like, you know, whatever

It’s always nice to see serious talk about applied epistemology, because these discussions happen only once every millenium.

David Lewis argued: If belief is the same as certainty, then a timid student who reliably gets the right answers in class, but who is very timid and unconfident, should not count as someone who possesses the relevant knowledge. But since timid correctness does intuitively count as knowledge, we should widen our conception of knowledge to include the student’s true justified intuitions. In this, Lewis proves once and for all that wallflowers are always the real troublemakers.

Now assume that’s true. Kvanvig remarks:

Given such a position, true belief has something going for it in terms of a connection to action that knowledge doesn’t. To use Socrates’s example, you’re better off hiring a guide with true opinion about how to get to Larissa than hiring one with knowledge when that knowledge isn’t accompanied by belief. For, as in Lewis’s student example, we can expect hesitation and indecision from those who know but lack belief, and we have no such similar expectation concerning those with true belief. In fact, in the student case, if Lewis is right, the student might know and simply refuse to answer at all because of the lack of belief. The analogue in Socrates’s example would be a knowledgeable guide who won’t go any further at some point on the journey because he is uncertain which way to go.

Kvanvig’s asks whether or not we should value timid-knowing at the same level as mere true belief. The criterion for value is, evidently, pragmatic value — confidence helps me to trust in the knower, perhaps because we suspect that a timid knower will break down under the stress at some point and stop answering questions. So it looks like the true believer gets a higher score than the timid knower. Kvanvig’s conclusion is that Lewis would emphasize the virtues of the true believer over the timid knower, at least in practical contexts.

This is an important discussion, because people often forget — or try to forget — that questions of trust play deeply into questions into the epistemic worth of testimony. Since testimony, knowledge by acquisition, is one half of epistemology, we would be fools not to investigate it seriously.

If we step back a bit, we find that our worry about whether or not we can trust the timid with respect to their inclinations to express anything appropriate at all (call it “expressive trust”; a matter of psychology), has nothing to do with the instrumental value of those kinds of expressions that a person has the disposition to utter (call it “instrumental trust”; a matter of epistemology). I think there is a difference between these two things.

1. Now if our distrust were anything more than just doubts about the timid-knower’s inclinations to express — i.e., if we worried that the timid knower would soon shut down entirely — then it really would be a reason to disvalue timid-knowing, much along the lines of Kvanvig’s analogue. But in this case, it should paradoxically not be a case where we might judge as a clear case of timid-knowing at all, since Lewis’s original experiment dealt with an individual who could be coaxed out of their bubble of worry. And the possibility of coaxing the person out of their worry-bubble is essential to developing any sense that we are even dealing with an epistemologically interesting case, i.e., developing criteria for rational, instrumental trust which will map onto a discussion of relative merits of some dispositions over others. If even the dispositions come into question, then how are we left with a basis for judging that the person has a disposition to speak truly?

Perhaps we judge the timid-knower as such on the basis of the evidence collected in a relatively unstressful environment (i.e., before they made their way out to Larissa). But this would only matter if epistemic standing were somehow conferred in something like a graduation ceremony, where our confidence in the timid person’s epistemic standing were fixed in Athens, and remained fixed along the road. But the epistemic standing of a person changes with the body of accumulated information over time; a timid knower in Athens might be a worthless goon on the road. (Join the club.)

Once we assume that the sudden shift from disposition-to-speak-true to disposition-to-be-a-goon actually affects our evaluations of what is going on with the timid-speaker, we run afoul of something like the competence-performance distinction. If I were Lewis, I’d say that the competence-performance distinction depends upon one’s preferred construal of possibility as it applies to the concept of ability. Competence-performance usefully holds in some explanatory contexts, not in others. This contextualization of competence may be the bedrock intuition that makes Kvanvig think that Lewis has run afoul of something — I don’t know. It would be helpful if he gave us some insight (or referred us to some insight) into why he thinks we should value timid knowledge over true belief invariantly. [Edit: assuming that he thinks this at all. There just isn't enough expressed to know what he thinks.]

But of course, we can reject the contextualization of competence. In doing so, we play into the tragedy of contemporary analytic philosophy: the reckless use of modal terms [as if their meaning in context were self-evident]. This is, uh, dubious, and the ubiquitous practice of it is liable to beg all kinds of questions, no matter what debate you’re in.

Instead, though, we might do something sort of similar to the rejection of the contextualization of competence if we restrict our context to the defense of the timid-speaker’s underlying competence in such a way that it supports wider generalizations across situations. In that case, it seems natural to defend the speaker’s epistemic stance as worthy of instrumental trust, no matter what misadventures on the road to Larissa that we have to suffer as a consequence! For why would we intentionally adopt this-or-that context if we didn’t think it was the most appropriate one for evaluation of particular types of utterances? Again, Lewis would seem to be safe.

2. On the other hand, and more plausibly, the worry about worry deals with the expressive trust issues of the evaluator, not any aspect of the competence of the evaluatee (the timid-knower). In which case it would be mere concern with the lack of the evaluatee’s inclination to express, and maybe a question about how our cognitions are muddle-headed and indecisive when it comes to the question of trusting others, but not an epistemology that can make any headway in discussion on the rational relative merits of the timid-knower. It has as much philosophical value as gossip.