Preface to the Second Edition

This book is intended for those following introductory undergraduate modules in Epistemology or the Theory of Knowledge, and for those studying the Theory of Knowledge component of the Philosophy A and AS level and the International Baccalaureate. I hope, though, that its readership is wider. Epistemology is one of the central areas of philosophy and anyone with an interest in philosophy would hopefully find this book rewarding.

Throughout the book I have used examples from literature and film (particularly the latter). Knowledge of films and novels is often common currency, and in lectures and seminars this can lead to animated discussion of the philosophical aspects of the plot or characterization of a particular work. Such cross-fertilization should be encouraged. Philosophy should not be seen as a dry academic discipline divorced from everyday life. There are times in its history when this has been the case: there is the clichéd image of medieval philosophers using arcane arguments to determine how many angels could stand on a pinhead. And, if you turn to certain contemporary journals, you will find that many research papers are just as inaccessible and idiosyncratic. There is a danger of philosophy becoming professionalized; inaccessible and uninteresting to those outside of university philosophy departments. The philosophical problems at which we shall look are ones concerning knowledge – that everyday notion – and these are problems that have been discussed for thousands of years, problems that can be illuminated by the great philosophers of the past such as Plato, Descartes and Hume, and by looking at the works of writers and filmmakers who are themselves exercised, perhaps indirectly, by the very same issues.

Questions are included at the end of each chapter to encourage you to engage critically with the material. (Instructors could use these as essay questions or as discussion topics in seminars.) And, as you progress through the book, you should be thinking up your own examples and counterexamples, assessing whether the arguments discussed are good ones, and reflecting on whether you understand the various issues and concepts that are presented. You should also note that there is a Glossary included at the end of the book in which certain key terms are explained; these terms are flagged in bold when they first appear.

In general I have tried to be neutral, not advocating a particular epistemological theory, and presenting the reader with various alternative responses to the problems that we discuss. In places, though, my preference for a certain approach may show through. This, however, is not a bad thing. First, a consistent attempt not to endorse a particular position can lead to a lot of hedging: too much ‘seems to’, ‘can be seen as’, ‘some have argued that …’. This can be stylistically clumsy. Second, you should always bear in mind that these debates are very much alive and, in places, you can – and should – disagree with me; in doing so, you are being a philosopher.

I would like to thank certain friends who read and commented on complete drafts of the book. Bernadette Evans suggested various stylistic and substantive changes to the text, and had a keen eye for inconsistencies (for where, as Lou Reed would say, ‘he was a she’). Discussions with Dr Martin Hall have shaped much of the book, particularly chapter 6 – we have been arguing over foundationalism for almost a decade now. Particular thanks to Matthew Gidley since, not being a philosopher, he claimed not to understand a word of the book and, throughout his editing, to have the expression of a dog that’s just been told a joke. (This is actually a very Wittgensteinian line, although I mustn’t tell him this as he already calls the book ‘an extended argument for National Service’.) Various readers of the Philos-L mailing list suggested useful examples, and thanks to Max Kolbel, Lawrence Goldstein and Rob Hopkins for commenting on particular chapters. Thanks also to Elizabeth Molinari, Ellen McKinlay, Emma Hutchinson, Andrea Drugan and John Thompson at Polity and to two anonymous reviewers. This book would not have been written but for the encouragement and support of Greg McCulloch and Harold Noonan during my postgraduate study. Most influential to my interest in epistemology and to much of the content of the book have been my students. The ‘Theory of Empirical Knowledge’ could, I admit, sound rather dry – less engaging than Existentialism, perhaps, or the Philosophy of Mind, or Aesthetics – but the interest shown by a great many of these students, and their contributions in class, have made this module, dare I say it, fun. This book hopes to carry on in the spirit of these classes.

It’s now almost exactly ten years on from the night I was completing the manuscript of what was my first book. On reading the first edition again it was surprising to see how certain things had dated and how some examples were now stale. Thus, for the second edition, David Beckham, Michael Owen and John McEnroe had to go – fame is short. My references to ‘The Internet’ and the ‘World Wide Web’ also carried a sense that these were new and exciting, that I had just discovered that they may be useful for academic study, and the fear that one could be led astray by the evil Wikipedia. All this seems rather quaint now.

Something else I did not expect was how nostalgic the process became. Many of my examples are autobiographical and reading it again brought back my life of a decade ago – my persistent colds (we now have central heating), the sound of lorries from the supermarket behind the flat where I used to live, and my Saturday morning breakfasts of chana puri. The battered blue corduroys are now no more, but the red hole punch is still on my desk – an apt madeleine for an academic. From the new additions you may deduce that I have now moved to the suburbs: gardening and neighbours taking the place of bars and concerts.

For this opportunity to revise my book, and for this journey back in time, I have to thank Emma Hutchinson, Pascal Porcheron and Ellen MacDonald-Kramer at Polity for encouraging me to write this second edition. I now say much more about scepticism, there being a new chapter (chapter 10) devoted to contextualism and invariantism, and a section on Pyrrhonism. I also sketch recent developments in social epistemology (chapter 5) and virtue epistemology (chapters 8 and 15). Few paragraphs were left untouched by red ink. Hume reports that he greatly enjoyed such tweaking and, as a good Humean, I do too.

Thanks are also due to my colleagues at Oxford Brookes – Mark Cain, Stephen Boulter and Bev Clack – for their academic support and friendship, to Lorenzo Greco and Constantine Sandis for sharing coffees and pizzas, and to the European Epistemology Network for running conferences that keep me up to date with all things epistemological, and that allow me to watch football tournaments in the sun (Euro2012 in Bologna; World Cup 2014 in Madrid; bring on Euro2016 in Paris!). Closer to home, thanks are also due to the Priory Road Posse – Betty; Alison, Mary and Betsy; and Betty and Larry – for their watchful eye over our growing cat colony. Henry is our only cat who has left his footprints on the drafts of both editions, but Aristotle, Philo, Cleanthes and Berkeley have enjoyed the logburner being stoked late into the night as I have been completing this second edition. Most of all, thanks to Lucy and Dylan for … well, everything – everything that’s important, anyway. And, a final thanks to Paul, for his friendship and help over the years – we will miss him.

1
The Theory of Knowledge

1 Epistemology

The Theory of Knowledge asks certain very general and very fundamental questions about knowers and knowledge. What is it to know? How is knowledge distinct from mere belief? Is knowledge possible? The Theory of Knowledge is also referred to as epistemology, from the Greek word for knowledge, ‘episteme’. Epistemology has a long history: in working through this book you will become engaged in a dialogue that has gone on for well over two thousand years. In the next chapter we shall begin our analysis of knowledge by turning to Plato (c. 428–347 BCE), and throughout our investigations we shall look at what important thinkers of the past have said: René Descartes (1596–1650) and David Hume (1711–1776) will have a high profile. Epistemology remains an area of vibrant research, and many of the positions and theories at which we shall look have emerged in the last few decades. This continued interest in epistemology is a reflection of the immense importance of knowledge in our lives. First, it is instrumentally useful: with scientific knowledge, for example, we hope to explain, control and predict the behaviour of the natural world. Second, even where knowledge has no practical use, we have the attitude that it is still something desirable to obtain. It is good in itself. After a criminal in the film Dirty Harry (1971) has given up his gun to Inspector Harry Callahan, he wants to know whether Harry had any bullets left in his gun or whether he was bluffing – ‘I gots to know’. This information will be of no use to him – he is now arrested, regardless – but it is nevertheless knowledge that he seeks.

Epistemology and Metaphysics are the two central topics of Philosophy. The former concerns the nature and possibility of knowledge; the latter concerns the nature of what exists. Metaphysical questions include: Are there things that are non-physical? Are there any other minds in existence apart from your own? And does God exist? We shall see that all of these issues intersect with our epistemological investigations. Along with epistemology, then, we shall be studying some metaphysics. Epistemology is also intimately related to other areas of philosophy, and we shall be introduced to issues in the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of religion, and ethics.

2 The Structure of the Book

2.1 Part I: Introduction to knowledge

To study any topic, we must first have a preliminary idea of the kind of things we are going to investigate. Biologists must know what they are talking about when referring to ‘armadillos’, ‘cells’ or ‘mitochondria’. Similarly the epistemologist: she, however, is concerned with such notions as knowledge, justification and belief, and with how they are related. Here and in the next chapter we shall start to look at just what we mean by ‘knowledge’, and in the rest of the book we shall investigate the nature of knowledge and the problems associated with it. Our primary concern will be with factual knowledge. I can know that Glasgow is in Scotland, that it was Descartes who wrote the Meditations, and that Bernice bobs her hair. Such knowledge is sometimes called ‘knowledge that’ or ‘propositional knowledge’; ‘propositional’ because it’s expressed in terms of the knowledge I have of certain true propositions or thoughts: I know that the proposition Glasgow is in Scotland is true. As well as with the words, ‘knows that’, factual knowledge is also expressed using such locutions as ‘knows why’, ‘knows where’, ‘knows when’, ‘knows whether’, ‘knows who’, and ‘knows what’. Such ways of speaking indicate that you know certain facts: in knowing where I left my keys, I know that they are in the coffee shop; in knowing when the programme starts, I know that it starts at 9 o’clock. Such knowledge can also be expressed without using the word ‘know’ at all. I could say that ‘My keys are in the café over there’ or that ‘The programme starts now’. These statements are nevertheless expressions of factual knowledge.

There are other kinds of knowledge apart from factual knowledge. One is know-how: I know how to ride a bike and how to make a Tequila Sunrise cocktail. This is sometimes called ‘ability knowledge’. We need to be a little careful here since I can have such knowledge without actually possessing the relevant ability. Practical constraints may prevent me from exercising a certain ability even though I know how it should be done: I may have temporarily lost my sense of balance and thus cannot ride my bike, or I may have run out of grenadine and so right now I cannot make a Tequila Sunrise. Knowing how to do certain things can involve the possession of factual knowledge. If I know how to play snooker, I must know that the blue ball has a points value of five, and that a red ball must be potted before I can pot a colour. However, in order to have other abilities, I do not require knowledge of any facts. I know how to perform such basic actions as walking, swimming and speaking without knowing that I move my body or mouth in a particular way: I can have know-how without the relevant propositional knowledge.

A third type of knowledge is knowledge by acquaintance. I know a certain person because I’ve met her; I know that melody because I’ve heard it before; and I know Yosemite National Park because I’ve been there. I can have such knowledge without knowing any facts about these things. I can, for example, know that melody without knowing what it is called, or without having any further beliefs about it at all; I just know it. Other languages use a different word to talk about this kind of knowledge. In French, ‘savoir’ is to have factual knowledge, whereas ‘connaître’ is to have knowledge by acquaintance. In German the two relevant verbs are ‘wissen’ and ‘kennen’. Knowledge, then, can involve acquaintance; various practical, intellectual and physical skills; and the knowledge of certain truths or facts. This book is mainly concerned with the latter kind of knowledge.

2.2 Part II: Sources of knowledge

We acquire factual knowledge in various ways. I can come to know certain truths just by thinking about the issue in question. I know that there are no triangles with as many sides as a square. I do not have to draw lots of triangles and squares to know that this is so; I simply have to use my powers of reasoning. Such knowledge is called a priori (meaning before experience) and it will be the subject of chapter 3. The main focus of the book, however, will be knowledge that is acquired through experience, or what is called empirical or a posteriori knowledge (meaning after experience). There are two sources of such knowledge: it is acquired either through perceiving the world for ourselves (chapter 4), or by listening to what others have to say or reading what they have written (chapter 5).

2.3 Part III: Justification

Knowledge has traditionally been seen as involving justification: if I am to have knowledge, I must have true beliefs and I must have good reason or justification for holding them. In part III we shall focus on this key notion of justification. First, though, we must be careful to distinguish the epistemic sense of ‘justification’ from certain other uses of the term. The basic idea – and one that we shall go on to develop (and question) – is that my beliefs are epistemically justified if I have good reason to think that they are true.

The basic role of justification is that of a means to truth … If epistemic justification were not conducive to truth …, if finding epistemically justified beliefs did not substantially increase the likelihood of finding true ones, then epistemic justification would be irrelevant to our main cognitive goal and of dubious worth. (BonJour, 1985, pp. 7–8)

There are, however, non-epistemic ways of assessing beliefs. The possession of certain beliefs may bring me success in various ways. Some people believe that positive thinking can aid recovery from illness. If I think in this way, then I may cope better when I am ill (even if such beliefs are false). There is therefore a sense in which such thinking is justified given the benefits it brings to my state of mind. One could call this pragmatic justification as opposed to epistemic justification. There is a philosophical argument for believing in the existence of God that relies on such a notion of justification, one that we shall discuss in chapter 16, section 4. The key to the argument is that we should believe in God, not because there is good evidence of his existence, but because of the rewards such a belief would bring if it turned out to be true; we would, for instance, have eternal life in paradise.

There are also other species of justification that must be distinguished from the epistemic notion. We may have what could be called ‘after the fact’ justification. In the play A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley Kowalski thinks that he survived the battle of Salerno because he believed he was lucky.

Stanley: You know what luck is? Luck is believing you’re lucky. Take at Salerno. I believed I was lucky. I figured that 4 out of 5 would not come through but I would … and I did. I put that down as a rule. To hold front position in this rat-race you’ve got to believe you are lucky. (T. Williams, 1962, p. 216)

He did survive and so there is a sense in which his belief was justified, justified in that it came true. He was not, however, epistemically justified since he didn’t have a good reason to believe that he would be one of the lucky survivors – his odds were not good (as he admits); he simply had faith. There may also be broadly ethical reasons for holding certain beliefs. It could be said that you are justified in believing what your friend says, simply because she is your friend. Here we may not be talking about either pragmatic or epistemic justification: there may be nothing in it for you, and she may not be very reliable. There is nevertheless a sense in which you are right to accept what she says. We must be careful, then, to focus on the kind of justification that is ‘conducive to truth’, and not on these non-epistemic forms (although we shall see in chapter 10, section 4 that some philosophers have recently argued that the pragmatic ‘encroaches’ on the epistemic).

We shall look at two debates concerning epistemic justification. First, one relating to its source. Empiricists argue that the justification for all our beliefs is grounded in our perceptual experience of the world. They are foundationalists because such experience provides the justificatory foundations for all of our empirical beliefs (chapter 6). Coherentists deny this claim. For them, a particular belief is justified if it fits in well with the rest of our beliefs; experience does not play a justificatory role (chapter 7). Second, we shall consider the debate between internalism and externalism. Traditionally, knowledge consists in justified true belief and, for a belief to be justified, a thinker must be capable of reflecting on the reasons why her belief is likely to be true. This is an internalist claim: what distinguishes knowledge from true belief is something that is cognitively accessible to the thinker. Recently, however, externalists have rejected this approach. They claim that a thinker need not be capable of reflecting upon what it is that distinguishes her knowledge from true belief (chapter 8).

2.4 Part IV: Scepticism

In parts I, II and III of the book it is assumed that we do have empirical knowledge, and we investigate the kind of justification our beliefs must have for this to be so. In part IV, however, this assumption will be questioned. There are certain ‘sceptical’ arguments that threaten all our claims to knowledge. Scepticism can be local in that it can concern a particular kind of fact: there are those, for example, who claim that we cannot have knowledge of the future. It can also be global, the claim being that we cannot have any knowledge of the world at all. Descartes puts forward an argument to this conclusion and, after him, epistemology became the central discipline in philosophy – its primary task being to ease the sceptical concerns that he had voiced. In chapters 9 and 10 we shall turn to Cartesian scepticism (‘Cartesian’ meaning from Descartes), and we shall consider some of the attempts that have been made to refute it. As we shall see, Descartes himself was not a sceptic: he provided a refutation of his own scepticism. Most, though, do not find his positive arguments persuasive. In chapter 11 we shall look at Hume’s argument for the claim that we do not have knowledge of the unobserved. Unlike Descartes, he does not think that his scepticism can be refuted. The lesson he takes from this is that we should not concern ourselves with providing a philosophical account of how our empirical thinking can be justified – it cannot; instead, we should pursue the scientific task of providing a causal account of how we have the beliefs that we do. Such a strategy can be seen as inspiring the modern project of Naturalizing Epistemology (chapter 12).

To reflect both the historical and methodological importance of Cartesian scepticism, textbooks and courses in epistemology often start with this topic. I, however, shall take a different tack. The spectre of scepticism is raised in part IV of the book, after we have discussed the sources of knowledge and the structure and nature of justification. The reason for this approach is twofold. First, no one actually believes the sceptical arguments: ‘“the sceptic” is just a literary conceit, a personification of certain challenging arguments, rather than a real-life opponent’ (M. Williams, 2001, p. 10). The issue of scepticism is rather paradoxical: the Cartesian and Humean arguments are logically persuasive – the reasoning appears sound (see inference) – yet the sceptical conclusions reached are psychologically very difficult to accept. Second, I have found that a certain unhelpful attitude can be fostered if one turns to scepticism first. If you are persuaded by the Cartesian arguments – and you cannot find a way to refute them – then there is the danger that you may not take the Theory of Knowledge seriously: ‘If we cannot have any knowledge, then what’s the point of studying such a notion?’ In this book, however, we shall investigate such notions as perception, testimony, and justification in the spirit of seeing how they ground knowledge, knowledge that it is assumed we possess. As one progresses through the book, sceptical concerns may start to seep in, finding their full voice in part IV. By this time, though, we shall have acquired a rich conception of the relevant epistemological notions; this will allow us both a better understanding of scepticism and of how it may be countered.

2.5 Part V: Areas of knowledge

Finally, we shall consider the epistemic role of memory (chapter 13), and whether we can have knowledge of the minds of others (chapter 14), morality (chapter 15), and God (chapter 16). The primary purpose of these concluding chapters is to illuminate further the epistemological notions introduced in the first four parts of the book; we shall look again, then, at the sources of knowledge, at justification, and at scepticism. These chapters will also act as useful introductions to the philosophy of mind, ethics, and the philosophy of religion.

3 Further Reading and Study

At the end of each chapter I shall suggest some further reading for you to explore. This will be of various kinds. Most philosophy is first published not in books but in journals. The following journals, among many others, regularly publish important articles in the field of epistemology: The Journal of Philosophy, Analysis, Philosophical Review, Noûs, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, Philosophical Quarterly and Philosophical Papers. Most titles are now available electronically and you should ask your library how you can access them in this form. Useful online resources include databases of research papers: two of the most comprehensive are philpapers.org and academia.edu. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu) and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (iep.utm. edu) are both excellent. Philosophy blogs often run discussions of epistemological questions and it’s worth looking in from time to time at dailynous.com and leiterreports.typepad.com. Blogs and websites devoted to epistemology include:

Keith DeRose’s Epistemology Page: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~kd47/e-page.htm

The Epistemology Research Guide: http:www.ucs.louisiana.edu/~kak7409/EpistemologicalResearch.htm

Epistemic Value blog: http://epistemicvaluestirling.blogspot.co.uk

Certain Doubts: http://certaindoubts.com

Collections or anthologies of key articles are also very helpful. In the Further Reading sections I shall point you towards those that are focused on particular issues, and here are some general anthologies that cover most of the topics from parts I–IV of this book.

S. Bernecker and D. Pritchard (eds), Routledge Companion to Epistemology (2011)
S. Bernecker and F. Dretske (eds), Knowledge: Readings in Contemporary Epistemology (2000)
J. Greco and E. Sosa (eds), Blackwell Companion to Epistemology (1999)
L. Pojman (ed.), The Theory of Knowledge: Classic and Contemporary Readings (2003)
L. Alcoff (ed.), Epistemology: The Big Questions (1998)
M. Huemer (ed.), Epistemology: Contemporary Readings (2001)
E. Sosa, J. Kim, J. Fantl and M. McGrath (eds), Epistemology: An Anthology (2008). John Turri’s Epistemology: A Guide (2014) is an excellent accompaniment to this anthology in which he provides commentary on each of its sixty papers.

Good textbooks provide both a summary of the key issues and philosophical insight of their own. This is the aim of my book, and the following are recommended for this reason.

R. Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (2010)
J. Dancy, Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology (1985)
N. Everitt and A. Fisher, Modern Epistemology: A New Introduction (1995)
A. Morton, A Guide Through the Theory of Knowledge (2002)
M. Williams, Problems of Knowledge: A Critical Introduction to Epistemology (2001)
D. Pritchard, What is this Thing Called Knowledge? (2014)
R. Fumerton, Epistemology (2006)
R. Feldman, Epistemology (2002)
J. Crumley, Introduction to Epistemology (2009)
N. Lemos, An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (2007)
D. Pritchard, Knowledge (2009)
R. Martin, Epistemology (2010)

J. Dancy and E. Sosa (eds), A Companion to Epistemology (1992) is also a useful encyclopaedia containing short entries on all the important issues and figures that we shall discuss, and Nagel’s Knowledge: A Very Short Introduction (2014) is engaging and informative.

Dedication

An Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge