Truth and Epistemic Norms: Introduction

Synthese DOI 10.1007/s11229-017-1352-9 INTRODUCTION Received: 9 February 2017 / Accepted: 21 February 2017 © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2017 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 On his 60th birthday Pascal Engel was presented with a collection of more than fifty papers authored by prestigious philosophers that reflected his long career of promotion and development of analytic philosophy in and out of Europe.1 This special issue brings together a selection of those papers centred on the topics of truth and epistemic norms. The papers are followed by replies from Pascal Engel. Normative questions in epistemology have been a longstanding focus of Pascal Engel’s research (see e.g. Engel 1991; Engel and Rorty 2007). A central question has been whether and in what sense truth is a norm for belief (Engel 2005, 2013a, b, c). A parallel question arises for assertion and inquiry (Engel 2008). Three of the collection’s papers deal with these issues. In “Engel vs. Rorty on Truth”, Erick Olsson’s focuses on whether rational inquiry aims at truth. The article critically assesses the debate opposing Engel and Rorty in their co-authored book ‘What’s the Use of Truth?’. unc orre cted 1 pro Julien Dutant1 · Davide Fassio2,3 · Anne Meylan4 of Author Proof Introduction 1 Dutant, J., Fassio D. and Meylan A. (eds.) Liber Amicorum Pascal Engel, University of Geneva, http:// www.unige.ch/lettres/philo/publications/engel/liberamicorum. The paper is the introduction to the Synthese Special Issue “Truth and Epistemic Norms”. B Davide Fassio davidefassio@gmail.com Julien Dutant julien.dutant@kcl.ac.uk Anne Meylan anne.meylan@unibas.ch 1 King’s College London, London, UK 2 University of Southampton, Southampton, UK 3 Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China 4 University of Basel, Basel, Switzerland 123 Journal: 11229-SYNT Article No.: 1352 TYPESET ! DISK LE CP Disp.:2017/3/3 Pages: 5 Layout: Small-X 1 Synthese 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 of Author Proof 15 Olsson sides with Engel in maintaining that truth plays a distinct conceptual role in our intellectual lives. Drawing on a general theory of rational goal-setting which has its roots in management science, Olsson argues that Rorty’s central claim that truth is not something we should aim for over and beyond justification rests on a principle of goal-setting rationality that is generally invalid. Olsson concludes by stressing that the goal of truth is likely to have the positive effect of increasing motivation and effort in inquiry, and that this may offset the drawbacks that Rorty calls attention to. In “Engel on Doxastic Correctness”, Conor McHugh raises two worries for Pascal Engel’s views on the norms for belief. Engel distinguishes two types of correctness, “e-correctness” and “i-correctness”, and says that a belief is e-correct if and only if it is true and it is i-correct when it is held for good reasons, on the basis of sufficient evidence; a belief is correct simpliciter if it is both e-correct and i-correct. McHugh argues instead that i-correctness is not a genuine kind of correctness. Furthermore, Engel defends the view that doxastic correctness is not a doxastic notion (permission or obligation) but an ideal of reason that belongs to the category of “ought to be” as opposed to “oughtto-do”. McHugh provides several challenges to that view. He concludes by exploring an alternative approach to the nature of correctness’ normativity. He suggests that correctness is a sui generis normative property, neither deontic nor evaluative, related to the notion of fittingness (see further McHugh 2014). In “Engel on Knowledge and Assertion”, Adam Carter argues against both the assumption that knowledge is the only norm of assertion (the so-called “uniqueness hypothesis”) and against the view that knowledge constitutes a sufficient credential for assertion. Building on Lackey’s (2008) Doctor Case, Carter presents another widespread range of cases in which knowledge would not make the assertion appropriate. Cases of “epistemic hypocrisy”—as Carter calls them—are cases in which the target assertion is criticisable. What would make the epistemically hypocritical assertion appropriate is that one had better epistemic support than one does when one asserts. One point of entry into the question of what epistemic norms govern belief is to ask what are the epistemic goods, that is, what is of epistemic value. Two central issues in this are whether knowledge has more value than true belief and whether the value of either is derived from their contribution to successful action. In “Engel on Pragmatic Encroachment and Epistemic Value”, Duncan Pritchard takes up Engel’s view on the latter (Engel 2009). While Pritchard agrees with Engel’s rejection of the idea that knowledge is sensitive to pragmatic factors, he criticizes Engel’s way of relating pragmatic encroachment to the issues that regard epistemic value. According to Engel, once we grant that there is no such phenomenon as pragmatic encroachment on knowledge, then it follows that the kind of pragmatic factors appealed to by proponents of this view cannot confer any value on knowledge. Pritchard argues that this latter claim is mistaken: the kind of pragmatic factors appealed to by proponents of pragmatic encroachment could potentially have a role to play in determining the value of knowledge without this having any bearing on whether the pragmatic encroachment applies or not. According to Pritchard, Engel’s mistake is to be located in the failure to observe an ambiguity between an attributive and a predicative interpretation of the notion of epistemic value. We can maintain that pragmatic factors add value to knowledge without having to accept pragmatic encroachment as long as we make it clear that we are talking of epistemic value in its predicative sense (the value of the epistemic as pro 14 unc orre cted 13 123 Journal: 11229-SYNT Article No.: 1352 TYPESET ! DISK LE CP Disp.:2017/3/3 Pages: 5 Layout: Small-X Synthese 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 of Author Proof 61 62 opposed to a distinctively epistemic kind of value). Thus, Pritchard argues, it is possible to reject pragmatic encroachment on knowledge while holding that pragmatic factors explain the value of knowledge. In “Commodious Knowledge”, Christopher Kelp and Mona Simion put forward a new account of the value of knowledge that builds on the idea that knowledge is useful for action. Knowledge, they argue, is like water in that it is a widely and readily available commodity. Like mere true beliefs or Gettierized true beliefs, knowledge is instrumentally good in virtue of involving a correct representation of the world. However, they argue, knowledge is superior because of its commodity: like water, it is readily and widely available. According to them, the superior value of knowledge lies precisely in its being a way of correctly representing the world that is much more readily available than alternative epistemic goods. While the foregoing papers concern what we may see as the analogue of “metaethics” for epistemology, the next two take up the ‘first-order’ questions of what, specifically, we should believe, both on ordinary matters and on academic ones. On ordinary matters, Engel has sympathies with the common sense tradition (Engel 2007). On academic matters, Engel has forcefully defended a rationalist ideal against various intellectual trends that “betray” it – to put it in the words of Julien Benda, whose legacy Engel has recently highlighted (Engel 2012). In “Common Sense and Skepticism”, Keith Lehrer spells out his own defense of a common sense answer to skepticism. He first compares the defense of common sense provided by Thomas Reid to that of G.E. Moore against the skepticism of David Hume. The discussion sets the stage for Lehrer’s own defense, which relies on an account of ordinary knowledge that combines Hume’s notion of sense impressions with Reid’s insistence on the trustworthiness of our faculties. In “Tool-Box or Toy-Box? Hard Obscurantism in Economic Modeling?”, Jon Elster points out that alongside the kind of “soft obscurantist” anti-rationalist trends of academia that Engel denounces, there exists a kind of “hard obscurantism” in the social sciences that abuses the tools of rational inquiry in the “hard” sciences such as quantitative, formal, and mathematical methods. In the writing of some economists and political scientists, Elster claims, such tools loose their explanatory function and become research goals in themselves—“toys”. Elster makes his case by criticizing some representative examples. Two further papers focus on how knowledge relates to true belief and perception, respectively. In “Knowledge as de re true belief?”, Paul Egré discusses Kratzer (2002)’s account of knowledge as a form of de re belief of facts and examines how best to articulate the de re versus de dicto distinction within this account. He shows that, contrary to Kratzer’s view, the distinction does not require postulating a primitive difference between facts and true propositions but can be fully captured in terms of mechanisms of binding and scope. Egré argues that if one adopts this articulation of the distinction, one can use the account to explain the original pair of Gettier cases. However, Egré also recognizes that the account provides at best partial truth conditions for knowledge, for it cannot be generalized to explain Ginet-Goldman cases of causally connected but unreliable belief, as well as other cases similar to Gettier’s original ones but in which it is not clear that a de re connection to a fact is missing. Egré also suggests that the de re belief analysis provides a way to spell out Starmans and Friedman’s (2012) distinction between apparent evidence and authentic evidence, which he takes to be the crux of the original Gettier cases. In “Knowledge, pro 60 unc orre cted 59 123 Journal: 11229-SYNT Article No.: 1352 TYPESET ! DISK LE CP Disp.:2017/3/3 Pages: 5 Layout: Small-X Synthese 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 2 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 of Author Proof 107 108 perception, and the art of camouflage”, Jérôme Dokic provides an original challenge to the Epistemic Conception of Perception (ECP) according to which perception either is a form of knowledge (Dretske 1969; Williamson 2000) or puts the subject in a position to gain knowledge about what is perceived (McDowell 1994, 1998). Against this view, Dokic puts forward a particular case in which a perceptual experience has propositional content and is veridical but fails to yield knowledge of the state of affairs presented by the experience. The case involves perceptual hysteresis, an empirically well-studied phenomenon involving the maintenance of a perceptual experience with a relatively stable content over progressively degrading sensory stimulations. In such cases, Dokic argues, the boundary between the experience being veridical and it being non-veridical does not coincide with the boundary between knowledge and ignorance. Dokic concludes by addressing three possible rejoinders by the defenders of ECP. The nature of truth itself has been one of Engel’s main research topics (e.g. Engel 1991, 2002). In particular, Engel opposes a “functionalist” account on which truth is characterized by a functional role that is realized by different properties in different domains (Engel 2002, 2013b). In “How to Account for the Oddness of Missing-Link Conditionals”, Igor Douven puts forwards a functionalist account of the truth of conditionals. His starting point is the perceived oddity of “missing-link” conditionals, conditionals whose antecedent and consequent lack any apparent connection. On the standard account the phenomenon is a pragmatic ones: roughly, the assertion of a conditional generates the implicature that there is an internal connection between antecedent and consequent, and if no such connection exists, the assertion is infelicitous (though not necessarily false). Douven draws on recent philosophical and psychological work to provide a semantic account instead. The central idea is that the connection between antecedent and consequent is a functional property, which can be realized by a variety of more specific, first-order relations. He focuses in particular on the “inferentialist” account proposed in Krzyzanowska et al. (2014), according to which the truth of a conditional requires the existence of a connector that may be realized by inferential relations of different nature: deductive, inductive or abductive. While the present collection falls well short of covering all the research areas Pascal Engel has contributed to, we hope that it highlights some of the most central ones. In his replies to each of the papers, Pascal Engel strikes us as exemplifying the openmindedness, intellectual rigor and good spirit that has inspired us as his students and junior colleagues. pro 106 unc orre cted 105 145 Acknowledgements We would like to thank the authors and the reviewers for their work on this issue as well as Pascal Engel for comments on the introduction and his work on the replies. Julien Dutant’s work was supported by the SNSF Research Project “Knowledge, Rationality and Choice” (PAOOP1-145323). Davide Fassio’s work was supported by the SNSF research projects ‘Knowledge-Based Accounts of Rationality’ (100018_144403) and ‘The Unity of Reasons (P300P1_164569). Anne Meylan’s work was supported by the SNSF Research Project “Cognitive Irrationality” (PPOOP1_157436). We are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation for supporting this research. 146 References 139 140 141 142 143 144 147 148 Dretske, F. (1969). Seeing and knowing. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Engel, P. (1991). The norm of truth. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 123 Journal: 11229-SYNT Article No.: 1352 TYPESET ! DISK LE CP Disp.:2017/3/3 Pages: 5 Layout: Small-X Synthese Author Proof 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 of 151 Engel, P. (2002). Truth. Chesham: Acumen Press. Engel, P. (2005). Truth and the aim of belief. In D. Gillies (Ed.), Laws and models in science (pp. 77–97). London: King’s College. Engel, P. (2007). Va savoir!. Paris: De la connaissance en général. Engel, P. (2008). In what sense is knowledge the norm of assertion? Grazer Philosophische Studien, 77, 99–113. Engel, P. (2009). Pragmatic encroachment and epistemic value. In A. Haddock, A. Millar, & D. H. Pritchard (Eds.), Epistemic value (pp. 183–203). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engel, P. (2012). Les lois de l’esprit: Julien Benda ou la raison. Paris: Ithaque. Engel, P. (2013a). In defense of normativism about the aim of belief. In T. Chan (Ed.), The aim of belief (pp. 32–63). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engel, P. (2013). Alethic functionalism and the norm of belief. In N. Jang Lee Pedersen & C. Wright (Eds.), Truth pluralism: Current debates (pp. 69–86). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Engel, P. (2013c). Doxastic correctness. Aristotelian Society Supplementary, 87(1), 199–216. Engel, P., & Rorty, R. (2007). What’s the use of truth?. Columbia: Columbia University Press. Kratzer, A. (2002). Facts: Particulars or information units? Linguistics and Philosophy, 25, 655–670. Krzyzanowska, K. H., Wenmackers, S., & Douven, I. (2014). Rethinking Gibbard’s Riverboat argument. Studia Logica, 102, 771–792. Lackey, J. (2008). Learning from words: Testimony as a source of knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDowell, J. (1994). Mind and world. Harvard: Harvard University Press. McDowell, J. (1998). “Criteria, defeasibility, and knowledge”, Meaning, knowledge, and reality. Harvard: Harvard University Press. McHugh, C. (2014). Fitting belief. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 114, 167–187. Starmans, C., & Friedman, O. (2012). The Folk conception of knowledge. Cognition, 124, 272–283. Williamson, T. (2000). Knowledge and its limits. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pro 150 unc orre cted 149 123 Journal: 11229-SYNT Article No.: 1352 TYPESET ! DISK LE CP Disp.:2017/3/3 Pages: 5 Layout: Small-X of Author Query Form pro Please ensure you fill out your response to the queries raised below and return this form along with your corrections Dear Author During the process of typesetting your article, the following queries have arisen. Please check your typeset proof carefully against the queries listed below and mark the necessary changes either directly on the proof/online grid or in the ‘Author’s response’ area provided below Query 1. 2. unc orre cted Author Proof Journal: 11229 Article: 1352 Details required Please confirm if the inserted city name for the affiliation 4 is correct. Amend if necessary. Kindly note that Douven et al. (2014) has been changed as Krzyzanowska et al. (2014) so that the citation matches the list. Please check and confirm. Author’s response