Abstract
Stephen Hetherington has defended the tripartite analysis of knowledge (Hetherington in Philos Q 48:453–469, 1998; J Philos 96:565–587, 1999; J Philos Res 26:307–324, 2001a; Good knowledge, bad knowledge, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2001b). His defence has recently come under attack (Madison in Australas J Philos 89(1):47–58, 2011; Turri in Synthese 183(3):247–259, 2012). I critically evaluate those attacks as well as Hetherington’s newest formulation of his defence (Hetherington in Philosophia 40(3):539–547, 2012b; How to know: A practicalist conception of knowledge, Wiley, Oxford, 2011a; Ratio 24:176–191, 2011b; Synthese 188:217–230, 2012a). I argue that his newest formulation is vulnerable to a modified version of Madison’s and Turri’s objection. However, I argue that Hetherington’s considerations lend support to a different, though also radical, thesis which can meet the objection. This thesis is what I call the Divorce thesis: the theory of epistemic justification is importantly independent of the theory of knowledge.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
I do not claim to be the first to have defended some version of the Divorce thesis; the paper’s originality is to be found in the claim that Hetherington’s argument for the tripartite analysis supports it, so that we have new reason to believe it, as well as the subsequent objections to Hetherington’s argument. Thanks to an anonymous referee for urging me to make that brutally clear.
Here I am mostly referring to the case Hetherington articulates in Hetherington (1998).
Madison attributes the distinction to Pritchard (2005). Pritchard also mentions doxastic luck—luck that S believes that p.
She probably also enjoys doxastic luck.
Hetherington is not explicit about whether his newest formulation is made in response to Turri and Madison. It is possible, then, that he thinks that his new account is compatible with his old one (indeed that it complements it) and that he does not thereby eschew it. I will not discuss here whether he is entitled to do so, since nothing very important hangs on it, I do not think. I am also not going to discuss the alternative, intermediate case Hetherington makes (Hetherington 2001a, b) in between his 1998 paper and his most recent material. In this work (also Hetherington 2007, 2010) Hetherington appears to endorse something like my DIVORCE. The arguments in his newest papers in favour of the idea that knowledge is justified, true belief are not meant to be arguments in favour of DIVORCE. This is probably no surprise, since, as I will show, those arguments carry no weight if DIVORCE is true. So I take the arguments in this paper to be novel in the sense that they provide some new considerations in favour of DIVORCE and at the same time provide an objection to Hetherington’s case for the claim that knowledge is justified, true belief (thanks to an anonymous referee for Erkenntnis for comments on this matter).
As Hetherington puts it: “My point is that, purely qua Gettiered belief (and regardless of its specific content), it is impossible for the belief in question not to be true…Although the belief simpliciter could have this susceptibility, the belief qua Gettiered belief cannot” (Hetherington 2012a, pp. 219–220). So the argument does not suffer from a simple confusion on the scope of ‘necessarily’ (as an anonymous referee seemed to think).
Proponents of DIVORCE include Foley (2004) and Booth (2011). I don’t know of anyone who explicitly defends the claim that justification is sufficient for knowledge; I add the sufficiency clause just to bring out the logical independence claim. Sutton (2005, 2007) argues however that knowledge is sufficient for justification; see also Williamson (2000).
In his most recent work, he formulates fallibilism in terms of Knowledge is Fallible* cf. Hetherington (2012a), p. 228.
With thanks to two referees at Erkenntnis for (independently) raising this point.
“Closeness” is here to be understood in terms of similarity to the actual world, and no world can be more similar to the actual world than the actual world.
“…safety is capturing an intuition about our tolerance of the risk of error. In the very closest nearby possible worlds we are extremely intolerant when it comes to such epistemic risk, and so would not want to be forming any false beliefs on the target basis” (Pritchard 2013, p. 6). Sosa’s formulation of Safety is: “If S were to believe P, P would be true” (Sosa 1999). Again, this seems to make Safety an infallibilist condition as I’ve defined the notion. As is well documented, Williamson’s (2000) construal of Safety also has this feature.
As I’ve mentioned, I think Safety IV is infallibilist, in so far as it does not allow for false, safe belief. In an interesting paper, Ian Church (2013) argues that Safety must be construed more strongly (and so in a more obviously infallibilist manner) if it is to account for some new kinds of Gettier cases he discusses. That is, Safety must be construed such that a belief is safe iff it is true in all possible worlds.
This is all compatible with Howard-Snyder and Feit’s case against the idea that Gettier cases support infallibilism. “One might argue for infallibilism in the following way: the property of being warranted is identical with a certain property described and defended by a substantive theory of warrant; a belief cannot have this property unless it is true; so a belief cannot be at once warranted and false—warrant entails truth” (Howard-Snyder and Feit 2003, p. 304). Their target is not this kind of argument, but rather any “nonpartisan” argument for infallibilism. Here the argument depends on the idea that safe belief is at least necessary for knowledge, so is not within their target-range.
As Hetherington argues. You might not be persuaded by Hetherington’s argument. If so, please just read the rest of this paper as an objection with the form: even if we assume that Hetherington’s argument is sound, it does not prove what he sets out to prove, that the tripartite analysis of knowledge is true. My aims in this paper are not to defend Hetherington’s argument here. Further, many others have inferred infallibilism from Gettier cases—for an overview cf. Moon (2012)—the case for (1) could find support there instead, modulo the absence of the second disjunct.
When I say that “knowledge is infallible” I mean that knowledge is such that it takes care of the Safety Intuition, not merely that it is impossible to have a false, known belief that p. Factivity differs to infallibility. Infallibility is about the lack of liability to error, and since S can err in having a true belief that p (S inferred that p from faulty reasoning, for instance) factivity does not entail infallibility—if knowledge was mere true belief it would be factive but not infallible. One might subsequently worry whether Knowledge is Fallible* is properly about fallibility and not merely about factivity (infallibility is logically stronger than factivity). It might have been better to call the thesis justification is not factive. I will let this go though, since the problem seems merely terminological and nothing substantive hangs on whether we can permissively call the thesis denoted by Knowledge is Fallible* a kind of fallibilism.
One could, however, appeal to Contextualism or other “shifty” views here (such as Subject Sensitive Invariantism) and claim that knowledge is infallible justified, true belief in the context where we consider Gettier cases but not in others. Another “shifty” proposal could be that knowledge is safe belief in this context and justified, true belief in other contexts. This latter proposal would be compatible with the idea that there is no such thing as infallible justification, where the former is not. This means that the Contextualist or SSI-ist must accept DIVORCE, at least in this context, if their proposal is to remain compatible with all the data that is playing a role in this argument (though of course the Contextualist or SSI-ist might not accept as unqualified the thought that there is no such thing as infallible justification—I have nothing to say here to rule this position out).
Note that if Hetherington is right and knowledge is compatible with luck, then justification could not be part of an analysis of knowledge just in order to rule out luck.
Cf. Booth (2011).
This looks like a similar intuition to that which Duncan Pritchard calls the “ability intuition”, cf. Pritchard (2009), that knowledge is success from ability in that it is cognitive success creditable to the cognitive agent.
With thanks to an anonymous referee at Erkenntnis for this point.
Can something be a properly a part of epistemology and not be part of the analysis of knowledge? Yes. I think we can afford some pluralism as to what counts as ‘epistemology’; for more, see Booth (2011).
“Reflective epistemic luck: Given only what the agent is able to know by reflection alone, it is a matter of luck that her belief is true” (Pritchard 2005, p. 175).
Referring to this (or to a component of this) as a kind of ‘luck’ might then also seem a bit forced. Nothing seems to be lost if we merely describe it as a requirement that it not seem to one that one’s belief is lucky (where the luck involved here is mere veritic luck).
One might still complain though that DIVORCE does not account for all our intuitions. For instance, one might be moved by Peter Unger’s argument that infallibilism leads to scepticism: infallibilism requires that one knows that p if one is certain that p and since one is never certain that p, one never knows that p. I think that DIVORCE does have the means to explain away these intuitions, since infallibilism is not now conceived of as a thesis that entails that epistemic justification is infallible (and so requires certainty). A full treatment of this issue will require a separate paper, however; so for now I will just refer to infallibilist accounts that putatively do not lead to scepticism (cf. Dodd 2011). Thanks to an anonymous referee for bringing this point to my attention.
With many thanks to Guy Axtell, Stephen Hetherington, Bob Lockie, Fred Muller, Sarah Sawyer, John Turri, and three anonymous referees at Erkenntnis for useful comments on earlier drafts of this piece.
References
Booth, A. (2011). The theory of epistemic justification and the theory of knowledge: A divorce. Erkenntnis, 75, 37–43.
Church, I. (2013). Getting ‘Lucky’ with Gettier European Journal of Philosophy. doi:10.1111/j.1468-0378.2010.00433.x.
Dodd, D. (2011). Against fallibilism. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(4), 663–685.
Dougherty, T., & Rysiew, P. (2009). Fallibilism, epistemic possibility, and concessive knowledge attributions. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 78, 123–132.
Foley, R. (2004). A trial separation between the theory of knowledge and the theory of justified belief. In J. Greco (Ed.), Sosa and his critics. Oxford: Wiley.
Gettier, E. (1963). Is justified true belief knowledge? Analysis, 23, 121–123.
Hetherington, S. (1998). Actually knowing. The Philosophical Quarterly, 48, 453–469.
Hetherington, S. (1999). Knowing failably. The Journal of Philosophy, 96, 565–587.
Hetherington, S. (2001a). A fallibilist and wholly internalist solution to the Gettier problem. Journal of Philosophical Research, 26, 307–324.
Hetherington, S. (2001b). Good knowledge, bad knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hetherington, S. (2007). Elusive epistemological justification. Synthese, 174, 315–330.
Hetherington, S. (2010). Is this a world where knowledge has to include justification? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 75, 41–69.
Hetherington, S. (2011a). How to know: A practicalist conception of knowledge. Oxford: Wiley.
Hetherington, S. (2011b). Abnormality and Gettier situations: An explanatory proposal. Ratio, 24, 176–191.
Hetherington, S. (2012a). The Gettier illusion: Gettier partialism and infallibilism. Synthese, 188, 217–230.
Hetherington, S. (2012b). The Significance of Fallibilism within Gettier’s Challenge: A case study. Philosophia, 40(3), 539–547.
Howard-Snyder, D. F., & Feit, N. (2003). Infallibilism and Gettier’s legacy. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 66, 304–327.
Lewis, D. (1996). Elusive knowledge. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 74, 549–567.
Madison, B. (2011). Combating anti anti-luck epistemology. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 89(1), 47–58.
Moon, A. (2012). Warrant does entail truth. Synthese, 184, 287–297.
Pritchard, D. (2005). Epistemic luck. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Pritchard, D. (2007). Anti-luck epistemology. Synthese, 158, 277–297.
Pritchard, D. (2009). The value of knowledge. Harvard Review of Philosophy, 16, 2–19.
Pritchard, D. (2013). There cannot be Lucky Knowledge. In M. Steup & J. Turri (Eds.), Contemporary debates in epistemology (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Sosa, E. (1999). How must knowledge be modally related to what is known? Philosophical Topics, 26, 373–384.
Sutton, J. (2005). Stick to what you know. Nous, 39, 359–396.
Sutton, J. (2007). Without justification. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Turri, J. (2012). Is knowledge justified true belief? Synthese, 183(3), 247–259.
Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its Limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Booth, A.R. The Gettier Illusion, the Tripartite Analysis, and the Divorce Thesis. Erkenn 79, 625–638 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9526-4
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-013-9526-4