Abstract
We know a lot. I know what food penguins eat. I know that phones used to ring, but nowadays squeal, when someone calls up. I know that Essendon won the 1993 Grand Final. I know that here is a hand, and here is another.
We have all sort so fevery day knowledge, and we have it in abundance. To doubt that would be absurd. At any rate, to doubt it in any serious and lasting way would be absurd; and even philosophical and temporary doubt, under the influence of argument, is more than a little peculiar. It is a Moore an fact that we know a lot. It is one of those things that we know better than we know the premises of any philosophical argument to the contrary.
Besides knowing a lot that is everyday and trite, I myself think that we know a lot that is interesting and esoteric and controversial. We know a lot about things unseen: tiny particles and pervasive fields, not to mention one another’s underwear. Sometimes we even know what an author meant by his writings. But on these questions, let us agree to disagree peacefully with the champions of “post-knowledgeism.” The most trite and ordinary parts of our knowledge will be problem enough.
David Lewis was deceased at the time of publication.
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Notes
- 1.
The suggestion that ascriptions of knowledge go false in the context of epistemology is to be found in Barry Stroud, “Understanding Human Knowledge in General” in Marjorie Clay and Keith Lehrer (eds.), Knowledge and Skepticism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1989); and in Stephen Hetherington, “Lacking Knowledge and lustification by Theorising About Them” (lecture at the University of New South Wales, August 1992). Neither of them tells the story just as I do, however it may be that their versions do not conflict with mine.
- 2.
Unless, like some, we simply define “justification” as “whatever it takes to turn true opinion into knowledge” regardless of whether what it takes turns out to involve argument from supporting reasons.
- 3.
The problem of the lottery was introduced in Henry Kyburg, Probability and the Logic of Rational Belief (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), and in Carl Hempel, “Deductive-Nomological vs. Statistical Explanation” in Herbert Feigl and Grover Maxwell (eds.), Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, (962). It has been much discussed since, as a problem both about knowledge and about our everyday, non-quantitative concept of belief.
- 4.
The case of testimony is less discussed than the others; but see C. A. J. Coady, Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) pp. 79–129.
- 5.
I follow Peter Unger, Ignorance: A Case for Skepticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975). But I shall not let him lead me into scepticism.
- 6.
See Robert Stalnaker. Inquiry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984) pp. 59–99.
- 7.
See my ‘Attitudes De Dicta and De Se’, The Philosophical Review 88 (1979) pp. 513–543; and R. M. Chisholm, “The Indirect Reflexive” in C. Diamond and J. Teichman (eds.), Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honour of G. E. M. Anscomhe (Brighton: Harvester, 1979).
- 8.
Peter Unger, Ignorance, chapter II. I discuss the case, and briefly foreshadow the present paper, in my “Scorekeeping in a Language Game,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 8 (1979) pp. 339–359, esp. pp. 353–355.
- 9.
See Robert Stalnaker, “Presuppositions,” Journal of Philosophical Logic 2 (1973) pp. 447–457; and “Pragmatic Presuppositions” in Milton Munitz and Peter Unger (eds.), Semantics and Philosophy (New York: New York University Press. 1974). See also my “Score keeping in a Language Game.” The definition restated in terms of presupposition resembles the treatment of knowledge in Kenneth S. Ferguson, Philosophical Scepticism (Cornell University doctoral dissertation, 1980).
- 10.
See Fred Dretske, “Epistemic Operators,” The Journal of Philosophy 67 (1970) pp. 1007–1022, and “The Pragmatic Dimension of Knowledge,” Philosophical Studies 40 (1981) pp. 363–378; Alvin Goldman, “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge:’ The Journal of Philosophy 73 (1976) pp. 771–791; G. C. Stine, “Skepticism. Relevant Alternatives, and Deductive Closure,” Philosophical Studies 29 (1976) pp. 249–261: and Stewart Cohen. “How to be A Fallibilist,” Philosophical Perspectives 2 (1988) pp. 91–123.
- 11.
Some of them, but only some, taken from the authors just cited.
- 12.
Instead of complicating the Rules of Belief as I have just done. 1 might equivalently have introduced a separate Rule of High Stakes saying that when error would be especially disastrous. few possibilities are properly ignored.
- 13.
A. D. Woozley, “Knowing and Not Knowing:’ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 53 (1953) pp. 151–172: Colin Radford. “Knowledge – by Examples,” Analysis 27 (1966) pp. 1–11.
- 14.
See Edmund Gettier, “Is lustified True Belief Knowledge?,” Analysis 23 (1963) pp. 121–123. Diagnoses have varied widely. The four examples below come from: (1) Keith Lehrer and Thomas Paxson Jr., “Knowledge: Undefeated True Belief,” The Journal of Philosophy 66 (1969) pp. 225–237; (2) Bertrand Russell, Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (London: Allen and Unwin, 1948) p. 154; (3) Alvin Goldman, “Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge,” op. cit.; (4) Gilbert Harman, Thought (Princeton. N1: Princeton University Press, 1973) p. 143.
Though the lottery problem is another case of justified true belief without knowledge, it is not normally counted among the Gettier problems. It is interesting to find that it yields to the same remedy.
- 15.
See Alvin Goldman, “A Causal Theory of Knowing,” The Journal of Philosophy 64 (1967) pp. 357–372; D. M. Armstrong, Belief, Truth and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973).
- 16.
See my “Veridical Hallucination and Prosthetic Vision,” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 58 (1980) pp. 239–249. John Bigelow has proposed to model knowledge-delivering processes generally on those found in vision.
- 17.
See Catherine Elgin, “The Epistemic Efficacy of Stupidity,” Synthese 74 (1988) pp. 297–311. The “efficacy” takes many forms; some to do with knowledge (under various rival analyses), some to do with justified belief. See also Michael Williams, Unnatural Doubts: Epistemological Realism and the Basis of Scepticism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991) pp. 352–355, on the instability of knowledge under reflection.
- 18.
Mixed cases are possible: Fred properly ignores the possibility W1 which Ted eliminates; however, Ted properly ignores the possibility W2 which Fred eliminates. Ted has looked in all the desk drawers but not the file drawers, whereas Fred has checked the file drawers but not the desk. Fred’s knowledge that Possum is not in the study is better in one way, Ted’s is better in another.
- 19.
To say truly that X is known, I must be properly ignoring any uneliminated possibilities in which not-X; whereas to say truly that Y is better known than X, I must be attending to some such possibilities. So I cannot say both in a single context. If I say “X is known, but Y is better known,” the context changes in mid-sentence: some previously ignored possibilities must stop being ignored. That can happen easily. Saying it the other way around – ”Y is better known than X, but even X is known” – is harder, because we must suddenly start to ignore previously unignored possibilities. That cannot be done, really; but we could bend the rules and make believe we had done it, and no doubt we would be understood well enough. Saying “X is flat, but Y is flatter” (that is, “X has no bumps at all, but Y has even fewer or smaller bumps”) is a parallel case. And again, “Y is flatter, but even X is flat” sounds clearly worse – but not altogether hopeless.
- 20.
Thanks here to Stephen Hetherington. While his own views about better and worse knowledge are situated within an analysis of knowledge quite unlike mine, they withstand transplantation.
- 21.
A proof-theoretic version of this closure principle is common to all “normal” modal logics: if the logic validates an inference from zero or more premises to a conclusion, then also it validates the inference obtained by prefixing the necessity operator to each premise and to the conclusion. Further, this rule is all we need to take us from classical sentential logic to the least normal modal logic. See Brian Chellas, Modal Logic: An Introduction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) p. 114.
- 22.
Dretske, “Epistemic Operators.” My reply follows the lead of Stine, “Skepticism, Relevant Alternatives, and Deductive Closure,” op. cit.; and (more closely) Cohen, “How to be a Fallibilist,” op. cit.
- 23.
See Stalnaker, Inquiry, pp. 79–99.
- 24.
Worse still: by what right can I even say that we used to be in a position to say truly that we knew? Then, we were in a context where we properly ignored certain uneliminated possibilities of error. Now, we are in a context where we no longer ignore them. If now I comment retrospectively upon the truth of what was said then, which context governs: the context now or the context then? I doubt there is any general answer, apart from the usual principle that we should interpret what is said so as to make the message make sense.
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Lewis, D. (2016). Elusive Knowledge. In: Arló-Costa, H., Hendricks, V., van Benthem, J. (eds) Readings in Formal Epistemology. Springer Graduate Texts in Philosophy, vol 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20451-2_28
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