cheese it, the cops!

Marian and Me

In Marian David's "Truth as the Epistemic Goal" (which is in a collection of papers on normative epistemology and truth, wherein the swamping problem is already central, or in some sense gives rise to the questions [Knowledge, Truth, and Duty: Essays on Epistemic Justification, Responsibility, and Virtue (Oxford 2001)]), she formulates the swamping problem:

Given the truth-goal-oriented approach to justification with justification understood as a means to that goal . . . it is now hard to see how justification could be anything but a constitutive means to that goal, which will make justification collapse into truth. (161)

footnote: More or less related argument are found in Sartwell (1992) (although he handles these issues rather oddly, by my lights); Depaul (1993), chap. 2.4; and Maitzen (1995).

So again, I seem first here, odd though I am. I'm going to have a look at Depaul. Also she discusses Richard Foley around these issues, and if I recall correctly Foley and I corresponded some about this in the early '90s. So I'll have a look there too. I am telling you that all roads lead back, though.

Just for the hell of it: David's wedge is to assert that it's not plausible that truth is always the ultimate goal in believing. My answer to that was in the first chapter of my unpublished book (written in '91 as I was also writing the papers). Truth as a goal is built into the nature of belief. You believe p iff you take p to be true. That's why epistemology is fundamentally 'teleological' or 'instrumentalist.'

I've put Knowledge Without Justification up as a pdf.

So as I catch up, a couple of bald assertions: (1) Anything that could plausibly count as an epistemic virtue will have be truth-conducive; (2) Social factors such as being authorized within a community or engaging its consensus are neither here nor there: irrelevant to truth and to knowledge. Here's my paper "Anti-Social Epistemology" (2015).

 

 

k=tb and standards of theory choice

just to begin the re-defense of 'knowledge is merely true belief': say you had some commitment to economy, ockham's razor, the simplest law-like explanation for apparently disparate phenomena. (that's supposedly stephen hawking's first criterion of theory choice, e.g.) don't you think you should see how far you can get with k=tb? not going to find a simpler among the proposed theories of knowledge, i believe (truly).

 

[nuthin, i just love this song.]

Swampin with Wayne Riggs

Again, I want to say that I haven't accused anyone except Zagzebski of plagiarism. Another person mentioned by Pritchard as a source of the swamping problem is Wayne Riggs, the chair at Oklahoma who according to Zagzebski said that I sent him a threatening email, which is demonstrably false. That got me threatened with arrest and held to be insane. That Riggs shows up again here as someone who's fundamental to the swamping problem is really quite the little coincidence.

At any rate, in Reliability and the Value of Knowledge (Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, January 2002), he attributes the problem to Ward Jones, who certainly got it from me, and to Zagzebski (however, to an earlier book [Virtues of the Mind] and paper ['From Reliabilism to Virtue Epistemology']), and to Kvanvig (see note, p. 80). Like everyone else, starting with me, he saw that it was a fundamental challenge to reliabilism.

But obviously Riggs could really have gotten it from Jones and Zagzebski, and I don't see any cut-and-paste, etc. Still there too it derives from me, I believe, because at a minimum it derives from Jones and Zagzebski, who got it from me. 

counter-consensus as a contribution

One thing about the swamping problem: whatever you may think of the thesis that knowledge is merely true belief, I don't think that anyone could have come up with the problem unless they had been focused very critically on the function of justification, someone who was skeptical about regarding justification as necessary for knowledge. And I think that perverse as the position was, it has turned out to be of use to the profession!

That is what I do, I feel, better than anyone working, more or less. I'm not necessarily smarter than the average analytic epistemologist, and i do make mistakes. But I focus on counter-consensus moves kind of automatically. So, if you want to remake part of a discipline or a topic, try this: what are the first few ground-clearing intuitions/assumptions that make everything else possible? These are often inadequately or not even argued for, and often I find when I think about it a little, I don't think they're obvious or even true at all.

That's how I did the swamping problem in Cargile's seminar at UVA, probably '87. I was probing for the assumption that would give a lever (and show my cleverness and profundity, etc). So we did Alvin Goldman's reliabilism, and something just seemed sort of off to me, like that's really just redundant: knowledge is a true belief that is reached by a reliable method for reaching...true belief. Well, what are we after then? What's our goal? Obviously or explicitly just true belief, so the method is merely instrumental to the real admitted telos. Then I started trying to generalize it and that's how I found all those quotes from Bonjour, Moser, Armstrong that Zagzebski and Jones recycled. Without that sort of reasoning, or to save some pet version of justification, no one would ever have generated the swamping problem.

Also I would say you better get out of a narrow frame. Actually, what was driving me was Kierkegaard; I thought that analytic epistemology just deployed definitionally a cult of reason that was really impoverishing and unrealistic. That's why I wanted to delete the justification condition in the first place. No one conducts their epistemic lives in the way the analytic trad suggests we all ought to; and anyone who did would just be gross and inhuman. So that's what made me probe for weaknesses. Ask any of these other alleged originators how and why they thought of this... 

So a more recent version of this move is that I assert that free will is not required for moral responsibility. I submitted it here and there with no luck; still getting the 'that's ridiculous' response. But it will be in the ethics chapter of Entanglements. If nothing else, it will really press people in the free will problem to think hard about the initial assumptions. I think it could make a positive difference and I think again that it will be vindicated.

in the swamp with kvanvig

Another locus classicus of the swamping problem is Jonathan Kvanvig's The Value of Knowledge and The Pursuit of Understanding (2003) (here it is on amazon). Kvanvig does much better: he sets the whole thing up as an attempt to deal with the problem I raised (i.e. the swamping problem). Man, I really should have been paying attention! But then by the time you get to Pritchard and Turri's Stanford Encyclopedia article, I've dropped out of the bibliographies. I'll have a look at some of Kvanvig's earlier papers.

When I finally get back up to speed, I'll make this sucker stick against virtue epistemology and all the other alleged answers. K=TB, baby. 

One way this happened, I think, was that everyone agreed that my position was ridiculous (and like I say many of the eminences of epistemology gathered at at APA in '92 or '93 and tried to crush it). One problem was that if I was right, the whole of analytic epistemology after Gettier was kind of a waste of time; I thought my position  was a fun and useful provocation, but I can see how people might not want that, and the book was never published (originally I submitted it to the same Cambridge series that eventually did Kvanvig).

 But then again, my argument did present one fundamental challenge: the 'swamping problem' or 'the problem of the value of knowledge.' For one thing, it just destroyed reliabilism. So people managed to absorb that, then maybe thought they'd be discredited by association with my insane conclusion? Everyone who tried to answer the problem or build on it, including Kvanvig, Jones, and Zagzebski, answered it on behalf of JTB or used it to build toward relatively fresh but not apparently bizarre conclusions (the way it drove virtue epistemology as a theory of justification). So that was a lot more palatable to everyone, and they wanted to forget where I drove it, so they wanted to forget where it came from.

Anyway, I am going to arm up (as it were) and reassert that (propositional) knowledge is merely true belief against all comers, virtuous, social, and whatnot. Then you can repress it again, so it might take another century or so, but finally people will capitulate to the obvious, no matter whom they attribute it to. One remark: the reason people have such strong 'intuitions' that knowledge requires more than truth and belief is because for a philosophy prof, whatever they said in intro when you were 18 is a baseline truth you remember from before birth. Guess what? There is no such intuition.