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

0:08 Mark: The Partially Examined Life Episode 348 Part 2 We've been talking about the ideas of Tim Williamson on Knowledge First Epistemology. We were in the middle of considering in detail a chapter in the Routledge Companion to Epistemology 2010 by Williamson, just called Knowledge First Epistemology, referring back to his the ideas from his Knowledge and Its limits book from 2000. And I think we had gotten through the idea. Were there Any other comments on the position that he's arguing against? Sees the mental as somehow transparent, or he used the term luminous, that mental states are things that if you're having them, you know you're having them.

Right.

If I'm in pain, I know I'm in pain. Many philosophers have. Right. Sartre even argued that Freud's unconscious didn't even make sense because for exactly this reason that he thought what the mental is all about is that it is transparent. And Williamson is arguing that even something like pain is not transparent. So definitely you wouldn't think something like belief or evidence or anything else that goes into epistemology. He wants to say that knowledge really is a mental state. It is not partly mental because it's transparent, and then partly not.

In fact, the whole thing, every component of it, every, if you want to say there are components at all, is not transparent. So if you want to say you should always moderate your beliefs in line with the evidence, well, you don't actually know exactly what you believe and you don't exactly know what the evidence is, even though you think you might. But you know, there your belief is going to have maybe words in it, and those words have references and things that are outside your immediate consciousness. The evidence is going to be like knowledge itself.

What you think might be evidence might not really be evidence. Right. So there's no such thing as a pure seeming, you know, at least that has any knowledge content.

Yeah, yeah, right. What seems to be evidence may not be evident. So, but he wants to identify evidence with knowledge, with what you know, even if you don't know you know it. So in the brain, in the vat case, I am, you know, in the real world, I know that I have hands in the brain. In the vat case, I only think I do, and we can treat that as a difference in evidence. So I'm just not aware that I have less evidence in the brain. In the vat case, I'm not aware that I don't actually know that I don't have hands. So the upshot is what am I justified in rationally believing? That doesn't just depend on the way it seems to me on what is what I have introspective access to that depends upon what I actually know. Even if I don't know and know

2:49 Christopher: here being what is factive. So true what it depends on what is true. Right.

2:54 Mark: Ultimately, so we're saying even justification, which is a term that has not yet come up in here, you might think that you. Right, according to Goldman, that we Talked about Alvin Goldman last time that you. As long as you're following a legitimate method for getting knowledge, you know, that generally works, or it seems like it should generally work. You know, we have strong a priori reasons to think so if you follow the scientific method, then you're justified, even though we know that not everything that science lands on ends up being true. So you could have false justified beliefs and that's just part of the knowledge game. Well, according to Williamson, no even justification. You might have thought you were justified, but you're not really justified it. That itself is not transparent to you.

Yeah.

3:41 Christopher: It's almost like he's saying, you know until you don't know.

3:44 Mark: Yep.

3:45 Christopher: It's kind of how I. Yeah.

3:46 Mark: Or you can know you know, you can not know even though you believe you know. So he ends this section by saying evidence equals K, evidence equals knowledge, but not what you believe. You know, because we have to make that distinction between believing we know something and actually knowing it.

I guess I want to bring in, open the door to talking about the second article here, justifications, excuses and skeptical scenarios from 2015, because this is very much about. Well, if you're a brain in a vat, you're in fact not justified in saying you have hands because you don't have evidence that you have hands. You think you have evidence you had hands. You think you're following a reasonable knowledge gathering procedure. Oh, I'm going to look really carefully at my hands.

I'm going to smack myself following that procedure.

Yes, you are.

4:38 Wes: Yes.

4:38 Mark: You're doing the best you can and there's nothing else that would be expected of you.

Yeah, right.

4:42 Wes: So.

4:43 Mark: But that's not a justification according to Williamson, but it is an excuse. So he just introduces this distinction between that we have, you can be excused, but you're still not justified. So excuse is something that's transparent to you. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

5:01 Christopher: Which is a cool way to characterize it because you do feel sympathetic to the brain in the vat person who did all the proper procedures to get knowledge the way we would. And so you, you want to say they're justified. I get the intuition. But this.

5:13 Mark: Or brain in the vat people.

5:15 Wes: Yeah.

5:16 Christopher: Or the. But yeah, this gives you a way to talk about still being able to be sympathetic to them but not going as far as saying they have knowledge.

5:24 Wes: And you think of the brain in a vat as being kind of like the case the. Really the bad. Obviously the bad case. But you can imagine more mundane cases where you take your evidence set to be say, like E. But it turns out you're in E prime, you have less evidence. Your total evidence doesn't support. You think it supports believing P, but it doesn't. So that's kind of maybe a more local case where your evidence on Williamson's account supports an attitude towards proposition and you're not in a position to know that that's the case. So, for instance, an example that's used is when Lincoln was assassinated.

A lot of people took themselves to know until the information had spread that Lincoln was the President, but in fact, he no longer was. So all those beliefs for all those people who hadn't yet come into evidence of the assassination were at least according to the framework we might think that Williamson will put forth in this paper, unjustified in believing that Lincoln's still the President. But they have excellent excuses.

6:42 Christopher: So we don't want to talk about any more of the first article, reasons for action, or any of that. I didn't know if it was.

6:48 Mark: If you have a point to throw out that's still relevant, go right ahead.

6:51 Christopher: I don't know that I do.

6:54 Mark: I mean, it's just so. It's very, very technical and it's a slog through the rest of that. So we should.

6:59 Christopher: Yeah, especially with the KRB stuff. And I'm looking at. Yeah, I was like, oh, okay. But so wait, so I have a question for Russell. How is it not just true belief, how is knowledge first not just sort of dispensing with the justification and saying the belief is it's knowledge if it's correct, if it's true, if it's factive, isn't that just true belief? Like what?

7:19 Wes: So what's the difference between what Williamson would say, mere true belief and knowledge?

7:24 Christopher: Yeah, I mean, I think examples just helped articulate what the differences would be helpful.

7:29 Wes: So you may decide whether to believe that it's going to rain tomorrow on the basis of flipping a coin, and that flipping a coin is your Heads you'll believe, tails you won't. Now it turns out that it rains tomorrow and the coin came up heads. So you have a true belief.

7:52 Mark: You say, I knew it.

7:55 Wes: My magic coin. I knew it. It's been blessed. In this case, it's intuitively not the case that you know. And there are a bunch of other cases where you arrive at a true belief on the basis of a method that's not knowledge. Conducive. Yeah. Broken clock. These are gettier kind of cases. Broken clock, exactly.

8:20 Christopher: Yeah. That's a great example of how that you might. You look at the clock. It's broken. But it is 8 o' clock in the morning. It just so happens to be that you looked at the right time and it's luck that you have this triple.

8:30 Wes: Exactly.

8:30 Mark: Luck reliabilist would say right? Yeah. It wasn't produced using a reliable procedure for generating knowledge. Is the knowledge first epistemologist doing the same thing? Is that.

Yeah. Was William going to be open to this at all or is he just going to say no? Actually, as Chris was insisting, you knew what time it was, you didn't know that you knew what time it was?

No, I think, I mean my initial intuition was going to be that you don't know. So the difference between mere true belief and knowledge can only be put in circular terms which is that what makes it true belief is that you didn't know. That's the only way you can explain it. But it sounds like maybe there.

Yeah.

Can we be reliableists as well about knowledge generating procedures?

9:15 Wes: Sure.

9:15 Mark: Russell. Yeah, yeah.

9:18 Wes: So the knowledge first approach to justification, there are various kind of hybrid views which take on the Williamsonian knowledge first unanalyzable all that with a reliabilist twist as to how we acquire justified beliefs. But where the reliability condition is defined in terms of knowledge. So where the process is reliable only if it has a certain propensity for generating knowledge rather than true belief. Where the value, epistemic value in play is knowledge rather than true belief. So these sorts of people take the knowledge first picture of the aim of our epistemic activities and plug it into a reliabilist account of justification. Well, that sort of view will try to reconcile the intuition that biv subjects and Gettiered subjects are justified.

10:18 Mark: Brain in the vat.

10:19 Wes: Okay, yeah, sorry, brain in the vat. Yes. With this knowledge first commitment to the unanalysability of the concept of knowledge and the thought that our epistemic activity aims at the value of knowledge.

10:35 Mark: So if I, if I'm a knowledge first epistemologist and I say that coin, I say hey, coin flips don't. Are not right. So I'm no longer saying hey, coin flips, flips don't generate true beliefs on enough to count as a, as a good justification or I guess or as a knowledge or as a true belief procedure. Let's just say, and it's a statistical criterion, it sounds like in the knowledge first epistemology case I would say well, they don't generate, they don't tend to generate knowledge. Is that right? But then I can't say, can I Say, why can I say statistics? I mean, or is that just a basic intuition?

11:15 Wes: Or it's an empirical claim, so it'd have to be borne out. Yeah, I mean, well, in a sense it's an empirical claim. So this might be going into the weeds a bit, but Goldman wants to kind of bring a naturalistic approach to epistemology. And what counts as a genuinely reliable process will be something that could be determined or perhaps ought to be determined by the psychologist, cognitive psychologists and all the rest. But what matters for justification is the epistemologist's project.

11:50 Mark: Yeah, I'm just, I'm asking because, yeah, for Goldman you can count up, if you're going on it statistically, you can say, okay, this percentage of time it produces true beliefs. But I don't know that you could ever do that with knowledge because knowledge is opaque.

Yeah.

So. Right.

12:08 Christopher: Well, unless you just assume it's always knowledge, the mental state, you just assume it's factive until it's not. Until something comes. Yeah, you just. So you're starting with it being knowledge, not having to figure out whether it is.

12:19 Mark: Yeah, it is maybe problematic to use to say the kind of procedure that in general generates knowledge if you think that we can't actually know whether we have knowledge or not, because then you can never either statistically or. There was sort of an idea that there's an a priori, like maybe we're in a world where just hinky things happen and when you have a wish for something to come true, then you know, a good, a benevolent demon comes in and makes it come true. But that's not, you know, wishful thinking is not a priori according to however we want to describe that something that we would put in the category.

Even if, wow, I find every time I really want something to be true, it ends up being true. I mean, don't, don't you have like. Well, every time, you know, you can't always get what you want, but you get what you need. Like people's sort of beliefs. Why there must be some sort of higher intelligence in the world is because they feel like, wow, I just, I really needed that thing and then that person entered my life right at that time. And we can talk about the sort of, the cognitive biases of why people have. It's almost pointless to argue whether there are illusions or not, but it is not.

If you're coming up with what a good knowledge based procedure you would not then just sort of say, oh, you know, when, how often do my wishes come true? Well, let Me just think back. It seems like every time I really want something, it, it comes true. I guess wishing ends up being, you know, so it's not just statistical or I guess sloppy. Statistical is what I was just referring to. There has to be some grounding for why you think this, this procedure gets you to the truth.

13:50 Wes: There's a related objection in the literature on epistemic justification where the knowledge procedure, method of belief formation is sort of paradigmatically unreliable. But it just so happens to be the case that the subject in question, Norm is the name he's given. Norm finds himself in the right world and so he's in the right world, he's using what is in other worlds would be an unreliable method. Shouldn't. Isn't this a problem for the reliabilist? And so that's how this sort of objection plays out with respect to reliabilism, which I suppose would be inherited by knowledge first reliabilist pictures as well.

But yeah, the question about confirming instances in which the outputs of a process are knowledge seem to be more challenging than determining whether they're mere true beliefs. So that does seem to be. That was something I think you were pointing your finger on there, Wes. That does seem to be a challenge for knowledge. First, hybrid views that are linked up with reliabilism.

15:02 Mark: I think the direct response to Goldman is here in this justification, excuses and skeptical scenarios case, which is this distinction. Yes, he's pulling out letters but between sort of consider normative cases generally, not just epistemic norms, but if you violate a rule, you violate a rule. So he just calls it that. N N the norm. But then there's the. Are you the kind of person who in general obeys the rule? And it's. This is easiest to think of in, you know, the cases of, of morality or law. Like, you know, did you actually obey a moral rule in this case? Or, you know, that's maybe what is important, but it also seems important to us. Like are you a good person? Are you the kind of person that in general follows the moral rules? All right, well, so that's. Let's call that dn. What does the D stand for?

15:51 Wes: Yes, derivative.

15:52 Mark: Derivative and yeah.

Or disposition.

Disposition, yes. So disposition. Yeah, disposition to follow the norm. And then a third one which is less important. But like in this particular circumstance, do you act like a person who in general follows the norms? So he just shows that these are all distinct by just giving you examples like you could be a total scumbag who does not intend to follow the norms is not the kind of person in general that follows the norms but in this occasion he follows the norm because it's in his interest to do so or something. So that's someone who follows odj the occasional disposition to follow the norm but yet does not follow DN disposition to follow the norm or nature.

And so the argument against Goldman is that yeah, okay, you could be the kind of person who epistemically is using a good method what seems a good method for finding knowledge. So that would be dn but that doesn't mean that you're actually finding the knowledge. Right. So the justification there is he translates to dn but what matters whether you have the knowledge or not is are you obeying the norm which is only believe true things which you don't know what the true things are. And so the other ones. Yeah.

Is that we get excuses for the dispositional states. We get excuses, yeah. But for actual he wants to cordon off justification and say no, that only that's not right. We're not justified just based on seemings. We're only just justified when there's this actual relationship to truth to the external world which is counter intuitive. But again it gets, you know, using that brain in the vat case, again we're used to the upshot is that the brain in the VAT person is doing everything right. They have the right dispositions that the, you know, or they could be right and they come to the perfectly quote unquote justifiable conclusion that they have hands.

But it's not justifiable, it's not justified with a big J in Williamson's sense because it's not true and it's not knowledge we get so we get this stricter sense of justification and then we get excuses and blame or whatever you want to call it for the weaker senses.

18:10 Christopher: Yeah, I was just going to say that you're right. It feels a little counterintuitive just because we're used to going using justification for our knowledge, we're going to justify our knowledge claims and it really does is flipped where they're intimately connected such that knowledge is how you get your justification. To get justification you have to have knowledge.

18:27 Mark: Exactly, exactly.

18:29 Christopher: But once you start thinking it sort of that way it can be interesting to kind of play out examples and stuff.

18:35 Mark: Yeah, we didn't read any anyone objecting to or countering his arguments. But Russell, from what you were saying, he's controversial and that there's a lot of that probably. So I imagine this is sort of a lot of a lot of internalist backlash, let's say.

18:51 Wes: But yeah, there's also quite. This is a minority position among knowledge firsters. I believe he's one of three people who endorse this knowledge is required for justification view and what they will. The other knowledge firsters will do is appeal to the thought that mere blamelessness is not quite capturing what is epistemically good about the brain in the vat's cognitive behavior. They're doing something better than merely being blameless. And this sort of analysis fails to capture that something better. It treats in fact the gettier cases and where the ignorance is the result of either intervening factors or something about the environment, as in the fake barn country case, as on a par with the sort of cognitive activity going on with the biv cases, the brain in a vat cases.

So other knowledge first accounts of justification. They try to rescue the intuition that you can have false justified beliefs and they have various ways of going about doing so. And one is, like I mentioned earlier, is cashing it out in terms. In reliable terms in just substituting the value true belief with knowledge that will allow for cases where an ordinarily reliable process outputs false belief and ignorance due to certain mitigating factors. So yeah, it is quite controversial.

20:54 Mark: So in both these latter articles, justifications, excuses and skeptical scenarios and morally loaded cases in philosophy, he wants to bring in the moral as another species of the normative that epistemic norms are one kind of norm and moral norms are another kind to make it more vivid to us. So we are saying we should give some examples of when we want to say, you know, we got the brain in the vat case where okay, we don't blame you brain for. For thinking that you have hands, but you're still wrong and you don't actually have justification. Do we have. You know, that's a pretty weird example if you. Well, the B I N. Yes, brain and Nazi. Let me give it maybe a simpler one. But if you are trying to. You go back in time and you're trying to kill baby Hitler but you kill the wrong baby.

21:45 Christopher: Yikes.

21:46 Mark: Like you know, your brain or you're doing just. You're performing some action that it just on most accounts is morally appropriate. Maybe going back in time and killing baby Hitler is not the ideal one. It's not the simplest one I could come up with. But you make a mistake or you

kill baby Hitler accidentally instead of intentionally.

That's a Gettier case.

22:08 Wes: I'm just accidentally run over blameworthy justified action.

22:12 Mark: You're trying to shoot him but sorry.

Right. Wouldn't we want you to say if you were trying to do the right thing and you make a mistake and you actually do something terrible, that, okay, we understand how you did that, but we don't want to actually praise you and carry around on our shoulders for doing the right thing. That Kant is wrong, that it's just internalist, it is just what your motives are and what you are trying to do that gives an action moral worth. What ultimately gives it moral worth is did you comply with the moral norm or not?

Yeah, I think hopefully this is what you're trying to segue us into. But section four in this morally loaded cases paper, the internalism leads to problems for ethics and for action. Because it seems to imply that, let's say, neo Nazis with a certain set of beliefs, and those are the only beliefs and to which they have access and a certain set of perceptions to which they have access, that based on those coherentist and consistency criteria, they might be justified on the internalist account in believing that they ought to kill the people who are, that they consider to be inferiors, that all they have is that, you know, a certain set of axioms and principles and perceptions.

And so how can we blame them if that's all they have for drawing the conclusions that they do? But we don't want to, even if we were to admit that as internalists, we wouldn't want to say that justified in believing that they ought to kill inferiors means that they. That they actually ought to do that. And so you get what Williamson calls isolation. We, as internalists, we need to be able to isolate these two different senses of ought, oughtness. You could be justified in believing you, you have to do something, or that you ought to do something without being justified in doing it, or.

Yeah, without being justified in. In doing it. And I think so what he ends up showing, I think, or trying to show is that we can accomplish this isolation. So for instance, if we are a brain in a vat and there's a, you know, to take Singer's example, there's a baby drowning in a shallow pond. And we're justified in believing by internalist standards, right, that there really is a baby drowning in a pond, then we're also justified.

Baby Hitler.

Yeah, he's trying to complicate the example. Then we're justified in acting on that belief. So in general, it's hard to isolate this concept of being epistemically justified in believing something from the idea that we ought to do things based on those beliefs.

25:03 Wes: I think that's exactly right. And there's another thing that he says that makes it perhaps kind of quicker to the point, says that believing something is being disposed to acting on it. Given that understanding of what belief is, we should expect that the norm governing belief inherits some of the normative or reflects, as he says, some of the normativity of action. So we should expect a presumption or a default case where if one's belief is justified, then acting on that belief is justified.

25:36 Mark: Yeah.

25:36 Wes: And so you get this. And that's what the internalists will have to deny in order to deal with the neo Nazi case or other sorts of morally, morally loaded cases where people believe things that are morally objectionable, but

25:54 Christopher: they meet the criteria of internalist justification. Exactly.

25:57 Mark: And then so the knowledge first is a really solves this problem because from the knowledge first perspective, Right, Yeah. Justification implies truth and neo Nazis are just wrong. They're not justified in believing that and they're not justified in acting on it. They ought not to do it. Ought not to do it. So it all lines up in a very nice way and doesn't involve this problem that internalism has.

26:24 Christopher: Yeah, I thought a lot of the critique of existentialist ethics and Nietzsche's ethics and you could have a perfectly consistent serial killer, you know, blah, blah, blah. How do you come up with some way to object to that?

26:34 Mark: Yeah, of course we probably don't see it as problematic that there is a truth of the matter whether the cat is on the mat or not or whether you have hands or not. Whereas it is wrong to kill people. Like that's uncontroversial. But it's not just obviously true in the same sense, such that we can all just reflect and refer to this objective truth. Such that we can say, I mean, what did you think about this comparable case? Like the brain in the vat, we can see how the truth is being hidden from that brain, that he's being presented with this full set of pseudo perceptions that show that he has hands and is in a room and all this sort of stuff and that those are wrong.

But whereas, and Williamson is saying that the brain in a Nazi. Right, that comparably has no way outside of his own because he looks for more evidence and he just sees, oh yes, those are more people that need killing and everything reinforces the beliefs he already has, we really think that those are comparable situations. Is there a, a moral truth that is just outside his reach? If he were just able to break out of his cloudedness, then he would reach it in the same way that the Brain could if, you know, given a red pill.

I think you're pointing to a real. Yeah, if someone wanted to find a weakness in this argument, you're pointing to it. I had a similar thought, which is that, well, whatever one thinks about, you know, morality, he's exploiting a problem within morality to come up with this sort of problem for internalism. See, one might say, well, this isn't so much a problem for internalism as it is a problem of free will or morality. Right? So you treat, on the one hand, you treat the neo Nazi as a product of their epistemic circumstances, right? They have no free will on one description, and so they just do whatever it is that their mental states have designed them to do.

But then you switch to another perspective in which they can be wrong about doing that. Do you see what I'm saying? One could say that this, he's really just pointing to attention, that that is more about morality per se and the conflict between the kind of description we give as a person, as a product of their circumstances or their epistemic circumstances, and then on another description, the idea that they're just free to do whatever they decide to do. Does that make sense? Mark? Am I, am I pointing to the same. Are we on the same track?

I think so, Chris.

29:02 Christopher: I want, Yeah, I kind of see attention. Right. I mean, here in that I assume this paper, he just assumes that we're going to be either moral realists or that our values line with his example. It would have to be the case that you would find the neo Nazi morally repugnant or think he's actually wrong. So it is a critique of internalism if you have those values or are a moral realist and think there are moral truths to be discovered and stuff like that. But you would have to think that already. I don't know, Russell, if he's even talked about metaethics or if he's a moral realist. But you definitely have to buy into. Otherwise it doesn't matter that this person's perfectly consistent. And the internalist justification works fine. If you don't think. I guess if you're a Nazi or you don't think there are real moral truths out there.

29:48 Mark: I mean, if you're a relativist, you could definitely say, we condemn the Nazi. Yeah, yeah, of course. And there's no problem with that, right? Yeah, there's. It's no, it's just the, the folks that think that it's not enough for us to merely agree on it. It has to be objectively the Case that there is a truth. Just like that he's not actually in a vat.

30:08 Wes: Yeah.

30:08 Christopher: Because the brain in the vat, you might think those are different kinds of truths. Maybe you don't.

30:11 Mark: Sorry, Russell, did you have anything to add to this discussion?

30:14 Wes: No, no. He's definitely a realist.

30:16 Christopher: I thought that makes sense.

30:18 Wes: The degree to which that bears on this issue might be a little dense, but I'm just not able to see how moral realism is in play here.

30:30 Christopher: Well, not necessarily moral realism, but also either moral realism or that like there's some truth of the matter. Right. Because that's. For it to be a factive mental state, it would have to be the case that it's true that being a neo Nazi wanting to kill people is bad or something like that. Or just, you know, obviously you might think values are contingent on your culture and historical background. So your values would have to line up with his examples. Do you think that.

30:55 Mark: Well, we need ought or not ought to do something.

You have to believe in all. Yeah.

To have a true value and to be. We needed to line up. Well, with the typical brain in the vat example of you just don't have hands. Right. You don't have hands. Or that's just wrong and that's the stumbling block.

Well, maybe this is getting at something because we haven't referred to this difference between epistemic justification and pragmatic justification. Because the pragmatist is going to say if you live in the vat and you're never getting out of the vat, you have hands.

31:26 Wes: Yeah.

31:27 Mark: From the point of view of someone outside the hand, the vat, you don't have hands. But that's your reality. You are. Your aboutness. You're thinking about your hands is referring to those virtual hands, etc. So.

Well, that's not what he means though, by pragmatic justification. Just to be clear. I mean, I think you're. This is an interesting case, but what he means is just it's believing it is useful. But Mark, it sounds like you're saying something a little bit different.

Well, but that's the question, you know, so it's pretty useful when you're in the Matrix. When you're a brain in the vat who's in the Matrix then to believe that you have hands. If you don't, then you don't get to do the fun stuff that involves hands.

Yeah.

When you're in there.

But the pragmatist idea is of truth as sort of, you know, the, the ideal limits of investigation. Or whatever it is you would find out within the. Within the matrix. Right? That's one idea. And it's an entirely separate idea to say, oh, if I just believe something, then the outcome will be better for me. That's a different pragmatist justification, which is one that he discusses.

Yeah, yeah.

32:34 Christopher: Pascal's wager is what he uses, right, to talk about the difference. Whereas the wager there is saying, look, this is just beneficial to you. It's not an. There's no evidence to God's existence. It's just, it's better for you to think this. Like that would be the pragmatic justification.

32:48 Mark: You don't know if your spouse has been unfaithful to you, but it's probably better if you just assume that they haven't and then you don't worry about it.

Just in general, you increase your chances of success by believing in success. So that's a really good example. I believe this pill is going to work and he's entirely right. And so therefore I enhance the chance of the success of the pill working because there's always a strong placebo effect. So I'm better off thinking that the pill works. But this is, you know, he's offering this pragmatic justification as a potential response for the internalist. And then he'll say, it doesn't work.

33:25 Christopher: Yeah, it ends up not being able to separate itself from epistemic justification the way they want. Right.

33:30 Mark: Because norms of belief and action are just not that independent from each other. And that's where he gets into the idea that the nature of belief is that a believer is to. Is actually disposed to act on it. And epistemic justification is a major determinant of pragmatic justification. And the typical cases, right, it's normally it's not useful to believe false things.

33:52 Wes: That's the default, right?

33:54 Mark: Yeah, that's the default.

So I wonder if this is a good sort of final topic for us to just dwell a little more on. Like the whole point of being an internalist, of being potentially a skeptic, is so that you can leave open the question that maybe I am a brain in the vat, maybe I'm wrong. Whereas being an externalist to having a knowledge first, it would be pretty goofy to have a knowledge first philosophy, yet you're a brain in the vat, and so actually you don't have knowledge about anything. And this morally loaded case in philosophy, right, he's going, he's comparing internalism, as you've said, to relativism and skepticism and talking about, you know, this just evidently harmful post truth atmosphere in politics, you know, tobacco.

He mentions tobacco companies trying to sow doubt about whether, you know, not that they're trying to convince people that tobacco is actually good for you, they're just trying to cloud the evidence. So there's just a lot of. Clearly he has reasons. And I even listened to an interview with him where he sort of got interested in is dairy could dairy Dobby. Right. You know, he went to these sort of continental, what are the alternatives to analytic philosophy, to believing in a strong notion of truth, the going the postmodernist Foucault sort of way.

And he just couldn't make sense of any of it. And he thought it was all very authoritarian, that it's just, oh, you dare to question the canon and Derrida, the masters? You must be stupid and not understand and just not, not willing to engage in the sort of truth based dialogue that is just a prerequisite for good intellectual hygiene. But I think we've hit on something. You know, a pragmatist is a sort of sophisticated, maybe less more plain spoken way. And he mentions Rorty in particular, somebody who might deny that again, the, the brain in the vat is really wrong because pragmatically it works for them to believe all the stuff that they believe.

And so maybe we just want to say, well, it's their truth, it's truth for them, but it's not truth for us outside. So bite the bullet and say that some kind of relativism is actually the case. And I think he's spending this last article arguing, arguing against internalism based on how these other ones, skepticism and relativism are just obviously wrong because they're just produced these morally objectionable examples. You have to admit that the Nazi is fully justified if you want to believe in relativism.

And I think I'm sympathetic to him about relativism, but for different, I mean for that reason, but mainly because it's inconsistent. So you don't need to get to the moral cases to find out that relativism doesn't work. I'm not as sympathetic to his argument about skepticism because I think skepticism really, it depends on context, right? So believing that the earth is flat as a practical matter is kind of dumb. But the more theoretical you get, the more doubt you're willing to invite in. And I think it's perfectly appropriate. Right? We could be a brain in a vat or something like that.

It just depends on your purposes and the reason why this is important. This is something Mill brings up in On Liberty. The opponent of freedom of discussion will say, look, some things are just too, are too dangerous to discuss, some things are too absurd to. For us to allow for there to be free discussion. And we don't do that at a.

Right.

When it comes to actually passing laws and policies and things like that. We're not that philosophical about that. We understand that something has to be done. There's going to be a tax or there's not going to be a tax. And we don't get, we don't become philosophers about that and say, well, I know who can know, or something like that. And Mill's point is that, yes, that for purposes of when there's an action to be performed, something that we have to do or not do, then our tolerance for skepticism should be very, very low. And ultimately we have to make a choice.

But that doesn't mean that that applies to the highest level of inquiry. There should be domains of. Context of investigation is what I call them, contexts of investigation where we're much looser about that and if we don't allow for that, then we can't ever course correct. We need this outer layer which is much more open to the skeptical, even if at a more core layer we're freer about action. In order to course correct when it's necessary to course correct.

38:23 Christopher: Yeah, you have to be able to be wrong.

38:24 Mark: Right. So we need at least some context in which we're maximally open to being wrong, even about the roundness of the earth. I don't know if that makes sense, but that's my. That's where I think he goes a bit wrong also on this relationship between you're.

You're talking brain, brain in a vat and then flat earth made me think of the concept of brain in a flat. That what if we're actually. What if the third dimension is something that does not exist in reality? It is merely. And this was something that in the. The we in our second Nyaya episode we, we explicitly considered that even if you're in a dream, all the elements in the dream have to have come from the waking world, from the outside. But is it possible, you know, more on the Kantian thing, that the way that we structure reality is not in the world in itself, that it is.

Even the brain in a vat case is picturing a three dimensional brain in a three dimensional vat in a room that's more or less like our room. But of course that's not, you know, inherent in the computer simulation picture where who knows what a computer could be nested in. It's just data. There's nothing. There's no particular environment it has to be in. So the element, even the basic elements, the colors and the dimensions and the shapes, could be something that merely our human way of being is inserting in things. So this is just a form of relativism or potential relativism.

39:51 Christopher: I will say that I. And maybe Russell, can push back a little or defend a little, but it does feel a little bit like this point of view, this knowledge first, epistemology. It just kind of dismisses skepticism from the outright and says there's definitely an external world. That's how we're setting this all up, is we're just assuming there is an external world immediately, and then we can get knowledge pretty easily because it's just. Is it true?

40:14 Mark: Is it factive?

40:15 Christopher: Is it of the world? And so it feels kind of like that would appeal to people of a certain temperament. Thinking of James here about people's underlying temperaments and the way they influence their, like, acceptance of certain views. And because my initial. I don't know if I find some of the arguments persuasive enough to just buy into the fact or just take for granted the idea that there's an external world. I don't know if that's just something about my temperament, but I'm resistant a little bit. Russell, is there a particular argument that made you go, you know what? Yes. Or does it just sound kind of like it aligns with your dispositions?

40:48 Wes: Yeah. So what first attracted me to Williamson's project was the anti luminosity argument and the thought that whether we are doing what we should be doing, it's not always clear whether we're in the good case or the bad case. And seems to then suggest that these norms that are very important to living the way we want to live, whether they're epistemic, moral, practical, what have you, we might be very conscientious, we might work on ourselves, develop the right dispositions, but we could still fall short because of factors that we are totally unaware of.

And that seems kind of, I suppose, sort of a tragic view of our relationship to the normative. We can do the best we can and still fall short. And even though we did the best that we can, falling short will still matter. I mean, a way to think about it is like Oedipus, you know, there was no way Oedipus could have known that the person that he killed was his father. There's no way he could have known that the person he married was his mother. And these had incredibly. You know, except for the prophecy that

42:12 Mark: told him he was going to kill.

42:15 Christopher: Besides that.

42:16 Wes: Yeah, yeah. He could have just lived it literally invented this brain.

42:20 Christopher: I didn't think it was a reliable process.

42:21 Mark: Yes, exactly. That would not have been a rely. He would have known. Hey, wait, I'm about to marry somebody. Should I consider whether this is my mother? Well, prophecies don't work.

Well, actually, this is. Let me say this because it is actually relevant. He had. He was raised by people who weren't actually his parents, who he thought were his parents. And when he found out about the prophecy, he fled to a different country because there's no way I'm going to sleep with my mother now because I've moved. But he moved to the city.

I didn't kill my father. I killed a sperm donor. My father is. Is my stepfather. And he's fine.

42:56 Christopher: He's fine.

42:57 Mark: I didn't marry my mother either.

42:59 Wes: That's good.

43:00 Mark: Did the oracle mean biological father or. Yeah, there's no way he could have known. And in fact, you know, he took steps to maximize his knowledge, to make things as certain as he possibly could. And he wasn't going to accidentally do it because he got as far away from his parents as possible.

43:16 Wes: Exactly. That picture seems right to me. That's what drew me in. And the response to skepticism that you mentioned, Chris. Yeah. It does seem there's another paper where he puts forth a kind of what's called a neo-Moorian response to skepticism. And essentially what he says is that

43:37 Christopher: makes a lot of sense because Moore is that same kind of dismissiveness of like, well, I have hands. What are you talking about?

43:43 Wes: Yeah, he says that they're cognitively defective. They're cognitively malfunctioning. The skeptic. Sure. So there's. They're in the bad case. They don't have the same evidence, they don't have the equality, they don't have the same total evidence as the person in the good case. As a result, they're kind of cognitively compromised. And that's probably dissatisfying to epistemologists who want to start from the first person point of view and try to work out their theory of rationality and justification and knowledge from that starting point. But if you begin, I think, with the anti-luminosity argument, the only way to go forward is, it seems to me anyway, the third person point of view.

And then it's very easy to get from there to the E equals K J equals K. And that sort of response to skepticism, that's not the only way of going from anti luminosity, but that is what seems to me a very compelling way. But just for the record, I'm not so sure if I endorse this whole package of views, but I do find them attractive.

44:54 Mark: So I thought this was an interesting topic to end on just because looking forward then, if you look up. Tim Williamson is very much active today and he has a lot of YouTube clips of him talking and a lot of them are about philosophy of philosophy of when philosophers reach an impasse, what do you do?

Right.

So we had this example of the gettier issue and the well, let's move to a new paradigm. Let's stop arguing about how to analyze knowledge at all because as you know. So he's criticizing this whole everyday language approach of what do we mean by knowledge? Can we come up with a set of necessary and sufficient conditions that capture which, you know, Wittgenstein should tell you you can't come up with a necessary and sufficient conditions for. For words like that. It's just, it's a family resemblance. But you know, we want a robust theory that will then tell us is this case right here, is this one of knowledge or not?

And you know, we should just get rid of that whole. He says, as somebody like Goldman gives a more and more elaborate theory. And we saw this in our Grice on Meaning episode. You know, when you add more and more conditions of well, this is what justification is and thus what knowledge is, it actually begins to look less and less like what pre theoretically your everyday meaning. So it's a self defeating procedure to try to do these really deep analyses of everyday concepts.

46:22 Wes: That is actually really important point, especially with respect to that paper justifications, excuses and skeptical scenarios. Because he starts by noting that saying that someone knows something is much more pre theoretical than saying someone justifiably believes something. Once you introduce this notion of justification, it seems we're working with a more technical term. So relying on pre theoretical intuitions, for instance, those evoked by gettier cases, brain in a vat cases and all the rest, they might not be the right starting point, those intuitions when it comes to building a theory of justification, because again that notion, epistemic justification is already kind of theoretical and there are many different senses of justification.

This was something I think Chris got at a little bit earlier. Williamson wants to focus on the notion or the sense of justification which ties it to the key normative standard for the assessment of beliefs, the EPISTEMIC assessment of beliefs. But there are other senses. There's the sense of justification where you're in a conversation and you need to justify your position in light of. And so anyway, the point just being that Williamson wants to challenge the idea that we should start with our intuitions in response to these sorts of cases because for one, it's not clear that they're mapping on to the right sense of justification.

But two, it seems like based on, you know, inductive evidence that you're going to end up with these analyses that are non informative, that contain a ton of conditions and fail to shed light on the phenomenon in question.

48:32 Mark: Should mention one other. He talks about this guy, Jonathan Bennett, giving him, giving a lecture that he listened to as he was developing this idea of knowledge first epistemology. And this guy was just focusing on why belief is involuntary. And he said in response, he suggested one could try first explaining why knowledge is involuntary, which might be easier since you cannot come to know at will a given proposition be true. Perhaps one could then use a connection between belief and knowledge to extend the explanation from knowledge to belief.

Bennett's response that he had been philosophizing all his career without employing the concept of knowledge. And he advised me to do the same. So here's somebody that did not see knowledge as, oh, that's the pre theoretical thing. He saw it as hopelessly pre theoretical, as confused. Not that it's indefinable, but it, that's just fundamentally confused and we need to do something like belief that he thought we could just understand better.

49:26 Christopher: Right.

49:26 Mark: I can experience a belief. I think I know what belief I have. Maybe there are sort of Wittgensteinian concerns of do I know what all the words in my belief are? They refer to something social. They're not, it's not a private language. But you know, it's still maybe more concrete and analyzable than this thing that's supposed to cut across the subjective and the objective. Thanks so much to both our guests and thanks Wes. And do you guys have any, any closings here? I mean, I'll say this was very interesting to me. I think, you know, this philosophy of philosophy stuff is fascinating. I will at some point try to reach out since Tim Williamson is alive, like maybe we can get him as a guest. That would be very cool. True.

50:09 Christopher: I don't have much to say. I enjoyed the reading as well, like Mark Russell, thanks for coming on. And I know this is. You're steeped in this, so it's good to have you and thanks, Wes and

50:17 Mark: Mark for having me on. It was super fun. Thanks, Chris. Thanks, Russell, of course.

50:22 Wes: And yeah, just thanks for having me. Very excited to be on and to talk about knowledge first, epistemology. I hope people enjoy.

50:30 Mark: All right, thanks everybody. You should reach out to us pe partialexaminedlife.com or through Facebook or Twitter or whatnot. Tell us what you'd like us to read. If there's something that this is inspired in you as it did in Russell, who knows what can happen from your reaching out. Probably not what happened to Russell, but it's possible. Please leave us a nice rating and review the podcast and we'll have our regulars Seth and Dylan will be back from their vacations soon. Next time we're talking about the first two chapters of Richard Rorty's Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism. Thanks everybody and good night.

Good night.

51:05 Wes: Good night.