Ep. 348: Tim Williamson’s Knowledge-First Epistemology (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 348 is something like what is philosophy's task in analyzing knowledge? We read some articles by Timothy Williamson, Knowledge First Epistemology, which was published as a chapter in the Routledge Companion to epistemology in 2010, justifications, excuses, skeptical scenarios from 2015, and morally loaded cases in philosophy in 2019. For more information about these articles and the podcast, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer with crystal clear compliance conditions in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:47 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, Justified in believing I ought to do something without being justified in actually doing it. In Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:56 Christopher: This is Christopher Heath, I am Unjustified but also Blameless in Hollywood, California.

1:02 Russell: And this is Russell, Russell Ming, intellectually isolated in Bakersfield, California.

1:10 Mark: All right, so we recently had an episode on the Justified True Belief, the Gettier cases. And one of the things that came out of that was, well, explicitly in this Zagzebski article, the idea that actually you can't improve the definition of knowledge as justified true belief by beefing up justification or adding in an extra thing, that it's actually a hopeless task. And so the natural response to that, which I think some of us voiced even during the discussion, was maybe this was a fruitless project in the first place and we shouldn't expect to be able to analyze knowledge in this way.

And then we just covered the Indian Nyaya school, which actually has this knowledge first approach. That is, when we're talking about analysis of epistemology, don't start with the idea that we have in our perceptions or in our thoughts, some sort of it could be true or it could be false, but it's sort of epistemologically the same to us altogether, epistemologically neutral. Contents of consciousness, contents of perception, contents of belief. And then we make the jump of, okay, does that actually hook up to something in the world? Instead, following the Nyayas, let's just define knowledge as a connection between us and the world.

And then we can define belief based on that and illusion based on that and say, well, sometimes something just looks like a connection to the world, but it's not really a connection to the world. So this was something. Russell, you new to the podcast you brought to our attention. Can you just say a little bit about your background and who you are and why?

2:38 Russell: Williamson yeah, of course. First of all, I'VE been listening to the show for years, so it's like incredible honor to be on it. But yeah.

2:46 Mark: So yeah, people that email us, just. Just be warned, you might be asked to be on the show.

2:52 Russell: Yeah, I'm a PhD candidate at UC Irvine and I work on issues concerning epistemic normativity. And anyway, I've been into Williamson's Epistemology or Knowledge First Epistemology, basically, since I learned what epistemology is. The first book I read in Epistemology was Williamson's Knowledge first and its limits, the 2000 book. And I found it almost totally incomprehensible at the time, but I knew that there was something there and. Yeah. Anyway, so then I carried on into grad school and what I work on now is sort of a kind of, in Kuhnian terms, I'm like a kind of the normal science project working out these little puzzles within the Knowledge first research program.

So why Williamson? Why does he matter? Especially when discussing epistemology, analytic epistemology today. And this is what I said in the email. There's sort of a pre Williamsonian era of analytic epistemology and a post. He is a very influential figure, polarizing figure, as well as you might get from having just read these three articles. At least he takes on very radical externalist views. But his defense of this position has won over maybe a few converts, but he's at least attracted a great deal of attention. I believe his 2000 book is the most highly cited epistemology book maybe ever, at least in analytic tradition.

So whether you agree with him or disagree with him, he's got some powerful arguments. And again, very influential and polarizing. So figured once I saw you guys and listened to your episode on Justify True Belief, Gettier and all the rest, I thought, okay, it'd be awesome if you guys took on Williamson as well.

4:46 Mark: Yeah, people reach out to us with contemporary philosopher suggestions semi regularly, and if I haven't heard of them, I'm a little skeptical. It was mostly because we knew that both Dylan and Seth were going to be on vacation, so we needed someone with a guest. And so this worked out pretty quick. We could have just done it with the three of us, but I reached out to some of our analytic philosophy recurring characters, both Matt Teichman and Dusty Dallman, though they did not want to do this, affirmed that yes, Williamson is a big deal. And so Chris, our philosophy of Science guy, coming back for the several time do you have any experience with this figure or this neighborhood?

5:22 Christopher: Definitely the neighborhood I'm Very interested in epistemology. And although I've told you guys before, I'm sympathetic to some of the sort of pragmatist projects in terms of knowledge and Dewey and stuff like that, but I'm familiar with some of the more contemporary stuff as well. I'm a big fan of Sellars and I understand a little bit about. I flirted with phenomenal conservatism and I've read about the externalist and internalist sort of divide, things like that. So all of it's in my wheelhouse for sure. But I had never read Williamson, and yeah, it was a very novel approach to sort of flip epistemology's project on its head and say, let's start with knowledge.

It's got a super externalist temperament to it. Just like from the outset I can tell that's his, like you said, radically externalist, it seems. But it was really cool to read about his approach to knowledge. I'm also sympathetic to the idea that breaking down knowledge into its sort of necessary and sufficient conditions or its recipe is a doomed task. I don't know if he gets away from that traditional project. He seems to want to still analyze knowledge, but just from a different viewpoint. I'm wondering if that's fruitful still.

6:23 Mark: So just to remind folks, an internalist take on epistemology would be, again, talking about, from the knower's point of view, can we tell the difference, per Descartes, between illusion and authentic belief or authentic perception? Or do we just say, actually somebody could have? Because then you have that issue where it seems like I have full justification for saying this is true, but in fact it's not true because I'm actually a brain in the vat or something like that. And so, for instance, we might, on an internalist ground, say, well, you have to tailor your beliefs to the evidence that you have.

And Williamson is going to respond to that by saying, well, how do you know what evidence you have Exactly? You know, it looks like evidence, but if it's authentic evidence. Right. The brain, the vat, thinks it has plenty of evidence for the fact that it has hands, but it doesn't. So, yeah, Wes, do you want to get us going?

7:11 Wes: Yeah, yeah, let's find a good way to state the internalist case. And I, I guess, Russell, you can help us with this, but it seems to be the idea is that justification is a matter of the. The way it seems to me to be, not the way things necessarily are in the world. So if I am a brain in a vat and all my. My seeming perceptions show me that I have hands and it coheres with all my other beliefs is consistency and there's evidence in terms, in terms of seeming perception, then I'm justified in saying I have hands, but on a different knowledge first conception, our evidence would actually be what we know, not what it seems to us to be the case. So I would not be justified in believing that I have hands, even if I'm rigged up so entirely that I couldn't be expected to think anything else is the case. Russell, did you want to.

8:11 Russell: No, yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, just another general way of stating the internalist position is that it's the view which says that whether a belief is justified only depends on subjects internal mental states and then what kind of internalist you are will come out of what mental states you have in mind. Are they seemings or is there a consistency requirement? Is there a kind of what's called an accessibility condition that needs to be met? And yeah, that's the internalist picture in Williamson, as we'll probably get to in a second. So in some sense the internalist is what's called committed to the thought that your evidence, or at least one version of internalism, says that your evidence is what justifies your belief in a given proposition.

And Williamson doesn't. Exactly, this is a distinction, this is a difference between Williamson and Goldman and reliabilist views. Williamson will say, at least for the case of partial justification and the degree of confidence one may have in a proposition, that it will just be also be a matter of what your evidence supports. But where Williamson obviously breaks with on one of the other evidentialists, the internalist evidentialist is that Williamson says, well, our evidence just consists of what we know. So that's how you get the break between the brain in a vat being justified and the good case, the good person, one who's not envatted.

And then the difference between Goldman and reliabilist views and Williamson is reliabilists are concerned about the origin of the belief, whether it's of proper pedigree, whereas Williamson is more concerned with whether it has the right relation to your evidence. So anyway, that's kind of a way hopefully of kind of catching up a little bit of the terrain and the difference between Williamson and other externalists and Williamson and one variety of internalism.

10:17 Wes: Should we look at the way he characterizes internalism in this Morally Loaded Cases paper?

10:23 Mark: Yeah, let me just say first, so as you were mentioning Russell sort of his primary books, this Knowledge and its limits 2000 and we didn't read any of that you suggested three articles that he wrote subsequently. He's just, he's written hundreds of articles returning to this again and again. So explaining in a very stripped down way in this knowledge, first epistemology, and then in the second article justifications, excuses and skeptical scenarios. I think that's where we would get sort of his most direct response to Alvin Goldman that we considered in our gettier episode. And then Wes was going to pull from this most recent article morally loaded cases in philosophy. I think we can just make points as we want from the three, at least until we really get into this.

11:09 Wes: Yeah, so in this article he's going to point to the ways in which the relationship between belief and action can actually undermine internalism. And he starts out with talking about relativism and skepticism, which maybe would surprise people to see that lumped in with internalism, although I guess it shouldn't. But in the same way that we run into problems with those with skepticism and relativism when we start talking about morality. Right. If everything is relative, does that mean everything is permitted? We run into similar problems within internalism.

So I think we, in this paper we get maybe the clearest, but correct me if I'm wrong, characterization of internalism. So here's how he puts it on page four. Here is a still influential view in epistemology for short, we may call it internalism. The key normative status for belief is justification. Whether a belief is justified at a time depends on its coherence with the internal consciously introspectable mental states of the subject at that time, especially seemings, and perhaps other beliefs too. Seemings are pre doxastic. They are neither beliefs nor inclinations to believe.

You have a seeming when things seem to you a certain way, either sensorially or intellectually, seemings can be false. Sometimes things can seem to you to be some way, even though they are not in fact that way. Still, when it seems to you that P, you are at least prima facie justified in believing that P, you are all things considered justified in believing the P when. And so believing also coheres with your other relevant mental states, especially your seemings. Consequently, false beliefs are sometimes justified. So that fact you know. So for internalists, false beliefs, internalists, false beliefs can be justified, which is part of what leads to the gettier paradoxes and problems.

Williamson's approach, it looks like, is going to be to deny that and to say in fact that we are not going to that it's not going to be fruitful to try to analyze knowledge in terms of components like Justified true belief internally including some components that seem externalist and some internalist. So truth, right, is an externalist notion that has to be something out there in the world that is the case for truth to hold. But traditionally justification has been internalist so you get this sort of hybrid analysis of knowledge into those internalist and externalist components Instead it will seem to be the case that.

Or Williamson will argue that it's the case and by the way, it seems to me like a very tough project to actually make work. But that I think he's. And Russell, correct me if I'm wrong, he's going to say that knowledge in fact is more basic than belief and that the analysis should be a belief in terms of knowledge and not in knowledge in terms of.

14:15 Christopher: Yeah, I read him as saying belief is a spin off of knowledge rather than the other way around. Knowledge ends up being the most general factive mental state you can have.

14:24 Wes: That's bedrock. So you get a new conception of justification in terms of these externalist criterion which is to say knowledge and our. It'll turn out in one of these other papers that are evidence for something doesn't isn't really a matter of seemings. We could treat evidence as is the sum of what we know to be the case about something even if we don't know that we know that it's the case which it will turn out. He thinks these things are not luminous to use this term. We don't always know when we know something or don't know something so we

15:00 Mark: could ask sort of what the history is this externalism a new thing? It's not new. In India there's this article from 2022 from a collection about knowledge based epistemology that Williamson contributed to called Where Did It Come from, Where Will It Go? Where he talks little about the history and even the justified true belief which is as you said Wes, is not a purely internalist idea. He said we attributed that to Plato in our gettier thing. Well that's something that Plato plays with. He considers it but he's not necessarily committed to it.

And though we can see internalism, Descartes and the whole Cartesian tradition looks very obviously internalist. Is Descartes going to say that we have knowledge if we don't have any externalist considerations, that internalism is in fact the only thing at our disposal? No, actually he gets out of that by having this transcendental argument about God. And so it's not really clear according to Williamson, this explicit embrace of knowledge as justified true belief did not come until well into the 20th century. And then we've already talked about in our Nyaya episode disjunctivism, this idea that fundamentally the veridical perception, and this is usually about perception strictly, not just knowledge.

This is Williamson's critique of this, but his view is going to be sort of next door to disjunctivism. But the idea is that when we actually. Our belief, our perception connects with something is just a fundamentally different thing than when it fails to do so, as opposed to there's a doxastically neutral experience that we have. In other words, it doesn't tell us whether it's a true belief or a false belief. And that's going to be identical for the brain in the vat and for the person who's actually in a real physical world that both of them have the exact same thing.

Yeah, it wasn't entirely clear to me. We haven't actually read anything in disjunctivism explicitly. But Williamson just says disjunctivism is only concerned with perception. He's concerned with knowledge more generally, and that's the big difference. And he had some other criticism about just. Yeah, Russell, did you have any. I don't know how much we should focus on this, but that he was saying disjunctivism was some sort of relic, that thinking of things in this disjunctive form. I've had an experience now and either it's of the thing or it's actually a false perception.

It's not knowledge at all that. That's certainly not the way we experience things as disjunctive.

17:19 Russell: Yeah. So Williamson and the disjunctivists are sort of methodologically parallel in that they begin with success and then from that point of view, from that starting point, theorize about the relative phenomenon in question. Of course, Williamson case two ways of starting from the point of success. There's truly believing and knowledgeably believing. And he'll choose, of course, the knowledge first route. But there are parallels in methodology and they have a kind of. I don't know a great deal about disjunctivism, at least the view about perception. But I know that there are similarities and they are kind of agreeable to each other. If you go in for one, you should be more disposed to go in for the other sort of thing.

18:15 Wes: So let's go. I mean, let me just summarize a little bit what he says about disjunctivism in the knowledge first epistemology paper just for. It'll be more clear for listeners. He makes it out to be a sophisticated version of naive realism. And the idea is that genuine perception and illusion are not on par. You're not. It's not as if you're having an identical mental state when you have an illusion of an object and a perception of the object, although maybe if you looked at the brain, it would look identical. But disjunctivist account is going to deny this.

Certain mental states are. You're in them only when you're actually perceiving, when you're taking in the world. So the way you characterize the mental state depends on its causal relation to the world. And so there's this denial that mental states can be the same in cases of failure and in cases of success. So in a way, you have a different evidence base in the case of real perception or good perception than you do in the bad case. This is, by the way, it's kind of came up in Nyaya too, right, because there's. You have more perceptual evidence in the good case than in the bad case, even though you don't know it.

So what Williamson is going to say is just disjunctivism about perception is actually a kind of knowledge. First, epistemology as applied to perception with some qualifications. And I think one of his qualifications is he expresses some dissatisfaction with. Well, does he in this. This paper. Let me just put it this way. The thing that he wants to preserve about just disjunctivism is its quote, unquote spirit, which is the idea that success in perception must be defined in externalist terms. So, quote, it cannot be analyzed as a combination of success neutral perceptual appearances with external causal relations inessential to the subject's mental state.

We need just to just bite the bullet and say, what counts as a successful perception includes this relationship to an external world.

20:19 Mark: Yep. Let me just give a quote from that. Where did it come from this on page four, that this knowledge in its limits provides a sympathetic critique of disjunctivism about belief. I objected that the disjunctive form is just a misleading artifact because the equivalence of S believes P and either S knows P or S believes P without knowing P is merely a trivial consequence of the accepted entailment from S knows P to S believes P. The bad disjunct S believes P without knowing P is gerrymandered and unnatural. As I made clear, the objection speaks more of the letter than the spirit of disjunctivism.

What matters most is the insight S knows P cannot be understood as a conjunction of S believes P with other factors, although somehow prior to S knows P itself. Thus disjunctivism of belief is better reworked as anti conjunctivism about knowledge. And I think that is as stupid as needlessly scary sounding phrase. Anti conjunctivism about knowledge. That's it. Justified true belief is conjunctivism about knowledge. Knowledge is justification conjoined with belief, conjoined with its truth. And we instead let's just say knowledge is basic. We can try to describe like yes, okay, if you know that something is true, it follows from that that you also believe that it's true.

But that doesn't mean that belief is one of the ingredients that goes into knowledge. Knowledge is fundamental. It doesn't really have ingredients in this way. It just has implications. Yeah, what else about does knowledge first epistemology to make sure that we really have that. Or we could start going through in more detail that first article.

21:57 Christopher: Obviously he comes to us in this knowledge first epistemology article and, and, and talks about his plan to analyze knowledge as the most basic thing. And he kind of also goes through a few arguments about why we might think that belief is not conceptually prior to knowledge. I had a little trouble with the luminosity argument.

22:16 Wes: Should we go through this in order? Do we want to jump to luminosity or.

22:19 Christopher: Sure, I guess we could start with the analysis first. That first part, I just couldn't remember where exactly he started arguing that belief is not conceptually prior.

22:28 Mark: Right. So Goldman for instance wanted to give this analysis of justification specifically, but then as a component of knowledge that would be non circular. We want to be able to say what justification is in non epistemic terms. And so this is part of. Is there a way to analyze knowledge in terms that are not knowledge? Because that's what would make something epistemologically basic. Of course you can still say more about it if you then say more knowledge term. Well, I know something when I believe it's true and it ends up being true and then I can act on that.

You could say a lot of things about it, but that's not actually giving a definition of knowledge. It's just things about knowledge. So. So yeah, William wants to say a lot of people have tried to give non circular definitions, definitions that do not involve epistemological concepts in themselves and nobody has succeeded. So maybe this is just a bad attempt, a bad paradigm. I think that's. Russell, you were saying there's pre Williamson. So we've had a paradigm shift in analytic epistemology Right, Yeah.

23:28 Russell: And even those who do to this day try to provide an analysis of knowledge, their ambitions are not what they once were. So the goal now often is not exactly to provide necessary and sufficient conditions to totally reduce either the concept or what have you to more basic ones. Rather, people will today try to provide what they call a kind of illuminating or informative analysis of knowledge. And whether that project is worth engaging in, of course, is another thing. And still others have taken on a totally different analysis, what may be called like a network analysis, where you have this kind of cluster of epistemic concepts that are defined in terms of one another, where there's not one of the cluster that is reducible to another and all. All the rest.

24:24 Mark: I think we saw that in, in Strawson when we read about him trying to define truth.

24:28 Russell: Exactly.

24:29 Mark: Truth and knowledge just actually end up being defined in terms other.

24:32 Russell: Exactly, yeah. In fact, so I did my master's at the University of Glasgow and at the time, one of the people I worked with, Chris Kelp, he was working on a book on from a kind of more or less knowledge first approach. Not. But anyway, he was trying to provide a kind of framework for understanding epistemic normativity in terms of inquiry. His whole deal was to provide a network analysis of this kind of Strawsonian sort that you just mentioned. So, yeah, the pre and post Williamsonian epistemology, whatever. There are still those, of course, who are engaged in analysis, who do put forth analyses of knowledge, but definitely the ambitions have been tempered.

25:16 Mark: Yeah.

25:17 Wes: So let's look at the analysis of knowledge section in the Knowledge First Epistemology paper. What he's going to say there. Right, we get. We're reminded of the types of problems, gettier problems that we get when we try to analyze knowledge into justified true belief. And the fact is that attempts to repair that, as we saw in our Zagzebski paper, have not been successful. And Williamson will say that perhaps we should take this to show that such an analysis is just not possible, that belief is not priority to knowledge and that knowledge is perhaps prior.

So what he does next is he starts with a worry for internalist theories of mind that suggests that knowledge is not a purely mental state because it is connected to the external world. Right. If we know something, then that has to be true. There's this inherent connection that an internalist will lead an internalist to want to say that knowledge, again is. Is not purely mental. It's this hybrid state. So for an internalist, mental states have no necessary consequences for the outside world. And again, this means that someone in the brain, in the vat can have the exact same mental states as someone who's really in the world having the same subjective experiences.

26:42 Christopher: The internalist, like, he cleaves that. Right. He almost creates the subjective objective distinction there by saying, well, we have our internalist understanding and then there's this other component, the world, but he's sort of separating them. And I feel like Williamson wants to maintain the connection and say no, the mental state you have is factive.

27:00 Wes: Well, he'll want to say there's, there's lots of different. He's going to start out by saying actually it turns out that mental states in general often have external consequences.

27:11 Russell: Yeah, exactly.

27:12 Wes: For example, loving and hating, that implies a non illusory relationship to a real person. So for instance, if I'm in a brain into that and I love Mary and Mary doesn't really exist, then loving is not the right word for that. I think on his analysis.

27:30 Mark: Right. This is an ambiguity in the concept of aboutness or intentionality is the technical term that I think I was introduced to Hegel as like Hegel's advance over Kant was to say just the aboutness of consciousness means it actually connects with points at something in the real world. And that is what defines what the real world is. We could pick holes in that as stated. Because if I have about the wonderful lake that's over there, but actually there's no lake over there, it's a mirage then am I actually having something about. Or if I. I can have beliefs about Santa Claus. Right. There's difference in aboutness, in beliefs.

28:11 Wes: Well, let's give his snow example.

28:13 Mark: Yeah, go ahead.

28:13 Wes: Right. If I have beliefs about snow, but they it turns out that the snow is actually moths that look like snow. My beliefs are really about moths, not about snow.

28:24 Mark: Yep, yep.

28:25 Wes: So he wants to call this semantic externalism or it just is semantic externalism. And to quote the content of intentional states such as belief typically depends on causal connections between the thinker and the environment. So that's really significant. Right. The content, the meaning of a proposition is not simply a matter of the way it seems to us, but a matter of the thing that it's about.

28:53 Mark: Right. So aboutness is a connection with the world. It is not just about the ideas in our head. When I'm thinking about the moon, I'm not thinking about my idea of the moon, I'm thinking about the moon. So there's no reason to say the mental is entirely this internalist absorbed. You know, Williamson gave an early presentation a paper called something like Knowledge is a mental state. And he says in this later article how a friend of his, who's not a philosopher came to it and like why is this something you would argue? Of course knowledge is a mental state, but it's only if you've been duped by this Cartesian tradition or whatever.

Oh no, our mental states have to be entirely self referential. But Williamson says if you take away the aboutness, you actually take away what is most mental about mental states. The mental is not just I have a qualia and I have no idea what it's related to in the external world, it's that it's about something in particular.

29:50 Wes: I think traditionally it's a quasi mental state. Right. Supposed to break down into mental and non mental.

29:55 Christopher: Yeah, that's what you get with the Descartes and the internalist. You get these two separate things in your head and then what's on whether or not it's connected. And he just wants to say there's. We can't disconnect those. Knowledge is a mental state about true things, about true propositions, I guess I don't know.

30:12 Wes: And this goes for love and as he points out, love as well, so and belief. So they have aboutness. We don't even have to go to knowledge. And if you take that aboutness away, as Mark just just quoted him, you take away what is actually most mental in them. And what that means is that semantic externalism doesn't really give us a problem with the mentality of a state, which is what the internalist might worry about. It doesn't mean that knowledge, by saying that knowledge is purely externalist, that I'm denying that it's a mental state, in fact it's completely consistent is his argument. So the truth entailing nature of knowledge is not a problem for its being a mental state in the fullest sense. But in any case, the upshot of this section is that knowledge first epistemology is externalism about mental attitudes themselves, not just about the contents of mental attitudes.

31:12 Russell: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, right. And he kind of puts forth this view and then as we're going through now, just is considering a number of reasons for rejecting it, a bunch of objections. And then this one that we've just been going over is just the appeal to a theory of mind that we're led to think is outdated within kind of contemporary philosophy of mind, which is the internalist theory. And because as he kind of lays out in the other paper that Mark's been referring to where did it come from?

31:45 Mark: Where will it go?

31:46 Russell: Yeah, yeah. You kind of get a story about the rise of externalism, beginning with, you know, Putnam, then through Kripke and Tyler Burge and Davidson and onto Williamson. Williamson is kind of situating this picture of epistemology within this broader trend going externalist in these other fields of philosophy. So it's kind of a natural progression of a trend that's already out there in the analytic philosophy world. So this objection that one might have had from long ago, no longer the ideas would apply, at least if you're kind of a card carrying practitioner involved in philosophy of mine or what have you.

32:29 Wes: So you can't go up to the knowledge first epistemologist and say, hey, under your conception of things, knowledge isn't even in a mental state anymore. That's ridiculous. That objection doesn't work.

32:39 Russell: Exactly. Yeah. And he also questions the motivation like why would we even have thought to begin with that there'd be such an analysis forthcoming? Setting aside the inductive evidence that's resulted from the tradition born out of Gettier cases Gettier's paper, other concepts are not reducible to more simple ones. And he gives the example of being colored and being red is not reducible to being colored plus something else. Why I think that knowledge would be subject to an analysis in more basic terms and why not think of it that as being more like color concepts? So he questions with respect, I mean that objection, the motivation to begin with

33:21 Wes: and the next objection is the problem of access.

33:24 Russell: And that kind of unites the maybe two parts of the knowledge. First project the view that knowledge is a mental state and then the view about evidence and justification and all the rest.

33:36 Mark: Right. So the idea is that you might think that if you know something you automatically know that you know it. And he wants to just deny that there's no reason to think that we could be even on the justified true belief, like you don't know for sure whether it's true or not. So you could have justified true belief and yet not know for sure that it is justified true belief.

33:57 Russell: And also this section, the the anti luminosity argument, which we'll I'm sure get to just a second, not only challenges that, what's called the KK thesis, the idea that if you know P, you know that you know P, but it also challenges kind of orthodox views of rationality and justification, that whether you conform to or comply with the norms of rationality or justification or belief more broadly, you should always be in a position to know Whether you do or you don't. And this argument is meant to challenge that sort of picture of rationality and justification. The picture which tries to make, as he says, epistemology operational, operationalizable or something like that.

34:47 Mark: Yeah, this actually came up in our discussion of what is the point of doing what Gettier or Goldman was with that whole set of disputants was trying to do of define, give an analysis of knowledge. Shouldn't your analysis of knowledge tell you how to your knowledge how to improve your knowledge? Right. That seemed to be what Bacon was doing. Bacon came up with a scientific method and this is what knowledge is and this is how to make sure that you're not saying things that you will later regret. And so there is that tradition that seemed to have been thrown away certainly by an externalist who just says well what knowledge is is when you actually connect with the thing.

And you might ask well how do I know if I've connected with the thing? And well that's, that's outside of the scope of what knowledge. Right. In the, when we were talking about the Nyaya school, they were not giving a Bacon like set of details on like how do you have to approach the object? In what additional views do you have to get it to. To make sure that your initial impression you're seeming is in fact an authentic case of knowledge. They didn't really have anything to say about that and didn't even see it as relevant. And Williamson actually is going to follow that that if you think you can try to somewhat epistemology be operational in the sense of providing rules for rational inquiry such that one is always in a position to know whether one is complying with them.

For instance, the rule proportion your belief to the evidence sounds useful. It seems to have a good chance of being operational. But his theory is going to be non operational. It has a third person aspect evaluating an agent's epistemic status from the standpoint of an external observer.

36:23 Wes: So the upshot is that for knowledge, first epistemology, there are no, what he calls non trivial states. It's not just knowledge that are fully open to introspection or operationalism. You know, the fully operational rules. So we're not in a position we can know without knowing that we know. But beyond that, any non trivial mental state is arguably not open to introspection. And he has a little. So in other words, it's not luminous to use that, to use that word. And he has an argument that sounds a bit like some of the things we've seen in personal Identity papers, a thought experiment in which you go undergo a gradual process of being in a state to not in a state.

And at a certain point, Right. So first of all, you have to admit that it's, it admits of gradations. And then once you do that, you can say, okay, well at the point where I go from being in this mental state, not being in this mental state, right on the border of being in it and not being in it are not discriminable, they can't be discriminated, we can't tell them apart. And if that's the case, then the wider implication is that in general we don't have introspective access to whether or not we are in a particular mental state. If we can point to the fact that in these border cases we can't discriminate between in being, between being in and out of them just because they're right on the border.

I don't know if that's the clearest explanation. Anyone else want to add to that?

37:56 Mark: Yeah, I was also thinking sort of more directly of some of these arguments about consciousness, that you might say that our brains obviously are conscious, but you might posit that a silicon based structure could never possibly be conscious. Well, what if you started systematically replacing neuron by neuron, your brain with the silicon one, so that you end with a silicon one that has exactly the same structure as your current neurons, functionally all the same. Is there some. If you really think that. No, no, the computer, even if it has that structure, is not going to be conscious. Well, where is the point at which consciousness would just suddenly cut out? Is there either the conscious light is on and then it's off, or is it somehow gradual? What does a half conscious being even mean? This whole thing?

38:40 Wes: Yeah, see our Ned Block episode for yes and our Parfit episode for personal identity versions of the similar argument.

38:48 Mark: But he talks about pain here. One can feel pain without being in a position to know that one feels pain. What did you guys think of this? That sort of as the pain gets less and less, you might actually not realize you're still in pain. Maybe we could hook up your brain and see the pain receptors are firing. But at that moment, at least until I call your attention to it, you don't know that you're in pain. Did you guys find that? Because that's usually given us the paradigm case of like there's no such thing as an unconscious pain.

39:17 Wes: What's interesting here is. Right, yeah, that, that's an abstract philosophical argument in terms of discriminability and a thought experiment. But he'll go on to say, well, there's these independent arguments by which he means he doesn't say it, but psychological arguments. What is the psychology of this? And it talks about unconscious beliefs and. But of course, yeah, if we were to look to our own personal experience, the best I can do is to say I might be sitting here for a while not notice that my knee is aching because it's. I have a strain, a pickleball strain, right.

I'm not always focused on that pain and so I'm not really aware that I'm in that pain. And then suddenly I notice that why am I so irritable? I'm like, oh yeah, it's because my knee has been aching all the time and I haven't been paying attention to it. So we could do little psychological thought experiments like that as well if we wanted to convince ourselves that even something like pain is not a mental state to which we have complete introspective access.

40:15 Russell: Yeah, that's good. That's probably the most difficult non trivial mental state to get this argument to go through with because we might think, okay, knowledge, belief, sure, but when I feel pain, it's something about feeling pain involves the first person awareness of being in it. And so this is a point. So the thesis is, the anti luminosity thesis is that for any non trivial mental state one is not always in a position to know that one is in it. And again, pain is the example paradigmatic mental state that's appealed to in order to challenge this claim. But like you just said, Wes, you don't have to run through this kind of indiscriminability argument or the sorites argument. You can just appeal to evidence from ordinary experience. Why am I doing things that I don't normally do? Oh, and then you discover upon further investigation, I've got a strained ankle or what have you.

41:22 Wes: Yeah, or we can discover on investigation that we are having a feeling or thought that we weren't having, aware that we are actually having. The mind is just psychologically that complicated. And I find that entirely convincing. Chris, you were saying you were not so sure about that. I don't remember what you were saying, Chris.

41:39 Christopher: No. I guess hearing you guys talk about it helped me out a little bit. I guess I was wondering what this argument was like, what's at stake, what it was meaning to do. Because I am completely sympathetic and genuinely agree with the idea that. I also don't buy that our state's mental states are fully. We have to be fallible about our own mental states and introspection. We don't have access to everything. We could be wrong. I just. I totally buy into that. What's the point of. In what way does that push forward the idea that knowledge is prior to belief? Or what's the luminosity argument doing here?

42:09 Wes: It helps us challenge internalism.

42:12 Russell: Specific.

42:13 Mark: Okay, so he talks about evidence in the next paragraph, right?

42:16 Wes: Yeah, that's the upshot, is that we can say that an agent's total evidence is the total content of their knowledge. So you say E. E equals K, I think is the way. Or evidence equals knowledge. So what does that mean? That means our evidence isn't limited to simply what's available by introspection at any given time. Our evidence can be constituted by what's outside of introspection, including knowledge that we don't know that we have.

42:46 Mark: I see. So.

42:47 Christopher: I see.

42:48 Wes: So justification is not simply an objective state thing.

42:52 Christopher: Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it. Okay.

42:54 Mark: Right. So that makes believe only what you have evidence for to be not no longer operational, because evidence. You don't know what you have evidence for. Yes, it seems like that. Redefinition. We could just say, okay, fine, don't use the word evidence. Use seemings. Believe only what you have. Seemings. What the weight of your seemings from the face you see, it seemed to be in favor of. And then he'd have to say, well, do you even know what your seemings are? If it's not going to be a purely unanalyzed qualia. I'm experiencing red dot now, even just red.

Associating that with other. Is that really red? Is that. Think. Compare it with other reds you've seen before. Like there might just be something that even a seeming to define that. He says, again, non trivially. I think trivially would be. Define it in terms of this moment and defined it as transparent, as luminous. Like. Okay, if you're not doing that and you're saying, what does this seem to be? This seems to be a red ball or something. Okay, well, do you actually have the evidence that it is really a ball and not a picture of a ball, an illusion of a ball, Something like that?

Is this. Do you. Do you guys buy this argument? Let's make this our last point in part one.

44:07 Wes: Yeah, I think I buy this. And this isn't. I think it's important we can have. Right, so it. What does it remind me of? It reminds me a little bit of say, say in Wittgenstein, when, if we want to talk about concepts as something that. Right. They're not just pictures in the mind or something like that. They involve procedural knowledge, which in a way is another form of what you might want to call unconscious or non conscious knowledge. We can't really do with them without this more expansive conception of knowledge. It's not just that there's knowledge with a capital K and then there's these other types of procedural or implicit knowledge. The two things are actually much more intimately related. And in this case, yes. I think it must be the case that what we know is much larger than what is introspectable or what is in conscious awareness at any given time.

45:05 Christopher: I don't know.

45:05 Wes: Does someone have a better case for that? I mean, I think his case is the case of pain and all that is convincing. But can anyone articulate that in a better way?

45:12 Christopher: Like I said, I'm already sympathetic to the idea that it's not. We don't have full access to our internal states, all of the knowledge. Yeah, I agree that we. I mean, especially because he. I mean, like it ends up being the case that something like. Like you said, operational knowledge can end up being kind of a species of the genus knowledge. To me, knowledge is like the most basic and so even knowledge we don't know about that. It would be kind of a species of the genus knowledge, kind of perception to memory, all these things.

45:42 Wes: I mean, it's worth reiterating. Right. That knowledge wasn't supposed to be an purely internalist concept. It was supposed to be this hybrid concept.

45:50 Russell: Right.

45:50 Wes: But now it turns out to be. Would we call it purely externalist? Is that the upshot?

45:56 Russell: I mean, there's still an internal component.

45:59 Christopher: Yeah, we just. We're not separating them into two distinct to concepts.

46:02 Russell: Right, Exactly.

46:03 Mark: All right, let's make that the last word for part one. Come back for part two. If you're a Partially Examined Life supporter, that should be in your feed already or very soon. Unless you support through Apple, it'll be up next week. For everybody else, if you want to become a supporter, go to partially examinedlife.com support. See you soon.