knowledge, belief-transfers, and reasoning

KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF-TRANSFERS, AND REASONING

STEVEN R. LEVY

Those of us who are engaged in the fascinating endeavor of providing a definition of 'knowledge' make frequent use of examples. Our examples are descriptions of epistemic situations for which we hope there will be at least a consensus as to whether or not knowledge exists. In the more difficult examples, a consensus is only sought among those sharing a more or less similar attitude about which conception of knowledge is the most useful object of inquiry. The skeptic will never agree with those who examine the notion of knowledge as it is typically employed by the non-philosopher that a given example is an instance of knowledge. The stickler will rarely agree. 1 Increasing numbers of us, however, hold that the usual non- philosophical sense of 'knowledge' is a useful notion and that it ought to be examined philosophically, l shall use the term 'knowledge' in this latter sense throughout.

We should not conclude, however, that the skeptic and the stickler can't agree with the rest of us as to what constitutes the correct analysis of knowledge. A condition which is quite often taken as necessary for a behef to be knowledge is that that belief be justified. The skeptic and the non-skeptic can agree on an analysis with a justification condition but disagree that that condition can ever be satisfied. This, indeed, is the proper battle ground for the skeptkc-non-skeptic skirmish. 2 The justification condition, however, is a doubly contentious condition. It is contentious first because it is precisely the condition about whose satisfaction we are most likely to disagree in any given example. This is the most dramatic when the skeptic and the non-skeptic battle it out. But it can also give rise to friction among non-skeptics. The second area of dispute surrounding the justification condition concerns its very propriety in an analysis of knowledge. 3 Examples can be constructed in which a person S, has a belief which most should agree constitutes knowledge but which is nevertheless not justified - at least not in any ordinary sense of the term. I shall provide such an example later in this paper. But even in those theories of knowledge which lack a justification condition,

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there must be some device to "keep S honest." That is, there must be some condition that carries out the essential function of the justification condition and yet lacks its disadvantages. Some epistemologists prefer to talk of S's inferences all being warranted or valid. Some talk of an inference being reasonable, or of S having "the fight to be sure." I t is not my intent to examine the differences - subtle, if any - that these various formulations .have. Rather I wish to concentrate on a property that they all hold in common.

To detormine whether an example is an instance of knowledge under the terms of a given theory of knowledge, we must see that each of the conditions which the theory proposes as necessary are satisfied and then make sure that a combination of conditions which the theory holds to be suffident for knowledge are met. If necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge are satisfied, then, according to that theory, an instance of knowledge exists. Every comprehen- sive theory of knowledge that has yet been proposed contains a condition occupying the role of the essential aspects of a justification condition. S may have arrived at the candidate belief in a number of ways. In order to grant that belief the status of knowledge, we must be sure that he arrived at it in an epistemically acceptable way. The justification condition was intended to insure that this be so. If we must do away with the justification condition, then a substitute has to be found. But whether we employ the notion of justification, warrant, reason, etc. we check the appropriate condition by examining S's reasoning. For empirical knowledge, perception is the limiting case. I shall discuss perception near the conclusion of this paper. In all other instances S is presented with evidence for the candidate belief. From this evidence S makes inferences (perhaps acquiring new evidence along the way) culminat- ing in the belief in question. Before we can determine whether or not this belief is knowledge, we must determine whether or not S's inferences are epistemically acceptable. Thus, in order to apply any theory of knowledge to particular cases or examples, we must first isolate the subject's, S's, reasoning so that it may be scrutinized.

In many real-life cases this is not difficult. Isolating S's reasoning usually becomes even less of a problem in the examples that epistemologists concoct, because the reasoning is frequently made an explicit part of the example. For an illustration consider the following two cases. I am sitting in my living room with S watching a ball game on television. At a critical point in the game the manager goes onto the field to talk to the pitcher. Shortly, and before any announcement is made, S remarks that the pitcher is going to be

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KNOWLEDGE, BELIEF AND REASONING

relived by the knuckleball thrower. When his prediction is verified, I wonder if he knew that the knuckleball thrower would be brought in or if he were only guessing. How can I determine which is the case? The obvious method is to ask him why he thought that the knucklebaU thrower would be brought in. If he is able to produce an acceptable rationale for his conclusion, then we should be willing to grant that he had knowledge. If he cannot, then we should most probably deny that he had knowledge (although, for reasons to be made clear shortly, this is not absolutely necessary). When he answers that he observed the catcher signaling to the bench that he wanted the oversized catcher's mitt and that such a mitt is only used to catch knuckleballs, there should be little hesitation in granting him knowledge. He produced his reasoning and it was acceptable.

The second illustrative case comes from Gilbert Harman. 4 In this example a student believes that he will fail an ethics class. His reasons for believing this (as clearly described in the example) are that he failed the midterm examination, has not been able to under- stand the lectures for several weeks, and the instructor is known to fail a high percentage of his students. However, we are asked to suppose that the student is unaware of his real reasons for believing that he will fial. Although he understands the significance of all those factors, the student does not want to accept his own incompe- tence. He prefers to believe that he will fail because the instructor dislikes him. Regardless of whether our favorite theory of knowledge yields the result that the student knows or does not know, it is not difficult to state the student's reasoning leading to his belief. It is not difficult because the reasoning was a "given" in the example. In real-life cases we are not presented with such "givens."

We can imagine a case in which it is not so easy to pick out a person's reasons for a particular belief. Suppose that when I ask S why he believed that the knucklebaU thrower would be brought in he answers that he doesn't know, but that at a given point in a discussion on the pitcher's mound he can always tell what they are going to do. And suppose further that his predictions are one hundred per cent accurate. We may, as Ayer would do, grant him the fight to be sure and hence call his beliefs knowledge without any further thought about it. But we may do this only because we believe that the probability that his predictions would be so accurate without there being a reason why is, in fact, negligible. It is theoretically possible that the reason why his beliefs are so reliable has nothing to do with any preceding cognitive state. Such a reason might be quite bizarre. Perhaps the baseball monster wants him to

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know in advance all of the details of a pitching change and, a la Descartes' demon, engenders appropriate beliefs. I think that we whould allow that knowledge exists under these circumstances and that an appropriate analysis of knowledge would have provisions for such demonic intervention. Such would be a case of knowledge without justification.

Cases in wl~ich we have reliable beliefs for which we are not able to give our reasons are all too common, however, for us comfortably to expalin them by postulating weird forces at work. We should suppose that in most examples of knowledge (and perhaps all actual cases) the essential features of the justification condition are appropriate. The phenomenon of our not being able to give our reasons is generally explained by our having "evidence" containing a reliable indicator of the object of our subsequent belief, yet our being unaware of the indicator - or even that it exists. Nevertheless, it is what is responsible for our belief. If our theory of knowledge has a proper reasoning condition, then our most convenient tack would be somehow to attribute reasoning to the agent in cases such as these and then to judge whetehr or not such reasoning can lead to knowledge.

If this is done, then our theories of knowledge can account for the significant amount of knowledge that we have for which we cannot produce our reasoning or for which the reasoning that we do produce verbally is not the true reasoning that led to our belief. Thus, the method by which we attribute reasoning to an individual should be a vital part of analyses of knowledge.

One attempt at formulating such a method was put forth by Harman. s Harman contends that it is much easier to make a decision about whether or not knowledge exists in a given case than it is to decide directly whether (and what) reasoning has occurred. ~ The basis for this contention is that when epistr of the current genre are presented with the most delightfully outrageous examples, there is remarkable agreement as to whether or not an instance of knowledge exists. But this phenomenon would only support Harman's conclusion if our initial acceptance or rejection of a knowledge claim were determined without taking the agent's reasoning into account. And this is seldom done. Recall Harman's own example about the student who believes that he is failing an ethics course. We determine whether or not he knows that he is failing only after we decide what reasoning he employed to arrive at this belief. If we attribute reasoning involving the failing of the mid-term examination, etc. to him, then we should grant that he knows. If we

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suppose that his true reasoning comes from the belief that the instructor dislikes him, then we should deny that he knows. It may be easy for us to decide in this case that the stduent has knowledge - but if it is easy, it is because attributing reasoning to the student posed no problem (particularly because Harrnan tells us that the true reasoning is the former). So while it might not be difficult to determine whether or not knowledge exists in a particular case, it does not follow that our determination is made antecedent to a jdugment about whether and what reasoning has occurred. Using knowledge as a ground for determining reasoning will, more often than not, involve us in an incestuous circle. 7

What is needed, then, is an independent formula for isolating reasoning. Harman gives us a start by characterizing what he calls a reasoning instantiator, s What is not provided are detailed or

coheren t instructions for its use. 9 I shall briefly describe the reasoning instantiator as'Harman envisions it and then construct a method by which to employ it.

Harman points out that words like 'reasoning,' 'argument,' or 'inference' may refer to an abstract structure consisting of certain propositions as premises, others as conclusions, perhaps others as intermediate steps. The relevant correlation of the one to the other, he continues, is a mapping F from mental or neurophysiological processes to abstract structures of inference. For any x which is a process in the domain of F, F(x) is the reasoning that x instantiates. F is a reasoning instantiator. An account of reasoning which employes such a function must indicate which, of all the possible mappings from processes to abstract inferences, are reasoning instantiators. The correlation must be between conclusions of an abstract structure of reasoning and beliefs reached by the process of reasoning. The only mappings F that can serve as reasoning instantiators are those such that for any process x in the domain of F there is a proposition p that is contained in the conclusion of F(x), the reasoning that x instantiates, and such that the process x leads to a belief that p (or would so lead if p were not already believed). For example, consider the mental or neurophysiological process corresponding to the reasoning of the following inference:

(Inf) p or q not.q . . p

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If x is the process corresponding to this inference, then F(x) is 0nf) itself. F can only be a reasoning instantiator if the process x leads to a belief that p (since p is the conclusion of (Inf)). Further- more, F(x) must be a form of reasoning which warrants belief in its conclusion if x is to be a knowledge producing process. That is, F(x) must be a valid form of reasoning. Harman concludes that, "to ascribe reasoning r to someone is to presuppose the existence of a reasoning instantiator F and to claim that his belief resulted from a process x such that F(x)=r. ' 'l~

This much seems plausible. Of course, ascribing reasoning r to somone only presupposes the reasoning instantiator if we also adhere to a view that claims a correlation between brain states and mental states (interactionism, epiphenomenalism, the identity theory, etc.). But this, for the moment, we shall take to be relatively uncontrover- sial. Since, as I have argued, some principle involving reasoning is a necessary ingredient in an adequate analysis of knowledge, determining a person's reasoning is extremely important for the epistemologist. Harman's examples of how the instantiator might be employed are sketchy and on the wrong track (as I have argued else- where, see above). But I think that the reasoning instantiator itself can be an extremely useful tool in isolating a person's reasoning. I, thus, wish to construct a view of reasoning which relies quite heavily on it.

Consider a case in which S is sitting in his study, hears the sirens of fire engines, and forms the belief that there is a fire in.the neighborhood. His belief that there is a fire in the neighborhood arose from his hearing the fire engines although he had not gone through a process of explicit reasoning, consciously thinking, "I hear a fire engine, therefore there must be a fire." Should such reasoning be attributed to him? Any analysis of knowledge that does not attempt to attribute some sort of reasoning to S in this case would be hard pressed to explain why he knows (or does not know) that there is a fire in the neighborhood. But if we are to attribute reasoning to him, on what grounds shall we do so? 11 An application of Harman's reasoning instantiator, and a sensitivity to the causes of S's belief can provide us with the needed grounds.

Unlike Harman's analysis (or seemingly unlike it) we should not attempt to determine F(x), the reasoning involved, by what reasoning we should, as observers, normally attribute in such a circumstance. Rather, F(x) should be determined by considering what causal mechanisms went into producing the conditions which made the process x occur. In the example immediately above, the process

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x was a shift from a belief of hearing fire engines to a belief that there is a fire in the neighborhood. On the causal analysis to be proposed, the following considerations are relevant. S heard what he believed to be a fire engine (How he came to believe that the sounds that he heard were produced by fire engines need not be discussed here. Once one such instance of so called "unconscious" reasoning is illustrated, other such instances can easily be constructed,) and subsequently transferred to the belief that there was a fire in the neighborhood. Some process must have taken place to get from the first belif to the second. That is, there must have been some mechanism in his brain (mind) by which the first belief led to the second. What reasoning took place, then, should be determined by how this particular mechanism came to be. If, for example, S had observed many instances in which a fire engine was present and in all, or in a high percentage of these instances he also observed a fire in the neighborhood, and if this repeated correlation of the two events gave rise to this particular belief- transfer mechanism, then the following enumerative inductive argument should be attributed to S:

There is a fire engine present. In a high percentage of cases in which there is a

fire engine present there is a fire in the neighborhood.

.'. There is a fire in the neighborhood. It is plausible to attribute this reasoning to S because it is due to the conditions expressed in the premises and conclusion of the argument that the belief-transfer mechanism (from the belief that fire engines are present to the belief that there is a fire in the neighborhood) arose. That is, the extremely consistent correlation between fire engines and fires (i.e., high percentage of confirming cases) made S's inference from one to the other "second nature."

Let us return to the case of the man who can predict when the manager of the baseball team is going to change pitchers and let us alter it slightly. If his predictions are reliable and yet he cannot produce his reasons, we should most likely, suppose that there are reasons for his judgments nevertheless. Perhaps the manager has a nervous twitch that he exhibits only when he is about to remove a pitcher and that it is this twitch that causes the predictor to believe that a pitching change will be made. Even though the predictor is not (consciously) aware of the twitch, the reasoning that we attribute to him should involve it. Could such reasoning give him knowledge? To answer this question we must evaluate the argument that

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we are attributing to him. And this is done in the same way that we evaluate any other argument. Suppose that the manager had been managing for many years and that the predictor had seen all of his games and witnessed a very large number of pitching changes. In this case we should surely judge his enumerative inductive argument to be very strong. Suppose, on the other hand, that the predictor has only seen this manager in action a very few times. It is hard to imagine that ariy such "automatic" belief-transference could develop in such a case but ff it were to develop, we should judge his argument to be a hasty generalization and hence deny that he has knowledge.

Of course, we can only attribute this reasoning to him ff we know what causal factors preceded his belief-transference mechanism. Otherwise, given that his predictions are reliable, we should probably grant him the right to be sure, in Ayer's sense, under the supposition that a reliable indicator exists and that reasoning could be attributed to him based on this indicator. However in such a case our "real-life" judgments may occasionally conflict with the judgments that we make when the case is described from a philosophically omniscient point of view. When the predictor is first beginning to develop his, in real life mysterious, skill, the reasoning that we attribute to him based on o u r knowledge that the twitch is the key might be judged to be insufficient to warrant a knowledge claim. As time passes, however, the reasoning attributible to him will become stronger and stronger until we judge that he does know when a pitcher will be removed. However, if we are not put in a position to know why the predictor is so accurate, we should probably judge (mistakenly) that he knew all along.

We can construct examples in which no knowledge producing reasoning can be ascribed to an individual based on the etiology of a belief-transference mechanism. Suppose thatwhen S was a little boy he was told by a gentleman wearing a monocle that it was very dangerous to eat wild berries. Nevertheless, as boys will do, S ate some berries anyway and became deathly ill, surviving only after several days in which his fate was in doubt. This incident had such a profound psychological effect on S that from that point on he believed anything that men with monocles said. But since men with monocles are so rare, this did not put a serious constraint on S's beliefs and he became a moderately successful business executive. S's boss is a man who is a notorious pessimist. Before the conclusion of any business agreement he can be heard exclaiming that the deal will surely fall through. Let us focus on a day, however, when the boss

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acquires uncontrovertible evidence that a contract proposal will be rejected. At the company's costume party that night the boss tells each person to whom he speaks that their proposal will be rejected, but, for good reason, few believe him. But S believes him because the boss came to the party as his childhood idol, Joseph Chamber- lain. Another person who believes the boss is S's cohort, Jones. Jones believes the boss because the boss took the time to explain why he believes that the proposal would be rejected. We should conclude that Jones knows that the deal will fall through, and that S does not know. Jones' reasoning involves the bess's evidence, his sincerity, a rational rejection of any hypothesis attributing the bess's beliefs to his usual pessimism, etc.. S. believes as he does because at the time the boss uttered his statement he was wearing a monocle. What reasoning, if any, ought to be attributed to S? This depends, to a certain extent, on the psychological analysis given to S's transference mechanism. If some amount of apprehension is involved when a man with a monocle speaks, we might attribute something like the following to S:

A man wearing a monocle said that the proposal would be rejected.

It is dangerous not to believe statements uttered by men wearing monocles.

(.'.) The proposal will be rejected. This ad baculum type of "argument" is surely not one that could produce knowledge in a case such as this.

Another psychological analysis may describe the situation as one in which no reasoning at all ought to be attributed to S. We may suppose that, because of the traumatic event in S's past,a mechanism was set up such that the transference from the perception of statements fnade by monocled gents to a belief in their truth is purely automatic and arational, i.e.:

A man wearing a monocle said that the proposal would be rejected.

(.'.?) The proposal will be rejected. This may be viewed as either a total nonsequitur, or as no argument at all with no difference in epistemological consequences. The only reasons for preferring one interpretation over the other have to do with the initial characterization of the reasoning instantiator. Recall that the instantiator correlates conclusions of abstract structures of reasoning and beliefs reached by the process of reasoningl If the

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latter process is viewed as having a logical structure then S's '~reasoning" could be described as a non sequitur. Otehrwise we could deny that S reasoned at all in this transference and still be consistent with the original intent of the reasoning instantiator.

The clearest case in which we should not attribute reasoning to S is one in which a demented brain surgeon (with no specific purpose in mind) alters S's brain so that whenever he hears a declarative sen- tence beginning with the word "well," he believes the proposition expressed by it. When S subsequently meets a colleague in the hall who says, "Well, S, you just won the Irish Sweepstakes," he will, of course, automatically believe him. But it would be a mistake to suppose that S arrived at his belief through any kind of reasoning. The causal history of the belief-transference mechanism, plus its lack of intermediate steps, renders this plain. The transference mechanism did not arise through repeated experiences, as would be appropriate for us to attribute an enumerative inductive argument to S. Likewise, there are no intermediate steps involving any sort of logical operation (either innate or acquired). As hypothesized, there was neither rhyme nor reason associated with the establishment of the belief-transference mechanism so none should be associated with the transference itself.

Thus, whether one's reasoning to a particular belief involves complex logical principles that were carefully taught to him or whether it was caused by obscure events in his life of which he has no recollections our method of determining his reasoning remains the same. We isolate the mechanism (or mechanisms) involved in the shift from one or more beliefs to the belief in question and dis- cover its origen. Once we have found the cause of the belief-shift mechanism we are then in a position to infer what reasoning it would be appropriate to attribute to him. The cuase determines the reasoning.

We have now formulated a method by which we can attribute reasoning to individuals given a sufficient description of their particular circumstances. Does this provide us with an insight as to how we are to view perceptual knowledge Is knowledge acquired through perception inferential or nonJnferential? Certainly most

cases of perceptual knowledge do not involve any conscious reason-

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ing. But whether or not my belief that there is a typewriter in front of me is inferred from my seeming to see a typewriter in front of me rests on the question of whether I learned as an infant that whenever I seemed to see something in front of me there actually was something in front of me, i.e., upon having certain visual sensations I had certain other sensations under the proper conditions, and that an expectation of these other possible sensations developed into something more or less automatic; or whether this expectation was not something that was learned but was, in a manner of speaking, wired into me before birth. If the former is ture, then my characterization of reasoning dictates that perceptual knowledge is infer- rential. If the latter is the case, the question is still left unanswered. It would depend upon whether an inference was wired into us (involving innate logic) or whether what was wired into us was an automatic transference of belief (as in the brain surgeon example). How one might determine what type of circuity we have (i.e., whether we are computers or pin-ball machines) is a theoretical question which may well be impossible to answer. 12 I think that it would be useful to view perceptual knowledge as inferential for the same reason that Harman proposes, namely that it would unify the analysis of perceptual knowledge with that of other empirical knowledge. However in the absence of any other compelling reasons for viewing perceptual knowledge as inferential, many have left perception as an independent disjunctive condition leading to knowledge. Nothing prevents us from doing this.

So I began with the fact that we acquire knowledge via many diverse routes and have argued that although the essential aspects of the justification condition seem not to be necessary for knowledge to exist, they are only absent in rather bizarre circumstances. In all cases in which the justification condition is appropriate, a determination of the agent's reasoning is important. However many of even our most common place beliefs seem not to be arrived at through a process of reasoning. Nevertheless, we' can construct a useful method of attributing reasoning to individuals in such instances. The method consists of correlating brain processes with structures of reasoning. For us to make this correlation properly, however, we must have information concerning the etiology of the brain processes involved. I have briefly sketched how this information can be employed to these ends. Once an agent's reasoning has been isolated, we can make the further judgments as to whether or not such reasoning can lead

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to k n o w l e d g e u n d e r t he specif ied c o n d i t i o n s . Bu t in such cases, d e t e r m i n i n g reason ing is a n t e c e d e n t to a f f i rming or deny ing k n o w -

ledge.

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' 'Stickler' is a technical term referring to those who hold that empirical knowledge is possible but rarely achieved. Although I think there is room for debate, Bertrand Russell seems to take such a position in his discussion of knowledge, error, and probable opinion (The Problems of Philosophy, Oxford University Press, 1959, C]~apter XIII.).

2 A skirmish hardly seems necessary. Both are concerned with related, yet nevertheless different notions. If we properly sort these out, nothing that one says need be taken to be incompatible with anything that the other says.

3 I argue that the inclusion of a justification condition leads to a very pe- cul/ar result and should thus be avoided in "Do You Know Everything That You Know?," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, June 1979.

4 "Knowledge, Reasons, and Causes," The Journal of Philosophy, November 5, 1970.

s Ibid., and later in Thought, 1973, Princeton University Press. e So, he argues, we ought to use intuitions about knowledge to decide when

reasoning has occurred and what reasoning there has been. There are cases in which we can attribute reasoning to an individual based on a prior independent assessment that knowledge exists, ("If S knows that h, then he must have reasoned in such and such a manner from e.") I have a feeling that such cases must be contrived and that none can exist in fact. Nevertheless, it seems that we can never get from an independent judgment that knowledge does not exist in a given case to any conclusion regarding S's reasoning. There are too many possible examples of bad reasoning that could account for S's lack of knowledge to allow us to isolate any one instance. In the works cited.

9 I argue for this claim in "Reasons, Instantiators, and Causes," The South- ern Journal of Philosophy, Fall, 1978.

~o Thought, p. 49.

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11 Alvin Goldman, in "A Causal Theory of Knowing," The Journal of Philo. mphy, June 22, 1967, wishes to ascribe reasoning in this case - but he avoids providing us with reasons why his particular reasoning, and not some other, should be employed.

1~ Some progress may be possible by extending the relevant etiology of belief- transference mechanisms to include certain factors involved in evolution. I 'm not quite sure how this would be done but intuition tells me that such an endeavor would be interesting, if not fruitful.

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knowledge, belief-transfers, and reasoning

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