Extended knowledge and autonomous belief

ABSTRACT

Adam Carter has recently presented a novel puzzle about extended knowledge – i.e. knowledge that results from extended cognitive processes. He argues that allowing for this kind of knowledge on the face of it entails that there could be instances of knowledge that are simply ‘engineered’ into the subject. The problem is that such engineered knowledge does not look genuine given that it results from processes that bypass the cognitive agency of the subject. Carter’s solution is to argue that we need to impose an additional autonomy condition on knowledge that excludes such cases of non-autonomous knowledge. In response, two points of criticism are offered. First, that when extended knowledge is properly understood, virtue-theoretic accounts of knowledge can already exclude non-autonomous knowledge without the need of an additional epistemic condition. Second, that the cases that Carter offers of putatively non-autonomous knowledge involve the inclusive folk notion of belief rather than the more restrictive notion of belief that is relevant to epistemology (K-apt belief). Once it is recognized that the belief condition on knowledge concerns this more restrictive notion, then we already have the means to exclude cases of non-autonomous knowledge (regardless of which theory of knowledge one favors).

KEYWORDS:

• Belief
• epistemology
• extended cognition
• extended knowledge
• virtue epistemology

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The locus classicus in this regard is Clark and Chalmers (1998). For some other key works on extended cognition, see Wheeler (2005), Clark (2008), and Menary (2010).

2 Of course, there are those who are critical of even the possibility of extended cognition. For some representative literature in this regard, see Adams and Aizawa (2001, 2008), Rupert (2004, 2009), and Sprevak (2009). For the purposes of this article, however, we may reasonably take the possibility of extended cognition for granted.

3 Such is the import of the ‘parity principle’ that lies at the heart of extended cognition: ‘If, as we confront some task, a part of the world functions as a process which, were it to go on in the head, we would have no hesitation in accepting as part of the cognitive process, then that part of the world is (for that time) part of the cognitive process.’ Clark and Chalmers (1998, 8)

4 I discuss the epistemological ramifications of extended cognition, and thus the idea of extended knowledge, in Pritchard (2010, 2018b, 2018c). See also Palermos (2011, 2014), Carter (2013), Clark (2015), Jarvis (2015), and the papers collected in Carter et al. (2018a, 2018b).

5 For specific discussion of the question of cognitive enhancement in this context, see Carter and Pritchard (2019).

6 For comparison, here is Carter’s own gloss on the proposal: ‘[The] view says (put simply) that your belief that p is epistemically autonomous if and only if it’s not the case that you came to acquire that belief in a way that bypasses or preempts your cognitive competences, and the bypassing or preemption of such competences results in your being unable to easily enough shed that belief.’ (Carter 2022, 61)

7 To take some prominent examples: Sosa (1991, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2015, 2021), Plantinga (1993b), Zagzebski (1996), and Greco (2009). (Of these, Plantinga at least rejects the virtue epistemology terminology). My own view about knowledge is also virtue-theoretic in this sense – see, for example, Pritchard, Millar, and Haddock (2010, chs. 1–4) and Pritchard (2012, 2020).

8 See, for example, Pritchard (2018b).

9 See, especially, Carter’s (2022, §1.3) discussion of the TRUETEMP*** case.

10 In response, Carter might be tempted to insist that all that matters is that the acquisition of the belief is non-autonomous, such that whatever cognitive integration that subsequently occurs cannot prevent the belief from remaining non-autonomous. This would be suggested by his formulation of the autonomous belief condition, which only focusses on acquisition in the first condition. As the foregoing suggests, however, I don’t think that this is plausible (and hence I don’t think Carter’s formulation of the autonomous belief condition is quite right as it stands). If a belief that’s acquired in a non-autonomous fashion is subsequently integrated within that subject’s noetic structure, then it ceases to be non-autonomous (as reflected in how the latter belief is now attributable to the subject’s cognitive agency).

11 A fairly standard view of delusions is that they are beliefs, for example. See Bayne and Pacherie (2005), Bortolotti (2010), and Bentall (2018). As I’ve argued elsewhere, this is only plausible if one is thinking of the folk notion of belief – see Pritchard (2023).

12 For discussion of the notion of belief as it applies to the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge commitments, see Pritchard (2015, part 2).

13 For further discussion of this notion, see Pritchard (2015, part 2). See also Pritchard (2018a).

14 For a useful recent discussion of the varied range of propositional attitudes that get classed as beliefs, see Stevenson (2002).

15 Thanks to Adam Carter. An earlier version of this paper was presented at an author-meets-critics workshop devoted to Carter’s monograph at the University of Cologne in September 2001. Thanks to the organizer of this conference, Waldomira Silva Filho. This paper was written while a Senior Research Associate of the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science at the University of Johannesburg.