Jason Stanley, Knowledge and Practical Interests. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2005. Pp. xi, 208.
The thesis of this book is that what makes someone’s true belief a case of
knowledge is partly determined by the believer’s practical interests. This thesis,
which Stanley calls “interest relative invariantism” (henceforth, IRI) is incompatible
with the “intellectualist” view that is most widely received in contemporary
epistemology; the latter is the view that says that what makes someone’s true belief
a case of knowledge does not depend upon any facts from the domain of practical
rationality.
Although it is not made completely explicit, a careful reading of Stanley’s
book seems to reveal that his reasoning for IRI has the following overall structure.
(1) Knowledge has a value that is distinct from the value of true belief, or
justified true belief, or other epistemically valuable states that are not
knowledge.
(2) We can evaluate someone’s decision to act in a particular way by appeal to
whether or not the person knew that a particular proposition that was a
reason for her so acting was one that she knew to be true.
(3) The best explanation for both (1) and (2) is that one may act on p if and only
if one knows that p is true.
(4) There is good reason to believe that one may act on p if and only if one knows
that p is true. (From 3)
(5) Whether one may act on p depends upon the costs of being wrong about p.
(6) There is good reason to believe that whether one knows that p is true
depends upon the costs of being wrong about p. (From 4, 5)
(7) Our intuitions concerning whether someone knows that p is true are
sensitive to the costs to that person of being wrong in believing that p.
(8) Given 6, the best explanation of 7 is IRI: whether someone knows that p is
true depends upon the costs of being wrong about p.
(9) Therefore, there is compelling reason to believe that IRI is true. (From 6, 8)
Step 1 states a widely held epistemological view that Stanley plausibly assumes to
be true. He briefly makes the case for step 2 in his Introduction, where he discusses
the use of knowledge attributions to justify and to criticize actions. He also defends
step 3 in his Introduction, where he discusses the factors that obscure the
knowledge-action link. (Steps 2 and 3 have both been defended at length in
subsequent work.1) Step 4 follows from step 3. Step 5 is obvious and undisputed.
Step 6 is plausibly inferred from steps 4 and 5. Stanley makes the case for step 7 in
his Introduction, where he surveys a variety of hypothetical cases of knowledgeattribution and knowledge-denial – cases in which the costs of being wrong about a
particular proposition vary significantly – and shows that our intuitions about the
correctness of the knowledge-attributions or knowledge-denials in those cases vary
systematically with those costs. So the first 7 steps of this reasoning are all
defended, if at all, in the Introduction to Stanley’s book.
John Hawthorne and Jason Stanley, “Knowledge and Action”, Journal of Philosophy
105 (2008): 571 – 90.
1
All of the rest of Stanley’s book – chapters 1 through 9 – is devoted to
defending step 8. This is the step that most interests Stanley, and that has been
most widely discussed. So Stanley’s task is to argue that, given the knowledgeaction link, IRI is the best explanation of our intuitions about such cases as the
following:
“Low Attributor-High Subject Stakes. Hannah and her wife Sarah are driving
home on a Friday afternoon. They plan to stop at the bank on the way home to
deposit their paychecks. Since they have an impending bill coming due, and very
little in their account, it is very important that they deposit their paychecks by
Saturday. Two weeks earlier, on a Saturday, Hannah went to the bank, where Jill
saw her. Sarah points out to Hannah that banks do change their hours. Hannah
utters, ‘That’s a good point. I guess I don’t really know that the bank will be open on
Saturday.’ Coincidentally, Jill is thinking of going to the bank on Saturday, just for
fun, to see if she meets Hannah there. Nothing is at stake for Jill, and shows nothing
of Hannah’s situation. Wondering whether Hannah will be there, Jill utters to a
friend, ‘Well, Hannah was at the bank two weeks ago on a Saturday. So she knows
the bank will be open on Saturday.’” (Stanley 2005, 4)
Why do we intuitively regard Hannah’s denial of knowledge to herself as true, and
Jill’s attribution of knowledge to Hannah as false? Why is it that, in cases in which
are exactly like this one, except that Hannah stands to lose very little by being wrong
about the bank’s being open on Saturday, we would intuitively regard her denial of
knowledge to herself as false, and Jill’s attribution of knowledge to her as true?
Many different answers have been offered to these questions. Various philosophers
have claimed (a) that these intuitive verdicts are the result of framing effects that
operate on our psychology, and they reveal nothing very interesting about the
nature of knowledge, or (b) that, when one stands to lose a great deal by being
wrong about p, one should be less than knowledgeably confident that p, or (c) that,
when one stands to lose a great deal by being wrong about p, one needs not only to
know that p is true but also to know that one knows that p is true, or (d) that the
intuitions above are revelatory of some semantic facts: either facts about the
semantics of knowledge attributions, or facts about the structure of semantic facts
quite generally. Stanley dispatches all of claims (a), (b), and (c) in a few pages of the
Introduction, and devotes all of the rest of his book to criticizing claim (d).
The main targets of Stanley’s book, then, are those who would resist step 8 of
his reasoning by claiming that the best explanation of the fact stated in step 7 is a
semantic explanation. Chapters 1 through 4 are devoted to stating and criticizing
those “attributor contextualist” views2 according to which the semantic explanation
concerns the semantics of knowledge attributions specifically, while chapter 7 states
and criticizes those “relativist” views3 according to which the semantic explanation
concerns the very structure of semantic facts themselves. Chapters 5 states
See Stewart Cohen, “How to be a Fallibilist”, Philosophical Perspectives 2
(Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1988); Keith DeRose, “Contextualism and Knowledge
Attributions”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 52 (1992): 913 – 29 and
“Solving the Skeptical Problem”, Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 1 – 51; David
Lewis, “Elusive Knowledge”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy 74 (1995): 549 – 67.
3 See John MacFarlane, “The Assessment Sensitivity of Knowledge Attributions”,
Oxford Studies in Epistemology 1 (2005): 197 - 233; Mark Richard, “Contextualism
and Relativism”, Philosophical Studies 119 (2004): 215 – 42.
2
Stanley’s IRI view, chapter 6 argues that, while it has costs, they are less significant
on balance than the costs incurred by attributor contextualism. And chapters 8 and
9 conclude by arguing that an IRI explanation of the data, unlike the attributor
contextualist explanation, is not an application of a general schema that can be alltoo-easily applied to solve virtually any philosophical puzzle.
Stanley’s book is full of detailed arguments that deserve extensive discussion,
and I cannot devote such discussion to any one of those arguments within the very
short space that has been mandated for this review. Fortunately, those detailed
arguments have almost all been widely discussed already. The only observation
that I would now like to add to that critical discussion is the following:
Stanley’s most widely discussed arguments against attributor contextualism
all take the form of noting that the semantic context-sensitivity posited by the
attributor contextualist is without any clear precedent in natural language:
therefore, the positing of such context-sensitivity is ad hoc. The attributor
contextualist might claim that the context-sensitivity of “know that p” is just like the
context-sensitivity of, e.g., “sufficiently justified in the belief that p” or “sufficiently
sensitive in believing that p” or some such complex expression, but Stanley can
justly complain that the obvious context-sensitivity in those expressions is carried
by the context-sensitivity of “sufficiently”, and so is unlike the context-sensitivity
that is alleged to be present in the semantically unanalyzable verb phrase “know
that p”.
I would like to point out, however, that IRI itself posits a metaphysical
feature of knowledge – interest-relativity – that is without any clear precedent in the
metaphysics of propositional attitudes. Of course, there clearly are some attitudes
that are interest-relative: e.g., the relation of being rationally pleased that p. But the
interest-relativity of such analyzable attitudes is carried by the interest-relativity of
rationally, and so is unlike the interest-relativity that is alleged to be present in the
metaphysically unanalyzable relation of knowledge. If attributor contextualism is
ad hoc, then so too, for the very same reason, is IRI.
Ram Neta
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill