Feminist disability epistemologies offer another window into changes in standpoint, which further illuminates the concept of standpoint.

Aimi Hamraie described how the built environment reflects a “normate template” of design. How tall is the doorway? How wide is the chair? How bright are the lights? For buildings, clothing, furniture, and many other things, designers envision a specific type of body (and mind) as “normal.” The normate template reinforces a “one-size-fits-all.” In Hamraie’s article, they analyze how it is sustained by the illusion “that normates are normal, average, and majority bodies” (2013). This illusion resonates with Audre Lorde’s concept of the “mythical norm” (1984, 116).

One size does not fit all. If the doorways, chairs, and light levels “fit” you, you might develop a false belief that they fit everybody. However, when they aren’t a good fit for you, you are acutely aware that you are in a space built to fit someone—and that someone is not you. As Hamraie puts it, “misfitting shatters the illusion” of the normate template, and signifies its failure to reflect many humans’ living realities (2013).

Fitting is impermanent: as Garland-Thomson notes, “Any of us can fit here today and misfit there tomorrow” (2011). As their body changes, a person who is accustomed to “fitting” might newly experience “misfitting.” This change over time might, likewise, shatter the illusion of “normal” and expand their personal epistemic resources.

This section focuses on one specific epistemic aspect of disability; regrettably, a full consideration of epistemologies of disability and crip epistemologies is outside the scope of this chapter. Readers eager to learn more are encouraged to consult the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on “Critical Disability Theory” (Hall 2019) for an overview, as well as recent interviews in Shelley Tremain’s Dialogues on Disability series featuring Laura Cupples (2020) and Nathan Moore (2020).

Epistemic Advantage

While your standpoint changes as your experiences change, at any given moment you have a distinctive standpoint. Following Williams, honestly “owning” your standpoint makes you more reliable as a knower than one who claims a false objectivity. However, are all standpoints equally valuable? Returning to our analogy about a stadium: could you have a “better view” of the action from one standpoint than another?

Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa in 1990 at Smith College. Photo by K. Kendall via Flickr. License: CC BY 2.0

One key insight of feminist epistemologies is the idea that oppressed or marginalized groups might hold an “epistemic advantage.” Within feminist epistemologies, perspectives on the nature of this idea vary.

One point of view envisions this as a dual knowledge, in a way that is in dialogue with the “mestiza consciousness” discussed by Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004) and the Black “double consciousness” discussed by W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963). When a society is structured to favor a dominant group—placing their knowledge, practices, and norms at the center—people outside that dominant group typically need to acquire fluency in the dominant group’s knowledge, practices, and norms in order to function within that society. The comparatively marginalized person needs to learn the knowledge of the dominantly situated group in addition to their own—but not the other way around.

William Edward Burghardt Du Bois in 1918. Photo by Cornelius Marion Battey via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Language-learning in a (post)colonial context is often used to illustrate this disparity. The British Empire colonized many places around the world with rich linguistic and literary heritages—many of which are now places where English is an important language of formal education and commerce. Consequently, many of the world’s fluent speakers of English are native speakers of languages such as Bengali, Irish, or Shona. On the other hand, among the world’s fluent speakers of English, many of those who speak English as their first language are monolingual, and remain so. Moreover: when monolingual native speakers of English do learn a second language to advance in the business or educational world, how likely is it to be Bengali, Irish, or Shona?

Another core argument is that the epistemic advantage of the feminist standpoint comes from the experience of living as a woman in a misogynist society and the development of a “critical consciousness about the nature of our social location” (Wylie 2003, 31). Paulette Nardal (1896–1985) was a foundational figure in establishing this idea ([1932] 2002). Nardal formulated this as part of commenting on the epistemic acuity of Antillean women students in early twentieth-century Paris. As Nardal wrote, “The women of color living alone in the metropolis,” who were “less favored than their male compatriots,” arrived more rapidly at what Nardal described as “the awakening of race consciousness” ([1932] 2002, 122). Subsequently, rooted in Marxian theories about other standpoints, Nancy Hartsock (1983) defined the “feminist standpoint” as an epistemic achievement that comes about through struggle and analysis, establishing the vocabulary of “standpoint” to characterize this idea in feminist epistemologies.

Paulette Nardal via Wikimedia Commons. This work is in the public domain.

Another important idea—also dating back to Nardal—locates the significance of epistemic advantage in the two-part activity of (a) critiquing the limits or errors in knowledge provided by dominant, mainstream structures and (b) constructing knowledge resources that mitigate those flaws. For example, suppose your child’s public school curriculum narrates the national history in a way that neglects the history of your ancestors within that nation. To fill in the gaps in the school curriculum, you seek out other resources such as books, documentaries, and online activities. Sometimes, there’s not a child-friendly resource, so you make your own. In effect, first, the knower critically recognizes that the “default” content and frameworks for knowledge were constructed to reflect someone else’s experience—not their own. Then, perceiving the inadequacies of the existing epistemic resources, a marginalized knower contributes to constructing alternative epistemic resources that are “experience-rich” and more comprehensive than mainstream epistemic resources. Often, this takes place in a community of marginalized knowers.

Epistemic advantage is a powerful idea that should be applied with care. In a foundational article in feminist epistemologies, Uma Narayan identified some of the perils of how “Western” (often, White) feminist philosophers applied the idea of epistemic advantage too crudely or naively to women in “non-Western” contexts (1989). Notably, Narayan highlighted the fact that simply having access to different sets of knowledge and ways of knowing is no guarantee of deep critical insights—what matters is what you do with that knowledge. Equally importantly, Narayan cautioned readers to recall that a position of epistemic advantage is not necessarily comfortable, safe, or satisfying to dwell in. Narayan advised “Western” feminist philosophers to check the assumption that non-Western feminists would “express unqualified enthusiasm about the benefits of straddling a multiplicity of contexts” (221). Narayan highlighted the discomfort of perpetual outsiderness, rootlessness, or lacking a space to feel fully relaxed and “at home.” As Narayan wrote, “The decision to inhabit two contexts critically, although it may lead to an ‘epistemic advantage,’ is likely to exact a certain price” (222). As the bicultural philosopher Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz explored in the seventeenth century, such knowledge can take a toll on one’s well-being: “For all I add to discourse/I usurp as much from my years” (2014, 13–14).

Power-Based Ignorance

Just as experiencing oppression can shape a person’s knowledge, being in a position of social power can produce ignorance. José Medina (2013) refers to this as being epistemically “spoiled.” Like coddled children, people in a “dominantly situated” position of social power and privilege can be “spoiled” epistemically because they rarely have to acclimate to unfamiliar epistemologies. When the world is built to suit their experiences and ways of knowing, why would they bother to learn any others?

In practice, a knower is rarely 100% dominantly situated, but most knowers are dominantly situated in at least one context. It can be fruitful, therefore, to discuss different forms of ignorance that track different forms of social power. Epistemologies of ignorance address various forms of what we might call power-based ignorance—including White ignorance, male ignorance, straight ignorance, rich ignorance, and abled ignorance. Power-based ignorance reflects an intellectual laziness stemming from the “privilege of not knowing or not needing to know” (Medina 2013, 32). Feminist epistemologies of ignorance have explored how being ignorant of certain topics is normalized in dominant, patriarchal culture. These topics include sexual harassment, menstruation, clitoral orgasm, gaslighting by supposed allies, and forced sterilization (Tuana 2004, 2006; Tuana and Sullivan 2006; Fricker 2007; McWhorter 2009; and Ivy [McKinnon] 2017). Like most topics in epistemology, this can be explored at many levels. Consider, for example, how personal and family life are impacted when it is normalized for men to be ignorant of the basics of menstrual care. Or, consider how many matters of political significance are relegated as “women’s issues.”

Feminist epistemologies of ignorance also critically consider ignorance among feminists. In a foundational article, Mariana Ortega discussed “loving, knowing ignorance” as an attribute of White women responding to women of color (2006). White feminist women demonstrated an “ignorance of the thought and experience of women of color that is accompanied by both alleged love for and alleged knowledge about them” (57). Ignorance is far from innocent: as Ortega indicated, White feminist knowledge production may reject responsibility and adopt an “arrogant perception” that harms women of color.

Building on this idea, Medina explored the stakes of ignorance for epistemology and for ethics. Medina discussed the responsibility of a knower to remedy their ignorance: “The collective ignorance may not be of one’s choosing,” it may be inherited or normalized in one’s upbringing, but that is no excuse. A knower must make an effort to combat their ignorance. Otherwise, “one’s inattention to the ignorance one partakes in becomes complicity and active participation” (2013, 140). Combating one’s power-based ignorance is both a moral and an epistemic responsibility.

Constructing Ignorance: Choices, Gatekeepers, and Accountability

Medina’s discussion invites a broader consideration of responsibility. While many factors contribute to patterns of ignorance, they do not “just happen.” People make choices. In Heidi Grasswick’s words, “ignorance is not the result of a benign gap in our knowledge, but deliberate choices to pursue certain kinds of knowledge while ignoring others,” and we must be held accountable for these choices (2011, xvii). Formal education reflects many such choices: when a college has a curriculum that is made up of “core courses” required for all students, and “electives” that are optional, somebody in charge made a decision about which courses would be “core” and which would be “elective.” Consider the contemporary proverb by scholar and educator Ozy Aloziem: “White privilege is your history being taught as part of the core curriculum, while mine is being offered as an elective.”

Who makes those “deliberate choices”? Sometimes, they are described as gatekeepers of knowledge. In academic life, professors, librarians, and publishers are among these gatekeepers: they determine what counts as a “reliable source,” what is a “significant question” in a field, what is a “core” requirement—in short, they define “mainstream,” dominantly situated knowledge. An individual student might also have choices—for example, they might choose one among several courses that can fulfill a particular degree requirement—but the lion’s share of the responsibility in this case rests in the hands of the people who defined those degree requirements.

Valuable epistemic resources developed by marginalized people are often met with resistance from dominantly situated knowers, people who are in positions of relatively high social power—especially in academia. Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999) is a foundational work highlighting vital epistemic resources that most academics had ignored. More recently, consider the scholarly conversation around the politics of citation and structural inclusion/exclusion: Sara Ahmed (2013), Jenn M. Jackson (2018), and Kecia Ali (2019) are three important contributors.

Professor Linda Tuhiwai Smith after her investiture as a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit by the Governor-General, Sir Jerry Mateparae, on May 8, 2013. Photo by the New Zealand Government, Office of the Governor-General, via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY 4.0

As Gaile Pohlhaus discussed, dominantly situated knowers are not incapable of understanding frameworks developed by knowers who are relatively marginalized. However, they are not socially penalized for their lack of familiarity with relatively marginalized epistemic resources, and they have little social incentive to build their capacities. Indeed, the dominantly situated knower may find that marginalized knowledge might reveal the unearned advantages that keep them in their positions of power (Pohlhaus 2012, 721). Willful ignorance, on the other hand, may protect their power.

Meta-Ignorance

Ignorance has an inherent feedback loop: one may be ignorant of one’s ignorance. Medina called this meta-ignorance. As Kristie Dotson observed, “Convincing people that they are missing something integral when, in fact, they cannot detect such deficiencies is no easy task” (2014, 14). Encountering concepts like “date rape,” “White privilege,” and “cis-heteronormativity,” a knower ignorant of the experiences from which these concepts are constructed might perceive this as “making something out of nothing.”

Philosophy is just as susceptible to this as any other field—indeed, perhaps more so. For instance, Pohlhaus identified that mainstream epistemology had initially dismissed the idea of the “situated knower” (2012, 722). Dotson and many others have critiqued the normalized meta-ignorance and irresponsible gatekeeping by colleagues in academic philosophy (Dotson 2013, Dabashi 2013, Park 2014). Feminist epistemology is not exempt from this; notably, as discussed by Ortega and others, White women in feminist epistemology too often ignore the work of colleagues who are women of color. When we hold powerful knowers accountable for ignorance, we must also hold the mirror up to ourselves.

Epistemic Injustice

Miranda Fricker (2007) defined a vocabulary of epistemic injustice that has been widely adopted to describe how power interferes with knowledge. The development of these concepts was principally undertaken by many earlier philosophers (including Patricia Hill Collins and Mariana Ortega, discussed above). That said, Fricker’s vocabulary has played an important role in defining this conversation in epistemology as a whole. Fricker distinguished two types of epistemic injustice:

• Testimonial injustice: related to credibility and validation
• Hermeneutical injustice: related to resources for constructing understanding

Miranda Fricker by Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics. License: CC BY 2.0

A. Credibility

Dominantly situated knowers not only have the power to ignore; they also have the power to discredit. Indeed, ignoring and discrediting often go hand in hand. As noted above, dominantly situated knowers might claim that marginally situated knowers are “making something out of nothing” and discredit their knowledge as exaggerated, irrelevant, or unreliable.

In epistemology, “testimony” does not only refer to testimony in a court of law: if you know something because you read it in a book, or heard it from another person, or looked it up online, you are relying on testimony. But how do you decide whose testimony you should believe? How do you evaluate whether a source is credible?

As Lorraine Code (1995) observed, judgments about credibility are applied “unevenly” across social locations. A recipient of knowledge might “discount” or “deflate” the credibility they assign to a knower (or source of knowledge) based on unfair social biases on the recipient’s part. Credibility discounting might reflect many different angles of bias, including gender, race, education, age, physique, and language. Consider, for example, Tina Sacks’s analysis of how healthcare providers fail to take Black women seriously as “credible witness[es] to [their] own conditions” (2019, 49). Credibility may also be “inflated” according to inequitable distributions of social power, rendering to some people more credibility than they have fairly earned. Notably, Audrey Yap (2017) analyzed credibility excess in cases of sexual assault. In both of these forms of testimonial injustice, a person’s knowledge is not evaluated on its own merits, but is discounted or inflated according to social hierarchies.

Credibility inflation/deflation is enacted in many ways. To take one example, emotional expression is often used to discredit people; indeed, the very word “hysterical” was developed to discredit some women as knowers. Moreover, if a recipient of knowledge discredits a knower as “too emotional,” that itself might provoke strong emotion—rage, disappointment, sorrow, etc.—in the knower. The recipient can use that emotion as further ammunition to discredit the knower, in a vicious loop that Veronica Ivy (2017) called the “epistemic injustice circle of hell” (169).

Gaslighting is probably the most widely recognized issue of testimonial injustice. Pausing to consider gaslighting may further illuminate these questions of credibility and testimonial injustice.

“You’re overreacting.”

“It’s all in your head.”

“There you go again.”

“Don’t make a big deal out of nothing.”

These are phrases often associated with gaslighting—undermining someone’s confidence in their own credibility, in particular, undermining their trust in their own perceptions of reality. Gaslighting may take place as part of interpersonal harm in private or structural violence at a societal level. In either case, gaslighting often re-enacts systemic injustices, such as White supremacy, misogyny, and cis-hetero-normativity.

In popular everyday use, “gaslighting” might be used to describe many forms of doubting or discrediting. However, when we are doing philosophy, more precise definitions of terms are needed.

First, gaslighting is different from simply questioning, refuting, or correcting a perception: if I am gaslighting a person (or a group of people) I am attempting to make them doubt their perceptions in general or their capacity for accurate perception. This breadth is important: casting doubt on someone’s credibility and capacity for accurate perception in general is quite different from calling into question a specific perception of theirs that may be erroneous, or sharing your own dissenting perception of something specific.

In addition, gaslighting is different from contradicting, dismissing, or discrediting someone. If I am gaslighting you, I am not necessarily conveying “I don’t believe you,” nor am I necessarily advising some third party that they shouldn’t believe you. Although gaslighting often is combined with both of those forms of credibility deflation, the defining element in gaslighting is that it undermines your confidence in yourself as a knower: not “I don’t believe you,” but “you shouldn’t believe yourself.” In Kate Abramson’s analysis, “dismissal simply fails to take another seriously as an interlocutor, whereas gaslighting is aimed at getting another not to take herself seriously as an interlocutor” (2014, 2).

Gaslighting, finally, is targeted: it is not about casting doubt on the reliability of human knowledge in general, but about a particular individual, group, or category. If I am gaslighting you, I am attempting to persuade you that your perceptions are particularly untrustworthy, more so than people in general. Often, but not always, this might include persuading you that you should trust my perceptions of your experience more than your own.

B. Collective Hermeneutical Resources

Hermeneutics is the process of understanding and being understood; it’s how we turn the “raw data” of information into knowledge that has meaning. Hermeneutical injustice, for Fricker, takes place when a gap in the resources for understanding allows for an abuse of power.

Bosses sexually harassed employees long before the term “sexual harassment” was developed, but according to Fricker, victimized employees lacked the knowledge to name their experiences and accuse their bosses. Fricker defines this as a gap in the “collective hermeneutical resources,” and argues that this was part of the injustice done to employees victimized by sexual harassment.

Let’s pause to consider that idea. Philosophers build knowledge through collegial critique, and colleagues spotted some weaknesses in Fricker’s argument. Can you spot any?

Maybe you’re wondering: a gap for whom? Who lacks those resources? After all, a hermeneutical gap for one is not necessarily a hermeneutical gap for all. Who is to say that there would be just one one-size-fits-all set of collective hermeneutical resources?

Kristie Dotson was one of the most significant contributors to this conversation. For Dotson, Fricker’s characterization of the collective hermeneutical resources “fails to take into account alternative epistemologies . . . that exist in hermeneutically marginalized communities among themselves” (2012, 31). While some knowers might have a gap in their knowledge, that isn’t a gap in knowledge. Returning to the idea of power-based ignorance, dominantly situated knowers may be unaware of knowledge developed by marginalized people. That is not a lack in the collective knowledge or collective hermeneutical resources of humanity—just a lack of knowledge or hermeneutical resources among some people in power.

Dotson highlighted the epistemic significance of hermeneutical resources developed by marginalized people. While dominant hermeneutical resources might be inadequate in making sense of certain experiences of injustice, hermeneutical resources “homegrown” in marginalized communities prove more useful. Marginalized people create, value, and use these resources and knowledge, whether or not dominantly situated people recognize them (2012, 2014).

Kaleidoscopic Epistemologies: Together, We Know Best

If power can lead to ignorance, and oppression can lead to epistemic advantage, does that mean that the most oppressed knowers always know best? No: it’s not that simple. The relationship between knowledge and power is a vital epistemological question that philosophers continue to grapple with. However, while there are many perspectives on how power and knowledge relate to one another, none of them advance a simplistic equation where the value of someone’s knowledge would increase as their power decreased.

Feminist epistemologies value collaborative construction of knowledge, integrating multiple perspectives for a comprehensive whole. Collins had defined this paradigm as follows: multiple groups of knowers with distinctive standpoints share their knowledge with each other, with each group using its unique epistemological approaches and avowing its distinctive standpoint. Each group shares its own “partial, situated knowledge.” Openly acknowledging their standpoint does not diminish a knower or their knowledge: indeed, situating your knowledge is a criterion for credibility. Since each “perceives its own truth as partial” they recognize their interdependence with other knowers. “Each group becomes better able to consider other groups’ standpoints without relinquishing the uniqueness of its own standpoint or suppressing other groups’ partial perspectives” (Collins [1990] 2000, 270). Each holds a piece of a larger puzzle: their piece is valuable, as is their neighbor’s, and they know best when they put their pieces together.

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui by LizChezca via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 3.0

More recent work in epistemology has enriched these points. Indeed, Dotson’s abovementioned critique of Fricker reflected Dotson’s theorizing about a plurality of collective hermeneutical resources, which itself built on Collins. José Medina (2011, 2013) advocated a “kaleidoscopic” approach characterized by “guerrilla pluralism” and a constructive “epistemic friction.” Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui described constructing knowledge according to the Aymara concept of “ch’ixi,” interwoven-ness of multiple threads, the “parallel coexistence of multiple cultural differences” (2012, 105). While there are important differences in the details of the philosophical frameworks provided by Collins, Dotson, Medina, and Rivera Cusicanqui, a common thread is generating knowledge by placing multiple standpoints and knowledge resources in dialogue together as an integrated whole. Whether it’s a kaleidoscope, a tapestry, or any of the many other metaphors used to describe it, a commitment to plurality and dialogue is a cornerstone of feminist epistemologies.

Interconnections

Uma Narayan reflected that feminist epistemology “resembles the efforts of many oppressed groups to reclaim for themselves the value of their own experience” (2004, 214). In fact, feminist epistemologies necessarily are interconnected with critical race epistemologies, postcolonial epistemologies, disability epistemologies, queer epistemologies, and more. As discussed above, we do not live single-issue lives, and we do not have single-issue epistemologies.

Kimberlé Crenshaw by Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung via Wikimedia Commons. License: CC BY-SA 4.0

Often, this interconnectedness in feminism (and feminist epistemologies) is described as “intersectionality,” broadening a conceptual framework and vocabulary created by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1988, 1991). Consider, for example, the works of Jasmin Zine (2004) and Farhana Rahman (2018), which illustrate an intersection of at least three elements: religion-specific epistemology, anti-racist epistemology, and feminist epistemology. Rahman illuminates Muslim women scholars’ resilience in response to two forms of epistemic marginalization: (1) often-patriarchal Islamic scholarly epistemologies; and (2) often-Islamophobic, White, secularist academic feminist epistemologies.

José Medina’s work on epistemologies of resistance (2013) is significant in part because it powerfully integrates several conversations within epistemology with a strong emphasis on the possibilities that epistemic interconnectedness offers for equity and justice in a broader social sense. Along with dismantling historically empowered epistemic systems, epistemologies of resistance construct more responsible ways of knowing rooted in historically marginalized knowledge, toward social and personal transformation. One important voice in this is the queer feminist Indigenous epistemology of the Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg philosopher Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. Simpson contrasts her Nishnaabeg forms of intelligence, processes of education, and ways of constructing knowledge with dominant “Western” epistemologies characteristic of settler colonialism. For Simpson, lifting up Nishnaabeg epistemology is part of a larger process of resurgence among Indigenous people. Now, as ever, epistemology is not isolated from living, human realities—including “political” realities.

Box 7 – Leanne Betasamosake Simpson: Theory with Living Resonance

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson by Bull-Doser via Wikimedia Commons. This image is in the public domain.

To me, this is what coming into wisdom within a Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg epistemology looks like—it takes place in the context of family, community and relations. It lacks overt coercion and authority, values so normalized within mainstream western pedagogy that they are rarely ever critiqued. The land, aki, is both context and process. The process of coming to know is learner-led and profoundly spiritual in nature. . . .

“Theory” is generated and regenerated continually through embodied practice and within each family, community and generation of people. “Theory” isn’t just an intellectual pursuit—it is woven within kinetics, spiritual presence and emotion, it is contextual and relational. It is intimate and personal, with individuals themselves holding the responsibilities for finding and generating meaning within their own lives. Most importantly, “theory” isn’t just for academics; it’s for everyone . . . Theory within this context is generated from the ground up and its power stems from its living resonance within individuals and collectives. (2014, 7)

One might wonder: with all this interconnectedness, is this still a chapter about feminist epistemologies? Yes. As Mariana Ortega memorably put it, despite talk of growth and inclusion and justice, “the writing that comes from the white female hand” is still treated as more important within feminist philosophy, even while feminism “push[es] philosophy and others to see further, to understand more” (Ortega 2014, 186). This chapter attempts to avoid disproportionately featuring the work of White, cis, straight, nondisabled women philosophers in its discussion of feminist epistemologies.

The field of epistemology includes many epistemologies that may be grouped as “alternative” or “marginal.” Feminist epistemologies are among these, as well as critical race epistemologies, queer epistemologies, trans epistemologies, crip (disability) epistemologies, Indigenous epistemologies, religion-specific epistemologies—the list goes on. Feminist epistemologies have often been the so-called “alternative” epistemologies that scholars of “mainstream” epistemology most readily include in discussions of epistemology as a whole, and this textbook is no exception; exploring the reasons behind that is beyond the capacity of this chapter. It is, however, important to acknowledge that this chapter’s relatively interconnected discussion of feminist epistemology is no substitute for engaging fully with any of the abovementioned epistemologies. Each of the abovementioned epistemologies could fill a dedicated chapter of its own in an epistemology textbook. Readers are encouraged to explore these further through the resources listed in the bibliography and “Further Reading” section.

Further Reading

Articles, Blog Posts, and Books

Ahmed, Sara. 2013. “Making Feminist Points.” Feministkilljoys (blog). September 11, 2013. https://feministkilljoys.com/2013/09/11/making-feminist-points/ .

Alcoff, Linda Martín. 2019. “A Survivor Speaks.” Aeon. https://aeon.co/essays/consistency-shouldnt-be-the-test-of-truth-in-sexual-assault-cases .

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. 2016. “The Urgency of Intersectionality.” TED video, 18:40. October 2016. https://www.ted.com/talks/kimberle_crenshaw_the_urgency_of_intersectionality?language=en .

Cupples, Laura. 2020. “Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Laura Cupples.” Biopolitical Philosophy (blog). By Shelley Tremain. December 16, 2020. https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2020/12/16/dialogues-on-disability-shelley-tremain-interviews-laura-cupples/ .

Jackson, Jenn M. 2018. “Why Citing Black Women Is Necessary.” Cite Black Women Collective (blog). December 21, 2018. https://www.citeblackwomencollective.org/our-blog/why-citing-black-women-is-necessary-jenn-m-jackson .

Lavin, Andrew. 2020. “Michael Scott and Standpoint Epistemology.” APA (blog). January 29, 2020. https://blog.apaonline.org/2020/01/29/michael-scott-and-standpoint-epistemology/ .

Moore, Nathan. 2020. “Dialogues on Disability: Shelley Tremain Interviews Nathan Moore.” Biopolitical Philosophy (blog). By Shelley Tremain. October 21, 2020. https://biopoliticalphilosophy.com/2020/10/21/dialogues-on-disability-shelley-tremain-interviews-nathan-moore/ .

Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Sabelo. 2017. “Decolonising Research Methodology Must Include Undoing Its Dirty History.” https://theconversation.com/decolonising-research-methodology-must-include-undoing-its-dirty-history-83912 .

Ortega, Mariana. 2017. “Aesthetic Injustice, Practices of Othering, and Ignorance.” Philosopher (blog). May 26, 2017. https://politicalphilosopher.net/2017/05/26/featured-philosopher-mariana-ortega/ .

Park, Eugene Sun. n.d. “Why I Left Academia: Philosophy’s Homogeneity Needs Rethinking.” https://hipporeads.com/why-i-left-academia-philosophys-homogeneity-needs-rethinking/ .

Pitts, Andrea. 2016. “Featured Philosop-her: Andrea Pitts.” Philosopher (blog). February 19, 2016. https://politicalphilosopher.net/2016/02/19/featured-philosop-her-andrea-pitts/ .

Sheth, Falguni A. 2019. “Neocolonialism’s Anxieties? Schooling Women of Color.” APA (blog). July 31, 2019. https://blog.apaonline.org/2019/07/31/women-in-philosophy-neocolonialisms-anxieties-schooling-women-of-color/ .

Shew, Melissa M., and Kimberly K. Garchar. 2020. Philosophy for Girls. New York: Oxford University Press.

Yap, Audrey S. 2017. “Credibility Excess and the Social Imaginary in Cases of Sexual Assault.” Feminist Philosophy Quarterly 3 (4): 1–23. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/7666/6e69f413a10de9e756d7db15866471bda765.pdf .

Podcasts

Dotson, Kristie. 2015. “Episode 009: Kristie Dotson on Ignorance.” By Myisha Cherry. The UnMute Podcast. Podcast, 47:16. October 21, 2015. https://unmutetalk.podbean.com/e/episode-009-kristie-dotson-on-ignorance/ .

Ivy, Veronica (formerly Rachel McKinnon). 2015. “Episode 006: Rachel McKinnon on Allies and Active Bystanders.” By Myisha Cherry. The UnMute Podcast. Podcast, 29:35. July 14, 2015. https://unmutetalk.podbean.com/e/episode-006-rachel-mckinnon-on-allies-active-bystanders/ .

Khader, Serene. 2017. “Episode 031: Serene Khader on Cross-Border Feminist Solidarity.” By Myisha Cherry. The UnMute Podcast. Podcast, 56:22. December 21, 2017. https://unmutetalk.podbean.com/e/episode-031-serene-khader-on-cross-border-feminist-solidarity/ .

Krishnamurthy, Meena, and Veronica Ivy (formerly Rachel McKinnon). 2016. “Episode 020: Post-Election Panel on Trump and the Age of Ignorance.” By Myisha Cherry. The UnMute Podcast. Podcast, 29:23. November 16, 2016. https://unmutetalk.podbean.com/e/episode-020-post-election-panel-on-trump-and-the-age-of-ignorance/ .

Thompson, Winston. 2017. “Winston Thompson on Educational Justice.” By Myisha Cherry. The UnMute Podcast. Podcast, 30:22. December 8, 2017. https://unmutetalk.podbean.com/e/episode-030-winston-thompson-on-educational-justice/ .

References

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