The Proper Role for Contextualism in an Anti-Luck Epistemology Mark Heller Noûs, Vol. 33, Supplement: Philosophical Perspectives, 13, Epistemology. (1999), pp. 115-129. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0029-4624%281999%2933%3C115%3ATPRFCI%3E2.0.CO%3B2-C Noûs is currently published by Blackwell Publishing.
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Philosophical Perspectives, 13, Epistemology, 1999
THE PROPER ROLE FOR CONTEXTUALISM
IN AN ANTI-LUCK EPISTEMOLOGY
Mark Heller
Southern Methodist University
Contextualism in epistemology tells us that "knowledge" is a context sensitive term. Whether or not subject S counts as having knowledge will depend on the context in which the evaluation is taking place. But contextualism is not primarily an epistemological theory. "Knowledge" is just one word among many that is context sensitive.' Rather than presenting a theory of knowledge itself, contextualism is a complement to any theory of knowledge. What contextualism tells us is that "knowledge" refers to different properties in different contexts. Contextualism does not tell us anything about what those properties are. That is the job for a theory of knowledge. The theory of knowledge tells us what it is about the various properties that make them go together into a single family of properties-it identifies a general feature that all referents of "knowledge" have in common. Contextualism then tells us why "knowledge" refers to the family member it does in a given context. Contextualism provides a theory of the word "knowledge" as an overlay for any theory of knowledge, but these are distinct components of a complete epistemology. Neither component can answer all of the traditional epistemological questions on its own. My preferred theory of knowledge is what I call the "anti-luck theory. The component that turns true belief into knowledge must be externalistic and modal. The fundamental intuition is that for a subject S to have knowledge is for there to be a kind of necessary connection between her belief and the truth. The knower's true belief comes with a guarantee. A belief that just happens to be true is not knowledge. There are a family of such theories of knowledge: the counterfactual theory, the relevant alternatives theory, and reliabilism. I group these together as one theory and entitle it the "anti-luck" theory of knowledge. When a true belief is knowledge it is so because it is not just luck that the belief is true. The knower could not have been wrong. There is no possible situation, within a selected set of possible situations, in which S has the belief without its being true:
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S's true belief that p is knowledge iff S does not believe p in any of the selected not-p worlds. The anti-luck theory is equivalent to a relevant alternatives theory: S's true belief that p is knowledge just in case S is able to distinguish the actual p world from relevant not-p world^.^ I have called it a "relevant alternatives" theory in the past. But it might just as easily be called a "counterfactual" theory: S's true belief that p is knowledge just in case S would not believe p if p were false. To make this equivalent to the anti-lucklrelevant alternatives theory we need only stipulate that the closest not-p worlds are the same worlds that the relevant alternatives theory counts as relevant. This requires that the "closest" worlds include some that are less close than some others of the c l o ~ e s t It . ~is less straightforward to show that reliabilism is also an equivalent theory, but I believe it is. In epistemological contexts it is plausible that the relevant alternatives to the actual world will all be ones in which S uses the same belief forming process that she actually uses. If that process leads S to a false belief in any of the relevant worlds, then the process is not reliable in the actual world. Clearly these remarks are merely suggestive, and more needs to be said to defend the equivalence of these three theories, but I must leave that for another day? I will say no more here about the equivalence of the externalist, modal theories of knowledge. My official statement of the anti-luck theory is the one I presented above: S's true belief that p is knowledge iff S does not believe p in any of the selected not-p worlds. This is a theory of knowledge. Knowledge is a kind of necessity. Once a set of worlds is selected, the theory provides an answer to any question about whether S has knowledge. If the same set were selected for every knowledge claim in every context our work would be done. But the same set is not selected in every context, and that is where contextualism comes in. The worlds that are selected are the ones that are similar enough to the actual world, and what it takes to count as similar enough is what changes from context to context. We are to imagine all possible worlds spewed out across the logical universe, with the actual world in the center (or the hypothetical actual world if are considering hypothetical cases). The relative distance from a given world to the actual world is a measure of the relative similarity of that world to the actual world, so that if one world is closer to the actual world than another world is, the first is more similar to the actual world. There are two roles for context to play. First, different respects of similarity count for more or less in different contexts. So the ordering of worlds around the actual world, their relative distances to the actual world, changes with context. Second, the positioning of the boundary between close enough and too far away, the boundary between similar enough and too dissimilar, is also context sensitive. It is the second of these which has received the most attention, especially in discussions of skepticism.
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Every selection of worlds defines a specific epistemic property. It is these various properties that are the possible referents for the term "knowledge". It is context that determines which of them is referred to on a particular occasion. A wider, more inclusive selection of worlds defines a property that is more difficult to possess. The more inclusive the selection, the greater demands placed on a subject in order for her to have knowledge. A narrower, less inclusive selection defines a property that is easier to possess, creating lower demands. So the context sensitivity of world selection can be thought of more intuitively as a selection of standards for knowledge, or more exactly, standards for what it takes to be the referent of the term "knowledge". If all not-p worlds are selected, then the standards will be so high as to pose the threat of Cartesian skepticism. Such high standards would require that S not believe p even in evil genius worlds-even in worlds in which the genius is doing everything in her power to get S to falsely believe p. There are very few values for p for which a typical subject could satisfy this requirement. In contrast, if the standards are so low as to select only the actual world, then any true belief will count as knowledge. Rarely do our standards reach either of these extremes. Our standards change in accordance with our interests, in accordance with the demands of our conversational partners, and in accordance with which facts or possibilities are most salient to us. What is changing is which not-p worlds S must be able to rule out-which not-p worlds she would have to not believe p in-in order to have knowledge of p. What is changing is which of the various epistemic-properties is the referent of " k n ~ w l e d g e " . ~ If two evaluators are in different contexts they may have different standards for knowledge, different standards for what it takes for any of S's properties to be the referent of "knowledge" . If the standards that apply in my context are high and the standards that apply in yours are low, then S may satisfy your standards but not mine. She may have the property that you refer to but not the one that I refer to. In such a case it is true for you to say "S knows that p" but false for me to utter the exact same sentence. There is nothing contradictory about this. Your true assertion and my false one are not the same; we are attributing different properties to S. The truth of "S knows that p" is relative to which worlds are selected, and your context and mine have selected different worlds. Your true attribution of knowledge to S entails the truth that S does not believe p at any of the worlds selected by your context, while my false attribution entails the falsehood that S does not believe p at any of the worlds selected by my context. To say that the truth or falsity of a knowledge attribution is context relative is not to say that knowledge itself is context relative. What is relative is "knowledge", not knowledge. The relativity comes from the fact that "knowledge" is vague, and that there are no vague properties. What there are are non-vague properties referred to ~ a g u e l yWhich .~ property I am talking about when I say "knowledge" depends very much on linguistic facts, but what is true of knowledgewhat is true of the property that I am in fact talking about in the present context-is independent of any linguistic facts about "knowledge". It is the employment of the vague term that brings in the relativity, not the having of any given property that might be referred to by that vague term.
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To say that the truth of knowledge attributions is context relative is also not to say that there is any indeterminacy in S's condition, but only in our descriptions of her condition. Because the condition is not dependent upon the description, my proposed contextualism is not, in any substantive sense, a subjectivism. The fact that utterances of "S knows that p" can be both true and false, relative to different contexts, does not mean that S both has and lacks a single property called "knowledge". It only means that the property she has and the one she lacks are both referents of "knowledge", the one being the referent in one context, and the other being the referent in the other. They are distinct referents, and S's having the one property that is referred to in the one context does not conflict with her lacking the other property that is referred to in the other context. Which properties S has does not depend upon context in any way. If we want, we can discuss an epistemic property that does not even have the appearance of context relativity. Any given weighting of respects of similarity will yield a world ordering around the actual world. Consider any particular weighting and any particular drawing of a boundary line given the resulting world ordering. Call that a "standard". Whether or not S believes p at any of the not-p worlds that fall within the boundary for a given standard is a purely objective fact with no appearance of relativity. If S does not believe p at any of these not-p worlds, call this "satisfying the standard". Which standards S satisfies is a purely objective, non-relative matter. We can describe her complete epistemic condition by providing a listing of all the standards she satisfies and all of the standards she fails to satisfy. Her complete epistemic condition, or just "epistemic condition" for short, does not even have the appearance of relativity. A true report of S's epistemic condition will be true independent of context, and regardless of context there is only one true report. A report of someone's total epistemic condition is wholly non-valuative-to describe S's epistemic condition is not to assign a value to that condition in any way. In contrast, to say of someone that she has knowledge is to pass such a value judgement. Attributing knowledge is not just describing S's epistemic condition but also asserting that that condition is good enough. By attributing knowledge we are saying that someone who is in that epistemic condition has the epistemic property we care about in that context. That is why two evaluators can agree about S's epistemic condition and still disagree about whether she has knowledge; the two evaluators simply care about different properties. But it is also noteworthy, that in most ordinary uses of the term "knowledge" there is a wide degree of agreement about what it takes to have knowledge. Typically normal evaluators in normal contexts will agree about whether a subject has knowledge, because they care about pretty much the same properties. Consider the following sadly true story. When I put away the leftovers last night I wrapped them with plastic wrap, and then I unthinkingly put the plastic wrap in the refrigerator and the leftovers in the drawer. My wife found the wrap in the refrigerator, figured out what happened, and moved the wrap to the drawer and the leftovers to the refrigerator. Today we both believe that the leftovers are in the refrigerator, but her belief is better connected to the truth than mine is. We
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use the word "knowledge" to indicate her superior epistemic condition. The property we care about is one that I lack and she has. My true belief is just luckily true. And, as gamblers are well aware, we cannot trust to luck. My true belief might just as easily have been false, and if false my leftovers would have rotted, I would have gone hungry at lunchtime, and I would have had a stinky mess to clean up. In a world without a protective spouse, I would suffer for my ignorance. This is one reason it is important to have beliefs that are connected to the truth. In situations that are similar to this one, I suffer. My wife does fine in those situations. Neither of us is sufficiently well connected to the world to catch the evil genius if he were up to his mischievous tricks. But we are not likely to find ourselves in such situations. On the other hand, situations in which the person putting the leftovers away is the last to see them are common place. And now we can see what is really so bad about unusually high standards, standards so high as to endorse skepticism. It is not that the skepticism itself is an unacceptable conclusion. Rather it is that such standards fail to draw the distinctions that are important to us. Even though neither my wife nor I can rule out the possibility of an evil genius deceiving us about where the leftovers are, she is in a better epistemic condition than I am. If the standards are so high as to force us to be compared across all worlds, including evil genius worlds, it turns out that we both fail to be in an adequate epistemic condition. If all worlds are selected, neither of us can satisfy the anti-luck condition. The distinction between our epistemic conditions gets lost because too many worlds are included. Skepticism would not be a problem at all if we had another word of epistemic praise that distinguished my wife's epistemic condition from mine-even if neither of us knows anything, she still has the property that is important to us. But "knowledge" is the word we use for epistemic praise; we have no other to take its place. To say of S that she has knowledge is to say that she has the property we care about. All of this talk of which property an evaluator cares about is a bit too simplistic. We never care about any one specific property-we never care exactly in which situations S would believe p. That would be a waste of conceptual effort. What we really care about is that S have any one of a set of properties, any one of which would serve our purposes. There are any number of properties that are good enough for us. What we care about is whether S would believe p in the right sorts of situations, in the situations that are enough like the actual world. We want her condition to be good enough, but we do not care exactly how good it is or exactly in which respects it is good. Perhaps this is part of the explanation for why we do not have any words in English that express particular epistemic conditions. "Knowledge" is our word for saying that S's epistemic condition is good enough when she has a true belief without saying exactly what that condition is. We seem also to have a word for saying that S's epistemic condition is good enough even when she has a false belief, namely "justification", but this word seems tied to an evidentialist concept, and knowledge is not always evidential. So I introduce the noun "anti-luck" and the adjective "non-lucky" for saying that S's condition is good enough. If what makes S's true belief knowledge is her being in a good
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enough epistemic condition, then it is not at all surprising that knowledge attributions are context relative. Evaluations of good-enoughness are just the sort that we would expect to be context relative, both with regards to the respects and degree of goodness. The evaluator's context has a very specific role to play. The truth of a knowledge attribution, like the truth of any other attribution, has both a linguistic and a non-linguistic component, and context is only relevant to the linguistic component. The non-linguistic component is S's epistemic condition. The linguistic component is the reference to a particular property (or vague set of properties). Which is to say, the linguistic component is the standards that are in effect. Which is to say, the linguistic component is the weighting of respects of similarity together with a drawing of the boundary line. The evaluator's context-her interests and concerns, what is salient to her, her interaction with her conversational partners-determine the degree of weight assigned to various respects of similarity and determine what degree of similarity is required. Note that the ordering of worlds has both a context dependent element and a context independent element. It is the subject's actual situation that determines what the other worlds are to be similar to. What depends on the evaluator's context is how much weight to assign to similarity with respect to the presence of an evil genius. What is independent is whether the genius is present or not. Typical evaluator's attach a lot of weight to this attribute of the world. That is why all of the close enough worlds are similar to the actual world in this respect. We have been assuming that this has the consequence that the close enough worlds are evil genius free, but that is only because we have been making assumptions about what the actual world is like. If we are wrong about what the actual world is like, we are also wrong about what the close enough worlds are like. And the same applies to the evaluator. The evaluator's opinions about what the actual world is like have no bearing on the ordering of worlds (except in so far as they influence her concerns, which influence the weighting of respects of similarity). Once the weighting is in place, the actual world determines the ordering of other worlds. Two evaluator's with radically different beliefs, but alike in their concerns and other contextual pressures, will have the same world ordering. They will be attributing the same property to S, even if they do not realize it.7 The fact that the evaluators might be wrong about what the actual world is like highlights one kind of error that people make when considering contextualism. The contextualist should not say that the evaluator's context selects specific features of the world that must obtain at all worlds that are relevant for evaluating S's knowledge, since the evaluators might be wholly unaware of those features or even mistaken about them. The evaluator's context selects relevant respects of similarity, and that combines with what the world is really like to select the relevant features. For instance, the presence or absence of an evil genius manipulating some of our evidence is a relevant respect of similarity, because it is the sort of thing that we care about-it is the sort of thing that, if common, we would want to be able to protect ourselves from. So if the actual world is an evil genius world, so will be the worlds relevant to evaluating S's knowledge, and if the actual world
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is not an evil genius world, neither will be the relevant alternative worlds. The evaluator's concerns influence the relevant respects of similarity, but it is the world that determines whether being similar in the relevant respect requires having the feature in question or lacking it. So here is the story we end up with. Context, the evaluator's context, selects a set of relevant respects of similarity. The actual world (or the hypothetically actual world, if we are evaluating a counterfactual situation) combines with that set to select a world ordering around the actual world. The evaluator's context draws an approximate boundary line between those worlds that are close enough to the actual world to be relevant and those that are too far away. Thus we have a standard for evaluating S. Whether or not S satisfies that standard, and which other standards S satisfies, are wholly non-relative matters. And that is why S's epistemic condition is wholly non-relative. It is determined by which world she is in and which worlds she can rule out, both of which are context independent. The role of context is limited. One word of warning. My emphasis on the evaluator and her concerns should not lead to the false conclusion that S cannot have knowledge unless S is being evaluated. The property that we are now referring to with the term "knowledge" could be had by S even if no one were evaluating whether S has it and even if no one had ever given any thought to that property. What is true is that which property we care about is dependent on who we are and what situations we are in. The point is that once we appreciate the vagueness of "knowledge" we epistemologists should replace the single question "does S have knowledge?" with the pair of questions "What epistemic condition is S in?" and "Which epistemic conditions do we care about?" The second of these questions is a question about us, the evaluators, not about S. But that does nothing to lessen the significance of the first question, a question to which the evaluator is irrelevant. Much of the focus on contextualism, especially when discussing skepticism, has been on the ways in which contextual pressures can change the conversational score. We start with ordinary, every day standards for knowledge. But when confronted with the skeptical challenge our desire to be cooperative conversational partners, or the salience of the possibility of an evil genius, or some combination thereof, changes the standards, pushing the boundary line out to the point at which we can no longer satisfy the standards. S's epistemic condition is unchanged, but it is no longer true to say of S that she knows p. It is misleading to describe this as a loss of knowledge. Even after the skeptic changes the standards on us, S still has the property that she had before the change of standards. There is no property that she loses. This is, I think, a completely convincing response to the skeptic. But focussing on this aspect of contextualism tends to overemphasize context's role in changing standards and underemphasize context's role in fixing the standards that are in place at the beginning of the conversation. And this, in turn, leads to the overemphasis of specific aspects of context over others. In particular, those aspects that change during a conversation-salience and the input from other conversationalists-get emphasized over an aspect that typ-
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ically does not change during a conversation (or only changes in reaction to the other aspects)-the evaluator's concerns. In fact, the evaluator's concerns play the primary role in the initial fixing of standards, and in the vast majority of cases, these standards do not change significantly during a conversation. The conversations that produce change are the more striking ones, especially when considering skepticism, but they are not the more common ones. It is because we typically have the same interests, because we typically care about success in the same sorts of situations, that our standards usually coincide (coincide well enough for our communicative purposes). If I hope that my wife knows where she left the car, I do not care about her ability to rule out worlds in which an evil genius is feeding her false memories or in which roads leading away from the car confused her by shifting around like the paths in a Looking Glass garden. Or at least I do not care about such worlds unless they are more like the actual world than I think they are. What I care about is her ability to rule out worlds in which her memory works as it actually does and the roads work as they actually do, but she leaves the car in a different location. If she can rule out such worlds, then she is likely to find the car. If she can't, then she is less likely to find the car, and if she does it will be by luck. It is our concerns that are doing most of the work in fixing the standards for knowledge. Salience might still play a role (for instance if we had just been talking about how much the parking lot on this side of the mall looks like the parking lot on the other side of the mall), but it is our interests that are doing most of the work. Because we are not usually concerned about evil genius worlds, our ordinary standards, before they are altered by conversational pressures, are fallibilistic. S need not be able to rule out every possibility of error in order to know p. She must not be lucky, but the degree of her anti-luck can be less than absolute. The fallibilism is a function of which worlds are selected as relevant. Fallibilism is a thesis about "knowledge", a thesis about what is important to us as evaluators. The epistemology being proposed here is also externalistic. It is externalistic because in order to have knowledge S need not be able to know what the actual world is like or which worlds she can rule out-she need not be able to know what her epistemic condition is. Its being externalistic is not due to the fact that S does not need to know what standards are in place. It is the anti-luck condition itself that is externalistic. Externalism is a theory about what should be required by a theory of knowledge. There is a risk of confusion that comes from adopting fallibilism, but it is a confusion that can be avoided by emphasizing the externalism. The problem with fallibilism is that it has the apparent consequence that S can err while still satisfying the anti-luck condition. Traditionally, fallibilistic theories of justification allow that S can be justified in her belief even when the belief is false, for instance in an evil genius world. If this carries over to the anti-luck condition, then that appears to have the consequence that S can satisfy the anti-luck condition and still only luckily have a true belief, for example in an evil genius world in which p happens to be true but S believes p because of the workings of the genius. And that defeats the fundamental intuition grounding the anti-luck account of knowl-
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edge, since it now seems that it can just be luck that S's so-called "non-lucky" belief is true. Moreover, this seems to make the anti-luck account vulnerable to Gettierization, because the case of a lucky "non-lucky" belief would be a case in which S satisfies the proposed sufficient condition for knowledge, but still fails to know p. But once we recognize the externalistic nature of the anti-luck condition we will see that these apparent difficulties with fallibilism can be avoided. The problems do not even get off the ground, because it is not true that S satisfies the anti-luck condition in the original evil genius world. We only think that S satisfies the anti-luck condition in such a world if we are stuck in the "justification" mind set. There is certainly a sense of "justification" according to which S must be equally justified in the actual world and in an indistinguishable genius world. After all, if she forms exactly the same beliefs for exactly the same reasons, her degree of justification must be the same. However, that does not make her nonlucky in the evil genius world. The sense of "justification" that supports the equally-justified intuition is an internalist sense, and anti-luck is externalistic. In particular, whether or not S is non-lucky will depend upon which world the selected worlds must be similar to. That is, S's being non-lucky will depend on what situation S is actually in. If S is in fact surrounded by barn facsimiles, then worlds in which she is looking at a barn facsimile are similar to the actual world to a higher degree than they would be if she were not surrounded by facsimiles. In normal contexts of evaluation, we want S to be able to distinguish real barns from those structures she might come across. If S is in fact surrounded by barn facsimiles, she might just as easily have been looking at a facsimile as a barn. We draw the boundary line far enough out to include worlds that are like her actual world with respect to the commonality of facsimiles. But if S is not in such a world, then facsimile worlds are much further away, and are therefore not selected. It is because S's epistemic condition depends on what her world is like that her epistemic condition will vary from world to world, even if her evidence does not change. If painted mules are common in S's vicinity, worlds in which she is looking at a painted mule instead of a zebra are selected. Such worlds are not as distant from her world as they are from ours. And, if she happens to live in an evil genius world, then worlds in which she is being deceived by an evil genius would be selected. It is S's connection to reality that counts, not her internal states. She is better connected to reality in a world without an evil genius than she is in an evil genius world, even though she cannot distinguish the one world from the other. In an evil genius world in which S is being deceived by the genius it is not true that S does not believe p in all of the selected not-p worlds. That world is itself one of the close enough not-p worlds, and she believes p in that world. She does not satisfy the anti-luck condition. Even in a world in which the evil genius is having the same effect on S but p happens to be true, S is not non-lucky. The close enough not-p worlds will still be ones in which the evil genius is affecting S in the same way. In those not-p worlds S believes p. More generally, in situations in which negating p has no effect on the input to the process that S is using, the relevant worlds will include ones in which she is using that same process with
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the same input. In those worlds she will form the same belief. So we need not be committed to S's being able to have a luckily true belief while satisfying the anti-luck condition. And this dissolves the Gettier threat. Consider one of the original Gettier cases. Smith does not own a Ford, but Jones has great evidence that he does. So Jones falsely believes that Smith owns a Ford. He then existentially generalizes from this evidence to what turns out to be a true conclusion-someone in the office owns a Ford. He has a justified true belief that is not knowledge. It is just luck that the justified belief is true. Does he satisfy the anti-luck condition? No. The close enough not-p worlds will include ones in which Jones goes through the same reasoning process based on the same evidence. He will have the same evidence, because negating p does nothing to affect the input to his belief forming process. In normal cases, non-Gettier cases, the actual world is such that using the same reasoning in similar worlds will only produce a belief in someone's owning a Ford when that someone does own a Ford, because similar worlds in which no one in the office owns a Ford are ones in which the input to the reasoning process are different. But in the Gettier case the world is such that using the same reasoning in worlds similar to that world (the Gettierized world) yields a Ford ownership belief in the absence of a Ford owner. The difference between the Gettier case and the non-Gettier case is the difference in what the not-p worlds have to be similar to in order to be relevant. The same respects of similarity are taken to be important in evaluating the two cases; no change in standards is involved when we shift from ordinary cases to Gettier cases. What changes is not the standards, but the actual world. Bottom line: it is the anti-luck condition that is doi'ng the work in solving the Gettier problem, not the contextualism. Contextualism solves problems in virtue of explaining why certain standards are in effect in certain contexts. For instance, that is the contribution contextualism makes to resolving the threat of skepticism. But the challenge of the Gettier problem does not involve any difference in standards when considering a case of knowledge and a case of mere justified true belief. Of course, I concede that in order for it to be true that someone has knowledge in a non-Gettier case or that someone does not have knowledge in a Gettier case, worlds must be selected. And in order for worlds to be selected, context must have had a role in the selection. But that does not make the solution contextualist. The details of one's theory of world selection matter little to the solution. Whatever standards are used, if they are remotely plausible candidates for being our "ordinary" standards, if the same ordinary standards are used to evaluate the non-Gettier cases and the Gettier cases, the subject will satisfy the antiluck condition in the non-Gettier cases and will not satisfy the anti-luck condition in the Gettier case. To my knowledge it was Goldman who first realized that an anti-luck condition avoids the Gettier problem.' Lewis has recently rediscovered this point, but his emphasis on the principles of world selection gives the misleading impression that it is the contextualism that is doing most of the work, rather than the anti-luck condition? Cohen has criticized Lewis's principles of world selection.1° In eval-
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uating the Gettier case, Lewis says that among the not-p worlds that are relevant, there will be some that are like the actual Gettier world in that Jones has all of the same evidence in virtue of Smith's performing all of the same actions. His reason for including those worlds is that those features of the Gettier world are salient to us, the evaluators, and his Rule of Resemblance tells us that salient similarities
should be preserved at the relevant worlds. Even adjusting this point in recognition of the fact that the important salience is of respects of similarity, rather than of specific features of the world, it gets things wrong because it puts too much weight on salience. As Cohen points out, there could be other evaluators of Jones for whom those respects of similarity are not salient. Such evaluators would still be incorrect in attributing knowledge to Jones. Hence, there must be some other contextual force that is making those worlds relevant. Salience cannot carry the weight." The contextual force at work is the evaluator's interests. We, the evaluators, are concerned about Jones's ability to distinguish situations in which there are Ford owners in his office from situations in which there are not. That means that the relevant respects of similarity are going to include the reasoning process Jones used to form his belief and an environment like the one in which he formed his belief. In normal, non-Gettier cases, the reasoning process is perfectly adequate because environments like the actual one are such that people in the office only act like they own Fords when they do. But the Gettier case is one in which the actual world's environment is abnormal. In the Gettier case, Jones's environment is one in which there is a disconnection between Ford owning behavior and Ford owning. An environment like that one and without the Ford ownership will be an environment in which the Ford owning behavior continues. Notice that an evaluator who does not realize that Jones is being Gettierized will still have the same interests as the rest of us. That evaluator will still deem the same respects of similarity to be important. That evaluator will be mistaken about what the actual Gettier world is like, and so will be mistaken about what the similar worlds are like-she will not realize that similar worlds in which no one in the office owns a Ford are still worlds in which Smith carries on with his Ford owner behavior. Thus, that evaluator will incorrectly judge that Jones does know that Smith owns a Ford and that someone in the office owns a Ford. But her judgement will be incorrect, and it will be incorrect even according to her own standards. Could there be an evaluator with such radically different concerns from ours that she really does not attach significant weight to the disconnection between Ford owning behavior and Ford ownership? Of course, at least in some sufficiently broad sense of "could have". Such an evaluator would simply be saying something true with the sentence "Jones knows that someone in the office owns a Ford". But she would be saying something very different from what we say when we use that sentence. What has been underemphasized in the literature on the Gettier problem is that it can be read as an argument for skepticism. More specifically it can be read as an argument for infallibilism, from which it is a short step to skepticism. What Gettier pointed out to us was that, no matter how good S's justification is, short of
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an entailment of the truth of her belief, she can have a justificatory twin who has a justified true belief that is not knowledge. That is, if S's justification for p is consistent with the falsity of p, then S could have that same justification in a world in which p is false. This would be a world in which S's justification does not adequately connect her to the world. But if there is a world like that, then there should also be one in which S's twin has the same justification with the same disconnectedness to the world, but in which the belief is just coincidentally true. The original Gettier cases are instances of this general schema, and Descartes's evil genius case is an extreme example. What these cases show is that if we insist on clinging to the JTB account of knowledge, the only way to avoid the problem of a justificatory twin is to require justification that rules out any possibility of error. Which is to say, the JTB account entails infallibilism. Gettier concluded that the JTB account is false, prompting a search for a fourth condition to knowledge. But if we instead replace the justification condition with the anti-luck condition, no fourth condition is necessary. Gettier provides the link we need to connect fallibilism to externalism. In fact, any remotely plausible fourth condition will be externalistic too. It is the externalism that gives them promise. Externalism is what allows justificatory twins-internally indistinguishable-to differ with respect to knowledge. But not just any externalism will do, as so many fourth-conditionalists have found out. What is required is that the externalist condition, whether it be a replacement for the justification condition or an addition to it, block the possibility of S's having a false belief while satisfying the condition. And the problem is that any condition with that desirable consequence runs a serious risk of undermining fallibilism. The anti-luck condition manages to produce the desired guarantee of truth while maintaining fallibilism. That anti-luck is fallibilistic is a simple consequence of the fact that unselected not-p worlds in which S falsely believes p do not count against S's satisfying the anti-luck condition, at least in ordinary contexts. That non-lucky belief is guaranteed to be true can be shown by this simple reductio. Suppose that S satisfies the anti-luck and belief conditions without satisfying the truth condition. Then she will not believe p in any of the not-p worlds that are close enough to the actual world. The actual world is one of those, because by hypothesis the truth condition is not satisfied. So she must not believe p in the actual world. But that conflicts with our assumption. So, if she satisfies both the anti-luck and belief condition she will satisfy the truth condition. This is not to say that it is impossible to satisfy the anti-luck condition without the truth condition. That can happen as long as S does not believe p. When S is properly connected to the world (with respect to p) she will not believe p if p is false. What we can rule out is a non-lucky false belief. If she is non-lucky, then she believes p only if p is true. The truth condition on knowledge is redundant. So here is where we have ended up. Contextualism must be used to defend our ordinary, fallibilistic standards against Descartes's challenge. Once those standards are in place, the anti-luck theory must be used to defend our knowledge against Gettier's challenge. The anti-luck condition is well-suited for this task because it provides a guaranteed link between belief and truth. The guarantee is
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so strong in fact as to make the truth condition on knowledge superfluous. And the guarantee holds even when the anti-luck condition is applied in ordinary contexts that ground fallibilism. Contextualism does not itself play any significant role in defeating Gettier's worries. Those worries were genuinely about what it takes to turn true belief into knowledge, and they can only be answered by a theory knowledge . In contrast, Descartes's challenge turned out to concern only our standards governing the use of the term "knowledge". In any context in which fallibilistic standards are appropriate, skepticism is avoided.12 The point of this paper was to separate the two components of a complete epistemology. The evaluator employs the term "knowledge"; the subject possesses the property that is referred to. Contextualism is a theory about the term. A theory of knowledge will be a theory about the property in any given context. Whatever relativity there is in our epistemology, it is in the employment of the term and not the possession of the property. All of the relativity is on the evaluator's side. The subject's epistemic condition is a function of which world is actual and which worlds she believes p in, and there is nothing relative about those. Once these facts are appreciated, contextualism should be wholly uncontroversial. That does not make it trivial or unimportant. Contextualism is not a cure-all, but it is an essential ingredient in coming to understand the anti-luck epistemology.13 Notes 1. The general point of contextualism is presented in David Lewis's "Scorekeeping in a Language Game," Journal of Philosophical Logic (1979), 339-359. That paper contains a number of examples of how the point might be applicable to different topics, one of which is Peter Unger's argument for skepticism in Ignorance: A Case for Skepticism (Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1975). The contextualist point was simple, persuasive, and significant, explaining the force of skepticism while at the same time undermining its threat. Unger has embraced the contextualist point, in, for instance, "The Cone Model of Knowledge," Philosophical Topics (1986), 125-178. Over the years, a leading proponent of contextualism has been Stewart Cohen. See, for instance, "How to be a Fallibilist," Philosophical Perspectives (1988), 581-605. Lewis has considerably fleshed out his earlier suggestions in "Elusive Knowledge," Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1996), to which Cohen has offered a reply in "Contextualist Solutions to Epistemological Problems: Scepticism, Gettier, and the Lottery," Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1998), 289-306. 2. Alvin Goldman and Fred Dretske have proposed relevant alternatives theories. See Goldman, "Discrimination and Perceptual Knowledge", in Pappas and Swain (eds.), Essays on Knowledge and Justification (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1978) , 120-145 and Epistemology and Cognition, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1986). See Dretske, "Epistemic Operators", The Journal of Philosophy (1970), 1007-1023. Lewis's version of the relevant alternatives theory in "Elusive Knowledge" appears to be different in its emphasis on evidence, but how different it is depends on the details of his rather broad definition of "evidence" 3. Lewis mentions the possibility of adopting this more inclusive sense of "closest" in "Ordering Semantics and Premise Semantics for Counterfactuals", Journal of Philo-
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4.
5.
6. 7.
8. 9. 10. 11.
sophical Logic (198l), 217-234. Robert Nozick champions a version of the counterfactual theory in Philosophical Explanations (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1981), and his discussion seems to require the more inclusive reading of "closest". In "Relevant Alternatives" Philosophical Studies (1989), 23-40, and "Relevant Alternatives and Closure," Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1999) I defend a relevant alternatives theory over a counterfactual theory, but there I was assuming a version of the counterfactual theory that stipulates a more limited set of closest worlds. For a few additional suggestive remarks about the relationship between reliabilism and the relevant alternatives theory, see my "The Simple Solution to the Problem of Generality" N o h (1995), 501-5 15. The property in question is the property of not-believing p in any of the not-p worlds within the selected set. The simple version of the anti-luck theory would hold that the selected worlds are all and only the similar enough ones. However, when not-p is very bizarre there may not be any not-p worlds among the similar enough worlds. In such cases the simple version would be forced to attribute vacuous knowledge. To avoid this consequence, I prefer a more complicated version of the anti-luck theory according to which the selected worlds are all those that are close enough plus all those that are as close as the closest not-p worlds. This extra clause will only make a difference in cases in which there are no not-p worlds among the close enough worlds. See my "Relevant Alternatives and Closure" for a more complete discussion of this debate. The simple version of the anti-luck condition preserves closure, while my more complicated version rejects closure. I ignore the complicated version throughout the remainder of this paper. See my "Against Metaphysical Vagueness," Philosophical Perspectives (1996), 177183. That the actual world plays this role in world ordering is the truth that underlies Cohen's distinction between subject-sensitivity and speaker-sensitivity, but it is misleading (at best) to think of the subject-sensitivity as one aspect of the contextual relativity of "knowledge". There is no relativity involved in what the actual world is like or in which worlds are similar to it in specified respects. Epistemology and Cognition, 46-47 and 54-55. "Elusive Knowledge". "Contextualist Solutions to Epistemological Problems". I agree with Cohen in his dismissal of salience as the contextual force that selects the correct respects of similarity in the Gettier case. That does not, of course, mean that no other contextual feature is selecting the relevant worlds. Cohen's overall point is that contextualism does not solve the Gettier problem. I agree with that too. As I have just asserted a few paragraphs ago, it is the anti-luck theory that is solving the Gettier problem. But this again does not mean that context plays no role in selecting the relevant worlds. Furthermore, in so far as Lewis holds a version of the anti-luck theory, Lewis may still be correct in his claim to have solved the Gettier problem (following Goldman). Cohen's criticism of Lewis should be restated thus: Lewis is at least misleading in his emphasis on the role of context in solving the Gettier problem, and he is incorrect in his appeal to salience when describing the world selection process. Finally, it is worth noting that once Lewis's Rule of Resemblance is put in terms of respects of similarity rather than specific similar features, the principle of resemblance can be seen not to be subject-sensitive at all (contrary to what Lewis seems to think and to what Cohen explicitly claims).
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12. This is stated too strongly. I leave it open whether there are versions of the skeptical challenge that really do require an answer from a theory of knowledge. Such an argument would have to be one that supports skepticism even if we stipulate fallibilistic standards. 13. I would like to thank my colleagues at Southern Methodist University for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. I would also like to thank the members of the audience at the University of Manitoba, especially Bob Bright and Tim Schroeder. Finally, I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for funding this project.
