- Email: [email protected]
Can we agree to disagree?
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 282–285
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Essay Review
Can we agree to disagree? Paul Faulkner Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Arts Tower, Western bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Knowledge by agreement. The programme of communitarian epistemology Martin Kusch; Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. xiii+303, Price £53.00 hardback, ISBN-13 978-0-19-925122-3, Price £24.00 paperback, ISBN-13 978-0-19-925137-7. Knowers are individuals because knowledge is a species of belief (or some other mental state). A belief is knowledge because of the relations it objectively possesses to the world and other mental states (and similarly if knowledge is a mental state other than belief). And the state of knowing can be transmitted across individuals by testimony. The programme of communitarian epistemology set out by Kusch denies these three orthodoxies. Moreover this programme is broached through denying that testimony functions to transmit knowledge. Rather than function to transmit knowledge, testimony functions to generate it; it does so because knowledge is fundamentally a state of agreement between individuals and testimony, as communication, is a means of putting individuals in agreement with one another. That testimony can establish agreement and so generate knowledge Kusch takes to be shown by performative testimony. His favourite example is that of marriage. ‘The registrar a tells the couple b that they have now entered a legally binding relationship of marriage; and by telling them so . . . the registrar makes it so that they are in the legally binding relationship of marriage’ (p. 65). Agreement on the registrar’s testimony brings about both the marriage and the shared knowledge of the marriage. Moreover, both the marriage and knowledge of it are social statuses; that is, both refer to bundles of entitlements and commitments where these articulate social, or intersubjective, relationships. Whilst a subject a might claim to know that p irrespective of others’ judgements, considered solely as an individual this is a status the subject alone cannot possess. In the most primitive case, a knows that p only insofar as she can persuade an audience b that p. Since knowledge is a social status, ‘a (or b) knows that p only insofar as she is a member of a knowledge constituting we’ (p. 72). That is, a knows that p only because and insofar as she has this social status within a ‘we’ that is the epistemic community formed when a persuades b E-mail address: paul.faulkner@sheffield.ac.uk 0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.03.020
that p. ‘And forming this community is tantamount to initiating and maintaining the communal performative ‘‘we hereby declare ourselves to be the epistemic subject of p and are thereby committed and entitled to use p in the ways in which the general institution of knowledge suggests”’ (p. 73). In particular, the community of knowledge formed when b recognises a’s justification is defined in terms of a’s commitment to being able to produce this justification and b’s entitlement to rely on a to do so. According to Kusch then, an individual knows something if and only if he is able to convince others to form a community—a ‘we’—that becomes the communal subject of belief, and within this community the individual is recognised as a knower. To know something is just to possess a certain status within a community. On this account Kusch takes communal performatives to be epistemically fundamental in two respects. First, an individual will be recognised as a knower through being able to produce a justification that is recognised as an exemplar of what justifications should be. Second, there must be some agreement as to what counts as exemplary of justification. Both cases Kusch represents in terms of the communicators tacitly endorsing the communal performative, ‘We believe that beliefs of type X are justified if they are justified in the way in which the following beliefs are justified: [and then follows a list of cases]’ (p. 152). (And in the primitive case, I presume, the list of cases includes just one: the one therein agreed upon.) So, Kusch claims, ‘communal beliefs have communal performatives as a condition of their possibility’ (p. 151). Knowledge— and for that matter being justified—are social statuses that are initiated and sustained by communal performatives; by acts that could be fictionally represented as ‘we hereby declare . . .’, and which are in reality fragmented and widely distributed over all the speech acts that refer to the social status in question. ‘[I]t is this direct and indirect reference that creates knowledge as a status’ (p. 71). There are four aspects to this epistemological theory that Kusch seeks to emphasise. First, what it takes to convince someone to adopt a belief will be contextually dependent. Precisely, what it takes to convince someone to adopt a belief for the reasons one possesses for this belief so that one forms with them a communal subject of belief will be contextually dependent. However, to be justified in belief is to be able to get someone to form a communal
P. Faulkner / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 282–285
subject of belief so that within this community one is recognised as justified in belief. So what it takes to be justified in belief will be contextually dependent; ‘to be justified in one’s belief is to be able to defend it against other members of one’s own society’ (pp. 131– 132). That is, communitarianism proposes a contextualist theory of justification. Second, insofar as what it takes to be justified is contextually determined and insofar as justification is established by reference to community endorsed exemplars, there can be no general theory of justification. As the list of exemplars is altered by each successful justification and as context is variable what it takes for any given type of belief to be justified is something that is not fixed. So, for instance and in particular, there can be no answer to the question of whether the justification conditions of testimonial beliefs are correctly given by a reductive or anti-reductive theory. There can be no answer because there is no such thing as the justification conditions of testimonial beliefs where this is understood in general and in abstract. In Kusch’s terms one should reject the demand for any general theory and be quietist. Third, just as the application of the term ‘justified’ is determined by reference to an array of exemplars established by communal performatives, so too is the application of any given term. What makes an application of a word correct rather than incorrect is that one’s interlocutors let one get away with, or perhaps even praise, the way one has judged the similarity between a shared exemplar and a newly encountered entity. Only others’ agreement can constitute correctness. (p. 204) Given this account, which Kusch terms meaning finitism, there is no fundamental distinction between empirical and semantic questions. Moreover, since ‘true’ is just another term—whose application is determined by communally endorsed exemplars— there is no fundamental distinction between ‘is true’ and ‘is communally endorsed as true’. Fourth, and at the root of all these claims, is the idea that normative phenomena, like epistemic justification and meaning, can only exist within communities. Kusch labels this the community thesis and he gives it a very strong interpretation: ‘An individual is able to follow a rule only if the individual is currently a participating member of a group in which the very same rule is followed by other members’ (p. 181). A problem with expressing the community thesis this strongly is how it integrates with Kusch’s claim that, in the primitive case, a subject is justified in believing something only if they can persuade another to believe the same thing. I presume that persuasion must be by means of a justifying argument as opposed to obtaining agreement through rhetoric or some form of domination. And, according to Kusch, this means that the argument must satisfy the norm of being recognised as similar to exemplary justificatory arguments. But if the community thesis requires that the other person already be a participating member of a group in which this norm applies in order to be able to follow this norm, and so be rationally persuaded in this way, then it seems that both parties must already be members of the same community. However, this seems either to make the necessary condition on justification otiose, or to make Kusch’s description of the primitive case an impossibility. Since in the primitive case it is agreement which constitutes the communicators as a community—and constitutes, I presume, the norm stating that this case is exemplary of justification. However, the strong reading of the community thesis can be saved: it is saved by reading Kusch’s use of ‘community’ in ‘community of knowledge’ and ‘communal’ in ‘communal belief’ as a term of art and distinguishing these terms of art from other uses of ‘community’, which can be ordinarily understood. On this suggestion, the ‘community of knowledge’ constituted in the primitive case is constituted within an actual community. The cost of this interpretation is that Kusch’s strong reading of community thesis
283
makes the actual community mark the limit on how far any ‘community of knowledge’ can extend, where this is to conceive of actual communities as something like epistemic islands. The problem is then that it seems no more problematic transmitting knowledge between actual communities than transmitting knowledge between individuals. This problem is forceful if one is in the sway of the view that testimony transmits knowledge—the third orthodoxy above—and so to the extent that one does take this to be intuitive, Kusch’s communitarianism will seems little improvement on the epistemological individualism it is a reaction to. However, there are, I think, more fundamental problems. Put simply, communal endorsement seems neither necessary nor sufficient for an individuals knowing or being justified in believing something. These criticisms similarly express at root the view that individuals are knowers and are knowers because of their relations to the world, which I termed the first two of my starting orthodoxies. ‘As far as the social status knowledge is concerned’, Kusch claims, ‘to acquire this status for one of my beliefs is for this belief to be shared by others’ (p. 147). As we’ve seen, this is not the complete picture: sharing need have an appropriate cause. However, irrespective of this refinement in the statement for what is sufficient for knowledge, Kusch’s claim is overstated as a necessary condition on knowing something. Many things we seem to be able to know regardless of other people’s opinions on the matter. Or at least, we seem to be able to know these things insofar as we can know anything; maybe being a member of a community is necessary for being able to know anything. But this is not the claim Kusch intends here; here the claim is that an individual capable of knowing things about the world can nonetheless only know things about the world in the light of other people’s opinions and this claim seems exaggerated. I can be in a position to know what I am thinking without needing to share these thoughts with others. And I can be in a position to know facts about my immediate perceptible environment without needing to share this environment with others or needing to tell others what I can clearly see. The possession of knowledge need not depend on its being shared: the endorsement of the community is not necessary for an individual’s knowing something, or therefore for their justifiably believing it. However, there is a way in which Kusch’s claim can be given an interesting individualist reading. Suppose a speaker S who believes herself to know that p is frustrated by an audience A rejecting her testimony to p. In this situation, it seems that either S is mistaken in believing that she knows that p or A is epistemically in the wrong to reject S’s testimony to p. However, irrespective of whether S is mistaken or not, A would be rational in rejecting S’s testimony to p if A believed that S did not know that p. As such and given the situation as described, either S is mistaken in believing that she knows that p, or A is mistaken in believing that S doesn’t know that p. That is, unless it is simply the case that A is behaving irrationally. So given the background presumption that people do behave rationally, the audience A’s rejection of the speaker S’s testimony to p provides the speaker with a reason for thinking that she is wrong to believe that she knows that p. An undefeated reason for thinking that one doesn’t know entails that one doesn’t know. So the truth of S’s belief that she knows that p is thereby conditional on either rationally persuading A that p or explaining A’s rejecting her testimony to p in terms of A believing falsely. However, since this latter course can amount to rejecting the presumption that A is behaving rationality, unless this epistemological option is open to S, the truth of her belief that she knows that p becomes conditional on her rationally persuading A that p. Moreover, this conclusion can be reached even if contrary to Kusch it is allowed that S alone knows that p. Allowing this, it is S’s retaining knowledge that becomes conditional, short of rejecting the
284
P. Faulkner / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 282–285
presumption of rationality, on rationally persuading A that p. Since a condition on the retention of knowledge is equally a condition on the possession of knowledge, for if it is possessed, it is possessed for some time interval. Thus, it can seem that a condition on S’s knowing that p is that she can rationally persuade A that p. However, as a defence of Kusch’s position the weakness of this argument should be clear. The presumption that someone is rational in acting a certain way is consistent with this action being premised on a false belief. Moreover, this presumption is entirely defeasible: people can be obstinate in the face of rational persuasion. So defeaters of any defeating reason provided by another’s rejection of what one believes oneself to know can be, and often are, very cheap. In the case described, whatever grounds S’s belief that she knows that p also grounds S’s belief that A must be epistemically in the wrong in rejecting her testimony. So whilst this rejection provides S with a reason for thinking she doesn’t know, S already possesses a defeater of this reason. It might be epistemically irresponsible for S to simply and dogmatically dismiss A’s response in this manner. But it is not clear that S would not be justified in doing so. This is because the extent to which S would be justified in doing so is just the extent to which S is justified in believing that she does know that p irrespective of A’s opinions. The problem of sufficiency could be presented as the possibility of the converse error in the terms of Kusch’s primitive case. The problem is that just as the audience A can be mistaken in judging that S doesn’t know that p, so too can A be mistaken in agreeing that S does know that p. However, if this is possible, then agreement between S and A—the endorsement of this primitive community—does not suffice for making it the case that S (or A) knows that p. Yet this possibility requires no more than that p could be false despite the judgement of S and A, or that S and A could be mistaken about the evidence for p, neither of which even seems unusual. Moreover, even if a full blooded notion of community is used, the source of the problem remains: communities could go wrong about both facts and arguments. And that actual communities do go wrong is amply supported by reflection on the history of science. So even if S’s judgement that p and that she knows that p is in agreement not merely with an audience A but an actual community, this still does not suffice for the truth of S’s beliefs that p and that she knows that p. (Presuming that p makes some claim about the world and not merely our perspective on it.) Now motivating Kusch’s claim that agreement is necessary and sufficient for knowledge is his view that ‘normative phenomena can only exist within communities’ (p. 175). This view is expressed in his community thesis and Kusch takes it to be supported by Wittgenstein’s consideration of rule following. In short, Kusch argues that normative phenomena can only exist within communities because the notion of something being the right way to do things requires the distinction between something seeming right and its being right, but this distinction is only possible with the perspective provided by the community. Turning to the relevant normative phenomenon—epistemic justification—suppose for the sake of argument that justification could be specified in terms of epistemic rules. According to Kusch these rules would be established by communal performatives, but the supposition is independent of Kusch’s communitarianism; it is only that justified belief can be construed as belief formed by correctly following those rules which specify epistemically appropriate ways of forming belief. Given this supposition, Wittgenstein’s point is meant to be that one could be justified only if one could distinguish occasions when the epistemic rules had been correctly followed from occasions when they merely seem to have been correctly followed. More precisely, three conditions need to hold for justification to be possible. It must be possible (a) to judge that a rule has been properly followed, (b) for this judgement to be true and (c) for this judgement to be false. That is, there must be something that counts
as following a rule, such that (a) and (b) can diverge and (c) is possible. Kusch then argues that if individuals are considered in isolation, condition (c) can never be satisfied because on their own an individual cannot discriminate following a rule from merely seeming to follow a rule. The only standard against which success and failure could be measured is the community judgement; the judgement that in this case, the relevant epistemic rule has been properly followed. So only through a community’s acceptance could an individual be said to correctly follow an epistemic rule, that is, form a justified belief. Hence the claim that the agreement of the community is necessary for justification. That it is sufficient then follows with the further claim that all there is to correctly following a rule is the community judgement that one has done so. That is, ‘what seems right to almost everyone—that is, the collective ‘‘seems right”—is the most we can get in terms of an ‘‘is right”’ (p. 98). Both these claims would be contested by mainstream epistemology. With respect to the necessity claim—presented here as a condition on the possibility of justification—externalist views of knowledge and justification would deny that following a rule requires any judgement that one has followed the rule. To be justified one’s belief must have been appropriately formed, one need not further be able to discriminate appropriate ways of forming belief from ways of forming belief that merely seem appropriate. Whilst on an internalist epistemology it is not clear that the judgement that one has followed a rule is not alone sufficient for justified belief, even if the content of this judgement is no more than that one seems to have correctly followed the rule. Now, though, I’ve argued that there is a sense in which I think the necessity claim is correct; namely, that the possession of knowledge requires that one is able to explain disagreement. This is in no way to agree with Kusch. In particular, I take it that an adequate defence of the claim that one’s belief was appropriately formed could be grounded by whatever grounds the knowledge that is the focus of disagreement. These grounds could be such prosaic facts as that one so happened to form one’s belief appropriately. For instance if the disagreement was over what one saw to be the case, that one saw what one did can ground both one’s contested knowledge and one’s explanation of the disagreement. The sufficiency claim is even more problematic. A good starting point for showing why it is so is the possibility, indeed fact, of community diversity. More precisely, pressure is put on the idea that ‘what seems right to almost everyone’ amounts to ‘is right’ by community diversity. This diversity allows a third person perspective on another community’s judgements, where this is shown in cases of de re belief attribution. For instance, consider the community constituted by agreement on some previous scientific theory. We feel entitled to judge, say, that this scientific theory concerned atoms but as a theory about atoms it is not scientific knowledge and nor was the previous community’s belief in this theory. So there seems to be a certain parallel between the individual and the community such that if the individual considered in isolation cannot satisfy (c) above—cannot discriminate properly following a rule from merely appearing to do so—then nor can the community considered in isolation satisfy (c). An isolated community cannot discriminate properly following a rule from merely communally appearing to do so. The fact of community diversity (actual or possible) then makes it clear that merely communally appearing to get things right is far from actually getting things right. In short, if following a rule genuinely requires the possibility of satisfying conditions (a) to (c), then it requires the judgement that a rule is followed to be categorically different from the fact of the rule being followed and this difference applies at both the individual and the community levels. Kusch’s response to this argument is to claim that it rests on treating the community as if it were an individual: ‘the group is
P. Faulkner / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 282–285
conceptualised as an individual writ large’ (p. 190). I cannot see why this is the case, but this not withstanding such a response is surely not available to the communitarian. It is not available given that it is the communitarian who takes the knower to be the ‘community’ in the technical sense of that group which holds a ‘communal belief’. So it is the communitarian, not the traditional epistemological individualist, who conceptualises the group as the ‘individual writ large’. To make this clear, suppose that some actual social community C0 contains two divergent sub-groups C1 and C2 which disagree over some scientific proposition p, where it is sub-group C1 which endorses p. Now consider how Kusch would explain an individual’s being justified in believing that p. An individual would be justified through possessing this status within a community that believes that p. However, ‘community’ is herein being used a term of art: it refers to the individual’s membership in sub-group C1 rather than actual social community C0 for in the latter there is no consensus as to whether or not p. However, if communities are defined in terms of agreement in belief, Kusch’s response is particularly flat footed. The possibility of community diversity, and so the analogy between communities and individuals, undercuts the sufficiency claim because it shows that whilst the community provides the possibility of a third person perspective on an individual’s belief, the notion of the community’s perspective is not synonymous with the third person perspective. Rather, a possible diversity of communities shows that it is equally possible to take the third
285
person perspective on a community’s judgements. Now the fact that one can distinguish first and third person perspectives when considering an individual’s justification, allows the distinction between a belief’s being justified and its being justifiable. Thus, one could say that a belief is justified for an individual, given what else he believes, but is nonetheless unjustifiable given that what else he believes is false. Equally, one could say that a belief is unjustified for an individual, given his reasons for believing, but is nonetheless justifiable in terms of what else he does or should believe. In both cases, the judgement of justifiability involves a perception of justifying reasons that is either not made or not available to the individual in question. Equally, given that it is possible to take a third person perspective on community judgment, it is possible to separate the question of whether a community belief is justified from whether it is justifiable. Having made this separation, the statement that a belief is justified within a community still allows for the further question of whether this belief is nonetheless justifiable. This is just to say that there is at least one sense to justification such that community agreement is not sufficient for justification in that sense. But this is the sense of justified in which it should explain why an individual knows something to be the case. Justification in this sense is not reducible to communal judgement because knowledge is given by facts about the world and how the knowing subject is related to it. This is to return to the starting orthodoxy, which, I suggest, is agreed on for good reason.
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/shpsa
Essay Review
Can we agree to disagree? Paul Faulkner Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield, Arts Tower, Western bank, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
When citing this paper, please use the full journal title Studies in History and Philosophy of Science
Knowledge by agreement. The programme of communitarian epistemology Martin Kusch; Clarendon Press, Oxford, 2002, pp. xiii+303, Price £53.00 hardback, ISBN-13 978-0-19-925122-3, Price £24.00 paperback, ISBN-13 978-0-19-925137-7. Knowers are individuals because knowledge is a species of belief (or some other mental state). A belief is knowledge because of the relations it objectively possesses to the world and other mental states (and similarly if knowledge is a mental state other than belief). And the state of knowing can be transmitted across individuals by testimony. The programme of communitarian epistemology set out by Kusch denies these three orthodoxies. Moreover this programme is broached through denying that testimony functions to transmit knowledge. Rather than function to transmit knowledge, testimony functions to generate it; it does so because knowledge is fundamentally a state of agreement between individuals and testimony, as communication, is a means of putting individuals in agreement with one another. That testimony can establish agreement and so generate knowledge Kusch takes to be shown by performative testimony. His favourite example is that of marriage. ‘The registrar a tells the couple b that they have now entered a legally binding relationship of marriage; and by telling them so . . . the registrar makes it so that they are in the legally binding relationship of marriage’ (p. 65). Agreement on the registrar’s testimony brings about both the marriage and the shared knowledge of the marriage. Moreover, both the marriage and knowledge of it are social statuses; that is, both refer to bundles of entitlements and commitments where these articulate social, or intersubjective, relationships. Whilst a subject a might claim to know that p irrespective of others’ judgements, considered solely as an individual this is a status the subject alone cannot possess. In the most primitive case, a knows that p only insofar as she can persuade an audience b that p. Since knowledge is a social status, ‘a (or b) knows that p only insofar as she is a member of a knowledge constituting we’ (p. 72). That is, a knows that p only because and insofar as she has this social status within a ‘we’ that is the epistemic community formed when a persuades b E-mail address: paul.faulkner@sheffield.ac.uk 0039-3681/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.shpsa.2008.03.020
that p. ‘And forming this community is tantamount to initiating and maintaining the communal performative ‘‘we hereby declare ourselves to be the epistemic subject of p and are thereby committed and entitled to use p in the ways in which the general institution of knowledge suggests”’ (p. 73). In particular, the community of knowledge formed when b recognises a’s justification is defined in terms of a’s commitment to being able to produce this justification and b’s entitlement to rely on a to do so. According to Kusch then, an individual knows something if and only if he is able to convince others to form a community—a ‘we’—that becomes the communal subject of belief, and within this community the individual is recognised as a knower. To know something is just to possess a certain status within a community. On this account Kusch takes communal performatives to be epistemically fundamental in two respects. First, an individual will be recognised as a knower through being able to produce a justification that is recognised as an exemplar of what justifications should be. Second, there must be some agreement as to what counts as exemplary of justification. Both cases Kusch represents in terms of the communicators tacitly endorsing the communal performative, ‘We believe that beliefs of type X are justified if they are justified in the way in which the following beliefs are justified: [and then follows a list of cases]’ (p. 152). (And in the primitive case, I presume, the list of cases includes just one: the one therein agreed upon.) So, Kusch claims, ‘communal beliefs have communal performatives as a condition of their possibility’ (p. 151). Knowledge— and for that matter being justified—are social statuses that are initiated and sustained by communal performatives; by acts that could be fictionally represented as ‘we hereby declare . . .’, and which are in reality fragmented and widely distributed over all the speech acts that refer to the social status in question. ‘[I]t is this direct and indirect reference that creates knowledge as a status’ (p. 71). There are four aspects to this epistemological theory that Kusch seeks to emphasise. First, what it takes to convince someone to adopt a belief will be contextually dependent. Precisely, what it takes to convince someone to adopt a belief for the reasons one possesses for this belief so that one forms with them a communal subject of belief will be contextually dependent. However, to be justified in belief is to be able to get someone to form a communal
P. Faulkner / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 282–285
subject of belief so that within this community one is recognised as justified in belief. So what it takes to be justified in belief will be contextually dependent; ‘to be justified in one’s belief is to be able to defend it against other members of one’s own society’ (pp. 131– 132). That is, communitarianism proposes a contextualist theory of justification. Second, insofar as what it takes to be justified is contextually determined and insofar as justification is established by reference to community endorsed exemplars, there can be no general theory of justification. As the list of exemplars is altered by each successful justification and as context is variable what it takes for any given type of belief to be justified is something that is not fixed. So, for instance and in particular, there can be no answer to the question of whether the justification conditions of testimonial beliefs are correctly given by a reductive or anti-reductive theory. There can be no answer because there is no such thing as the justification conditions of testimonial beliefs where this is understood in general and in abstract. In Kusch’s terms one should reject the demand for any general theory and be quietist. Third, just as the application of the term ‘justified’ is determined by reference to an array of exemplars established by communal performatives, so too is the application of any given term. What makes an application of a word correct rather than incorrect is that one’s interlocutors let one get away with, or perhaps even praise, the way one has judged the similarity between a shared exemplar and a newly encountered entity. Only others’ agreement can constitute correctness. (p. 204) Given this account, which Kusch terms meaning finitism, there is no fundamental distinction between empirical and semantic questions. Moreover, since ‘true’ is just another term—whose application is determined by communally endorsed exemplars— there is no fundamental distinction between ‘is true’ and ‘is communally endorsed as true’. Fourth, and at the root of all these claims, is the idea that normative phenomena, like epistemic justification and meaning, can only exist within communities. Kusch labels this the community thesis and he gives it a very strong interpretation: ‘An individual is able to follow a rule only if the individual is currently a participating member of a group in which the very same rule is followed by other members’ (p. 181). A problem with expressing the community thesis this strongly is how it integrates with Kusch’s claim that, in the primitive case, a subject is justified in believing something only if they can persuade another to believe the same thing. I presume that persuasion must be by means of a justifying argument as opposed to obtaining agreement through rhetoric or some form of domination. And, according to Kusch, this means that the argument must satisfy the norm of being recognised as similar to exemplary justificatory arguments. But if the community thesis requires that the other person already be a participating member of a group in which this norm applies in order to be able to follow this norm, and so be rationally persuaded in this way, then it seems that both parties must already be members of the same community. However, this seems either to make the necessary condition on justification otiose, or to make Kusch’s description of the primitive case an impossibility. Since in the primitive case it is agreement which constitutes the communicators as a community—and constitutes, I presume, the norm stating that this case is exemplary of justification. However, the strong reading of the community thesis can be saved: it is saved by reading Kusch’s use of ‘community’ in ‘community of knowledge’ and ‘communal’ in ‘communal belief’ as a term of art and distinguishing these terms of art from other uses of ‘community’, which can be ordinarily understood. On this suggestion, the ‘community of knowledge’ constituted in the primitive case is constituted within an actual community. The cost of this interpretation is that Kusch’s strong reading of community thesis
283
makes the actual community mark the limit on how far any ‘community of knowledge’ can extend, where this is to conceive of actual communities as something like epistemic islands. The problem is then that it seems no more problematic transmitting knowledge between actual communities than transmitting knowledge between individuals. This problem is forceful if one is in the sway of the view that testimony transmits knowledge—the third orthodoxy above—and so to the extent that one does take this to be intuitive, Kusch’s communitarianism will seems little improvement on the epistemological individualism it is a reaction to. However, there are, I think, more fundamental problems. Put simply, communal endorsement seems neither necessary nor sufficient for an individuals knowing or being justified in believing something. These criticisms similarly express at root the view that individuals are knowers and are knowers because of their relations to the world, which I termed the first two of my starting orthodoxies. ‘As far as the social status knowledge is concerned’, Kusch claims, ‘to acquire this status for one of my beliefs is for this belief to be shared by others’ (p. 147). As we’ve seen, this is not the complete picture: sharing need have an appropriate cause. However, irrespective of this refinement in the statement for what is sufficient for knowledge, Kusch’s claim is overstated as a necessary condition on knowing something. Many things we seem to be able to know regardless of other people’s opinions on the matter. Or at least, we seem to be able to know these things insofar as we can know anything; maybe being a member of a community is necessary for being able to know anything. But this is not the claim Kusch intends here; here the claim is that an individual capable of knowing things about the world can nonetheless only know things about the world in the light of other people’s opinions and this claim seems exaggerated. I can be in a position to know what I am thinking without needing to share these thoughts with others. And I can be in a position to know facts about my immediate perceptible environment without needing to share this environment with others or needing to tell others what I can clearly see. The possession of knowledge need not depend on its being shared: the endorsement of the community is not necessary for an individual’s knowing something, or therefore for their justifiably believing it. However, there is a way in which Kusch’s claim can be given an interesting individualist reading. Suppose a speaker S who believes herself to know that p is frustrated by an audience A rejecting her testimony to p. In this situation, it seems that either S is mistaken in believing that she knows that p or A is epistemically in the wrong to reject S’s testimony to p. However, irrespective of whether S is mistaken or not, A would be rational in rejecting S’s testimony to p if A believed that S did not know that p. As such and given the situation as described, either S is mistaken in believing that she knows that p, or A is mistaken in believing that S doesn’t know that p. That is, unless it is simply the case that A is behaving irrationally. So given the background presumption that people do behave rationally, the audience A’s rejection of the speaker S’s testimony to p provides the speaker with a reason for thinking that she is wrong to believe that she knows that p. An undefeated reason for thinking that one doesn’t know entails that one doesn’t know. So the truth of S’s belief that she knows that p is thereby conditional on either rationally persuading A that p or explaining A’s rejecting her testimony to p in terms of A believing falsely. However, since this latter course can amount to rejecting the presumption that A is behaving rationality, unless this epistemological option is open to S, the truth of her belief that she knows that p becomes conditional on her rationally persuading A that p. Moreover, this conclusion can be reached even if contrary to Kusch it is allowed that S alone knows that p. Allowing this, it is S’s retaining knowledge that becomes conditional, short of rejecting the
284
P. Faulkner / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 282–285
presumption of rationality, on rationally persuading A that p. Since a condition on the retention of knowledge is equally a condition on the possession of knowledge, for if it is possessed, it is possessed for some time interval. Thus, it can seem that a condition on S’s knowing that p is that she can rationally persuade A that p. However, as a defence of Kusch’s position the weakness of this argument should be clear. The presumption that someone is rational in acting a certain way is consistent with this action being premised on a false belief. Moreover, this presumption is entirely defeasible: people can be obstinate in the face of rational persuasion. So defeaters of any defeating reason provided by another’s rejection of what one believes oneself to know can be, and often are, very cheap. In the case described, whatever grounds S’s belief that she knows that p also grounds S’s belief that A must be epistemically in the wrong in rejecting her testimony. So whilst this rejection provides S with a reason for thinking she doesn’t know, S already possesses a defeater of this reason. It might be epistemically irresponsible for S to simply and dogmatically dismiss A’s response in this manner. But it is not clear that S would not be justified in doing so. This is because the extent to which S would be justified in doing so is just the extent to which S is justified in believing that she does know that p irrespective of A’s opinions. The problem of sufficiency could be presented as the possibility of the converse error in the terms of Kusch’s primitive case. The problem is that just as the audience A can be mistaken in judging that S doesn’t know that p, so too can A be mistaken in agreeing that S does know that p. However, if this is possible, then agreement between S and A—the endorsement of this primitive community—does not suffice for making it the case that S (or A) knows that p. Yet this possibility requires no more than that p could be false despite the judgement of S and A, or that S and A could be mistaken about the evidence for p, neither of which even seems unusual. Moreover, even if a full blooded notion of community is used, the source of the problem remains: communities could go wrong about both facts and arguments. And that actual communities do go wrong is amply supported by reflection on the history of science. So even if S’s judgement that p and that she knows that p is in agreement not merely with an audience A but an actual community, this still does not suffice for the truth of S’s beliefs that p and that she knows that p. (Presuming that p makes some claim about the world and not merely our perspective on it.) Now motivating Kusch’s claim that agreement is necessary and sufficient for knowledge is his view that ‘normative phenomena can only exist within communities’ (p. 175). This view is expressed in his community thesis and Kusch takes it to be supported by Wittgenstein’s consideration of rule following. In short, Kusch argues that normative phenomena can only exist within communities because the notion of something being the right way to do things requires the distinction between something seeming right and its being right, but this distinction is only possible with the perspective provided by the community. Turning to the relevant normative phenomenon—epistemic justification—suppose for the sake of argument that justification could be specified in terms of epistemic rules. According to Kusch these rules would be established by communal performatives, but the supposition is independent of Kusch’s communitarianism; it is only that justified belief can be construed as belief formed by correctly following those rules which specify epistemically appropriate ways of forming belief. Given this supposition, Wittgenstein’s point is meant to be that one could be justified only if one could distinguish occasions when the epistemic rules had been correctly followed from occasions when they merely seem to have been correctly followed. More precisely, three conditions need to hold for justification to be possible. It must be possible (a) to judge that a rule has been properly followed, (b) for this judgement to be true and (c) for this judgement to be false. That is, there must be something that counts
as following a rule, such that (a) and (b) can diverge and (c) is possible. Kusch then argues that if individuals are considered in isolation, condition (c) can never be satisfied because on their own an individual cannot discriminate following a rule from merely seeming to follow a rule. The only standard against which success and failure could be measured is the community judgement; the judgement that in this case, the relevant epistemic rule has been properly followed. So only through a community’s acceptance could an individual be said to correctly follow an epistemic rule, that is, form a justified belief. Hence the claim that the agreement of the community is necessary for justification. That it is sufficient then follows with the further claim that all there is to correctly following a rule is the community judgement that one has done so. That is, ‘what seems right to almost everyone—that is, the collective ‘‘seems right”—is the most we can get in terms of an ‘‘is right”’ (p. 98). Both these claims would be contested by mainstream epistemology. With respect to the necessity claim—presented here as a condition on the possibility of justification—externalist views of knowledge and justification would deny that following a rule requires any judgement that one has followed the rule. To be justified one’s belief must have been appropriately formed, one need not further be able to discriminate appropriate ways of forming belief from ways of forming belief that merely seem appropriate. Whilst on an internalist epistemology it is not clear that the judgement that one has followed a rule is not alone sufficient for justified belief, even if the content of this judgement is no more than that one seems to have correctly followed the rule. Now, though, I’ve argued that there is a sense in which I think the necessity claim is correct; namely, that the possession of knowledge requires that one is able to explain disagreement. This is in no way to agree with Kusch. In particular, I take it that an adequate defence of the claim that one’s belief was appropriately formed could be grounded by whatever grounds the knowledge that is the focus of disagreement. These grounds could be such prosaic facts as that one so happened to form one’s belief appropriately. For instance if the disagreement was over what one saw to be the case, that one saw what one did can ground both one’s contested knowledge and one’s explanation of the disagreement. The sufficiency claim is even more problematic. A good starting point for showing why it is so is the possibility, indeed fact, of community diversity. More precisely, pressure is put on the idea that ‘what seems right to almost everyone’ amounts to ‘is right’ by community diversity. This diversity allows a third person perspective on another community’s judgements, where this is shown in cases of de re belief attribution. For instance, consider the community constituted by agreement on some previous scientific theory. We feel entitled to judge, say, that this scientific theory concerned atoms but as a theory about atoms it is not scientific knowledge and nor was the previous community’s belief in this theory. So there seems to be a certain parallel between the individual and the community such that if the individual considered in isolation cannot satisfy (c) above—cannot discriminate properly following a rule from merely appearing to do so—then nor can the community considered in isolation satisfy (c). An isolated community cannot discriminate properly following a rule from merely communally appearing to do so. The fact of community diversity (actual or possible) then makes it clear that merely communally appearing to get things right is far from actually getting things right. In short, if following a rule genuinely requires the possibility of satisfying conditions (a) to (c), then it requires the judgement that a rule is followed to be categorically different from the fact of the rule being followed and this difference applies at both the individual and the community levels. Kusch’s response to this argument is to claim that it rests on treating the community as if it were an individual: ‘the group is
P. Faulkner / Stud. Hist. Phil. Sci. 39 (2008) 282–285
conceptualised as an individual writ large’ (p. 190). I cannot see why this is the case, but this not withstanding such a response is surely not available to the communitarian. It is not available given that it is the communitarian who takes the knower to be the ‘community’ in the technical sense of that group which holds a ‘communal belief’. So it is the communitarian, not the traditional epistemological individualist, who conceptualises the group as the ‘individual writ large’. To make this clear, suppose that some actual social community C0 contains two divergent sub-groups C1 and C2 which disagree over some scientific proposition p, where it is sub-group C1 which endorses p. Now consider how Kusch would explain an individual’s being justified in believing that p. An individual would be justified through possessing this status within a community that believes that p. However, ‘community’ is herein being used a term of art: it refers to the individual’s membership in sub-group C1 rather than actual social community C0 for in the latter there is no consensus as to whether or not p. However, if communities are defined in terms of agreement in belief, Kusch’s response is particularly flat footed. The possibility of community diversity, and so the analogy between communities and individuals, undercuts the sufficiency claim because it shows that whilst the community provides the possibility of a third person perspective on an individual’s belief, the notion of the community’s perspective is not synonymous with the third person perspective. Rather, a possible diversity of communities shows that it is equally possible to take the third
285
person perspective on a community’s judgements. Now the fact that one can distinguish first and third person perspectives when considering an individual’s justification, allows the distinction between a belief’s being justified and its being justifiable. Thus, one could say that a belief is justified for an individual, given what else he believes, but is nonetheless unjustifiable given that what else he believes is false. Equally, one could say that a belief is unjustified for an individual, given his reasons for believing, but is nonetheless justifiable in terms of what else he does or should believe. In both cases, the judgement of justifiability involves a perception of justifying reasons that is either not made or not available to the individual in question. Equally, given that it is possible to take a third person perspective on community judgment, it is possible to separate the question of whether a community belief is justified from whether it is justifiable. Having made this separation, the statement that a belief is justified within a community still allows for the further question of whether this belief is nonetheless justifiable. This is just to say that there is at least one sense to justification such that community agreement is not sufficient for justification in that sense. But this is the sense of justified in which it should explain why an individual knows something to be the case. Justification in this sense is not reducible to communal judgement because knowledge is given by facts about the world and how the knowing subject is related to it. This is to return to the starting orthodoxy, which, I suggest, is agreed on for good reason.