Pragmatism, truth, and cognitive agency

ABSTRACT

The main objection to pragmatism about knowledge is that it entails that truth-irrelevant factors can make a difference to knowledge. Blake Roeber [2018. “Anti-Intellectualism.” Mind: A Quarterly Review of Philosophy 127: 437–466] has recently argued that this objection fails. I agree with Roeber. But in this paper, I present another way of thinking about the dispute between purists and pragmatists about knowledge. I do so by formulating a new objection to pragmatism about knowledge. This is that pragmatism about knowledge entails that factors irrelevant to both truth and ‘cognitive agency’ can make a difference to knowledge. An interesting additional upshot of my argument is the connection revealed between the debate between pragmatists and purists about knowledge, and the debate between ‘alethists’ and pragmatists about reasons for belief.

KEYWORDS:

• Pragmatic encroachment
• anti-intellectualism
• reasons for belief
• epistemic normativity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Henceforth, for ease of exposition, unless stated otherwise I will simply use the term ‘pragmatism’ (as opposed to ‘pragmatism about knowledge’) to refer to the view that practical interests can make a difference between knowledge and belief falling short of knowledge.

2 Roeber attributes the main objection to pragmatism to DeRose (2009), Grimm (2011), and Reed (2014).

3 Evidence and reliability of belief-forming process are paradigm examples of factors that affect the probability of a belief.

4 The point is made by many others; see Fantl and McGrath (2009, 27).

5 To take a paradigm example, I may respond to the visual appearance of snow falling in the window by forming the belief that it’s snowing outside.

6 A scientist considering the results of some experiment may badly want them to have been different—perhaps it would have led to a great publication in a big journal. But they nevertheless lower their credence in their hypothesis. As such they express an epistemic evaluative commitment: a concern for appropriate methods in scientific inquiry.

7 Some may want to leave out the restriction to good reasoning. Whether or not one is happy to do so depends in part on whether one thinks it is psychologically impossible to reason about whether p from truth-irrelevant considerations, or whether it is merely impossible to reason well about whether p from truth-irrelevant considerations. I remain officially neutral on this issue – though I lean towards the latter view. It seems like an empirical fact that people sometimes reason about whether p from truth-irrelevant considerations. What is less obvious to me is whether doing so counts as good reasoning. This point overlaps with my discussion of argument b) for ‘alethism’ below (12).

8 In addition to the point about arguments as expressing reasoning, Way presents three other arguments in support of Link (Way 2016, 816). I won’t get into the details of these arguments.

9 Some will argue that knowledge is itself an exercise of cognitive agency, as opposed to a ‘result’ of cognitive agency (Sosa 2015; Zagzebski 2003). However, note that ‘result’ can be read here either in terms of a causal or constitutive relation. I will remain neutral on this issue.

10 Of course, purists deny that such factors actually make a difference to knowledge. For non-pragmatist interpretations of the appearances, see (Williamson 2005; Leite 2007; Brown 2013; DeRose 2005, 2009).

11 Thanks to Blake Roeber, Nick Hughes, participants at the 1st Annual Riding Mountain Pre-Read Philosophy Workshop, and an anonymous referee for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.