Epistemology: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments

Kevin McCain

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000417029
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In this new kind of entrée to contemporary epistemology, Kevin McCain presents fifty of the field's most important puzzles, paradoxes, and thought experiments. Assuming no familiarity with epistemology from the reader, McCain titles each case with a memorable name, describes the details of the case, explains the issue(s) to which the case is relevant, and assesses its significance. McCain also briefly reviews the key responses to the case that have been put forward, and provides a helpful list of suggested readings on the topic. Each entry is accessible, succinct, and self-contained. Epistemology: 50 Puzzles, Paradoxes, and Thought Experiments is a fantastic learning tool as well as a handy resource for anyone interested in epistemological issues.

Key Features:

• 
  
  

• Though concise overall, offers broad coverage of the key areas of epistemology.

• 
  
  

• Describes each imaginative case directly and in a memorable way, making the cases accessible and easy to remember.

• 
  
  

• Provides a list of Suggested Readings for each case, divided into General Overviews, Seminal Presentations, and Other Important Discussions.

PART I

Nature of Knowledge

General Background: The Traditional Account of Knowledge

The entries to follow begin with a bit of background information to help situate and make clear the particular puzzles, paradoxes, and thought experiments discussed. However, some general background on the traditional account of knowledge is helpful to have in hand for most all of the entries in this book. So, let’s begin by taking a brief look at how knowledge has been understood for many years.

Epistemologists have distinguished between three primary kinds of knowledge: acquaintance knowledge, knowledge-how, and propositional knowledge. Although our focus for this background, and most of the book, is the last sort, it will be helpful to take a quick look at the other two as well.

Acquaintance knowledge is knowledge you have of people and things you are familiar with personally. For example, let’s say that you have a dog, which your new acquaintance, Fred, has never seen. You tell Fred all sorts of facts about your dog. She is a Yorkshire Terrier. She is ten (human) years old. And so on. After you share this information about your dog, Fred will know a lot of facts about her. But, Fred doesn’t know your dog. After all, Fred has never seen your dog or interacted with her in any way. You know your dog in a way that Fred does not. You have acquaintance knowledge of your dog; Fred doesn’t.

Knowledge-how is different from acquaintance knowledge, and it at least seems to be different from knowledge of facts. Knowledge-how is the sort of knowledge common of abilities or skills. You know how to swim. You know how to throw a baseball. And so on. Knowing how to do something is different from having acquaintance knowledge, and it seems different from merely knowing facts. For instance, you might know all sorts of facts about how to swim and yet be in danger of drowning if you’re ever thrown into deep water! Conversely, you might be an excellent swimmer but completely incapable of expressing your ability to swim in terms of facts about swimming. (Relatively recently, a debate has emerged concerning whether knowledge-how reduces to knowledge of facts, but we can set that aside for now—traditionally the two have been taken to be different.)

Propositional knowledge (which we will simply refer to as “knowledge” in the entries that follow) is knowledge of facts. This knowledge is called “propositional” because we mentally represent (think about) facts by way of thinking of propositions. In simplest terms propositions are what declarative sentences mean. Consider these three declarative sentences: “The dog is brown”, “El perro es cafe”, and “Der Hund ist braun”. These three sentences are all declarative, but they are very different. They contain different words, and they are in different languages (English, Spanish, and German, respectively). However, they all mean the same thing. They all mean what we express with the English sentence “The dog is brown”. How can they mean the same thing though? After all, the sentences look completely different, and if they were spoken out loud, they would sound completely different. The answer to this question is that although these declarative sentences are different in important ways, they express the same proposition (which represents the same fact, namely that the dog is brown). It is the fact represented by the proposition that you know when you have propositional knowledge (for simplicity, we will later simply speak of knowing a true proposition). This is why an English speaker, a Spanish speaker, and a German speaker might know that the same dog is brown, even though they would express this knowledge differently by using different sentences.

Now, let’s take a closer look at the traditional account of propositional knowledge. This is sometimes referred to as the Justified True Belief (JTB) theory because it says that knowing that some proposition, p, just is having a justified true belief that p. Hence, in order for you to know that p, “the dog is brown” say, you must believe that p, p must be true, and your belief that p must be justified. It also says that any time you believe that p, p is true, and your belief that p is justified you know that p. It’s worth briefly examining each of these three components of the traditional account of knowledge.

Belief. You might think that knowledge doesn’t require belief because we sometimes say things that seem to suggest this. For example, if you were in an argument with someone who believes the Earth is flat, you might plausibly say: “I don’t believe the Earth is spherical, I know it is!” It would be a mistake to take this as showing that you don’t actually believe that the Earth spherical. Why? Because you behave the same way as someone who believes that the Earth is spherical does. You answer affirmatively if asked whether the shape of the Earth is a sphere. You are willing to use the proposition that the Earth is spherical in your reasoning, e.g. you reason that since the Earth is spherical, if someone were able to start walking in a straight line and do so long enough, she would end up where she started. So, the best explanation for why you might assert something like “I don’t believe the Earth is spherical, I know it is!” is that you want to emphasize that this is not something that you merely believe. You are making it clear that this is something that you believe for good reasons, i.e. you have strong justification for accepting that the Earth is spherical. To make the general point clearer, think about your acquaintance Fred again, who not only doesn’t believe the Earth is spherical, he actually believes that it is flat. Would we say that Fred knows that the Earth isn’t flat? It seems not. Rather, it seems that we might say that he should know that the Earth isn’t flat. Even if Fred is aware of all sorts of evidence for thinking that the Earth is spherical, it doesn’t seem that he knows it isn’t flat since he doesn’t believe this. Hence, the traditional account of knowledge holds that belief is necessary for knowledge.

Truth. As with belief, there may be a temptation to think that knowledge doesn’t really require truth. For example, when your team loses a big game that you thought you were going to win, you might say something like: “I just knew we were going to win.” Superficially, it seems that you are saying that you have knowledge of something false—you had knowledge that the team would win, but it’s false that the team would win. Is this the best way to understand what you are saying here though? It doesn’t seem so. A much better explanation is that what you are really expressing is the fact that you were confident that the team would win or that you thought you knew that the team would win. In order to see this even more clearly, imagine that you and Fred, the flat earther, place a bet, the loser has to walk the other’s dog. Fred bets that the Chicago Bears will win a particular football game, and you bet that they won’t. Assume (unfortunately, for many years this has been a safe assumption!) that the Chicago Bears in fact lose the game. You come to collect on your bet, but Fred responds, “I know that they won, so you have to walk my dog.” Would you think that Fred knows that the Chicago Bears won even though they didn’t? Or would you think that Fred doesn’t know what he’s talking about and needs to get to walking your dog? Presumably, you’d conclude that Fred doesn’t actually know that the Chicago Bears won regardless of how convinced he is that they did. Why not? Because it’s not true. They didn’t win, so Fred can’t know that they did.

Justification. We’ve seen that knowledge requires true belief. Is that enough though? It seems not. Consider the following sort of situation: you and your new friend (talking about the JTB theory has led you to move from acquaintances to friends) Fred, the flat earther, are discussing another football game that neither of you watched. Neither of you has heard the game’s final score, and you both know that the odds going into the game were even, i.e. it was predicted that the teams were equally likely to win. However, Fred decides to believe that the Detroit Lions won. You ask Fred why he thinks they won, and he responds: “No reason, I just really want them to win, so I believe that they did.” Let’s assume that in fact Fred, by pure luck, is correct because the Detroit Lions really did win the game. Does Fred know that the Detroit Lions won before you and he look up the score? Surely not. Fred has no reason to think that the Detroit Lions rather than their opponents won—he is simply believing because of wishful thinking. Not only does Fred fail to know that the Detroit Lions won, but it’s also unreasonable for him to believe that they did. The rational thing for Fred to do is to suspend judgment about who won the game—he shouldn’t believe the Detroit Lions won or believe that they lost. The rational thing is for Fred to not believe one way or other about the outcome of the game until he has some evidence about the score. Although Fred has a true belief about how the game went, he clearly doesn’t know that the Detroit Lions won. Something more is needed for knowledge. This something more is justification. Roughly, justification amounts to having good reasons/evidence to believe something. Fred clearly lacks good reasons/evidence, so he fails to know. (For more discussion of justification, see General Background: The Nature of Justification pp. 113–119.)

We can put these insights together to get a precise formulation of the traditional account of knowledge:

Someone, S, knows that p if and only if: (1) S believes that p, (2) p is true, and (3) S’s belief that p is justified.

1

Promotions and Traveling Friends (The Gettier Problem)

Background: In order to appreciate one of the classic “Gettier cases”, it is important to keep in mind a particular rule of logic, what is called “disjunction introduction”. It is the inference rule that says that if p is true, then “p or q” is true. For example, if it is true that you have a dog, then it is also true that you have a dog or a cat. And, it is true that you have a dog or no pet; you have a dog or the moon is made of cheese; and so on. Hence, if it is true that you have a dog, then it is also true that you have a dog or (any claim whatsoever can be plugged in here).

Epistemological Issues: Analysis of Knowledge; Gettier Problem

Let’s think about two people who are often referred to in philosophical examples, Smith and Jones. Smith and Jones work for the same company, and they are both vying for the same promotion. Smith can’t help but do a bit of snooping concerning who got the promotion. As a result of his snooping, Smith comes to have excellent reasons for believing that Jones got the promotion, though it hasn’t been officially announced yet. He overheard the boss saying that Jones got the promotion, he saw a letter congratulating Jones on the promotion, and he even saw the new plaque that will go on the coveted corner office that belongs to the person who got the promotion and it had “Jones” on it. On the basis of this information, Smith believes that Jones got the promotion. Smith also knows that Jones owns an Armani jacket. While sitting at his desk, Smith gets bored and starts thinking about facts concerning the person who got the promotion. He thinks to himself, “Jones got the promotion and Jones owns an Armani jacket,” so “the person who got the promotion owns an Armani jacket.”

So far the case of Smith and Jones is not all that interesting. However, let’s consider a twist to the narrative. Imagine Smith also owns an Armani jacket. And despite all of the evidence, it is actually Smith who got the job—he misheard the boss, the letter congratulating Jones was for a different Jones and a different promotion, and the new plaque was for the other Jones and her new office. Does Smith know that the ...