The comments below were presented at the 2006 Pacific Division meeting of the APA.
Please comment with author’s permission only.
Comments on Jennifer Lackey’s
“Why We Don’t Deserve Credit For Everything We Know”
Jason Baehr
Loyola Marymount University
I found this a very enjoyable paper: very nicely written and carefully and elegantly
argued. I have a fair amount to say by way of critical feedback, however, and so will get
right to the point. My discussion will focus on three main points, the third of which is
most substantial.
First, it’s not at all clear to me that the authors Lackey discusses really are committed
either to credit thesis or to the difference thesis. The difference thesis states that the
“central epistemic difference” between knowledge and mere true belief – that which
distinguishes or separates knowledge from mere true belief from an epistemic standpoint
– is that when one has knowledge, one gets credit for reaching the truth. But this isn’t at
all the sort of condition that either Greco or Sosa, for example, appeal to when
accounting for the difference in question. Greco characterizes knowledge (roughly) as
true belief formed via one’s intellectual virtues. Sosa holds a similar view but adds the
requirement of an accurate “epistemic perspective” on the known belief. What, then, are
we to make of the fact that both Greco and Sosa do appeal to (something like – see
below) the credit thesis? Greco provides a clear answer to this question. In his discussion
of knowledge and epistemic credit, he distinguishes between what he describes as “two
questions one might try to answer when giving an account of knowledge.” He says: “The
first is the ‘What is knowledge?’ question. This question asks what conditions a person
must satisfy to count as knowing. The second is the ‘What are we doing?’ question. This
question asks what illocutionary act is being performed when we say that someone
knows.”1 Clearly the first, “What is knowledge?” question corresponds to Lackey’s
1
“Knowledge as Credit for True Belief,” p. 116.
difference thesis. Greco, however, makes clear that he is interested in the second, “What
are we doing?” question. Thus while these authors do hold that knowledge generally
involves a special kind of credit vis-à-vis mere true belief, they do not regard this value
as the central logical or epistemic difference between the two states.
A more modest worry concerns the extent to which the authors in question really are
committed to the credit thesis, which says that when a person has knowledge, she
deserves credit for her true belief. Recall Greco’s claim that to deserve intellectual credit
for believing a particular proposition, believing that proposition must be intellectually
valuable. Greco and Sosa alike, however, acknowledge that there are certain true
propositions (e.g., a proposition concerning the number of grains in a cubic foot of sand)
such that believing them is not intellectually valuable. And yet neither denies that such
propositions can be known. Therefore they apparently do not accept the claim that
knowing entails deserving credit for reaching the truth.
Second, it seems to me that at least some of the disagreement between Lackey and the
reliabilist or quasi-reliabilist authors she discusses is the result of a fundamental and
probably intractable principled or intuitive disagreement and that consequently certain of
Lackey’s objections are likely to strike these authors as fundamentally misguided. One
example is Lackey’s Dorothy case. Unless I misunderstand the details of the case,
Dorothy, owing to a kind of momentary inspiration from a recent happy relationship,
does excellent work in the lab and makes an important discovery. Lackey says that
Dorothy’s accomplishment, while “significantly out of character,” “is not a matter of luck
in any substantive way” and that Dorothy “surely can know” the content of her discovery.
But this would appear to be a pretty clear case of a person’s getting to the truth via a
“fleeting process,” and as such, it is a case that virtue reliabilists like Greco and Sosa
would not regard as knowledge.2 Thus while internalists, say, might agree with Lackey
that Dorothy has knowledge on the grounds that she presumably has good reasons for
thinking that her findings are true, such cases are likely to carry little weight with many
externalists.
Greco makes this point in response to Zagzebski’s account of knowledge in “Two Kinds of Intellectual
Virtue,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 60 (2000), p. 183.
2
A third and final worry concerns Lackey’s argument for the claim that “some of the
most ordinary and uncontentious cases of knowledge” reveal that knowledge does not
require credit for reaching the truth. Lackey’s argument centers around the case of
Morris. I think this case and its epistemological implications are considerably less clear
than Lackey suggests.
On the most straightforward reading of the case, it would appear likely to evoke
another clash of basic epistemological principles. Lackey is very clear that Morris
acquires his belief about the whereabouts of the Sears Tower by randomly approaching
the nearest passerby for directions. Sidestepping worries about the generality problem,
we can say that Morris forms his belief in an unreliable way or as a result of an unreliable
trait of cognitive character. After all, for all we know about Morris, if the nearest
passerby had been a child or a barely conscious drug addict or an obvious tourist, Morris
would just as willingly have believed this person’s reply to his query. Nevertheless,
Lackey seems to think it is obvious that Morris acquires knowledge. The problem is that
reliabilists like Greco and Sosa are likely to think that Morris obviously does not have
knowledge, for he has reached the truth in an obviously unreliable way. Thus, while they
may agree with Lackey that Morris doesn’t deserve credit for reaching the truth, they can
deny that this case presents a counterexample to their accounts of knowledge.
To get around this difficulty, Lackey might modify the case such that Morris’s belief
does count as knowledge even from a reliabilist standpoint. We might imagine, for
instance, that Morris is reasonably good at identifying the “locals” in an urban
environment. Thus as he exits the train station, he immediately spots what strikes him as
a Chicago native and asks for directions. Greco and Sosa can agree in this case that
Morris acquires knowledge, since his belief is formed in a reliable way. The problem,
however, is that it no longer seems right to say that Morris does not deserve any credit for
reaching the truth. Indeed, it seems right to say that an important and salient part of why
Morris forms a true belief is that he knew whom to ask. His good judgment in these
matters explains how he has managed to acquire accurate (rather than inaccurate)
directions.
Proposed counterexamples of this sort are, then, subject to a certain dilemma. When
characterized such that the person in question does not deserve credit for reaching the
truth, it is unclear whether the person really has knowledge. But when modified such that
the person does clearly acquire knowledge, it begins to look as if the person deserves
credit for reaching the truth. Either way, such cases fail to yield a convincing objection to
the relevant conception of knowledge.
I close by noting that the problem in this case is not merely a function of conflicting
intuitions between reliabilists and nonreliabilists. For it would seem that even an
internalist could reject Lackey’s suggestion that Morris (in the initial characterization of
the case) acquires knowledge. This is because, for all we are told about Morris, he has no
reason at all to think that the directions he has received are actually trustworthy. For
again, he inquires randomly. If so, he fails to acquire knowledge even from an internalist
standpoint. On the other hand, if Morris has a knack for identifying locals, is aware of
this fact, and is aware of having used it in this case, then the internalist will say that
Morris has good reason to trust the directions and so has knowledge. But again, Morris
would then appear to deserve credit for his accomplishment. This shows that the
limitations of this kind of case cannot simply be chalked up to the standard intuitive
divide between internalists and externalists.