In The Meno, Socrates raises what has come to be called the value problem for knowledge. Suppose, he says, you want to get to Larissa. He notes that someone with mere true belief about how to get there (say, based on a lucky guess) will be just as reliable a guide as someone who has knowledge; they both, after all, have the same information, one of them knows it while the other does not.
Socrates' answer to the value problem is rather simple: he says that knowledge is stable, whereas mere true belief is not. Miranda Fricker (2009) calls this the resiliency of knowledge, noting that this will not necessarily be a categorical fact about all knowledge: some knowledge may be rather fleeting, psychologically speaking. Rather, in general, "lucky" true belief will be much less likely to stick around than knowledge. John Hyman (2010) thinks Socrates' answer is mistaken, but he fails to (a) incorporate Fricker's point about generality, and (b) consider the sorts of philosophical resources that are available to the defender of the resiliency view.
I think that Socrates is on the right track, but a striking assumption made in the literature I've encountered is that knowledge is a property of individual beliefs. At least since Gettier (1963) descended, god-like, into epistemology, we have treated its foundational question this way: "what property of belief, other than its being true, makes it count as knowledge?" Naturally, once this particular hunt is on, the question of non-lucky justification comes to dominate the discussion, and we end up with swarms of thought-experiments concerning particular beliefs and whether they "count".
Now, I want to ask a question: what if knowledge is not a property of belief, but is, rather, a property that emerges from the relations between beliefs?
By way of initial illustration, consider two very primitive minds, each with ten true beliefs (I do not take this to be a possible scenario, but it is just for illustrative purposes). Now, the contents of the first ten true beliefs are not related to one another, logically speaking; they do not support inductive conclusions about one another, nor are there relations of entailment between them. Now, the second mind also has ten true beliefs, but each is connected to at least one other belief via relations of logical support. Isn't it possible that knowledge is just this kind of general state, where one's true beliefs are embedded in a larger network of mutually supporting true beliefs?
This model should be familiar enough: it is related to Quine's holistic "web of belief" model. Yet, it seems to me that it can immediately help us make sense of Socrates' claim. Knowledge of how to get to Larissa is in fact not a single belief, rather, it is a property that a certain set of beliefs [turn left here, turn right there, etc.] has relative to a much larger cognitive architecture. As such, dropping the set of beliefs has an enormous cost to the cognitive system: it requires that a whole bunch of other beliefs be revised or dropped.
This is not so in the case of a lucky guess: I now guess that the 37th digit of Pi is 4, and I commit to this belief. Now I carefully work it out for myself using an algorithm I learned in math class: turns out it's 9. Darn. But, since it was a guess, coming to believe that the answer is 9 is cognitively trivial, it requires the revision of just this single belief.
Now, imagine that some math whiz comes along and "proves" to me, via some trickery, that the answer is in fact 7. In order to revise this belief, I have to do some very uncomfortable cognitive work. I have to decide that I was mistaken in my calculations, or that my math teacher was mistaken or malicious, or I have to decide that Ms. Math Whiz is herself mistaken or malicious... whichever path I take, the integrity of my belief-system is thrown into considerable disarray.
This pattern, I think, will repeat itself for most instances of what we ordinarily call "knowledge": the embeddedness of a belief in a larger network of mutually supporting beliefs will make it far more resistant to revision. In Quine's terminology, the belief will be closer to our cognitive core, and as such it will be more essential to the system's smooth functioning. It will resist revision. In short, Socrates was right:
Socrates' answer to the value problem is rather simple: he says that knowledge is stable, whereas mere true belief is not. Miranda Fricker (2009) calls this the resiliency of knowledge, noting that this will not necessarily be a categorical fact about all knowledge: some knowledge may be rather fleeting, psychologically speaking. Rather, in general, "lucky" true belief will be much less likely to stick around than knowledge. John Hyman (2010) thinks Socrates' answer is mistaken, but he fails to (a) incorporate Fricker's point about generality, and (b) consider the sorts of philosophical resources that are available to the defender of the resiliency view.
I think that Socrates is on the right track, but a striking assumption made in the literature I've encountered is that knowledge is a property of individual beliefs. At least since Gettier (1963) descended, god-like, into epistemology, we have treated its foundational question this way: "what property of belief, other than its being true, makes it count as knowledge?" Naturally, once this particular hunt is on, the question of non-lucky justification comes to dominate the discussion, and we end up with swarms of thought-experiments concerning particular beliefs and whether they "count".
Now, I want to ask a question: what if knowledge is not a property of belief, but is, rather, a property that emerges from the relations between beliefs?
By way of initial illustration, consider two very primitive minds, each with ten true beliefs (I do not take this to be a possible scenario, but it is just for illustrative purposes). Now, the contents of the first ten true beliefs are not related to one another, logically speaking; they do not support inductive conclusions about one another, nor are there relations of entailment between them. Now, the second mind also has ten true beliefs, but each is connected to at least one other belief via relations of logical support. Isn't it possible that knowledge is just this kind of general state, where one's true beliefs are embedded in a larger network of mutually supporting true beliefs?
This model should be familiar enough: it is related to Quine's holistic "web of belief" model. Yet, it seems to me that it can immediately help us make sense of Socrates' claim. Knowledge of how to get to Larissa is in fact not a single belief, rather, it is a property that a certain set of beliefs [turn left here, turn right there, etc.] has relative to a much larger cognitive architecture. As such, dropping the set of beliefs has an enormous cost to the cognitive system: it requires that a whole bunch of other beliefs be revised or dropped.
This is not so in the case of a lucky guess: I now guess that the 37th digit of Pi is 4, and I commit to this belief. Now I carefully work it out for myself using an algorithm I learned in math class: turns out it's 9. Darn. But, since it was a guess, coming to believe that the answer is 9 is cognitively trivial, it requires the revision of just this single belief.
Now, imagine that some math whiz comes along and "proves" to me, via some trickery, that the answer is in fact 7. In order to revise this belief, I have to do some very uncomfortable cognitive work. I have to decide that I was mistaken in my calculations, or that my math teacher was mistaken or malicious, or I have to decide that Ms. Math Whiz is herself mistaken or malicious... whichever path I take, the integrity of my belief-system is thrown into considerable disarray.
This pattern, I think, will repeat itself for most instances of what we ordinarily call "knowledge": the embeddedness of a belief in a larger network of mutually supporting beliefs will make it far more resistant to revision. In Quine's terminology, the belief will be closer to our cognitive core, and as such it will be more essential to the system's smooth functioning. It will resist revision. In short, Socrates was right:
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 chains of reasons why.However, we can only see why he is right when we accept that knowledge is not necessarily a property of individual beliefs: rather, it emerges rather out of a general state which might also be called understanding. This state is itself only a matter of degree, a consequence of the number of true beliefs and the number of connections between them, and so the resiliency of knowledge will also come in degrees. I do not find this troubling in the slightest, but it is alarming to see the number of people in the literature who think that the difference here must be absolute or categorical.
3 comments:
Perhaps I misunderstand you, but if the interdependence of beliefs is what makes up knowledge, there is an important piece of the puzzle missing: truth.
For example, Christian theologians have spent generations making the Judeo-Christian metaphysics internally coherent (no doubt such a complex task could take no less time). So, if the network of beliefs about the Christian metaphysics are enough for the Christian to say he KNOWS that Jesus is this or that and that substance dualism is the way the universe is composed (etc.), then we are in a great deal of trouble.
The problem becomes that anyone can claim they know something so long as their beliefs are internally coherent. Hell, murderers could have a web of distorted beliefs about murder being a moral imperative.
But perhaps I've misunderstood you?
Nick (Byrd), I think you have misunderstood Nick, for he writes, "consider two very primitive minds, each with ten *true* beliefs" In other words, Nick isn't espousing straightforward coherentism (whereby the coherence of, say, the 'flat-earther's' beliefs is sufficient for knowledge). I am interested to know how Nick understands truth, however, since his Nietzschean leanings, to which I am sympathetic, seem to require a non-standard account here.
Daniel (and Nick) that's exactly right, I am assuming (as the participants in this literature all seem to) that the beliefs in this case are true.
Daniel: I am completely, utterly, and categorically devoid of any useful thoughts on truth. Perhaps this makes me a bad philosopher. Nietzsche's perspectivism seems crazy, it is a healthy antidote to an unreflective objectivism, and "seeing with many eyes" is no doubt a very important thing to do, but I can't see how anyone can make the case for subjectivism or perspectivism without presupposing certain truths that hold non-perspectivally or non-subjectively.
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