Knowing and Seeing: Groundwork for a new empiricism 0198833563, 9780198833567

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Knowing and Seeing

Knowing and Seeing Groundwork for a new empiricism

Michael Ayers

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1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Michael Ayers 2019 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2019 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2018959695 ISBN 978–0–19–883356–7 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Preface and Acknowledgements Knowledge is power, and the question ‘How much do we know?’ is of no little importance. ‘Theory of knowledge’ or ‘epistemology’, however, arises when the question is given a Socratic twist, perhaps by the question ‘How much do or can we really know?’, a question that couples the question of what is known with the question of what it is to know it. That last question, the question of what knowledge is, has been at the centre of European philosophical thought, directly or indirectly, at least since Plato, and the answers given are usually integral to the world-view or ontology of the philosopher who gives it. If we consider the long epistemological tradition that is discussed in Chapter 1, certain debates and lines of thought stand out, most famously and persistently, perhaps, the arguments between, on one side, broadly Platonist, so-called ‘rationalists’ and, on the other side, ‘empiricists’ such as were already targeted by Plato. Is it reason and rational understanding or the deliverances of the senses that allow us such access as we have to reality and the nature of things? The starting point for the argument of this book, however, is the way in which perceptual knowledge, the knowing that comes with (in the usual exemplary case) seeing, figures in traditional theory of knowledge, as it does in everyday speech, as the very paradigm of knowledge—even, for example, mathematical knowledge. As Aquinas put it, according authority both to reason and the senses: ‘those things are said to be seen which, by themselves, move our intellect or the senses to knowledge of them.’ It is, indeed, by a choice of language both paradoxical and significant that rationalists eager to impress upon us the superior evidence of the objects of pure intellect over what Descartes calls ‘the uncertain credibility of the senses’ (the objects of which Plato places between reality and nothingness) have done so by flooding their account with the metaphors of sight and light, of ‘seeing’ and ‘illumination’. The word ‘evidence’ itself derives from the Latin for ‘see’. And when, as I was long ago exploring the background to early modern empiricism, I reread some passages of Lucretius’ extraordinary masterpiece (first read as literature rather than as philosophy), the lines I have placed at the front of the present book stood out for me as an explicit, indeed emphatic recognition of the paradigmatic and in some sense foundational status of perceptual knowledge. The best way to start an inquiry into what knowledge is, I concluded, might be ‘bottom up’, that is by seeking an understanding of perceptual knowledge and, in particular, of what it is about it that has made it the main paradigm of knowledge both in ordinary life and language and throughout a couple of millennia of philosophy. Just what is it about sense experience that gave philosophy the notion of evidence? Or is that itself too evident to call for explanation? Well, some explanation can be given, I think, and in the present state of philosophy needs to be given.

vi Preface and Acknowledgements I suppose that my first reasonably systematic thoughts on these questions came to me as, writing on Locke’s philosophy over thirty years ago, I reflected on that philosopher’s ingenious (but unsatisfying) explanation of perceptual knowledge and the ‘evidence’ of the deliverances of the senses, with its apparent indebtedness to, yet significant difference from, Stoic theory. There was also the need to assess the seeming inconsistencies between his conception of ‘knowledge of co-existence’, his distinction between ideas of one sense and ideas of more than one sense (the latter restricted to sight and touch, and to ideas of space), as well as his famous response to the ‘Molyneux Problem’, a response as ambivalent as that ‘problem’ is ambivalent. In consequence I arrived, first, at a sense of the importance of an understanding of the phenomenal integration of the senses, a pretty obvious feature of sense experience more or less ignored or, in effect, denied by the tradition, and hardly a hot philosophical topic even by the 1980s. (Since then, things have changed a lot as more empirical psychologists have turned their attention to ‘cross-modal’ and ‘amodal’ perception, carrying at least some good philosophers with them.) Second, I concluded that, in order to achieve a philosophical understanding of what lies behind the traditional ideas of ‘evidence’ and ‘seeing’ the truth, it is helpful, if not essential, to distinguish between primary and secondary knowledge, the former being knowledge acquired in such a way that, in acquiring it, we are ipso facto aware of just how we are acquiring it. We are aware of our cognitive relationship to the object of knowledge, which in the case of perceptual knowledge comprises awareness of how its object is impinging on our senses. Primary knowledge is therefore something other, and more, than the reliably caused true belief that many analytic philosophers have definitively identified as what constitutes knowledge. It is knowledge that is consciously knowledge. And without some primary knowledge—some immediate and conscious cognitive contact with what is known—no knowledge is possible. With such an explicit understanding of perceptual knowledge, it would seem possible, and desirable, to explore the traditional analogy with intelligent understanding, for example mathematical or logical or, indeed, philosophical insight, such as we so regularly mark by the notion of ‘seeing’ connections, ‘seeing’ the truth. The development of those ideas, a development integrated with argument reflecting my long-standing dissatisfaction with the kind of comprehensive conceptualism endemic in analytic philosophy since the 1950s, as well as with the undue respect frequently paid by reductionist philosophers, doctrinae causa, to philosophical scepticism, has been spread over very many years. My first, foetal essay in criticism of conceptualist theory of individuation and identity, for example, was written almost fifty years ago. Accordingly a list of acknowledgements that attempted to include everyone who, in formal discussion or informal conversation, have said things that, sometimes perhaps contrary to the speaker’s intentions,1 have contributed to this development would 1 The view of events and their identity adopted in this book, for example, and the contrast between material things and events (etc.), was helped into existence by brief remarks made in conversation, way

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inevitably be incomplete, and almost inevitably misleading. Fierce, sometimes even dismissive opposition that forces one to work harder towards a coherent exposition of one’s views can be as useful in its way as the more directly helpful remarks of a sympathetic reader or listener, although it is difficult to be as grateful for the former as for the latter. My colleagues in philosophy at Wadham College, I am happy to say, although not uncritical, were always encouraging. I benefited first from the staunch common sense of Ian Crombie, and later from frequent, stimulating discussions with Ian’s successor as Tutorial Fellow, Quassim Cassam, with whom I shared many of the same interests and intuitions. I know too that I have profited from discussion with many philosophically interested students that I was purportedly teaching: Bill Brewer, Bill Child, Tom Crowther, Hannah Ginsburg, Colin McGinn, Rory Madden, Sarah Patterson, Sarah Richmond, and A. David Smith (sadly now deceased) come now to mind, but there were many others. It should also be said that the privilege of a semester at the University of California at Berkeley in 2007, five years into retirement from teaching at Oxford, provided a probably necessary stimulus to undertake one more major project. I am grateful for that opportunity to talk with, and learn from, some of those working in epistemology who were there at the time, including Michael Martin, John Campbell, and again, in those rather different circumstances, Hannah Ginsborg. More immediately relevant to the present content and form of this book is the debt I owe to the several anonymous readers for Oxford University Press, whose critical comments and helpful suggestions led to three major transformations. One suggestion in particular should be mentioned, and that was the recommendation that there should be a first chapter on the historical background. That leads me to the grateful acknowledgement of the great debt the text and, indeed, the eventual form of the book owes to Maria Rosa Antognazza, co-author of the first chapter. How this chapter came to be written and included should be recorded. Around the time that the first draft of the book was completed and with the publisher for assessment, Professor Antognazza and I were both at a conference in London at which a speaker cited Aquinas’s explanation of knowing in terms of ‘seeing’, dismissing it as obviously unhelpful. I raised an objection to that dismissal on behalf of the view that at least central or basic cases of knowledge involve conscious apprehension, whether literal seeing or otherwise perceiving or something enough like seeing (say, understanding) to justify the metaphor that we all use (as well, indeed, as the metaphors of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘apprehension’). Such metaphors, endemic, certainly, in every language with which I am acquainted, point to something important and shouldn’t simply be dismissed. The speaker disagreed, seeming to suppose my view nothing but an ancient confusion. After the session I met up with Maria Rosa, who back in the early ’70s, by two philosophers as different as Terence Penelhum and Gareth Evans. Terry pointed out that the view that eventually got into Ayers 1974, ‘Individuals without Sortals’, wouldn’t work for events—adding, as I still remember, ‘but that might not worry you’. Gareth remarked that we should think of the criteria of identity for events as set by sentences, rather than concepts. Both suggestions seemed completely obvious, as well as important, once made.

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said how much she agreed with my objection, and we spent time in a break between lectures discussing the history and significance of the idea that knowing comes with ‘seeing’, and the related distinction between knowledge and belief. We ended by agreeing that someone should write an article defending and explaining these doctrines. I did nothing, I fear, but not long afterwards a first draft of such an article arrived from Maria Rosa, with a request for suggestions for improvement. We spent the next few months, meeting fairly regularly and working together as well as separately between meetings, in a collaboration that I found hugely stimulating and enjoyable—indeed, as ideas and interpretations clicked together, positively exciting. It turned out that we had, at least initially, different, but complementary interests, knowledge, and views. Unsurprisingly, Maria Rosa was much the more at home with the writings of Leibniz and Aquinas, and, I think, more focused on the idea of ‘seeing’ necessary relationships and universal truths. I was more familiar with the history of empiricism and interested in the idea of ‘the evidence of the senses’. I had understood (for example, in my book on Locke’s Essay2) the idea of knowing as grounded on ‘seeing’ as essentially the idea that real knowledge must be ‘perspicuous’ in the sense that if we really know something, we know that and how we know it. She, I think, was more inclined to stress the role, in that idea, of the traditional thought that to know, in the strict sense, is to be in direct cognitive contact with the object of knowledge. These properties can, in some cases, come apart, but also fit very well together (as I hope the reader will discover). We found also that we have complementary competences. Maria Rosa is far more fluent in more languages than I, including Latin, but my somewhat rusty Greek was enough to allow me to grapple with some crucial and controversial passages in Plato’s works and with one point of of Stoic doctrine (with what success I leave others to judge).3 In that I benefited from some useful comment, with advice in particular on current Plato scholarship, from Lesley Brown. The draft article soon became dangerously long for the ambition to have it published in a journal, especially if there was to be space not only to illustrate the virtual universality of the distinction between knowledge and belief, and the different roles it played in systematic philosophy over such a long period, but also to say effectively why the history mattered, and what we could learn from it. Two things then happened. The article was returned from one of the few philosophy journals that we judged might conceivably print such a long piece. It came with a criticism by a reviewer—self-described as a philosopher rather than an historian of philosophy—to the effect that, as feared, our claim that the traditional views discussed were of philosophical importance was inadequately supported. Not very long afterwards the Readers’ reports on the first draft of this book arrived, one of which recommended that there be a first historical chapter. It seemed a golden opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, and Maria Rosa 2

Ayers 1991, vol. I: 137–44; 180–92. Although my co-author has not disapproved, I take full responsibility for the eventual interpretation of the ‘sight-lovers’ argument, in case there are convincing objections to it from those more expert in ancient philosophy. 3

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very generously agreed, at the price of what has turned out to be a long delay in the publication of her work, that the article we had written together could be used as that first chapter, with such adjustments as seemed necessary for its new role. In fact, apart from reshaping the opening and closing sections for that purpose, and a handful of minor, mostly stylistic improvements, I have left it unchanged. It serves as an essential introduction to the themes of rest of the book, and, I hope, illustrates something of the philosophical value of the study of the history of philosophy, and the dangers of ignoring that history. One more formal acknowledgement is called for. I am grateful to the editor of The Monist for permission to use a large part of my article, ‘Ordinary Objects, Ordinary Language and Identity’ (2005, vol.88, no.4) in Chapter 3, section 3.5. Finally, I must express my gratitude for the support and tolerance of my wife, Delia, to whom this book is dedicated with love (and a promise to have more room in my life than recently for other things than philosophy).

Contents Part I Knowledge, Belief, and Perception 1. Knowledge and Belief from Plato to Locke Michael Ayers and Maria Rosa Antognazza 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5

Traditional Epistemology and a Modern Myth Plato’s Distinction between Knowledge and Belief The Distinction in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy Early Modern Continuity, Development, and Rejection What Can We Learn from Traditional Epistemology?

2. Perception and Primary Knowledge 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6

The ‘Evidence’ and ‘Authority’ of the Senses What is Phenomenology of Perception? The Perception of Space and the Integration of the Senses The Perception of Causality and Action The Perception of the Causality of Perception Primary and Secondary Knowledge

3. Conceptualism and Perceptual Knowledge 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

Aristotle versus Kant Sources of Conceptualism John McDowell: Concepts and Perception McDowell’s Change of Tack Perception, Concepts, and Individuation

4. Internal and External Objects of Cognition 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6

Objects of Cognition and ‘Ordinary Language’ Propositions and Facts, Content and Object ‘Perceiving that . . .’ Knowledge and Propositions Facts, States of Affairs, and Events ‘Knowledge that P’, ‘Knowledge of X’, and ‘Knowing X’: How They Are Related

3 3 5 11 16 23 34 34 36 40 48 53 61 70 70 71 74 82 86 95 95 96 104 114 121 125

Part II Scepticism 5. Scepticism, Certainty, and Defeasibility 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5

‘Cartesian’ Scepticism The ‘Cartesian’ Argument: A First Critical Analysis Fallibility and Uncertainty Scepticism and ‘Contextualism’ Defeasibility and Burden of Proof

133 133 135 144 152 157

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6. Scepticism and Externalism 6.1 6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5 6.6

Externalism and Internalism in Theory of Knowledge Truth-Tracking, and Externalist ‘Reliabilism’ Externalism and Scepticism: Fred Dretske’s Argument Externalism, Defeasibility, and Misleading Defeaters How Do We Know that Our Faculties Are Reliable? Perception, Internalism, and ‘Disjunctivism’

164 164 166 169 175 180 185

Conclusions

194

Bibliography Index

201 209

denique nil sciri siquis putat, id quoque nescit an sciri possit, quoniam nil scire fatetur… et tamen hoc quoque uti concedam scire, at id ipsum quaeram, cum in rebus veri nil viderit ante, unde sciat quid sit scire et nescire vicissim, notitiam veri quae res falsique crearit et dubium certo quae res differre probarit. invenies primis ab sensibus esse creatam notitiem veri neque sensus posse refelli. nam maiore fide debet reperirier illud, sponte sua veris quod possit vincere falsa. quid maiore fide porro quam sensus haberi debet? an ab sensu falso ratio orta valebit dicere eos contra, quae tota ab sensibus orta est? qui nisi sunt veri, ratio quoque falsa fit omnis. De rerum natura 4. 469–85 Lucretius (So if someone thinks that nothing is known, then he does not know whether that can be known either, since he admits that he knows nothing . . . . But even if I allow that he does know that, I will still ask him, given that he has never before seen anything of the truth, how he knows what knowledge is, or its opposite, ignorance. What gave him his notion of the true and the false, or showed him the difference between what is doubtful and what is certain? You will find that the notion of truth has its origin in the first deliverances of the senses, and that the senses cannot be refuted. For something more trustworthy would need to be found, something that could independently refute falsehoods with truths. But what should be accorded greater trust than the senses? Could reasoning deriving from false sense experience confute the senses, when all reasoning starts from deliverances of the senses? Unless the deliverances of the senses are true, all reasoning is likewise false.)

PA RT I

Knowledge, Belief, and Perception

1 Knowledge and Belief from Plato to Locke Michael Ayers and Maria Rosa Antognazza

1.1 Traditional Epistemology and a Modern Myth This first chapter is a brief history of a good idea that helped to shape European theory of knowledge from Plato to Locke. That is the idea that ‘knowing’ and ‘believing’ are exclusively distinct acts of the mind, products of distinct faculties, such that there is no question of one being defined in terms of the other. The idea was shared by participants on both sides of the important argument between (as they later came to be called) ‘rationalists’ and ‘empiricists’. Perhaps because of the role that that dispute has for long been assigned, not unreasonably, in structuring the historiography of early modern philosophy, attention has been drawn away from this common ground between the two parties. That, we think, is unfortunate, since what rationalists and empiricists were broadly agreed on is strikingly at odds with most recent theory of knowledge, and there are positive lessons to be learned from it. Times have changed, it is true, and, at best, doctrine centuries old is seldom quite as we would now want to express such insights as we might take it to contain. The difference between traditional and current ‘analytic’ theory of knowledge with respect to which, in the judgement of the present authors, the past has the advantage, can be put in general terms. On the one hand, it has been assumed by most analytic epistemologists, from the 1960s until at least very recently, that knowledge is definable as true belief together with some further condition or conditions relating to the justification of that belief and/or the causality and circumstances of its genesis. In contrast, it was held by most philosophers from Plato to Locke that knowledge and belief, and by many of them that even the objects of knowledge and belief, are different in kind. Those philosophers, however, did not count either as knowledge or as belief all that is counted as such in ordinary parlance or in current epistemology. That is not because common language has changed—variations between languages and shifts within any particular language are not significantly relevant to the point—but for philosophical reasons by which they were impressed. It is those that will be explored and developed in this book,

4 Knowing and Seeing above all the idea that direct awareness of an independent reality, an immediate and self-conscious cognitive contact with its object, is central to what knowledge is, constituting its specific difference from what was regarded, not as ‘knowledge’, but as, at best well-justified, ‘belief ’.

The myth of a ‘traditional analysis’ Our sense that it is appropriate to start an enquiry into the nature of knowledge with a closer look at the history of epistemology has been encouraged by the fact that for much of the last fifty years analytic philosophers writing on theory of knowledge have routinely asserted that, on the ‘traditional’ or ‘standard’ analysis or definition of knowledge, knowledge is simply true belief that is (fully or sufficiently) justified.1 That postulated, mythical tradition was and, to some extent, still is supposed to have been brought to an abrupt end by Edmund Gettier’s making the simple point that one may be well justified both in believing something that is in fact false and in inferring a true conclusion from that false premise, and so may have justified true belief without having knowledge.2 A number of writers, including Gettier himself, have ascribed that allegedly ‘standard analysis’ to Plato,3 a claim later supported by Gail Fine’s more closely argued interpretation of passages, in particular, in Meno, Theaetetus, and Republic. Gettier set the question, supposed radically new, of what, other than justification or in addition to justification, is required for true belief to constitute knowledge, a question many have laboured to answer over several decades. Results have proved ultimately unconvincing (although the effort has not therefore been unenlightening), and notoriously vulnerable to counter-example or to the charge of circularity, or, very often, to both.4 Accordingly, that ‘degenerating research programme’5 has recently been ceding ground to other approaches.6 The associated historical narrative has also at least begun to fall out of favour. Fine’s not implausible arguments, which as far as we know constitute the only serious and

1 Here are some examples: Moser 2002: 4; Steup 2005; Klein 2005; Shope 2002: 29; Pollock 1986: 180 (according to whom Gettier ‘single-handedly changed the course of epistemology’), Williamson 2000: 30. 2 Gettier 1963. In fact, as others have pointed out, one may be well justified in believing something true, without having knowledge of it, independently of believing anything false, e.g. if I truly believe that a valid lottery ticket won’t win, given the odds against. 3 See Moser and vander Nat 2003: 1; Fine 2000; 2003; and 2004. 4 For criticism of many attempted analyses, see Shope 1983 and 2002. For argument that the quest for a non-circular analysis of knowledge in terms of belief is misguided as well as unsuccessful, see e.g. Ayers 1991 I: 121–44, Williamson 2000, esp. ch. 1. See also Kripke 2011b: 162–224 (drafted 1986), for a sustained, destructive critique of the ‘externalist’ analyses of knowledge promoted by Gettier’s article. 5 Williamson 2000: 31. 6 See, for example, Quine 1969; Craig 1990; Hyman 1999; Kornblith 2002; Williamson 2000: 23 and 42; 2007: 270. Pragmatism is often the influence, but Williamson draws a distinction between knowledge and belief in some ways like the traditional distinction that we document in this chapter, sections 1.2–4. He notes an antecedent to his view in the ‘Oxford Realism’ of J. Cook Wilson, H. A. Prichard and others, but these philosophers were themselves schooled in a more ancient tradition. (Cf. Marion  2000, cited by Williamson, and Hetherington 2012: 236, who cites Gerson 2009.) For some discussion of Williamson’s views, see Chapter 4, sections 4.2–5.

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sustained attempt to find evidence for the story, although initially receiving some acceptance, have met with convincing objections.7 As one critic, Lloyd P. Gerson, puts it, for ancient philosophers generally, ‘knowledge and belief are exclusive categories’.8 That simple point, easy enough to document, was not enough to kill the myth, and Gerson himself concluded that ‘the real beginning of the Standard Analysis is in the seventeenth century’. Yet it is difficult to find evidence that mainstream seventeenthcentury philosophy is anything but smoothly continuous with ancient philosophy in just this respect. Even some of those who repeat the myth have begun to show embarrassment in doing so, but the myth, it often seems, supplies too convenient an Aunt Sally to discard completely.9 Nevertheless, it is evidently well on the way out, if perhaps needing a kick or two to send it finally through the door. It is a subsidiary purpose of the present chapter to help that process on. The next section, 1.2, will examine a famous argument of Plato’s in which he draws a distinction between knowledge and belief. Section 1.3 will chart the place of the distinction in antiquity after Plato, and in the epistemology of the great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas. Section 1.4 will consider its still dominant role in seventeenth-century philosophy, and its rejection in Hume’s Treatise. Section  1.5 will first offer a very brief critical appreciation of the traditional theory expounded in previous sections, giving at least an indication of some of the main philosophical themes to be pursued in later chapters. It will end with some suggestions as to why the late-twentieth-century misrepresentation of traditional doctrine should have found such ready and for long virtually unquestioning acceptance by analytic philosophers.

1.2 Plato’s Distinction between Knowledge and Belief In Books V–VII of Republic, Plato, in the persona of Socrates, distinguishes between knowledge and belief in the context of a contrast between ‘philosophers’, the ‘lovers of the forms’ who look for unified answers to such universal questions as ‘What is justice?’ or ‘What is beauty?’, and those who are satisfied to judge a variety of things to be just, honourable, or beautiful without ever considering in general what justice, honour, and beauty are. Socrates first argues that the universal ‘forms’ of justice and beauty are objects of knowledge, while particular sensible things are objects of belief (Republic 475e–476d). Socrates’ auditor, Glaucon, who already accepts the theory of forms, agrees. Socrates then offers a second argument for this conclusion that purportedly does not presuppose the theory of forms, but is designed to persuade a class of unthinking aesthetes less well trained in philosophy than Glaucon. These ‘lovers of sights and sounds’, who do not seek a unified conception of the beauty they claim to admire, are 7 See Gonzalez 1996 for detailed criticism of Fine. 8 Gerson 2009: 2–3; cf. 2006. 9 An interesting example is Turri 2012: 214, who prefixes ‘that the “traditional” or “standard” view of knowledge is justified true belief ’ with ‘Legend has it’, an adjustment entirely ignored in the ensuing enthusiastic demolition of ‘the K = JTB theory’.

6 Knowing and Seeing the upper-class Athenians whose traditional education Plato proposes to replace, but also, perhaps, the wider class of those who take the senses and sensual pleasure to deliver knowledge, including the knowledge that here most concerns him, knowledge of what is truly good. The discussion culminates in three symbolic analogies—the Sun, the Divided Line, and the Cave—that define a line of thought destined to run through the history of Western philosophy and characterized by sharp distinctions between the intelligible and the sensible, reality and appearance, and knowledge and belief. As we shall see, however, these three distinctions, tightly linked by Plato, can come apart in the hands of others.

The ‘sight-lovers’ argument in Republic It is the second argument (Republic 476d–480) that most concerns us. This argument is presented as ad homines, designed, as I have said, specifically to convince the philosophically unsophisticated ‘sight-lovers’ that experience of particulars, at least on its own, does not afford knowledge, but merely belief. Since its interpretation remains highly controversial, we first attempt a neutral abbreviation, in two parts, as follows: 1. To know is always to know something, something that is. At the other extreme, total ignorance (agnoia) relates to what is not. What entirely or absolutely is is knowable, what entirely is not is unknowable. Belief or opinion lies between knowledge and total ignorance, darker than knowledge and brighter than total ignorance. The faculty of knowledge and the faculty of belief, opinion, or judgement are different, since, like sight and hearing, they are related to different things and accomplish different things. As the faculty of knowledge is directed towards (or ‘set over’) what is, the faculty of belief is directed towards what both is and is not, and so towards what lies between what purely is and what in no way is. The faculties accomplish different things, since the faculty of knowledge is infallible, that of belief fallible. 2. Now, the many things that the sight-lovers would classify as examples of beauty or justice or piety, as well as experienced quantities and qualities, all hover between what absolutely is and what absolutely is not. What is held noble and honourable will sometimes appear base and ugly. What is double, large, or heavy in one relation or circumstance appears half, small, or light in another. It follows that the particular objects of sense experience are objects of belief or opinion, not knowledge. The first, famous problem facing any explication of this argument concerns the meaning of the verb to be (einai). Should ‘esti’ be read as ‘exists’, or as the predicative copula ‘is (F)’ employed elliptically in (1), or even, with Gail Fine, as ‘is true’ throughout both (1) and (2)? Since the first part of the argument reads most easily taking ‘esti’ as ‘exists’, while the second part seems to require its being understood as the copula, Plato has been accused of simply confusing two senses of ‘esti’. Since nothing exists without satisfying some predicates, however, and nothing satisfies predicates if it

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doesn’t exist, then if there is confusion, it is not that simple. As Lesley Brown has argued, the so-called ‘ambiguity’ of ‘esti’ (or, indeed, of the English ‘is’) as between existential and predicative uses can seem rather less pronounced if (despite obvious differences) we compare the former ‘complete’ use with ‘teaches’, and the latter with ‘teaches French’. Moreover, as she says with respect to a comparable passage in Sophist, even if we interpret einai in Plato’s argument as the ‘complete’ (but still essentially predicative) to be, the most perspicuous translations of ‘to on’ into English will employ the verb ‘exist’ and/or the notion of reality.10 Accordingly, we follow the main tradition in reading ‘is’ in (1) as ‘exists’,11 accepting that Plato presents us with the task of finding something that falls between the fully existent and the entirely non-existent correspondent to the way in which, he supposes, believing (opining, judging) falls between knowledge and absolute ignorance. The second part of the argument can then be read as suggesting that the allegedly halfhearted way, as it were, in which particulars, notably sensible things, satisfy predicates (a sort of relativism that might have sounded familiar to Plato’s first readers with knowledge of Parmenides and Protagoras)12 means that they have a kind of half-being. But it is the first part of the argument, with its characterization of knowledge and belief and their different objects, that is our main concern. The claim that knowledge has to do with what exists, in so far as it is a claim that sight-lovers not already sharing Plato’s conception of reality might be expected to accept, presumably makes the point that someone who knows is in a direct cognitive relation to something real—something in the world, so to speak. In so far as the argument does not yet distinguish between sensible and intelligible worlds, we might illustrate it by drawing an example from the former (contrary to Plato’s own intentions). If I know that John hit Bill last night the object of my knowledge is the actual event, John’s hitting Bill, to which I am appropriately cognitively related. I have latched onto a bit of reality–let us suppose that I saw it. But suppose now that I do not thus directly know, but simply opine or judge, on whatever indirect ground, that John hit Bill last night. (For example, I had seen John angrily looking for Bill, and Bill has a black eye this morning. Believing an eyewitness account is perhaps more complicated.) Is the object of my opinion an actually occurrent, wholly existent event? Obviously not, if there was no such event in reality. But even if my belief is true, it is at least arguable that the relation between the postulated or possible hitting that figures in my belief and the actual event in virtue of which my belief is true is not identity.13 The event in my mind, so to speak, matches in some respect an event in the world, but (on this not entirely 10 Brown 1999. 11 But see n. 14, this section. 12 Behind Plato’s argument there seems to be the thought that a determinate, unequivocal ‘account’ can’t be given of sensible things: i.e. they can’t be known. 13 Of course, knowledge and belief (whether true or false) may concern the same things (in either world). I can have false or speculative beliefs about someone I know well, or about the number 7. But for Plato the objects of knowing, like the objects of seeing, are entities or realities, not propositions. For a quasi-Platonic argument to be most plausible here the object of a belief is perhaps best taken to be the whole postulated state of affairs or event.

8 Knowing and Seeing implausible view) the two are not therefore identical. After all, I might believe that John hit Bill with his fist, when he actually hit him with his elbow. How (it might be asked) could such different hittings be identical? But the event in my mind, so not a few philosophers since Plato have agreed, has a kind of sub-reality or ‘subsistence’. As Descartes said of an idea taken objectively, the intentional object of a thought, it is not nothing.14 We suggest that it is broadly that kind of point that Plato was making in arguing that knowledge is of what is, whereas beliefs have as their objects only secondclass, postulated things—‘nomima’, ‘believed things’ as he calls them15—which are nevertheless not nothing. It is important that Socrates insists that it is impossible to form a belief without an object. Even to opine falsely is to opine ‘some one thing’.16 A related if less metaphysically loaded point has been made more recently by Zeno Vendler, who argues that we believe propositions, but know facts.17 To know that S is P, according to Vendler, is to know the fact that S is P. It is to have latched onto an aspect of reality, S’s being P. To know the proposition that S is P is something different, and ‘I believe the fact that S is P’ doesn’t make sense. As we might put the point Platonically, the faculty of belief is ‘set over’ postulated states of affairs, the faculty of knowledge is ‘set over’ real ones. Knowledge, on the understanding of it that we are examining, involves perspicuous cognitive contact with reality, while belief is seen more as a matter of hypothesis–the postulation of states of affairs with which one is not in direct, perspicuous contact. It is the history of that idea, taken broadly, that provides the main theme of this chapter. The idea itself is a main theme of this book. The second part of the argument, which identifies sensible things as proper objects of belief rather than of knowledge, leads into the famous analogies of Sun, Line, and Cave through which Plato explains his conception of a ‘way up’18 from the perception 14 Descartes 1897–1909: Meditations on First Philosophy I, AT VII 41/CSM II 29; cf. Objections and Replies, AT VII 102–4/CSM II 74–5. Descartes might even have had Plato’s argument in mind, given the direct allusions to Republic in Meditations—most obviously the climactic analogy of the sun in the Third Meditation, as well as the expressed aim of the work to ‘turn the mind away from the senses’, which echoes Republic VII, 518c–d and 521d. See also section 1.4, notes 41 and 42. 15 Fine takes ‘nomima’ to mean beliefs in the sense of propositions believed, but the context requires that ‘nomima’ are related to belief as its proper objects in the way that ‘to on’ is related to knowledge. ‘Nomima’ commonly meant conventions, i.e. things that exist by convention, and is perhaps preferred here to ‘doxasta’ (cf. 478b) in order to imply that the proper objects of belief or opinion are ‘conventional’ in that (whether the opinion is true or false) they are postulated states of affairs, constructs of the mind (in this case, moreover, the minds of ‘the many’). Cf. 478b: ‘Does not the believer bring his belief to bear on something, or can he believe, but believe nothing?’ Clearly the answer Socrates is looking for is not ‘He believes a belief or proposition’. He has something like ‘subject-matter’ in mind (in some sense of that slippery term). 16 Republic 498b. An objection to the interpretation of ‘what is’ in this passage as ‘what is true’ is that it fails to explain why we should be told that the cognitive state corresponding to ‘what is not’ is complete ignorance or nescience, the opposite of knowledge. The point is that what Plato calls absolute ignorance doesn’t have an object. It is ‘set over’ nothing, ‘what in no way is’—what satisfies no predicates—not over what is false. 17 Vendler 1972. 18 For those not familiar with Plato, the ‘Divided Line’ and ‘Cave’ both distinguish four grades or levels of cognition. Level 1 (the first section of the Line) is imaginative conjecture, corresponding, in the allegory of the Cave, to the shackled prisoners’ seeing only shadows cast by a fire on the wall of the cave, and forming

1.2 plato’s distinction between knowledge and belief

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of sensible particulars to knowledge of universal truth and ultimately to the very highest form of knowledge, an understanding of the Good, the first principle that makes teleological sense of everything. But as we shall soon see, a distinction between knowledge and belief along broadly Platonist lines can survive being cut away from Plato’s rationalist disparagement of the sensible, as well as from his teleology.

The argument in Meno What, then, of passages in other dialogues in which Plato has been thought not simply to envisage but also to endorse the definition of knowledge as true belief with an explanatory ‘account’ or reason (logos)? In Symposium Socrates gives Diotima the rhetorical question, ‘How can it be knowledge without a logos?’19 In Meno, he makes the much-quoted remark that true beliefs are not worth much until you tether them by working out the reason (aitia). . . . Once they are tied down, they become knowledge and are stable. That is why knowledge is more valuable than right opinion. What distinguishes one from the other is the tether.20

Quite apart from the question of what a logos or an aitia is, however, such passages leave certain questions open. Firstly, is the formula itself a definitional ‘account’ of knowledge? Here it is important that Meno, although evidently pointing towards the doctrine of Republic, is nevertheless ‘Socratic’ in structure, ending inconclusively in aporia, impasse, or puzzlement. If the formula ‘true belief with an account’ was itself an ‘account’ of knowledge, Socrates would be claiming to know what knowledge is, but the very next thing he says is: And yet I myself am speaking not as one who knows, but as one who is guessing. What I don’t think is pure guesswork is that correct judgement and knowledge are different. If there’s anything else that I would claim to know—and there are precious few things of which I would claim that—this is one thing that I would add to the list of those that I know.21

As David Sedley has pointed out, this ‘carefully crafted paradox’ not only undermines the account of knowledge just given by assigning it to speculation, but provides a accordingly limited judgements. Level 2 is belief based on sense perception, corresponding to the state of those, now unshackled but still in the cave, who see the moving artefacts and images whose shadows were first seen. Level 3 is the state of those who achieve a degree of universal knowledge and understanding by reasoning from assumptions and using illustrative particulars such as geometrical diagrams. (The prisoners emerge from the cave, at first somewhat dazzled—like Meno’s slave boy, discussed in this section, who has not fully shifted his gaze from particular to universal). Level 4, reason or intellection, is that of pure universal thought, considering only Forms themselves—the ex-prisoners see things clearly in the daylight. At (the top of) Level 4 full teleological understanding of reality is drawn from knowledge of the Good (the Sun) itself. The bottom half of the line is to the top half as Level 1 is to Level 2: particular objects of sense experience are, as it were, ambivalent or shifting shadows or reflections of higher universal principles. Knowledge of the Good is like perception of the sun, which is the source both of the life of living things and of the light by which we have knowledge of them. 19 Symposium 202a, in what is, roughly, a summary form of the Republic argument against the sight-lovers. 20 98a, Fine’s translation. 21 Meno 98b, Sedley’s translation.

10 Knowing and Seeing counter-example: Socrates’ knowledge that there is a fundamental difference between knowledge and belief is held to be independent of his possessing a satisfactory explanatory ‘account’ of the difference. If merely believing the account does not constitute knowledge of what knowledge is, and if, on the other hand, some things are simply known, without an account, the account of knowledge given cannot be adequate.22 It is, in any case, working out the ‘cause’ or ground (aitia) of what is believed that was supposed, in the earlier passage, to constitute the ‘tether’. Simply being told it would not serve.23 Even Meno’s slave boy, who has come to accept each step of a geometrical proof, is described as having no more than true belief until he becomes sufficiently at home with the proof, and other such proofs: that is, presumably, he must grasp precisely why not just these, but all such figures must be equal, and why. On the Republic model, to acquire knowledge is to achieve a direct cognitive relationship to reality, i.e. to the Forms, whereas belief or opinion, however true, involves no such direct relationship. The move from belief to knowledge is like the move from (however reasonably) supposing that Socrates is in the room to seeing that he is.

The conclusion of Theaetetus All this accords with Plato’s frontal assault, in Theaetetus, on the question whether the formula is adequate. Socrates’ final objection to the formula, apparently taken to be lethal (and to lead to aporia), is that such an account of knowledge is circular, since being able to give an account of X is a criterion of knowledge of X only if the account itself is known or understood (the subject sees why it is true), not just believed.24 So what more might Plato have thought there is to knowledge or understanding than true belief with an account? Fine, taking her cue from her reading of Meno and from the assumed hierarchical, systematic order of the Forms, argues that it is a matter of fitting the believed account into a system of beliefs—a form of coherence theory of knowledge. It is more plausible, however, that, in line with his thesis that knowing and believing are different in kind, Plato wants us to recognize that knowledge and understanding cannot be reduced to the having of true beliefs at all. I can truly believe that a figure defined in a certain way has certain properties, I can even believe that such and such is the proof of that fact, without understanding why these things are true. That understanding, when I have it, is not a matter of having further beliefs that I can give as reasons. That Plato should have had that thought is entirely in line with the emphatic and pervasive (and totally natural) analogies of sight and light, which are otherwise hardly intelligible. We have to ‘see’ what is known, be consciously confronted with it, so to speak, in order to grasp and know it, and that cannot be reduced to having a network of

22 See Sedley 2004: 176–7. 23 Plausibly the final message of Theaetetus. 24 A point repeated, in effect, by Russell, immediately after a couple of Gettier-style examples (Russell 1912: 131–3). See also Chapter 4, section 4.3, on the difference between knowing that, necessarily, S is P and knowing/understanding why, necessarily, S is P.

1.3 the distinction in ancient and medieval philosophy

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true beliefs. That is so even if, as Plato evidently thought,25 full knowledge of anything brings with it the ability to give an explanatory account of that thing, and the full understanding or teleological science of reality will indeed be systematic and top-down.

1.3 The Distinction in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy Plato’s epistemology had a deep influence on ancient and medieval traditions reasonably regarded as distinct from one another, and even as opposed. It left its mark on Aristotle, on Epicureanism, and on the long debate between Stoics and Academic sceptics, as well as on the dominant philosophy of late antiquity known as Neoplatonism. Each of these traditions played a significant part in shaping earlymodern epistemology.

Aristotle In many respects Aristotle can be read, and often was read, as working out in detail the Platonic teleological vision, even as he broke away from a transcendental conception of universal ‘forms’ and accorded enduring sensible bodies, understood as combinations of matter and form, the status of fundamental ousiai, ‘things that are’. That difference went with his granting an essential, basic role to the senses and experience in the acquisition of knowledge. He maintained a quasi-Platonic conception of ‘scientific’ knowledge, systematic knowledge with understanding (epistēmē), but his version of the Platonic ‘way up’ has its start from the firmer, more concrete ground of experience. In Posterior Analytics and elsewhere he charts the cognitive progress from perception and perceptual knowledge of particulars, through remembered experience of similar cases, the formation of a concept of a kind and empirical generalization (affording practical knowledge), to knowledge of an explanatory definition of a kind— that is, to an understanding of the essence of the kind that in turn supplies a potential starting-point or principle of a demonstrative science. He seems to have seen the move from empirical generalization to the ability to give a quasi-Platonic ‘account’ as an intellectual leap, a movement to a cognitive state, knowledge with understanding, different in kind from perceptual knowledge as well as from mere belief.26

25 Plato’s late dialogue, Timaeus (28a), has both claims, that knowledge (noesis) is different from belief, having different objects, and that one who knows must be able to give an account (logos). 26 Posterior Analytics B19 (99b15–100b17). See Aristotle  1975: 248 for a close analysis by its editor, Jonathan Barnes, who comments, ‘B19 is Janus-faced, looking in one direction towards empiricism, in the other towards rationalism.’ (Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics A 980b26–982a2.) Only when it is understood why every member of a kind K always (and necessarily) possesses a property P do we have universal science. However, as Barnes points out, while principles of Aristotelian science are self-explanatory and necessary, they are not in general (despite the influence of Euclidean geometry as paradigmatic worked-out science) self-evident or undeniable (Aristotle 1975: 101).

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Epicureans, Stoics, and Academics Epicureans followed earlier atomists in maintaining the combination of materialism and empiricism (and philosophical hedonism) that had been a target of Plato’s criticism,27 giving perceptual knowledge an absolute priority over beliefs achieved by reasoning. To deny us the former (in the way of the scepticism of the later Academy) is to deny us the latter, since reason depends on the senses.28 In general, ‘opinions’ are formed in the absence of ‘self-evidence’ (enargeia), to be endorsed or not by experience. Inference only supplies knowledge when it is such that, if what is postulated were not so, it would follow that something ‘self-evident’ would not be the case. For example, allegedly, we can infer the void from evidently existing motion. The scepticism of the later Academy was also a main target and constructively provocative opponent of Stoic epistemology.29 For the Stoics, knowledge is, if anything, even more sharply distinguished from belief or opinion than by Plato, but between full scientific knowledge on the one hand and opinion on the other lies the degree of knowledge afforded by ‘cognitive impressions’ (phantasiai kataleptikai),30 which, indeed, supply the foundations of scientific knowledge. Apparently under the pressure of sceptical argument, it was held by some later Stoics that the wise never assent to what is not known. There is no such thing as justifiably believing—only an ignorant fool has opinions, whether true or false. An impression is ‘a printing on the soul’ which normally ‘reveals itself and its cause’, and which may be either sensory or intellectual. Impressions, simply as such (even, on one account, reasonable impressions),31 may be misleading or false. Cognitive impressions, however, which command assent and ground scientific knowledge, are each clear and striking (enargēs, trānēs, plēktikē), ‘impressed exactly in accordance with what is’, and ‘such that an impression from what is not so could [not] be just like it’. In general, human cognitive impressions that enable the subject immediately to recognize individuals or kinds involve ‘preconceptions’ built up by abstraction from experience. The senses are, as it were, tutored by experience, which is not regarded simply as a source or store of remembered observations supplying premises for inductive inference. It is easy to take the Stoic-sceptic dispute to be about justification for belief, as if the Stoic ‘cognitive impression’ is proposed as an internal, immediately known item the occurrence and peculiarities of which provide a premise for an inference to an external state of affairs. That reading would simply identify Stoic ‘belief ’ with ‘assent’, and define 27 The ‘giants’ of Sophist 246. For discussion of Plato’s targets, see Frede 1990. 28 Cf. Lucretius, De rerum natura IV, lines 474 ff., quoted at the front of the present book. The senses give us the concepts and premises that reasoning employs, including the concepts of truth and knowledge employed by the sceptic. 29 The debate ran for centuries and Stoic doctrine underwent development, so that different accounts of it fail exactly to cohere in ways not taken into consideration in this brief sketch. 30 Long and Sedley  1987 adopt a free translation of ‘phantasia’ as ‘impression’ partly because of the imprinting metaphor and partly to draw a connection with the modern use of ‘impression’ by such as Hume. Arguably, that underplays their revelatory role. Stoic epistemology was not much like Hume’s. 31 Long and Sedley 1987: I 244 (excerpt 40F).

1.3 the distinction in ancient and medieval philosophy

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Stoic ‘opinion’ negatively, as assent without adequate reasons. But the structure of the theory and much of the language used suggest a much closer parallel with Platonic antecedents, and that we should see the theory of cognitive impressions and responses to sceptical demands for a ‘criterion of truth’ as constituting an attempt to give an account of the sheer immediacy of perception, recognition, and understanding. ‘Phantazein’ means to reveal, and ‘katalambanein’ to seize or grasp. What is, in a standard translation, a ‘cognitive impression’ is, in Greek, a ‘grasping revelation’ of the reality impinging on the mind. Thus a reported thought of Chrysippus reads like a mildly distorted echo of Plato: ‘The word “phantasia” is derived from “phōs” (light): just as light reveals itself and whatever else it includes in its range, so an impression (phantasia) reveals itself and its cause.’32 It is not a matter of reasons and reasoning, or of having grounds for belief, but of immediate perceptual or intellectual grasp or vision or illumination of ‘what is’. Cognitive impressions are not internal evidence for hypotheses about an independent world or truth, but are the mental constituents of the situation in which independent things (or facts, or states of affairs) become or are evident to us, compelling assent. Further Stoic arguments against the Academics can be regarded as what Locke would later call ‘concurrent reasons’, available to confirm the independent authority of ‘cognitive impressions’ in the face of sweeping scepticism, not as reasons required to justify perceptual beliefs, nor as premises of inferences.

Neoplatonism The dominant philosophy of late antiquity, from Plotinus in the third century ce to Proclus in the fifth, was the form of dogmatic Platonism later dubbed ‘Neoplatonism’. Incorporating some Aristotelian and Stoic ideas, it served for centuries as a main window on Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic philosophy. The most remarkable and influential feature of Plotinus’ theory of knowledge and intentionality, constituting a theme on which not only later Neoplatonists but also many modern philosophers (including ‘Cambridge Platonists’, Spinoza, Leibniz, Malebranche, Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel) contrived variations, is the way mind and cognition are built into his general ontology and cosmology. Plotinus postulates three universal immaterial ‘hypostases’ or substantial levels. In order of priority and production, and reverse order of ontological dependence, they are the One, Intellect, and Soul. The essential activity of what is dependent accords with an aspiration to cognition of, and assimilation or union with, the higher level from which it timelessly emanates. Knowledge is an achievement of Intellect, and it is of two kinds. The highest kind of knowledge arises when Intellect achieves a quasimystical unity with the Good or One (or God), an immediate vision or apprehension 32 Long and Sedley 1989: I.237 (sec. 39 B, Aetius). Contrast Long and Sedley 1989: I.246 (sec. 40 K[5–6], Sextus Empiricus): ‘(an) impression is the criterion. For nature has given the sensory faculty and the impression which arises thereby as our light, as it were, for the recognition of the truth (pros epignōsin tēs alētheias)’. ‘Alētheia’, however, like ‘the truth’, often means what ‘makes’ true propositions true, rather than a true proposition or a property of propositions.

14 Knowing and Seeing without discrimination. Below that, knowledge of the Forms is Intellect’s self-knowledge, knowledge of its own essential nature and activity, and as such immune to sceptical argument. Sensation, on the other hand, belongs to Soul and is cognition of the sensible qualities of material things: that is, cognition of the sensible ‘images’ of the Forms. Human knowledge accords with this high metaphysical dance. We have material bodies and animal life and sense, but also participate in Intellect—indeed we are most ourselves when we engage in intellectual contemplation of the Forms or, better still, direct contemplation of the One. But another function of our intellect is to form perceptual judgements on the basis of sense experience together with knowledge of the Forms. As for Plato, the sensible and contingent are the objects of belief, the intelligible and necessary, of knowledge. At the same time the sensible is to a degree intelligible through the universal Forms or archetypes that the intellect contemplates.33 Augustine in particular imported Neoplatonic ideas into Christian theology, and some were retained within the scholastic Aristotelianism that eventually became dominant in Christian Europe, largely through the influence of Aquinas in the thirteenth century. The Neoplatonic account of Intellect enjoyed a kind of survival in the doctrine that essences are ideas or archetypes in the mind of God that we are to some extent able to grasp. In general, a conception of universal knowledge as, ultimately, a primitive grasping or ‘seeing’ intelligible truth was a central feature of medieval scholastic, as of Platonic, epistemology. But at the same time a significant role was accorded to sense-perceptual knowledge in grounding the principles of natural science.

Thomas Aquinas Aquinas draws a notably clear and influential epistemological map. Knowledge is distinguished from belief by the presence of the object of cognition to the mind of the knower: in knowledge the object is ‘seen’, whereas in belief it is not seen.34 But although knowledge and belief are exclusively defined, they have something in common, since both are cases of ‘thinking with assent’ [cum assensione cogitare]. Thus believing [credere] is distinguished from ‘thinking with assent’ as species from genus.35 33 For recent detailed discussion, see, for example, contributions to Gerson 1996. 34 We (obviously) differ from Hawthorne 2013: 127–31, who dismisses as unhelpful Aquinas’s explanation of knowledge, in contrast to belief, as what is seen. Hawthorne, of course, is not alone among philosophers, but in a popular modern tradition, in his summary condemnation of the utterly natural and, in the history of philosophy, hugely important metaphor of ‘seeing’ for understanding. 35 (Aquinas: Summa Theologiae IIa IIae, q. 2, art. 1): ‘If “to think” is taken broadly . . . then “to think with assent” does not express completely what it is “to believe” [credere], since someone considering the things he knows or understands [scit vel intelligit] also “thinks with assent” in that sense.’ There is a problem choosing English (and for that matter Greek or Latin) words to mark the difference between ‘thinking with assent’ and ‘belief ’ in this story. Locke, although in some respects very possibly influenced, directly or indirectly, by Thomist theory, limits ‘assent’, as coming in degrees, to ‘belief ’, ‘opinion’, and (a sub-class of belief, reliant on testimony) ‘faith’, while ‘judgement’ is the faculty that forms beliefs, well or badly (Locke: An Essay concerning Human Understanding IV.xiv). ‘Knowledge’ serves for both act and faculty of perceiving truth or fact. The generic role of Aquinas’s ‘thinking with assent’ is accorded in Locke’s account to mental ‘affirmation’ and ‘denial’, described as ‘putting together’ and ‘separating’ ideas (Locke: Essay IV.v.5–6). Knowledge and belief are specifically different ways of doing that.

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There are different grades of knowledge. Intellectus differs from ratio or ratiocinatio: ‘For understanding [intelligere] is the simple apprehension of intelligible truth [veritatem intelligibilem apprehendere]. But to reason is to advance from one thing understood to another in order to know an intelligible truth.’ Our need of reasoning is a mark of imperfection. Angels ‘apprehend the truth directly and without discursive reasoning’.36 Like Aristotle, Aquinas counts sense-perceptual knowledge as knowledge: as with intellection, it is motivated by its objects themselves: Now the intellect assents [assentit] to something in two ways. One way, because it is moved to assent by the object itself [ab ipso objecto], which is known either through itself [per seipsum cognitum] (as in the case of first principles, of which there is understanding [intellectus]), or through something else already known [per aliud cognitum] (as in the case of conclusions, of which there is discursive knowledge [scientia]). In another way, the intellect assents to something, not because it is sufficiently moved to this assent by its proper object, but through a certain voluntary choice turning toward one side rather than the other. And if this is done with doubt or fear of the opposite side, there will be opinion [opinio]; if, on the other hand, this is done with certitude [cum certitudine] and without such fear, there will be faith [ fides].37 Now those things are said to be seen which, by themselves, move our intellect or the senses to knowledge of them [ad sui cognitionem]. Wherefore it is evident that neither faith nor opinion can be of things seen [nec fides nec opinio potest esse de visis] either by the senses or by the intellect. (Summa Theologiae IIa IIae, q. 1, art. 4.)

However, although the same thing cannot be known and believed [scitum et creditum] at one time by the same person, ‘it may happen that what is seen or known by one, is believed by another’. (Summa Theologiae IIa IIae, q. 1, art. 5.) There are fundamental differences between the theories of knowledge that have been illustrated or summarized in this section, but it is notable that, whether they take knowledge to be delivered by reason alone, by sense alone (or sense tutored by experience), or by both sense and reason, all of them operate with a conception of knowledge as specifically different from belief, opinion, or judgement however much these are supported by reasons. And all of them assimilate knowing to seeing or perceiving. Accepting on the highest authority that the angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles is different from ‘seeing’ that equality, just as believing with excellent reason that the distant object is a man is different from seeing that it is a man. The main point of the analogy of knowing with seeing is the view, taking various forms, that real

36 Summa Theologiae I, q. 79, art. 8. God, it seems, does not even have to universalize, since his thought is of things in their full particularity. Universals are creatures of human intellect, although, Aquinas adds, that point does not significantly impair Augustinian theology. Translations of Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae are our own, based on the Textum Leoninum (1886–7). We record his use of such key terms as intellectus, ratio, visio, cognitio, scientia, notitia, and credere since they can be variously translated. 37 In the case of faith, where there is no uncertainty, ‘the one who believes is similar to the one who knows and understands [convenit credens cum sciente et intelligente]’ (Summa Theologiae IIa IIae, q. 2, art. 1. See also q. 1, arts 4 and 5). Aquinas distinguishes different epistemic attitudes such as doubt, suspicion, and opinion according to the different degree of assent by which they are characterized.

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Knowing and Seeing

knowledge, knowledge in the full sense, involves the direct revelation of the object of knowledge to the mind, its immediate and perspicuous presence to or ‘in’ the mind.38

1.4 Early Modern Continuity, Development, and Rejection The seventeenth century has a reputation as a period of innovation in science and philosophy, but much of that innovation, or the shape it took, sprang from the revived interest in, and development of, ancient philosophical traditions that had been more or less eclipsed by scholastic Aristotelianism. One of the first moves in that direction had been an improved knowledge and appreciation of Plato in the sixteenth century, and the philosophers we now know as ‘the Rationalists’ are in effect more or less heretical Platonists.

Descartes For Descartes, as for Plato, knowledge is certainly not a matter of justified belief— differing from ‘mere belief ’, that is to say, simply by being justified. Quite the opposite. The first step toward knowledge is to free ourselves from beliefs and opinions, turning away from the ‘uncertain credibility of the senses [ fluctuantem sensuum fidem]’ and ‘the deceptive judgement of the imagination’, and relying only on intuition [intuitus]— ‘the conception of a pure and attentive intellect [mens] which is so easy and distinct that absolutely no doubt remains about what we understand’.39 Deductio is a second ‘mode of knowing’ in so far as the conclusion owes its evidence to the evidence of the premises and the evidence of the step from premises to conclusion.40 Being founded in intuitus, deductio can never be performed wrongly by a rational mind, although a correct inference can be missed ‘if it is not seen [si non videatur]’ (AT X, 365/CSM I, 12). There is obviously a close parallel between Descartes’s intuitus and deductio and the intellectus and ratiocinatio of Aquinas, whom Descartes admired. For both philosophers, discursive reasoning is a strength, since it has the power to extend knowledge, and indeed to offer us systematic ‘science’, but also a weakness, in so far as the conclusion is only mediately seen. The main difference lies in Descartes’s rejection of Aristotelian teleology, but it may also seem, as it did to some of its early critics, that for 38 This view sometimes (as in Plotinus) involves the idea of a unity or identity of subject and object, and was associated with Aristotle’s assertion (De Anima III, 2: 425b) that ‘the actualities of the sensible object and of the sensitive faculty are one actuality’: i.e. potentialities on both sides are actualized within the act of perception. The scholastics broadened the principle to knowledge in general: ‘cognoscens in actu et cognitum in actu sunt unum’ (‘in the act of knowing, the knower is one with the known, in its being known’), and the distinction between conceptus formalis and conceptus objectivus reflects a similar conception of a unity embracing the duality of subject and object. See Vanni Rovighi 1962: 113–15. Perhaps a little surprisingly, the thought occurs in Russell 1912: 159: ‘Knowledge is a form of union of Self and not-Self.’ See also Chapter 2, section 2.2, especially n. 4. 39 Regulae ad directionem ingenii, AT X, 368/CSM I, 14. 40 See ‘Rule Three’ (AT X, 368–370/CSM I, 14–15).

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his ‘new way of ideas’ the objects immediately present to the mind are its own conceptions or thoughts, rather than independent things or ‘forms’ themselves. But that apparent novelty can be misleading, and is often quite superficial. For Descartes took over the scholastic distinction between conceptus formalis and conceptus objectivus as a distinction between the idea taken formally and the idea taken objectively—roughly, the distinction between the act of thought and the object or content of the thought. The latter is identified with ‘the thing itself ’ as it is conceived of (as it exists ‘objectively’, ‘in the mind’), although that is distinguished from the thing as it exists in reality.41 But however we interpret these identifications and distinctions, and whatever we think of them as ways of dealing with intentionality, for Descartes, as for the scholastic tradition, to know is, ultimately, for there to be a primitive and irreducible presence of the object of thought to the mind, whether that object is described simply as an independent entity or as a ‘clear and distinct idea’ considered with respect to its ‘objective reality’—that is, roughly, as an intentional object or, in Husserl’s terminology, a ‘noema’. The relative insignificance of this difference of language is evinced by a highly Platonic passage in the Fifth Meditation in which no sharp distinction is drawn between ideas and their objects or, indeed, between truth and existence. Here Descartes argues that his ability to demonstrate the properties of any determinate triangle that he has arbitrarily conceived of shows that he is clearly perceiving a ‘determinate nature, or essence, or form of the triangle which is immutable and eternal, and not . . . dependent on my mind.’ The geometrical figures he considers are ‘certainly true [i.e. real], since I have a clear understanding of them [a me clare cognoscuntur], and therefore they are something, and not nothing’. They have ‘true and immutable natures’.42 The argument opens with an apparent allusion to Meno.43 Like Plato, Descartes saw perception of eternal truth as the key to understanding the sensible world, in so far as it is intelligible.

Other ‘Rationalists’ The other great Rationalists all share Descartes’s Platonic conception of knowledge as the intellectual perception of truth. They differ radically from him, however, as from one another, in their ontology, including the ‘ontology of knowing’, and accordingly in the roles they assign to sense perception. In effect, their theories offer different versions of the Platonic epistemological triangle between eternal truths (understood as ideas or essences in God’s mind), sensible particulars instantiating those essences, and human minds that, by grasping the essences of things in the mind of God, can thereby achieve an understanding of the sensible world.44 Malebranche, for example, bases his 41 Cf. note 46. A key passage here is in his ‘First Replies’, AT VII 102–3/CSM II 74–5. 42 AT VII 64–5, CSM II 40–1 (but taking ‘quae’ to refer back to ‘figuras’, rather than, with CSM, to ‘proprietates’). On Descartes’s conscious Platonism, see section 1.2 n. 14. 43 AT VII 64/CSM II 44: ‘on first discovering [these matters] it seems that I am not so much learning something new as remembering what I knew before.’ Compare AT VII 63–4 (63, line 23 to 64, line 5) with Meno 85c–d. 44 Cf. Craig 1987. Craig does not explore the model’s Platonic ancestry.

18 Knowing and Seeing epistemology on the thesis that we directly apprehend the divine idea of matter, and indeed that sense perception itself involves just that cognitive union with divinity particularized, so to speak, by the sensations appropriately caused in us by God: we see all things in God. Spinoza, in Ethics, distinguishes three forms of cognition—or rather, in effect, a Platonic four, since the first, ‘imagination or opinion’, embraces both sense-perceptual belief and belief based on repeated experience or, more generally, on ‘signs’, including testimony. Second (or third) comes knowledge such as is achieved in geometry and mechanics, while the highest form of knowledge is ‘intuition’, the quasi-Neoplatonic immediate perception of things sub specie aeternitatis, as a whole and without analysis. For Leibniz, famously, truth is the inclusion of the predicate in the subject of a proposition, and the ultimate subjects are individual substances. Knowledge is, basically, ‘seeing’ (immediately or by a process of discovery) this inclusion. Degrees of knowledge reflect the degree to which we can see or discover this inclusion, and the extent to which we are able to list the properties or requisites that enter into the notion of something—in effect, how far we can give a quasi-Platonic ‘account’ of that thing. When ‘all that enters into a distinct notion is in turn known distinctly, that is, when the analysis is carried through to the end, knowledge is adequate’. But, Leibniz adds, ‘I don’t know whether human beings can give a perfect example of it, although our knowledge [notitia] of numbers comes close’. Just as for Spinoza, as far as human cognition is concerned only abstract universal knowledge is a candidate for adequacy. In most cases, and ‘especially in a longer analysis, we do not gaze simultaneously at the entire nature of a thing [non totam simul naturam rei intuemur], but use signs instead of things’ (A VI, 4, 587). Leibniz has often been seen as the prophet of modern mathematical logic, an inspiration to Russell in particular, but it is notable that he calls this last mode of cognition blind or (sc. merely) symbolic, opposing it to the intuitive knowledge we have of ‘distinct primitive notions’. Whereas ‘of composite notions there is for the most part only symbolic thought’, ‘in distinct knowledge no ideas are perceived except by intuition’.45 Just as for Descartes, the bedrock of knowledge is intuitus, an immediate mental perception or understanding. To the extent that one sees (immediately or mediately) the inclusion of a certain predicate in the subject, error is not possible;46 but in so far as the analysis of the subject is not complete, our knowledge of the subject is confused and limited despite including (universal) elements that are certain.47 This framework allows Leibniz to include sense-perceptual knowledge as knowledge of its object, but as confused knowledge—and also, as Kant complained, as a kind of intellectual knowledge.48 45 A VI, 4, 587–8. 46 See ‘Leibniz to Johann Friedrich Leibniz, 5 October 1669’, in Leibniz  1934: 68–9: ‘he who knows [qui . . . scit], in so far as he knows, does not err.’ 47 A VI, 4, 590: ‘it is possible to have perfect knowledge [scientia] of several truths about objects of which we do not have adequate knowledge [notitia].’ 48 Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, A44/B61–2, A264/B320, A270–1/B326–7.

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Empiricism and Locke The early-modern empiricists looked back to ancient exemplars much as rationalists did to Platonism. Gassendi, for example, embraced the Epicurean principle that all evidence is founded on the evidence of the senses—a view that, as he expounded it, made all knowledge empirical, including knowledge of necessary universal truth.49 Hobbes on the other hand, more in line with Stoic epistemology, couples a bluntly empiricist account of sense-perceptual knowledge with a conception of an intelligible mechanistic physics. ‘Knowledge of Fact’, he asserts, ‘is nothing else but Sense and Memory, and is Absolute Knowledge’—‘absolute’ and ‘of fact’ in contrast to the intelligible universal hypotheticals of science, made possible by language and abstraction from experience.50 Locke’s epistemology drew on both sides of the tradition. His earliest writings adopt a general knowledge-empiricism much like Gassendi’s.51 But well before An Essay concerning Human Understanding was published, while insisting that all our ideas come from experience or are composed of such ideas, he had arrived at a theory that accepted what can look like a ‘rationalist’ definition of knowledge as the perception of a relation between ideas, ‘the perception of the connexion, or agreement, or disagreement and repugnancy of any of our ideas’, as he puts it in the Essay. His first two ‘degrees’ of knowledge (and, accordingly, of ‘evidence’) are ‘intuitive’ and ‘demonstrative’ knowledge, much as Descartes and Aquinas had held.52 The Platonic analogy of light and vision is elaborated with a vigour at least equal to theirs, and the traditional contrast with belief is just as firm: ‘These two, (viz.) Intuition and Demonstration, are the degrees of our Knowledge; whatever comes short of one of these, with what assurance soever embraced, is but Faith, or Opinion, but not knowledge, at least in all general Truths.’ 53 The terms ‘faith’ and ‘opinion’ do not here carry their now usual suggestion of judgement motivated by less than convincing or, at least, conclusive reasons. On the contrary, the ‘assurance’ with which an ‘opinion’ may be embraced includes entirely reasonable assurance on thoroughly convincing grounds. The distinction between assured true ‘belief ’ and ‘knowledge’ lies in the different kind and source of assurance, rather than simply in its degree. Secondly, the proviso, ‘at least in all general Truths’, warns of the fundamental empiricist objection to the Platonic tradition. For Locke’s 49 See, for example, Gassendi  1981, Institutio Logica, Part III, Canon 16: ‘all evidence and certainty which attaches to a general proposition depends upon that which has been gained from an induction of particulars.’ 50 Hobbes  1651, Leviathan I.ix. Evident universal knowledge, including knowledge of the essential nature of matter and the principles of mechanical physics, may be achieved by abstract consideration of the sensible properties of body (1655, De Corpore I.vi.1–6; II.viii.2–3). 51 See Locke 1954, Essays on the Law of Nature: 146. 52 An Essay concerning Human Understanding IV.ii.1–2. Locke repeats Aquinas’s speculation that angels’ (universal) knowledge is all intuitive. There is no evidence that Locke saw a copy of Regulae, but the distinction between knowledge of principles and worked-out demonstrative science, a commonplace of Aristotelian logic that would have been more than familiar to him, pervades the Essay. 53 Essay IV.ii.14. ‘Faith’ is, more specifically, acceptance of testimony.

20 Knowing and Seeing third degree of knowledge, perception of ‘the particular existence of finite Beings without us’, although in this chapter seeming almost to be slipped in as a minor qualification,54 is counted as a primitive form of cognition needing no recourse to reason to justify its claim to ‘evidence’. That is clearly proclaimed in a later chapter, where distinctive echoes of Epicurean and Stoic argument signal Locke’s allegiances. The immediate deliverances of the senses themselves supply ‘an assurance that deserves the name of Knowledge’, and Locke means ‘deserves’.55 Consequent argument employed in response to scepticism serves only to ‘confirm’ that immediate assurance, not to present grounds or justification possession of which is a condition of knowledge. For if we can see that S is P, what need have we of reasons or argument to establish that S is P? On Locke’s account, there are two things of which the subject is immediately aware (i.e. intuitively ‘perceives’) in sense perception: an idea of sense, and that it is being caused by something ‘without’.56 Since it is also his view that simple ideas of sense signify their regular causes, whatever they may be,57 we can understand why he holds that ‘actual sensation’ delivers the propositional knowledge that the object of the idea actually exists, and is present: v.g. whilst I write this, I have, by the Paper affecting my eyes, that Idea produced in my mind, which whatever Object causes, I call White; by which I know, that that Quality or Accident (i.e. whose appearance before my Eyes, always causes that Idea) doth really exist, and hath a Being without me. (Essay IV.xi.2)

This ingenious model is designed to be consonant with Locke’s view that sense perception gives us knowledge of the existence of physical objects, their sensible qualities, and some of their powers, but not of their fundamental nature or essence. For all its weaknesses, it contains more than a grain of truth in its contention that in sense perception we are aware, not only of ‘external’ objects, but of their acting on us, on our senses. For the senses give perceptual knowledge, not only of the object before us, but of how we are related to that object so as to perceive it.58 As belief is for Leibniz ‘holding as true’,59 rather than seeing that something is true, so Locke defines ‘Belief, Assent, or Opinion’ as ‘admitting, or receiving any Proposition 54 An impression that may misleadingly appear to be confirmed by the description of sense-perceptual knowledge as something that, ‘going beyond bare probability, and yet not reaching perfectly to either of the foregoing degrees of certainty, passes under the name of knowledge’. ‘Degrees of certainty’ are degrees of knowledge. 55 Essay IV.xi.3. 56 Essay IV.xi.2. 57 Simple ideas are for this reason all ‘real’ (Essay II.xxx.2), ‘adequate’ (II.xxxi.2), and ‘true’ (II.xxxii.14–16). What they signify (i.e. are indications of) they also signify in another sense (i.e. stand for in thought). 58 The point will be argued in Chapter 2, throughout. On some of the most suggestive recent work on the philosophy and psychology of perception that is in effect a contribution towards spelling this out, see e.g. O’Callaghan 2012. Of course, as Locke insists (contra Descartes), we need ‘neither know nor consider’ the physiology of perception in order to have perceptual knowledge. There are well-known problems, however, with Locke’s attempt to bring ‘sensitive knowledge’ under his general definition of knowledge as the perception of a relation between ideas, a mental proposition. 59 Leibniz, Commentatiuncula de Judice Controversiarum, 1669–70* in 1923 (A VI, 1, 550): ‘Credere est verum putare.’

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for true, upon Arguments or Proofs that are found to perswade us to receive it as true, without certain Knowledge that it is so’ (Essay, IV. xv. 3). Such assent has degrees that range ‘from full Assurance and Confidence, quite down to Conjecture, Doubt, and Distrust’.60 Locke is perhaps the most explicit and emphatic among early modern authors in representing belief not as a more generic epistemic category that, with the addition of the appropriate differentia, such as better reasons, becomes specifically knowledge, but as a qualitatively different epistemic state, product of a different faculty, in which precisely that which defines knowledge—the perception of its object—is absent.61 Crucially, ‘That which makes me believe, is something extraneous to the thing I believe.’62 Knowledge and belief do not, in Locke’s system, have fundamentally different objects: roughly, everything that can be believed can in principle (if true) be known, and vice versa.63 But the passage from belief to knowledge would be from one mental act or state to another qualitatively different act or state, from (for whatever reason) presuming a relation between certain ideas to perceiving that relation, rather than a passage to a special case of ‘belief ’. Locke’s account of ‘extraneous’ grounds for belief is in effect a discussion of degrees of probability (formulated as of ‘degrees of assent’), which, in the case of matter of fact, he takes to vary in accordance with the consonance of the proposition with one’s own experience and others’ reports of their experience. Testimony was an important theme of the Essay, both because of Locke’s characteristically seventeenth-century promotion of the idea of a scientific community working cooperatively and sharing information,64 and because testimony was central to the epistemology of revealed theology. Like Aquinas, Locke classifies religious faith as a form of mental assent to testimony rather than as knowledge or perception of truth. Both philosophers also reject the claims of ‘direct’ revelation to be a source of knowledge, at least in this life.65 Like Aquinas and Descartes, Locke affirms that, nevertheless, divine testimony, coming from ‘such an one as cannot deceive or be deceived’, ‘carries with it Assurance beyond Doubt, Evidence beyond Exception’: ‘we may as well doubt of our own Being, as we can, whether any Revelation from God be true.’66 Purported revelation, however, which is

60 Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae IIa IIae, q. 2, art. 1 and q. 1, art. 4. 61 Se, e.g. Essay IV.i.2. 62 Essay IV.xv.3. 63 ‘Roughly’, because for Locke (i) self-evident truths are known as soon as understood, and (ii) universal propositions such as ‘All swans are white’ can only be known if interpreted as ‘trifling’, that is, as mere definitions. If interpreted as ‘informative’, they cannot be known, at least by us. But, in general, relations between ideas that can be ‘perceived’ can be ‘presumed’, and vice versa. 64 See Essay III.xi.24–5. 65 Compare Aquinas on prophecy and rapture, Summa Theologiae, IIa IIae, q. 171–5 with Locke, Essay IV.xvii. 66 Essay IV.xvi. 14. That God cannot lie, of course, is not for Locke a ‘belief ’, but a relation between ideas that can be ‘perceived’. Given the need for ‘extraneous’ reasons to believe that any judgement is revealed, it might seem a useless piece of knowledge, but, as Locke points out subversively, it can be employed in a reductio to the effect that, if reason demonstrates that an allegedly revealed principle is false, it can’t in fact have been revealed by God, at least in the sense taken.

22 Knowing and Seeing all we have, remains otherwise subject to the same requirements as any testimony.67 For ‘we must be sure, that it be a divine Revelation, and that we understand it right’. Since those questions call on ‘extraneous reasons’, an affirmative answer, however reasonable, will be belief and a matter of probability rather than knowledge and ‘evidence’—a conclusion consonant with Locke’s plea for religious toleration. While perhaps most of us, apart from particularly enthusiastic believers, would accept that religious beliefs are not, strictly speaking, examples of knowledge, it seems paradoxical to deny that we know such things as that Julius Caesar was assassinated in Rome long ago, that there are (at the time of writing) tigers living wild in India, that dinosaurs once roamed the earth, or even that DNA has a double-helix structure. These are for most of us well-grounded true beliefs, which are held because they are true, and which we regard as ‘common knowledge’.68 Yet none of the philosophers so far considered would have classified them as knowledge, real knowledge. Locke was as aware as anyone that very much of what we ordinarily count as knowledge is dependent upon the testimony of others.69 But it is clearly his considered view that, strictly speaking, knowledge itself is not transferable, since to acquire knowledge the recipients must ‘perceive’ for themselves the truth of the propositions expressed, the pertinent ‘relations between ideas’. Some kinds of knowledge may be prompted in the hearer (for example, Plato’s slave boy) by what is said, but are not transferred. For Locke, as for Plato and Descartes, we have to do our own knowing. On the other hand, some things that we do not, strictly speaking, know ‘border so near upon Certainty, that we make no doubt at all about them’. Probability, based on experience that is commonly extended by the testimony of others, is there to guide us when ‘knowledge’, in the strict sense, fails.70

Hume’s sceptical naturalism During the century after Locke, for whatever reasons, the distinction between knowledge and belief gradually lost its place as a dominant principle of European epistemology. Perhaps that was because the Platonic ideal of a natural science based on self-intelligible principles became implausible, although boosted for a time by mechanistic corpuscularianism, while at least some branches of idealism favoured a coherence theory of knowledge. Retrospectively, however, the change might appear most clearly marked by the book that roused Kant from his ‘dogmatic slumber’, Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature. Indeed, Hume’s ‘naturalistic’ scepticism has perhaps been

67 i.e. its probability depends on ‘1. The Number. 2. The Integrity. 3. The skill of the Witnesses. 4. The Design of the Author, where it is testimony out of a Book cited. 5. The Consistency of the Parts, and Circumstances of the Relation. 6. Contrary Testimonies’ (Essay IV.xv.4). Locke’s view that testimony does not confer knowledge does not entail that proper trust in testimony depends on crudely ‘inductive’ justification, as proposed by Hume and criticized by e.g. Coady 1973 along the lines proposed by Austin (1946). 68 If you don’t, choose other examples. 69 Cf. Essay IV.xvi.8, etc. 70 See Essay IV.xv.2–4. Cf. Descartes on ‘moral’, as opposed to ‘metaphysical’ or ‘absolute’, certainty (Principles of Philosophy IV sects 205–6, AT VIIIA 327–9/CSM I 289–291).

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even more important in shaping current analytic epistemology than Descartes’s ‘methodological’ variety. The epistemology of the Treatise, if ‘epistemology’ is the right word, consists in such psychological explanations of our beliefs as seem carefully designed to avoid the impression that any human beliefs about the world are well grounded, even if those that are normal as well as natural (all belief is natural) somehow accord sufficiently with an unknowable reality to be useful.71 Our sense-perceptual knowledge receives a particularly elaborate and damning psychological analysis as wholly irrational belief in the independent existence of ‘impressions’, the immediate objects of sense experience. And although a priori knowledge of necessary universal truth is formally allowed to be ‘knowledge’ achieved by ‘intuition’, it is soon reduced to a function of an ‘extraordinary’ natural tendency to imagine counter-examples to false universal propositions. In effect, such ‘knowledge’ is explained as nothing but the default belief that arises when we entertain a universal proposition to which we do not imagine counter-examples. Our ‘seeing’ that some imagined cases are cogent counter-examples to universal claims (not to speak of our realizing in some cases that no cogent counter-examples could be brought) is not comparably explained, unless implicitly as itself a natural tendency not to believe both the universal and the contrary particular propositions, and to prefer the latter.72 The notion of ‘seeing’ or understanding why a necessary truth is true plays no role in Hume’s account. So both traditional categories of knowledge are reduced to natural, if normal belief. Hume’s philosophy is widely esteemed less because it is sceptical, or because his deflationary psychology is plausible in detail (it isn’t), than because it adopts a ‘naturalistic’ approach to what we think of as knowledge and justification that accounts for them in purely causal (and potentially purely physical) terms. He laid the foundation for the view that basic cognition can be understood simply in terms of the causality of belief, as if the senses and reason were nothing but fortunately fairly reliable mechanisms generally productive of true (or effective) beliefs. There is no explanation, or even recognition, of the fact that their deliverances are authoritative and not merely psychologically compelling. An aim of this book is to provide such an explanation, one that recognizes the insights of the pre-Humean tradition.

1.5 What Can We Learn from Traditional Epistemology? Philosophers in the epistemological tradition here so briefly and selectively examined, although taking different sides in the debate between what came to be called ‘rationalism’ 71 A Treatise of Human Nature Bk I, Part IV, sect. 4, opening paragraph, expounds this argument, which is central to Hume’s position but to which commentators often fail to give the emphasis it deserves. 72 Hume 1978: Treatise Bk I, Part I, sect.7. A similar problem arises for coherence theories of truth or knowledge: the truth or cognitive status of a judgement of ‘coherence’ or incoherence between beliefs cannot itself be explained by coherence with existing beliefs.

24

Knowing and Seeing

and ‘empiricism’, nevertheless, with that admittedly significant exception, have been seen to have shared the same broad conception of knowledge. Early modern philosophers on both sides, we have suggested, looked back to ancient models, the rationalists ultimately to Plato, non-sceptical empiricists to Epicurean and Stoic epistemology. Central to that debate was the question whether the deliverances of sense perception are in themselves a source of knowledge in the full sense, or are simply a cause of natural belief—at least, unless and until interpreted and endorsed by reason. Sceptical argument had an important influence on both sides. So, too, did conceptions of a ‘science’, no less after the general rejection of the idea of a teleological natural science in favour of some form of mechanistic corpuscularianism. The corpuscularian model itself was deeply and consciously indebted (of course) to Epicurean atomism, but also to aspects of Platonic rationalist cosmology and, indeed, epistemology.73 An important position, perhaps ultimately the most significant of the time for the progress of natural science, had roots in Epicurean epistemology and was the beating heart of Locke’s philosophy. That view combined a strong conception of perceptual knowledge with a healthily critical approach to claims to have achieved an intellectual understanding, whether teleological or mechanistic, of the fundamental natures or essences of the things perceived. The notion of knowledge broadly shared by both the rationalist heirs to Platonism and their empiricist opponents might be roughly summarized as follows. True knowledge, knowledge in the strict sense, knowledge as it should be understood philosophically, is much narrower in scope than what we are prepared to call knowledge in ordinary life. We have knowledge in the strict or full sense of all and only what is immediately and in itself ‘evident’ to intellect or (for empiricists) the senses, or inferred by evident steps from what is in itself evident. ‘Knowledge’ and ‘belief ’ are different species of the genus that Aquinas called ‘thinking with assent’. Knowledge is acquired by direct cognitive contact with its object, by perceiving or ‘seeing’ reality or truth, whether the particular object in question is intelligible or (for empiricists) sensible. ‘Belief ’, on the other hand, is simply taking something to be the case, without either literally or metaphorically ‘seeing’ that it is. Belief may be maximally justified and reasonable, even ‘morally certain’, but such a belief will be based on ‘extraneous’ reasons, as opposed to direct cognition by sense or intellect. Although we can think we have knowledge when we don’t, if we have real knowledge, we know that we have it— the thesis known by acronym-loving analytic philosophers as the ‘KK principle’ and as generally rejected. A further, often associated idea, variously interpreted, is that there are degrees of knowledge and certainty, as well as degrees of belief or probability. In what follows in this section and more extensively later in this book, something will be said on behalf of all the above aspects of the traditional view of knowledge and 73 For all his teleology, geometry supplies Plato’s paradigms of knowledge, and in Timaeus he himself envisages the quasi-atomistic idea that the material world is composed of particles shaped according to intelligible geometrical principles. An analysis of this system, and discussion of its relation to his teleology and to Democratean atomism, is given in Vlastos 1975, ch. 3.

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its relation to belief, although (of course) what is said will generally fall short of unqualified endorsement. The aim will be to reveal and explore insights that lie within a package now hardly acceptable as a whole—truths that are commonly overlooked in current epistemological debate or, if considered at all, are routinely consigned to history.

Infallibility There is, admittedly, one prominent and almost—but not quite—universal element of the traditional views examined that will be rejected. Claims to infallibility have been a sitting target for critics of traditional conceptions of knowledge, from the arguments of ancient sceptics to the role of the ‘Myth of the Given’ as a popular Aunt Sally in the late twentieth century. Indeed, some very recent work,74 in rightly criticizing the lazy misconception that knowledge was traditionally assumed to be simply ‘justified true belief ’, identifies the idea of infallible faculties as the essential characteristic of traditional accounts of knowledge. It cannot be denied that there is plenty of evidence of the historical importance of that idea, some recounted above. Apparent failures of a knowledge-generating, supposedly infallible faculty (whether ‘sense’ or ‘reason’) were routinely ascribed, as in Plato’s Timaeus, not to the faculty but to mental confusion due to the influence of the imagination, passion or desire, or to some more purely physical cause, or simply to carelessness—a failure to think methodically that leads us to suppose that we know when in fact we only believe.75 But no human faculties or methods are infallibly truth-delivering, nor could they be. It is a magical ideal irrelevant to theory of knowledge except in so far as it has been thought relevant. That is not to say that it is particularly surprising if philosophers who contemplated their knowledge, for example, that if a = b, and b = c, then a = c should be persuaded that, given the complete understanding of why the principle is true that is bound up with their recognition that it is true, no consideration could be brought capable of shaking their knowledge of its truth, so that the idea of infallibility should have been pulled into the mix along with genuine insights, conflated with certainty and ‘knowing that one knows’. At any rate, it cannot simply be dismissed as a crude mistake, an inappropriately substantial interpretation of the tautology that if I know that P, then P (‘If I know, I can’t be wrong’). There are passages that might encourage, and no doubt have encouraged, such a critical judgement,76 and there needs to be argument to establish

74 Dutant  2015. Also Pasnau 2018, who endorses the traditional conflation of fallibility with uncertainty. 75 This model for the explanation of error is followed throughout the argument of Malebranche’s Recherche de la vérité and in Book IV of Locke’s Essay (see also II.xxxiii). Hume can be read as extending such explanation to all belief in the cause of scepticism (on which see Wright 1983). 76 Cf. Descartes, Meditations, ‘Second Replies’, AT VII 145–7/CSM II 104. Cf., too, Locke (Essay IV.xx.1): ‘Knowledge being to be had only of certain visible Truth, Errour is not a Fault of our Knowledge, but a Mistake of our Judgement giving Assent to that, which is not true.’ It clearly won’t do to put all the blame for the occasions we get things wrong on the faculty of ‘judgement’ that gives rise to ‘belief ’, and none on such normally knowledge-delivering faculties as ‘intellect’ or, indeed, sight. There are illusions of reason, as there are optical illusions.

26 Knowing and Seeing that, while undoubtedly a feature of many traditional accounts of knowledge, the mistaken idea that we have one or more infallible faculties is inessential to the genuine insights traditional theory contains. It is a mistake to conclude from our capacity to achieve certainty and knowledge that we have infallible faculties, but it is the just same mistake, still made often enough by the sceptically inclined, to draw from the fallibility of our faculties the conclusion that their deliverances can never be objectively certain.77

Why the traditional narrow (‘strict’) notion of knowledge? In order to give some indication of the form that a defence of the traditional view of knowledge will take, and of the connection between this and later chapters, it is appropriate to start by assessing the idea that knowledge in the strict or philosophical sense is much narrower in scope than what we ordinarily consider as knowledge—or, indeed, than what was ordinarily counted as knowledge by ancient Greeks or early modern Europeans. In the spirit of mainstream post-Gettier epistemology it might well be assumed that the traditional view falls at the first hurdle simply because it excludes so much of what we are generally prepared to call knowledge—knowledge, for example, that is acquired by testimony or instruction, or even by causal inference, not to speak of such borderline cases of knowledge as may be manifested in correct answers to forced-choice questions given by diffident students or by ‘blind-sighted’ subjects.78 How can an account that excludes so much of what we ordinarily (and so properly) call ‘knowledge’ throw any light on what knowledge is essentially—on how it should be defined? Well, it should at least be clear that the traditional narrowing of the scope of the notion of knowledge to what is in itself ‘evident’ and independent of ‘extraneous reasons’ was entirely self-conscious and deliberate. Accordingly, the present-day externalist’s purported counter-examples to the much-maligned principle that if we know that P, we know that we know that P (the idea that, as Timothy Williamson puts it, knowledge is essentially ‘luminous’) would simply have been dismissed as cases of belief rather than knowledge in the strict sense. Historically, as we have just seen, there were two main motives for limiting the scope of what counts as knowledge. An aim of Plato and rationalists generally was to assign knowledge exclusively to reason. Their paradigm was the kind of intellectual grasp of truth achievable in the case, for example, of mathematical axioms or the principles of identity and non-contradiction, necessary truths that understandably appeared less vulnerable to sceptical or relativist argument 77 The question whether we have an (at least one) infallible faculty should be distinguished from a current debate, sometimes represented as between ‘fallibilists’ and ‘infallibilists’, but which is actually concerned with the question whether objective certainty is a condition of knowledge (or is a high degree of probability enough?). That question, and the long-standing, still operative tendency to confuse infallibility and certainty, is discussed in Chapter 5, section 5.3–section 5.5. 78 A standard account of ‘blindsight’ is Weiskrantz 1986. Brain damage can prevent conscious perception of what lies within a part of the normal visual field, although it is still unconsciously registered to the extent that the subject is liable, within limits, to respond appropriately to what is there. For the purposes of epistemology, it is broadly comparable to subliminal perception in normal subjects.

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than the deliverances of the senses. Empiricists’ contrary insistence on the ‘evidence’ of clear and distinct sense perception, in response not only to rationalist, but also (and for long even more so) to sceptical argument, itself encouraged a retreat, such as Locke’s, to what actually is or has been clearly and directly perceived.79 Today, however, the question worth asking is whether there is a philosophically significant insight in this narrowing of the notion of knowledge to a (literal or metaphorical) perceptual confrontation with ‘evident’ reality or truth. Can we safely consign this traditional restriction of knowledge to what is, or has been, literally or metaphorically ‘seen’ or ‘perceived’ to the rubbish-heap of history, or does it rather mark a genuine and important distinction of kind that cuts across what we ordinarily count as knowledge, a distinction that perhaps highlights what is central to knowledge, its essential core? A theme of this book is that it does, and that recent epistemology is for the most part at fault in failing to appreciate that achievement. One sign of that failure is precisely the common assumption that the best that can be done to illuminate the notion of knowledge is to come up with a definition or ‘analysis’ that fits each and every case of what is normally counted knowledge.80 Another is the idea that traditional epistemology assumes just such a definition, the bad equation of knowledge with justified true belief. It may help to explain our position—and traditional doctrine—to draw an analogy with the once much-discussed example of the class of games.81 Not all games are played for pleasure, for their own sake. There are, or could be, games played simply for money, as a vehicle for gambling, as military or diplomatic training, to achieve fame, to avoid punishment by sports teachers, as a religious ceremony, as an aptitude test—the list of possible, possibly overlapping motives for playing a game other than for pleasure or the activity’s own sake is open-ended. Nevertheless, it seems right that quintessential, paradigm, conceptually central instances of the universal game are activities valued and engaged in for their own sake, for the sheer pleasure of or interest in playing them. As one might put the point, if there were no such activity as playing a game simply for the enjoyment of doing so, simply for fun, nothing would count as playing a game. On that basis we might draw a distinction between primary and secondary games and games-playing. Secondary games are games because they are, in one way or another, analogous to primary games. Similarly, the idea that knowledge comes with ‘seeing’ what is ‘evident’—with direct cognitive contact with reality or truth—and the corollary idea that when we acquire knowledge, we know that we are doing so, each mark features of what might be called ‘primary knowledge’: ‘primary’, because if nothing were ever simply evident to the subject, if there were no cases of knowledge in which subjects were directly and perspicuously conscious of the object of knowledge, and in acquiring that knowledge 79 Cf. Locke, Essay, IV.x.11. 80 The programme that Pasnau 2013 dismisses, not without some justification, as mere lexicography. 81 Our use of the example, however, follows that of Ayers 1991: 135–9 rather than the famous discussion at Wittgenstein 1958: 32–6 (I. sects 66–78).

28 Knowing and Seeing were aware that and how they were acquiring it, there would be no knowledge. The traditional suggestion that anything else that we ordinarily call knowledge is not real knowledge is like the claim that anyone who ‘plays a game’ simply to gain fame or fortune is not really playing a game—it isn’t a real game for them, they are not really playing. Just as the latter claim, by narrowing the extension of ordinary words or notions, makes a valid point about what games and playing are essentially or paradigmatically (but not universally), the insistence on evidence, certainty, and ‘knowing that you know’ is by no means irrelevant to an understanding of what knowledge essentially is. As the point might be put, if someone was always in the position of diffident students whose knowledgeable responses to questions appear to the students themselves to be mere guesses or hunches plucked from the air—if that were someone’s position with respect to everything about the world—then that person would simply be cut off from a world to which they had no cognitive access. It is arguable, moreover, that such a supposition is an impossibility, since some conscious cognitive contact with the world, a perspicuous presentation of things in the world, a conscious grasp of their environment, would be necessary for the subject’s judgements even to be about the world or, indeed, to have any content at all. But even if, for argument’s sake, we granted sense to the supposition that such subjectively disembodied individuals were capable of thought and could have hunches that possessed content and were about things (including their own bodies) in the world from which they, as conscious beings, were otherwise, except purely causally, cut off, (and, for good measure, that those hunches were largely non-accidentally true, being the product of reliable, though unconscious mechanisms), that would not be to grant that their beliefs would constitute knowledge. In order to have such secondary knowledge, such a subject must also have some primary knowledge. That, at least, is what is here proposed, and will be argued for in the chapters folllowing. The ‘KK principle’ and the notion of the immediate ‘evidence’ (in its primary sense) of the object of knowledge, although not by any means instantiated in all cases of what we ordinarily count as knowledge, take us to the heart of what knowledge is in something like the way in which the claim that real games are played purely for the pleasure or interest of playing them takes us to the heart of what games are, to the core of the notions of a game and of playing. How, then, it might be asked, can we understand the unity of the broader concept of knowledge that we actually employ in ordinary life without a general analysis or definition or ‘theory’ covering all cases? Well, as is indicated by the comprehensive force of the extended or metaphorical use of ‘seeing’ that pervades both the philosophical tradition and everyday parlance, knowledge gained by sense perception of our environment is the paradigm of knowledge. The authority and what G. E. Moore called the ‘transparency’ of sense experience are precisely aspects of its being direct cognitive contact with independent objects of knowledge.82 We can expect the unity of the 82 Cf. Campbell and Cassam 2014: 18–19.

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ordinary notion of knowledge to be revealed as we come to understand the relationships of other forms of knowledge to the paradigm. That is not to advocate a crude form of foundationalism to the effect that perception gives us the premises from which the rest of our knowledge is deductively or ‘inductively’ inferred (however ‘induction’ is understood). The relationship between types of knowledge may be analogical, as it is between literal seeing and the ‘seeing’ of a logical connection, both of which may be called ‘perception’. Our suggestion is, then, that philosophers in the tradition we have examined, whether fired by visions of immediately intelligible universal ‘scientific’ truths, natural and moral, or simply under pressure from sceptical argument, narrowed what they counted as ‘knowledge’ down to the core. Despite differences, focusing on the core, on the kind of knowledge without which there would be no knowledge, is also the point of the distinction, defended throughout this book, between primary and secondary knowledge.

Traditional responses to scepticism Scepticism, ancient as it is, continues to have a huge influence on epistemology, some part of which influence will be discussed in Part Two. For the sceptic, nothing counts as simply perceiving that P as distinct from believing or judging that P, so nothing counts as knowledge in the traditional sense.83 All that Aquinas called ‘thinking with assent’ is, for the sceptic, more or less judicious ‘belief ’ or ‘opinion’. Direct cognitive contact with the world is characteristically represented as shaky inference from what is inside to what is outside, from appearance to reality. Accordingly, if scepticism is allowed to set the terms of epistemological debate, it will do so in a way that assumes a cognitive gap between mind and world such as, if it were to be bridged, would have to be bridged by further reasons or justification. Responses to scepticism may either be attempts to offer such reasons, or argument that there is no gap to be bridged. It is not always recognized how far traditional anti-sceptical argument took the latter, in our view more appropriate route—the route adopted in this book. Consider the way in which Descartes—in particular, the argument of Meditations— is commonly understood and criticized within the analytic tradition (but not only there). For many students of European philosophy, one of their first lessons consists of a critique of Descartes’s notion of clear and distinct perception or ideas, and of his notorious ‘general rule’ that whatever is perceived clearly and distinctly is true.84 Some of his earliest critics represented him as in effect postulating a happening in 83 Influenced no doubt by scepticism, anti-foundationalist proponents of radical coherence theories of knowledge also reject the traditional idea that knowledge that P can be acquired simply by ‘seeing’ or perceiving that P, arguing that at least implicit ‘extraneous reasons’—rather a lot of them, potentially involving our whole world-view—are always required for anything properly to count as knowledge. No set-piece or extended critique of coherentism will be offered in the present book, although the issue, in one form or another, is sometimes in the wings. For brief discussion, see below, Chapter 5, section 5.3. 84 ‘Third Meditation’, AT VII, 35/CSM II, 24.

30 Knowing and Seeing consciousness such as he took to constitute an infallible mark of truth, the ‘criterion’ demanded by Academic sceptics. In other words, he seemed to them to be claiming to have identified a conclusive ‘inner’ justification for assent—a claim easily supposed vulnerable to the sceptical objection that there is nothing for ‘clarity and distinctness’ to be but subjective conviction or a feeling of certainty such as could attach to any belief whatsoever, whether true or false, plausible or fantastical. If it is more than that, his critics in effect demanded, by what criterion do we distinguish this criterion from mere feelings of certainty? 85 More recent critics may see Descartes as simply failing to recognize that ‘understand’, ‘know’, ‘perceive’, and the like are in their usual senses what Gilbert Ryle called ‘success words’ (connoting what just now are commonly called ‘factive’ mental states) and that, in general,86 the criterion for epistemic success lies outside how it is subjectively for the knower. Even coming to understand a necessary truth, such as Pythagoras’ Theorem, has been held by some simply to be a matter of subjects’ acquiring a tendency to ‘go on’ appropriately to some external standard, an achievement to which whatever, if anything, occurs in their conscious experience or thought is irrelevant or, at most, a ‘characteristic accompaniment’ of understanding.87 There is, however, another way in which Descartes was read by some of his contemporaries. So far from claiming to supply the ‘criterion of truth’ demanded by ancient sceptics, Descartes is, on this interpretation, telling us that and how we can know the truth, and know that we know it, without a ‘criterion’. That reading, echoing a thought present (as we have suggested) in Stoic doctrine, is explicit in the philosophically Cartesian Logic of Port Royal: For the Academics’ view that it is as impossible to find the truth, if one has no marks of it, as it would be to recognize a fugitive slave for whom one was searching, if one had no signs to distinguish him from others, . . . is only a vain subtlety. Just as no other marks are needed to distinguish light from darkness except the light itself . . . , so no marks are necessary to recognize the truth but the very brightness that surrounds it and to which the mind submits . . . .88

As the point might be put less figuratively, if (as most of us do) one immediately understands why it is, and must be, that if a = b, and b = c, then a = c, then there is no need for a ‘criterion’, justification, reasons, or ‘extraneous’ evidence, and no place for ‘judgement’ or calculation of probability. The fact itself is evident, but its evidence is 85 Cf. ‘Second Objections’, AT VII 126/CSM II 90; ‘Fifth Objections’, AT VII 280/CSM II 194–5. The index of CSM, under ‘truth, criterion of ’, instructs us to turn to ‘clear and distinct perception of truth’, although, as far as I know, Descartes does not himself use the former expression. 86 We pass over the question of knowledge of the contents of consciousness, traditionally assigned to intellect. 87 A suggestion made by Wittgenstein (1958: 59–61 [I sect. 150–5]), and enthusiastically taken up by not a few—for example, by Putnam (1975: 3–7). 88 Arnauld and Nicole, La logique, ou l’art de penser, First Discourse. Descartes’s definition of intuitus in Rules for the Direction of the Mind supports Port Royal’s account of his view: ‘By “intuition” I [mean] the conception of a clear and attentive mind, which is so easy and distinct that there can be no room for doubt about what we are understanding [quod intelligimus]’ (‘Rule three’; AT X, 368/CSM I, 14).

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not a property, whether of the ‘proposition’ or of one’s thought, such as, when noticed or recognized, serves as a ‘mark’ or ‘criterion’ of truth, or even as a reason for belief. The truth is evident because it is itself the immediate object of understanding. There is no gap, as it were, between what is ‘before my mind’ when I ‘see’ or ‘grasp’ it and the fact or truth itself. The notorious ‘rule’ is simply telling us how to be sure that we do not believe what is false by telling us only to accept what we know to be true in the way in which we know and understand that, since we are thinking, we exist, or know that, and understand why, if a = b, and b = c, then a = c. That is no more proposing a ‘mark’ of truth than it would be to say that we should only accept as certain what we see to be so with our own eyes. ‘Clear and distinct perception’ (or a ‘clear and distinct idea’) that 2 +3 = 5 is no more a ‘justification’ in the sense of a reason for belief that 2 + 3 = 5 than my clearly seeing a red cube in front of me is a reason for belief that a red cube is in front of me, or a mark of the truth of that belief. Asked, ‘How do you know that there is a red cube on the table?’, I may respond, ‘I can see that there is’, but that is not stating a reason for believing that that there is such a cube—a premise from which I infer that conclusion. It is simply saying how I know that there is, immediately and without inference. In seeing a red cube the subject is immediately aware both of the cube and at the same time of how it is that they are aware of it—a crucial point about sense perception to be explored in detail in the next chapter. To propose that such knowledge can be broken down into belief and justifying reason for belief is to fail to do justice to the knower’s direct cognitive contact with what is known, and so at the same time to fail to do justice to the traditional philosophical conception of knowledge.89 The similarly traditional, virtually inescapable metaphor of sight for rational understanding (who never says such things as ‘I don’t see why this follows from that’?) records at least that analogy between intellectual and sensory ‘perception’ or ‘apprehension’. In both metaphorical and literal senses, conscious ‘seeing’ not only affords knowledge of a ‘perceived’ fact or state of affairs but is such that, in the very way in which that knowledge is acquired, the subject is conscious of how, and that, they are acquiring it.

The notion of degrees of knowledge One other traditional thesis in our list, that there are degrees or levels of knowledge, evidence, and certainty, might seem easy to dismiss on the ground that certainty, and so knowledge, is an absolute limit, whereas what has degrees is probability. Moreover, since all our faculties are fallible, it is easy to suppose further that the absolute limit cannot be attained, so that the conception of degrees of knowledge is in effect an 89 It is true that someone who perceives such and such a state of affairs may not, as we say, believe their eyes, perhaps believing mistakenly that there is something wrong with them, or that conditions are causing an illusion. But it does not follow that what their senses have delivered is simply a reason for belief such as is normally cogent, but which is judged to be outweighed by other reasons in this case. Their senses have simply presented the state of affairs in question—which is what they don’t accept, for whatever ‘extraneous’ reason.

32 Knowing and Seeing admission that what we call knowledge and take to be certain is simply what has some high degree of probability, a standard that may differ from person to person, or from occasion to occasion.90 That thought contributes to the common assumption that traditional epistemology’s narrowing of the concept of knowledge is simply the adoption of a higher, perhaps impossibly higher, standard of ‘justification’ than normal. In fact, as we have already seen, traditional uses of the notion of degrees of ‘evidence’, knowledge, and, indeed, certainty constitute no qualification of the distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, or of the link between knowledge and certainty. The classic Platonic conception of different levels of universal knowledge, a conception shared by the Stoics and later rationalists, itself bears witness to that. The highest form of knowledge—in effect, knowledge that embodies an understanding of everything— was often described in quasi-religious terms, but is an ancestor of the modern conception of a universal explanatory science.91 Another use of the notion, for example by Locke, was to mark, with respect to the categories of knowledge that we do have (‘intuitive’, ‘demonstrative’ and ‘sensitive’ knowledge) supposed differences of degree in our liability to the error of taking ourselves to have such knowledge when we don’t. In any case, the simple, common-sense point that what is certain and known can nevertheless be further confirmed—a point the importance of which will appear in Chapter V— implies that in some sense knowledge can have degrees, without at the same time implying that knowledge is simply sufficiently probable belief. It may, for example, be evident and certain that there is a causal connection between two observed or experienced states of affairs, events or processes, knowledge further confirmed by the discovery of the linking mechanism.

Why the myth of the ‘standard analysis’? Finally, why did the recently standard story of a traditional ‘standard analysis’ of knowledge as justified true belief become standard? What made that quaintly inadequate story seem acceptable? On the most convincing interpretation, as we have seen, the passages in Meno and Theaetetus that have been supposed by some to show that Plato embraced that analysis were written precisely to show the inadequacy of

90 A view discussed in Chapter 5 section 5.3. 91 An interesting and enlightening article, Pasnau  2013, sees post-Gettier pursuit of an ‘analysis’ of knowledge as little more than descriptive lexicography, whereas ancient and early modern epistemology, he thinks, was concerned to formulate prescriptive conceptions of an ideal knowledge, with assessments of how far it is attainable by human beings. Despite some close connections between his view and the present argument, we believe that Pasnau is to an extent misled by what was indeed a traditional concern with the form that a completed explanatory ‘science’ should take, and the methodology to be adopted in pursuit of such a science, into misrepresenting the surely ‘descriptive’ accounts given of categories of knowledge people actually do have, accounts that sharply distinguish them from belief or judgement, however probable. The narrow concept of knowledge that went with this classic distinction (the distinction that we suggest is what most fundamentally divides the tradition discussed from most current epistemological theory) was applied by empiricists to everyday perceptual knowledge, and by nearly all non-sceptical philosophers to everyday mathematical knowledge.

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something rather like it—that is, with a purpose not entirely unlike Gettier’s, whose famous article also leaves us with an aporetic challenge. The significant difference between Plato’s and Gettier’s arguments is that Gettier does not question, but rather encourages, the assumption that a more complex definition in terms of belief is what is required in order to understand what knowledge is. Accordingly post-Gettier epistemologists took off in pursuit of that more sophisticated definition. Plato, on the other hand, wrote those dialogues in the context of his making the contrary move of drawing the distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, a distinction with enough going for it to have dominated epistemology for millennia. Why, then, was the research programme implicitly proposed by Gettier so widely— for decades almost exclusively—adopted by ‘analytic’ epistemologists? A quick, unsympathetic answer is simply that Gettier wrote as an analytic philosopher for analytic philosophers, and was criticizing a current attempt at just such an analysis. He and most of his readers were simply not open to the idea that knowledge is not reducible to belief distinguished contextually, whether by the quality of the justification that the believer can give for it or by other aspects of its causality. Gettier’s bringing just such a mythical ‘traditional analysis’ into his argument was, in that context, a bit of inspired spin, hugely effective in the short run but, like much spin, eventually unravelling under interrogation. At the same time, however, there has been an older, deeper motive at work. Notably, most of those who have taken up the challenge to find an alternative to the ‘traditional analysis’ of knowledge have come up with purely ‘causal’ or ‘reliabilist’ definitions, theses at least partly motivated by a kind of reductive naturalism in the philosophy of mind that is well consonant with post-Gettier ‘externalist’ denigration of the role of justification and conscious grounding in a philosophical account of knowledge. To offer a full discussion of that reductive approach in the philosophy of mind is a task beyond the scope of this book, although some criticism of its role in epistemology will be given in Chapter 6. But it will be seen that it is likely have been attractive to those who favoured it to be able to present Gettier’s argument as demolishing any conception that true knowledge, of its nature, is perspicuously so to its possessor—in effect, as burying the ‘KK principle’ entirely.

2 Perception and Primary Knowledge 2.1 The ‘Evidence’ and ‘Authority’ of the Senses In this chapter I attempt to identify an important feature of the content of perception that helps to explain why what is known perceptually is, in general, simply evident to the perceiver without the need for supporting ‘evidence’ or reasoning to render it evident. That is, the chapter will constitute a more detailed and argued account than is given above of how and why, when we have (at least, pure or basic) perceptual knowledge, in general we know immediately that and how we have it. In yet other words, I will attempt to justify the traditional view of anti-sceptical empiricists that the deliverances of the senses are intrinsically authoritative (even if their authority is, in a certain sense,1 ‘defeasible’). Traditionally, the question of the source of the authority and evidence of the deliverances of the senses has often been answered, at least by empiricists before Hume, with an appeal to the qualitative difference between what it is like to perceive something and what it is like merely to imagine or think about it (where the latter is taken to involve the formation of a sensory image), to the involuntariness of perceptual experience and the independence of its object to the will of the perceiver, and to the coherence of the deliverances of the senses, the last commonly treated as if the senses were a number of witnesses giving, on the whole, mutually supporting evidence. (Gassendi, for example, writes of ‘the suffrage of the senses’.) None of these considerations are beside the point (although the imagist model for thought favoured by some empiricists now provokes some eye-rolling), but if they are offered, as they have often appeared to be, as our reasons for believing in the existence of an ‘external’ world,2 a fatal concession to scepticism and idealism has already been made. The subject is internalized, represented, in effect, as a homunculus within, whether mind or brain, making inferences and drawing, or jumping to, conclusions about what’s outside on the basis of what’s inside. The ‘evidence of the senses’ has become a matter of ‘evidence’ in the secondary sense— evidence, moreover, of the existence of postulated or even theoretical entities with which we have no direct contact and of which direct experience is impossible. 1 The various senses given to this notably ambiguous term, and the one to be preferred, are considered in Part Two, Chapter 5, Section 5.5 and Chapter 6, section 6.4. 2 Locke, however, calls such considerations ‘concurrent reasons’, confirming what we already know.

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There is obviously something in the traditional appeal to the character of perceptual experience. As Locke puts it, ‘there is nobody that doth not perceive the difference in himself, between contemplating the Sun, as he hath the Idea of it in his Memory, and actually looking upon it’. There is little point, however, in wasting words trying to say what it is like ‘qualitatively’ to perceive—see, feel, taste, smell, hear—surrounding objects, something that is in any case familiar to us all, except in so far as some individuals lack one or more particular senses. We can, of course, say things that convey, more or less precisely, qualitative differences between, for example, distinct sounds— they can be differently placed on a precise scale, and so forth—but, firstly, full understanding of what exactly is being said requires some familiarity with (in this example) how things sound, and, secondly, such examples fall a long way short of the qualitative characterization of sense experience in general that would be required if it were to contribute to an argument for the independent existence of the objects of perception, or an explanation of the ‘evidence’ of the deliverances of the senses. (Hume subversively summed up the peculiar character of sense experience as mere ‘vivacity’, in turn identified with belief itself.) Moreover, any such attempt to describe the quality of a perceptual experience seems to be largely, if not entirely, confined to predicating sensible qualities of external objects of sense experience, so that a question arises as to whether anything has been said about the quality of the experience itself. As G. E. Moore pointed out, sense experience itself seems strangely ‘transparent’, a clear-glass window to its objects. Accordingly the argument of this chapter will start, in section 2.2, with a brief general discussion of what a systematic phenomenology of perception might be, focusing on a centuries-old issue currently debated with fresh concern,3 namely the relation between the object and the content of perception. If I perceive a rock, something is going on in me, caused in significant part by the rock’s impinging on my senses (say, sight and touch), such that that rock is an object of my perceiving. The ‘content’ of that sensory ‘intentional’ state is what it is about it in virtue of which the rock is one of its objects, and not just one of its causes. section 2.2 contains an explanation of what it is to give an account of such content. Section 2.3 contains an account of what, once largely overlooked or misrepresented by philosophers, has very recently become a major topic in the psychology and philosophy of perception, the integration of the deliverances of the different senses. Section 2.4 will be concerned with the associated topic of the perception of causality, firstly to establish, against some philosophical doctrine, that there is such a thing, and secondly to consider its extent and close association with action and awareness of acting. Discussion of these topics will supply material for the desired explanation of the ‘evidence’ of perceptual knowledge—that is, of the defeasible authority of the deliverances of the senses—and of why perceptual knowledge is the paradigm of ‘primary knowledge’ in the sense I have given to that term. In Section 2.5, after a summary of 3 See e.g. Brewer 2011 and the papers in Brogard 2015.

36 Knowing and Seeing that conclusion, other candidates for the title of primary knowledge will be considered, with some discussion of secondary knowledge—and why it counts as knowledge at all—with further thoughts on the importance of the hierarchical relation of primary to secondary knowledge. As, arguably, no one could have beliefs, and certainly no justified beliefs, if they had no knowledge, no one could have secondary knowledge unless they had some primary knowledge.

2.2 What is Phenomenology of Perception? A short answer to this question is that the phenomenology of perception is the systematic pursuit of an accurate account of what it is like to perceive one’s environment. But more needs to be said, and the reasoned answer I give is a simple and very traditional one: the phenomenology of perception is, in the first instance, an account of the objects of perception as they are perceived.4 That enterprise might usefully start by listing some banal but important facts about perception.

Four valuable ways in which perception is limited It is possible to distinguish at least four main, closely interrelated ways in which what we perceive at any time is limited. One consists simply in what might be described as the coarseness of perception. Many things in our environment are imperceptible or, even if perceived, are too small or too distant ever to be clearly perceived, while some features or motions of things perceived, or differences between them, or changes in them, will be too insignificant or slight to impinge as such even on the attentive perceiver. That there are limits of this general kind to every sensitive creature’s perceptual capacities is a necessary fact, given that such capacities themselves must be grounded in physical organs responsive to physical effects on them of the things perceived. Anything capable of sense experience must have a pretty complex structure. For much the same general reason, whether or how well we perceive things depends on current conditions. Much perception requires the presence of a ‘medium’ such as light or air. We don’t see non-luminous things clearly or at all in the dark, for example, or hear impacts taking place in a vacuum. The old dream of the perfect perceptual powers of angels, beings outside nature who are supposed to perceive objects by an immediate and total apprehension, is like the dream of a mechanism moving without friction or, rather, of things happening by magic. 4 The notion that an account of the content of a cognitive state takes the form of a certain kind of account of its object is historically associated with the idea of knowledge as union of thought and object (Cf. Chapter 1, section 1.3, n. 38.) Cf. too Descartes, Meditations AT VII 40–4.2 (CSM II 27–9) and his reply to Caterus at AT VII 102–3 (CSM I 74–5). Descartes’s identification here of the idea of the sun in so far as it has objective reality with the sun itself as it exists in the understanding (more briefly, his identification of the idea taken objectively with the object as it exists objectively ‘in the mind’) explicitly looks back to scholastic theory and the distinction between conceptus formalis and conceptus objectivus. These traditional views in turn influenced Brentano and modern phenomenology. ‘Intentional’ is roughly equivalent to ‘objective’ in this sense. For discussion of the notion of an idea in the seventeenth century, see Ayers 1998.

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Another kind of limitation on perceptual knowledge consists in the fact that we are directly perceptually aware of some features of our surroundings only in a sense-relative way. The traditional ‘secondary qualities’ comprise a fairly motley bunch over which it is difficult to generalize, but one of the things they have in common is that, unlike spatial properties, they are all immediate and ‘proper’ objects of just one sense. So we variously perceive material things as coloured, as smelling and tasting in certain ways, as emitting warmth, light, and sounds; and we also smell odours, feel warmth, see light and colours, and hear sounds as independently qualifying or occupying or travelling through material things or parts of the space around us, sometimes, as in the case of warmth, our own bodies. Such features of the world are ‘objective’ and ‘real’ at least in the default sense in which ordinary growing lawn-grass really is green, and doesn’t only seem to be green, being really red. But objective colours are ways things, including such ‘things’ as the sky and shafts of light itself, objectively look (i.e. appear specifically to sight), and that difference from the spatial properties of things gives ground for the characterization of colours and the like as ways things appear to us, rather than ways things ‘really’ are ‘in themselves’.5 A third way in which perception and perceptual knowledge are limited at any one time follows from the fact that perception is always from a ‘point of view’. Unlike the first two limitations, this is not in itself a limitation on how much of the world is accessible to perception. Taking the notion of a point of view quite literally, whatever spatial objects we see, we see from a particular place, with our eyes turned in a particular direction, an exigency that in itself guarantees that some things seen are less clearly and closely seen than other things seen, that we do not see at once every aspect of the things we see, and that much of the world or, indeed, of our immediate environment is simply out of sight for one or more of a number of reasons. It may, for example, be behind something else, turned away from us, behind our backs, too far away, or emitting or reflecting too little light. The notion of a point of view can be extended to other senses than sight, indeed to perception in general.6 For example, a sound heard from one place may be more clearly heard, and the direction of its source may be more accurately identifiable, than it is when heard from another place; and there will be a very wide range of places, even on the planet, from which it will not be heard at all. How well we catch the scent of the roses in the garden depends on the spatial relation between the roses and our noses (among other things, such as the temperature, or 5 All this is, of course, both far too simple and too allusive, but will do here. Heat, for example, is not sense-relative in the same way as colour, although ‘directly’ perceptible by one sense only, of which it is a ‘proper object’. For an argued, less summary discussion of the continuing significance of the distinction between primary and secondary qualities for the philosophy of perception (as well as of the closely associated, but distinct topic of the early modern popularity of the idea of an intelligible mechanistic physics), see Ayers 2011. This paper includes an attempt to do at least some justice to the ontological, epistemological and logical variety of the so-called ‘secondary qualities’, and to the traditional use of ‘real’ and ‘really’ in drawing the distinction. 6 The metaphor of a ‘human point of view’ is often even more generally employed, not only to embrace the other two ways just noted in which perception is limited, but also extended beyond perception itself in ways not here relevant.

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speed and direction of a breeze). And obviously what we can feel by touch is very much determined by our location. Fourthly, even within an overall perceptual ‘field of view’ what is distinctly perceived at any one moment is what falls within a narrow, shifting and interrupted focus of attention beyond which things may be either only indistinctly perceived or not consciously perceived at all—although it may be that even things of which we were not previously consciously aware may nevertheless catch our attention. Given also that our field of view is liable to be in constant flux as we and observed objects move, our observation of our environment is very much a matter of scanning it over time, and that may seem to some a scrappy second best to magically instantaneous apprehension of the whole. A classic example is the phenomenon of ‘change blindness’, when quite major changes in features that fall squarely in our visual field, but on which our attention is not (and cannot be)7 continuously focused, are commonly overlooked. As a result, the perceiver erroneously takes a scene observed over a period to have been, for the whole period, in some particular respect just as they now see it, even though, had they been asked at the earlier time what they saw, they would have answered correctly. It may be that our short-term memories of what we have just perceived are to an extent continuously reconstructed in the light of what we now perceive.8 However that may be, that we can attend to one element or aspect of our environment to the detriment of our apprehension of others is understandably an essential part of the evolutionary economy of cognition. What in the world we can perceive is, then, variously limited, but the flip side of that potential food for the idea that senses only give knowledge of appearances, never of how things are in themselves, is that some, at least, of such limitations fulfil a necessary condition of our acquiring some absolutely vital information about our environment, information such that, without it, or something like it, perceptual knowledge of our environment would be impossible. Such features of perception as the directionality and perspectival three-dimensionality of sight, the occlusion from sight of what is further off by what is nearer, or the close relationship between the sense of touch and awareness of our own body and of our own physical movements play an obvious role in our perceiving things from a point of view and, ipso facto, in our being aware of our own location in relation to surrounding objects. It is also because the aspects and appearances of surrounding objects vary with our spatial relations to them that we can achieve a more or less accurate awareness of those spatial relations, constantly changing as they are with our own movements and movements of perceived objects. Even the perception of ‘secondary qualities’ enables us not only to note otherwise imperceptible differences between things, but also to receive information about things at a distance. The latter may include their location, as the perception of its radiant heat may draw attention to the location of an object, or as a thing’s odour may enable us to find it by 7 If only because of involuntary eye movement, blinking, and the ‘blind spot’ on the fovea. 8 A theme of Dennett 1991.

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‘following our noses’, or as sounds may be heard as having a near or distant source lying in a particular direction. As for the phenomenon of attention, the associated shading out of what is not the object of attention may seem a cognitive limitation, but equally our capacity to direct attention, and to have our attention caught by features of our environment, would seem a natural condition of our animal capacity to respond effectively to the situation we are in.

Phenomenology and the limits of perception Reference to these familiar or, at least, unsurprising general facts about sense perception enables us to begin to fill out our explanation of what phenomenology of perception is, and an indication of its potential value to epistemology. Phenomenology of perception is, then, at least in large part the attempt to give a systematic account of what is perceived, as it is perceived. Its subject-matter is accordingly neither simply what is going on in the perceiver, without regard to the objects perceived, nor is it the reverse. It concerns how the world appears to perceivers, and how perceivers perceive (or misperceive) the world, whether in general or in anomalous cases. It might be brought against the idea of an objective phenomenology that there can be a kind of indeterminacy or ambivalence in the way things appear. A drawing of a three-dimensional object, for example, can ‘in a way’ look three-dimensional (think of aspect shift in the perception of a line-drawing of a cube), but at the same time look two-dimensional (one wouldn’t try to pick up a drawn cube so perceived). Do holograms look just like solid objects? Well, like some trompe l’oeil pictures, they can deceive the eye, but the best answer to that general question is probably ‘no’. J. L. Austin, in Sense and Sensibilia (1962), invites us to lie on our backs gazing up at the ceiling from the midpoint of a oblong room, and then say whether it looks oblong, with straight, parallel sides, or whether it looks wider above us than at each end of the room. There seems reason to say both. Isn’t it a matter of how things appear to us that distant things ‘appear smaller’? But things evidently becoming more distant don’t thereby appear to be getting smaller. Austin arrayed such cases against the conception of determinately describable sense data, ‘internal’ objects of ‘immediate’ perception. But there is no reason why they should not simply be grist to the mill of phenomenology. The way things look can very well be shifty or simply ambivalent. There is, unsurprisingly, a close symbiotic relationship between phenomenology and neuropsychology of perception. How people describe their experience—the accounts they give of how things appear to them—can provide evidence as to the mechanisms involved in perception, not least when the subject has suffered neurological damage. Their descriptions are one important part of the evidence, for example, as to how someone’s capacity to deal effectively and appropriately with their environment has been affected by injury, as other tests of that capacity involving physical action are a part of the evidence, for others, of how things appear to someone so injured. Serious phenomenology of perception is a business calling for analytic thought and, inevitably, for reflection on one’s own experience, but on more than that. It should certainly not be

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supposed that, because its subject-matter is something of which we are by definition conscious, the description is a simple matter of stating the obvious, as if it can be done without any concern for the evidence of systematic tests and repeatable experiments. On the other hand, that naive conception of phenomenology should not be co-opted as an argument against affording phenomenology a key role in philosophy of mind. One of the main themes of the present book is that the content of perceptual experience possesses features that have managed entirely to escape the notice of many philosophers in the past, and have only fairly recently been accorded appropriate attention by empirical psychology, but which are of fundamental importance to theory of knowledge. Since the purpose of the present account of perceptual content is epistemological, it draws largely on common experience, marginally broadened by reference to certain findings of empirical psychology. The argument has already in effect started with the (doubtless platitudinous) observation that the particular way in which we are perceiving things from moment to moment, how they appear to us subjectively and where they appear to be in relation to us, is what enables us to perceive them as constituting our environment. But that bit of epistemological explanation is just a beginning. In the rest of this chapter I will endeavour to show that much more that is central to theory of knowledge can be gained from a more detailed phenomenology. For the content of perception includes, so I will argue, ‘how we perceive things’ in another sense of the phrase, that is, causally—how they come to impinge on our organs of sense from where they are. Accordingly perception delivers, not only knowledge of our environment and ourselves in our environment, but does so in a way that at the same time affords knowledge of how it is that we are acquiring such knowledge, and the role of the object itself in that achievement. So much for a brief explanation of how I understand phenomenology of perception, and why it is needed in epistemology.

2.3 The Perception of Space and the Integration of the Senses If sight is taken as the paradigmatic sense, it is tempting to think of a ‘point of view’ as like the place from which a photograph is taken—a point which is not itself perceived, but which is, as it were, geometrically presupposed by the perspectival way the environment is presented. Such a model is phenomenologically inadequate, and it is worth considering why.9 Significantly, it has sometimes been attractive to philosophers 9 The following sections are a development of an argument that I advanced three decades ago (Ayers 1991: 125–144, 171–192). Since then (coincidentally!) experimental work on sensory integration has increasingly burgeoned, recently becoming a hot topic for philosophers. Experimental work understandably focuses on very specific cross-modal effects, but the sheer comprehensiveness of the senses’ phenomenological integration needs to be recognized and its significance for philosophy thought through. The main aim of the psychology is to identify and understand the neurological basis of cross-modality,

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who hold the ‘self ’ to be a non-bodily perceiving mind,10 especially, perhaps, those who have taken to be a deep truth the strange doctrine that the self does not perceive, or directly apprehend itself. That curious bit of metaphysics11 is not a present concern, but two closely related features of perceptual experience that count decisively against the model are important to any account of perceptual knowledge. First, the human animal, like, it is certain, many other animals, has a primitive, preconceptual perceptual grasp of the self/other-things distinction. It is perceptually aware of itself as currently perceiving the environment and acting within it. It perceives itself from the inside, so to speak, primarily, but not only, through the proprioceptive faculty or faculties12 by which it is aware of the relative location and movements of the parts of its body (that is, of its own parts). The role and importance of proprioception, however, cannot be well understood without reference to a second important feature of perception, the integrated functioning of all the senses together, and indeed their integration with bodily action. That integration, unifying our ‘point of view’ and sensory field, is a constitutive condition of the senses’ coherent presentation of an environment in which we can perform appropriate, often highly refined voluntary movements, relying on the mutual feedback between perception and action. The very character of what is presented in and through sense perception—that is, the subject-matter of the phenomenology of perception—should make it clear that the deliverances of the senses do not have distinct intentional fields for each sense such as have to be associated, either by learnt correspondences or by combinatory concepts of reason, in order to put together in thought a unified representation of the environment. A few examples of cross-modal perception should help to make that plain.

Sight and touch (and other senses) Since it has been routinely misinterpreted over centuries in the philosophical tradition, the general relationship between sight and touch might be a good place to start. The Molyneux Problem, since first enunciated in the seventeenth century, has focused attention on the perception of shapes, and the relation between shapes as seen and shapes as felt. The general question that became a familiar part of the philosophy and psychology of perception is whether there are geometrical ideas or concepts common to both modalities, or whether the shape as seen, the ‘idea of sight’, is wholly different from the shape as felt, the ‘idea of touch’, so that the ‘man born blind, and . . . made to see’ has to learn by association between them to distinguish by the way they look rather than to contribute to theory of knowledge. Accordingly, the primary objects of sensory awareness are liable to be treated as some kind of internal objects, whether ‘multi-sensory’ or ‘unisensory’, rather than as objects and events out there in the world. Moreover, many of the inter-modal phenomena studied, such as the effect of the colour or shape of a cup on the taste of its contents, are of doubtful relevance to epistemology. 10 e.g. Penelhum 1970. 11 Critically explored at length in Cassam 1997. 12 The term ‘proprioception’ has been variously used, originally to include the sense of balance. I will distinguish the latter from the proprioceptive sense or senses mentioned here.

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objects that he has previously only distinguished by the way they feel.13 In effect, the question was whether objects simply look the same shape as they are felt to be, or whether this form of words is acceptable only as shorthand for their looking to be a visual shape that the subject has correlated in their experience (or that is innately correlated) with the tactual shape they are felt to have. Berkeley, in An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, a work that remained influential well into the nineteenth century, took the line that sight and touch not only have different spatial fields, but that these different fields are ‘spatial’ only homonymously. On this account they are somehow mapped onto each other only by an experienced correlation between entirely different perceived qualities or properties. Moreover, if tactual and visual shapes and sizes have to be correlated by associative experience, then places or spaces have to be similarly correlated, since a thing’s shape and size, and the place or space the thing occupies, are mutual determinants.14 It is difficult to make phenomenological sense of this whole supposition, even as a wild thought experiment. Worse, even if it is recognized, contra Berkeley, that both visual and tactual fields are ‘spatial’ in the same sense, it is difficult to make sense of the idea that they are distinct, so that location in one is not at the same time location in the other. It is not a judgement we make that this object we see is identical to this object we feel, unless, possibly, a corrective judgement in peculiar circumstances of illusion or sensory malfunctioning, or in such a case as seeing a felt object only in a mirror. Normally, we simply perceive the object, and where it is in relation to ourselves, by both sight and touch. And if we see an object, we are normally thereby immediately aware, at least roughly and if it is fairly near, of its location in relation to ourselves, that is, to our bodily selves of which we are proprioceptively aware. That is how it is that, without any such associative judgement as Berkeley proposed, we can reach out and touch the suitably close objects we see, or move towards more distant ones. No judgement based on experienced association or, a fortiori, ‘conceptual scheme’ or ‘theory’ is required for the task of threading a needle or kicking a ball. The work is done at the level of perception by the phenomenal integration of the senses involved and, as well, their integration with the power of bodily action. The senses involved are not only sight and the sense of touch, but also proprioception, the sense of balance and the awareness of gravity that, through integration with other senses, gives us phenomenal up and down,15 and is a condition of normal effective agency on the earth’s surface. 13 Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding II.ix.8–9, the short passage probably responsible for the early fame of the ‘problem’. It is open to question how far Molyneux’s and Locke’s arguments reflect a concern with the general relationship between the objects of sight and those of touch, rather than, more narrowly, with the possibility that the tridimensionality of vision is a kind of gift from touch. A specific target was probably Descartes’s suggestion that the perception of distance involves a kind of innate geometry. 14 Recognition of objects’ shapes may nevertheless involve a mechanism distinct from that involved in ‘placing’ them, as brain-imaging and the effects of neurological damage suggest. 15 That is, as a perceived feature of the world. Visual ‘up’ and ‘down’ is a ‘cross-modal’ phenomenon, due to the integration of sight with the proprioceptive sense or senses that enable us, if blindfolded, to be aware of being upside down, and even of the chair we are in being very slightly tilted.

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The central role of proprioception The relation between the deliverances of touch and proprioception is transparently intimate. In feeling the surface or consistency or warmth of an object by the sense of touch we are normally at the same time aware of which part of our body we are touching or grasping it with, of the proximity of the object to that part of the body, and also of the way the body, and that part of it, is disposed. If we grasp the object, or move our fingers inquiringly over its surface, or test its consistency or mobility by pressing or squeezing it, our immediate awareness of the position and movement of our hand, and not just consequent tactual feelings from moment to moment supposed somehow separate from that awareness, are constituents of our perception of the object’s extent and shape. That we are acting, and not merely moving, in grasping, pressing, etc. the object also makes a contribution, more particularly considered in the next section. The close integration of sight with bodily awareness is equally evident. We see things from (the place of) our eyes, and are aware of doing so even though we do not see our eyes. That non-human animals are similarly so aware is manifested even in such actions as their turning their eyes or head in order to see something touched, or to look in a certain direction. And, like other animals, if we see an object unexpectedly and rapidly approaching our point of view, we know we must duck our head or protect our face. That natural, ‘instinctive’ reaction is not because of an association in experience or, for that matter, a ‘blind’ instinct, but precisely because we see the object as coming towards our face, of which we are aware, but which we do not see. Shine a dazzling light in someone’s face, they will perceive it as hurting their eyes. In a different kind of case, a subject wearing inverting spectacles sees things upside down for some time, until, famously, the brain adjusts to bring sight in line with other senses and with bodily action. The frame determining ‘up’ and ‘down’ is not itself seen, but is supplied by bodily awareness, ultimately, as I have suggested, by awareness of gravity.16 Left–right orientation, which can also be reversed for vision with comparable effects, is nevertheless different again. Up–down orientation is in a way, and is perceived as, an objective feature of the environment. That something is at once seen, felt and heard as on the left, on the other hand, is simply a matter of one’s own perceived relationship to it. But the immediate point is that such perception of location is another manifestation of the integration of the senses, and characteristically involves perceptual awareness of one’s own body.

16 Berkeley recognized, without seeing how it could be explained by the senses’ integration, that no direction could be ‘up’ purely visually. He accordingly argued that up and down are not given in perception, but are determined by a judgement based on a purely external relation of correspondence such as determines up and down in representational pictures, but between visual and tactual objects. This is a striking example of philosophers’ historic inability to take in the fact of the senses’ integration, let alone its importance to epistemology. For a more recent example of the same failing, cf. Armstrong 1960: 11 n. 15.

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The perception of movement Take another familiar example. We are continually aware of movement, both our own and the movement of other things perceived. We are perceptually aware too of the differences between passive and active movement of our bodies (that is, of ourselves) as well as the differences between our own movement, whether active or passive, and the movement of perceived objects. The difference between what it is to perceive the movement of oneself and what it is to perceive the movement of a perceived object is illustrated by an illusion familiar to travellers by rail. A first reaction to the sight of the train on the next platform moving off, while the train one is in remains stationary, is often to have the experience as of the reverse, to the extent of momentarily, until other cues prevail, feeling as if one is oneself in motion. Since this is a case of perceptual or sensory (cross-modal or intersensory) illusion, it is further illustration of the fact that we normally perceive movements of ourselves as movements of ourselves, and movements of perceived objects as just that. There is no inference, no intrusion of thought or theory or ‘concepts’ at the level of conscious experience to ‘explain’ these differences. They are simply perceptual differences, a function of a modular perceptual system functioning normally, its parts functioning together.17 Imagine the following case. An array of objects passing before our eyes is first perceived as doing just that, and then the same array is seen sequentially as our eyes pass over the objects at rest. Let us suppose that the same objects are subjected to visual attention in the same sequence at the same time-intervals in each case: to that extent the contents of the visual experiences are the same. But the two perceptual experiences, each taken as a whole, differ in content in that in one the objects look to be in motion, in the other they look to be at rest. That is to say, in the first we are perceptually aware of the continuous sequence or replacement of the objects visually attended to as due to the movement of the objects, in the second the same change or replacement is experienced as due to our shifting our gaze while the objects remain at rest. That becomes intelligible if we bear in mind the integration of vision with (some level of) perceptual awareness of our own movement or lack of movement, including movement of head and eyes. Our own movement is itself differently perceived depending on whether it is active or passive, and that can affect how the objects are seen. If our eyes are forcibly shifted, in a certain way, from one part of an immobile object to another, it is no longer presented as clearly immobile, and our view of it may be otherwise distorted. Such phenomena are not, of course, restricted to vision. The experience of passing a hand over a knobbly surface, and the different experience of having one’s hand passed over such a surface, are both different from the experience of having the surface slide under one’s hand, although the knobs may be felt in the same order at the same 17 The point is quite general. Much of what neo-Kantian conceptualists such as P. F.Strawson and John McDowell assign to the human (‘our’) conceptual scheme is, as Austen Clark puts it, ‘built into our sensory mechanisms’—which are, of course, adapted to the world and closely similar in many animals (Clark 2011). Kant and his modern followers are guilty of the fault he finds in Leibniz. They assign too much to thought.

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time-intervals. But cases involving vision are perhaps more effective illustrations of the integration of the senses, and of how the deliverances of one are, as it were, instilled phenomenally into the deliverances of another. Or rather, the integration of the senses should be understood as an essential condition of our perceiving the environment as it is—that is, as an independent whole within which we exist and move, and with which we interact. Normally, at least, all perception is, in one way or another, ‘cross-modal’.

The integration of the senses, and things in space These by now, perhaps, largely uncontroversial observations make sense only because sight, touch, proprioception, awareness of movement, and the like, together with the capacity for, and awareness of, our own physical action, are intentionally and phenomenally related to the same space, and to the same things in that space, including ourselves. The same general point, moreover, applies to the deliverances of three senses so far unmentioned. Hearing, smell, and taste, despite some traditional denials,18 are similarly integrated into the general perception of things in surrounding space— their integration consisting precisely in their being of things in surrounding space. They meet, as it were, in real space. Hearing, for example, is directional, if relatively feebly so in human beings as compared to some other animals.19 Sounds can also be heard as distant or near. It might be argued, not very plausibly, that distance is not heard, but inferred on the basis of the quality and (say) supposed cause of the sound,20 but no such argument could be mounted with respect to direction, since qualitatively identical sounds may be heard as from different directions without having a perceived cause. In any case, a sound may be heard as, for example, coming from a place near one’s left ear, but that part of the body is not heard. The frame for the heard direction and distance of sound is supplied not only by awareness of the body, and of the location of the organs of hearing, but also by the whole scenario in which the subject is self-perceived in relation to things in the perceived environment. The directionality of hearing is, it is true, affected by the seen direction and activity of objects.21 In an impoverished environment in which just one object is seen against a uniform background, subjects tend to hear a sound as coming from that object, an effect that occurs even when the sound is in fact coming from a significantly different direction. If the object is removed, subjects are better at judging the actual direction. 18 e.g. Hume 1978, Treatise of Human Nature I.iv.2. 19 Experiments indicate that the predatory success of owls depends entirely on their precisely locating the movements of their prey by hearing (Birkhead 2012: 52–6). 20 Remember, we are now considering the phenomenology of perception, not what ‘cues’ ‘prompt’ the brain in the production of the phenomena of hearing. 21 Similarly, what we see around us may well affect the hearing of distance (indeed, there is evidence that it can affect how things taste). Conversely, where a sound is heard to be coming from may be a particularly important source of knowledge of their surroundings for blind subjects. Some players of ‘blind football’ attribute their surprising skill to the sound of the bleeping ball, other players’ movements, etc. automatically building up a ‘picture’ of what is going on around them.

46 Knowing and Seeing Another, extremely familiar case of this effect is demonstrated by our ability to hear speech as coming from appropriately moving lips, an ability that not only enables identification of the speaker, but supplements the capacity to distinguish what is heard. The cross-modal illusion of ventriloquism exploits this phenomenon, as cinema commonly does more widely with respect to all represented noise-makers. As for taste and smell, in both cases their functioning is integrated with awareness of the spatial relationship of their objects to the specific bodily organ, mouth or nose, and, in the case of taste, with touch. Apart from the specificity of the organ, we perceive the taste of an object rather as we perceive its warmth, by touching it. Smelling an odour, even if it is unrelated to any perceptible object, is not a matter of having a sensation from nowhere that happens to come when our nose is in the right place. We are directly aware of which part of our body we are smelling it with—the smell is in our nose in something like the way a taste is in our mouth.22 As with hearing, if more weakly, we may smell odours as coming from, or belonging to, otherwise perceived objects. Some animals, possibly even insects, may be much better than we are at directional smelling, although the bloodhound’s following a scent is not quite that.23 The relation between the deliverances or objects of different senses, then, is not like the ‘external’ relation between a film of an event and a sound recording of the same event, which exists just because both are caused and shaped by the same event. That different senses have the same object is normally given to the subject in perception itself, not as a piece of information further to the deliverances of each sense, but as something embodied in all the sensory information available in consciousness. The intentional content of vision on the one hand and touch on the other does not normally leave it open, for example, whether this seen object is the same as this felt object, as if a further act of thought or employment of some ‘concept’ was required to identify them. Whatever is going on in the brain, the phenomenology of vision and touch simply do not come apart in that way as far as spatial properties and relations are concerned. That is not to deny that seeing things in space is phenomenally very different from feeling things in space by touching or grasping them. The phenomenal difference between sight and touch is not restricted to differences between qualities peculiarly visible on the one hand and tangible on the other, the ‘proper objects’ of each sense—or between visual and tactile ‘qualia’, whatever they are supposed to be. The difference in ‘proper objects’ goes along with a difference between the two ways of experiencing the purely spatial, geometrical properties themselves. Nevertheless things seen and felt are 22 The long-recognized fact that the perception of some apparent differences of taste are due to the sense of smell would be at least more surprising if the sense organs were at opposite ends of the body. 23 Birkhead 2012: 141–61. The capacity of some insects to detect potential mates across long distances is well known, but the view that it is through a sense of smell, rather than a sense in some ways like smell (or a faculty in some ways like a sense), is open to question. I refrain from speculating on what, if anything, it is like to be a moth, but it is certainly possible that it is like something. The whole question of the directionality of smell is interestingly complex. Moths are generally thought to find the source of a pheromone simply by flying up the wind that bears it. On the other hand, there is a view, not without all evidence, that having two nostrils may contribute to an ability to sense the direction of a smell.

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perceived in these different ways as occupying the same real space as is occupied by the proprioceptively perceived perceiving subject, and are perceived as related to the subject in that space. There may, of course, be grounds for distinguishing between different spatial ‘fields’ for each sense in so far as, for example, at any moment not everything seen is also (or could also be) concurrently an object of touch or proprioception. Moreover, senses are distinguished not only phenomenologically, but also physiologically, by their different mechanisms or organs, as different ‘information channels’, and these two grounds for distinction can to an extent come apart. More than one mechanism is involved in supplying normal bodily awareness, as neurological damage can reveal. The senses of touch and balance are physiologically independent of proprioception, although their deliverances may not be separable phenomenologically when they are working normally. Similarly, feeling warmth (as also, arguably, pain)24 in a foot is phenomenally unified with proprioceptive awareness of the foot, although the perception of warmth has a certain mechanism of its own (as does pain). Given all this, it is appropriate for neuropsychology to postulate, as it has, a ‘supramodal’ perceptual system. It is important to be clear, however, that what is postulated is a ‘sub-personal’ neurological mechanism or function, not a kind of rational operation of thought. It is not a matter of reason, or the brain, making sense, so to speak, of the association in experience of disparate deliverances of the senses. The integration of the senses around common objects in surrounding space is a phenomenological given. That is how senses and sensory systems have evolved, presumably from some primitive or simple sensitivity to pressure or light, and perhaps to damage, so as to give their possessors the kind of knowledge of their material environment and power to move purposefully within it that they have. It is difficult to see how such knowledge and power could be otherwise grounded.25

24 It is sometimes suggested that pain is an awareness of disorder or damage, as such, but things are more complicated than that. Phenomenologically, physical pain is felt in a part of the body, and is standardly consequent on damage or stress of that part, but having a pain in a foot is not in itself perception of such damage or stress. Nor is it perception of a secondary quality of the foot. I too can feel the warmth in or of your foot, but I can’t feel the pain in, or painfulness of, your foot. There is no general physical state (even a ‘disjunctive state’) of body-parts in which pain is felt, such that, if pain is felt in some body-part by a subject on some occasion, but that body-part is not in that physical state, then the pain is illusory. (Replace ‘pain’ with ‘warmth’ in that sentence, and it would express a falsehood.) Some pain may be said to be illusory, but not because such a general physical condition is absent, or because the pain is not real (we really do feel it), but because it appears to be in a part of the body other than the part of the body some condition of which is the actual distal cause. ‘Transferred’ pain, pain in a leg due to pressure on the spinal column, and pain in a ‘phantom limb’ might all be described as illusory—the last perhaps most readily and convincingly just because it involves the illusory feeling that an amputated limb is still present. Accordingly, it is better to regard having a pain in one’s foot simply as an unpleasant form of awareness of one’s foot (and, like any apparent awareness of a part of the body, capable of being mistaken), than to regard pain as (like warmth in a body-part) an object of bodily awareness. 25 The neurophysiology and capabilities of octopuses, however, raise interesting questions in this area, discussed in Godfrey-Smith 2017.

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I say that the senses’ integration is ‘around common objects in surrounding space’ because it is significantly difficult, and arguably impossible, to talk coherently and non-misleadingly about cross-modal content entirely in terms of internal ‘representations’ without bringing the actual ‘external’ objects of perception more directly into the account. For one thing, if we postulate a visual representation of A and a tactual representation of B, and a representation which somehow has the content A = B, it becomes difficult to see how the last could be sensory or sense-perceptual rather than a matter of judgement (as Berkeley thought) on the part of a homunculus within. But the identity is simply given to the animal in sense experience. Phenomenologically, we simply perceive the one object by both sight and touch. Nevertheless there is a danger in focusing on the so-called ‘binding problem’ of features of particular objects and events perceived by different modalities. Thus Casey O’Callaghan, starting from the point that seeing a mouth moving has a different ‘phenomenal character’ from that of hearing speech, argues that hearing the speech as coming from the mouth has a different phenomenal character again, one that is not modality specific: ‘no collection of merely auditory and merely visual perceptual experiences captures the phenomenal character of a of a perceptual experience as of the identity of something audible with something visible.’ (O’Callaghan 2015) But that claim masks the difference between talk of the general ‘phenomenal character’ of vision (‘what it is like’ to see the world) and talk of what it is like to see and feel (or hear, etc.) the same thing as the same thing. The former may advert to general features of things that are ‘proper objects’ of the sense in question (as colours in the case of vision), but the latter goes beyond the general subjective ‘character’ of a modality and is out there in the world perceived. Identity, sameness, is not a feature of anything, or a kind of ‘proper object’ of multi-modal (or ‘amodal’) perception.26 Phenomenologically, the integration of the visible, tangible, etc. features of one object or event are just one aspect of our perceiving our environment as our environment. It may be that, if we are to understand the neurological basis of perceptual consciousness, then, as O’Callaghan says elsewhere,27 it is necessary to postulate ‘multimodal organizing principles’ such as ‘track ordinary objects and events’ (‘binding’ their disparate features), but the phenomenological outcome is simply our conscious awareness of objects of perception as located within our environment–that is, in spatial and causal relations to one another and to ourselves, our perceived bodily selves. There’s only one thus populated environment, which we perceive in a variety of inter-influential ways.

2.4 The Perception of Causality and Action Two views on the perception of causality that are both well represented in the philosophical tradition are, on the one hand, the view that in sense perception we are aware 26 On the difference between ‘multi-modal’ and ‘amodal’ interpretations of sensory integration, see Nudds 2015. 27 O’Callaghan 2012 a paper that affords a useful overview of relevant experimental work. On further argument for a direct realist framework, see Clark 2011.

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of external objects acting on us and, on the other hand, the doctrine that causal relations are not perceived, but are only ever judged to exist on the basis of theory, or of experienced ‘constant conjunctions’ of kinds of perceived ‘objects’. The former view classically relied on no more than a supposed implication of the involuntariness of the deliverances of the senses28—in effect conceding one leg of the latter view, that the causal relations in question are not perceived, while denying the other leg. The claim to be made here, however, is that the causal relation between perceived object and perceiver that is essentially involved in perception is itself something of which the subject is perceptually aware in any normal case of perceptual knowledge. It is itself, to a significant extent, an object of perception. But I will take the argument slowly, beginning with the still extant view that all causal judgements are essentially theoretical, never simply perceptual, or grounded on immediately perceived causality.

The perception of mechanical causation Several kinds of example have been advanced in support of the thesis that causal relations may be immediately perceived. The simplest, perhaps, consists of such cases as Michotte recorded in which coloured shapes on a screen variously moving in relation to one another are seen as in corresponding causal relations.29 Most famously, a round shape moving at speed to ‘touch’ another and come to a stop or slowing down, while the other shape immediately moves off at some speed, is almost universally seen as one object (a sphere or ball) hitting another and setting it in motion. A question is whether this is strictly a sensory or perceptual illusion, or just a very simple case of the kind of illusion routinely created in the cinema, the illusion that we are observing, not only a three-dimensional space containing objects, but (say) a space full of people engaged in meaningful conversation and complex but intelligible activities. Is seeing one ball move another like seeing an object’s shape and colour, or is it more like seeing and hearing one man aggressively threatening another and demanding payment?30 Some philosophers would be prepared to say that there is no significant difference between any of these objects or ways of ‘seeing’ or ‘perceiving’, but I will assume, as I have so far assumed, that common sense, together with most philosophy and psychology of perception, is not mistaken in drawing some sort of line, even if sometimes a fuzzy one, between sense perception and interpretive understanding of what is perceived—understanding that may significantly influence, but does not constitute, sensory or perceptual content. I take it that Michotte’s claim that his experiments are indeed simple cases of perceptual illusion is convincing. Accordingly, pace Hume and

28 So Descartes, Principia Philosophiae II.1; Locke, Essay IV.xi.5; Berkeley, Principles of Human Knowledge Part I, 28–9. The idea that the senses present their objects as causally independent of us is summarily rejected by Hume. 29 Michotte 1963. 30 Michotte included in his experiments movements of the shapes that led some subjects to describe what they saw in anthropomorphic terms, e.g. to the effect that a small ball wanted to play with a large ball, but was rebuffed. Understandably, such imaginative reactions were less universal.

50 Knowing and Seeing his many followers in this, when the perceptual experience is veridical, we simply see (for example) one billiard ball’s causing another to move.31

The perception of one’s own physically acting Another view granting immediate, non-inferential awareness of causality lays emphasis on action. In (for example) intentionally pushing over a heavy table I am immediately aware of my acting on another object. What is involved in such immediate awareness? Again, there are feelings of resistance and weight, pressure on my hands and so forth, proprioceptive awareness of the position and movement of my body, as well as bodily feelings of muscular effort, all within overall perceptual apprehension of what is going on. But I am not just aware of an object’s being pushed over by the movement of parts of my body, I am aware of this perceived event as being an action of mine: I am aware of acting. Is this latter awareness itself perceptual? Do I know that I am acting because I just perceive myself doing so? ‘Agent’s knowledge’ of acting has often been thought of by philosophers as different in kind from perceptual knowledge, somehow more immediate and direct, independent of any specific sense modality. A locus classicus for that general view is Berkeley’s denial that awareness of acting involves an ‘idea’ of volition, but there are more recent versions of it. Hume, on the other hand, sees volition itself as just another ‘impression’, a view of our knowledge of acting as broadly perceptual that has been modernized by those physicalists who see such awareness as a matter of the subject’s ‘accessing’ the process in the brain that initiates and controls the action in question.32 But there is a problem with that simple model for conscious agency, quite apart from the oddity of the suggestion that we are perceptually aware of a brain process. If consciousness of acting were merely perceptual (or quasi-perceptual) in the way proposed, its object would be independent of its being perceived. But since actions are necessarily conscious at least in so far as they are fully intentional—all the more if they are deliberately initiated and carefully controlled (as threading a needle) according to a however briefly considered 31 There is a well-known experiment in which the movement of two shapes is potentially ambiguous as between one passing behind or through the other, or each bouncing off the other. With an audible blip at the moment of contact an experience as of the former was replaced by one as of the latter, an interesting instance of cross-modal illusion, in that the visual appearance of impact is determined by the sound. Similarly, two bleeps at the time of one flash can create the impression of two flashes. (O’Callaghan 2012). 32 Cf. Bayne 2011: 355–74. This move may be part of an attempted general explanation of consciousness as the ‘accessing’ of brain processes, a model favoured by some empirical psychologists, but which I take to be deeply misguided. Consciously perceiving, deciding, reasoning, remembering, recognizing, or understanding is not perception, decision, reasoning, memory, recognition, or understanding constituted by brain events that happen to be ‘accessed’ or (following Bayne’s terminology) ‘perceived’ by their subject. Their being conscious (and ipso facto the physiological basis of their being conscious) is integral to—plays an essential role in—these functions and their everyday and evolutionary effectiveness. The same goes for conscious agency. That is not to deny that there may be conceptually secondary or peripheral (even if biologically normal and ubiquitous) unconscious forms of perception, such as ‘blindsight’ or subliminal perception, involving some of the same or closely similar neurological processes as normal sight and, very possibly, operating as an essential adjunct to conscious perception. Nor is it to deny that much of what we do is done without conscious choice or control.

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aim or purpose and means—the neurophysiological basis of acting would have to include not only the supposedly ‘accessed’ or ‘perceived’ process but also the neurophysiological basis of the purported ‘accessing’ itself. If talk of ‘accessing’ serves a useful purpose, it can do so only as a (misleadingly metaphorical) reference to a sub-personal link between parts or functions of the brain jointly involved in conscious, intentional action. We do not perceive or ‘access’ any part of such brain activity. We are no more aware of it than we see nerve impulses from eye to brain, or the relevant brain activity itself, when we consciously see things around us. Nevertheless, if awareness of physically acting involves awareness of one’s action, as it does, then it at least involves perceptual awareness, with which it is fully integrated. The sense modalities essentially operative in such awareness, in normal agents,33 will be those through which the physical event is perceived ‘from the inside’, although sight and touch are likely to be involved, and possibly other senses (as awareness of one’s own speaking normally involves hearing). Consider such an action as threading a needle. How can one’s ‘immediate’ agent’s awareness of acting—of doing what one is doing—be separated out from one’s perceptual awareness of what one is doing? There is, as, for example, Susan Hurley and Alva Noë rightly stress (whether or not their broad conclusions follow), a continuous ‘feedback loop’ in any physical action.34 This ‘loop’ is particularly tight and clear in such an action as the careful threading of a needle. Every tiny movement, in so far as the process is continuously controlled (and the movement is not due, say, to a shaking hand), is deliberately determined according to what is perceived virtually at the moment it is made, and relevant changes in what is perceived are for the most part determined, virtually instantaneously, by controlled movements being so made. In this particular task sight might seem the dominant sense, since we need a good light and some of us need our spectacles. But the movements themselves would also be, at least for normal subjects, impossible without continuous proprioceptive feedback—as impossible as it would be to bring a finger directly to touch one’s nose blindfold without continuous proprioceptive feedback. That is dramatically demonstrated by the now well-known immobilizing effect of the loss of proprioception through neural damage.35 Accordingly, immediate ‘agent’s knowledge’ of what one is doing can be separated only very notionally from perceptual knowledge of what one is doing, and the project of separating them even notionally is problematic. It is tempting simply to ascribe them different subject-matters, as if, for example, qua agent one knows what one wills or is trying to do, and qua perceiver of the action one knows the effect of so willing or

33 For abnormal cases involving loss of proprioception through brain damage, see n. 36. 34 Hurley 1998; Noë 2004. 35 See e.g. the accounts at www.hhmi.org/biointeractive/ian-waterman-compensating-proprioceptiveloss or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v = FKxyJfE831Q of how one heroic individual, Ian Waterman, taught himself to compensate for the loss by a combination of imaginative rehearsal of action and the employment of sight as the main provider of perceptual feedback.

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trying.36 But my ‘agent’s knowledge’ of my pushing over the table and my perceptual knowledge of my pushing over the table share their object, and are phenomenologically and functionally intertwined. Each is imbued with, and dependent on, the other. But the main point for present purposes is that agent’s awareness of acting would seem to imbue perceptual awareness of the action with an even stronger, more decisive sense of causality than Michottian examples do.

The perception of resistance Our awareness of the resistance of material objects, whether or not resistance to our actions, has long been brought in support of the view that we perceive causality. We feel chairs or the ground supporting us, we feel ourselves being pushed over by a toppling ladder or bookcase or surrounding members of a crowd, we feel a wall that we blunder into in the dark physically preventing further progress, we feel a hard object pressing into us, hurting us. As long as we are conscious there are few interruptions to our tactual sensitivity, at some level of consciousness,37 to the resistance of surrounding objects (roughly, what Locke called ‘solidity’).38 All these felt relations are causal, and they are felt, and so objects of perceptual awareness.

Mechanism, perception and theory These three kinds of examples of the perception of causality all involve mechanical interactions between material objects, the last two including the subject as one of the objects, either agent or patient. Such interactions are perceived via one or more senses or ‘channels of information’. With respect to each kind of case I have in effect agreed with a long-existing, indeed ‘classical’ view that the causal, mechanical process or relation in question is, as such, the object of immediate awareness. I have also proposed that the awareness is, in some cases certainly, in others arguably, perceptual, the latter at least in being inextricably bound up with the undeniably perceptual. 36 This move is one form of the wider view, less plausibly judged mistaken, that Hurley and Noë set up as a target, that perception is related to action as input to output. The very notion of ‘feedback’ would seem to assume such an output–input duality, although one that doesn’t have to be understood as a duality of objects of knowledge. 37 I take it that a phenomenal continuity in one’s awareness of an object is compatible with a discontinuity in the attention one pays to that object (and both with a failure to recognize even what category of entity it is of which one is aware—e.g. whether it is a material thing, a coloured patch on a wall, or a shadow). The view that conflates conscious awareness of X with attention to X (unless in a very special sense of ‘conscious’) seems to me simply contrary to everyday experience, a too sweeping conclusion from admittedly interesting experiments in which, for example, subjects deeply engaged in a task requiring close attention to one kind of object or event fail to notice others that would normally be salient. 38 Cf. Essay II.iv.1: ‘There is no idea, which we receive more constantly from Sensation, than Solidity. Whether we move, or rest, we always feel something under us that supports us, . . . and the Bodies which we daily handle, make us perceive, that whilst they remain between them, they do by an insurmountable Force, hinder the approach of the parts of our hands that press them.’ This recognition that we can perceive the modus operandi of mechanical causation in such cases is not repeated in the chapter on the ideas of cause and effect, but lies behind Locke’s (qualified) approval of corpuscularian mechanism, as at Essay, I.viii.9–11.

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If that is right, then the thesis has a certain historical resonance, since Hume’s denial that the causal relation is ever perceived (there is no ‘impression’ of it, even in the case of the subject’s own actions) was directed largely and specifically against philosophical mechanists, the empiricists amongst whom characteristically and plausibly held that the ‘modus operandi’ of observable mechanical interaction is peculiarly open to view. For that kind of mechanist, we can just see how and why a mill operates as it does— why, when this cog turns, so does that one.39 The thesis also has implications for the more recent idea of ‘intuitive mechanics’, understood as a kind of primitive physical theory or proto-theory internalization of which (if it is not already innate) is a condition of effective interaction with the world. If cases of mechanical causation are simply perceived as such, that would suggest that ‘intuitive mechanics’ is intuitive indeed in the traditional sense, and no ‘theory’ at all, whether based on experienced constant conjunctions or innate. We don’t need a theory, even an innate one, in order to ‘see how’, in a simple mechanical process, one thing leads to another as it does, as we would need a theory in order to understand why a rose is scented, stinging nettles sting or gold dissolves in aqua regia. It might be that a child takes time—has to ‘learn’—to master even simple mechanical interactions, but such ‘learning’ will be the consolidation of innate perceptual-cum-agent capacity— a bit like learning to walk or talk, but at the most general and fundamental level.40 What is not reasonably deniable, I would suggest, is that Hume’s thesis that no causal relation is simply perceptible as such is false. My aim is to take the argument much further than that, however, and to establish the conclusion that the perception of a causal relation is essential to the acquisition of any perceptual knowledge.

2.5 The Perception of the Causality of Perception When we see or hear something, the object seen, event heard, is a distal cause of our experience. It is impinging on our sensibility. I have argued that we can perceive mechanical causation—one perceived object moving another—and that we are, in a particular way, perceptually aware of such causation when we are engaged in physical action, and are ourselves the agent object intentionally, consciously moving another. The claim that in all cases of perception we are perceptually aware, at a practical level, 39 It was, of course, a theory to hold that all change, if we could observe it at ‘corpuscular’ level, would prove to be similarly perspicuous or ‘intelligible’ mechanical process. Probably the most effective early criticisms of such confident mechanistic doctrine were appeals to prima facie recalcitrant phenomena, such as gravity and magnetism, rather than the Humean insistence that it is in principle impossible to ‘see why’ anything at all happens as it does. Locke’s ambivalent attitude towards mechanistic physics reflects the tension between his recognition of the peculiar perspicuousness or evidence of mechanical causation and his sensitivity to the vulnerability of the theory of universal mechanism. 40 Even this use of the notion of a ‘learnt’ skill here may be misleading in so far as it suggests that an infant progresses in its physical dealings with the world simply by acquiring through practice a skill it previously lacked, whereas a main reason why a human neonate is so much less able in this respect than, say, a newly born deer or bison, is because it is relatively undeveloped physically, not least neurologically.

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of the causal relation between the object of perception and our experience of it clearly goes a lot further than that. The causal relation between the distant mountain and my visual experience of it is not a perceptible mechanical relation. But it may help to start by considering a case in which the object–experience relation is (partly and obviously) mechanical. Consider again the perception of the solidity or resistance of material objects. In being perceptually aware of an object’s pressing on us, or of its resisting the pressure we are putting on it, we are at the same time aware of the causality of our knowledge that the relation in question holds: in feeling, and so knowing, that a hard object is pressing into my arm, hurting me, I am perceptually aware of how it is that I know of the object’s doing so. At least, I am in any normal case—I am not in the middle of a mind-blowing car crash, or just waking in a state of confusion. In the inadequate terms of twentiethcentury ‘causal theory of knowledge’, not only is my belief that a hard object is pressing painfully into my arm caused, via a ‘non-deviant’ route (i.e. sense perception!), by a hard object’s pressing into my arm, but I am also perceptually aware that that is how my belief is caused.41 I say ‘perceptually’ aware, because, although, logically speaking, this is ‘second-order’ knowledge, there is no kind of second-order, reflexive act above and beyond the perception by which I come to have the first-order knowledge. In coming to know through touch and bodily feeling that a hard object is pressing into a particular part of me, I am aware of just how I come to know it. This kind of perception, at least, clearly grounds, not simply my knowledge of an external object, but also my knowledge of the spatio-causal relation by which I come to have that knowledge. Both the hard object and its pressing into me are experienced as both objects and causes of my tactual experience, so that, by the same token, I have the practical knowledge of what to do to stop thus perceiving the object, as also how better to perceive it, by whatever sense. Examples of felt resistance and the like, however, in being limited to mechanical interaction, may not seem to take us very far down the road towards justifying a general claim that in all perceptual knowledge we are perceptually aware of the causality of the knowledge—that all perceptual knowledge, as such, brings with it perceptual knowledge of how we know. But they do at least establish that it is both possible and common for the causality of perceptual knowledge to be included in the content of the very perceptual experience through which the knowledge is acquired.

Expanding the argument to perception in general It is perhaps worth noting here a danger of the argument going too fast. It might be argued, for example, that, in general, when we consciously perceive something, and so have knowledge of it, we of course know how we know of it. In normal cases at least, in being perceptually aware of a book, or that a book is on the desk, for example by seeing 41 Note that I don’t just believe that, I am aware of it, just as I am aware of the material object itself. I take it that the idea is wildly mistaken that perceptual awareness simply is suitably caused belief (as Davidson 1986: 111).

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it, we are all at once aware of the object or state of affairs, of our perceiving it, and (generally) of the modality by which we perceive it.42 But perceiving, seeing, etc. (the argument may continue) essentially involve causal processes—necessarily, what is perceived is only perceived because it has a certain effect on the perceiver’s sense organs and nervous system. Nothing could count as perception without such a causal relation. So doesn’t it follow that, simply in thus knowing that we see the book, we automatically know what that entails, that our knowledge or belief is caused by the book, via the mechanism of sight? Such an argument goes too fast, not because it is not normally true that when we see an object we are aware of the object as visually presented, or because seeing and perceiving in general do not necessarily involve causal processes (they do), but because it has yet to be shown that when we see an object we are thereby perceptually aware of our seeing it as a causal process linking the object with ourselves as perceivers. That is, it has not yet been shown that the simple awareness of the modality by which an object or state of affairs is perceived (an awareness that, as perhaps most would allow, at least in normal cases comes along with perceiving the object) includes any perceptual awareness of the causal process involved, or even perceptual awareness of its object’s being a cause of one’s perceptual state. To return to the argument that we do have such awareness, what is tactually perceived is not, of course, restricted to material things and the mechanical interactions between them. We can perceive the shape of an object, by grasping it or running a hand over it. We can perceive its warmth in the same way, or simply by a certain proximity. In these cases too—indeed in all perception by touch or feeling—we are as perceptually aware of the causal relation between the object and ourselves that is involved in our perceiving it as we are aware of its spatial relation to us. To that extent we are perceptually aware of how we know what we know about the object and its relationship to us. That is much less, of course, than being perceptually aware in detail of the physiological and neurological mechanisms of touch, which no one yet fully knows (and which no one could know perceptually), but it is more than simply being aware of the modality involved through its general phenomenal character.43 Assuming that all this is true of touch and of ‘feeling’ generally, is it also true, mutatis mutandis, of the other senses? Taste, as a ‘contact’ sense, would seem to fall into line fairly readily. Briefly, in tasting a sour grape as sour one is perceptually aware of one’s tasting it as its affecting the relevantly sensitive part of one’s body, one’s mouth or, perhaps, if one is that discriminating, one’s tongue, with which it is in contact. Such 42 There may be abnormal examples of someone’s consciously knowing that P because they see that P without consciously knowing at the time that they see that P. Someone hearing and reading slightly different sentences, for example, can mistakenly suppose that they have just read a sentence that in fact they heard, or vice versa. 43 In an influential paper J. W. Roxbee Cox (1970) states rightly that ‘feeling always involves perceiving something affecting a part of the body’, but argues that ‘this provides us with a feature to distinguish feeling from the other senses’. My proposal is that that general feature is characteristic, not only of contact senses, but also of all (normal and conscious) ‘external’ perception, and is of central importance to epistemology.

56 Knowing and Seeing perceptual awareness, of course, is a function of the full integration of taste, touch, and proprioception.

Beyond contact perception What about the perception of heat and cold? The perception of radiant heat suggests that contact is not what is essential to the awareness, embodied in perception, that the object perceived is physically affecting our senses. As I pass my hand near an electric smoothing iron to check that it is switched on, I feel the radiant heat as the effect of something beyond my hand, on my hand. Feeling my hand so warmed by the iron is as different from simply feeling that my hand is becoming warm as feeling the warmth of an iron by contact with it is different from simply feeling that my hand is being warmed.44 Although the feeling of heat is integrated with sight—the heat is felt as the heat of the iron I see—the character of the feeling as the feeling of heat beyond the body may be the same if I am blindfold. Moreover, as with sight, proximity on a human scale is not necessary—we may, after all, feel the heat of the sun in much the same way. We don’t just feel warm, we feel warmed by something beyond our bodies, lying in a certain general direction. What then, if not contact, is essential to the perceptual awareness that we are perceiving X in and through X’s physically acting on us, on our senses? What condition of such awareness that is satisfied in contact perception such as feeling and tasting is also satisfied in other forms of perception? Contact perception supplies a clue, I think, in that such perceptual awareness of an object’s physically impinging on the relevant sense organ is tied up with perceptual awareness of the spatial relation of the object of perception to oneself. In the case of the perception of radiant heat, one is perceptually aware of the role, in one’s perception of the heat, of the affected part of the relevantly sensitive surface of one’s body. One is aware of it, moreover, not only in its being in general the ‘organ’ affected, but in its playing that role because it is the part of the body turned towards the heat. One’s awareness of the direction from which the radiant heat affecting a part of the body-surface is coming is bound up with one’s awareness that it is that part of the body-surface turned in that direction that is being affected, so that, for example, the perceptual effect can be terminated by appropriate movement. Perceptual awareness of causality, including the causality of the perceptual experience itself, is also manifested in the spatial integration of hearing and sight, mentioned above. Our hearing speech as coming from an appropriately moving mouth is not a matter of judgement or inference, but of immediate perception. But is it immediate perception of the causality of the auditory experience? It might be objected that, if a causal relation is perceived in this case, it is a relation between two external sensibles, a mouth in motion and sounds, not between an external sensible and how it is subjectively 44 This claim is consonant with the existence of the kind of illusion by which, in general, an insulating material feels warmer than, say, stone or metal at the same temperature, since it does not draw heat from the part of one’s body in contact with it in the same way.

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for us. That would make the case comparable to Michotte’s examples of perceived causality, except that two sense-modalities are involved. Alternatively, it could be said that we simply hear and see the same object, the speaker’s speaking. Yet we look towards a sound with an expectation for ourselves, as well as an expectation with respect to the ‘external’ world or environment, and both are fulfilled when we see what is making the noise, and perceive it making it. A natural, pretheoretical way of thinking about a sound is as something that, as it were, lies between, and links, the auditor and what is ‘making’ the sound, a way of thinking consonant not only with the theoretical explanation of sound as vibrations in the air, but also with how we perceive sound, the phenomenology of the perception of sound. Although considered judgement as to their cause might sometimes be called for even when the source is visible, for example if the distance is great, we readily hear sounds as reaching us from visible things making them. That perception of causality is tightly involved with the auditory perception of direction and distance. The two are not phenomenally distinct. My proposal is that, in general as in these cases, the perceptual awareness of the spatial relation of objects of perception to ourselves that comes with perception of those objects also, by the same token, comes with a broad perceptual awareness of the causal relation they have to us, i.e. to our sense organs, whether or not there is physical contact with the object, and whether or not touch or ‘feeling’ is directly involved. To that extent the perception of the causality of perception is an essential feature of all normal, conscious perception.

The perception of movement and of its causality It may help us to accept that we are perceptually aware of how a change in viewpoint affects what we see of an object to consider again the ‘moving train’ illusion, since the content of such an experience, as of its veridical counterpart, includes a causal relation. For the visual perception of relative movement is part of one or the other of two different total perceptual experiences, and the illusion is a confusion between the two. In one the visually presented relative movement is experienced—that is, perceived—as due to one’s own movement, in the other it is experienced as due to the movement of the object. And it is difficult to see how that could be so if the object itself is not experienced as a causal factor in the occurrence of the experience. In the related cases, discussed in section 2.3 above, of the sequential perception, visual or tactual, of an array of objects, stationary or moving, the sequence in which the objects are perceived may be experienced as causally dependent on perceived movement of the objects, or else as causally dependent on perceived movement of ourselves, active or passive, bodily or in part (for example, of head, eye, or hand). It may, indeed, be perceived as a combination of two, or of all, of these types of movements. For we may be all at once perceptually aware of our being moved (say, in a train), of our actively moving (say, walking along the train), and of the motion of a perceived array of

58 Knowing and Seeing objects (say, carriages of another passing train).45 Such an experience is likely to be confusing at least to the extent that relative speeds may be impossible to estimate with any accuracy. Again, it is difficult to understand the possibility of these different perceptual experiences, or elements in one perceptual experience, unless the ordered array of objects is itself experienced, along with our own body and sense organs, as a causal factor in the experience.

The role and significance of active exploration To summarize the picture so far presented, the integration of the senses is an integration of content or ‘field’, and they are integrated around, or with respect to, perceived objects, characteristically material objects and structures, always including oneself, arrayed in, and moving through, environing space. Contributing essentially to the apprehension of this array, I have suggested, is the perceptual awareness of movement and its concomitant effects on the perceived aspects or features of things as they are presented to the perceiver. The movement may be movement of the perceived object or of the perceiver, and the latter may be intentional or unintentional, whether bodily movement from one place to another, or movement of head, hand, eye, and so forth. We take in our surroundings bit by bit, over time. Doing so characteristically involves activity, an activity incessant most of our waking life, but which may simply be the minimal action involved in changing the focus of attention while we explore our environment—for example, by simply (as we say) casting our eyes over the scene before us. In all normal perception such activity is intimately linked to perceptual awareness of the body, an awareness that characteristically involves at least some background, inattentive awareness of the role of that part of ourselves, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, hand, or whatever other sense organ or body-part that is employed as we direct our attention to some object. We are not only perceptually aware of ourselves as material objects in a special way (‘from the inside’), and not only is that perception of ourselves integrated with perception of other objects spatially related to us (as so related), but, together with many other higher animals we are at the same time inarticulately (which doesn’t imply dimly)46 perceptually aware of our physical, material selves as perceiving subjects, as possessing sense organs giving rise to conscious responses to changes in our surroundings, however brought about. Our awareness of the spatial relationship of perceived objects to ourselves is essentially bound up with some awareness of the physical ways in which those objects come to impinge on our senses.47 45 I have myself had just such an experience. It was confusing, but I was perceptually aware of what was moving in relation to what. 46 That such awareness is inarticulate is worth stressing, together with the fact that we share it with other higher animals. For the point goes hand in hand with the point that here what is ‘logically’ second-order knowledge does not involve a second-order reflexive act. It therefore does not follow, as some have argued, that because infants and animals lack the concept of knowledge, even if they have knowledge they cannot know that they have it. For criticism of a related view, see Chapter 3. 47 I wrote this before reading John O’Dea (2011) or Dominic Lopes (2000), whom O’Dea cites. Lopes rightly states that ‘it seems that the phenomenal character of each sense includes or makes possible an awareness of the organs by which the sense operates’, bringing the point, as I do in Chapter  5, against

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The subject’s joint awareness of their spatial and causal relations to the perceived object is manifested in such responses, mentioned above, as ducking the head to avoid an object seen flying towards it, shutting one’s eyes or turning away when a light is too bright, moving one’s hand away from an object that feels uncomfortably warm or cold, or covering one ear to shut out a sound from that direction. Such reactions may be automatic rather than deliberate, but even reflex actions generally occur with perceptual awareness. Generally, too, however uncontrolled, the reflex response is to an extent unsurprising to the subject in the light of the total experience—it is not as if touching a hot iron with one’s hand has caused one to shoot out a leg or cover one’s ears.48 Such awareness of the spatio-causal relationship of object to organ is also manifested in the very activity involved in much perception itself—looking, peering, sniffing, feeling (as an action), tasting, shifting a limb to be sure of its position, moving to get a better view, and so forth. The effect of so acting is continuously apparent to the subject, as they act. Looking, as an action, has traditionally been distinguished from seeing, the passive result of looking, as if looking at an object is simply the act of turning one’s eyes towards it, or getting in a better position with the consequence that one sees it.49 But active looking or peering involves seeing (if sometimes only seeing absence of light) as listening involves hearing (if sometimes only hearing silence). To deliberately look at an object50 is to pay attention to it visually, an act of which turning the head to bring it into one’s field of view may be at most a preliminary part. Looking for an object is, of course, a different activity, although it also involves seeing, just as feeling for coins in mud involves feeling something, even if not coins. It is not particularly surprising that, in the cases of feeling, tasting, and smelling, one verb may do for both active exploration and passive perception, commonly bound up together. If I suddenly and unexpectedly feel something tap me on the back, my tactual experience is fully passive. If I deliberately feel the texture of a material, however, not only the physical action but the tactual experience itself is not in just the same way passive. That is not simply because the experience is actively sought, but because it is continuously controlled by an activity that is continuously responsive to the experience itself. A similar control is involved in the more or less close visual examination of an object, whether ladybird or landscape. I do not, of course, know precisely what I shall see as I shift my point of view on the object, whether by moving it, moving myself, or simply shifting my gaze. But I am broadly aware of how the shift will affect my view of the object, of how the aspect presented will change—that, for example, I shall see the Dretske’s externalism. O’Dea 2011, who cites J. J. Gibson and Peter Ross as well as Lopes, will be discussed later in the present section. 48 Some natural reflex actions, such as a startled jump at a sudden noise, or perhaps a hedgehog’s curling into a ball when touched, are less intimately related to the mode and character of the sensory stimulus, and more to potential or actual defensive response to its external source. 49 Cf. Locke, Essay concerning Human Understanding IV.xiii.1. 50 There is also a mildly paradoxical use of ‘looking at’. We are looking for a key, and our companion helpfully says ‘You are looking at it’.

60 Knowing and Seeing other side if I walk round it (if it does not itself move). That means that I am aware of the general causal relation between the object, placed as it is, and what I see of it. I am aware of how the object is, so to speak, making itself accessible to my sight. Is this latter awareness perceptual, like the awareness that a hard object is making itself felt by pressing into my arm? There seems no reason to deny it. As the movement occurs—my own movement or the movement of the object—I am perceptually aware of the change in my spatial relationship to the object as having an effect on what I see. Accordingly, depending on what appears, I may modify my own movement or activity—including under ‘activity’ my simply focusing on what catches my attention. Some philosophers of perception, most notably Susan Hurley and Alva Noë,51 have recently advanced rather similar considerations to some of those that I have advanced, but in support of the view that perceptual content should not be thought of simply as the content of actual passive sensory states, which are in any case, allegedly, scrappy, momentary, and comprehensively aspectual, but as somehow constituted, at least in part, by our grasp of how we might further access the environment thus partially presented—by our ‘sensory-motor skills’ as they operate in the particular case. I don’t intend to discuss their view here, which seems to me questionable, risking incoherence in so far as it proposes that the role of the content of perception in guiding action is a determinant of that very content. It seems a more natural interpretation of such experience to suppose that, while our capacity for controlled action is dependent on, and a manifestation of, our perceptual apprehension of the relevant causal relations, the latter is not reducible to the former. Likewise, our perceptual awareness of these relations is manifested in our skill in the employment of the senses in controlled observation, as when we look more closely or move to get a better view of an object, or look in the direction of a sound to see what is making it. But again, the content of that awareness is not reducible to its overt manifestation. Another writer, John O’Dea (2011) suggests that the room there is for the notion of our ‘employing’ our sense organs as ‘tools’ to explore our environment is the basis for the traditional count of just five senses. He recognizes that our employing a particular sense is a manifestation of perceptual knowledge of the causality of sense experience to the extent of our knowing which organ or part of the body is being affected by the perceived object, knowledge he attributes to proprioception. But, as I have argued, it is normally through a fairly complex cross-modal integration or conflation of the deliverances of other senses with those of the proprioceptive senses, rather than through proprioception alone, that the content of our sense experience includes the broad causal relationship of the perceived environment to our sensory experience of it. Moreover, he claims that the proprioceptive senses themselves miss the traditional count because, whether or not we suppose that there are organs of proprioception (O’Dea does), they are not organs we employ or, indeed, are aware of.

51 Hurley 1998; Noë 2004.

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It is surely not implausible, however, that a tightrope walker is consciously ‘employing’ a well-honed sense of balance, not to speak of his close attention to how his body is disposed from moment to moment. Even moving a limb in order to be clearer as to its position is arguably ‘employing’ an organ of kinaesthesia as much as reaching out to feel something is employing an organ of touch. It is certainly plausible that in proprioception, as in other modalities of perception, we are aware of the intimate causal relation between the object of perception—our body as disposed in space—and the perceptual experience. There is here, of course, no causal pathway from perceived environment to perceiver, but the very bodily immediacy of proprioception would seem to ensure that the object of the experience is presented as its cause. Just as I know how to end the discomfort of an object’s pressing into my arm because I am perceptually aware of what is causing the experience, so I know how to end the discomfort of an awkward posture because I am perceptually aware of what is causing the experience.52 In any case, as we have seen and these last examples illustrate, our knowledge, when we perceive something, of our causal-cum-cognitive relation to that thing is not only manifested in the ‘employment’ of our senses or our ‘sensory-motor skills’, but also and equally in reactions to unsought perception, as we slap an arm bitten by a mosquito, cover our ears at a loud sound, or shield our eyes from a bright light. How do we have such knowledge of these causal relations? I have argued that they are not inferred, but are presented in perceptual experience itself. We do not have to learn by trial and error that, given such and such a painful sensation, it is this part of the body that should be moved or soothed; or that, given a repellent taste, it is appropriate to empty the mouth; or that, given a small free-flying object fast approaching along the line of sight, that it is the head that should be ducked, or face protected. How an infant’s initially shaky perceptual and agent capacities come into such basic working order together is a question for developmental psychology and neurophysiology, but the intellectualist notion of a ‘conceptual scheme’ or ‘system of belief ’, as it were a theory of the world clicking into place ‘as light dawns gradually over the whole’, is unlikely to be any more help than the assumption of some empiricists that it is inference based on experienced ‘constant conjunctions’ that does the trick.

2.6 Primary and Secondary Knowledge To sum up the conclusion of the last two sections, when we perceive such a state of affairs or event as, say, a cat’s crossing the lawn, that state of affairs or event is not, of course, something presented in isolation. We do not perceive just that one propositionally shaped or conceptually individuated state of affairs or happening, or, for that 52 A central thesis of O’Dea 2011 is that the only subjective difference between different sense modalities consists in a proprioceptive awareness of the organ involved, a claim I imagine I am not alone in finding unpersuasive, and which, together with O’Dea’s view of it, would seem to entail, equally against all experience, that there is no subjective aspect to the proprioception itself.

62 Knowing and Seeing matter, any determinate number of such objects. The proposition that the cat is crossing the lawn picks out just one element or ‘aspect’ of the whole changing situation that we perceive from our position within it, one among the indefinitely many other features or aspects of that situation that we may take in, whether attentively or not, during the time over which we take in that precisely described state of affairs. Moreover, the state of affairs itself, like the rest of the situation or scene as it is perceived, is presented not only in its spatial, but also in its causal relationship to us, the perceiver. However much we are paying attention to the cat’s movements, we are also, at least normally53 if generally less attentively, perceptually aware of ourselves as perceiving it and, in perceiving it, as being in a physical, causal relation to it. That is, we aware of how we are perceiving it in a way stronger or richer than simply by being aware from the qualitative character of our experience that the object is visually perceived. The content of the total experience is such that we are aware of the source of our knowledge that the cat is crossing the lawn is the cat’s crossing the lawn, and are perceptually aware of that in being perceptually aware of the spatio-causal route from object to us as perceivers—not in all its physical and physiological detail of course, but broadly, enough for ordinary practical and epistemic purposes. We accordingly know what to do—that is, how to manipulate the immediate situation and our relation to what we are perceiving—in order to learn more. That, I would suggest, is central to what it is for the object to be directly ‘presented’ to the knower, rather than being merely ‘represented’ in thought or imagination, and also for what is known to be immediately evident to the knower. That is to say, the argument is a contribution to a phenomenological analysis of what it is like to be in direct cognitive contact with one’s environment—with the world in which we all exist and which is independent of our awareness of it. As I noted in section 2.1 of this chapter, philosophical realists have traditionally tended to appeal to three features of perceptual experience: its coherence, its involuntariness, and its qualitative character, the character that the sceptic Hume supposed he could dismissively capture by the term ‘vivacity’. Such considerations are not wholly without force. Only a philosophical sceptic or devotee of dystopian science-fiction could suppose those features of experience capable of being fully replicated in a totally comprehensive, lifelong quasi-hallucination. But the ‘evidence’ of sense experience is not explained by there being a good argument from these features for believing that it has an independent, ‘external’ cause. It is something more immediate. The general notions of coherence and involuntariness do not capture the significance of the specific, complex, integrated content of the total experience. The integration of 53 I do not want to deny (or assert) that there are, or could be, abnormal trance-like or dream-like (perhaps so-called ‘out-of-body’) experiences in which the perceiver’s perceptual awareness of their own presence or physical relation to what is perceived is more or less suppressed. I do want to say that, if such awareness could be totally suppressed, what was perceived would lack the content necessary for it to ground perceptual (‘primary’) knowledge of the perceiver’s environment, whether or not it happened to give rise to firm belief, and whether or not beliefs provoked by such experiences tended to be true.

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the senses, and our awareness of the causality of our experience, are not simply a matter of the different senses, like different witnesses, telling us consistent stories in co-conscious experiences, together with our being aware that our sense experience is not just up to us. For not only are possessors of perceptual knowledge so suitably related to the object of their knowledge as to have that knowledge, they perceive themselves as so related, and know that they are so related as surely and in the same way, through the very same perceptual experiences, as they have any perceptual knowledge at all of their environment. Conscious perceptual knowledge is such that those that have it not only have perceptual knowledge of their environment, but also perceptual knowledge that and of how they have that knowledge. They have that logically second-order knowledge without second-order reflection. They have what I have called ‘primary knowledge’, knowledge gained by being evidently, self-consciously, in direct cognitive contact with the object of the knowledge.

Self-evidence and a priori knowledge Bare ‘evidence’, without need for supporting ‘evidence’ in the secondary sense, was standardly ascribed to the deliverances of the senses by classical empiricists, or by those, at least, who had not bought into the idea purveyed by rationalists and some sceptics that we infer (whether legitimately or not) the existence of external objects from immediately perceived sensations or sense data, a view that treated sense experiences as mere indications of external objects. This chapter offers an analysis of what that evidence comes to. In the long shadow of Plato, however, philosophers, at least in their studies, have been more likely to associate the notion of bare ‘evidence’, unsupported by further reasons, with the ‘self-evidence’ of such rationalist paradigms as the Principle of Identity or geometrical axioms. These are propositions such that, to employ that revealing, inescapable metaphor (embedded, so one would guess, in most natural languages sophisticated enough to allow easy reflection on such knowledge), we can just see them to be necessarily true. Whatever we think of the old view that certain propositions are evident to anyone who understands them, or certain necessary relationships to anyone who clearly conceives of them, it is surely difficult to deny that it is indeed evident to most of us, without further proof, reasons, or justification, that 2 + 3 = 5, or that if A = B, and B = C, then A = C. We understand why it is so. We believe it, not because we have or can give reasons for believing it, but because it is evident, obvious. It would seem impossible to explain the bare evidence of such necessary facts in terms of the perspicuous causality of our cognitive relation to them, since they are not part of the causal order. Philosophers looking for a definition of knowledge that will capture what is in common to empirical knowledge of contingent facts and a priori knowledge of necessary facts are therefore liable to reach for such a wider Nozickian54 54 Nozick 1981: 172–96. For some discussion, see Ayers 1991: I.133–8.

64 Knowing and Seeing analysis as S would not have believed that P, unless P and S believes that P, because P, allowing for a no further determined link between knowledge and its object, one that may or may not be causal. However, a more direct approach to the analogy between understanding and sense perception might be more illuminating. One thing the metaphor of sight suggests is that we are in immediate cognitive contact with what is understood. The fact itself lies open to us, so to speak. We not only know it, but in virtue of the way we know it we know how we know it—that is, how we are related to it so as to know it. More can be said. In the case of primary knowledge of contingent facts we are characteristically aware of the causality of our knowledge or belief, not only in being broadly aware of the route by which the object of perception is having an effect on our sense organs, but in being aware of the role that our consciously perceiving and, perhaps, recognizing the object play in that causality. So, mutatis mutandis, with evident necessary facts.55 There is no ‘causal route’ from abstract fact to thinker, but there is the awareness, not only of the fact (whatever such facts consist in), but of our understanding it. There may be such a thing as unconscious understanding, but paradigmatic, primary understanding is self-consciously understanding. In this, understanding resembles recognition and memory. If I recognize someone as the woman I spoke to a week ago, I know how I know that she is the same woman in that I know that I see and somehow recognize her, even if I can’t put words to just what it is about her appearance and manner in virtue of which I recognize her. There is such a thing as memory and recognition that is unconsciously so, but paradigmatic memory of things and events is consciously memory, and paradigmatic memory of facts is also consciously so. Similarly, I know how I know that, if A is a part of B, and B is a part of C, then A is a part of C. I am aware of the causality of my knowledge or belief to that extent, even though the necessary fact of which I have knowledge is not part of the causal order. In understanding the necessary fact, I am ipso facto consciously aware of understanding it, and that it is by understanding it that I know it.

‘Secondary knowledge’, and why it counts as knowledge According to the traditional view examined in Chapter 1, only primary knowledge is in the strict sense truly knowledge—for rationalists, of course, not even all of that. Why, then, should anything else be called ‘knowledge’? What is ‘secondary knowledge’ and why should it count as knowledge? First, ‘evidence’, certainty and knowledge such that subjects know that and how they have the knowledge, is not restricted to primary knowledge that comes with direct cognitive contact with its object. The etymological relationship between the two main 55 Some may object strongly to the word ‘fact’, which (unsurprisingly, given its origin) is often used more narrowly. Though I am myself fairly happy with ‘necessary facts’, and more so with ‘necessary relations’, I would baulk at ‘necessary states of affairs’ in this use of ‘necessary’. I have views on the matter, but I deliberately avoid trying to give an account of such ‘necessary facts’ or, in any detail, of our knowledge of them, in this book. Ars longa, vita brevis.

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senses of the word ‘evidence’ suggests that the ‘evidence’ of what is simply evident or manifest, literally or metaphorically ‘seen’, can be, as it were, transferred or extended by inference.56 What is simply evident, or enough of it, can so serve as ‘the evidence’ for a conclusion as to make that conclusion itself evident and certain, if not ‘primary knowledge’ in the full sense. Such knowledge is perspicuously so to the knower. Consider a successful ‘inference to the best explanation’ that is not just reasonable, but succeeds in drawing the true conclusion that P from observed facts or states of affairs that are correctly taken to be explained by its being the case that P, in the absence of any epistemically possible rival explanation of them. It is not just the best, and the correct, but the only epistemically possible explanation in the field—i.e. it is certain that P—so that the upshot of the inference is knowledge. If faced with the challenging question, ‘How do you know that?’, the subject can simply rehearse the inference by stating the evidence, and explaining why it is evidence for their conclusion. But that itself is in effect to trace the causal route between the state of affairs concluded to exist, or to have existed, and their present knowledge. It is to explain how they are so related to the object of their knowledge as to have knowledge of it. As with perception, the subject’s cognitive faculties will be engaged, not simply in the apprehension of the causal route from object to knowledge, but as constituting, in their operations, a part of that causal route, a role of which the subject will be conscious in so far as the inference is conscious.

An example: Inference to the best explanation An example may make this clearer. Suppose that a bear has recently passed this way, leaving footprints and droppings, and that I see these, know enough about the local bears to recognize them, notice that the dung is still warm, and conclude truly that there was a bear here recently. The bear, in passing, caused the indications, and the indications, by being perceived and recognized as such, caused my true belief. First, is this conclusion known? Well, as the case is so far described, not necessarily, since there may be a possible alternative explanation. It may be possible, for example, that someone is employed by the tourist agency to make bear-like footprints and scatter realistic heaps of heated bear dung from the zoo to disguise the fact that wild bears are now very rare in this region. If that is an epistemic possibility, then, for all I know, what are in fact genuine indications of a bear’s having passed by might not have been so. However that may be, we can see that one general condition of ‘evidence’ is fulfilled in that the inference itself charts the actual causal route from the state of affairs of which I have inferential knowledge, the recent presence of a bear, to the current indications that I now perceive and recognize. To that extent, I know how I know. 56 The word ‘evidence’ has two main related senses. They are: ‘(1) the quality of being evident, (2) a mark or sign that renders something evident.’ (Concise Oxford English Dictionary before 2000, when the first sense mysteriously drops out of the article.) The relation between the senses is simple. Strictly, only what in itself possesses the ‘quality’ of evidence1 can serve as evidence2 for something else, rendering it (derivatively) evident. So, ‘The country gave evidence of careful cultivation’ is approximately equivalent to ‘It was (derivatively) evident that the country had been carefully cultivated.’

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It is relevant that the perception of the indications, their recognition, and the inference are all conscious: in arriving at my conclusion I am aware of the part these cognitive steps themselves have played in the journey. I might appropriately rehearse them in answer to the question ‘How do you know?’—‘I saw prints in soft mud, and warm dung. I knew from experience that both were bear and so I drew the evident conclusion’—just as one might say ‘I can see it’ in answer to such a question as ‘How do you know that there’s a squirrel in the garden?’ Or I might simply present the argument for the conclusion that it is objectively certain that a bear was here recently. Knowledge is always in the end someone’s knowledge, however, and the presently relevant point is that such inferred knowledge can be seen as a kind of extension of perceptual knowledge, retaining a crucial feature of ordinary perceptual knowledge, and a condition of ‘evidence’ in its first sense, in that the causal relation between object and knowledge or belief is perspicuous to the knower. There is no mystery to the subjects themselves about how they have come knowingly to latch onto an unperceived state of affairs. There is nothing of a hunch about the belief involved. That does not, as we have seen, mean that with that evidence there could not in principle be room for reasonable doubt, not to speak yet of the arguably unreasonable doubt of the philosophical sceptic. Roughly (and the point will receive further discussion in Part Two), if the conclusion of such an inference is to be evident, indeed to be knowledge, not only must ‘the best explanation’ be the right explanation, but there must be no alternative explanations of ‘the evidence’ that are at the time epistemically possible. Something superficially similar, but also significantly different, applies to perceptual knowledge, in that there could ‘in principle’ be other explanations of a sensory experience than that it is caused by its intentional object. All grounds for claiming knowledge are ‘defeasible’, another point to be explored in Part Two. The present point, however, is simply that the analogy between perceptual knowledge and knowledge achieved by inference to the only epistemically possible explanation— that is, the tight link between knowledge and certainty—gives reason to allow that inferred knowledge, although not counted as ‘knowledge’ in the strict sense by the Plato-to-Locke tradition, can relate closely enough to the perceptual paradigm fully to ‘deserve the name of knowledge’. So much is consonant with the model of transferable ‘evidence’ embodied in the dual use of that term. Such knowledge is clearly not epistemologically ground-level or immediate in the way in which perceptual knowledge is ground-level and immediate. But it is knowledge, and the traditional view that it is not knowledge but justified belief is committed either to the view that no amount of evidence can render an inferred conclusion objectively certain (in turn, derivatively, ‘evident’), or to breaking the intuitive link between knowledge and objective certainty.57

57 That link is denied by some current theorists: so-called ‘fallibilists’ (discussed in Chapters 5 and 6, esp. section 5.4) argue that high probability is sufficient for knowledge. But here what is in question is the possibility of breaking the link from the other direction, by allowing that inference can supply certainty but, nevertheless, not knowledge.

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The line standardly taken in the early modern period was the former, mitigated by the thought that ‘moral certainty’ is enough for practical purposes.

Secondary knowledge that is not ‘perspicuous’ What about other cases of knowledge, or of what we are prepared to call ‘knowledge’ in other than philosophical contexts, that are even further from the paradigms of ordinary perceptual knowledge or the understanding of necessary truth? ‘Externalists’ and advocates of purely causal theories of knowledge tend to lay heavy emphasis on cases of knowledge such that the subjects are not conscious or aware of how they know what they know, or even that they know it. We may remember the date of an event (to take a common example) without knowing that we remember it or, even if we are sure of that, we may not know how we came to know it. We may also remember an event or object within our own experience, without believing or knowing that we remember it: for example, we may think that we have dreamt the event, or we may not be sure whether we remember it or have imagined it on the basis of someone else’s account of it. We may know that a theorem is true without remembering the proof that convinced us, or our being convinced by it, or that we were convinced by a proof, and we may even do so without being at all sure that the theorem is correct, or that we know it. Such situations are neither unusual nor paradoxical. It is therefore natural to talk of ‘unconscious’ memory and knowledge (with no psychoanalytic overtones) when we remember or know something without knowing that we do so. What makes such cases more than mere belief with the good luck to be true, and sufficiently like paradigmatic, primary knowledge to be counted as knowledge, if peripherally so, is a causal connection with the reality that is the object of belief, a connection that is at least broadly of a type that in other cases is associated with perspicuous or conscious knowledge. Crudely, the belief or hunch or what is supposed mere imagination must be the product of a faculty the mechanism and operation of which is shared with, or analogous to, the mechanism and operation of some faculty or faculties such as grounds what is consciously known. The point can be illustrated by reference to perceptual knowledge. At first blush the notions of unconscious perception and of perceptual knowledge that is not perspicuously so may seem more paradoxical than that of unconscious memory. It has long been recognized, however, that we may see or feel or hear something without noticing or being aware that we do so. The experience of recalling something about a situation perceived in the past that one did not consciously take in at the time is not uncommon, although that may be a matter of identifying or interpreting, on reflection, what had been consciously perceived, if not attended to. A clearer example is that of subliminal perception. The appearance of a message or picture flashed onto a screen, for example, may be too brief to be consciously registered, but may nevertheless be sufficient to influence the subject’s behaviour and beliefs. The now much studied and discussed phenomenon of ‘blindsight’, which occurs in rare cases when brain damage has reduced the subject’s field of conscious vision, supplies an even more radical example.

68 Knowing and Seeing In some cases the subjects are, or claim to be, entirely unaware of what lies to one side of what would be a normal visual field, but their responses to forced-choice questions or more subtly devised tasks appear so influenced by objects of which they disclaim conscious visual awareness as to give convincing evidence that they can in fact locate and identify material things, shapes, movements, meaningful sentences, and so forth lying in the occluded area. They may also retain some unprompted practical competence over the ‘lost’ part of their visual field, exhibiting a certain capacity, for example, automatically to pick up specific objects needed, although there is no conscious visual awareness of them. Such unconscious, if notably imperfect rapport with the world, acquired through some of the mechanisms of sight, makes it natural to say that the subject unconsciously sees and knows where and what the object is, however surprised they may be at the success of their responses. Their own correct answers to relevant questions may seem subjectively to be guesses or hunches, or are perhaps not confident enough even to count as hunches. Confidence may only come with repeated success, and with the subjects’ increased understanding of their condition. As with knowledge in general and memory in particular, a distinction can thus be drawn between primary and secondary perception.

Could someone have only secondary knowledge? Why ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’? One point of this ranking is to mark the philosophically crucial claim that, without primary knowledge, there would be no knowledge. No being could possess knowledge to whom nothing was evident. That is, no being possesses any knowledge unless it possesses some knowledge such that, when it is acquired, the origin of the knowledge in what is known is immediately perspicuous to the knower. That condition is fulfilled by every animal with conscious perceptual knowledge of the world. So why couldn’t some subject have only secondary knowledge—that is, with no ordinarily conscious perceptual knowledge at all, but nevertheless with knowledge of its environment? Let us suppose that the cognitive connection with their environment necessary for any subjects to have knowledge of it and of their own action (if it can be called action) within it, is entirely through secondary perception such as blindsight or subliminal perception, but total. Suppose that such unconscious sensory input gave rise in them to a kind of ongoing, coherent, more or less comprehensive grand Hunch about their environment, confident and true. One might first ask how such a Hunch could have any empirical content, and what would or could it be like to be an animal that did not have perceptual consciousness, but nevertheless had thoughts about the world. Perhaps these problems are sufficiently mitigated if it is supposed that the subject once perceived things normally, but in any case the subject would be unable ever to check, even if they once could, whether or how far the current Hunch is correct, whether their actions are appropriate, or whether they were in fact doing what they believed they were doing. There would be no direct cognitive contact with the world, a kind of sceptical nightmare.

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My account of the ‘evidence’ of perceptual knowledge, however, which has concentrated on its content, might wrongly be taken to suggest that nothing of epistemological significance is lacking in the supposition that a subject could have only secondary, ‘unconscious’ knowledge provided that it is explicitly built into it that subjects have true beliefs with the relevant content. That is, if it is stipulated that they have true beliefs not only about their environment but about their spatio-causal relationship to their environment—indeed, that they have true beliefs about how they come to believe truly what they believe.58 Yet all that that stipulation of belief would do is to put our imaginary person into a roughly similar position to that of a blind-sighted person who has been enlightened as to their situation, except for the crucial difference that the latter is able to check up directly on the truth of their ‘blind’ beliefs or hunches—most simply by moving or, indeed, looking around. Even a totally blindsighted person (there are said to be such) could employ other senses. The understanding of their situation by any blind-sighted person is grounded on, and would be impossible without, conscious perception of, and engagement with, their environment, including the psychologists who are so eagerly testing and recording and explaining the subject’s reactions. The conscious awareness of how the observed object or state of affairs is affecting us perceptually that comes with normal perception of an object or state of affairs cannot be replaced without epistemic loss simply by supplying the subject in our thoughtexperiment with a set of ‘blind’ true beliefs having the same content and external cause as the awareness, and as reliably generated. Primary knowledge is not just caused, but is also consciously grounded, and primary perceptual knowledge is grounded in its objects as they are perspicuously presented or revealed in sense perception in their changing spatio-causal relationship to the subject. Primary perceptual knowledge that P is grounded, not simply in the subject’s perceiving that P, but in the whole extent of their awareness, which includes their being perceptually aware of their physical and cognitive relationship to their environment, of which the articulate judgement that P picks out, for whatever reason, just one ‘aspect’—whether or not the subject makes, or is equipped to make, that articulate judgement.

58 Cf., for example, the extraordinarily insouciant and unconvincing (out of the context of that time) identification of awareness with belief in Davidson 1986: 111.

3 Conceptualism and Perceptual Knowledge 3.1 Aristotle versus Kant The common-sense assumption that our senses and the basic knowledge of our environment that they afford us are faculties and knowledge such as other animals possess, an idea that has played a role in much philosophy of knowledge at least since Aristotle, has not gone unchallenged. A rival account of human perceptual knowledge, and of what it is for human perceivers to know that and how they have it, representing a different, ‘conceptualist’ approach in theory of knowledge that can surface in a variety of ways, here calls for general consideration. It is a view deriving from the old idea that in all human knowing reason plays a role, so that what is known, as it is known, necessarily possesses logical form. In this view, as it has developed, the object of human knowledge, ‘knowledge’ in the full sense, is essentially propositional in form or, if not propositional, at least ‘conceptual’, and that is taken to imply that such knowledge is possible only for those possessing language. Reason is also called on to explain what it is for human perceivers to know that and how they have knowledge, even perceptual knowledge. If knowledge is ascribed to animals and infants, then on this view it must be second-class, preconceptual, prelinguistic proto-knowledge, less than fully knowledge. Although the origins of this approach lie in antiquity, the dominant influences on analytic philosophers who adopt it now are Kant and Frege. After a look at its earlier history, section  3.2 contains a summary of the most relevant Kantian argument together with some account of the conceptualist strain in analytic philosophy. Sections 3.3 and 3.4 are dedicated to critical consideration of some of the claims made about perceptual knowledge by John McDowell, currently one of the most active exponents of conceptualist theory. His view is of particular relevance to the theme of this book, since he argues explicitly, as I do, that perception is direct cognitive contact with the world, and that perceptual knowledge comes with knowledge that one has it—a feature of perceptual knowledge for which he gives a quite different explanation from the one given here in Chapter 2. In section 3.3 his original thesis is considered, while section  3.4 turns to his view as revised in response to criticism. Finally, section 3.5 will engage with ‘sortalist’ theory of individuation and identity, perhaps the most widely and firmly accepted of all conceptualist doctrines among analytic

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philosophers, and one to which McDowell alludes favourably. It will be proposed that the phenomenological analysis of perceptual experience given in Chapter  2, together with further argument, counts decisively against both McDowell’s claims for conceptualism and comprehensive sortalism.

3.2 Sources of Conceptualism The conceptualist approach to knowledge, dominant, in one form or another, in much current epistemology, has a long history and diverse, variously motivated sources. One of the oldest of these is the Platonic (and Neoplatonic) conception of reality as one or, indeed, ‘the One’. On that view, all distinctions drawn between elements or aspects of unitary reality involve a kind of distortion or inadequacy in so far as they impede comprehension of that unity, and so fall short of the highest kind of knowledge.1 But such conceptual distinctions are nevertheless taken to be necessary for ordinary human knowledge—any knowledge, that is to say, that is less than God-like comprehension of Being sub specie aeternitatis. God has no need of the logic or reasoning made possible by such distinctions. Another source, not unrelated but with a rather different motivation, was early modern criticism of scholastic ontology, in particular the accusation that it takes merely logical distinctions, ‘distinctions of reason’, for real distinctions, notably in reifying ‘accidents’. Thus Bacon charged Aristotle with ‘fashioning the world out of the categories’, an accusation that, in one form or another, became a commonplace of the ‘new philosophy’ of the seventeenth century. Some works on logic broadly within the Aristotelian tradition, however, were also firm enough that logical reasoning is not only necessary for systematic human ‘science’, scientia, but also impossible without reasoning that takes logical forms imposed by thought on its non-logical subject-matter. One logic,2 for example, much in use in the seventeenth century, starts with the assertion that all the objects of logic are entia rationis, beings of reason as opposed to ‘real’ beings, since logic deals with the conceptions or categories under which we speak, think, and reason about things. The world as it is the object of rational thought, and so knowledge, is articulated in a way in which it is not articulated in itself. Such ideas as these were developed by at least one seventeenthcentury philosopher in the direction of a comprehensive idealism,3 and helped prepare the ground for the role that Kant, a century later, assigned to reason, logic, and the forms of judgement in structuring the objects of experience and knowledge.4 1 A view discussed in Chapter 1, sections 1.2–3. 2 Martin Smiglecki, Logica (1638). 3 Richard Burthogge, probably following in the footsteps of Arnold Geulincx. For more on this significantly innovative and interesting thinker, and on moves towards idealism in the seventeenth century, see Nuchelmans 1983; Ayers 2005b. 4 The thought that possession of a language with logical structure is a condition of rationality was influential beyond philosophy, not least in education. It appeared, for example, in an argument for an eighteenthcentury policy of preventing congenitally deaf children from using signing. Only if they were taught to

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Kant’s transcendental idealism This not the place, nor I the person, to offer a close analysis of the arguments of the Critique of Pure Reason, but in order to assess the influence of Kant on analytic philosophy, a little, at least, needs to be said. Briefly, then (and with apologies to those familiar with the story here so simplified), Kant argues that the unity of the conscious states of the self, taken by rationalists to constitute a paradigm, perhaps our only paradigm of the unity of a substance with its accidents (Leibniz was notably emphatic), is not theoretically free-standing under that interpretation. Indeed, any unifying ordering of our experiences, even such as is assumed in Locke’s conception of the self as ‘a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places’ (a conception deliberately neutral with respect to substantial unity), presupposes the unity of a perceived material world. As one might roughly restate the Kantian point, one’s awareness and conception of oneself as the enduring, self-aware subject of a synchronically and diachronically coherent consciousness requires an awareness and conception of the object of perceptual consciousness as a synchronically and diachronically coherent, substantial world, subject to law. Notably, endurance presupposes objective time-determination, and that presupposes law-abiding clocks—a point Kant exploits against Cartesian scepticism. That conception of a substantial world subject to law is what, for Kant, connects together particular ‘intuitions’ that would otherwise (per impossibile, no doubt) simply be disparate, unrelated (or only contingently and externally related) ‘blind’ experiences, as experiences of one world. At the same time it permits empirical knowledge of oneself, through inner sense, as the subject of temporally ordered states of consciousness in cognitive relation to material things. The significance, for Kant, of this relationship between an order of my experiences taken formally, as states of a single, coherent consciousness, and their order taken objectively, as experiences of a single coherent world, is that it flows from, and is explained by, his ‘transcendental idealism’. For the principles of order in both cases, Kant argues, are the categories or forms of judgement, deriving from the faculty of rational judgement, when they are applied to the objects of outer and inner sense, that is, to appearances under the forms of each sense, space and time respectively. It is because these categorial concepts of pure reason are brought to bear in sensory ‘intuition’ on spatio-temporal ‘appearances’ that the latter are united in experience as appearances of a natural, coherent, law-governed material world, with determinate location in space and time. We experience things in that way because we are rational beings and reason requires it, not because they are communicate in propositionally structured sentences, some argued, could they fulfil their nature as rational beings, rising above their merely animal nature so as to think in accordance with principles of reason (Rée 1999) . Perhaps fortunately for their charges, not all educators of the deaf shared that formalist prejudice. The relation between formal (syllogistic) logic and the structure of natural human reasoning was for long a hotly debated issue (see e.g. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding IV. xvii).

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that way in themselves. So the order of rational thought is prior to, and explains, the experienced order of nature. What Kant sees as a great achievement of this ‘Copernican revolution’ is that it explains the possibility of ‘synthetic a priori’ truths, such as the principle that the universe is law-governed, which are both a priori necessary and yet say something about the world of which we have experience, prior to that experience. Mathematical science, also taken to be synthetic a priori, is explained as flowing from the forms of pure intuition, space and time. The main point of the model, as far as Kant is concerned, is to endorse a priori, and at the same time to disarm, the conception of the world as Nature, the object of science in which everything happens of necessity. It disarms that conception by, in effect, representing it as the filter through which reality has to be apprehended by the free, rational, morally accountable beings that human beings are, rather than a matter of the way the things they apprehend, including themselves, are ‘in themselves’.

Conceptualism in twentieth-century analytic philosophy If it is his commitment to that extraordinary argument, brilliantly worked out as it is, that explains why it is essential to Kant’s main thesis that human sense experience is shaped by a system of categorial concepts, what is the explanation of the conceptualism of twentieth-century neo-Kantian analytic philosophers who discard the transcendental idealism? I take it that one source is the Pragmatist reaction to Kant’s outdated assumption that he can identify, through the categorial concepts of substance and deterministic law, the general form that any possible physics must take. Another perceived weakness is the exclusive role of Euclidean geometry in his doctrine of space, and the conceptions of absolute space and time. Such criticisms led to the view that human conceptual schemes are modifiable, open to improvement or replacement for pragmatic reasons, or even that different schemes may be useful for different purposes, one for theoretical physics, for example, and another for the practicalities of everyday life. A second motive favouring conceptualism was simply the role ascribed to philosophy of language and philosophical logic by analytic philosophy of all varieties. Here a great conceptualist influence was Frege, whose arguments relating to individuation and identity were commonly pressed on philosophy students by the 1950s, not least in the United Kingdom, with beginners set to read Locke on identity and diversity. Frege’s work was the object of translations by leading linguistic philosophers, J.  L.  Austin (1950), Anthony Quinton (1956), and Peter Geach and Max Black(1952). Michael Dummett, soon a dominant influence at Oxford, advised Geach and Black on their 1960 second edition and himself published the product of years of work on Frege’s philosophy of language in 1973. David Wiggins, still now a leading advocate of conceptualist theory of individuation, first formed his views in the late 1950s and the 1960s in a context in which there seemed5 no alternative to conceptualism.

5 I was there too!

74 Knowing and Seeing Quine was perhaps the most significant mid-twentieth-century figure subject to the influence of both Pragmatism and the work of Frege and Russell in logic and the philosophy of language. His doctrine of ‘ontological relativity’ presents a picture according to which input from the senses could in principle stimulate belief-systems (or ‘theories’) of indefinitely various ontological form, the fittest to survive being the most effective for predictive purposes. Strawson’s ‘descriptive metaphysics’, in effect a response to the ‘anything goes’ implications of Quine’s doctrine and a defence of the everyday conception of a sensible material world (and to that extent a defence of Kant), took the form of a ‘transcendental’ argument for the inevitability of something like ‘our conceptual scheme’, given that we are in cognitive contact with independent objects. From the 1950s, at least, important debates were for decades almost universally framed in terms of ‘concepts’ (often ‘conceptual schemes’) and language. Among analytical philosophers in the second half of the twentieth century, that was the default mode of thought about intentionality, even the intentionality of perceptual experience. Stuart Hampshire, Donald Davidson, Wilfred Sellars, Peter Geach, Michael Dummett, David Wiggins, John McDowell, and many others offer further variations on the theme, often with an admiring eye on Kant or on Frege, or on both, even though Kant does not explicitly tie rationality and the role of ‘judgement’ and the categories in structuring experience as tightly as they do to the possession of language. For the analytic conceptualist, we may share senses with other animals, but perceptual knowledge, perceptual experience, even, for some, belief, in the full or central sense of those terms, is seen as a prerogative of human beings capable of speech and articulate rationality.

3.3 John McDowell: Concepts and Perception A leading, currently active proponent and tenacious defender of a conceptualist approach to perception and perceptual knowledge is John McDowell. McDowell’s first sustained argument for the view was expounded in his influential book Mind and World (McDowell 1994), with defensive explications and modifications in later work. He writes in the wake of philosophers of a previous generation particularly inspired by Kant, notably Peter Strawson and Wilfred Sellars.

Mind and World, and after The argument of Mind and World is initially deployed in opposition to the extreme coherence epistemology of Donald Davidson, in some vogue when McDowell was formulating his ideas. Davidson embraced the old idealist argument6 that there can be no direct access to reality such that we can compare a belief with, or base it on, how things are in themselves. Consequently, although the truth of a true belief consists in its correspondence with the way things are, our reasons for any belief can only be other 6 For perhaps the first clear exposition of essentially the same two-step argument for a coherence epistemology, see Burthogge 1678. For an account of his argument, see Ayers 2005b: 183–5.

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beliefs, so that the criterion of its truth can only lie in its coherence with the subject’s other beliefs. The role of perception, in Davidson’s view, is simply to cause beliefs, or inclinations to believe, that the rational subject assesses as they are compatible or cohere with their whole existing belief-system, a coherence that might sometimes be best achieved by modifying the latter. For Davidson, it is belief that is structured by language. Sensations or sensory states as such are not, for him, intentional states of mind, with objects and content. In response, McDowell argues, reasonably enough, that our sense experience is direct cognitive access to the way things are, not a matter of blank sensory happenings with an effect on belief. But unsurprisingly, given the local zeitgeist, he is sufficiently impressed by Davidson’s argument to feel it appropriate to insist that in perception we are in a relational state with belief-like propositional content—that is, with a fact or fact-like ‘aspect’ of reality as its object, perception of which can be cited as conclusive reason for belief. Employing the Kantian distinction between ‘receptivity’ or sensitivity and ‘spontaneity’ or judgement, he proposes that concepts that are or could be ‘actively’ exercised in judgement are ‘passively’ exercised in all human perception. Thus perception affords direct access to reality as tailored to ground belief: ‘In experience one takes in, for instance sees, that things are thus and so’.7 That things are thus and so is the content of the experience. Since it is also the content of a possible judgement, it is conceptual, indeed propositional. At the same time it is ‘an aspect of the layout of the world’ or ‘how things are’, ‘a perceptible fact’. ‘Facts’, we may indeed agree, are essentially propositional in form, tightly linked to statements as they are. As Strawson put it, facts are what true statements state. Whether that tight link to statements is entirely compatible with their being the primary objects of perception is one of the things to be discussed in the next chapter, when a negative answer will be given. As it appears more clearly from writings after Mind and World, knowledge, for McDowell, at least knowledge in the full or primary sense, knowledge as human beings have it, is self-consciously knowledge. Those who possess knowledge know that and how they have it. They judge with reason, and in order consciously to have reasons, McDowell thinks, drawing on Sellars’s conception of ‘the space of reasons’, it is necessary to be able to give reasons—to answer the question, ‘How do you know that S is P?’, by giving reason for belief, for example, ‘Because I saw that S is P.’8 Only with this ‘self-conscious’ state of perceptual knowing does a perceiver enjoy ‘a perceptual state in which some feature of their environment is there for them, perceptually present to

7 McDowell 1994: 26. 8 See e.g. McDowell 2011: 12: ‘[The] warrant by which a belief counts as knowledgeable is accessible to the knower; it is at least potentially known by her. Someone who has a bit of knowledge of the relevant sort is self-conscious about the credentials of her knowledge. As Sellars puts it, she occupies a position in the space of being able to justify what one says.’ McDowell’s conception of knowledge is thus firmly ‘internalist’, and, of course, with narrower extension than ‘knowledge’ has in ordinary parlance.

76 Knowing and Seeing their rationally self-conscious awareness.’9 Why is that supposed to require that sense experience itself has conceptual content, that conceptual capacities such as are actively employed in expressed judgements are passively employed in perception by linguistically competent human beings? Here is what seems to be McDowell’s first answer, given in response to a charge that his account of human experience is too ‘intellectualist’: There is no excessive intellectualism in a conception of a capacity in whose exercise a subject acquires knowledge that is grounded, and known by her to be grounded, in the perceptual presence to her of objective states of affairs. An ordinary adult human being might not put it in those terms, but that is what she would mean if she said something like ‘I can tell a green thing when I see one’. (McDowell 2011: 32)

The argument here seems to be that for the colour of a green thing to be ‘perceptually present’ to the subject’s ‘rationally self-conscious awareness’ they must recognize it as green, and for that they need the adjectival concept green. Their knowing that and how they have perceptual knowledge is here virtually identified, it seems, with the essential self-consciousness of recognition of a determinate property. (There is such a thing as, in some sense, unconscious recognition, but that, arguably, is not full or paradigmatic recognition, as unconscious understanding is not full understanding.) When recognizing that something falls under a general concept, the subject is aware of so recognizing it, and consequently can give—and so have—as their reason for judging and saying ‘(I know that) it is green’ that they see that it is green.

Conceptual content and perceptual content: two objections to the story so far McDowell’s account of the role of conceptual capacities in perception, as so far expounded, is open a number of objections. Here are a couple, at least the first of which has led him to modify his views. That is the objection that recognition may sometimes affect—but does not in itself play an essential role in determining–how things appear to the senses.10 The idea of recognizing or ‘telling’ that what is perceived falls under a general concept (that it is green, for example) won’t do the work McDowell has asked from it, or certainly seems to have asked from it, in his argument that conceptual capacities are ‘passively’ exercised in perception. Two people may see the same thing—a bird, a stone, a shape drawn on paper, or a colour—and see it in just the same way, although only one of them recognizes it as a cardinal bird, a flint, a rhombus, or puce. Only one of them can have the precise articulate thought, or claim to have seen (i.e. to know through what they have seen), that that bird is a cardinal, that figure is a rhombus, or that all the sweaters in the sale are puce. These conceptual capacities therefore can’t be said with any plausibility to have been exercised in perception itself. They have been exercised, if at all, where one would expect them to have been exercised, in verbal 9 McDowell 2011: 27.

10 Cf. Travis 2004, also Ayers 1991: 173–9, and 2004.

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classification and description. As for their role in describing how something looks to a subject, the concepts exercised in an accurate account of that need not be possessed by the one who has the experience, still less employed in their visual perception of the object (however that might be understood). Someone (for that matter, a non-human animal or infant) may see a shape as a rhombus or a surface as puce without possessing the concepts rhombus or puce. It is difficult to see how anyone could acquire such concepts if that were not so. Another line of objection that may have contributed to the way McDowell came to modify his view was broached, presumably even before he was writing Mind and World, by Gareth Evans’s point that propositional judgements and general concepts cannot capture the ‘fine grain’ of particular objects of sense experience. A judgement that this surface is green will not convey the precise information that one would acquire by seeing the surface or, for that matter, a colour-sample known to match it. Endeavouring to meet that point, McDowell appealed in Mind and World to the notion of a ‘demonstrative concept’, arguing, in effect, that perceptually to take on board (for example) what precise colour this surface is requires that the subject can recognize that shade again—that is, that they possess the ‘demonstrative concept’ of just this shade. That move puts the cart before the horse, since we are able to form the ‘demonstrative concept’ because of the way we see the world: we don’t see the world that way by passively exercising a demonstrative concept we don’t yet have. But in any case it merely ducks a more general and fundamental point, that sensory or perceptual content and semantic or conceptual content are incommensurable. One way of illustrating that incommensurability is by considering the relationship between two ways people may actively represent the world to others. Pictorial representation (of a ‘photographic’ kind) conveys information about what is represented by exploiting the content of the experience of seeing it—that is, how the object or scene looks from a particular point of view. It does so by means of, for example, a painted canvas that, when seen from a particular position, looks, as far as possible, the same way. On the other hand, a conceptual or propositional representation of how the object or scene looks—that is, a true description of it in terms of its visible properties—is a judgement that conveys information in quite a different way. Each way has its own kind of determinacy and indeterminacy. In one way a picture is more precise or determinate than a descriptive judgement, since a description might be illustrated, as it were, by indefinitely many different determinate pictures, all representing scenes that fit the description, even if only one or none of them is an acceptably accurate representation of the reality described. (‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’) Yet in another way it is less precise or, at least, determinate, since indefinitely many determinate things might be truly said of the content of a picture, picking out precise features or ‘aspects’ of its object, the scene depicted. In the face of this incommensurability it would seem difficult to hold that the object of visual perception has the logical form of a true description of that object. A pictorial content no more has to

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be proposition-shaped or conceptual in order to accord with a description than a description has to have pictorial meaning in order to be appropriately illustrated.11 And the same goes for the visual content that enables pictorial content.

Reasons and justification: more objections Another line of objection might question the principle that in order to believe or act with reason—in order to have a reason for belief or action—a subject must be able to give a reason (presumably that same reason). First, it is plausible that to act or believe in such a way as to manifest intelligence is to act or believe ‘with reason’. But to judge by the tool-using, problem-solving behaviour of some individual animals, many creatures other than Homo sapiens would seem to manifest creative intelligence and grasp of possibilities. Not to mention only great apes and corvids, or anecdotes about domestic animals (there is a dog that can match appropriate objects with hundreds of different general names, and it is not implausible that the easiest sheepdogs to train are those that most quickly get the point of what their trainer wants them to do, and how it may be done), studies over recent decades have found quantities of evidence of intelligence in animals as distantly related to us as fish and even octopuses. The action of the individual fish that was filmed carrying clams a significant distance to break them open, after considerable effort, against a favourite hard coral, or of the particular octopus that found a way to evade and confuse predatory sharks by covering itself with shells and seaweed, is surely plausibly taken be evidence of a level of intelligence and ingenuity once routinely denied to such creatures.12 Mounting evidence of that kind of animal ‘behaviour’ makes McDowell’s and his heroes’ rhetorical insistence on a sharp distinction between the rational, speaking animal to whom a ‘world’ is disclosed and other animals—between articulate human Reason and mere animal ‘responsiveness to their environment’13—look just a bit oldfashioned. The dogma that only creatures that can give reasons for their actions and beliefs can have reasons for their actions and beliefs is at least open to question. However that may be, another, related question that arises from the application of this principle to perceptual knowledge is whether ‘I saw that the car was green’, as a response to the (significantly phrased) question ‘How do you know that the car was green?’ (itself an at least formally appropriate response to an assertion that the car

11 I have here dared to repeat a few sentences from Ayers 2004. As I remarked there in passing, it is odd that philosophers who insist that sensory or perceptual content is ‘permeated by concepts’ should happily accept the point made by both Russell and Wittgenstein, exploiting the incommensurability, that an associated sensory image or mental picture could not possibly be the vehicle of the meaning of a word. McDowell completely ignores the argument for incommensurability in his enjoyably lofty response to that paper (McDowell 2009b). 12 Behaviours filmed for the BBC series Blue Planet II. Researchers emphasized that they seemed peculiar to particular individuals among members of the same species observed over significant periods of time. 13 Cf. in particular McDowell 1994: 55, where it is suggested that the notion of non-conceptual intentional content is acceptable so long as intentionality is understood purely functionally, in the way of ‘cognitive psychology’. Cf. also McDowell 1994: 121.

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was green), in fact states a reason or justification for a belief. If that response is true, the speaker’s original assertion is certainly in some sense ‘warranted’, and an expression of well-grounded knowledge, but that is because they are in a position to know that the car was green, not because they have a stateable reason to believe that the car was green. (Compare the point that understanding why if a = b, and b = c, then a = c puts us in a position to know that that principle is true, but not by supplying us with a stateable reason to believe it.14) To put it another way, ‘I saw that S is P’ simply states how the speaker has come to know that S is P in the same way as ‘Fido saw and can smell the rat in the cage’ explains how the hound Fido knows there’s a rat in the cage. Fido can’t say how he knows, we can—and that is important for all that we can do with our knowledge (we can record it, for example)—but the way of coming to know is the same. That one sees that S is P may be a part of one’s reason for asserting that S is P, of course, but reasons for stating what you know are not reasons for believing what you state. Perceptual belief is the natural and normal, but not a reasonable reaction to the deliverances of the senses, which afford and ground knowledge of the environment not by giving reasons for belief but by presenting the environment, affording or constituting direct access to it.15 They are fallible but, as McDowell would doubtless agree and as will be explained at length in Part II, we don’t need reasons for supposing that they aren’t failing unless there is special reason to suppose they might be. So it is not, after all, so clear that to possess or even to claim perceptual knowledge is to step into what McDowell, after Sellars, calls ‘the space of reasons’—that is, of giving and having reasons for believing what is believed.

Another feature of McDowell’s ‘perceptual presence’ I have so far passed over another line of McDowell’s argument, already hinted at in one of the passages quoted above, that deserves fuller consideration. He claims that someone who is self-consciously in possession of [the capacity to know the colours of things by looking at them] must know that the reliable capacity to get things right that she attributes to herself . . . is restricted to certain conditions of illumination. . . . She will not make statements about the colours of things for which she claims that authority if she knows, or has reason to believe, that the light is not suitable for exercising the capacity to know the colours of things by looking at them.16

McDowell is here, apparently, introducing a further condition of a feature’s being ‘perceptually present to’ a subject. Sensitivity to a feature or state of its environment on the part of an articulate human being is differentiated from that of inarticulate animals not only, on this view, by a determinate conceptual capacity that serves to pick out just 14 There are, of course, differences. One is that we are less likely to say ‘I understand why . . .’ than ‘I saw that . . .’ in explanation of how we know, and more likely simply to say ‘It’s obvious’ (or just ‘Think about it’). Each bit of perceptual knowledge is, as it were, more personal, less commonly available, than a priori knowledge. 15 In effect, the position taken by pre-Humean empiricists discussed in Chapter 1. 16 McDowell 2011: 44–5.

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that feature or state of affairs, but also by a self-conscious sense of the reliability of that capacity to recognize such a feature in the circumstances that prevail. There is a certain unclarity in this particular passage, since it might be taken to suggest that ‘perceptual presence’ requires that the subject know under just what conditions (here ‘conditions of illumination’) the conceptual capacity in question is reliable, and that they are fulfilled. That would be asking quite a lot, since the science of colour-perception is a complex area, full of surprises. It is more plausible that what is required is simply that the subject should have no positive reason to judge it epistemically possible that the circumstances are not right for the exercise of that capacity. Even on the latter understanding of the proposed condition, however, the awkward question arises whether the object is ‘perceptually present’ if and when the subject does have such a reason for doubt, but the circumstances are nevertheless in fact right for them to perceive the object in question. The light is in fact right for them to tell a colour accurately, for example, but they are aware of a significant epistemic possibility, relative to the evidence available to them, that the conditions of illumination are abnormal.17 Even then, according to McDowell, the colour of the surface is not ‘perceptually present to’ the subject in the required sense, since they do not know that it is. I do not suppose that I am alone in finding this view paradoxical. It is paradoxical because it either cuts ‘perceptual presence’ away from being perceived, or (apparently the preferred option) makes what is perceived relative to the subject’s background knowledge—to the evidence available to the subject at the time, and perhaps to what the subject makes of it in assessing epistemic possibility. No doubt background knowledge, interests, and skills can and do, to a significant extent, causally affect how we perceive the world (what catches our attention, for example, or the patterns we pick out), but McDowell’s proposal seems designed to build a role for it into the necessary conditions of ‘perceptual presence’ and so, presumably, not only of perceptual knowledge but of (post-infantile human) perception itself. It would seem to follow that something could suddenly become ‘perceptually present’ and so perceived (in his special sense), simply by the subject’s learning that the indications previously and reasonably taken to suggest that conditions might not be right for accurate colour-perception are in fact misleading. And that surely is paradoxical—or perhaps an indication of just how peculiarly special a sense McDowell chooses to assign to ‘perceptual presence’, and so, it seems, to ‘perceive’.

Perceptual presence and indefeasible warrant It is relevant that McDowell develops his conception of ‘perceptual presence’ with more than a defence of his version of conceptualism in mind. He writes, in a passage aimed against an alleged premise or presupposition of philosophical scepticism, 17 McDowell 2011: 52–3. This question was explicitly put to McDowell, no doubt as a conscious application of the more general and well-known ‘problem of misleading defeaters’ (discussed below in Chapter 5, section 6.4).

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Reason is at work . . . in the perceptual presence to rational subjects of features of their environment. And if a perceptual state consists in a subject’s having a feature of her environment perceptually present to her, that gives the lie to the assumption that a perceptual state cannot warrant a belief in a way that guarantees its truth. If a perceptual state makes a feature of the environment present to a perceiver’s rationally self-conscious awareness, there is no possibility, compatibly with someone’s being in that state, that things are not as the state would warrant her believing that they are, in a belief that would simply register the presence of that feature of the environment. The warrant for a belief that the state provides is indefeasible; it cannot be undermined.18

What is going on here? McDowell seems to be saying that the possession of language and consequential rationality by human beings enables them to enjoy special perceptual states that, unlike the perceptual states of infants and other animals, justify belief— indeed ‘indefeasibly’ ground knowledge. The thought seems to be something like this: such rational animals can see (in a special way involving conceptual capacities) and so know (in a special sense), for example, that a bear is advancing towards them, where another animal would just see (non-conceptually), and react to, a bear advancing towards them, without (in that same sense of ‘know’) knowing anything. And if someone is in that special perceptual state, they can’t be wrong. Clarity is not helped by McDowell’s taking the primary objects of perception to be facts (hardly what spring to mind as ‘features of the environment’, as he calls them). For as others have objected, ‘X perceives (e.g. sees) that S is P’ roughly unpacks as ‘X knows through perception (by perceiving that state of affairs) that S is P’.19 The issues here are complex, and will receive more detailed discussion in their own right in the next chapter. Other ideas deployed here by McDowell in constructing his conception of ‘perceptual presence’—ideas of fallibility, defeasibility, possibility and certainty, together with the question of where, if at all, the sceptic has gone wrong—will also be discussed at some length, in a wider context than McDowell’s argument and at a more appropriate place, in Part II of this book. It will then be appropriate to return briefly to McDowell’s response to philosophical scepticism. But for all the differences that will appear and have already appeared in the light of such passages as have so far been considered, it would seem that McDowell’s enterprise has a purpose in common with the present book. He evidently recognizes that at the core of the notion of knowledge, as the very paradigm of knowledge, lies knowledge acquired through direct cognitive contact with reality, through the presentation of the object of knowledge itself in sense experience. That raises the question of what it is about sense experience that constitutes that perspicuous presentation, such that we not only have immediate, non-inferential knowledge of the world but also, by the same token, know that and how we have that knowledge.

18 McDowell 2011: 31. 19 Cf. Rosenberg 2004: 275: ‘ “I see that such-and-such is the case” simply means “I know by seeing that such-and-such is the case” .’

82 Knowing and Seeing According to the argument of this book, however, in his attempt to characterize sense experience in answer to that question McDowell looks in the wrong place. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the conceptualist tradition within which he writes, he proposes that it is because experience is somehow imbued with the structure of the specifically human thought, reflection, and self-consciousness made possible by language that it affords knowledge of the world that is perspicuously, consciously knowledge. But, as it was seen in the last chapter, a careful phenomenology of perception reveals a more primitive and less problematic feature of perceptual experience that supplies a more plausible and satisfying explanation of the perspicuity of perceptual knowledge.

3.4 McDowell’s Change of Tack The first objection considered in the last section, that two people may see the same thing, and see it in just the same way, even if only one of them has the recognitional or conceptual capacity to know what it is and ‘actively’ to employ that capacity in judgement, has persuaded McDowell to shift his ground. He has dropped his earlier contention that the capacity to recognize or ‘tell’ that what is perceived falls under a certain general concept—that it is of a certain kind, for example, or possesses a certain property—is always exercised (or ‘passively actualized’) in the perception of things as of that kind or as having that property.20 How could a conceptual capacity that a subject does not possess be exercised or actualized, however ‘passively’, by that subject in perception? McDowell accordingly no longer claims that perception (or what he calls ‘intuition’ in a would-be Kantian sense) has the same articulate conceptual content as a discursive judgement. We don’t need to have the concept of a cardinal bird or of puce in order to see a cardinal or a puce shirt in just the same way as someone else sees them who possesses those concepts, and who employs them on this occasion in explicit judgement as to what they see.

An appeal to Kant and categories Nevertheless, McDowell continues to assign a role to conceptual capacities in perception, by undertaking what is in effect a strategic withdrawal to a position that appeals, if somewhat loosely, to the main core of Kantian conceptualism. While conceding that one might have perceptual experience of, for example, a cardinal bird without the ornithological concept cardinal, and experience it in just the same way as someone who does possess that concept and who recognizes it as a cardinal, he argues that, nevertheless, in order to have that experience conceptual capacities must be at work to give it the appropriate categorial structure, such as to make the experience available for the formation of that concept. Citing Kant, McDowell associates his notion of the categorial structure of the content of sense experience to three forms of unity, the unity of apperception or 20 See McDowell 2009c: 258–9.

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consciousness, the unity of the object as variously perceived, and the unity of judgement. However, perhaps because of the reputation for rigidity and conservatism of Kant’s system of categories,21 McDowell has a somewhat freer conception of ‘categorial concepts’. First, he proposes that the ascription of a role to conceptual capacities in perception can be understood as no more than saying that, for rational animals, every perceptible aspect of what they perceive supplies material for the formation of a concept.22 As he puts it, All that would be needed for a bit of [a world-disclosing experience] to come to constitute the content of a conceptual capacity, if it is not already the content of a conceptual capacity, is for it to be focused on and made to be the meaning of a linguistic expression . . . [or] . . . given a name.

For an experience to be ‘world-disclosing’, by McDowell’s lights, the subject’s possession of language, and passive exercise of conceptual capacities, has given it the categorially appropriate shape thus to be material for the introduction of new terms. One is able to focus on one or another determinate aspect of the perceived world and ‘give it a name’ in so far as experience is already categorially structured—for example (and, perhaps, above all), as experience of substantial things and their perceptible properties and relations. It is because human beings’ sense experience has already been afforded the relevant conceptual or categorial form as a result of the possession of language, so it is supposed, that they can pick out as an animal or a bird (McDowell’s examples, but presumably a colour or a shape, etc. would do as well) that ‘aspect’ or element of the perceived world to which they can then ‘give a name’.

Some objections It has reasonably been objected to this abstractionist model that there’s more to the determination of a concept—for example, a concept of a sensible quality such as the concept green—than can be achieved demonstratively by a simple, single ostensive act. ‘Focusing’ and ‘naming’ is not in general enough, even if it is supposed that ‘focusing’ already involves an understanding of the category of what is being picked out. ‘Anything coloured like that I call green’ leaves the question, ‘How like?’ unanswered—just one aspect of the incommensurability of perceptual and conceptual content. Predicative concepts have (often pretty flexible) boundaries not, in general, capable of being set by a single example, or read off the perceived environment. It is perhaps no accident that McDowell picks on animal and bird, since the boundaries, such as they are, of a biological species are set by nature, so that one example of a cardinal bird may be enough to determine the denotation of the name, given an appropriate conception of a species.

21 McDowell remarks, somewhat dismissively, that Kant got the forms of judgement from ‘the logic books of his time’, a not particularly appropriate comment on Kant’s contribution to the philosophy of logic. In context, it is hardly surprising that Kant looked to logic in an argument that the categories derive from reason, not the world. 22 Cf. McDowell 2009c: 318–20.

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But as his favourable reference to the work of David Wiggins would suggest, the main importance of biological kinds to the conceptualist lies in their role in conceptualist theory of identity, an ancient doctrine well ensconced in analytic philosophy and subject to criticism in the next (and last) section of this chapter, section 3.5. Another problem with McDowell’s story simply lies with the difficulty of drawing from it an unambivalent account of what is supposed to be added by the acquisition of language to the content of the child’s perceptual awareness. What exactly is the difference supposed to be, at the level of perception, between sensitivity to the ‘environment’ enjoyed by non-human animals and infants and perception of the ‘world’ disclosed only to human beings at home in a language? The acquisition of the structured language supposed necessary for categories to come into play is presumably taken to involve a gradual ‘dawning of the light’ as the child gets the point of such utterances as ‘Let’s put the red peg in the red hole and the blue peg in the blue hole’, said along with appropriate action. On the model McDowell puts before us, it would seem to be only after that initial bootstraps grasp of significance and of propositional or conceptual structure that aspects of experience become ‘material’ for the introduction of new concepts, and corresponding knowledge. It is, however, wildly implausible that a child could come to learn language and so to an understanding of predicative judgement without a prior capacity to pick out unitary material objects, including animals and other people, to notice many resemblances and differences between things, and to achieve some practical grasp and memory of what is going on around it, shaping its expectations. Nothing could acquire a language that wasn’t independently at least that well at home in the world, and responding to it with intelligence. A cognitive and emotional rapport with situations and people that is much more specific than that is probably also at work, perhaps necessary. Is McDowell’s somewhat rhetorical talk of the difference between an animal’s or infant’s mere sensitivity to an environment to which it is ‘responsive’ and our having ‘world-disclosing’ sense experience supposed to imply that animals can’t pick out individual material objects, for example, including other animals, or is it a way of allowing that that they can do so? His frequent favourable reference to the ‘insights’ of Kant would suggest the former, since for Kant concepts of reason as well as sensitivity are a condition of our perceptual apprehension of causally efficacious material things, indeed of anything at all. They are for Kant a condition, as McDowell himself often reminds us, of the very intentionality of experience. If we pursue that line of thought, linking concepts to language as McDowell does, the result is hugely implausible.

Strawson’s conceptualism: a difference It might here be helpful to consider Strawson’s rather less ambivalent neo-Kantian view of what it is that concepts give to sense experience. Here is Strawson is criticizing A. J. Ayer’s proposal that a ‘strict’ account of sensory data would make no reference to an external world of material objects. Strawson’s response to Ayer is analogous to

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McDowell’s response to Davidson. He argues correctly that such a non-intentional account of sensory content is impossible, but he gives a conceptualist explanation: Our perceptual judgements, as Ayer remarks, embody and reflect a certain view of the world, as containing objects, variously propertied, located in a common space and continuing in their existence independently of our interrupted and relatively fleeting perceptions of them. Our making of such judgements implies our possession and application of concepts of such objects. But . . . we cannot give a veridical characterization even of the sensible experience which these judgements, as Ayer expresses it, ‘go beyond,’ without reference to those judgements themselves; . . . our sensible experience itself is thoroughly permeated with those concepts of objects which figure in such judgements.23

Prominent in this passage is the bad argument from the premise that, to quote from the same article (my italics), ‘the employment of our ordinary, full-blooded concepts of physical objects is indispensable to a strict, and strictly veridical account of our sensory experience’ to the conclusion that ‘sensible experience is permeated by concepts unreflective acceptance of the general applicability of which is a condition of that experience being what it is’.24 It clearly does not follow that conceptual capacities that are necessary for any satisfactory account of an experience are therefore necessary in order to have the experience described. But it also seems clear (implausible as that view is, at least if we suppose that possession of ‘concepts’ is tied to possession of language and denied to infants and non-human animals) that for Strawson it is in virtue of the intrinsic conceptual structure of human experience that it is experience of, among other things, independent, enduring, qualitied material objects in space. In comparison, McDowell’s distinction, following Gadamer, between cognitive access to an ‘environment’ and access to a ‘world’ reads as a bewildering fudge. It is not that no plausible sense can be made of that distinction, or of the claim that ‘language introduces [what Gadamer calls] a “free, distanced orientation” towards what would otherwise have been merely features of an environment’. For we could take that to mean that language enables a second-order, ‘self-conscious’ reflection on our sense experience, allowing us to place the perceived objects, events and processes within our environment into the context of a much wider understanding of a naturally coherent world with an extent and history beyond our own experience or knowledge. But the suggestion that those features of their environment are not therefore ‘perceptually present’ to infants and animals, and that, in virtue of their linguistic competence, the very content of first-order perception by older human observers somehow intrinsically embodies that placing in the wider world in a way not open to other animals precisely in virtue of that content being ‘permeated by concepts’,25 is neither easily intelligible nor consonant with the facts of perception. 23 Strawson 1979: 44. 24 To be fair, the argument could be treated as enthymematic, with the suppressed premise that all intentional content is conceptual. That premise is highly contentious, of course, indeed one of the things here in contention. 25 An expression used by McDowell as by Strawson.

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3.5 Perception, Concepts, and Individuation The connection between comprehensive conceptualism and the theory of identity and individuation that has been favoured by analytic philosophers was summed up by Quine in two slogans: ‘No entity without identity’ and ‘No objects without concepts’. According to this view, it is concepts or ‘ideas’ that set or embody the principles of individuation of objects of whatever category—a notion famously embraced by Locke, but which in essence goes back to the Stoics (with some pretty good arguments against supplied by Academics). In the present section, however, it will be argued that there are significant differences between categories that, when properly understood, point to a very different conclusion. So far from its being the case that the structure of our thought or language, ‘our conceptual scheme’, comprehensively shapes the content of our experience, as it were slicing it up into objects of this or that category, the structure of our language and articulate thought about the world is fundamentally shaped, at the very deepest level, by the perceived physical structure of the independent reality of which we are immediately aware, and of which we have preconceptual knowledge. Here epistemology tips over into ontology and theory of identity, and this is not the place to enter into all the ramifications of the debate in that area. But it is importantly relevant to our understanding of knowledge, and perceptual knowledge in particular, to have some idea of the eminently available alternative to the still dominant doctrine that all determinate objects are picked out by concepts—indeed owe their determinate individuality to the concepts that pick them out. In Chapter 2 it was argued, on phenomenological grounds, that the only way to make sense of perceptual experience is to recognize the comprehensive phenomenal integration of the deliverances of the senses, and the only way to make sense of that integration is to recognize that they have an unmediated common object—broadly, the subject’s environment, which includes the subject and their perceptual relationship to that environment. Phenomenologically, there are not distinct sense-fields—visual, tactual, olfactory, auditory, gustatory, and proprioceptive—with distinct objects combined by association or by some ‘conceptual scheme’ or ordering by thought, as Descartes proposed that they are brought together by the innate idea of material substance, and Kant by the categories. There are simply different (but integrated) ways of perceiving the same total object, our environment and, importantly, ourselves in it. The main aim in Chapter 2 was to explain how, when we perceive something, we are, at least normally, ipso facto perceptually and directly aware of its spatial relationship to ourselves, of ourselves perceiving it, and of how we are perceiving it, That is, we have perceptual awareness, and so knowledge, of the causality of perception—of how the environment is impinging on our sense-organs. All this is given in the deliverances of the senses themselves, functioning normally, and is intrinsic to what it is to perceive one’s environment as one’s environment.

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So much may be conceded, and yet the seemingly more limited conceptualist position be maintained that picking out any element or aspect of the world as an individual object of knowledge, or, indeed, of perception and attention, involves conceptualization. So we perceive, and have knowledge of, material things (‘substances’), attributes, states of affairs, events, relations, and so forth, but these categories of entity are all taken simply to reflect conceptual categories, in effect, the structure of our language. The concepts that ‘slice out’ particular entities from ‘amorphous’ or continuous reality26 accordingly fall into categories correspondent to categories of noun, whether primitive ‘substance-sortals’, nominalized predicates (verbal, adjectival, relational), or (as in the case of events and ‘states of affairs’) nominalized sentences of one type or another. The spatial and temporal boundaries of any particular entity in any particular category in question are set by a concept belonging to that category. Crudely, the particular event, a battle, exists as long and as far as certain particular armies are fighting. The particular state of affairs, John’s being in love with Mary, exists just as long as John is in love with Mary. The particular or individual quality, the green of the leaves of that tree, like the particular state of affairs, that tree’s leaves’ being green, exists in so far as the tree’s leaves are green. The particular spatial relation between two objects exists just so long as those objects are so related. As these examples themselves suggest, however, material things are exceptional in that, as Aristotle emphatically pointed out, entities in other categories are predicated of substances, and substances (which, in his set-piece explanation of what a substance is, he first provisionally identifies as ‘bodies’, somata27) are predicated of nothing else. In other words, individual material ‘substances’ are otherwise picked out or individuated than by concepts formed by the nominalization of a term not already a noun. The crucial question, with respect to the doctrine of comprehensive conceptualism, is whether they are nevertheless individuated by concepts correspondent to primitive substantives not so derived (or their equivalents), nouns of the type characterized by Locke as ‘sortal’ names (‘horse’, ‘ash tree’, ‘human being’, etc.). Or is it that they can be picked out preconceptually, their individuality and distinctness from other material structures and objects given to us in perceptual experience, and that a ‘sortal’ term is simply a general name bestowed on a group of such experientially given, naturally distinct individuals on the basis of a supposed common nature?

Against sortalist conceptualism The theory of individuation and identity almost exclusively favoured by analytic philosophers has been that sortal concepts are necessary to do the work of individuation, but there are some pretty obvious considerations in favour of the other view. If we think about perceptual experience phenomenologically, as in Chapter  2, the common-sense view would seem undeniable that we can pick out particular discrete, materially coherent and surfaced objects, available as such to sight and touch, without 26 See, e.g., Dummett 1973: 363–6 for this metaphor.

27 Metaphysics 1028b2.

88 Knowing and Seeing our knowing what they are or, indeed, without their falling as individuals into any specific sort or kind at all—for example, if what we have picked out is simply a particular chunk of metal or rock. That is possible precisely because, unlike particular events, qualities, or states of affairs, coherent and discrete material objects have natural, ‘given’, relatively lasting spatial boundaries, edges, and surfaces, physical limits that are palpably independent of human conceptualization. Such material objects are natural wholes. Whereas every event or process or state of affairs is part of some other event or process or state of affairs (at least, up to the total world process, or state of the universe), it is not the case that every material object is a part of some other material object. Soldiers are members, not parts of platoons, and platoons are not individual physical objects.28 The individuality of many unitary material objects is immediately ‘given’, then, not only in being independent of human concepts, but also in being evident to human perception. As I have argued, in general one’s integrated perceptual experience is at the same time an awareness of oneself as a discrete material object in relation to a material environment, not least to other discrete, coherent, more or less mobile material objects. If it weren’t, we probably wouldn’t last long. Much of what philosophers like Strawson ascribe to our ‘conceptual scheme’ is, as Austen Clark puts it, ‘built into our sensory mechanisms’, mechanisms evolved in relation to how the world is. Not all ‘entities’—potential objects of reference—that are material are thus naturally bounded and unitary. To pick out a quantity of matter is to pick out something more or less arbitrarily defined, whether by reference to something naturally bounded, as ‘The gold of which that ring is made’, or without respect to any such object, as ‘The rainwater that fell on the Pennines last night’. The existence and identity conditions of such a material entity as a pond are also pretty arbitrary,29 and the same goes for many artefacts.30 In these cases, as with entities picked out by nominalized predicates and sentences (which, following in a tradition, I will call ‘modes’), the concept employed in classifying the entity also serves to individuate it. Without the classification, without 28 Contrary to the implications of Frege 1968: 59. 29 A typical pond might seem to have boundaries that are physical enough, namely its banks, bottom and the surface of the water itself. Yet there is nothing in nature—or, indeed, in ordinary language—to determine the answers to a range of questions about its identity through change that also, significantly, raise further questions about its individuality, and even the ontological question of what kind or category of entity a pond is. When the water gets low, is the pond half empty or has it just got smaller? Has the pond ceased to exist if it dries up completely? Is an empty pond still a pond, or just the place where a pond was? If it is still a pond, does that mean that a pond is not, after all, material? If it isn’t, does that mean that the existence of ponds can be ‘gappy’? If the stream that supplies the pond overflows and floods the whole valley, has the pond got much bigger, or has it ceased to exist—or does it still exist under the flood? If the water in a pond leaks out and fills another depression lower down the hill, has the pond moved or has it simply emptied, with its last contents forming another pond? My point is not that each answer might just as reasonably be given as its contrary (although that might be so in particular cases), but that, if there are most reasonable determinate answers, that is down to the preferred concept of a pond; and if there are not such answers, that indeterminacy is likewise conceptual. 30 As such famous paradoxes as ‘Theseus’ ship’ bear witness, artefacts play a major part (in my view, to pretty disastrous effect) in traditional discussions of the identity of material things.

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the idea that it is an event or quality or activity or whatever of this or that kind, there is no determinate, bounded individual to be picked out. In contrast, discrete, coherent material objects are, simply as such, independently available for classification. The procedure for ‘modes’ is thus in a sense ‘top-down’, from class to individual, whereas that for material objects or ‘substances’ is ‘bottom-up’, from individual to class.

‘Bottom-up’ classification, ‘principles of activity’, and origins That is no minor difference, but one that carries with it a significant range of corollary differences. Not all will be mentioned here, but one particularly salient one, recognized by Aristotle, is the possibility of a system of classification of some material objects into natural kinds that is in an important way privileged. Human beings have no doubt always had an awareness that living things fall into groups, as it were ‘tribes’ of related individuals sharing a broadly common nature. With the aid of the theory of evolution (and much else) we can now understand why the ideal basis for biological classification is a total and detailed knowledge of the physical structure of the individuals in question (in particular, of their DNA), their consequent ‘nature’ or characteristic way of life and life-history, and, not least, their genetic relationships to other individuals—three closely linked, more or less interdependent considerations. An increase of knowledge of this kind can lead to fairly radical changes in our classification, but very seldom to any change in what we take to be the biological individuals to be classified. But whatever improvements are made to it as we get to learn more about the course of evolution, there will necessarily be something ideal and arbitrary or pragmatic about the kind of hierarchical classification we employ, especially in the case of higher taxa. Nature—the evolutionary tree—is notoriously not that neat or obvious. Nevertheless, even a neat hierarchical classification, if successful, approximately matches or maps an evolving biological world that is by no means merely chaotic. To describe the classification of substances as ‘bottom-up’ is not to deny that the status of material individuals up for classification can be less than perfectly neat. When we are dealing with elm trees or foetuses, for example, whether we have one individual or more may on occasion be impossible or inappropriate to say, even when all the relevant facts are known. Whether we have one individual or a colony of individuals may also be a question with no straightforward answer in the case of some primitive animals and plants. But in general the experientially ‘given’ individuality of physically distinct material objects at the ground-floor level is one of the things that make ‘bottom-up’ biological classification, as we know it, possible. Another is the fact that natural relationships between these individuals afford species with relatively, even if by no means absolutely, distinct and settled natural boundaries. David Wiggins, to whose arguments John McDowell makes some appeal, is a kind of moderate or, as he puts it, ‘realist’ conceptualist, much influenced by Aristotle and, in his later books, by Hilary Putnam’s and Saul Kripke’s views on natural kinds. He accepts that a horse, for example, is a naturally ‘given’ individual. But he claims that only

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material objects that are members of natural kinds are determinate natural individuals, and that it is only in recognizing that the individual is a member of a natural kind that we can pick it out as a determinate individual. That, so he argues, is because only an object belonging to a kind is unified by an internal ‘principle of activity’ such as (at least in favourable circumstances) affords the object a life-history characteristic of the kind, and it is only in the light of such a characteristic life-history that there are determinate answers to the question of when we have the same object again. This thesis might seem a somewhat last-ditch defence of sortalist conceptualism, but it is right that in some sense a ‘principle of individuation’ brings along with it a principle of identity over time. All that need mean, however, is that (to put it crudely) a materially unitary, coherent, discrete physical object continues to exist as long as it remains coherent and discrete. Nevertheless, although it is edged coherence that constitutes the property of material, natural, ‘given’ individuals that is fundamental to their individuality, causation is important in other ways than sheer, or mere, coherence. For simple coherence isn’t enough—witness the distinction we would all make between a tree and the nail it has grown to enclose. The nail is not a part of the tree. A paving-slab and the lump of chewing gum firmly stuck to it do not together make one material object. What these examples indicate is that the causation of the coherence matters, not just in respect of the different ways in which the parts of (e.g.) the nail and of the tree hang together, but, more importantly, in respect of the different origins and history of these two coherent objects—the explanation of how they each came be, and be related, as they are. After all, the parts of a bone and of the attached muscles hang together in distinguishable ways, even when both are parts of a material object, the animal, rather than discrete material objects. The bones and muscles came into existence and grew together, as parts of that animal. The tree grew, as trees do, from a seed, the nail had a quite independent origin. Their coming together was, in Aristotelian terminology, ‘accidental’. The principle according to which origin and causal history are relevant to questions of the identity and diversity of material objects at a time and over time is the same whether the unitary objects are plants or useful bits of metal, rocks or animals. Suppose a pebble at time t2 is composed of (say) half the material that composed a pebble existing at an earlier time t1. Whether they are the same pebble, whether there is ‘continuity’, may depend on how the diminution occurred—whether it was by the pebble’s being gradually worn away by water, for example, or by it’s being broken in half to create two pebbles. It is true that, if a material object is a member of a natural kind, it remains a member of that kind throughout its existence, but questions as to its continuity are not decided as Wiggins’s theory would suggest, by how far it follows the course of life characteristic of that kind. The ‘once a dog, always a dog’ principle is compatible with radically uncharacteristic change. Were the DNA of a dog changed by some ghastly experiment so that it grew to look and behave like a large rat, it would be that dog, metamorphosed

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or deformed, not a different individual, a rat. And although it must have begun to exist as a living thing, at least in the womb, a dead dog is simply a dog that has ceased to live, not a distinct individual from the previously living dog. Such broad considerations of origin and causal history are relevant to the individuation of material objects generally, and membership of a natural kind does not in itself privilege biological individuals, as individuals, above other coherent, discrete material objects. It does in general go with a more interesting history, of course, so that distinguishing and reidentifying individuals (as first caterpillars and later butterflies, for example) may in some cases be an accordingly more complicated business, but that does not mean that the individuality of animals and plants is in principle any more determinate than that of pebbles on the beach.

Top-down classification of modes, with the conceptual divisibility both of kinds and of individuals However that may be, things are clearly very different in the case of non-material entities or ‘modes’. There are no given or basic individual modes, and so no room for simple naming of natural kinds or groups of modes, let alone the construction of privileged hierarchical taxonomies. There are no basic or ‘first’ natural kinds comparable to biological species. For example, we may think of walking, running, crawling, etc. as species of locomotion, but power-walking, strolling, and marching are equally species of walking, while quick-marching and slow-marching are species of marching, and so on down, in principle, at least, without limit. Accordingly, we may manufacture species of any species of a mode, turning the latter into a genus, so to speak, simply by introducing stipulatively defined terms.31 Indeed, the species–genus relationship applies to modes in a highly flexible and ad hoc way, which is not to say that there is never any point in distinguishing determinate species and genera of modes. There may be considerable legal and moral point in distinguishing certain species of the genus homicide according to the manner and circumstances of the killing: murder, manslaughter, killing in self-defence, causing death by dangerous driving, euthanasia, and so forth. But these distinctions are neither more nor less privileged ontologically than distinctions drawn on quite another basis, as between causing death by asphyxiation, by shooting, by stabbing, by poisoning, by neglect, by running down with a vehicle, and so forth, or as between patricide, infanticide, regicide, etc., by the status or relationship of the victim. Indefinitely many other ways of distinguishing species of homicide could be adopted, even if most of them would serve no human purpose.

31 A long-established point. Cf. Locke, An Essay concerning Human Understanding III.x.19: ‘in mixed Modes any of the Ideas that make the Composition of the complex one, being left out, or changed, it is allowed to be another thing, i.e. to be of another Species, as is plain in Chance-medley, Man-slaughter, Murther, Parricide, etc.’ Locke wrote this in the course of making the consciously unorthodox and radical (but mistaken) claim that the same applies to substances.

92 Knowing and Seeing The same goes for ‘natural’ modes as for human actions. Disease, for example, is a natural process, but diseases are open to classification on a variety of principles— aetiology, characteristic symptoms, virulence, genetic mutability, etc.—none of which serves as the key to a uniquely privileged natural classification. There are no natural kinds of modes in the way there are of substances, a traditional point recognized by Aristotle but more or less unrecognized by many current and recent theorists, who are liable to employ substances and modes indiscriminately in giving examples of natural kinds. Accordingly, any species of a mode can be a species of more than one genus, as malaria is a species (or ‘natural kind’) of disease, but also a species of parasitism and of the causes of death (although other species of these genera may not even be diseases). As species of pneumonia, viral pneumonia and bacterial pneumonia fall under the same genus, but as viral and bacterial diseases they fall under different genera. The radical difference between ‘bottom-up’ and ‘top-down’ classification appears in a striking way with respect to events that take time or ‘perdure’. That individual events or processes owe their distinct identity to concepts generated by the nominalization of predicates and sentences—that events are indeed ‘sliced out’ by concepts—appears from the consequences of splitting a species of event by means of an attribute such as its members may possess just for a period of their perdurance. For such splitting is not only division of the species, but also division of actual or possible individuals of that species. In arbitrarily creating new species, so to speak, we at the same time create new individuals. To return to the example of locomotion, an individual act of walking—the event picked out as John Doe’s walking on some occasion—may be distinct from his act of locomotion, if, for example, his locomotion first took the form of running, then of walking, and then of crawling. On the other hand, it will also be distinct from his strolling and from his marching, if, while walking, he first strolled and then marched. These distinct events will be related as parts and wholes, or as parts of the same whole. There are no ‘given’ natural or physical parts and wholes among events, however, in the way in which a horse is a perceptibly unitary, discrete natural individual of which its undetached leg is a part. Events do not have anything equivalent to the physical coherence and surfaces of material objects. Every event or process is a part of indefinitely many wider and/or longer events and processes, and is neither more nor less of a whole, objectively, than any other event. One event or kind of event we pick out may be causally more integrated than another, but such relative integration does not supply boundaries, edges, or surfaces. Each determinate event is equally sliced out from the world process by an individuating concept. If a perceived event stands out from the general course of events, its salience is a matter of what is striking or important for us, not of real and independent physical boundaries. An explosion, an avalanche, the melting of ice on a pond, and the boiling of water may each be a salient occurrence, significant in its consequences, and may strike us as a peculiarly distinct event, but it is simply part of such another process as a battle or a volcanic eruption, an increase in the motion of the molecules of a certain

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quantity of water, the coming of spring, or the preparation of a drink. And an eruption, of course, is in turn a part of a wider geological process, and so on up.

Properties, accidents and compound terms Consider a biological taxonomist who has the task of identifying the material individuals before her and selecting from all that she knows about them those resemblances, differences, and relationships that are significant with respect to species membership, to the exclusion of what is irrelevant. In traditional terms, she must distinguish typical or normal ‘properties’ from ‘accidents’. The task is often simple enough. No deep biological knowledge of human beings is required in order to list being sunburnt, being musical, being muscular or being tired as ‘accidents’ in that sense. Certainly any attribute that a biological individual can acquire or lose during life is for that reason an ‘accident’, although such a temporary attribute may be the actualization of a power that is itself a ‘property’: for example, if the temporary attribute is typical of the species at a particular stage of life. An accident may, indeed, simply be the attribute of being at a particular stage of life, as being a child. Other accidents, such as having black hair, are, as a matter of fact, not so easily lost or gained. This distinction between properties and accidents makes room for a class of general nouns (names of Aristotle’s syntheta, ‘compounds’) definable by the name of a species or wider kind together with a predicate connoting an accident. Examples of compound names are ‘boy’, athlete’, ‘butcher’, ‘professor’, ‘diabetic’, ‘albino’, ‘gelding’, ‘warhorse’.32 These descriptive general nouns are not, in the nature of the case, names of species or ‘natural kinds’, however physical, permanent or, indeed, natural the accident may be. We have seen that many naturally individuated—that is, roughly, physically coherent and discrete—material objects, such as lumps of rock or metal, are not as such members of natural kinds at all, but they are, of course, describable. Just because they are describable natural individuals they may satisfy ‘compound’ general concepts, and properly bear ‘compound’ names—for example, ‘landmark’, ‘memorial’, ‘sphere’, ‘wedge’—where the first element in the ‘compound’ could be as general as ‘object’, ‘chunk’, or ‘thing’, rather than the name of a kind. The term ‘sphere’ may be used for a shape (as soldiers may form a square, or three lines drawn on paper, a triangle)—that is, for a mode. It may also be used for any coherent, discrete material object or thing that is spherical, whether or not it belongs to a natural kind (as e.g. an egg), and whether or not the object’s shape is temporary or retained throughout the object’s existence. If predicated of a material object, it serves as a ‘compound’ term. That is possible just because the individuation of a discrete material object is independent of, and logically

32 Wiggins calls such terms ‘phase-sortals’, a term that would seem to exclude ‘albino’ and the like, though perhaps to include ‘sphere’ or ‘gravestone’. As far as I know, he offers no discussion of the crucial question of why the distinction between names of natural kinds and ‘phase-sortals’ has little or no application to modes.

94 Knowing and Seeing prior to, that object’s having a particular shape, as the individuation of a baker is independent of, and logically prior to, their being a baker. It is easy to see why ‘compound’ noun-predicates are essentially predicates of ‘substances’, that is, of material objects and stuffs. (Ice, food, fuel are compound concepts, not concepts of natural kinds. Ice is frozen water (or any other stuff that freezes), food is, roughly, stuff of any kind that is beneficially edible.) As we saw, if we stipulatively define a kind of mode by splitting a wider kind, the result is liable not only to split one species into two, each as much a species as the divided kind, but also to split each individual of that divided species into two perfectly good individuals, each a part of an individual of the kind originally divided. A newly coined compound term, on the other hand, picks out neither a different species of object nor a different individual object. Athletes and children are not species of human being, and (pace ‘processphilosophers’) someone currently an athlete or child is not a different individual from, or a part of, the currently athletic or juvenile human being. That logically ‘compound terms’ are commonly predicable of material things, but not of modes (unless in some cases in which the ‘accident’ is purely relational), is just because individual material objects are given as such in experience whereas individual modes are notionally individuated. With modes, if you change the concept, you not only switch species but are also liable to switch individuals. As I have implied, to attempt anything approaching a comprehensive treatment of the topic of individuation and identity would be to stray well beyond the scope of the present work. There are too many questions left to answer, too many hares, ancient and modern, left to pursue.33 But I hope that I have said enough to count at least as an explanation, if not the fullest possible justification, of my claim that fundamental features of natural language and of ‘our conceptual scheme’, centred as they are on enduring material objects, owe their existence to the way the world, with ourselves in it, perceptibly, evidently, is. Universal conceptualism puts the cart before the horse. Seeing and knowing are prior to saying. Serious idealism may be out, but Kant’s ‘Copernican revolution’ still needs countering, and a necessary step in that task may be to recognize that it is no myth that some, at least, of the objects of perceptual knowledge are indeed preconceptually ‘given’ individuals.

33 One that runs and runs is the popular thought, there in Spinoza and perhaps Heraclitus, that material things are ‘really’ processes. Another ancient argument alive and kicking in recent years makes play with the supposed distinction between a statue and the piece of clay of which it is composed. For some critical analysis of such arguments, see Ayers 1991 II:239–53, and 2005a.

4 Internal and External Objects of Cognition 4.1 Objects of Cognition and ‘Ordinary Language’ Not all in the tradition that accepted a sharp and exclusive distinction between knowledge and belief were as insistent as Plato that they have different objects. As was hinted in Chapter 1, that issue is not dead, and the present chapter will explore it further. Is it right, for example, that we believe propositions, but know facts? Our inquiry will first move on, however, to the related and, in its way, also Platonic question of how best, as philosophers, to think of the objects of perception. What exactly is the logical and epistemological relationship, for example, between seeing Mary’s red hair and seeing that Mary has red hair? Later, a similar question will be considered with respect to the relation between knowing Mary’s kindness, knowing of Mary’s kindness, and knowing that Mary is kind (or knowing Mary to be kind). Is one of these forms to be preferred in theorizing about knowledge—for example, as one might be led to suppose by many current discussions, the ‘seeing that . . . ’, ‘knowing that . . . ’ form? The issues raised by these questions are, or can appear, surprisingly complex. In the course of this enquiry, the writer whose views I will have most cause to mention is Timothy Williamson, who also takes seriously the idea that belief and knowledge are different in kind. To that extent he and I have come, no doubt from very different directions, to at least one broadly similar, long unfashionable general conclusion. This chapter, however, in so far as it refers to Williamson’s arguments, perhaps says more about the differences than the similarities between our views. A word about methodology may be helpful, although the justification of a methodology ultimately lies in the fruits of its employment—that is, its contribution to understanding. In the course of this chapter there is some fairly close—many may think pettifogging—consideration of some ‘ordinary’ English as an example of natural language as it seems relevant to the question of what constitutes the philosophically most perspicuous and explanatory way of thinking of the objects of perception, knowledge, and belief. That raises the question, already mooted in this book, of why ‘what we say’ in any language in ordinary life, the forms of everyday speech, should be thought particularly philosophically significant. Some reject appeals to ‘ordinary language’ as a philosophical methodology on the ground that natural, non-technical language is rooted in the practicalities of everyday life and in a naive understanding of the world,

96 Knowing and Seeing taking no account of the methodology and advances of physical science, or the achievements of formal logic, or simply the rich possibilities of speculative ontology and untrammelled ‘analytic metaphysics’ (depending on the critic’s own preferences). It is true that, as a method of argument unsupported by others, evidence drawn from an analysis of natural language needs to be employed with care and some scepticism as to its universal cogency—a point that will come up more than once in what follows. ‘Things we say’ are not only open to rival explanations, and to misconstruction, but may themselves embody outdated beliefs and theory—even philosophical theory. In its everyday employment, moreover, natural language is a pretty elastic and variable tool, and all more useful for that. Nevertheless, I believe that an understanding of the structure of natural language can both require and promote an understanding of the epistemological-cum-ontological basis of that structure. Misunderstanding of one is likely to involve, or may even necessarily involve, misunderstanding of the other. And such misunderstandings can run deep. In the next section,  4.2, the question is raised whether noun-phrases or nounclauses (nominalizations of sentences) of the form that S is P refer to the same or different categories of entity when they follow ‘believe’, ‘know’, and ‘perceive’. In section 4.3 the focus is on perception, and the significance of the difference between perceiving S (a perceptible object or entity of any category—whether a material object, an event, state of affairs, or whatever) and perceiving that S is P. Section 4.4 examines the question whether the objects of knowledge that S is P are propositions, answering in the negative, and in section 4.5 the view that they are facts is found equally questionable. The principle that the object of knowledge is also a significant cause of that knowledge suggests that the object of an ascription of knowledge that S is P is the event or state of affairs, S’s being P, rather than either the proposition or the fact that S is P, neither of which are ontologically satisfactory causes. But section 4.6 arrives at the conclusion that the assumption in so much epistemological discussion that the ‘knowing that S is P’ form of ascriptions of knowledge is the one most significant or relevant for the purposes of epistemology is fundamentally misguided. The different formulations of knowledge-ascriptions have complementary functions, just as the categorially different ways we can think of ‘the evidence’ have complementary functions, and the epistemological task is to explain their interrelations, not to pick one as philosophically the most satisfactory for the purposes of ‘analysis’.

4.2 Propositions and Facts, Content and Object Consider the following sentence, as if uttered as a (somewhat fogeyish) response to the question, asked in appropriate circumstances, ‘What makes John believe that the door is open?’: ‘John believes that the door is open because from where he is sitting he can see that the door is open and so knows that the door is open.’

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This sentence contains three occurrences of the noun-phrase ‘that the door is open’, grammatically the simplest or most straightforward form in which the sentence ‘The door is open’ can be nominalized. Does this noun-phrase or nominalized sentence serve the same role each time it occurs, or do the differences between believing, seeing (or, more generally, perceiving), and knowing mean that it serves a different role each time?1 As a noun-phrase it purports to refer to something, as does the same phrase in ‘That the door is open is alarming’, or ‘The draught is explained by the fact that the door is open’. So our question can be put by asking whether, qua noun-phrase employed (let us suppose) in a successful utterance of the sentence to express a truth, it refers to the same or to a different entity, whether abstract or concrete, each time it occurs?2 For example, does it in all three uses refer to a proposition (whatever that is)? To answer that question we need to think about what believing, perceiving, and knowing are, and it may help towards doing that to consider the structure of natural language as it deals with each (or, at least, a natural language—and differences in the languages I am acquainted with do not appear significant).

Are grammatical differences between ‘know’ and ‘believe’ conceptually significant? In Chapter 1 it was suggested, more or less in passing, that an argument for something like Plato’s view that there is a fundamental distinction between the objects of knowledge and the objects of belief might draw on the difference between permissible expansions of ascriptions of belief and knowledge in certain languages. Someone who believes that P may be believing the statement or proposition that P,3 whereas to know that P, if ordinary English is anything to go by, is to know the fact that P. ‘She believes the fact that P’ doesn’t make good sense, even if it is true that P, while knowledge of, or acquaintance with, the proposition that P (again, whether or not it is true) is very different from knowledge of, or acquaintance with, the fact that P. As for perception, it is, at first sight at least, a powerfully counter-intuitive view that we perceive propositions in the sense in which we believe them, and it is not greatly more attractive to talk of seeing, smelling, and feeling facts. Why is that so? Wider examination of our usage of the verbs know and believe readily reveals other constructions proper to each. Belief can be conceptually close to trust, so that we may, 1 Effectively the same question could be pursued with respect to the equivalent construction, more common to a number of languages than in English, of sentence nominalizations employing accusative and infinitive, as in ‘He believed (knew, perceived) her to be tall’; but to do so would leave differences less capable of being made perspicuous by expansion. The equivalence does, however, suggest that we should simply understand a ‘that . . .’ clause, in this context, as the nominalization of a sentence comparable to ‘Mary’s being tall’, rather than as a ‘contained’ sentence combined to the rest of a logically compound or complex sentence by an ‘operator’, the model apparently preferred by some philosophers. 2 Timothy Williamson argues in effect that even in ‘That the door is open explains the draught’ the ‘that . . .’ clause denotes a proposition. See this chapter, section 4.5. 3 I do not suppose that all believing is believing statements or propositions, since belief can be (and most belief is) inarticulate. Of course the ascription or expression of belief is articulate.

98 Knowing and Seeing for example, believe an informant as well as an account, and ‘believe in’ a practical principle, a herbal remedy, or a friend, as well as, in a different sense, miracles, ghosts, or Father Christmas. (Hence the potential ambiguity of ‘belief in God’, the stimulus, no doubt, for many a sermon.) There is no similar construction in which ‘know’ occurs. On the other hand, there are constructions in which ‘know’ occurs but is not grammatically replaceable by ‘believe’. We may know how to play tennis, or how to pot that red ball, or how a car engine works; and we may ‘know why’ or ‘whether’ our car has broken down, or why if A is greater than B, and B than C, then A is greater than C. We may also know of Jim Brown, or London, or the man who broke the bank at Monte Carlo; or we may, more intimately or directly, just know them—knowledge close to Russell’s ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, although not as circumscribed in its objects as that theoretical relation was taken to be. ‘What do you know about Jim?’ and ‘What do you believe about Jim?’ call for formally similar answers, whereas to replace ‘know’ with ‘believe’ in the question ‘Do you know about Jim’s accident?’ destroys sense. ‘What do you believe about Jim’s accident?’ is permissible, but that seems to be because in order to have a belief about something you have to have knowledge of that thing. Reference requires knowledge, direct or indirect. Knowledge of all these kinds may involve direct cognitive contact, and sometimes active engagement, with what is known, the object of the knowledge—which in the case of empirical knowledge means contact and engagement with the world, as always taking ‘the world’ to comprehend oneself. Someone who holds that these linguistic differences are of no great philosophical significance might argue that it is simply a matter of idiom that we can’t speak of believing why . . ., how . . ., or whether . . ., since we can speak, for example, of considering or, as might seem even more to the point, guessing why . . ., how . . ., or whether. . . . That could, however, be one of those purported exceptions that prove a rule. ‘He guessed how the dishwasher works’, or ‘. . . why the road is closed’, or ‘. . . whether she would be at the party’, or ‘. . . where the money was kept’, like ‘He guessed that she would be out’ or, for that matter, ‘He guessed the weight of the cake’ have readings that imply that the guess in each case was right, successfully latching onto reality (i.e. facts, as far as specified, known by the speaker), even if not in the perspicuous or grounded or reliable way characteristic of knowledge. In such contexts ‘guessing’ would seem to be, in Williamson’s terminology, ‘factive’, registering success. ‘How the dishwasher works’, ‘where the tools are kept’ are objective, independent matters of fact. To that extent ‘guess’ is, in these contexts, like ‘know’, and unlike ‘believe’. In another context, however, ‘He guessed that she would be out’ would serve, roughly speaking, to ascribe a less than well-founded, perhaps false belief. It would seem that guessing can have either propositions or facts as its object, depending on whether it is assimilated to belief or, when success is implied, to knowledge. Even in its ‘factive’ use, however, guessing is (truistically) unlike knowing or seeing in that the subject is not in such cognitive contact, direct or indirect, with the object of the successful guess as to render it certain. Williamson not unreasonably declines to recognize a fully or truly ‘factive’ use of

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‘guess’ (Williamson 2000: 35), taking the implication that what is guessed is true to be cancellable, and therefore, presumably, conversational rather than semantic. How seriously should we take this as an argument for a philosophically significant distinction between the objects of belief and the objects of knowledge? How significant, when all is said and done, is this distinction between facts and propositions? As Aquinas himself remarked (while denying that one person can both know and believe the same thing), what one person believes another may know, and that may suggest that to make too much of the distinction between propositions and facts is to run the risk of founding a theory on split hairs. A resolution might be sought in the notion of truth. What we know are truths, and to be acquainted with the truth that P is to know that P. But a truth is a true proposition. Why, then, can’t we conclude that the objects of knowledge, as of belief, are propositions, and that to know the true proposition that P is to know that P? The obvious objection to this argument is that talk of ‘truths’ suffers from an ambiguity correspondent to the proposition–fact distinction.4 Accordingly, the use of ‘truth’ in the first premise, that what we know are truths, is different from its use in the second, that a truth is a true proposition, a difference that we might mark by reviving and mildly reinterpreting an old distinction between ‘metaphysical’ and ‘conceptual’ truth. In the first premise a truth is the fact in virtue of which a certain proposition is true (call this a Truth). In the second premise, a truth is a proposition that is true in virtue of a fact or Truth. To be acquainted with the true proposition that P is not to be acquainted with the Truth that P, or to know that P, since for that one needs to know that the proposition is true: that is, one needs to be (as, at least, we say) acquainted with the fact that P.5 Let all this stand, for the time being, as the case or, at least, the linguistic case for holding that knowledge and belief have different objects, and that ‘ordinary language’ comprehensively reflects in this way the ancient and, when you think about it, in itself hardly radical thought that the object of knowledge that S is P is ‘to on’, the reality or Truth itself in virtue of which a belief that S is P is true. Knowing is a relation of the knower to what it is in the world that is known.

To what does a noun-phrase of the form ‘that S is P’ refer? Williamson has a different view, being disposed to argue, in effect, that the nounphrase ‘that the door is open’ purports to refer to the same thing in all its occurrences in our exemplar sentence, namely the proposition that the door is open. He identifies a family of ‘factive attitudes’, ascribed by ‘factive mental state operators’, all of which are apparently taken to be of a kind with respect to their objects.6 This class is taken to 4 Cf. Plato’s use of ‘alētheia’ (truth), mentioned in Chapter 1, section 1.2. 5 An interesting use of the notion of acquaintance—not, it would seem, Russell’s. But perhaps it is a mark of the abstract nature of facts (and ‘Truths’), discussed in section 4.5. 6 Williamson’s combining the rejection of the idea that knowledge should be explained in terms of belief with a classification of knowledge as a ‘propositional attitude’ is surprising, seemingly, at least, verging on inconsistency.

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include ‘perceive’ (and specific verbs of perception) as well as ‘know’. Both the notion of an attitude and the notion, borrowed from logic, of an ‘operator’ are open to question as Williamson employs them. The latter usage, admittedly, is fairly standard, and the idea behind it is presumably that the ‘that . . . ’ following the main verb (or, as Williamson’s nomenclature here would imply, ‘knows that . . . ’, taken as a unit) functions to combine two sentences to form a compound sentence, in this like a logical operator. Perhaps the intended analogy with standard logical operators is pretty weak, but it was originally, one supposes, motivated by a wish to represent the problem of understanding intentionality as essentially a logical problem.7 An obvious objection to it is that ascriptions of knowledge that P do not take the form of distinct sentences combined to form a complex or compound sentence, but of a sentence with a main verb which has the so-called ‘contained’ sentence as its grammatical and, it seems, logical object (if, as we shall see, in a particular sense its ‘internal’ object). The ‘contained’ sentence is simply a part of the logically simple containing sentence. That is why I have supposed that it supplies a clearer reflection of the grammatical and logical form of such ascriptions to treat the ‘that . . . ’ clause simply as a particular kind of nominalization of a sentence. In this at least it is comparable to such other forms of sentence nominalization as give us expressions that, appropriately used, refer to states of affairs, events, actions, etc.—for example ‘Jane’s being busy this morning’, ‘Peter’s running away’, or ‘Mary’s kissing James last night’. Like these, ‘that P’ noun-clauses can stand as grammatical subjects of predicative sentences, including sentences of which the main verb does not even implicitly ascribe a cognitive or other mental state (i.e. like ‘That the door is open explains the draught’ and unlike ‘That Mary kissed James upset John’). When it does so, the ‘that P’ clause certainly seems to refer to some situation in, or aspect of, the world, and the natural expansion of the clause is ‘the fact that P’, as it is when it follows ‘know’. So it seems that a noun-phrase of the ‘that P’ form can refer to a fact (whatever that is) as well as to a proposition. Which, then, does it purport to refer to after ‘know’ and ‘see’? And does it matter?

Propositions and content Let’s start with propositions and their connection with belief. A paradigm proposition, roughly speaking, can be thought of as an assertion or statement, not in the sense of the act of asserting or stating but in the sense of its ‘content’, what is asserted or stated, such that two assertions or statements count as the same if and only if one is true if and only if the other is true. (There are well-known problems with this simple account—one will be mentioned below—but it will do for now.) Actual assertion is unnecessary, and a proposition can be expressed in the absence of any inclination to assert or deny it, as it may be, for example, in a question. It may, moreover, simply be a possible or, as it were, candidate assertion or statement such as could be proposed or put forward, whether to

7 i.e. the problem supposed raised by the failure of substitutivity in intentional contexts.

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another or to oneself, for consideration. Propositions can therefore exist not only unasserted, but also, like numbers, unthought of. They are pretty abstract entities. Statements or assertions may be believed, but beliefs (in the everyday sense of ‘belief ’), unlike assertions, don’t have to be propositionally articulate. A capacity for language and articulate thought is not a necessary condition of having beliefs, although it is, of course, a condition of expressing or ascribing beliefs—just as it is a condition of giving an account of anything. Perhaps there can or could be meaningful actions (gestures, for example, or signing) describable as assertions with content not propositionally articulate, even implicitly, but they would fall towards the fringe of the concept of assertion. Inarticulate belief, on the other hand, is ubiquitous. Belief is not unproblematically quantifiable, but it is not implausible that most belief—certainly, perceptual belief—is inarticulate. To articulate or express a belief is to select or otherwise decide, and not simply to put words to a content already somehow individuated and articulated just as expressed. The standard characterization of belief as a ‘propositional attitude’ is therefore potentially misleading, straightforwardly appropriate only in the case of propositionally articulate belief, such as an asserted belief or acceptance of something one has been told. A more satisfactory general characterization of belief might be that belief is acceptance of, or mental assent to, an ‘intentional content’—not only the ‘semantic content’ of an assertion, but also the content of an experience, for example, or, for that matter, the content of a picture or video that one accepts at face value—accepts as veridical, a true record. One might accept or mentally assent to such a content without attempting, or even being able, to give an articulate account of it. That point serves, of course, as a qualification either of the thought that the internal objects of belief are propositions, or of the assumption that there is a tight connection between ‘propositions’ and articulate assertions. Either inarticulate beliefs are not propositional, or ‘propositional’ beliefs are not necessarily articulate. The expression or account of a belief will, of course, be articulated, like any account. The role of the ‘that P’ noun-phrase when it is the grammatical object of ‘believe’ is to denote the internal object of the verb, the belief believed. That is, it specifies or gives an account of the content of the believing. Does a belief that P also have an external object? As noted above, one kind of external object believing may have, in this like trust, is an informant or their assertions. But does it have an external object in the way that perceiving and knowing do? It certainly does in so far as it is a belief about something in the world, that is, its expression involves reference to something in the world (to consider now only empirical beliefs). My belief that Charles is well-off is a belief about Charles. It is also a belief about his financial circumstances (‘Charles is well-off ’ approximates to ‘Charles’s financial circumstances are healthy’). A rough test of whether a belief is about X might be whether the belief can properly or reasonably be expressed in a way that refers to X.8 A condition of successful reference, however, as 8 This is indeed rough, and might at best be a necessary condition. There is a burgeoning debate on the subject of subject-matter. See, notably, Yablo 2014, and responses to it.

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already suggested, is knowledge of the relatum.9 Charles can only be the object (or subject) of my belief if he is an object of my knowledge. I must either know him, or know of him. What, then are we to make of Williamson’s apparent thought that (in successful and appropriate use) ‘that P’ denotes a proposition after ‘know’ and ‘perceive’ just as it does after ‘believe’? Let us assume a liberal notion of a proposition, as an intentional content such as can or could be ‘expressed’: that is, a more or less adequate account of it can or could be given by means of a declarative sentence. It seems that Williamson’s position might then be rephrased as the view that ‘that P’ after any of these verbs serves as the internal object of the verb, specifying the intentional content of the mental state in question. Understood in this way the claim is not implausible, and to those who suppose that the only mental or intentional state in question is belief it would appear straightforwardly true in the case of knowledge (and to some even in the case of perception). But Williamson, it seems, is not of their number.

Williamson’s account of ‘factive’ mental states Williamson argues at some length that knowledge is in itself a mental state, and his doing so, I take it, is a way of rejecting two ideas popular among philosophers: chiefly, no doubt, the idea that, because it is ‘factive’, knowledge can be reductively broken down into a ‘narrow’ or ‘purely mental’ element, belief, plus the truth of the belief together with other extra-mental conditions. But he may also, perhaps, be implicitly rejecting the pragmatist idea that the ascription of knowledge should be understood as a kind of ‘performative’, functioning as endorsement of the subject’s belief, rather than as the ascription of a mental state or property at all. On both points I would agree with him. To question whether knowledge that it is raining is in itself a mental state on the grounds that rain is not mental is like questioning whether being in love with one’s partner is in itself a mental state on the grounds that it is impossible without a partner— as if the really or purely mental state involved could be understood in its own right as distinct from, and (if there happens to be a partner causally related in the right way to that mental state) a free-standing constituent of, the compound and only partly mental state of being in love with one’s partner. Since this is a controversial claim, it should perhaps be clarified. It might be argued that in a particular case the purely mental state of being in love with someone could have been just the same if the object of the subject’s love had not existed. However, the ‘could’ here is at best the ‘could’ of ‘logical’ possibility, since it is reasonable to assume that anyone in this world in a state describable as being in love with an imaginary partner will be in a psychologically very different state from that of someone in love with their partner—to suppose otherwise will soon get us into deceitful demon, brain-in-a-vat territory (on which much more in Part II of this book). 9 A point embodied in Keith Donnellan’s important distinction between attributive and referential uses of definite descriptions (Donnellan 1966).

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That does not mean that a psychologist could not focus on the ‘narrow’ state of the subject—for example, on the general character of the emotional state of being in love with someone in just that way, the kind of thoughts they have and the neurophysiology involved—while bracketing off, so to speak, the other term of the relation so far as this enquiry is concerned. But even that would require an account of the content of that state—of what it like for the subject—which would hardly be possible without mention of the partner. Some relevant brain-imaging would not be possible, for example, without getting the subject at least to be thinking of, perhaps looking at, just that person. How the subject reacts to things the partner does, moreover, might afford some of the most significant evidence of the subject’s state of mind. Indeed, an account of how the subject perceives or thinks of their partner would owe much of its psychological significance to the possibility of comparing it with a more objective account of that partner. So bracketing off the partner would neither be easy nor, in all probability, anything but obscuring. To put the point another way, the relational state is prior. It is not reducible to a state of quasi-being-in-love with a possibly existent, possibly imaginary partner plus the ‘external’ fact that such a state happens, in this particular case, to be caused (‘in the right way’) by an actually existent partner. Like being in love with someone, then, or regretting having pulled the trigger, knowledge is an irreducibly ‘factive’ mental state. If there can be no mental state of regret without something actual being regretted (something that is often, of course, an omission), that is because regret is irreducibly relational, the relation being to its object—to what it is in the world, past or present, state or event, act or omission, thought or desire, that is being regretted. The same is true of empirical knowledge (and, I suspect, mutatis the not insignificant mutandis, of all knowledge), and here the relation is to the ‘external’ object of knowledge—to what it is in the world that is known. Indeed, as might already be clear, there is more than an analogy between knowledge on the one hand and regret or being in love on the other, since the relation between the latter and its object itself presupposes the cognitive relation. One cannot regret or be in love with that of which one has no knowledge, as one cannot refer to it. Regret at having done something that one never did is like (as its expression purportedly involves) referring to something that doesn’t exist. There is reason, at least, to deny that either is strictly possible; for how can one have knowledge of something that doesn’t exist? One can do so, perhaps, in the way in which one can have knowledge of, and refer to, a fictitious character, but that is certainly not a primary case of knowledge of, or reference to, an object. To make a point in a certain kind of case, however, we may fairly readily, if usually not very seriously, speak as if existential belief is enough, and sometimes as if even that is unnecessary, and as if such attitudes as regret and love can, like desire, have non-existent objects. A problem with Williamson’s account, however, is that he also characterizes knowledge as a (factive) ‘propositional attitude’, a move that not only stretches the notion of an attitude well beyond breaking-point 10 but looks like an implicit endorsement 10 If knowledge is an attitude, to what is it an attitude? It is difficult not to assume that Williamson calls knowledge a propositional attitude just because it entails or presupposes belief (Aquinas’s ‘thinking with

104 Knowing and Seeing of the very idea that he explicitly rejects, that knowledge simply is belief that is true, provided that it is also non-accidentally or reliably engendered (and so on and so forth). Moreover the easy assimilation of the content of knowing with the content of believing reflected in the thesis that propositions are the relata of ‘that P’ in ascriptions of knowledge that P simply glosses over an issue that surfaces in the case of perception as well as knowledge, a question raised in Chapter  2. That is the question of what exactly it is to give an account of the ‘content’ (‘intentional content’) of perceptual states and states of knowledge, and how that is related to giving an account of the ‘external’ objects of those states—that is, an account of what it is in the world that the subject perceives, and of which they have perceptual knowledge.

4.3 ‘Perceiving that . . . ’ It may be helpful to focus first on perception. The particular objects of sense perception include material things and, more generally, material structure, but also events, states of affairs, and, as was argued in Chapter 2, causal processes and relations, including the process of perception itself. But what about perceving that P? To take an example from Williamson, how is seeing that Olga is playing chess different, as it evidently is, from seeing Olga playing chess, or seeing Olga’s chess-playing? The notion of a proposition is unhelpful here—too specifically related to asserting and believing, perhaps—but the significant question can be put in more general and appropriate terms. Is the noun-phrase ‘that the door is open’, as it appears in ‘She can see that the door is open’, an internal accusative of ‘see’, as it would be of ‘believes’ in ‘She believes that the door is open’? If the cases were just the same, its function after ‘see’ would be to specify the intentional content of the subject’s visual state comparably to the way such a nominalized sentence can specify the content of belief, the belief believed. But after ‘see’ the noun-phrase ‘that the door is open’ does not seem to serve as an internal accusative specifying only the content of a subjective visual state or experience. It would seem rather to identify a more than merely intentional object of vision, namely the fact that the door is open, and facts might seem to be ‘out there’ in the world, capable of having causes and

assent’), at least in central cases. However, being legally in receipt of a state pension entails being of a certain age, but that does not mean that the former is the same kind of property or condition as the latter. In fact the expression ‘propositional attitude’ has become a popular catch-all for a wide variety of intentional states. Desires were for long brought under the term along with beliefs, but even the distinction drawn between ‘propositional’ and ‘objectual’ attitudes tends to mask the significance of a categorial or ontological distinction. A belief can be said to be an ‘attitude’, no doubt, but towards a proposition, bearer of truth and falsity, an abstract, timeless entity with whatever ontological status such objects have, a status independent of whether they are true or false. A desire, on the other hand, is very commonly an attitude towards a concrete particular existing in space and time. A desire for what does not yet exist or obtain is open to satisfaction by just such a spatio-temporal particular–whether physical object, event or state of affairs. More is said about the relation between propositions and states of affairs below, but knowledge is not an ‘attitude’ to either, or to anything else. It might do no harm to the philosophy of mind, and probably some good, if use of the term ‘attitude’ were banned.

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effects11 and, by impinging on our senses, of being the external objects of perception. Isn’t the significant question, then, whether what the nominalized sentence denotes is the internal content or the external object of perception?

The content and objects of perception Well, the argument of Chapter 2 was an illustration of the point that an account of the ‘content’ of perceptual awareness, which is at least the major part of an account of ‘what it is like’ to be in that perceptual state, is in essence an account of the objects of perception as they are perceived. The phenomenology of perception, it was argued, is the systematic pursuit of such an account with respect to human perception in general. Content and object are to that extent conceptually inseparable. So we should not be surprised if the sentence ‘She saw that the door was open’, appropriately used, tells us something specific about the content of the subject’s visual experience, at least comparably to the way in which ‘She believed that the door was open’ tells us the content of the belief. What it says is more specific in this respect than, say, ‘She saw the open door’, which might be true even if the open door looked to her to be, and she took it to be, the clever trompe l’oeil mentioned in the guide book. (Of course, context, including what else is said, can serve to make what is conveyed more specific, as ‘She saw the open door and made for it just as the sermon was about to start’.) On the other hand, although ‘She saw that the door was open’ is thus peculiarly specific with respect to content, it is also just as specific with respect to the (external) object of perception, which is what makes it ‘factive’ in Williamson’s sense. Its specifying role is Janus-faced. But that means that it is a mistake to insist either that the ‘that P’ phrase denotes a proposition or mental content, or that it denotes something in the world, a fact. Or perhaps it does denote a fact, but perhaps facts are not straightforwardly or wholly ‘out there’.

An analogy: episodic and factual memory Before attempting to say more about how the ‘perceives that P’ formulation spans the potential gap between content and object—between how it is ‘from the inside’ and what is ‘out there’ as the external object of perception—I will digress a little to look at other members of Williamson’s class of ‘factive mental state operators’. Examples of ‘factive attitudes’ discussed or at least mentioned by Williamson include ‘remember’, ‘regret’, and ‘recognize’, and we could add ‘understand’. Each of these has its peculiarities, but the general point marked by the term ‘factive’ holds, although ‘regret’ is something of an exception, as we have seen, being rather clearly an attitude towards something in the world and not towards some proposition about it, or some intentional content.12

11 For a qualification of this suggestion, see section 4.5. 12 It could, I suppose, be held that belief is characteristically or in basic cases an attitude towards the world. Thus it could be said that belief that there is a wall in front of you is a wall-ascribing attitude to your environment. There seem few rewards for going in that direction. The simple moral is rather that one has

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Moreover, it is not cognitive, but presupposes cognition. ‘Perceive’, ‘remember’, ‘recognize’, ‘understand’ clearly have more intimate relationships to ‘know’. Perception, recognition, and understanding all characteristically lead to, or actually involve, additions to knowledge, while memory involves the retention or (conscious or unconscious, but paradigmatically conscious) accessing of knowledge. Philosophers and psychologists commonly draw a distinction between factual and episodic memory. For someone to remember (the fact) that their grandfather died in 1979 is not the same as for them to remember their grandfather’s death. To ascribe memory of facts is not to ascribe memory of events or occasions, or of the people or objects involved in those events or occasions. And to ascribe memory of events, states of affairs, and their participants is not to ascribe memory of any facts in particular, although some relevant facts or other will be remembered. Something similar holds with respect to the otherwise rather different distinction between perceiving (seeing, hearing, etc.) objects, events, etc. and perceiving that such and such is the case. Williamson suggests, with respect to this contrast, that memory or perception of, for example, Olga playing chess does have content, but not the conceptual content necessary for remembering that Olga was playing chess, or for seeing that she is doing so. Only the latter, he takes it, constitutes a form of knowledge. Here he would seem to be generalizing from this case along traditional, broadly neo-Kantian lines according to which it is ‘our concepts’ and the propositional form of judgement that give depth to the thin data of sense, turning mere sensory content into experience and knowledge of an independent world. As an explanation of the significance of the ‘know (etc.) that P’ construction, however, this conceptualist proposal is open to objection on more than one count. Certainly, chess being what it is, one has to know at least roughly what chess is, what ‘chess’ denotes—i.e. to ‘possess’ the concept of chess or, at least, have some grasp of it—in order to see that someone is playing chess. But I do not have to possess or grasp any ‘concept’ at all in order to feel that (and so know that) something is pressing into my arm, or to see that there is there is a large object in front of me.13 As was argued in Chapter  3, not all perceptual ‘knowledge that’, still less all perceptual knowledge, involves recognition or classification or characterization under a determinate concept. Indeed, as with ‘knowing that’ and ‘seeing that’, the ‘remembering that’ construction is often conveniently employable to ascribe memory to creatures to which we may reasonably hesitate to ascribe either a grasp of concepts or even direct recall of particular events and situations. That is a kind of memory that Gilbert Ryle included under ‘having learnt and not forgotten’, which (for reasons related to his inclination towards

to have some knowledge of the world in order to have beliefs about it. As Williamson says (if with a different point in mind), ‘Knowledge first!’ 13 Some will hold that even these perceptual achievements require concepts, notably the concept of a material object. In section 3.5 it was argued, in effect, that that model puts the cart before the horse. The perceptual achievement of picking out material objects comes before any determinate ‘concepts’ or propositional structure.

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behaviourism) he seemed prepared to regard as the paradigm of remembering.14 So the cat (let us suppose) can remember that her tin of food is in the cupboard (or over there) even if, as is at least possible, cats have (or this old cat has) no recollection of particular past events, as well as lacking the determinate concepts that we may employ in ascribing this particular memory to this particular cat.15 That point does not, of course, drive any kind of wedge between ‘remembering that . . . ’ and ‘knowing that . . . ’: the cat, in inarticulately remembering that fact, inarticulately knows that her food-tin is in the cupboard. Nor does it undermine the further point that to say of someone that he remembers that Olga was playing chess is to make what is in a way a more determinate ascription of knowledge than to say that he remembers Olga playing chess. Someone who simply remembers that event will certainly have some knowledge of it, an account of the content of which can be given by nominalized declarative sentences, but it may not be knowledge that Olga was playing chess. A similar point applies to perception, although there is also a difference. We would be unwilling, I take it, to say of all those who saw an atomic bomb exploding that they saw that an atomic bomb was exploding, if many of the onlookers did not know that what they saw was the explosion of an atomic bomb, and even lacked the concept of an atomic bomb. Williamson takes full note of that distinction. But two further points might be made here. First, no one could have seen,16 and in that way have come to know, that an atomic bomb was exploding without seeing an atomic bomb exploding, whereas you might remember that you attended a cousin’s wedding without remembering attending it. It is therefore unlikely that a distinction between ‘seeing X’ and ‘seeing that P’ could play the same kind of role in psychology as the distinction between episodic and factual memory.17 The distinction is merely linguistic or conceptual, rather than psychological. Second, anyone who saw an atomic bomb exploding would thereby (if they believed their senses) have come to know an indefinite number of facts, at least momentarily, even if not necessarily the fact that an atomic bomb was exploding. Such a person would have knowledge of the explosion of an atomic bomb, even if not knowledge of it as the explosion of an atomic bomb.18

Ways of knowing and ways of coming to know: recognition and understanding It is a significant feature of some members of Williamson’s class of those ‘factive mental state operators’ supposed to identify specific ‘ways of knowing’ that, along with a shift 14 An inclination that probably reflected his deeper and more consistent and more compelling opposition to what might be called ‘intellectualism’, the idea that all thought is logically articulate. See Ryle 1949: 272–9. 15 Such a cat might also remember, to the extent of recognizing, particular objects, places, etc. 16 i.e. directly, not e.g. in the way in which I can see that a festival is going on by reading a newspaper or a placard, without in any sense seeing the festival going on. 17 Which is not to deny that it could conceivably have some role in certain cases. 18 There is also the case, not here of much relevance, of someone who later discovers that what they saw in the distance was in fact the explosion of an atomic bomb.

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from other nouns or noun-phrases to that-clauses, from one kind of grammatical object to another, not only is there a clear difference in kind between the propositions expressed but the main verbs are liable to take on a different sense. Accordingly, the question arises whether it is the construction in which the verb is followed by ‘that P’ or the construction in which it is followed as direct object by a substantive or other noun-phrase referring to a material object or person, place, quality, event, state of affairs, or other such entity that better represents the exercise of a distinguishable cognitive faculty.19 If that question seems odd or mysterious, consider ‘recognize’ and ‘understand’ as employed in standard idiomatic English. To ‘recognize that P’ is usually simply to take on board the fact that P. Sometimes that requires insight or expertise, but that is not essentially implicit in the idiom, and the sense of ‘recognize’ often weakens to the extent that someone can be said to recognize that P when they have simply assented to a known truth, accepting that it is known. (There is something ‘performative’ in this sense of ‘recognize’). To understand that P is generally either simply to know (grasp the fact) that P (the phrase sometimes favoured in the face of a suggestion that knowledge is lacking, as ‘I do understand that this wine is from Chile’), or else, in accordance with a common use of ‘understand’, simply to believe or, perhaps, know it on the basis of assurances (as ‘I understand that this excellent wine is from Chile’). ‘Recognizing that’ and ‘understanding that’, extremely close as they generally are, in idiomatic use, to ‘knowing that’, seem thereby to be a significant distance from such meatier, more central ascriptions of recognition and understanding as ‘He recognized his long-lost sister’, ‘I recognize that flag’, ‘She understands electricity’, ‘He at last understood the proof of Pythagoras’ Theorem’ or ‘She understood what he said’. It is the latter that we naturally think of as ascribing exercises of specific faculties of recognition and understanding, faculties that may be involved in misunderstanding and misrecognition too. It can, moreover, take time to recognize someone, or to understand an argument or a machine. One can be in the position of having begun to understand something or to recognize someone, without yet (or ever) fully understanding or recognizing them—without having achieved full understanding or recognition. As such, recognition and understanding are, of course, important ways of achieving or grounding knowledge—of coming to have knowledge—but are decidedly not species or determinations of a genus or determinable, knowledge that. 20 19 In the case of memory, there might be reason to think in terms of two different faculties, in so far as there may be different mechanisms such that it is possible to lose one but not the other. 20 There is a dispositional use of ‘understands’, so that to understand Greek is to have the ability to understand (‘occurrently’) someone speaking Greek, but the once (perhaps in some quarters still) popular view, influenced by Wittgenstein, that such apparently occurrent understanding is analysable as dispositional is held doctrinae causa, and the doctrine is more or less sophisticated behaviourism. If someone speaks a language I understand, I normally understand them as they speak. To claim that my understanding is not occurrent, but a matter of how I am disposed to ‘go on’, is like claiming, absurdly, that perception is not occurrent on the grounds that we base a judgement as to whether someone can see their environment on whether they ‘go on’ to respond to it appropriately.

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That a man ‘recognizes’ that the woman before him is his sister does not entail that he recognizes her; and that he recognizes her does not entail that he recognizes that she is his sister, or anybody in particular. He might not be able, as we say, to ‘place’ her, although such a case might not count as a case of ‘full’ recognition. Of course, if he recognized her as his sister, or as the woman he saw on a previous occasion, he would thereby know that she was his sister, or the woman he saw previously, although he may have known (and ‘recognized’) that fact already, his knowledge having been acquired by other means. Similarly, understanding why something is so goes beyond understanding that it is so, and that further step cannot be reduced to knowledge of a further fact. Someone may ‘understand’, for example, that such and such a theorem is true, and ‘understand’ that this is the proof of the theorem, but fail to understand the proof and so fail to understand why the theorem is true. Most of us understand why, if A is greater than B, and B is greater than C, then A is greater than C, but no propositional ‘knowledge that’ encapsulates, or could encapsulate, our understanding. Our understanding can’t be passed on as a bit of propositional information, although things can be said in the face of incomprehension: examples can be given, appropriate analogies can be drawn, alleged counter-examples can be re-interpreted and rebutted. It is, at least in principle, possible to know that the conditional is true, having read it in a reliable textbook, without understanding why it is true. Suppose it is said that to understand or know why it is true is to know that the relation greater than is a comparative relation and that comparative relations are transitive. It is in principle possible to obtain knowledge of the latter from a reliable book, too, without understanding why that is true. And as it has often been pointed out, it is possible to know (or ‘understand’) that a sentence means such and such, without understanding it—that is, without grasping, however inarticulately, why or how it means what it does.21 An exercise of a faculty of understanding, such as understanding an argument, an axiom, a machine, someone’s motive or a sentence, involves understanding why something is the case, which is ultimately irreducible to understanding (i.e. merely knowing) that something is the case.22 On the other hand, as I have supposed elsewhere in this book, ‘understanding’ in that full-blooded sense can well supply us with propositional ‘knowledge that’, in this like perception. Just occasionally ‘I understand that P’ carries the implication that my knowledge that P is based on understanding why P, on understanding the fact: for example, on one reading (i.e. one that doesn’t take ‘I understand that . . . ’ to be roughly equivalent to ‘I gather/have taken on board the fact that . . . ’), ‘I understand that you 21 Incidentally, as with explaining, the distinction between propositions and facts is nicely illustrated by the difference between understanding the former and understanding the latter. It is said that a bowl of well-boiled, boiling hot water put in a freezer will freeze more quickly than a bowl of unheated tap-water put in at the same time. I may fully understand the proposition, and indeed believe it (and, if it was indeed known by my informant, can be said to know on good authority that it is true), without understanding the fact or phenomenon—that is, why the proposition is true. (There is in fact an explanation, plausible even to a non-physicist, of why it might well be true.) 22 The point is close to Plato’s in Theaetetus (see Chapter 1, section 1.2).

110 Knowing and Seeing will not want to meet her’ will imply that I understand your predictable reluctance— why you will be reluctant. We might conclude that, for all the differences between the processes and cognitive achievements characteristically marked by the term ‘recognize’ and those marked by ‘understand’, the construction in which either verb is followed by ‘that’ and a declarative sentence turns attention away from the knowledge-producing process, the exercise of a cognitive faculty, to a determinate bit of knowledge itself. Perhaps ‘recognize that’ and ‘understand that’ were earlier only used to include both cognitive process and a (presumably, currently interesting or significant) piece of knowledge so produced or gained. But, if so, that feature has been all but lost in idiomatic English, and the expressions have virtually degenerated into synonyms for ‘know that’. Such different overtones as there are seem to have little connection with the full-blooded recognition and understanding ascribed when the verbs are followed by nouns and other noun-phrases than that-clauses or—especially (but not only) in the case of understanding—by whyclauses or how-clauses.23

The analogy with perceiving: some complications Would it be too bold to generalize from just these two cases, understanding and recognizing, to all verbs that, like ‘understand’ and ‘recognize’, mark the exercise of a knowledge-producing cognitive faculty—including, in particular, verbs of perception? One problem is that, in the case of ‘see’, ‘hear’, ‘feel’, ‘smell’, ‘taste’, or ‘perceive’ itself, the situation is somewhat masked or complicated by the peculiarities of each sense and a consequent variety of dominant dead or moribund metaphors. Seeing is predominately a metaphor for understanding, and so very naturally stretches over inferential as well as perceptual knowledge, although this happens to some extent with respect to other senses. ‘I see that P’ can be used to ascribe knowledge ranging from knowledge grounded directly on vision (as ‘He saw that something was moving on the path’), to knowledge achieved by recognizing what one sees on the basis of characteristic appearance (as ‘When it opened its wings I could see that it was a Barbarstelle bat’ or ‘He saw immediately that it was a genuine antique’24), to knowledge inferred from evidence 23 In the long-running debate over whether ‘knowing how’ is reducible to ‘knowing that’, those who deny the possibility of reduction are generally motivated by the desire to give the intentionality of action (or ‘behaviour’) a central role in an explanation of intentionality, and so tend to argue that knowing how to do something, such as ride a bicycle, involves practical competence, not just knowing that such and such is a means to doing so. The opposing view is accordingly commonly described as ‘intellectualist’. But knowing how to solve quadratic equations characteristically comes with understanding how to solve quadratic equations, which comes with understanding why such and such is the procedure for solving them—all of which is intellectual enough. We might ask whether knowing that such and such is the requisite procedure is enough not only for knowing how to solve them (perhaps it is enough, or perhaps ‘knowing how’ is ambivalent here), but also for knowing why that is the means to doing so (for which it arguably isn’t enough). 24 These examples may seem different, in that the latter might seem equivalent to ‘He immediately inferred from its appearance that it was a genuine antique’, whereas there doesn’t seem the same pressure to read ‘I saw that the animal was a tiger’ as ‘I inferred from its appearance that the animal was a tiger’. But being a tiger, like being a genuine antique, goes beyond what is available to sight. A tiger must be related to

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available to sight (‘I see from your suit that you have come straight from work’), to cases of inferred knowledge unconnected with vision (‘I could see from the tone of his response that he would never admit his mistake’), to uninferred abstract knowledge (‘I do see that identity is a transitive relation’—that is, I know that it is so, in consequence of seeing why it is so). A linguistic oddity, or irony, of English idiom already noted is that ‘I see that P follows necessarily from Q’ would normally express the thought that the speaker understands the logical relationship in question, whereas ‘I understand that P follows from Q’ would in many contexts imply that the speaker only knows or believes on good authority that P follows from Q. In another context, however, ‘I see that P’ may be roughly equivalent to ‘I read (e.g. in the newspaper) that P’, as ‘I see that there is to be an election on May 6th’ or, for that matter, ‘I see from this logic book that you can deduce p ∨ q from q (although I don’t see why)’. ‘Hear that . . . ’ is perhaps predominantly used in this last way, as in ‘I’ve heard that the Pope is going to Africa’. In some cases, at least, of ‘I heard/saw that P’ used in this way, knowledge or even belief is not explicitly ascribed, or even conversationally implied. Compare ‘I heard that John has died. Is it true?’ with ‘Have you heard that John has died?’ The latter would often imply, at least conversationally, that the speaker knows that John has died, although a possible, possibly appropriate, if somewhat offkey reply is ‘Yes, I have, but it is isn’t true’. ‘I heard that the house was collapsing behind me’ is potentially ambiguous, since I might have been told that the house was collapsing without hearing the collapse. Neither ‘I could hear that the house was collapsing’ nor ‘I heard (or ‘could hear’) the house collapsing’ share this ambiguity, although the latter does not imply, as does the former, that I gathered (knew) that the house was collapsing, since I might at the time have put a different construction, or none at all, on the noise that I heard. The ‘could hear that’ formulation avoids the ambiguity by emphasizing that the bit of knowledge specified is gained directly through the exercise of the cognitive faculty: I knew of the collapse of the house by hearing it. (Williamson gives a different account.)25 But the questions ‘What do you hear (see, etc)?’ and “What can you hear (see, etc.)?’ are commonly interchangeable when they concern the other tigers, for example. It is therefore unfortunate that so much discussion of ‘perceptual knowledge’ focuses pretty well exclusively on such cases as seeing that there is a zebra in the enclosure. 25 Williamson (2000: 36–7) denies that the ‘could’ in such cases is the ‘could’ of ability, on the ground that ‘She could feel that the bone was broken’ does not mean ‘She had the ability to feel . . .’. But by parity of reasoning that would imply that the ‘was able’ of ‘She was able to feel . . .’ is not the ‘was able’ of ability— which is perhaps true on one natural reading, but only in so far as the term ‘ability’ is commonly reserved for general abilities, such as the ability to touch one’s toes. There is, however, no relevant difference between ‘She could/was able to feel (see, etc.) that P’ and ‘She could/was able to touch her toes’ said in a context in which the latter is roughly equivalent to ‘She managed to touch her toes’. In general, ‘can’ and ‘is able’ have a kind of ‘occurrent’ use for a particular exercise of an ability, usually a somehow doubtful or unreliable one—that is, for an exercise that is proof of the ability in the circumstances, when such proof seems called for. In general, too, ‘has the ability to . . .’ is not so employed, for understandable reasons. So ‘Can you/Are you able to hear me in the back row?’ and ‘Do you hear me in the back row?’ generally put effectively the same question, but ‘Does she have the ability to hear me?’ and ‘Does she hear me?’ would normally ask different questions. I see no ground for Williamson’s claim that ‘could feel’ is here grammatically analysable but semantically unanalysable.

112 Knowing and Seeing objects of the senses. The latter might be preferred when, for example, the addressee is straining to make something out, or has a subnormal or abnormal perceptual capacity, or is better or worse placed than the speaker. ‘Feeling that P’ is different, since it is predominantly a metaphor for a way, not of coming to know that P but of believing or coming to believe that P. ‘What do you feel?’ may ask for a report on tactual or bodily sensation, but in many common contexts asks for an opinion or tentative judgement. ‘She felt that her leg was breaking’ (like the perhaps slightly weaker ‘It felt as if . . . ’) would not in most contexts imply that the leg was breaking,26 unlike ‘She could feel that her leg was breaking’—the ‘could’ here again bringing the sensory faculty explicitly into the story, to mark the way knowledge was achieved. ‘She felt her leg breaking’ would normally imply that her leg was breaking, but on one reading at least, as in ‘She felt her leg breaking, but thought that she had just barked her shin’, it ascribes no particular knowledge or even belief that the leg was breaking. As we might expect, adding ‘could’ (‘She could feel her leg breaking’) on the natural reading achieves the implication that the subject knew that her leg was breaking, her knowledge deriving from her feeling her leg breaking. I pass over the question of just which of these implications are ‘semantic’ and which ‘conversational’. It might be interesting to pursue the question of why ‘seeing that P’ so generally serves as a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge, while ‘feeling that P’ commonly serves as a metaphor for unreasoned belief or, if knowledge, then at best knowledge that is ‘intuitive’ in the current everyday rather than classical philosophical sense. Perhaps it is because what is literally, physically felt on any occasion is normally, at least in part, oneself, or simply because judging such a thing as the precise shape of an object or the exact position of a limb by how it feels is often, for most of us, a fairly tentative matter as compared to judging shape or position by sight. We do, however, say such things as ‘I know he’s a crook—I just feel it’, and in this context ‘can feel’ creeps in naturally enough.

The role of ‘that . . .’ clauses after verbs of perception Can we infer anything at all about knowledge, sense perception, their interrelation and their objects from these somewhat minute (if, no doubt, far from comprehensive) considerations of idiomatic English? Well, in general, apart from some employments (particularly of ‘feel that . . . ’), ‘that-clauses’ following literally employed verbs of perception serve to identify one particular feature of the perceived situation noted by the subject, and so one particular piece of knowledge achieved by an exercise of the knowledge-producing faculty in question. The construction as it were welds the ascription of that particular bit of knowledge on top of the ascription of a perceptual achievement with respect to something in the environment that the knower is or was 26 There are contexts in which the ‘felt that’ and ‘could feel that’ sentences might seem interchangeable, e.g. if A and B knowingly share the knowledge that B’s leg has broken, there may seem little ground to distinguish A’s ‘Did you feel that your leg was breaking?’ from ‘Could you feel that your leg was breaking?’ But even in this context the former might seem more concerned with B’s belief at the time, the latter with knowledge gained by the exercise of a sensory faculty.

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latching onto, something, indeed, with which they are in direct cognitive contact, perception being direct cognitive contact with one’s environment.27 The verb, unless as general as ‘perceive’, specifies the sense modality or faculty (or one of the faculties) by which the subject achieves or achieved just that bit of knowledge (among others unstated). So ‘Holmes could smell that there had been a fire in the grate on the previous day’ welds onto Sherlock Holmes’s smelling and noting a peculiar odour a precise piece of knowledge he gained thereby, from within the wider scene. ‘Mary saw that the dog was afraid’ welds onto Mary’s seeing the dog’s being afraid the further achievement expressible by ‘She (thereby) knew that the dog was afraid’. That this is a further achievement is obvious in these cases—Mary might have interpreted the dog’s seen behaviour differently, for example as its being angry, or not at all. But something similar holds even in such a case as ‘She saw that the grass was yellow’ or ‘She saw that the figure was a trapezium’. Mary might have seen the yellowness of the grass and the trapezoidal shape of the figure and yet have taken note of neither, or might even have believed, for some special reason, the appearance of the grass or perceived shape to be illusory. In that case the ‘saw that . . . ’ construction would be inappropriate in so far as the ‘knew that’ construction is.28 To return to the question, ‘Do we perceive facts?’, we can now reply that language, at least, supplies no reason to suppose so, since the constructions that might encourage such a view are hybrid or compound, combining the ascription of knowledge with an assignment of its source or basis in sense perception. ‘John saw that Celia’s eyes were blue’ tells us that John came to know that Celia’s eyes were blue by seeing and noting, among all that he saw and noted of the scene before him, the blueness of her eyes. Accordingly, we should not be beguiled into over-assimilating perception and knowledge by the existence of both ‘know that P’ and ‘perceive that P’ constructions since, so I suggest, the latter is essentially parasitic on the former. Williamson, for example, calls seeing, hearing, etc. ‘ways of knowing’, but they are ways of knowing only in the sense in which they are ways of coming to know, ways in which knowledge may be grounded on perceived objects in an unmysterious way broadly similar to the way an accurate description of a perceived object as observed—an articulate expression of perceptual knowledge—is grounded on the object. The description may possess propositional form, but the perceived object so described clearly does not. To say that, of course, leaves us with the question whether the objects of knowledge, or of knowledge ‘in the full sense’, as well as expressions of knowledge and accounts of what is known, essentially possess logical form—that is, with the question whether ascriptions of knowledge of the ‘knows that P’ form are somehow logically basic, or the most revealing as to the nature of human knowledge. Or perhaps the more fundamental question is whether that question makes much sense. Our discussion of the objects of verbs 27 Cf Rosenberg 2004: 275 (on McDowell): ‘all this is so because “I see that such and such is the case” simply means “I know by seeing that such and such is the case”. ’ 28 The possibility of not believing what one sees provides standard examples used to drive a wedge between perceiving and believing. For Williamson, on the other hand, it often seems that to perceive is simply to know in a certain way.

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of perception would seem simply to have kicked that particular can further down the road. One reason why this is an important conclusion, however, justifying, as one hopes, a somewhat nit-picking examination of language, is that Williamson is by no means the only analytic philosopher whose conception of the relation between perception and knowledge is consonant with, if not shaped by, a preference for the form ‘perceives (sees, etc.) that P’. John McDowell’s penchant for the same construction in expounding his realist form of neo-Kantianism was discussed in Chapter 3, and we shall find the same tendency at work in arguments considered in Part II.

4.4 Knowledge and Propositions It should be clear that I agree with some of the main theses of Williamson’s book, not least with the thought, which has strong roots in the tradition, that knowledge is the fundamental cognitive state, prior to any other. Without some knowledge there could be no belief, no probability, no speculation, no thought—even (as Lucretius in his way pointed out) sceptical thought. Much of what Williamson says embodies, or is consonant with, that general point, summed up in his slogans ‘Knowledge first’ and ‘Belief aims at knowledge’. Such a view of knowledge, however, requires explanation, which is the point of the argument in Chapter 2 that our understanding of knowledge should be centred on the kind of knowledge acquired through our primitive and direct sensory awareness of the world, the paradigm of what I have called ‘primary knowledge’. To possess primary knowledge of any kind is to be in something like that perspicuous cognitive relationship to the object known, a relationship which is such that in coming to possess such knowledge we also know that and how we do so. Much of what we count as knowledge, however, is more clearly what I have called ‘secondary knowledge’, and is not in the same way ‘evident’ but relies on ‘extraneous reasons’. Some may even be ‘unconsciously’ knowledge, in the sense that its possessor does not know how or even that they possess it. As I have stressed, a main point of drawing this distinction between primary and secondary knowledge is to insist that, just as without some knowledge there could be no belief, so without some primary knowledge there could be no secondary knowledge. On this view, the common assumption that a properly ‘naturalistic’ theory of cognition should treat our cognitive faculties as in effect Hume does, as, from our point of view, no more than mechanisms for producing beliefs29 on the whole reliably correspondent to reality (whatever that is like ‘in itself ’), comes out as deeply misguided. Knowledge of the world is a natural relation to what is known just as perception— conscious awareness of one’s environment as one’s environment—is a natural relation to what is perceived. It is not necessary to leave the realm of the natural in order to argue, as was done in some detail in Chapter 2, that perceptual knowledge is perspicuous, 29 Perceptual beliefs being, for Hume, vivacious ‘impressions’.

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and such that its possessor knows that and—well enough, at least, for practical purposes—how they have it. It is necessary, however, to recognize the essential role in cognition of that eminently natural, if perplexing phenomenon, consciousness, and to seek a critical, evidence-based account of all that human beings are characteristically aware of in sense perception—that is, to pursue the phenomenology of perception.

Williamson, the KK Principle and primary knowledge How much of all this, beyond the thesis of ‘knowledge first’, would be congenial to Williamson? He reasonably assumes that, in general, sensory experience is a source of knowledge, indeed the fundamental source of such knowledge as may serve as evidence for further knowledge or belief.30 A main theme of his book is his identification of knowledge—what is known—with evidence in the secondary sense: for Williamson, our evidence and our knowledge are one and the same, or, as he puts it, ‘e = k’. Nevertheless he says little about perception itself beyond classifying it with knowledge as a factive mental state. There is no serious phenomenology of perception. Accordingly nothing is said about ‘evidence’ in the primary sense—the ‘quality of evidence’, as one dictionary puts it, that supporting evidence must have in order to serve as supporting evidence for a hypothesis. The thesis that evidence (in the secondary sense) must be known might be thought equivalent to saying that it must be evident, but Williamson argues at some length against the ‘KK principle’, the principle that knowing involves knowing that one knows. He seemingly rejects the principle even for foundational knowledge. His argument is, in effect, a denial of the relevance of ‘evidence’ in the primary sense to epistemology. Indeed, his emphasis on the point that knowledge is a mental state is closely linked in his argument to the claim that no mental state is ‘luminous’. In this like any epistemological externalist,31 Williamson seems satisfied that, given the existence of cases of knowledge the subject doesn’t know they have, the KK principle can effectively be dismissed from serious consideration of what knowledge is. He grants neither significance nor even recognition to the fact that there are cases in which the subject, in coming to know that P, ipso facto, by the very same route or means, indeed in the very same experience, comes to know how and that they know that P. In contrast, I claim that a KK principle holds, and does so essentially, for what I have called ‘primary’ knowledge, and I interpret the implicit or explicit assumption of the KK principle by traditional philosophers from Plato to Locke as just one aspect of their adoption of a narrower notion of knowledge than the everyday one. By many in the tradition, it is only primary knowledge, knowledge possessing intrinsic, underived evidence in the primary sense through the manner of its acquisition, that is counted as real knowledge. That point of history, however, is masked and complicated by the rationalists’ official denigration of perceptual knowledge in favour of the understanding 30 Cf. Williamson 2000: 186, where he subscribes to a ‘modest foundationalism’. 31 Epistemological ‘externalism’ is examined in Chapter 6.

116 Knowing and Seeing of necessary truth, as well as by the more widespread tendency, often in response to sceptical argument, of treating the knowledge-delivering faculties as infallible. Finally, as we have seen, Williamson holds, as I do not, that the internal objects of knowledge, as of belief, the objects denoted by ‘that . . . ’ clauses after ‘know’, are propositions. It is true that the ‘that . . . ’ clause after ‘know’ gives the content of the knowledge, the knowledge known, as after ‘believe’ it gives the content of the belief, the belief believed. The content of knowledge, however, is not a proposition but the object of knowledge as it is known, as the content of a perceptual state is the object of perception as it is perceived. To put it very crudely, to ask someone to say what they believe is to ask them a question primarily about themselves, whereas to ask them to state what they know or perceive is, in general, to ask a question primarily about the world, even if also about their relation to it.

Propositions, the rationale for ‘e = k’, and the senses of ‘evidence’ I take it that his principle that ‘e = k’ is a key to understanding the subjective unity of Williamson’s thought about knowledge. He aims, it seems, for a tidy epistemology according to which successful cognition comes up with an end product that is a fit term for logical relations and a fit basis for the assessment of probability and for inference in general. He takes that end product to be propositions that can be in rational relation to other propositions. Nothing can be evidence, he holds, unless it is knowledge, and all knowledge is evidence.32 He recognizes that the term ‘evidence’ has other uses in ordinary discourse—we talk, for example, of looking for evidence, and of the physical evidence. But he argues that, because of its justifying or grounding role, on the philosophically well-motivated view of evidence, evidence is propositional, indeed consists of propositions.33 In other words, he proposes a view of knowledge/evidence that seems to make it something that is essentially acquired in a language-ready form. It is true that one way in which we talk and think about ‘knowledge’ or ‘evidence’ is as something that can be stated, fills books, or is available on the web, but to concentrate

32 While it would be difficult to disagree with the claim that we can properly count as relevant evidence only what is known, indeed certain, I find the claim that everything that is known is evidence less than clear or obviously appropriate (even if we make a special exception for cases of such secondary knowledge as the diffident student’s, whose unconscious knowledge will hardly count as ‘evidence’ for other judgements). I take it that ‘k = e’ does not mean that everything known is evidence with respect to (for or against) every hypothesis, and it apparently doesn’t mean only that everything known is potentially evidence for some possible hypothesis. Nor is it, one supposes, simply the obverse platitude that, when all feasible investigation is done (if there ever is such a moment), our total knowledge constitutes the mountain to be mined for evidence with respect to any actual hypothesis. It may mean that, in assessing any hypothesis, all that we know is ‘evidence’ at least to the extent that our judgement should be compatible with it; or even merely that every known truth is ‘evidence’ for (e.g. entails) some other truth. In ordinary life, however, we only count something as ‘evidence’ that is evidence in relation to—for or against—some hypothesis in particular (evidence of something specific, something that enough ‘evidence’ can or could in turn make ‘evident’), or in relation to some question or inquiry, however vaguely specifiable, and I don’t see much reason to depart from that practice. See also, Chapter 5, section 5.3 (note 23), for another question raised by the ‘e = k’ equation. 33 Williamson 2000: 184–208.

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exclusively on that way of talking is arguably not the most helpful route to the understanding of what knowledge is that is the goal of epistemology. One problem with Williamson’s position is that it is difficult to see how a proposition, what is believed or asserted (as opposed its being believed or asserted), could, as such, be evidence for any judgement about the world. It is too abstract an entity to be the right kind of thing to serve as evidence for such a judgement. It is not too abstract for the purposes of logic, of course, since logic is an abstract science. When a (purported) witness gives ‘their evidence’, they will no doubt use declarative sentences that ‘express propositions’, but strictly the evidence consists not in the propositions expressed but the facts conveyed or the things or events or situations described. Ideally, it is what the witness knows, but the evidence that a jury, or someone in a jury-like position, has ultimately to take into account in assessing probabilities is what they themselves have more direct knowledge of: for example, the action of this person called as a witness, who is known, or claims, to have been present at the time, in asserting (e.g.) that the accused’s actions were such and such, all taken together with whatever other reports as might relate to the trustworthiness of the witness and the accuracy of their account. Consider the following argument of Williamson’s to the effect that evidence is propositional, on the way to his conclusion that evidence is propositional knowledge.34 His strategy is to pick out from the categorically different kinds of thing that may ordinarily be described as evidence, and ask which construction best serves the central theoretical function of the ordinary concept evidence. [W]here evidence [enables] us to answer a question, a central way for it to do so is by inference to its best explanation. Thus evidence is the kind of thing which hypotheses explain. Therefore evidence is propositional . . . . Inference to the best explanation concerns why-explanations, which can be put in the form ‘___ because . . . ’, which is ungrammatical unless declarative sentences, complements for ‘that’, fill both blanks. We cannot simply explain Albania, for ‘Albania because . . . ’ is ill-formed. We can sometimes make sense of the injunction ‘Explain Albania!’, but only when the context allows us to interpret it as an injunction to explain why Albania exists, or has some distinctive feature. . . . The same goes for events: ‘Explain World War One’ enjoins one to explain why it occurred, or had some distinctive feature. Again, the sensation in my throat is evidence for the conclusion that I am getting a cold in the sense that the hypothesis that I am getting a cold would best explain why I have that sensation in my throat.35

Taken to be an appeal to the grammar of natural language this would seem more than a little tendentious. As Williamson in effect agrees, it is perfectly natural to say that the best explanation of the sensation TW has (or of his having that sensation) is the onset of a cold, and neither sensations nor onsets are propositions. If asked what kinds of things hypotheses explain, I imagine that many more would reply ‘events’ or ‘the phenomena’ than would offer ‘propositions’, and possibly even than would come up with ‘facts’ (which are admittedly ‘propositional’ at least in the sense that a fact is a fact that P). 34 Cf., Williamson 2000: 194: ‘the propositions that are one’s evidence’.

35 Williamson 2000: 195.

118 Knowing and Seeing The injunction ‘Explain the proposition that TW has that tickling sensation in his throat’ would leave most people bewildered (though a philosopher or logician might have a go). Instead of using ‘because’ between declarative sentences, we could use such phrases as ‘causes (caused)’ or ‘is (was) the cause of ’, or even ‘because of ’ before a proper name such as ‘the First World War’, as well as before noun-phrases employed to refer to events or states of affairs. That such noun-phrases are characteristically nominalized sentences does not mean that it is not the event that is being explained but the proposition that would be expressed by the sentence in question. In any case, although ‘Albania because . . . ’ would no doubt be a bewildering thing to say, in the right context ‘. . . because of Albania’, or ‘Albania was a consequence of . . . ’, might not be bewildering at all, and are certainly not ‘ill-formed’. If the context has to be a rather special one, that is not because ‘Albania’ is not a declarative sentence, but because, unlike World War One, Albania is not the kind of entity that can easily be ascribed causes and effects, unless by metonymy.36 Of course, grammar is not the significant driver here. In looking for a use of the term ‘evidence’ that best reflects the function of evidence, Williamson is apparently looking ahead to inference from evidence, seeing inference in terms of a relationship between propositions. In particular, he takes that view of the calculation of the probability of hypothesis h on evidence e, taking h and e to be propositions. But if the inference is to afford knowledge of the world, including knowledge of a (from here and now) probability, the evidence employed, as he emphasizes, has itself to be known. But by my lights that means that the proposition that e had better be an account of an actual and known state of affairs—if you like, a statement of known facts. It is that state of affairs that constitutes the evidence, on a notion of evidence that is perfectly well-motivated philosophically. That conception allows sense to the possibility that, on some occasion, we need to look for more evidence for a certain hypothesis, or to enable us to decide between rival hypotheses. In such a case it is not enough simply to mine the knowledge we already have. It is true that we need to know more, but for that we need to search the world for evidence. Even the question whether h is here and now probable is a question relative not to what we currently know but to the evidence currently available, which may include facts as yet unknown, states of affairs or, indeed, objects yet to be discovered. 36 As e.g. ‘Romania was a cause of even greater concern to the Kremlin than Albania had been.’ Nevertheless, ‘The state of Yugoslavia was created by the Treaty of Versailles’ is a perfectly good explanation of the relatively short-lived state of Yugoslavia. If it said that it is really an explanation of something else, the existence of Yugoslavia (or why Yugoslavia existed), one might wonder what is gained by separating the entity from its existence. Isn’t that something like separating an event from its occurrence? In any case, such a division or multiplication of entities doesn’t get us closer to the conclusion that what hypotheses explain are propositions, such as the proposition that S exists, or that E occurred. The same kind of consideration as is advanced elsewhere in this chapter with respect to the objects of perception and knowledge point to the common-sense assumption that the ultimate objects of such explanations as appeal to scientific hypotheses lie within the spatio-temporal world, the sphere of cause and effect. As I will argue, events and states of affairs do that more easily than even facts succeed in doing, let alone propositions. Consonantly with that proposal, explanatory ‘hypotheses’ themselves may well be understood as what is hypothesized— that is, as postulated states of affairs or laws—rather than as ‘propositions’ in the logical sense.

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Williamson quotes Carnap to the effect that ‘the total evidence available must be taken as a basis for determining the degree of confirmation’ (Williamson 2000: 189), but immediately equates that (perhaps rightly reading Carnap) with Peirce’s limited point that ‘I cannot make a valid probable inference without taking into account whatever knowledge I have (or, at least, whatever occurs to my mind) that bears on the question’. Williamson’s own gloss is ‘one should proportion one’s belief in a proposition to the support which it receives from one’s knowledge’. It is indeed true that what we properly employ or ultimately appeal to as evidence must be known, and all that we know is in principle available as evidence. These platitudes accord with Williamson’s assumption, which I take to be correct, that the calculation of the objective probability of h on the ultimate basis of e 37 requires that the probability of e is taken to be 1. But they do not add up to the common-sense principle, on its most natural and acceptable interpretation, that probability is relative to the available evidence. For that principle implies that the evidence to determine a probability lies in the world, since it includes both things known and things now, perhaps, merely available to be known, things available to discovery by feasible investigation. We have, then, different ways of thinking of ‘evidence’, but that need not mean that our ordinary conception of evidence is confused or chaotic, or that there is particularly useful philosophical work to be done picking out the way of thinking of evidence that is best fitted for an allegedly central function of that ordinary conception, and discarding or devaluing the others. It is no accident that we can count as ‘evidence’ such categorically different things as an account, a fact, an event, or a bottle of arsenic. Each way of thinking of evidence has a role to play, integrally related to the roles of other ways of employing the term. The first philosophical task, I take it, is to understand those roles and relationships, not to grant peculiar respectability to one way of talking and to discard or denigrate the others.

Propositions and facts One of Williamson’s motives for holding that evidence, or what is known, consists of propositions is that the view that it consists of facts involves ontologically suspect entities. Accordingly, he believes that the idea, embedded in ordinary language, that the noun-phrase ‘that P’ in an employed sentence of the form ‘S knows that P’ refers to the fact that P is not philosophically sustainable. I am myself less than happy with the idea that the objects of knowledge are facts, and will soon give my reasons. First, however, another argument of Williamson’s is worth considering: If ‘that A’ refers to a fact in the context ‘S knows that A’, then we might expect ‘that A’ to suffer from reference failure when ‘A’ is false. Consequently we might expect ‘S knows that A’ and ‘S

37 For the term ‘objective probability’ see Chapter 5, section 5.3. I say, ‘on the ultimate basis of e’, since clearly a probability can be calculated from other probabilities, but if that is not simply a mathematical exercise then the latter must be grounded on what is supposed known.

120 Knowing and Seeing does not know that A’ not to express propositions. But if ‘A’ is false, ‘S knows that A’ expresses a false proposition and ‘S does not know that A’ a true one.38

This argument, I would suggest, suffers from an interesting form of equivocation. It switches between lemmas from one principle or way of talking to another. Let it be conceded that, strictly speaking, the sentences ‘Algernon is a friend of Bunbury’ and ‘Algernon is not a friend of Bunbury’ would only express propositions, and so be contradictories, if both names successfully referred. Since (in the world of The Importance of Being Earnest) they don’t, Algernon having invented an imaginary friend, ‘Bunbury’, to deceive his aunt Lady Bracknell, it follows, on that principle, that (in that Wildean world) it can neither be asserted nor denied, neither believed nor doubted, that Algernon is a friend of Bunbury. All this, however, is some distance from how we ordinarily think or speak with respect to failure of reference—perhaps better called ‘false’ or even ‘lying’ reference in such a case as this. Lady Bracknell, as we would ordinarily be happy to say when speaking English rather than philosophical logic, might have believed, disbelieved, or doubted Algernon’s pack of lies. Nevertheless everyone, I take it, would agree that, except in special (e.g. storytelling) contexts, neither of the sentences in question would be properly or appropriately used unless both names successfully referred, and accordingly that an assertive use of each of these sentences carries the implication, though not logical, then at least conversational, that there is someone called Bunbury as well as someone called Algernon. But in just the same way both of the sentences, ‘Algernon knows (the fact) that A’ and ‘Algernon does not know (the fact) that A’, when ordinarily used, carry the implication not only that ‘Algernon’ successfully refers but also that ‘(the fact) that A’ successfully refers. If I am told, and accept, that ‘Algernon does not know that A’, I take it that there is a fact, namely the fact that A, that is unknown to Algernon—just as, if it is said that Lady Bracknell does not know (or know of) Bunbury, naive hearers will take it that there is someone, namely Bunbury, who is not known (or known of) by Lady Bracknell. Williamson’s next premise is that, if ‘A’ is false (i.e. there is no fact that A), ‘S knows that A’ expresses a false proposition and ‘S does not know that A’ a true one. This premise is certainly attractive, but it is attractive in just the way in which it is attractive to allow that (say) Lady Bracknell first believed and then doubted Algernon’s pack of lies. It is as attractive and straightforwardly intelligible as the claim that when Algernon told his aunt that Bunbury was ill again, requiring his presence, what he said was false. But it is not a premise that Williamson is in a position to combine with his first appeal to the principle that with failure of reference there is no proposition expressed, nothing capable of being either true or false. Criticism of Williamson’s argument on the grounds of this peculiar form of equivocation is not in itself, of course, a criticism of that principle as it is employed in clarifying a particular notion of a proposition as a bearer of truth or falsity.

38 Williamson 2000: 43.

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4.5 Facts, States of Affairs, and Events It does not seem, then, that any simple appeal to ‘what we say’ in ordinary discourse will supply material for an argument for rejecting the notion that facts are the objects of knowledge. There are, however, some more directly philosophical (or, as some say, ‘metaphysical’) considerations that are relevant. Let’s start with two intuitive and, indeed, philosophically very traditional thoughts, perhaps truisms, namely: (1) The object of any knowledge of the world is also a significant cause of the subject’s possession of that knowledge. (2) The object of empirical knowledge that P is whatever it is in the world in virtue of which the proposition that P is true, its ‘truth-maker’ or fundamentum veritatis, a ‘Truth’. When applied to the question whether the objects of knowledge are facts these apparent platitudes can pull in different directions. With respect to (2), it would seem that the fact that X is F is precisely what ‘makes’ a true proposition that X is F true.39 What else is a fact but a ‘Truth’, in the sense of a particular proposition’s ‘truth-maker’? The proposal might be expanded to apply to all propositions whether true or false— ‘To every distinct proposition there is a distinct possible fact’. So does every distinct bit of knowledge have a correspondingly distinct fact as its object? And (turning now to (1)) is that fact, in any particular case of knowledge, qua object of the knowledge also its external cause?

What’s wrong with facts? A plausible line of objection to facts is that they are too closely tied to propositions, and so in a sense are too abstract to be anything but problematic denizens of the natural world of space, time, and causation. As Peter Strawson put it in his famous controversy with Austin,40 facts are what true statements state. When we state what we know, what we state are facts. This tight link to propositions is evinced, for example, by the point that the familiar problem of dealing with identity in ‘intentional contexts’ arises for knowing facts as it does for believing propositions. Since Hesperus, the Evening Star, is the same planet as Phosphorus, the Morning Star, the proposition that Hesperus rises in the morning is logically equivalent to the proposition that Phosphorus rises in the morning. Both say the same thing about the same object, and either is true if and only if the other is true. But it is not clear that to believe or assert the latter commits one to believing or asserting the former. There is no overt contradiction—nothing at all paradoxical, indeed—in 39 I here use the handy but intrinsically rather absurd notion of a ‘truth-maker’, or what ‘makes’ a proposition true. True statements are true because they match the world, not because the world obligingly ‘makes’ them true. A traditional term is fundamentum veritatis. 40 Strawson 1971: 196 (originally a contribution to a symposium with Austin in 1950). There were further papers from each participant.

122 Knowing and Seeing believing or asserting the latter while believing or asserting that the former is false. Similarly, although the fact that Hesperus rises in the morning might seem to be identical with the fact that Phosphorus rises in the morning, knowing the latter is not the same as knowing the former. Should we then, after all, distinguish between these facts and, in general, distinguish between facts as they are the objects of distinct bits of knowledge? Or should we, on the other hand, drop the assumption that distinct bits of knowledge are necessarily of distinct facts? Consider another kind of case that raises a broadly similar issue. An animal runs across the road in front of us. It is a weasel. Is the fact that an animal has crossed the road the same fact as the fact that a weasel has crossed the road? Clearly, we might know the former without knowing the latter, if we are unfamiliar with weasels or do not see the animal clearly enough to recognize it (weasels run fast). Or maybe we did not ourselves see it at all, but are simply told by a trusty, if zoologically inexpert companion that an animal crossed the road. This case differs from the previous example in so far as the proposition that an animal crossed the road is clearly distinct from the proposition that a weasel crossed the road.41 On the other hand, one might be justifiably inclined to say that what in the world ‘makes’ our belief true that an animal crossed the road, and is the cause of our knowledge, is the fact that a weasel (indeed, this weasel) crossed the road. The ground for this inclination is surely the thought that there is just one particular event, open to both more general and less general descriptions or accounts, that is the cause and object of our knowledge. Are the same facts similarly open to different descriptions or accounts? The everyday notion of a fact seems at best ambivalent in this respect. If we try to tighten it up, it is difficult to avoid the result that, strictly, a fact is precisely what a certain true statement or proposition (or true declarative sentence-in-use) states to be the case, so that if two statements or propositions are distinct, the corresponding facts are distinct. But then it is arguable that the discrimination of facts on such a basis, reasonable and useful as it may be for some purposes, makes them just too thinly abstract to be unproblematic denizens of the spatio-temporal world of cause and effect or, therefore, to be what it is in the world that are causes and external objects of knowledge. Certainly on this account they would be significantly different from events, since there seems little to recommend distinguishing as two events the weasel’s crossing the road from the animal’s crossing the road. The point is not simply that facts are notionally defined or individuated entities, picked out by nominalizations of sentences, since that is also true of events and states of affairs, although the nominalizations take a different form. As we have seen, however, I can have conscious knowledge of an event, for example by being present at, and seeing, a chess match, without knowing that that is what it is. In contrast, if I have 41 In ordinary talk, of course, we may speak of the proposition or thought that Phosphorus is identical with Hesperus, taking it to be distinct from, and not equivalent to, the proposition or thought that Phosphorus is identical with Phosphorus.

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conscious knowledge of a fact, I know just what fact it is of which I have knowledge. Events are ‘thick’ as facts are ‘thin’. But perhaps the central difficulty for the view that the fact that P is the object of knowledge that P, or the fundamentum veritatis or ‘truthmaker’ of a true belief that P, is that, in contrast to particular events, properties, states of affairs and the like, facts, on a strict account of them, are so intimately related to propositions that they are thereby infected by the timelessness or ‘eternity’ of propositions, on the standard understanding of ‘propositions’ as bearers of truth and falsity.

Time and place, facts and ‘truth-makers’ Ordinary language allows us to assert that what was true is no longer true, as it also allows ‘What is true in France is not true in Britain’. From a logical point of view, however, there is not in either case one proposition, once true but now false, or true in France, false here, but two conjoined, one about what the situation was at some time past, the other about the present state of affairs, or one about the French situation, the other about the British. Any proposition, if true, is so timelessly. True propositions cannot cease to be true or, for that matter, have come to be true.42 Accordingly, the tightly correspondent facts cannot begin or cease to be. That seems particularly clear in the case of such a fact as the fact that the Battle of Agincourt took place in 1415. Effectively the same goes for the place of facts as for their time: they have no place. But timeless or eternal entities, existing nowhere in particular, are not convincing candidate denizens of the physical, natural, concrete world.43 Particular causes and effects are not timeless and without place, but occur or exist in time and space. The proximate (external) cause of my ‘secondary’, second-hand knowledge that the Battle of Agincourt took place in 1415 lies in history lessons received and books read, but only because some of the recorded experiential primary knowledge of those there at the time was thereby filtered through to me. As it happens, witnesses of that battle operated with (roughly) the same dating system as I understand and employ. (The sources of my knowledge that Caesar landed in Britain in 55 bce are a little more complicated, although its proximate cause is not significantly different.) If the object of knowledge is necessarily also its significant cause, the object of my knowledge that the Battle of Agincourt took place in 1415 is simply the event itself, subject as it is and was to being dated—not a timeless fact, the fact that it occurred in 1415. The occurrence of that event at a certain place in France in 1415 is not an ingredient of the world distinct from the event—nor is the fact that it occurred there and then. What makes it (let us suppose) true that Bill hit Dick at place p at time t is the event, Bill’s hitting Dick. Obversely, the principle of individuation of that event—its identity and existence conditions—is supplied in part by that nominalized sentence. Nevertheless, 42 The sense in which it is possible for someone, by their actions, to make a proposition or prediction true does not, I believe, undermine this point. 43 I refrain from comment on their attractions to time-denying metaphysicians, or speculating on the role that insensitivity to the abstract nature of ‘eternal’ facts, or to its significance, has played in motivating time-denial.

124 Knowing and Seeing events and the like are not thinly abstract. Unlike facts as discriminated by propositions, they arise or occur in time and space and so are paradigmatically entities of a kind to have, and to be, causes and effects. If we talk as if some fact is cause or effect of this or that, the subject-matter of our assertion is a causal relation between less abstract entities than facts. Unlike facts, events characteristically take time, develop, and have temporal parts. States of affairs, too, (mutatis mutandis) may develop and undergo change, as the greenness of a leaf, its state of being green, may change from being a bright green in spring to being a dull green in July. The fact that the leaf was green from April to October 2017, on the other hand, does not undergo change. Events and states of affairs, like material objects, are entities such as we perceive, and of which we may have partial or imperfect knowledge. Individual facts, to be rough, are either known or not known. On the clearest, cleanest notion of a fact, to have more knowledge about an event is to know more facts, not to know some one fact more completely.

Facts, events, states of affairs and identity It is significant that the identity of an event or state of affairs is determined by more than the nominalized sentence employed to pick it out. Take the event picked out as ‘Bill’s hitting Dick’. Suppose Bill hit Dick on the jaw. Just that event would not have occurred if he had hit him on the nose instead, even if he had done so at the same time and place. To adopt the ‘possible worlds’ model, there is no determinate individual event, Bill’s hitting Dick, common to all ‘possible worlds’ in which Bill hits Dick, or even to all those in which he does so at the same time and place. There are different possible events, all describable as ‘Bill’s hitting Dick’—all, as it were, specific instances of the genus, Bill’s hitting Dick. Roughly, events have to be qualitatively identical in order to be numerically identical across possible worlds.44 In contrast, the unspecific or generic fact that Bill hits Dick, together with such even less specific facts as that someone is hit, obtains or ‘exists’, in whatever sense facts exist, in all worlds in which Bill hits Dick; and, truistically, it is a fact that someone is hit in all the hugely more worlds in which someone is hit. In every world in which Bill hits Dick, whenever, or in whatever circumstances, or however, or however many times. Bill hits Dick in each world, it is a fact—the same fact—that he hits Dick. Particular events and states of affairs are therefore significantly better candidates for being what in the world we have in the end ‘latched onto’ or apprehended when we have knowledge of the world. That is so even if (to stay with the example) we have latched onto the particular event, Bill’s hitting Dick, only at second hand, and only via such general verbal information as that someone hit Dick, or even that someone hit someone else. It is that particular event, that bit of reality, that is both object of that bit of our knowledge and significant cause of our having it, even though our knowledge of 44 I am here assuming that the same substantial or material individuals (and times and places) can in principle exist in different possible worlds: i.e. that hypotheticals about actual individuals are possible. This difference between events and ‘substances’ (discussed in Ayers 2005a) can be added to those discussed in Chapter 3, section 3.5.

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it is partial, incomplete, unspecific. Such particular, determinate, ‘thick’ entities exist, take place, or obtain in the physical world, in time and space, and are causes and effects, yet are individuated by concepts correspondent to nominalized declarative sentences (not of the ‘that P’ form). To know that Bill hit Dick is to know of, or have knowledge of, an actual, concrete, determinate, particular event, describable as Bill’s hitting Dick, and to know of it as Bill’s hitting Dick, whether or not we know of it in any other way.

4.6 ‘Knowledge that P’, ‘Knowledge of X’, and ‘Knowing X’: How They Are Related The argument of this chapter has been circling round the question of the relationship between having (direct or indirect) knowledge of particular events, states of affairs, and the like and having knowledge that such and such is occurring or is the case, a relationship itself related to, and to an extent comparable with, the well-used distinction between so-called episodic memory45 and memory of facts.46 On the one hand, it is easy to fall in with the assumption that the ‘canonical’ or basic form of ascriptions of knowledge is ‘A knows that P’, a supposedly well-motivated preference that some extend, as Williamson is not alone in doing, even to sense perception. That is to give priority, if not (as Williamson also does) to propositions, then (like McDowell) to facts as the objects of knowledge. As it has just been argued, however, if we take it that in possessing empirical knowledge we are in a natural relation to the objects of our knowledge, then there is reason to give priority to less abstract objects than either propositions or facts. The first or fundamental objects of knowledge are the objects with which we are in immediate cognitive contact and that are directly presented to us in perception, objects of which we have direct knowledge or ‘acquaintance’,47 and these, unlike propositions or facts, are ‘thick’ particulars, concrete ingredients or elements of the passing scene. To ‘perceive (see, feel, etc.) that P’ is to acquire perceptual 45 Remembering an event or past state of affairs is a form of having (by preserving) knowledge of the event or state of affairs, and as far as ordinary language is concerned the knowledge may be direct or indirect. I remember—retain direct knowledge of—my grandmother’s dramatic announcement that the Maginot Line had fallen, and so can be said to remember the event, the falling (or bypassing) of the Maginot Line, via memory of its announcement. 46 One difference may be that there are, or could be, animals without memory—at least long-term memory—of particular events to which we might nevertheless ascribe memory of such learnt facts as that brightly coloured caterpillars are unpleasant to eat, but such animals would have had direct perceptual knowledge of a caterpillar and its properties at the time of learning. On some positive results of experiments aimed at determining whether cuttlefish have memory of events, see Godfrey-Smith 2017: 197–8. 47 Russell, in The Problems of Philosophy, did not envisage that we have ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ of an external world and his narrowly ‘internalist’ view might be, and perhaps usually is, taken to be definitive of his concept of acquaintance. But no one would deny, I take it, that that concept trades on a more commonplace conception of the scope of acquaintance. (His later ‘neutral monism’ runs the internal and external together, nicely in accordance with his earlier scriptum that knowledge is the union of mind and non-mind.) For a recent argument that we have just that immediate cognitive relationship to sensible objects that many, like Russell and Berkeley, have supposed we have to ‘ideas’, ‘impressions’, ‘sense data’, or sensa, see Brewer 2011.

126 Knowing and Seeing knowledge that P, but we cannot reduce the content or object of the knowledge acquired in perception over any period of time to a finite set of known facts, any more than we can reductively analyse memory of events simply as memory of some suitably extensive set of facts. But that reduction is just what is implicitly attempted by those hard-nosed ‘naturalistic’ epistemologists who treat perception as no more than a fairly reliable mechanism for producing true beliefs, as if all that happens in the perceiver that is significant for cognition is the formation of determinate beliefs in response to certain physical stimuli. Whatever the motives behind the tendency to regard the ‘knows that P’ construction as the more fundamental or revealing of what knowledge is, it may be more profitable than disputing that point simply to focus on how that construction’s normal function differs from, and relates to, the primary function of the ‘know X’ or ‘know of X’ constructions, and how that difference compares with the difference between perceiving or remembering X and perceiving or remembering that P. As argued in section 4.3, the ‘X sees that P’ construction characteristically picks out (abstracts) a ‘thin’, fact-like aspect of what is seen, one registered by the subject, whereas the ‘X sees Y’ construction identifies a concrete or ‘thick’ object of vision. The point was made, using another example, that seeing a red cube need not involve seeing that the cube is either red or cubic, but there is no possibility of seeing that the cube is red without seeing the red cube. Reciprocally, if one sees a red cube, one will necessarily see that it has some properties or other, although the properties it is seen to have may be more a matter of how it looks than how it is. Someone may see an aeroplane on the horizon, when the only significant property it has that is visible to them from this distance, apart from location and movement, is that of looking like, or appearing as, a dark dot. Much the same can be said about the difference between, on the one hand, ‘S knows O’ or ‘S knows of O’ and, on the other hand, ‘S knows that O is P’. Roughly, the ‘S knows O’ construction is more appropriate for ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, ‘S knows of O’ for ‘knowledge by description’, while ‘S knows that O is P’ identifies an aspect of O registered by the subject, S, whether from direct acquaintance or, less directly, in consequence of inference or testimony.

Ambiguities of scope The relatively 48 ‘thick’, ‘concrete’ character of states of affairs and events in contrast to the ‘thin’, ‘abstract’ nature of facts is illustrated by, and explains, a difference with respect to the potentiality for ambiguities of scope between ascriptions of knowledge of the former and ascriptions of knowledge that S is P. For example, both my knowing that Caesar was assassinated and my knowing of Caesar’s assassination entail my having cognitively latched onto the particular event, Caesar’s being assassinated, via a long chain of events involving witnesses, their experiences and oral and written reports and records of their experiences, at first hand to nth hand, with at least some of which I 48 For this qualification, see next note.

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have been in direct cognitive contact. And given either kind of knowledge, I am in a position to refer to that event. But if I know that Caesar was assassinated, it follows that I am in a position to refer to it, and think of it, as Caesar’s assassination, but possibly only in that way, and in ways deducible from that way. Conversely, I might be said to know of Caesar’s assassination even if I know of it only under some other description or ‘mode of presentation’, for example as Caesar’s famously violent death, without knowing whether it was at the hand of an assassin or in battle. Or in the case of contemporaries who had perceptual knowledge of the event ‘by acquaintance’, they may for a time have known of it, somewhat indeterminately,49 only as the collapse in the street of some senator, surrounded by others, that they caught sight of on their way to the forum, all without knowing that Caesar was assassinated. The proposition expressed by ‘She knows of Caesar’s assassination’ does not entail that she knows that Caesar was assassinated when the correct reading of the sentence, in the circumstances of its use, takes the mode of presentation of the event as Caesar’s assassination to lie outside the scope of the assigned knowledge. But on another perfectly natural, in general more natural reading of that sentence, that mode of presentation lies within the scope of the knowledge (or, if preferred, the scope of the quasi-operator knows of ).50 Another way of saying the same thing would be by the clumsy sentence ‘She knows of Caesar’s having been assassinated’, which more or less eliminates that particular ambiguity of scope. Or we could explicitly eliminate ambiguity of scope one way or the other by saying ‘She knows of Caesar’s assassination as Caesar’s assassination’ or, on the other hand, for example, ‘She saw Caesar’s assassination, but only knows of it as the collapse of some important person’. The difference between the ‘knows that’ and ‘knows of ’51 constructions, then, is not that there is not a natural reading of each according to which they are equivalent, but that a certain ambiguity of scope that can affect the latter does not affect the predicate of the contained sentence following ‘knows that’. That might seem a point in favour of (and may even partly explain the popularity of) the knowing that X is F construction as both more precise than, and irreducible to, the knowing of X’s being F construction. The greater openings the latter affords for misunderstood scope, however, is simply because the kind of 49 On which see Chapter 3, section 3.5. Events, as determinate individual objects of reference, can’t float as free from how we think of them, or what we take them to be, as material objects can. 50 But consider another, more complicated case: ‘Mary knows that that revolver is normally kept in the safe’ is vulnerable to three ambiguities of scope. There is a reading under which it could be true, first, even if Mary knew of a certain revolver that it is kept in the safe, but did not know that it is that revolver; or, second, even if she did not know that it is a revolver; or, third, even if she did not know of the safe that it is a safe. Under the most natural reading, however, the implication is that she knows all three. ‘Mary knows of that revolver’s being kept in the safe’ suffers from the same ambiguities of scope, but the theoretical possibility of her knowing of that state of affairs other than as such and such an object’s being kept in such and such a container seems far-fetched. What might the mode of presentation of that state of affairs then be? (I don’t deny that answers could be far-fetched.) 51 I do not here assume that in ‘A knows of (about) B that it is P’ the phrase ‘A knows of B’ functions in just the same way as in the complete sentence ‘A knows of B.’ The latter does not invite completion by a ‘that’ clause, as if it remains to be said what A knows of B.

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sentence-nominalization involved identifies the objects of knowledge as concrete entities with ontological depth or ‘thickness’, potential objects of reference open to a variety of modes of presentation not enjoyed by facts. And as I have argued, the world of ‘thick’ particulars is where the objects of basic, primary knowledge had better be supposed to be if we are to understand what knowledge of the world is. As the point might be put, knowledge is ‘metaphysically’ closer to perception, and less close to assertion, than belief is. That is, knowledge of the world, in this unsurprisingly like perception, is a cognitive relation to an ‘external’ object in a way that belief, as such,52 is not. And as a cognitive relation it involves a special kind of causal relation, from object to, paradigmatically, an effect in consciousness.

Epistemological vs logical priority It may be worth emphasizing that the objections that I am advancing to the idea popular with analytic philosophers that the ‘know that P’ construction is the more fundamental or more perspicuous, with some kind of priority over the ‘know X’ or ‘know of X’ constructions, are largely on epistemological grounds, deriving from a concern with what knowledge is. They are consonant with the distinction that I have drawn between primary and secondary knowledge, and to that extent in the broad spirit of the traditional, narrow conception of knowledge. For that matter, they could be said to share a broadly similar motivation with Russell’s according priority to knowledge by acquaintance. However that may be, the issue is a philosophical one about what knowledge is, not a grammatical or logical one. If it were simply a grammatical or logical question, the ‘X knows that S did A’ construction, for example, might well be judged more primitive or, in a sense, basic than the ‘X knows of S’s having done A’ construction simply because, in the former, the sentence nominalized is (more or less) retained in the nominalization. Such phrases as ‘the revolver’s being in the drawer’ and ‘the assassination of Caesar’ are each grammatically and morphologically further from the declarative sentence nominalized than the ‘that P’ nominalization of the same sentence. It can hardly be denied that a sentence is linguistically prior to its nominalization and, as I have stressed, the principle of individuation of a state of affairs, X’s being F, or of the event, X’s doing A, derive from the truth-conditions of the proposition X is F, or X does A. Indeed, predicative sentences are grammatically and logically prior even to the nominalized predicates we employ to refer to the properties or qualities of things, or to relations between them. The function of ‘red’ as a descriptive predicate is prior to its function as the name of a colour. The question for epistemology is whether this hardly contestable logico-linguistic ordering, if carried over into our account of knowledge, is liable to get in the way of our understanding of what knowledge is. I have suggested that it is so liable, since knowledge of the world, like perception and unlike belief, is essentially a natural 52 i.e. except only in so far as it is about (its expression involves reference to) something known.

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relation between knower and object known. As Plato pointed out in distinguishing knowledge from belief, the object of knowledge is ‘to on’, what is, reality. And its object is by the same token a significant cause of the acquisition of the knowledge. That is not to claim that the ‘knows that P’ construction is intrinsically misleading, or that the ‘knows X’ and ‘knows of X’ constructions, in which the designated object of knowledge is a ‘thick’ entity (in the case of empirical knowledge, a denizen of the natural world), have some kind of absolute priority. As in the case of the different constructions in which verbs of perception are used (in particular, ‘seeing X’ as opposed to ‘seeing that P’), or the different ways we have of talking and thinking about evidence, it is no accident that we have them all. Each has its role, intimately related to the roles of the others. They all work together, and all ascribe knowledge, and how they work together is one of the things that needs to be understood if the notion of knowledge is to be understood.

PA RT I I

Scepticism

5 Scepticism, Certainty, and Defeasibility 5.1 ‘Cartesian’ Scepticism Philosophical sceptics have employed a variety of arguments, but this chapter will focus on just one that has become the influential paradigm for modern philosophy. That is Descartes’s ‘methodological’ use of sceptical argument in Meditations, a selective rehash of ancient scepticism given new work to do in the rationalist cause. The general idea is that, whatever ground or evidence I have, whatever appears to me to be incontrovertibly the case, there are conceivable circumstances such as are compatible with that experience or evidence, but are incompatible with what I take myself to know, or would ordinarily take myself to know, on the basis of that experience or evidence. Perhaps my cognitive faculties (or what I think are cognitive faculties) themselves function unreliably, inappropriately to reality and truth. I take myself to know, on the basis of my current sense experience, that I am sitting at my desk, drafting this chapter. I also suppose that I know, on the basis of perspicuous calculation, that 42 + 73 = 115. But perhaps I am dreaming, or in the power of a deceitful demon, or (to move out of Descartes’s world to something more up-to-date) a brain in a vat manipulated by fiendish scientists, all in such a way that falsehood—even, perhaps, self-contradictory falsehood—seems to me to be evident and undeniable truth. Since there is, ex hypothesi, no relevant difference for me on the basis of which I could discriminate a situation in which my belief is true from a situation in which such a sceptical hypothesis is true, it follows (the sceptic concludes) that I do not know which is true. Moreover, given the nature of the sceptical hypothesis, there is nothing I can do to rule it out by way of more observation or thought, by gathering further evidence or pursuing further lines of reasoning. Descartes presented his version of this argument in order to refute half of it. His rebuttal draws a contrast between our unreasoned, if natural, sense-perceptual beliefs and the knowledge that we can achieve by means of the ‘clear and distinct perceptions’ or intuitions of reason. The former allegedly succumb to the sceptic’s argument, along with mere prejudices, while rational knowledge allegedly resists it. No demon, however powerful, could be deceiving me, Descartes held, as and when I grasp such a necessary truth as that I exist as long as I am thinking, that 2 + 3 = 5, or that if a = b and

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b = c, then a = c.1 He concludes that we can only have perceptual knowledge of the world around us in so far as our perceptual beliefs are endorsed by a watertight rational argument, his candidate for which is given in the Sixth Meditation.2 A famous premise is that God is not a deceiver. As it was said in Chapter 1, Meditations is, among other things, an anti-empiricist tract on broadly and self-consciously Platonist lines. Empiricists of Descartes’s time not only criticized the rapidly notorious argument offered for accepting the deliverances of the senses as endorsed and interpreted by reason, but also denied that any argument is necessary. Epicureans had taken this line nearly two millennia earlier, insisting that there is a place for reason only because we first have uninferred perceptual knowledge of the world. In the seventeenth century, Gassendi, Hobbes, and Locke followed suit, taking the deliverances of the senses to be independently authoritative, if sometimes potentially misleading, sources of knowledge, as well as of what Locke called the ‘materials’ of rational knowledge, our ‘ideas’. I believe that this traditional empiricist response at least points us in the right direction, not only in rejecting the rationalist thought that it is by some kind of reasoning or inference that we arrive at perceptual knowledge of external objects, but also in recognizing conscious perceptual knowledge as the paradigm of (what I have called) primary knowledge, the foundation of knowledge owing nothing to reasoning or ‘reason’. If only to judge by the perceptual metaphors that permeate the language in which we speak of the achievement of knowledge of other kinds, it would seem that Lucretius had a point in proposing that it is knowledge gained by the senses that supplies our implicit, ground-floor understanding of what knowledge is. That implicit understanding, however, doesn’t by itself tell us what is wrong with the sceptical argument, or what we may be able to learn both from its shortcomings and from its curious plausibility—the same kind of plausibility, I take it, as is possessed by Zeno’s argument against the possibility of motion. It doesn’t afford an explanation of the argument’s illusory force, even if it prevents most of us from being persuaded by it. On the other hand, the sceptical argument is an extremely simple one, and it is reasonable to suppose it at least unlikely that an explanation of what is wrong with it will need to call on the kind of complex, surprising, or openly counter-intuitive theories of knowledge that some late-twentieth-century epistemologists have brought in aid. It is true that one might reasonably hope that an articulate understanding of the concept of knowledge would come along with an understanding of what is wrong with an argument to the effect that the most basic cognitive relationship we have to the world does not ‘deserve the name of knowledge’. Nevertheless the idea that the attractions of the sceptical argument are in effect the attractions of a wrong epistemological theory seems to me to get things the wrong way round.

1 This Principle of Identity appears in Regulae ad directionem ingenii (AT X 419/CSM I 45) as an example of a simple idea. 2 And, more succinctly and clearly, in Principia Philosophiae II.i (AT VIIIA 40–41/CSM I 223).

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It is sometimes suggested, for example, not entirely without reason, that we feel the force of the argument just in so far as we have bought into an ‘internalist’, ‘Cartesian’ model of experience and thought, taking the soul to be a homunculus within speculating about what’s outside on the basis of what’s inside. But while Descartes’s account of the mind and its states may indeed be unduly ‘internalist’, he employs the sceptical argument with the aim of persuading his readers of his view. It is not a prior prejudice in favour of that view that makes the argument appealing: on the contrary, he employs the argument in order to sell his dualist internalism. The classic sceptical argument presupposes no theory (even ‘folk-theory’) of mind, thought, or knowledge whatsoever, since it surely owes its illusory force not to its auditors’ misguided metaphysical proclivities but to its apparent similarity to everyday arguments that everyone would rightly accept. Accordingly, I take the first task of its critic simply to be to recognize and explain how, despite that similarity, it is significantly, indeed fatally, different. We may then hope that, when we have thus identified what is wrong with the sceptical argument, we shall have learnt something about what knowledge is. The next two sections will therefore attempt a critical analysis of those similarities and differences, with the aim of clarifying where the sceptic goes wrong. Section 5.2 will take a first look at the peculiar structure of the sceptical argument from an untheoretical, common-sense point of view, and section 5.3 will offer an explanation of the distinction between fallibility and uncertainty, a distinction often ignored. That will lead into a discussion, in section 5.4, of so-called ‘fallibilism’, a recent attempt to drive a paradoxical wedge between knowledge and objective certainty, together with a first look at an associated response to scepticism, epistemological ‘contextualism’. Section 5.5 will present an understanding of the deceptively technical term ‘defeasible’, a borrowing by epistemology from the language of law that recognizes the force of grounds for ascriptions of knowledge and certainty, but that comes with its own potential for perpetuating questionable theory of knowledge. The main aim of the chapter, taken together with Chapter 2, is to explain both what is wrong with the sceptical argument and the source of its illusory cogency.

5.2 The ‘Cartesian’ Argument: A First Critical Analysis Although sceptical argument directed against claims to basic perceptual knowledge is quite general, intended to demolish all such claims with one blow, it apparently shares the form of perfectly commonplace and palpably cogent challenges to particular claims to knowledge. For what better ground could we have for doubting (for example) that what is observed on some one occasion or many is conclusive evidence for the occurrence of some event elsewhere or in the past, or, say, for the existence of a certain causal mechanism, than a rival possible explanation of what is observed? Until other epistemically possible hypotheses are ruled out, no such inference is put beyond doubt. We might believe its conclusion, which might also, as it happens, be true, but we cannot

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be said to know it, even if the explanation we favour is by far the most probable. Unless there is no other hypothesis with a probability greater than zero, we do not know it. The favoured hypothesis is not certain, but at best probable, even if highly probable. What, then, is the difference, if any, between a defence lawyer’s claim that an alternative explanation of the victim’s death is possible, so that the prosecution’s case for convicting the defendant of murder is not ‘beyond reasonable doubt’, and the sceptic’s radical appeal to the alleged possibility of universal, comprehensive error in our perceptual judgements? How does the ‘Cartesian’ sceptical argument for doubting the deliverances of the senses differ from everyday arguments that a particular claim to know that P on the basis of evidence E is unjustified because there are other possible, even if unlikely, explanations of E? One obvious difference is that the usual sceptical hypotheses or explanations of sense experience proposed as rivals to everyday perceptual judgements are not only overtly far-fetched, not to say fantastical, but comprehensively tailor-made to be irrefutable by any observations whatsoever—hence the alleged impossibility of knowledge. The evidence, it is held, does not, and no evidence could, enable us to discriminate between the ‘common-sense’ and the sceptical scenarios. Ordinary objections to everyday ascriptions of knowledge and certainty, on the other hand, are free from those interrelated properties, being neither far-fetched, at least not in the same way, nor so structured as to appear irrefutable. At least, that is true of such objections as would generally be supposed to deserve consideration. Consider the argument that we do not know that dinosaurs once roamed the earth, since it is possible that God created the fossil record in the ground exactly as if they did, perhaps in order to test our faith in Scripture. Such a purportedly possible alternative explanation of the evidence for dinosaurs or, more generally, for evolution, setting aside any problems for its metaphysical presuppositions, faces the familiar objection that it is intrinsically so elastic as to fit not only the evidence now available but whatever evidence could become available in future. It serves to poison the wells of knowledge of the distant past by offering an alternative story that would remove the very possibility of evidence to decide the question.3 Consequently the purported ‘explanation’ of the evidence lacks what is essential to an explanation. Something that would ‘explain’ any evidence, whatever it was, explains nothing. As the notably pious but scientifically pretty clear-headed Robert Boyle put it in the seventeenth century, those who have recourse to the will of God for their explanation of a natural phenomenon in effect admit that they do not know the explanation. The ‘Cartesian’ sceptical argument, whether or not it appeals to divine or demonic power, suffers from the same vice (assuming that that is what it is), but more 3 Cf. Gould 1992: 295: ‘Creationism, Darwin consistently argued, cannot be disproved directly because it claims to explain everything. Creationism becomes impervious to test, and therefore useless to science.’ It is, of course, not only useless to formal ‘science’ but is also a speculation that is necessarily without empirical foundation—or, rather, is contrary to all empirical evidence we might employ to test the truth of an ancient story.

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comprehensively and certainly more openly. It is an overt attempt to poison the wells of all knowledge of the world. If a similar argument is applied in particular to our knowledge of the past, including our own remembered past, as it has been by some serious philosophers,4 it is just a more general version of our fundamentalist’s sceptical argument for dinosaur-denial. It is a necessary feature of the sceptic’s hypothesis, if it is to achieve its purpose, that there is nothing that we can do, no investigation that we can undertake, that has a chance of ruling it out. But at the same time it needs to be a rival explanation of our sense experiences that deserves to be taken seriously, more seriously than it is sensible to take the argument for dinosaur-denial. Is there, then, some special reason to take it seriously, perhaps consequent on its role in a (certain kind of) philosophical argument?

Epistemic and logical possibility, and an ambivalence characteristic of scepticism Let us look some more at the implications of the sceptic’s position. As a preliminary, let us allow for the sake of argument that sceptical hypotheses, however wild, are at least logically possible, and ignore objections to that assumption that may arise in certain cases—for example, with respect to any hypothesis like Descartes’s that takes for granted the logical possibility of disembodied immaterial minds. What, then, is necessary in order to convert a merely logically possible hypothesis into one deserving to be taken into account in assessing ascriptions of knowledge? What would make it, as some put it, ‘relevant’ to an ascription of knowledge, a hypothesis that would have to be ruled out if the ascription is to be justified? In the case of everyday ascriptions of knowledge, at least, there seems to be a very simple answer. Such a hypothesis must be a genuine epistemic possibility, that is, it must be a hypothesis with a probability greater than zero, one that is not certainly not the case, one that there is reason to take seriously.5 Otherwise it is already, in effect, ‘ruled out’. In other words, to refute a claim to know that P it is enough, but also necessary, to demonstrate that, relative to the available evidence, it is not certain that P. Suppose that I am aware that it is possible or probable that my friend, on returning to his parked car, will find it wheel-clamped. That awareness rests, let us suppose, on such knowledge (or what would normally be counted as knowledge) as that it is illegally parked, and that local government has a policy of clamping cars found illegally parked in this area. A fairly complex, if perhaps vague or general knowledge of the world— about parking regulations, traffic wardens, the practice of wheel-clamping and much else—lies behind those two particular bits of knowledge. In contrast, it would not have been epistemically possible that he will find his car wheel-clamped if the only 4 Russell and Dretske, on the road to their their own accounts of our epistemic situation, both make use of such an argument, the argument that we cannot know that the world was not created five minutes ago, with all apparent memories, evidence of past events, etc. in place. 5 Which is why, whatever the odds against its winning, it cannot be known that a valid ticket in a fairly run lottery won’t win.

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purported ‘ground’ that could be advanced for that conclusion was that it is logically possible that mischievous aliens from another solar system had arrived in the area armed with a fiendish invention that renders wheels immobile. So what known facts about the world does the philosophical sceptic of the senses rely on in advancing his claim—or does he simply conflate logical possibility with epistemic possibility? Is his argument simply the product of that confusion? Such an explanation of the argument’s illusory force is too simple, as it stands, for more than one reason. One relevant point is that there seems at least often to be a rather odd ambivalence within sceptical argument. Take, for example, the considerations Descartes brings on the sceptic’s behalf. He progresses to the suggestion that we cannot rule out the hypothesis that a malicious demon is causing our sense experiences by careful, traditional steps, taken over from the debate between Academics and Stoics, via illusions, mad delusions and dreams. We all know that the latter do occur, and there are situations in which it is epistemically possible that, say, a dream is the cause of someone’s having a certain belief that P, so that, even if it is true that P, and even if the belief was in fact due to the subject’s being told that P (and not to their having consequently dreamt it), it is not certain that P from the subject’s standpoint, so that their belief is not knowledge. But such empirical considerations, as Descartes seems at least obscurely to recognize, fail to move the argument in the sceptic’s favour if only because an appeal to their occurrence is in effect an appeal to common knowledge of the kind that the sceptic wishes to argue is impossible. Admitting that we know that dreams and illusions occur would make it difficult to deny that we also know when they are not occurring. He accordingly moves across to the story of the malign demon, but even that gap between fact and fantasy is bridged by the idea of an omnipotent God whose existence, so he supposed and relatively few in Descartes’s time would have denied, can be established by reason or otherwise known. The malign demon is invented, as every philosophy student knows, only because of the assumed impossibility that God would deceive us. Similarly, the modern counterpart of the deceitful demon hypothesis, the scary ‘possibility’ that one is a brain kept alive and appropriately stimulated in a vat or pod, relies for its apparent force on some knowledge, however rough and second-hand, of the brain’s role in perception and thought, of transplant surgery and the fact that organs can be kept alive outside a body, of some effects of the stimulation of the brain by electrodes, and so forth—knowledge that ultimately depends on perceptual knowledge.6 6 Those who tell brain-in-a-vat stories with sceptical intent generally seem to suppose that all that would be required of a fiendish scientist using a computer to feed the unfortunate brain with a life-experience is simply more neurophysiological knowledge and surgical skill and perhaps computing ability than anyone currently has, but which people may well have in the future. But the course of a person’s experience is largely determined by its object, ‘the world’, so to grow a brain in a pod and give it the life-experience of (for example, why not?) a top physicist who makes ground-breaking discoveries, a total account of that other term of the experience-relation, the world (or, at least, a comprehensively coherent possible world), would also have to be fed into the computer. We don’t seem to have travelled so far from Descartes’s omnipotent, omniscient God.

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Yet if the consideration of a sweeping hypothesis of this kind really could do the work the sceptic wants from it of clearing away all claims to knowledge of the world, it would leave us with no body of knowledge by reference to which that very hypothesis might be judged to be a real epistemic possibility, rather than a merely ‘logical’ or ‘theoretical’ possibility without relevance to judgements of objective certainty and ascriptions of knowledge. In other words, the sceptic’s hypothesis, taken seriously as an alternative explanation of sense experience in general, would seem to rule out, not only any possibility of disproving it empirically but, by the same token, any possibility of grounds for ascribing it, or anything else, a probability greater than zero and, therefore, the capacity to refute an ascription of knowledge.7

Two moves open to the sceptic: first, the appeal to facts There seem to be, broadly speaking, two kinds of move a sceptic might make here, although in argument the first tends to merge with the second. One response stays with the thought that common experience of the fallibility of human judgement is such that particular perceptual judgements are never certain. The other, discarding any appeal to common experience or, indeed, to any known fact whatsoever, defends the idea that the mere logical possibility of an alternative explanation of our experiences, however fantastical that ‘explanation’ might be, casts all our perceptual judgements into doubt. The first line of argument might start by suggesting that fantastic hypotheses are unnecessarily rhetorical and misleading frills on the sceptic’s argument. All that the sceptic needs, it might be said, is what is undoubtedly matter of fact, that the senses are fallible. To employ a Cartesian analogy, if a witness proves untrustworthy in some things, nothing he says is certain unless we have corroboration by a trustworthy source. But there is no such alternative source in the case. One might go further than that: since all our faculties (including ‘reason’ or intelligence) are palpably fallible, none of their deliverances are certain. Or so it might be said. A possible objection to this argument is that it looks too like an argument that, since some 70-year-olds suffer from heart disease, we cannot know of any 70-year-old that 7 The point is made by Prichard 2012 that ‘error-possibilities’ lacking ‘epistemic support’ (which the sceptic in the nature of the case can’t give) can be ignored in ascribing knowledge, but without relating that point to the close relationship between knowledge and certainty. The ‘possibility’ of the term ‘errorpossibility’ is here evidently ‘logical’ possibility. Prichard indeed claims that the argument for radical scepticism is entirely independent of empirical considerations: ‘the sceptic . . . will usually have the good sense to eschew empirical commitments . . . and thus the problem regarding a possible radical sceptical appeal to empirical claims . . ., that they are effectively self-undermining, does not arise.’ And more boldly, ‘radical sceptical hypotheses are always merely raised and never epistemically motivated by appeal to empirical considerations.’ But to say that is simply to ignore a significant, virtually universal aspect of sceptical rhetoric. It is true that philosophical sceptics, whether their scepticism is sincere or ‘methodological’, don’t give us serious empirical reasons for concluding that, whenever we take ourselves to perceive that P, it is always epistemically possible that not-P, but an appeal to how the world actually is can be more subtle than that. How else would Prichard explain why the brain-in-a-vat scenario is now the popular alternative to Descartes’s malign demon (as it is his own standard example of a sceptical ‘error-possibility’)? The BIV story is not science, perhaps, but it is no accident that it is science-fiction and no mere fantasy (or reliant on religious belief). The plausibility (to some) of sceptical argument pretty obviously owes a lot to this ambivalence.

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they are not suffering from heart disease.8 In a particular case there may be reason to distrust or reject a deliverance of our faculties, but, on the other hand, circumstances may be such as to make it more appropriate to brush doubt aside as absurd—just as, in a particular case, given all the direct evidence, it might be judged certain that this 70-year-old does not have heart disease. But that objection assumes that we have some ground or basis or reason for giving credence or, in Aquinas’s sense, ‘assent’ to at least some deliverances of our faculties, a basis untouched by the general point that our faculties are fallible. Is that something that can properly be assumed? As it has often been noted,9 we certainly do seem to assume it. There is normally taken to be a burden of proof on anyone who wishes to question a particular (for example) perceptual judgement. The merely general point that there can be hallucinations cuts no ice if the aim is to cast doubt on the evidence of a witness of an event in question. Or take our capacity for recognizing individuals. A witness may be confident that she recognizes a particular man in an identity parade as her assailant, but the fact that he is a policeman attending only because he shares an unusual hair-colour with the suspect casts more than a little doubt on her claim, as, indeed, does the well-documented unreliability of witnesses’ judgements in identity parades. But that—and throw in the fact that some unfortunate people with prosopagnosia or with Alzheimer’s disease do not recognize their sisters by sight—would not normally be taken to cast doubt on our witness’s claim on another occasion that she sees her sister across the room. We’d need some better, more specific reason to do that—at the extreme, evidence that it is not her sister, but evidence that her sister has a perfect double in the area might do. Similarly, the general point that some deliverances of the senses can be misleading, or that there can be (well, fairly) realistic dreams, would not normally be thought enough to show that it is not certain that my current environment is as I perceive it to be, or that I do not now know that I am sitting in an armchair in my study, laptop on my knees, surrounded by familiar objects, and not dreaming that I am. It is in the attempt to infect such knowledge and certainty as that with doubt that, for the advocate of scepticism, the move to fantastic hypotheses becomes pretty well irresistible, comparable to Descartes’s imagined anti-intuitionist objector’s sceptical appeal, summarily dismissed by Descartes himself, to the possibly different view taken by God and the angels of what are for us evident logical relations.10 On the sceptical road, it seems, (to quote Hume in another connection) we are ‘soon got into fairyland’—or, nowadays, onto the wilder shores of dystopian science fiction. Nevertheless, it might seem that the sceptic can avoid fairyland or even the need to come up with any specific alternative hypothesis or ‘error-possibility’ at all, not to speak of particular grounds for supposing such a hypothesis an epistemic possibility, simply by appealing to what might be called the comprehensive possibility of frustrated 8 There are, of course, differences. 9 Perhaps the first analytic philosopher to do so with any clarity was J. L. Austin 1962, as discussed briefly in this chapter, Section 5.5. 10 Descartes, ‘Second Replies’, AT VII 146/CSM II 104.

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expectations. The world is an uncertain place, vaster and more complex than what falls within the narrow compass of our experience and then we can master in detail. The course of events is often enough determined by factors or a combination of factors that no one was or, short of omniscience, could have been in a position to have identified as present or significant beforehand, perhaps even afterwards. The world is full of what the US Vice-President Donald Rumsfelt, when defending some failed enterprise, famously called ‘unknown unknowns’ as opposed to ‘known unknowns’. How can we ever be sure, it might be said, with respect to any particular well-supported belief that we take to constitute knowledge of the world, that there is no fact that, if we knew it, would lead us to withdraw that claim, and at best to judge that what we supposed was certain is merely probable? How can we ever have knowledge of the negative fact that there is no such currently unidentifiable factor? Why, then, in such a world as we inhabit, should the burden of proof ever be on the doubter? In so far as this line of argument does not question that a belief about the world may well at least be probable on the available evidence, we may call it ‘moderate scepticism’. A reasonable first response to the argument is that situations differ. At one extreme we are trying to judge the likelihood of an outcome or explanation with relatively little knowledge of a complex state of affairs and the relevant causality, so that in order to question claims to certainty, or even unduly firm estimates of probability that allow too narrow a margin of error, one need hardly do more than advert to the lack of information and the complexity of the situation. But in other cases certainty is possible. If we know that the dog has been dead and buried for a month, it is certain that nothing, however unexpected, will lead to his climbing out of his grave barking to the tune of ‘God save the Queen’. These cases would seem to lie at opposite ends of a continuum, and to that extent what is objectively certain and so ‘deserves the name of knowledge’ is a matter of judgement, judgement that may differ from person to person. But it is not a matter of judgement whether to accept the clear deliverances of the senses. My senses may be fallible, and their deliverances are ‘in principle’ open to question, but it is not for me a matter of judgement whether at this moment I am sitting with a laptop before me, and it is certain that no factual discovery, however unexpected, will make it to any degree probable that I am not now so situated. Or so, at least, it would normally be supposed. Just as a general, arm-waving reference to optical illusions and hallucinations would not be supposed enough to cast doubt on my conviction that I am looking across the room at my wife, so the platitudinous exaggeration that we live in ‘an unpredictable world’ would hardly be supposed enough to undermine the judgement that the environment I am currently in is now more or less as I now perceive it. When (at least) it is knowledge grounded on the deliverances of the senses that is in question, the burden of proof is in general and from the first on the doubter, and the task for an opponent of philosophical scepticism, such as I am, is to explain why–a point to which I will shortly return. It is that explanation that is intended to be a contribution to an account of what knowledge is.

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Second, appeals to fantasy defended The second line of argument that a sceptic might adopt, faced with the objection that they need to offer grounds for according their sceptical scenario a probability greater than zero, avoids explicit appeal to experience of illusion and the like, or even the allegedly general unpredictability of the world, but directly defends the use of fantastical, merely logically possible scenarios. One possible line of this defence sees their role simply as a way of demonstrating a logical gap between what we claim to know and its grounding—the latter does not logically entail the former, and is therefore ‘inconclusive’, leaving room for doubt. This position may be little different from ‘moderate’ scepticism, with fantastic scenarios simply standing in, as it were, for the allegedly always possibly relevant ‘unknown unknowns’. But another (in its way philosophically more sophisticated) line of argument represents the appeal to such scenarios as appropriate to the purportedly ‘philosophical’ stance of one whose assessment of claims to perceptual knowledge is from a standpoint lying outside our everyday assumptions and procedures and natural beliefs, since it is precisely those that are in question. That philosophical task, it may be argued, requires that we start from scratch, with a clean sheet, taking what Barry Stroud has called an ‘external’ view.11 Accordingly, that basic epistemic situation may be taken to be such that no hypothesis as to the source of our sense experiences is, in itself, more probable than any other. In effect, it is supposed comparable to our situation prior to the tossing of a coin when we have no reason to suppose that it turn up one way rather than the other, when the probability of each possible outcome is 0.5. If it is assumed that that analogy holds, then given that there are indefinitely many logically possible—if mostly merely fantastic—‘explanations’ of our subjective sense experiences that are mutually exclusive, then, although we cannot assign each a determinate numerical value, each hypothesis will be as probable as any other, unless we can find independent reasons to prefer one hypothesis over others.12 In abstraction from all that we normally take ourselves to know about the world, such hypotheses are, it would seem, epistemically equipossible. Therefore, our sceptic might conclude, the probability of each will be vanishingly small, including the probability of what we naturally suppose to be the case, and suppose that we know. This position might be called ‘extreme scepticism’, one that in effect identifies epistemic with logical possibility. Much sceptical argument seems to waver between moderate and extreme scepticism. What, if anything, is wrong with the argument for the ‘extreme’ position? One questionable feature is that it treats assent to what is evident as if it was the adoption of an explanatory hypothesis. It presents primary knowledge as secondary knowledge in order to attack its claim to be knowledge. In effect, as often noted, it embraces the 11 Stroud 1984. 12 Descartes argues that there are such reasons. By the grace of God we have an innate concept of matter that enables us to form an intelligible explanation of the mechanics of perception, and that must be the true explanation, since God is no deceiver (succinctly argued at Principia philosophiae II.i).

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homunculus model for cognition, as if perceivers were not animals more or less at home in the world, aware of, attending to, focusing on, the perceptible things around them, but minds or brains within bodies. On this model, what we perceive, attend to, and are aware of is not our environment, including ourselves physically perceiving it, but some inner states or events or objects—whether ‘sensations’, ‘ideas’, ‘impressions’, ‘appearances’, ‘images’, or ‘brain-states’ neither the status nor the cause of which is given to us in perception—a model that is applied even to perceptual awareness of our own bodies. As I argued in Chapter 2, however, the causes of our perceptual knowledge of our  environment are in a sense ‘given’, since in perceiving our environment we are perceptually aware of ourselves perceiving it, and of how we are doing so. We are perceptually aware of our spatio-causal cognitive relationship to the objects of perception, and of how they are impinging on our senses. Perceptual knowledge of one’s environment comes along with, and depends upon, this immediate—if logically second-order—knowledge of its own causality, its source in that which is perceived. It thus comes, as one might put it, with its own built-in credentials, which is a characteristic of primary knowledge—of being in direct cognitive contact with the object of knowledge. That is at least the beginning of an explanation of why the burden of proof is on whoever wishes to challenge the deliverances of the senses. Cartesian scepticism characteristically stands the true epistemic situation on its head, as if the burden of proof lies on the perceiver, as if we need reasons to trust the deliverances of the basic cognitive faculties by which we apprehend the world.

Scepticism and the coherence theory of knowledge Before pursuing that point in following sections, a short digression would seem appropriate in order to take at least some further note of the coherence theory of knowledge, the pure form of which denies any kind of foundational status to what I have called primary knowledge.13 That theory, although opposed to what I take to be the deepest, most satisfactory answer to scepticism, may seem to gain support from some of the anti-sceptical points raised in this chapter. Consider the general distinction between objectionably far-fetched hypotheses on the one hand and, on the other hand, genuine epistemic possibilities capable of defeating claims to possess knowledge. A certain explanation of the distinction may commend itself to the coherentist: namely, that if a hypothesis, though compatible with the prima facie evidence for what is allegedly known, is incompatible not only with the latter but also with a wide range of our other beliefs, especially those very general beliefs (sometimes called ‘basic beliefs’) near the ‘centre’ of our belief-system, it is too far-fetched to be counted an epistemic possibility. For just that reason, it might be argued, my assumption as I pass over Magdalen Bridge in the morning that I know that it survived the night is untouched by the ‘possibility’ 13 Quine, for example, in appearing to accord some authority to what he calls ‘the tribunal of the senses’, lays himself open to the charge brought by Donald Davidson that he is not consistently coherentist.

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that aliens, having hypnotized potential onlookers to forget what they have seen, demolished it at midnight and put an exact replica in its place by morning. The special feature of sceptical hypotheses, moreover, that they are tailor-made to be compatible with every possible observation, can draw from coherentists the objection that the sceptic absurdly supposes that we could step outside our whole ‘system of beliefs’ to assess the reasonableness of holding it. The idea that our belief-system is comprehensively problematic, it may be argued, is senseless—the corollary being, presumably, that it is equally senseless to suppose that it is comprehensively well-founded. Realism just happens to be the working boat we are in. At a certain level, there is no doubt, coherence counts. A connection between two hypotheses or theories offering explanations of different data can increase the probability of both. The world is, after all, a coherent place. A pure or comprehensive coherence theory of knowledge, however, faces notorious problems, not least that of explaining ‘coherence’ and how it does the work required of it without our having an independent grasp of particular truths, including truths as to what is incoherent with what. More to the present point, such a theory cannot recognize or explain the fundamental role and authority of the deliverances of the senses, why we take them to be, in themselves and without reasoning, an at least prima facie source of knowledge. It doesn’t well explain, for example, how the result of even just one carefully constructed and conducted (and repeatable) experiment can ‘rule out’ what was previously an epistemic probability, or, on the other hand, how a few chance observations can raise a doubt about a long-accepted and wide-ranging physical theory, even without replacing it by another theory. It also does away with the common-sense distinction between what is known and evident, and so can count as evidence of something else, and more or less probable conclusions drawn from such evidence, a distinction arguably required by the notion of even roughly calculable probability. In any case, it is difficult to be satisfied with a response to scepticism so liable to fall back on the point that realism happens to be a deep feature of our system of beliefs. If one feels the need to embrace an ‘ism’, there is ultimately no tenable alternative, I would suggest, to foundationalism, the ‘foundations’ of the cognitive edifice being supplied by primary knowledge, acquired by direct apprehension of its independent object. A fully adequate critique of the coherence theory no doubt calls for more explicit discussion than it will get in this book, certainly more than two paragraphs, but I hope that I have elsewhere supplied positive reason for a form of foundationalism that will help to make full-blown coherentism unattractive.

5.3 Fallibility and Uncertainty Some points made so far in criticism of the sceptical argument obviously call for further explication and illustration, and as a contribution to that task I will now turn to consider the relations between fallibility, uncertainty, and, in section 5.5, defeasibility, distinct attributes that are liable to be conflated.

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As was illustrated in Chapter 1, certainty was anciently and widely conflated with infallibility, fallibility with uncertainty, and the same still happens. To pick a recent example more or less at random, John Turri, reviewing contemporary epistemology, states that ‘the [current] conventional wisdom . . . is that knowledge-grade justification is fallible: you could be wrong even though you have it’.14 However, so Turri tells us,15 there are difficulties both with this and with the contrary view. How much justification is needed, he asks, for a true belief to count as knowledge? ‘Think of justification for a belief as measured by how probable the belief is given the reasons or evidence you have. . . . The question then becomes, how probable, relative to your evidence, must your belief be for it to be knowledge?’ If we hold that only beliefs that are certain, with a probability of 1, can count as knowledge, then, according to Turri, we are ‘infallibilists’, and the problem with infallibilism, he supposes, is that it entails that we know very little, certainly nothing outside our own minds. ‘For it seems we could have had the same justification that we do in fact have, even if the world around us (or the past, or the future) had been radically different [sc. from how we are justified in believing it to be].’ In other words, the ‘infallibilist’, allegedly, has no defence against the sceptical argument. But now suppose that we adopt the ‘fallibilist’ horn of the supposed dilemma. That, according to Turri, would be to allow that knowledge requires only a high degree of probability. ‘Fallibilism’, on this understanding of it, would seem to make the boundary of knowledge arbitrary, and so something that may differ from person to person. That might seem acceptable in so far as it fits the fact that some people are more confident in their ascriptions of knowledge, others more cautious.16 However, Turri draws a more clearly paradoxical consequence from the point that whereas, if P is known and Q is known, then

is known, but if P and Q are unconnected, and each has a probability of 0.9, then

has a probability of only 0.81 (0.9 x 0.9). (One is less likely to win two fairly run lotteries for which one has tickets than just one such lottery.) Is it acceptable that, given knowledge that P and knowledge that Q, one’s belief that

may yet fail to achieve the standard for knowledge? Turri proposes that this dilemma or apparent antinomy as between ‘infallibilist’ and ‘fallibilist’ theories of the justification required for knowledge is the main problem facing epistemology today.

The infallible and the certain: a confusion I would suggest, however, that the argument that sets up the alleged dilemma is ill-structured. First, why should the contrast between what is fallible and what is infallible be supposed relevant to the question whether sufficient justification for a claim to know that P is by the same token a sufficient justification for claiming that, on the evidence, it is certain that P (and not merely that it is highly probable that P)? As for that question, it is strongly counter-intuitive to attempt to drive a wedge between knowledge 14 Turri 2012: 225. Pasnau 2018 also assumes throughout that certainty would require infallibility. 15 Citing Bonjour 2001. 16 But see Section 5.4.

146 Knowing and Seeing and certainty. In ordinary life, I have assumed, claims to know that P and claims that it is certain that P are taken to stand or fall together. To claim for oneself, or to ascribe to others, knowledge that P is by implication to claim that P is certain, either because one knows it directly, for example by perceiving that P, or because the available evidence rules out not-P.17 It is true that some well-grounded claims to know (for example, to see) that P turn out to be false, but that is by the same token true of some well-grounded claims that it is certain that P. If a claim to know that P, or the justification for it, is describable as ‘fallible’, then a claim that P is certain, and the justification for it, is also so describable. But it is more natural and intelligible to attribute either fallibility or infallibility to people, their cognitive faculties, power of judgement, methods, or the like than to any particular claim or judgement—not to speak of knowledge or justification.18 When Plato says that knowledge is infallible, he explicitly employs the term epistēmē for the power or faculty (dynamis) that delivers knowledge. Indeed, within Turri’s conception of ‘fallibilist’ theory of knowledge there lies the controversial assumption that, if our faculties or methods are fallible (as they all are), then their product must be less than certain. To that issue I will shortly return. Arguments for the view that we have infallible faculties have characteristically appealed to facts that seem rationally unquestionable—that I am now thinking, that 3 + 2 = 5, that the square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides. No doubt there’s a sense in which belief in these things ‘couldn’t be wrong’, but that is because they are peculiarly certain (it is not epistemically possible that they are false) or because they are necessary (it is not logically possible that they are false), or for both reasons combined. But it is a mistake to think that there is anything around, such as a faculty or power of judgement (call it ‘reason’ or ‘intelligence’) or method (say, ‘the scientific method’) that is infallible. Not only may highly intelligent people commit fallacies in their reasoning, their fallacious arguments may be impressive products and evidence of their high intelligence. One needs only to think of the opposed arguments of philosophers to recognize that ‘reason’ can lead us astray, and there can be, as it were, illusions of reason. This chapter is an attempt to show that sceptics suffer from just such an illusion, not that they are stupid, irrational, or careless. On the other hand, that our reason is thus fallible, even when employed by mathematicians, does not mean that it is not certain, but only 17 When A ascribes knowledge that P to B, it is normally implied that it is certain that P from B’s viewpoint too, but that implication may be cancelled in effect if secondary and, in particular, second-hand knowledge is attributed, such that its possessor does not know that or how they possess it. In another kind of case, A may be claiming knowledge simply on the basis of B’s being in a position (e.g. as witness), and claiming, to know that P. What B tells A may be the main evidence available to A on which it is (if it is) certain that P. In other words, in the right circumstances knowledge can be transferred from one (trustworthy) person to another. There may, of course, be general ascriptions of knowledge in which the ascriber makes no claim to the knowledge ascribed, as ‘Mary will know the answer to that question’ or ‘She knows the identifying features of all the British orchids’. 18 McDowell (2011) makes a similar point, except that he distinguishes fallibility, not explicitly from uncertainty but from defeasibility, so that the product of a fallible capacity can be indefeasible—a move discussed in the next chapter, section 6.5. ‘Indefeasible’, as we shall see in section 6.2, is a term that has been given different meanings, but this use of it has unacceptable implications.

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probable, that 17 + 25 = 42. Similarly, that our senses can lead us astray and that there are sensory illusions does not mean that, given my current experience, it is not certain that, as I write this, I am sitting in my study. Arguing from the fallibility of our faculties to the uncertainty or mere probability of their particular deliveries19 is as fallacious as the converse argument, the Platonic move from the certainty of some of the deliverances of reason to the conclusion that reason is an infallible faculty. Accordingly, the question of how probable what is believed needs to be in order for the belief to count as knowledge should not arise. P is certain if and only if there no epistemic possibility that not-P or (if you prefer to put it that way) there is no positive degree of probability that not-P. If it is appropriate to talk at all of the ‘probability’ of what is known, which is questionable, it must be 1, and that of its contradictory, zero. That some people are more, others less confident in their ascriptions of knowledge does not show that for some, probability is enough for knowledge, while others demand certainty. It is more plausible that it indicates no more than that some people are more, others less confident in their assertions,20 including both ascriptions of knowledge and claims that this or that is certain—and, indeed, judgements of probability.

Probability, certainty and epistemic possibility: a difference More can be said, however. It is important that objective certainty21 and epistemic possibility, like objective probability as we normally employ the term ‘probable’ in ordinary life, are relative to a situation, that is, to the epistemic position of a subject (or subjects) in that situation—that is, to the subject’s experience and to the evidence available in that situation, whether or not the subject takes it into consideration. It has not always been clearly pointed out in works on probability that everyday, non-technical talk of probability, objective certainty and epistemic possibility, which is what is relevant to action and is epistemically fundamental, is not only relative to the evidence available to a subject in a particular situation at a certain time and place (who may just be ‘us now’), but also that the available evidence may be very different from what the subject actually takes or has taken or would take into consideration in forming an estimate of probability—or, indeed, currently knows.22 That is so with respect to the subject’s current experience too, of course. Thus a subject may misjudge objective 19 In the interesting and revealing chapter of Hume’s Treatise (Book I, Part iv, Section 1), ‘Of Scepticism with regard to Reason’, Hume does just that, arguing, first, that experience of the fallibility of our capacity to reason reduces any conclusion we reach by employing it to at best high probability, and then iterates the point to argue that the judgement of probability is itself merely probable, and so on ‘ad infinitum’, to reach the result that our conclusion has no probability at all. He explains why this allegedly valid argument will convince no one by the hypothesis that such iterative reasoning is ‘forced and unnatural’, so that natural belief stops after the first step or two. My point is that the first step is a mistake. 20 Cf. Hawthorne 2004, especially the last chapter. Hawthorne, however, somewhat clouds the issue by the suggestion that philosophical scepticism is, or is a product or manifestation of, extreme diffidence in judgement. Philosophers who look favourably on scepticism have never seemed to me more diffident in judgement than others. 21 ‘Objective’ as opposed to ‘subjective’ certainty, that is, to feeling certain. 22 That is one important reason why Timothy Williamson’s equation of evidence with knowledge seems not quite right.

148 Knowing and Seeing probabilities, or fail to recognize possibilities or certainties, simply as a result of overlooking, or failing to collect, some of the currently available evidence—perhaps simply failing to notice something before their eyes, or to recognize, as they ought, its relevance or significance.23 That said, the claim that it is certain that P, and the equivalent denial that it is epistemically possible that not-P, differ in a significant way from assignments of probability or, at least, from those between the technical limits of zero and one, limits at which we do not ordinarily, in non-technical contexts, speak of ‘probability’ at all. Suppose that someone—call her Mary—claimed at time t1 that the probability of H is 0.8. Suppose that she claims at t2, in a different situation affording further information, that the probability of H is 0.2. Clearly both claims could be correct, since in each case the probability is relative to the possibly different evidence available at different times or in different situations. It could be that it was at t1 (to one in her situation) probable to degree 0.8, even though it is now, at t2, probable only to degree 0.2. The newly available evidence does not falsify the old judgement of probability, although it may make it irrelevant to many current concerns (though not, perhaps, to some questions of culpability). Similarly if it is discovered at t3 (or if, at t1, John, in his different situation, knew, as Mary did not) that in fact not-H, it could still be that Mary was correct at t1 in assigning a probability of 0.8 to H. To deny that would be in effect to imply the absurdity that, if not-H, the probability of H is and always has been zero, and that it has always been certain that not-H, whatever the available evidence. The very notions of probability and objective certainty lose their grip. Suppose, however, that Mary claims at t1 that it is certain that H (or, being educated, claims that H has a ‘probability of 1’) and accordingly that she knows that H.24 Suppose too that these claims are supported at t1 by all her experience and the vast amount of evidence available to her, which she has conscientiously, competently and comprehensively gathered and reviewed. At t1 (let us suppose) not only is she justified in claiming to know that H, but she might also justifiably claim to know that and how she knows that H. But now suppose that some very surprising new evidence becomes available at t2—she unforeseeably comes to know some fact (previously a Rumsfelt ‘unknown unknown’) which raises the possibility of an alternative explanation, H2. The probability of H is now, let us suppose, down to 0.8. Unlike the original probability-claim in the previous example, Mary’s original claim at t that it was certain that H, or that H had a probability of 1, just like the closely allied claim that she knew that H, is shown to be

23 There may, of course, be an excuse for failing to collect all the available evidence, if there was too little time, for example, or the power of the subject was restricted in some way. ‘It was probable in the light of such evidence as there was the time to take into account’ does not entail ‘It was probable (full stop)’. Similarly, failure to notice evidence of H that is right before one’s eyes may or may not be excusable, but that is irrelevant to the probability of H relative to the available evidence. 24 To avoid the complications that arise when ascriber and subject are different people, I have deliberately chosen as examples here claims to possess knowledge oneself.

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false, even though it may still be regarded as having been reasonable, well-grounded or justified in a situation in which there was no evidence available for holding not-H as an epistemic possibility, even a remote one. Suppose again that, at t3, further investigation rules out H2, and all the evidence again points to H. Now, once again, it is proper for Mary to claim that H is certain—indeed, let us suppose that it is certain, and that she does know that H—but that does not mean that the original knowledge-claim at t1 has been shown to have been, after all, correct or true, or that the intermediate assessment of probability made at t2 has been shown to be false. In other words, claims that something is certain—and accordingly claims to knowledge—are open to being rebutted in a way in which claims that something is probable are not. To rebut a claim made in the past that it was then probable that P we must take into consideration only the evidence that was available in the circumstances of that claim. Present knowledge that not-P, for example, is irrelevant, as it is not irrelevant to past claims of knowledge or objective certainty. Talk of ‘a probability of 1’ or ‘a probability of 0’, convenient though it may be in some contexts, is at least to that extent questionably appropriate. Ascriptions of certainty function differently, unsurprisingly so, from ascriptions of probability. (Another difference will be mentioned below.)

Knowledge, certainty and probability Accordingly, when Turri’s ‘fallibilist’ (who might more properly be called, in some sense, a ‘probabilist’) says that whatever justification or basis you have for supposing that you have knowledge, ‘you could be wrong even though you have it’, there is no doubt a sense in which what he says is true. But I would suggest that there is also a sense in which it is false, and the latter is the sense in which he appears to take it. What is true is something like this: even if the available evidence or basis for a claim to know that P is such as to justify the judgement that it is certain that P and that there is no epistemic possibility that not-P, that judgement could in principle be overturned by further evidence. At the extreme it could, logically speaking, turn out to be the case that, all along, not-P (such things happen), but, as it has just been remarked, a claim that it is certain that P is subverted even if the fresh evidence simply gives reason to judge not-P a remote (but real) epistemic possibility. Here the phrase ‘in principle’ is important. For what is not true is that whatever justification or basis there is for you to judge that it is certain that P, and so that you know that P, it is epistemically possible that you are wrong. Mathematical judgements, as a class, are ‘in principle’ open to being subverted by further reasoning, but it is not epistemically possible, for someone in my epistemic position, that 117 + 225 is not equal to 342 (though it might be, relative to the epistemic position of someone who cannot perform even such simple calculations). Nor is it epistemically possible, given (or ‘relative to’) my current experience, memories, and all available evidence, that I am not at this moment sitting in my study with a laptop before me. To clarify the difference between my (traditional, orthodox, common-sense) association of knowledge and certainty and the ‘fallibilist’ or ‘probabilist’ view, let us first

150 Knowing and Seeing suppose, for the sake of argument, that the conditions for the particular kind of knowledge in question (i.e. ‘perspicuous’ empirical knowledge that one possesses together with knowledge of how one possesses it) are more or less as follows.25 Roughly, X knows that S is P, knowing that and how they know that S is P, if and only if (1) S is P (2) X believes that S is P. (3) X’s belief that S is P is either due to X’s consciously perceiving that S is P or is consciously and properly inferred from the available evidence E (E being itself known). (4) In the latter case, there is an appropriate causal relationship between E and S’s being P.26 (5) On the evidence available to X, it is certain that S is P (it is not epistemically possible that S is not P), and this is recognized by X. It is (5) that is questioned by the ‘fallibilist’, but that condition needs qualification for another reason, resting on a point mentioned above. If, at time t, we justifiably suppose, on all the available evidence, that it is certain that P, and so that we know that P, the appearance of an unforeseeable ‘unknown unknown’ at t+1 may nevertheless raise the epistemic possibility that not-P. (At the extreme, we may discover that not-P.) It has now turned out that, after all, it is not certain that P, and so that we do not know that P. It follows that it was not, after all, certain at t that P, and that we did not know that P when we justifiably thought that we did. Such a situation can arise even when all the conditions (1)–(4) were fulfilled, and (5) was at least ostensibly fulfilled. Nor can we, at any later time, properly claim to have known at t that P, even if by then the ‘unknown unknown’ has been shown to be, after all, irrelevant—to have been, in the jargon, a ‘misleading defeater’ (a term soon to be further explained). It is as if we treat the ‘misleading defeater’ as evidence that X’s justification was incomplete—that X’s evidence was not after all sufficient for certainty, even if it was for high probability. But I will shortly look at the rationale for that reaction from another angle. Now consider ‘fallibilism’. Some (moderate) ‘fallibilists’ may agree with the above list of conditions apart from (5), which for them should read something like (5prob) From X’s epistemic position it is either certain that S is P or it is sufficiently highly probable that S is P, and this is recognized by X. 25 This list of conditions is not, of course, an attempt at a strict definition of knowledge (it is, for example, circular), even of ‘perspicuous’ knowledge, but is simply a way of focusing on the significant claim of ‘fallibilism’. I here take ‘believes’, of course, in the ordinary broad sense in which if I know that P, I normally believe that P—in effect, Aquinas’s ‘thinking with assent’—rather than in the philosophically traditional, narrower, and technical sense explored in Chapter 1 in which ‘belief ’ or ‘opinion’, however judicious and well-supported, is opposed to direct ‘knowledge’ (i.e. to what I have called ‘primary knowledge’). 26 This allows for knowledge of the (unperceived) present and, in so far as we have it, the future, as also knowledge of a past event or state of affairs that is based on independent knowledge of the previous and/or contemporary as well as the consequential situation.

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Moderate ‘fallibilism’, or ‘probabilism’ in the sense explained, allows some certainty and ‘hard knowledge’, but drives a wedge between certainty and knowledge in general. Extreme ‘fallibilism’ takes the line that (since all our faculties are fallible, etc.) certainty and ‘hard knowledge’ are impossible, so that so that whether someone has knowledge of the kind in question is a matter of sufficiently high probability. Quite apart from the question of what counts as ‘sufficiently high’, both positions face the objection mentioned by Turri, which is simply a consequence of trying to disconnect knowledge from objective certainty. Whatever is taken to be the lower limit of the ‘sufficiently probable’, then, if P and Q are unconnected, one could know that P and know that Q but not know that

. There is, however, a further difficulty for (5prob), deriving from the possibility of ‘misleading defeaters’, facts such as, when discovered, defeat a previously justified claim to know that P, even when it is true that P, by rendering it epistemically possible that not-P. If a claim made at time t to know that S is P depended only on the high probability of S’s being P, then (consonantly with the difference noted above between probability and certainty) it would follow that the emergence of a misleading defeater at t + 1 that lowered the probability that S is P to below the level required for knowledge would leave it proper to assert at t + 1 that X knew at t that S is P, but does not know it now (or to assert at a later time, t + 2, that X had the knowledge at t but not at t + 1) in just the same way as it might be proper to assert that it was highly probable at t that S is P, but significantly less probable at t + 1. It is of course possible to lose knowledge that one once had by forgetting or, perhaps, by simply ceasing to believe what one knew, but it seems more than a little implausible that knowledge can be lost in just this way, by an increase of information. The assertion that ‘I knew yesterday that she will arrive today, but it is now uncertain whether she will do so’, unless a kind of joke, is grossly paradoxical. What may be lost by an increase of information is one’s right to suppose that one had knowledge, not knowledge. A wedge simply cannot coherently be driven between knowledge and objective certainty, at least when the knowledge is conscious and well-founded, such that the subject knows how and that they know.27 A sceptic would no doubt hold that the paradox is in the view that a justification may be in one situation sufficient for ascribing or claiming knowledge, but in another situation no longer sufficient. The sceptic would argue that if every justification for the ascription of knowledge of the world is such that, in principle, a change in the situation could mean that it was no longer a justification, then no justification is sufficient for ascribing or claiming knowledge. That, I suppose, is the moderate sceptical position in a nutshell—‘moderate’ in so far as it allows probability, and denies only certainty. But if the argument works at all, then, unless the paradox is accepted that one can lose knowledge one once had by learning more, it works even if high probability, rather 27 The diffident student can yet again serve as an example, since so long as they reliably, even if unconsciously, remember the right answers, they can justifiably be said to know them, without its being certain relative to their epistemic position (but then it must be certain, relative to the epistemic position of the one who says so.)

152 Knowing and Seeing than certainty, is proposed as all that is required for a justification to be sufficient for knowledge-ascription. A rebuttal of the sceptical argument might start with the point that, since the different situations are, precisely, different epistemic situations, situations distinguished, in effect, by differences in the evidence available, the justifications available in those situations are not after all the same. If I see clearly a woman approaching on the lonely track across the moor, then in normal circumstances I see and know that a woman is approaching. But if I now read on my news-app that a male convict has escaped from the nearby prison, believed to be disguised as a woman, my sense experience may be the same but I neither know nor see, nor have the same justification for supposing, that a woman is approaching. It would be helpful here to turn to the topic of the burden of proof. If we make a claim of any kind, the onus is on us to explain how we know that what we say is the case, or at least why we believe it, and we may well be challenged to do so.28 To meet the challenge with an ostensibly adequate and effective answer to the question ‘How do you know?’ is at least to shift the onus onto an objector—a requirement that an objector may or may not in turn fulfil. That is, or ought to be, a point built into the widely accepted philosophical thesis that claims to knowledge, however well justified, even when grounded on the clear deliverances of the senses, are ‘defeasible’. It is therefore appropriate to give fuller consideration to the notion of ‘defeasibility’, as is done in section 5.5. Before that, however, section 5.4 assesses some of the reasons offered for ‘contextualism’, a popular adjunct to ‘fallibilism’ that is sometimes supposed to supply an argument in its favour.

5.4 Scepticism and ‘Contextualism’ The basic idea of ‘contextualism’ is that ascriptions of knowledge, in this, at least, like assertions that something is large or square, have truth-values that are relative to the context or point of the ascription. We may truly say of a creature that it is small, and of another that it is large, and yet truly say of the former that is much larger than the latter—for example, if the former is a small elephant and the latter a large rabbit. There are here three ‘contexts’, depending on whether we are comparing elephants, comparing rabbits, or comparing an elephant with a rabbit. The contextualist holds that, similarly, in one context it may be true that a subject A knows that P, whereas in another context it may be true that a subject B does not know that P, although the grounds on which

28 It is a question whether, as suggested by the natural response, ‘How do you know?’, a speaker’s unqualified assertions carry the conversational implication that they know them to be true, or only that they believe them (or perhaps not even that). I take it that in general there is less than total propriety in asserting without qualification what one does not know to be true, although not as much less as there is in asserting what one does not believe (lying).

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their judgements that P are based, like the sizes of the elephant and the rabbit, are the same for both A and B. Does this analogy survive critical examination?

‘Stakes’ contextualism, and some objections to it The standards of justification we observe in our ascriptions of knowledge, as in assertions generally, vary a good deal across contexts. In some contexts we are much more careful and cautious than in others. We know that, strictly, we ought not to assert without qualification what we do not know to be true, but who cares about that when telling an amusing anecdote? More to the point, we are less likely to claim knowledge, implicitly or explicitly, when a lot hangs on our being right. I am happy to assure my wife that I know that the back door is shut when I feel pretty sure I remember shutting it, if the worst that could happen if I am wrong is that some leaves blow in while we are gardening. But I may be reluctant to claim on the same basis to know that the door is locked without first checking, if we are about to drive off on holiday. Does it follow, as contextualism proposes, that I do know in the first case, when the stakes are low, but not, before checking, in the second, when they are high, just as I might be judged to speak truly when I describe a valley floor as completely flat, but falsely if I say that the surface of the bumpy road that runs through it is flat? Such an interpretation of the significance of conversational context would seem to imply that I remember shutting the door in the first case but don’t remember locking it in the second. Perhaps even less plausibly, it seems to imply that in some circumstances whether I see or otherwise perceive that P depends on whether the ‘context’ is high-risk or low-risk. To my wife’s question ‘Is the door locked?’ a perfectly appropriate reply would be (rather than ‘I don’t know, I forget whether I did it, so I’ll go and see’) ‘I clearly remember locking it, but I had better check’. That we know something does not mean that our knowledge can’t be confirmed, or that it is never worth taking steps to confirm it. It is a common rule among carpenters, ‘Always measure twice’. They do so, or are wise to do so, as a matter of course, however certain they are (and it is) that the first measurement is correct. Since they are not infallible, and costly mistakes can be made, in the long run the policy pays of taking the trouble to confirm what they already know. Occasionally some discover that they didn’t after all know it. (As ever, we should distinguish a general recognition that we are fallible from a judgement that particular deliverances are uncertain.) It is understandable that most of us are inclined to act and speak with similar caution or care on any particular occasion in which the stakes are high, at least if there is time and opportunity to check, although it is also possible to be unreasonably and unhelpfully cautious in judgement, a timidity that may infect action. On the other hand, of course, people are often too ready with their claims to knowledge, confidently claiming to know what is less than certain, yet (as others have pointed out) the contrast between cautious and confident assertion gives no clear reason for concluding that the cautious and the confident are asserting different things, or that where the cautious demand certainty as a condition of knowledge the confident

154 Knowing and Seeing are satisfied with probability. Self-assurance in thought and talk, or the lack of it, is at least as likely to be a mark of temperament or character or style as it is to be a reflection of what is at issue for the speaker, and it may well extend to their assertions generally. (I once heard an academic historian say of another, ‘I wish I could be as certain of one thing as he is of everything’.) Ignoring inconsiderable epistemic possibilities, indeed, often allows us to make a valid point with emphasis. So we might tell the too optimistic friend who has just bought a lottery ticket, ‘You know you won’t win’, to make the point that the remote, if undoubted possibility of his winning is not worth the place he’s giving it in his plans or the money spent. We don’t mean him to conclude that he should throw away the ticket or even sell it at a discount. The gambling context, depending on our attitude to gambling, can encourage otherwise unwonted dogmatism on one side or the other. So too can a political argument or a couple of drinks. Since the difference between confidence and caution may just as well be evinced by a difference in our readiness, depending on the stakes, to assert simply ‘The door is locked’ as ‘I know that the door is locked’, it is reasonable to ask why the truth-value of the latter is supposed to vary with the stakes but not, presumably, the truth-value of the former, which is clearly invariant. A contextualist might argue that reluctance to assert that P when stakes are high is due to the subject’s awareness that they can’t claim highstakes knowledge that P or, therefore, meet the challenge, ‘How do you know?’ in the high-stakes context. The same issue arises, however, with respect to assignments of probability. How much it matters whether such and such is the case may be relevant to the question of how assiduously we should collect and consider available evidence before coming up with any judgement of probability, or indeed to the question whether probability is here enough as a basis for action, but it is surely not plausible that it affects the meaning or truth-value of ‘The probability that such and such is the case is high (or ‘0.75’)’. Why then should ‘It is certain (there is a probability of 1) that such and such is the case (so I know it)’ be regarded any differently? Another, perhaps more decisive criticism of a ‘stakes’ contextualism is that there is no objective or interpersonal basis for a judgement as to whether the stakes are low or high, as there is for whether comparisons being made are between rabbits, elephants, or mammals in general, or for whether, in describing a stretch of land as extremely flat, the context of the assertion is a geological field-trip or a search for a site for an attempt on the land speed record. In the case of size or flatmess, any confusion if the concern is not mutual can soon be sorted out without supposing that there is disagreement as to the facts. In contrast, possible damage to the environment (for example) as a consequence of a proposed action may mean that the stakes are high for caring conservationist angler A, low for industrial farmer B. Yet what counts as a true answer to the question whether B has knowledge when he declares that a stream in question won’t be at all polluted by his activities is interpersonal, and he can’t appeal to his lack of concern in explanation of a claim to have knowledge. He can’t justify such a claim by pointing out that he spoke as one for whom the stakes are low, as a geology lecturer could justify a claim that the ploughed floor of a valley is completely flat by explaining

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that she was concerned with its geological character, not, as might be the concern of one of her students, its suitability for progress in a wheelchair. It might be held that one high-stakes personal context means that the interpersonal context is also high-stakes, but there seems no independent ground for taking that line, and such a principle corresponds to nothing in the allegedly analogous cases of context-relative predicates. Any appearance of disagreement between lecturer and student is dissipated when it is made clear that they had assumed different conversational contexts—‘I thought we were back on geology’ and ‘I thought we were still talking about how I’m going to get across the valley’. But there is no ambiguity in relation to ‘conversational contexts’ to be sorted out in the case of the disagreement between angler and farmer. It’s a real disagreement.

Contextualism, scepticism and certainty What has all this to do with scepticism? That emerges when the argument for contextualism moves on from alleged analogies between how we talk and think about knowledge in particular cases, and how we talk and think about such properties as largeness and flatness, to an attempt at a principled justification—a purported explanation of why contextualism is and must be true. Unsurprisingly, that justification is liable to take the form of an argument that, unless a contextualist account of knowledge is true, the sceptic is right that we have no knowledge or, at least, that we do not know most of what we normally take ourselves to know, which is unacceptable. Thus Jeremy Fantl and Matthew McGrath (2012), for example, offer such a justification in two steps. The first is to accept that the sceptical argument shows that, if we have knowledge, or nearly as much knowledge as we generally suppose, ‘fallibilism’ in some form must be true. Knowing that P must be compatible with its not being certain (or, as they put it, ‘absolutely certain’) that P relative to whatever grounds the belief that P. We can know that P even if there is some probability, below a certain degree, that not-P. The second step that makes knowledge knowledge, according to the authors, is not certainty, but ‘actionability’. That is, roughly, you know that P if and only if (either it is certain that P, or)29 it is (or would be, if relevant action was called for) proper for you to rely on its being the case that P as a basis for action. But whether it is proper to rely on its being the case that P for the purposes of action varies with how much is at stake. Therefore, they conclude, contextualism is true: that is, whether an ascription of knowledge is true depends on what is at stake. Just as we ignore more or less (depending on what is at stake) low probabilities that not-P when it comes to action on the basis that P, so we ignore them when we ascribe knowledge that P. There are obvious problems with this attempt to link knowledge with ‘actionability’ rather than with objective certainty. No one would buy a national lottery ticket if it 29 The clause in parenthesis is not necessary—presumably whatever is certain is ‘actionable’—but as is characteristic of such arguments, room is explicitly left, if only for the sake of argument, for some certainty, with regard to necessary propositions, perhaps, and maybe some propositions about one’s own conscious states.

156 Knowing and Seeing really was certain, and they knew, that they wouldn’t win. But if you have a ticket it is wise to ignore the remote probability of your winning and to rely on your not winning in making plans for the future. The assumption that you won’t win is (almost) fully actionable, but it isn’t knowledge. It isn’t fully actionable only in so far as it would be unwise to throw the ticket away before the draw—that is, for the same reason as it is not certain and so not knowledge. The ticket is, as it were, the material defeater of a claim to know, or that it is certain, that you won’t win. Another objection stems from the point that when fast, decisive action is called for, it may be necessary to ‘rely on’ the kind of quick assessment of the situation that one does not suppose, whether on reflection or at the time, issues in knowledge.30 Indeed, high stakes commonly lead to our acting on the assumption that P even when we know very well that it is highly improbable that P, if the likely consequences of inaction, supposing P, would be disastrous and, supposing not-P, at best marginally desirable. Insurance companies rely on the point that it’s better to be safe with the certainty of relatively minor loss than to take the risk, however small, of being that sorry. Indeed, the difference between high stakes and low stakes can rationally influence us in opposite ways. When there is time to reflect, then in general high stakes call for greater care in assembling and considering the evidence before forming a judgement, whereas there may be little point in such assiduity when nothing hangs on the question. That is so whether we are concerned to establish what can be known and certain, or simply to assess probabilities. When there is little time, on the other hand, then, as has been noted, high stakes may well increase the demand for urgency both in (at least provisional) judgement and in action. However that may be, the first step in Fantl’s and McGrath’s argument, with ‘fallibilism’ as its conclusion, has already been discussed and criticized above in the form expounded by Turri. But it does have an interesting, if minor difference, signalled by the use of the term ‘absolutely certain’, which suggests that there are degrees of certainty as well as of probability. If so, it would seem to follow that certainty (apart from ‘absolute’ certainty) and merely high probability overlap. At any rate, the authors appeal to our tendency to ignore very remote epistemic possibilities in ascribing knowledge, from which ‘fallibilists’ normally conclude as a point of semantics that high probability is enough for ‘knowledge’. But we have the same tendency in assessing objective certainty, so that it would seem that the same ‘fallibilists’ need not deny the tight connection of knowledge with certainty of some degree less than ‘absolute’ certainty. The cost, however, of that move would be a disruption of seemingly evident relationships between the epistemic modalities. For it is certain that P if and only if there is no epistemic possibility (it is epistemically impossible, or ‘ruled out’) that not-P; and it is 30 Or are these not cases of ‘relying on’ something’s being the case in the sense intended? If not, one suspects that it would be necessary to bring back the notion of certainty in order to explain that sense. (So much for ‘fallibilism’.)

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epistemically possible that P if and only if there is some probability (a probability greater than zero) that P. In other words, certainty and epistemic impossibility are absolute limits, and we are steering far too close to incoherence if we deny that. Nevertheless, the fact that we can seem to get some sense out of a distinction between ‘absolute’ and, presumably, merely relative certainty might suggest another ground for the analogy between ‘certain’ and ‘know’ on the one hand and ‘flat’ or, perhaps better, ‘square’ (not, of course, ‘large’!) on the other. Perhaps, so it might be suggested, the sceptical argument that absolute certainty and perfect or ‘real’ knowledge are impossible is like the quasi-Platonic argument that nothing in the world is absolutely or perfectly square. Perfect squareness, as an object of geometry, is an ideal that the physical things we call square at best approach. Is the sceptic, then, like one who demands impossibly perfect geometrical squareness before they are prepared to call anything in the world square? Have they similarly simply raised their standard for knowledge to levels that no sublunary knowledge can reach? Well, I think not, if only because, from my current epistemic position, it is ‘absolutely’ certain that I am now sitting in my study composing this argument, as it is also absolutely certain that if a is identical with b, and b with c, then a is identical with c. There is, pretty clearly, nothing anybody could do to make either of these facts more certain. But that we often talk as if confirmation by more looking, more evidence, or more argument can always make what is certain ever more certain may well be a factor in encouraging scepticism. Since there’s always the possibility of further confirmation, it might be argued, our judgements may at best approach, without ever reaching, ‘absolute’ certainty. It may even be concluded that all we can achieve is probable belief, so that, if we have knowledge, probability must be enough for it. A strange consequence, one might think, to draw from the truism that if I know that P, my knowledge is in principle open to confirmation.

5.5 Defeasibility and Burden of Proof Unlike ‘fallible’ and ‘uncertain’, ‘defeasible’ is a technical term, one borrowed from law. Its use in theory of knowledge has been contentious, and it is important to see how, in any legitimate employment in the philosophy of perception, the analogy with its specifically legal use is imperfect.

‘Defeasibility’, ‘presumption’ and burden of proof in law Coming from the Old French ‘defeasance’, ‘defeasible’ has had a legal use for a right or obligation capable of being annulled on particular grounds, but also, as currently, for a ‘presumption’ of fact grounded on the established or agreed facts of the case in question together with a legal principle or rule. Such a presumption may be overridden by further evidence to the effect that the case is an exception to the rule. An example of such a principle is the defeasible rule that killing with intent is murder. In one case

158 Knowing and Seeing analysed in Walton 2014,31 a presumption of murder based on proved killing with intent together with this rule put the burden of proof on the defence to provide evidence that the case is an exception. The defence then produced witness evidence A that the victim was threatening the accused with a knife. This move placed the burden of proof back onto the prosecution, in accordance with the defeasible rule that killing in response to a threat to life is self-defence, not murder. The prosecution in this case then brought witness evidence B that the accused could easily have run away, making the situation an exception to that rule in turn. The defence then provided evidence that the witness giving evidence B was a friend of the victim, appealing to the rule that such a relationship renders given evidence unreliable. This last move is the first to cast doubt on an opponent’s claim as to the facts of the case (i.e. that the accused could easily have run away). It is the first production of evidence to conflict with previous evidence, rather than simply with the presumption immediately consequent on that evidence in accordance with a defeasible rule. The burden of proof, then, when understood as the ‘evidential burden’, i.e. the burden of providing evidence on pain of losing the case, initially lies on the prosecution in a criminal case, but can shift in the course of the argument from one side to the other. But another kind of burden of proof, known as the ‘burden of persuasion’ and commonly fixed at the start of the argument, does not shift and may be different for the two sides. Thus the of burden of persuasion on the prosecution in a criminal case is the requirement to establish that the accused is guilty as charged beyond reasonable doubt, while the burden of persuasion on the defence is simply to establish that there is reason to doubt whether the accused is guilty. In a civil case, the plaintiff has the initial evidential burden together with the burden of persuasion of proving the legally significant alleged fact on the balance of probabilities (e.g. that a contract existed with the defendant). I have here used ‘presumption’ for the provisional conclusion of fact drawn from established and agreed facts of the case together with a defeasible rule, but the term is also sometimes used, quite understandably, for the rule itself or for the whole act of inference. The purpose of presumptive legal rules is generally explained as practical, namely to make it possible to move an argument or inquiry on by shifting the burden of proof onto the respondent by reasonably ‘presuming’ some matter of fact that has not been, or cannot strictly be, proved or established to the degree set by the ‘burden of persuasion’—a view of such rules that accords with their having specific exceptions recognized in law, or open to being recognized as such by the court. That purpose distinguishes such presumptive inferences from other inferences from known or agreed facts or evidence together with generalizations such as are all the time employed both in legal argument and in everyday argument and inquiry.32 The latter inferences and rules, however, may also be called ‘defeasible’ simply because the probative force of the factual premises or evidence may in principle, as a matter of logical possibility, be weakened or annulled by further evidence or alternative explanations, however 31 To which I am indebted for clarifying a number of points.

32 Cf. Walton 2014: 110.

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certain it is in fact that no such evidence will emerge. According to this broad, merely logical usage of ‘defeasible’, every non-deductive inference from evidence is defeasible, even if the evidence on which the inference is based is so strong as to put the conclusion beyond all reasonable doubt, rendering it (from a legal and common-sense point of view) ‘proved’ rather than merely ‘presumed’.

‘Defeasibility’ in epistemology Now consider the use of the term ‘defeasible’ in theory of knowledge. It was perhaps first introduced into ‘analytic’ epistemology by Roderick Chisholm. He offers this definition: (1) There is a justification for h which has been overridden =def. There is a body of evidence e and a body of evidence e´ such that e is true and e justifies h, and e´ is true and the conjunction of e and e´ does not justify h. (2) A justification is defeasible =def. There is a body of evidence e such that e is true and e justifies h and this justification may be overridden.33 This account explains defeasibility as a property of justifications, but, as just seen, both the consequence drawn and any generalization or rule employed34 might also be termed ‘defeasible’. More importantly, the definition is open to different interpretations in ways discussed at a more appropriate place in the next chapter. It is at least clear, however, that Chisholm is defining ‘defeasible’ in such a way as to make it a property of any non-deductive inference from evidence where the evidence is (at least initially and ostensibly) strong enough to justify belief. The expression ‘may be overridden’ apparently means only ‘may in principle be overridden’. The possibility in question is logical or theoretical rather than epistemic. But as a property of justifications or justified beliefs, defeasibility carries with it implications with respect to burden of proof. In any dialogue, as in legal argument, to offer an ostensibly effective justification for an assertion is at least to shift the burden of proof—the evidential burden—onto the other participant, who has a conversational obligation to assent or give reasons for denial or doubt in the face of the evidence so far considered. Is this particular notion of defeasibility of use in epistemology? In particular, is it helpful towards explaining the status of perceptual knowledge, in the face of sceptical denial that such a thing exists, to describe perceptual belief or claims to perceptual knowledge as ‘defeasible’? And is the legal notion of a ‘presumption’ of relevance here? Is it helpful to assign the deliverances of the senses the benefit of a ‘defeasible presumption’ that they are veridical, so that it is for that reason that the burden of proof lies on anyone who wishes to challenge them?

33 Chisholm 1964: 148–9. 34 Especially if it is a rule of thumb to which there are recognized exceptions. To cite a standard example in ‘argumentation theory’, if all we know about Tweety is that he is a bird, we can reasonably presume that Tweety can fly, but the presumption is open to defeat by evidence that he is an ostrich or a penguin.

160 Knowing and Seeing Something like the general idea of defeasibility, but without the term or any explicit analogy with the legal concept, was perhaps first brought to prominence in analytic epistemology, well before Chisholm’s definition, by J. L. Austin in his seminal paper ‘Other Minds’.35 To paraphrase selectively, Austin notes that an unqualified assertion is an implicit claim to knowledge, inviting the question ‘How do you know?’ That question is open to various interpretations depending on context,36 but may often be met with such responses, Austin suggests, as ‘I saw it’, ‘I was told by Mary who saw it’, or ‘I looked it up in the encyclopaedia’. As we might put Austin’s point, the first appeals to the authority of the senses, the second to the (related) authority of the testimony of a witness, the third to an ‘authority’. Each answer justifies the assertion (the act of asserting, and the implicit claim to know) by explaining how the subject is in a position to know. To challenge such a claim it is necessary to give a ‘special reason’ for suggesting that what is normally a route to knowledge is not so in this case. The challenger can’t just say, for example, that it is ‘not enough’ to have taken yourself to have seen it, or to have been told it by a witness, or to have read it in a reputable recent encyclopaedia. There must be a special reason given why these normal ways of acquiring knowledge are not so in the particular case—a special reason to doubt, a weakness or lack in the subject’s ‘being in a position to know’.37 Accordingly, Austin says such things as ‘if . . . there is no definite lack, which you are at least prepared to specify on being pressed, then it is silly (outrageous) just to go on saying “That’s not enough” ’, ‘we don’t [properly] say we know . . . if there is any special reason to doubt’, and ‘if you are aware you may be mistaken, you ought not to say you know’.38

‘Defeasibility’ and ‘evidence’ as properties of the deliverances of the senses The appeals to testimony and to an authoritative source are forms of appeal to evidence for what is claimed that, like any and every reasoned and reasonable explanation of 35 Austin 1946. 36 It may, for example, be a way of raising the question how something was recognized, as an individual or as a kind, a question to which the answer ‘I saw it’ or even ‘I saw that it was an X’ (say, a barbastelle bat) would hardly be enough. 37 Austin to an extent lumps together all these appeals to an authoritative source as of a kind, as being defeasible only by ‘special reasons’. There is ground for this in the case of testimony, as others have argued since Austin (cf. Coady 1973). But the cases differ. An ‘authority’ on Homer or the housing market has to earn that title (so the ‘special reason’ may simply be that they haven’t done so), and the plausible philosophical explanation of why a (readily questioned) prima facie trust in what others tell you is only very broadly analogous to the explanation of why a (much less easily questioned) trust in the deliverances of one’s own senses is appropriate. 38 Austin does not give any justifying explanation of the practice he describes, and is in effect criticized for that by Stroud 1984, but there are signs in his exposition that he thought justification beyond careful description of our practice is unnecessary, rather as it might have been thought unnecessary to offer an elaborate argument that there should be a defeasible presumption in law that killing with intent is murder (or even, to cite an abandoned defeasible rule, that an agent intended the foreseeable consequences of his action). The point of each, it might be thought, is obvious in the light of common knowledge, in the one case of human agency and social mores, in the other of sense perception. Perhaps so, but as I have in effect argued, phenomenological analysis can contribute to the philosophical understanding of why ‘special reasons’ are needed to ‘defeat’ perceptual judgements.

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‘how one knows’, at least shift the burden of proof from claimant onto any objector. But the explanation ‘I saw it’ is rather different. It does not, in meeting the challenge, give a reason for belief in the sense of spelling out an inference from evidence, but simply explains how the speaker knows in the most direct way by identifying the basic cognitive faculty by which the purported knowledge was acquired—the faculty by means of which the subject was consciously in direct cognitive contact with the object of their knowledge. Given that contact, there is no call for reasons. In the case of perceptual knowledge, as I have argued, from the speaker’s point of view no inference is involved or necessary if only because what is perceived, simply in being perceived, is perceived together with its cognitively significant spatio-causal relationship to the perceiver. They are immediately aware, not only of the object, but of their coming to be thus aware of it, and of the way in which they are aware of it. There is nothing indirect or hidden about the subject’s cognitive relationship to the perceived object, about how the subject is in a position to know. That relationship is presented or given in the experience itself as part of its total object; it is not a hypothesis, whether more or less reasonable. All this raises the question whether any idea such as that of a defeasible presumption, originating as it did in the analysis of legal argument and falling fairly easily into a similar role in general ‘argumentation theory’ (that is, in the attempt to formalize rational dialogue or argument, whether oppositional or cooperative), fits as readily into an explanation of the epistemological status of perceptual judgements. What room is there for such an idea, we might ask, when there is no inference or reasoning and so no rule, principle, major premise, or conclusion to be characterized as ‘defeasible’, while a description of most perceptual judgements as mere prima facie ‘presumptions’ in anything like the legal sense seems deeply inappropriate? In relation to my situation as perceiver, little is more certain, more established ‘beyond all reasonable doubt’ and beyond mere ‘presumption’, than the fact that I am holding and observing, feeling and seeing, this object in my hand. Well, although there is no epistemic possibility, relative to my situation, that I am not holding a material object in my hand, there is a certain sense, as has been noted, in which it is ‘in principle’ possible that I am entirely wrong. Not only are my faculties not infallible, but also, even if (as is considerably more than likely) no one in human history with anything just like the kind of full, integrated sense experience that I am currently having has been mistaken in that respect, it is logically possible that there should have been such occasions, and that I am now thus mistaken. That purely logical or quasi-logical point is what the sceptical argument misrepresents as having the force of evidence. But evidence is what is called for. To say sincerely ‘I saw that P’ is both to claim knowledge that P39 and at the same time to say precisely how one knows, and so already, without further reasoning or justification, how to answer the ‘How do you know?’ question and so to place the ‘evidential burden’ on a potential objector to that claim, even if the ‘burden of persuasion’ on that sceptical objector is simply to raise a

39 See Chapter 6, Section 6.5.

162 Knowing and Seeing doubt. To that limited extent acceptance of the deliverances of the senses at face value can be supposed ‘defeasible’ in something a bit like the legal sense. Calling the perceptual belief or claim to knowledge ‘defeasible’, however, does not imply that that belief or claim is less than certain (even ‘absolutely’ certain, ‘with a probability of 1’!), or that it is ‘presumed’ rather than ‘evident’ in the primary sense. On the contrary, it is simply that what is taken to be known is indeed certain, in the absence of ‘special reasons’ for supposing abnormality or cognitive failure. Both legal rules and ordinary generalizations and rules of thumb require justification, but rather than needing reasons to trust (within their limits) our own senses, there has to be some fact or state of affairs that serves as a ‘defeater’ or ‘special reason’ to distrust them by constituting, if and when known, evidence that the experience is or might be misleading. The philosophical sceptic can offer no such evidence. I say ‘if and when known’ because, even if there is such a potentially ‘defeating’ fact, if it is not known then any doubt remains ungrounded, and the well-grounded claim to knowledge and certainty, even if in fact false, remains thus far unscathed. The philosophical significance of these points should become clearer in the next chapter. The characterization of perceptual judgements as ‘defeasible’, then, should in no way suggest that they are arrived at by reasoning, explicit or implicit, from premises supplied by ‘subjective experiences’ or ‘sensations’ as the established facts of the case (the ‘evidence’), together with a defeasible rule or ‘presumption’ that if it seems that P, then P. The epistemic status of perceptual knowledge is quite different from that of a conclusion of an inference, let alone a presumptive inference ‘defeasible’ in the legal sense. The subject just perceives, and so knows, that P.  The ‘evidence’ traditionally ascribed to the deliverances of the senses is evidence in the primary sense, the evidence of what is evident. It is, moreover, intrinsic evidence, not derived from ‘evidence’ in the secondary sense.

Defeasibility and fallibility: a small correction It would appear from the above discussion that the fallibility of our perceptual faculties entails the defeasibility (in the appropriate sense) of their deliverances, and that seems right. As I have explained them, both are ‘in principle’ properties, and in the absence of ‘special reasons’ both the failure of the faculties and the ‘defeat’ of their deliverances remain merely theoretical or logical, rather than epistemic possibilities. But if there is a general link of this kind between fallibility and defeasibility, the use of ‘logical’ in this context carries a certain danger, in particular by promoting the idea that, as is implicit for example in Chisholm’s definition, all and only non-deductive justifications (and perceptual judgements) are ‘defeasible’. However, since our rational faculties are by no means infallible either, and their deliverances are accordingly ‘in principle’ open to question, it would seem to follow that a priori judgements and deductive arguments can also properly be said to be in some sense ‘defeasible’—which does not, of course, mean that, with respect to every such judgement, it is logically possible that it is false. It’s just that in order to defeat them some kind of ‘special reason’ is required as in the

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case of perceptual judgements and non-deductive justifications. There seems, however, to be an interesting difference. It is plausible that, to ‘defeat’ a purported deductive proof is ipso facto to show that there was something wrong with the reasoning, but in order to defeat a non-deductive justification that is not necessarily so. One may simply bring further evidence.40 In this chapter I have attempted to analyse the ‘Cartesian’ sceptical argument, to set out what is most wrong with it, and to explain its illusory force. That has involved distinguishing and explaining the very different, too often conflated notions of fallibility, uncertainty, and defeasibility (on a particular understanding of ‘defeasible’). I have incidentally criticized current ‘methodological’ use of the sceptical argument by advocates of two views of knowledge, the inappropriately so-called ‘fallibilism’, which denies the essential and explanatory link between knowledge and objective certainty, and a further doctrine, ‘contextualism’, consonant with ‘fallibilism’. Much argument for these approaches relies on ascribing the sceptical argument legitimate, more than illusory force that, as I have argued, it simply doesn’t possess. In the next chapter I will consider critically the use of scepticism in support of a philosophically more significant and currently influential theoretical position in theory of knowledge (and, more generally, of mind), so-called ‘externalism’. That task that will involve, among other things, criticism of two different, theoretically flawed understandings of the term ‘defeasible’, and consideration of the question of how we know that our faculties are (on the whole, fairly) reliable.

40 There is the related question whether it is possible to defeat a claim to a priori knowledge simply by giving reason to hold it epistemically possible that it is false, for example, by pointing out that leading mathematicians are agreed that any proof of the theorem in question along the lines of the proof proposed is very unlikely to be sound.

6 Scepticism and Externalism 6.1 Externalism and Internalism in Theory of Knowledge The opposition between ‘externalism’ and ‘internalism’ is variously understood in theory of knowledge, and perhaps even more so in general philosophy of mind. According to one possible usage, the epistemological ‘internalist’ is one who, like the sceptic, takes it that all that the subject is directly or immediately aware of lies within ‘the mind’ (or brain), and that knowledge of anything else, including its own body, must depend on inference from that internal evidence (what I have sometimes called the ‘homunculus’ view of the self). In that sense of the opposition, the account of knowledge offered in this book is ‘externalist’, since I have argued that the direct object of the most basic form of cognition—what we are immediately aware of in sense perception—is our environment. To put it in another way, my account is one of those that treats the perceptual relation as an irreducible cognitive relation to the environment, an idea discussed in Chapter 4, section 4.2, and further in Chapter 6, section 6.6. The present account of knowledge, however, takes the central or basic cases of knowledge, knowledge that I have called ‘primary’, to be consciously so. In acquiring such knowledge we are ipso facto aware of how, and that, we are acquiring it. I have also laid stress on the general connection between knowledge and objective certainty1— and so, in the case of conscious empirical knowledge, on its grounding in perception and available evidence. That may be enough, I take it, for my account to be characterized, in another sense, as ‘internalist’, as opposed to ‘externalist’, despite the fact that I allow for secondary knowledge to include peripheral cases of ‘unconscious’ knowledge in which possessors of the knowledge may be unaware of how they are acquiring or have acquired it, or even that they have it. The epistemological ‘externalism’ that is the main topic of the present chapter, however, is the thesis that some of the necessary and sufficient conditions for a belief to count as knowledge are such that the subject need not, indeed cannot, be aware whether they are all fulfilled. What matters is that they are fulfilled, not that the subject knows that they are. That goes even for ordinary perceptual knowledge of one’s environment. 1 ‘Objective’ certainty as opposed to subjective or psychological certainty.

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‘Externalism’ in this sense became popular in the latter part of the twentieth century for more reasons than one. First, it was no accident that it arose at the time that ‘functionalism’, a sophisticated form of behaviouristic physicalism that draws heavily on the analogy between brain and computer, was entering its period of dominance in analytic philosophy of mind. Animal consciousness was (as in some quarters, no doubt, it still is) out of fashion, commonly regarded either as irrelevant to cognition or as itself to be explained away functionally. Second, as is more specifically relevant to theory of knowledge, epistemological externalism constituted a natural response to the challenge set by Gettier’s famous attack on the (allegedly ‘traditional’) explanation of knowledge as justified true belief. Gettier’s squib stimulated its readers to ask what else, other than justification, we can turn to in the relation between knowing subject and known object as material for a satisfactory definition that fits each and every case of knowledge. Few in the history of philosophy have denied or even failed to give explicit recognition to the obvious point that, at least in the case of knowledge of the world, the knowledge relation, like the perceptual relation, is causal: the object of knowledge, as of perceptual knowledge in particular, is also a significant cause of its acquisition. Whatever the subject contributes to the relation, the acquisition of knowledge is after all a causal process, from object to receptive subject. After Gettier, unsurprisingly given the zeitgeist, causal theories of knowledge took centre stage—that is, theories that explained knowledge as belief caused by its object in the ‘right’ kind of way. The task for the conscientious ‘externalist’ here is to give an account of the ‘right’ kind of causality without presupposing that the belief in question is grounded in the deliverances of a cognitive faculty or knowingly justified by reasons as well as being caused. That is no easy task, if only because the ‘right’ kind of causality necessarily includes the functioning of cognitive faculties, and the deliverances of our cognitive faculties characteristically ground as well as cause belief. They put us consciously in touch, so to speak, with the objects of knowledge. Certainly, they always do so in the case of primary knowledge, with ordinary perceptual knowledge as the paradigm. The present chapter, however, is largely centred on a third reason for the popularity of ‘externalism’ in this sense—on an argument, at any rate, that is commonly advanced in its favour—namely, the claim that it supplies the only viable answer to scepticism. In other words, the chapter will be focussed on externalists’ ‘methodological scepticism’, their interesting similarity to Descartes. Consideration of externalism from that point of view will also highlight two assumptions or principles on which it depends, both contrary to the argument of this book. One is the assumption, already sufficiently criticized, that a central aim of epistemology is to come up with an account or definition of knowledge that fits each and every instance of what we would ordinarily count as knowledge, and nothing that falls outside that class. The other is the assumption that, if it is allowed to be a plain matter of fact that S knows that P, such an account of the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge will be straightforwardly ontological, a non-normative account

166 Knowing and Seeing of how the world has to be in order for it to be the case that S knows that P, an account of the bald ‘natural’ facts on which the possession of knowledge supervenes. That some belief is ‘justified’, ‘probable’ or ‘certain’, terms that have to do with conscious grounding and what it is rational to believe, need somehow to be excluded. The significance for externalism of these assumptions, incompatible with the argument of this book, together with the assumption that the sceptical argument has more than illusory force, will, I hope, be clearly illustrated in this chapter, sections 6.3 and 6.4, in which some externalist arguments and positions are critically examined. Section 6.3 offers a critical analysis of a particular argument of Fred Dretske’s that externalism is the only alternative to scepticism, an analysis complemented in section 6.4 by criticism of externalist conceptions of defeasibility. Section  6.5 focuses on the question of whether (and, if so, how) we can know, without circularity, that our cognitive faculties are reliable. Ernest Sosa’s answer to these questions, a kind of combination of externalism and internalism, is considered, and another answer given. Section  6.6 turns away from externalism to the internalist approach to perceptual knowledge known as ‘disjunctivism’, in particular as advocated by John McDowell. That involves a brief return to an assertion of his considered in Chapter 3 (section 3.3), in particular a notion of defeasibility that reflects what is (as others have noted) in interesting proximity to externalism. All of which, so the chapter concludes, demonstrates the crucial importance, if the authority and evidence of perceptual knowledge is to be understood, of the phenomenological analysis given in Chapter 2.

6.2 Truth-Tracking, and Externalist ‘Reliabilism’ Epistemological ‘externalists’, in the sense explained, characteristically have a very different conception of perception, and more generally of primary knowledge, from the one proposed in Chapter 2. They typically treat perception as essentially no more than a mechanism for causing usually true beliefs, and appeal to rather special (if now well-worn) examples of secondary knowledge, such as the diffident student’s reliable but unconfident memory of facts, intuitive chicken-sexing,2 and even blindsight,3 as ground for the sweeping and paradoxical conclusion that justification and conscious awareness of how it is that one knows what one knows, whether by direct cognitive contact or by inference from evidence, is irrelevant to the possession of knowledge, and so to the question of what knowledge is. Accordingly, highly abstract characterizations of the ‘right’ kind of causal route from object to belief are offered, variations on a proposal that, to be rough, a true belief 2 There are, allegedly, chicken-sexers who cannot identify the features by reference to which they can reliably distinguish male from female chicks. They ‘just know’. So too someone may recognize a face without being able to say how. 3 Externalist appeal to blindsight is no doubt less common than the more natural understanding of it as evidence of the essential role of consciousness in cognition (and so the inadequacy of behaviourism). See Weiskrantz 1997, passim and especially pp. 168–72.

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constitutes knowledge if and only if the belief is held because it is true, and would not have been held had it been false, with a purportedly purely causal understanding of the ‘because’, at least in the case of knowledge of the world. ‘Reliabilism’ is one term for proposals of this broad kind: roughly, a true belief constitutes knowledge if and only if it is caused in a ‘truth-tracking’ way, that is, one that (fairly) reliably causes true beliefs, and avoids false ones.4 What is held to be among the defining necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge is something that, it is supposed, neither need nor can be known by the knowing subject to be fulfilled. Here the problem taken to be posed by sceptical argument and avoided by externalism is the demand for non-circular justification. So David Lewis, citing our capacity to recognize a face without knowing how we do so as evidence that justification is not necessary for knowledge, adds ‘What (non-circular) argument supports our reliance on perception, on memory,5 and on testimony? And yet we do gain knowledge by these means.’6 We will come back to that strange, double-edged rhetorical question.

A problem for reliabilism The difficulty of identifying reliable ‘ways’ of acquiring beliefs purely externalistically can be illustrated by examples. Suppose that I was hypnotized, without my knowledge, to believe (if it is belief) a number of propositions about (say) unimportant details of ways of life in various parts of the world about which I otherwise know nothing and care less. All of these propositions have been scrupulously chosen by the hypnotist because he knows that they are true. Now, when fed carefully planted questions by my acquaintances, I find myself urged to give, and believe, what are in fact true answers. It seems implausible to suppose that I know these facts, so is this a counter-example to reliabilism? Whether it is would seem to hinge, for reliabilism, on what we count as the ‘way’ the true beliefs or, at least, true answers (think of the diffident student, or blindsight, where there is no firm belief) are engendered, since that affects whether that ‘way’ can be judged a ‘reliable’ source of true beliefs. Perhaps hypnotism isn’t the right kind of ‘way’, since it could just as well be, and perhaps often is, employed to engender false beliefs. How could we confidently claim of true beliefs held simply as a result of hypnosis that the subject holds them just because they are true and wouldn’t have held them had they been false? On the other hand, consider a case in which hypnotism is openly employed at the subject’s request to afford the capacity to remember something that matters, for example how to go through some complicated procedure, or as preparation for an 4 Variations on the general thesis have different emphases, commonly summarized in different ways, for example as the theory that true belief is knowledge if it is ‘no accident’ that it is true, or if, in a particular case, it ‘tracks the truth’ over ‘near’ possible worlds. (The notion of truth-tracking comes from Nozick 1981.) 5 Including memory as a source of knowledge may just be a slip, unless he was thinking of cases in which reflection on what we remember may increase our knowledge of the past (pennies may drop). 6 Lewis 2003: 121.

168 Knowing and Seeing examination. Wouldn’t this be a way of acquiring the desired knowledge? So what is the difference between ‘ways’ here? Is it, circularly, that in the latter case the subject knows what’s going on, and that the hypnotist is trustworthy? Again, being told something is certainly, as Lewis says, a way of gaining knowledge, but suppose a stranger while passing told me truly that he knew that seventeen families called Jones all lived in that street, and I believed and still believe him, is that something I too now know? To an unregenerate (but moderate) ‘internalist’ these questions would all seem to boil down to the question whether there was or is an epistemic possibility, relative to the evidence available to the subject in the circumstances, that the (ex hypothesi true) belief in question was false. Wasn’t it epistemically possible, for example, on the evidence available to me, that the passer-by was a spy or criminal employing a strange coded message to see if I was the expected accomplice? Or that he was simply an eccentric joker, or suffering from crazy delusions? The very content of this bit of testimony makes it suspect. Trying to identify, entirely on externalist principles, a ‘reliable’ way in which the knowledge was gained in every case in which we want to say there is knowledge is an exercise doctrinae causa, when the ascription of knowledge actually rests on questions of epistemic possibility relative to the particular situation of the subject. It is true, of course, that all knowledge is engendered through the exercise of our faculties, and any cognitive faculty needs to be at least largely reliable if its operation is to deliver knowledge, but reliable faculties operating normally and well may still not deliver knowledge, a point anciently illustrated by stories of failure to distinguish twins, or tell a very good fake from the real thing. In the example given later in this chapter, in section 6.4, the presence nearby of Philip’s totally identical twin James does not suddenly render an otherwise pretty reliable and ‘truth-tracking’ capacity for face recognition unreliable, and therefore incapable of delivering knowledge—or rather, to say that it does is a theoretically biased interpretation of the point that, added to the subject’s experience and the available evidence presumed in our story, knowledge of the twin’s existence and proximity would serve to make it epistemically possible that it was James, not Philip, who was seen, and so would defeat the otherwise well-grounded presumption of certainty and knowledge.

When belief becomes knowledge: two explanations The causal, ‘reliabilist’ theory as to what knowledge essentially is—what makes knowledge knowledge—for a time became so much a part of the received wisdom that it is simply assumed in much epistemological discussion of the last forty years or so. Christopher Peacocke, for example, once gave an account of inference to the best explanation, or ‘abduction’, in the following terms: First, an explanatory suggestion is proposed which would explain certain phenomena; and second, the hypothesis is accepted as true on the basis of further experiment, evidence or reasoning. The method consists not just of thinking up a simple hypothesis to explain the

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data: it also comprises a policy of not accepting the hypothesis as true unless one has a sufficient range of evidence which, in the circumstances, ensures that if the hypothesis were not true, one would not believe it . . . . Thus for instance it is by now the case that if DNA were not to have the shape of a double helix, we would not believe it to do so. Until this counterfactual became true, the hypothesis about its shape was not knowledge (my emphases).7

That is not, perhaps, straight ‘externalism’ or ‘reliabilism’, but is it right that the Nozickian8 ‘counterfactual’ somehow explains where provisional, justified belief tips over into knowledge? The trouble with that proposal is that it is no more than a roundabout way of describing the policy of not accepting a hypothesis as established (we may, of course, believe it, since belief is not that much under the control of reason and policy) unless the range of available evidence rules out any epistemic possibility that it is false—that is, unless it is certain! It is precisely by arriving at that judgement about our evidence or justification that we may take ourselves to be in a position to claim that, if the hypothesis had been false, we (or, rather, the supremely rational person that we assume that we are) would not have believed it or supposed it to have been established. It would be implausible to propose that someone could decide, for example, whether the expert microbiologists have knowledge of the structure of DNA by ignoring their justification and the rational adequacy of their method of gathering evidence and testing the hypothesis, and focusing instead on a counterfactual hypothetical about their psychology—about what they would have believed had what they do believe been false. But that is what the externalist seems to be proposing, and unless that strange proposal is found acceptable, there is little point in trying to explain what knowledge essentially is in terms of hypotheticals about what the subject would or would not have believed in different circumstances.

6.3 Externalism and Scepticism: Fred Dretske’s Argument The epistemological externalist who makes use of sceptical argument will claim that it demonstrates that whatever ground or justification the subject may have for a belief, whether that belief counts as knowledge depends on the fulfilment of conditions that lie outside that ground or justification, on facts not cognitively accessible to the subject. Where the sceptic concludes that knowledge is impossible, the externalist purports to cut the knot with the claim that a subject has knowledge provided that the objective conditions of knowledge, including ‘external’, inaccessible ones, are in fact fulfilled. It is conceded to the sceptic that it is not possible, but argued that it is not necessary, that the subject knows that they are all fulfilled. Here is the doyen of externalist theory, Fred Dretske, arguing that ‘if scepticism is false, externalism is true’. Scepticism, he claims, is irrefutable in its own internalist terms, since if one takes steps to rule out a given sceptical scenario, 7 Peacocke 1986: 140.

8 Cf. Nozick 1981: 167–96.

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the sceptic merely enlarges the scope of the imagined deception until one’s evidence is, once again, neutralized. As long as the evidence is (as in perception it always is) logically inconclusive, we can always find facts on which the truth of our belief (hence our knowledge) depends9 which the totality of our evidence is powerless to justify . . . So the knowledge, if I have it, must be the product of things I need not know or be justified in believing, facts that sceptical possibilities (targeted at what I can justify) do not undermine. This is externalism.10

First, to reiterate a point that can hardly be too often repeated, the thesis that ‘in perception’ the ‘evidence’ is ‘logically inconclusive’, with its model of some kind of ‘logical’ relationship between one’s subjective experience (treated as ‘the evidence’) and one’s consequent beliefs about the environment, is inappropriate to the facts and essential nature of perception, our basic, direct cognitive contact with the world. What successful perceptual experience supplies are not premises—even quasi-premises— about internal experience that are capable of being in a logical relationship, whether satisfactory or unsatisfactory, for a conclusion about one’s physical environment. There is simply perceptual awareness of our environment as our environment, including, ipso facto, perceptual awareness of the perceptual relation—of ourselves perceiving that environment, and of the environment’s impinging on our senses. But to pass over that point, what are these ‘things that I need not [sc. and cannot] know or be justified in believing’, facts on which, despite my ignorance of them, the possibility of my knowledge depends? Dretske offers two general characterizations of such ‘external’ necessary conditions of knowledge, one negative and one positive. The positive general condition is stated as follows: Externalism in epistemology requires that all mistakes in fact be avoided; it doesn’t require you to be able to show, or be justified in believing, that they have been avoided. . . . I can see (hence know) my wife is on the sofa not because I can justify my belief that she is there—I can’t—but because I am connected to a state of affairs—her being on the sofa—in a way that gives me knowledge of her whereabouts. It is the fact that I am suitably connected to the world, not my awareness of, or justification for, this fact, that underlies my knowledge of the world [my emphasis].

9 There is something wrong with this formulation, since (for example) in the identical twins case discussed in section 6.4, the fact that James was around is relevant to the question whether I know that I saw Philip (and so, of course, to the truth of my belief that I know), but is irrelevant to the truth of my belief that I saw Philip. 10 Dretske 2003: 106. Dretske’s position involves more than his odd mixture of modalities here strictly implies, given his commitment to the thesis that there are necessary conditions of knowledge that the subject cannot know to be fulfilled. The wobble perhaps reflects the role that examples of secondary knowledge in which the subject does not know how or that they know commonly plays in externalist argument, along with the assumption that the epistemological task is to give an account of the necessary and sufficient conditions of knowledge in general.

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On the other hand, the supposed ‘external’ condition is also characterized as a general negative fact: If, as a result of seeing her there, I know my wife is on the sofa, this knowledge cannot depend on my justification for thinking she is there. . . . What seeing my wife on the sofa provides is an experience, E, of a kind that is compatible with her not being there. There is always something (usually a lot of things) that can make E occur (make me have those reasons for believing she is on the sofa) without my belief being true. The fact that none of these things did make E occur without her being there is something that must be true for my perceptual belief to be true and, hence, for me to know she is there. This is a fact, though, that seeing her there does not justify.11 The fact that the person on the sofa looks like my wife, the fact that causes me to believe she is on the sofa, is not evidence that the person on the sofa isn’t an imposter put there to deceive me. So seeing her there doesn’t provide me with evidence that my perceptual belief isn’t false in this particular way. Additional evidence—evidence, for example, that deception of this sort is most improbable—is of no help. The sceptic merely enlarges the scope of the imagined deception. . . [etc.]. [my emphasis]

Perception, recognition and background knowledge Before considering how these two general accounts of the allegedly unknowable conditions of knowing are related, a complication involved in Dretske’s example should first be noted. As commonly and misleadingly in discussions of perceptual knowledge, perception and recognition are run together. Had Dretske been taken in by an imposter, the failure would not have been one of perception but of recognition, a failure to distinguish a dead ringer from his wife. (Even that need not have been due to any shortcoming in his recognitional capacity, since no one can be expected to distinguish solely by sight between visually indistinguishable objects.) Dretske’s partiality to such examples is unsurprisingly associated with a preference for the ‘that P’ nominalization of sentences in his discussion of perceptual knowledge, and it might be worth first considering that particular aspect of his argument. Focusing on such examples as seeing that his wife is on the sofa, seeing that there are cookies in the jar, and seeing that there is a zebra in the enclosure, Dretske argues that, in general, gaining knowledge from perception depends on a context of assumptions that, as it were, sets the questions that perception answers. His analogy is walking to New York—one has to start from somewhere. Just as whether or not it is possible to walk to New York depends on where one starts from, so whether or not it is possible to see that there are cookies in the jar depends on the context of background assumptions— and (so he evidently holds) there will always be such assumptions. Dretske argues, indeed, that acceptable claims to see that S is P respond to a specific question implicit in the ‘conversational context’ as to whether S is P or is Q, or whether it is S rather than T or U that is P, and so forth.12 Perception can answer such questions 11 i.e. presumably, ‘a fact such that seeing her there does not justify a belief that it is a fact’. 12 Dretske 2003: 110.

172 Knowing and Seeing in ordinary contexts, he holds, because it can discriminate between such possibilities, but there will always be other possibilities that cannot be perceptually discriminated from these. We can see, and so know, that an animal is a zebra and not an okapi, but that entails that it is not a counterfeit zebra, such as a donkey so cleverly painted with stripes as to be perceptually indiscriminable from a zebra—and we can’t just see, and so know, that. We can, of course, come to know it by other means, but in the end we have to rely on sense perception, and in all cases of perceiving that P, Dretske supposes, the subject relies on assumptions. I may see and know that I have a hand, which, as I also know, implies that a material object exists, but the sceptic is right, according to Dretske, that I do not see or know that any material object exists. The ‘counterfeit’ argument is supposed to go all the way down to our basic cognitive contact with the world, where there is taken to be no other way of unmasking ‘counterfeit’ experiences than by appeal to experiences similarly suspect. Dretske’s examples of seeing that P in his argument in this paper all involve recognition—the subject recognizes his wife as his wife, cookies as cookies, a zebra as a zebra. These are offered as typical cases of perceptual knowledge, as if the knowledge that perception gives is never basic, never from scratch—as if we can never get cognitively and consciously out into our environment without employing some such concept or exercising a capacity for recognition. But one may fail to recognize an object before one, fail completely to know what it is, but nevertheless see it clearly and know that it is there. It is difficult to see how, if that were not so, we could ever come to recognize anything. Some detailed familiarity with the world, obviously, is a prerequisite for such questions to arise as ‘Is that a zebra or an okapi over there?’, ‘Is this coin a pound or a euro?’ or ‘Is that lady Mrs Dretske?’ That is to say, they can only arise for someone who has built up a good deal of knowledge of the world. The explanation that is offered in section 6.5 of how we are in a position to reject as absurd the suggestion that our cognitive faculties are systematically unreliable, applies equally to the question of how we can acquire such ‘background’ knowledge of the world from scratch, as we grow into the employment of those animal and specifically human faculties.13 The present point is simply to bring to attention the misleading role, in Dretske’s argument for an externalist account of perceptual knowledge, of the dominant use of sentence nominalizations of the ‘that P’ form.14 13 Since drafting this, I have read Millar 2014, where a similar proposal is made in relation to the acquisition and possession of recognitional capacities. 14 Dretske elsewhere distinguishes two kinds of perception, ‘epistemic’ and ‘non-epistemic’ (e.g.) seeing, corresponding to the ‘seeing that P’ and ‘seeing X’ constructions. As discussed in Chapter 4, section 4.3, however, it’s just that ‘He saw the horse in the barn’ doesn’t as explicitly specify what the subject thereby came to know as does ‘He saw that there was a horse in the barn’ or ‘. . . that the horse in the barn is white.’ There is nothing ‘non-epistemic’, however, about consciously seeing a horse, even if the subject doesn’t know that that is what they have seen. They will have acquired other (perhaps many other) specifiable bits of knowledge thereby, even if only, for example, just knowledge that something is moving across the distant hillside. For discussion, see Chapter 4, section 4.3.

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On knowing that one is ‘suitably connected to the world’ To return to Dretske’s characterizations of the (allegedly) perceptually unknowable condition of perceptual knowledge, it will be clear that the argument of this book raises a problem for the positive account, that what is perceptually unknowable is that one is ‘suitably connected to the world’. It would seem that Dretske is making the implausible claim that, so long as he is in fact perceiving his wife, his consequent knowledge that she is there owes nothing to knowledge that he is suitably connected to her, that is, that he is perceiving her. However, as so often noted in this book, in being perceptually aware of something I am at least normally (and importantly for my knowing that I know) also aware of being perceptually aware of it, and of how I am perceptually aware of it—I am aware of the perceptual relation. Whether I have the background knowledge and skill to recognize the object for what or who it is, the object of my awareness and knowledge is, and is perceived as, ‘out there’ in the environment, in ‘the external world’. That knowledge, at least, is perspicuously, ‘luminously’ so. If I do recognize it as this or that individual or kind of thing, that too is characteristically perspicuous—I do know that I so recognize it. Thus whatever it is about a subject’s relationship to some element or feature of her environment that counts as being so ‘suitably connected’ to it as to have knowledge of it, that same relationship would seem to hold, in ordinary conscious perception, between the subject and that ‘suitable connection’ itself. At least, it holds if that ‘connection’ is taken to be the cognitive (intentional-cum-causal) relationship that holds between subject S and object O when S is perceptually aware of O. In other words, the nature of the perceptual relation is such that Dretske’s ‘externalist’ move can’t save my perceptual knowledge that there is a book on my desk from the sceptic without, by parity of reasoning, saving my perceptual knowledge that I am so ‘suitably connected’ to the book’s being on my desk as to know that it is there.

Scepticism and the denial of ‘closure’ Of course, a sceptic will say that even if it appears to me that there is a book on my desk just in so far as it also appears to me that I am entirely ‘suitably connected to the world’ (namely, that I am seeing the book there and touching it), it could still be that both appearances are misleading. The whole scenario ‘could’ be a complex hallucination. The externalist may then respond that, provided it is not a hallucination, I have knowledge even if I don’t know that it is not a hallucination. But that seems to boil down to saying that I have knowledge provided that the experience that grounds my belief is veridical or ‘factive’—that is to say, provided that all that appears to me to be so, and that I accordingly believe to be so, is so. What then, in the case of perception, is it that, according to the externalist, I don’t, and need not, know about my ‘suitable connection to the world’ in order to have knowledge of the world? There is a possible reply to this question available to the externalist who accepts a notoriously questionable doctrine advanced by Nozick and David Lewis, as well as by

174 Knowing and Seeing Dretske—the denial of the so-called logical ‘closure’ of knowledge-ascriptions. That denial is the paradoxical claim that it is possible to know that P, and know that P entails Q, but not know that Q. It could accordingly be allowed that (1) when I perceive, and so know, that there is a book on my desk, then through the same experience I also know how I know that fact, namely by perceiving (say, seeing and touching) the book on my desk; and also allowed that (2) I know that when I perceive a book I am not at the same time hallucinating the book perceived; but nevertheless be held that (3) when I perceive, and so know, that there is a book on my desk, I do not know that I am not hallucinating the book. That provocative conclusion is certainly interesting, but perhaps that is only because it shows where externalists who resolutely think through the implications of their position can end up. Is the supposed unknowable necessary condition of knowledge that there are no ‘defeaters’ out there? Rather than pursuing that question, however, it may be more rewarding and revealing to pass over Dretske’s positive characterization of what, in order to have perceptual knowledge, we allegedly do not and/or need not know, as our being ‘suitably connected to the world’, and focus instead on the idea that, if we have knowledge that P, there is some general negative condition of that knowledge that we need not, indeed cannot know to obtain. After all, he gives a prominent role in his argument (as did the ancient sceptics) to such circumstantial considerations as the possibility of an imposter masquerading as his wife, but such a negative fact as that there is no one around either sufficiently like Mrs Dretske or in the least motivated to pretend to be her seems to have little to do with Dretske’s being ‘suitably connected’ to his wife’s being on the sofa. Even if such a woman existed, and even if Dretske would have taken her to be his wife if she had been on the sofa instead of his wife, he could still be suitably connected, cognitively (and ipso facto causally), to his wife’s being on the sofa. Nevertheless, the bare existence of such a woman, if it came to be known, could cast doubt on Dretske’s assumption that he knows that his wife is on the sofa. As we might put it, Dretske’s ‘defeasible’ claim to knowledge could be ‘defeated’ on the ground that, given the wouldbe imposter’s existence, it is (or was, relative to Dretske’s epistemic situation) epistemically possible that it is the imposter who is on the sofa. Accordingly, drawing on the discussion of defeasibility in Chapter 5, section 5.5, we can describe Dretske’s general negative condition of knowledge that the subject cannot, but need not, know to be fulfilled simply as the condition that there are no potential ‘defeaters’ out there, i.e. things, facts, or states of affairs such as, if known, would ‘defeat’ the assumption that we have the knowledge in question by supplying Austinian ‘special reasons’ to judge that it is epistemically possible that what we suppose we know is false. Among such possible states of affairs that we cannot know not to obtain, Dretske includes the sceptical scenario that the world was created, with all memories etc., five minutes ago. It might seem unnecessary, however, to bring such purportedly unfalsifiable fantasies into his argument. The alleged impossibility of knowing that his general

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negative condition is fulfilled could be ascribed, not to the unfalsifiability of any particular alternative explanatory ‘hypothesis’ (if we can so describe such a fantastical ‘error possibility’), but to the indefinite or indefinitely elastic number of possible ‘defeaters’ that would need to be ruled out—‘indefinitely elastic’ since the problem is represented as recurrent: ‘As long as the evidence is (as in perception it always is) logically inconclusive, we can always find facts on which the truth of our belief (hence our knowledge) depends which the totality of our evidence is powerless to justify.’ Although the claim appears to be simply that if one alternative hypothesis is ruled out (i.e. one relevant negative fact is established) there will always be others still needing to be ruled out, the sceptical argument implies that even that first step can never be taken, since it implies that before we can ‘rule out’ even one possibility—that is, know that it is not actual—we can always think up other possibilities that will need to be ruled out first. The broad line of the externalist response to scepticism, then, would seem to be that, so long as there are in fact no potential defeaters out there, it is not necessary that the subject has considered and ruled out all or any merely imagined defeaters in order to have knowledge. So long as it actually is Dretske’s wife on the sofa, and there is no imposter in the offing (etc., etc.), he can see her, recognize her, and know that she is on the sofa. I can see and so know that this book-cover is red without knowing or being justified in believing that I am not red–green colour-blind so long as I am not in fact red–green colour-blind. Or, to revert to sceptical fantasy, although I can’t know that I am not a brain in a vat, I can have knowledge of the world through the operation of my senses provided that I am not in fact a brain in a vat, and my senses are in fact functioning appropriately.

6.4 Externalism, Defeasibility, and Misleading Defeaters Quite apart from its implausible implication with respect to ‘closure’, certain problems have emerged for this externalist position. One is the problem of so-called ‘misleading defeaters’ and may be illustrated by building on examples on the lines of Dretske’s possible wife-impersonator. Suppose that I see and take myself to recognize a neighbour, Philip, in his garden, but unknown to me he has an identical twin, James, who is visiting and has just gone into the house. Arguably, I don’t in that situation know that it’s Philip in the garden, if it is at least epistemically possible that, had it been James, I would have taken him to be Philip. Just because of the actual circumstances, unknown to me, the hypothesis that I in fact saw James becomes what, had I known of James’s existence and presence in town, I would or should have accepted as an epistemically possible rival explanation of my experience and initial judgement. Of course, apprised of James’s existence, I could take steps to rule out that I had seen him rather than Philip. But the general conclusion seems to follow that whether I know that an acquaintance I see before me is indeed my acquaintance, and perhaps even whether I successfully recognize

176 Knowing and Seeing him, may depend on circumstantial (negative) facts unknown to me, such as the fact as that he does not have an identical twin, or at least one who is liable to be in the area. To return to Chisholm’s definition of defeasibility discussed in Chapter 5, section 5.5,15 does the bare existence of James in the area defeat or ‘override’, in Chisholm’s sense, the basis for my claim to know that Philip was in the garden because I saw him there and recognized him? What we should say here would seem to depend, in part, on whether we count such a fact as a constituent of ‘a body of evidence e1’ even before it is known (or even readily available to be known by the subject), or whether we count it as ‘evidence’ only when it actually becomes known, or is available to be considered.16 If we accept a Chisholmian account on the former understanding of his expression, ‘the evidence e1’, we suppose that the justification or grounding of my judgement is ‘overridden’ or ‘defeated’ by the bare existence or presence of the twin, whether or not it is known about or considered. On the latter understanding of ‘evidence’, ‘defeating’ is something that happens only when the ‘further evidence’ is known and considered and brought into play in criticism or assessment of a judgement or claim that a belief is certain, constituting knowledge. What property, then, does ‘defeasible’ (capable of being defeated) connote? Given the former understanding of ‘the evidence’ and ‘defeating’, ‘That justification of P is defeasible’ presumably means something like ‘That justification is of a kind such that, for all we know, it is overridden by unconsidered defeaters out there’. Given the latter understanding of ‘defeating’, however, the situation becomes more complicated. On the ‘internalist’ version of that understanding of it that I explained and promoted in section 5.5, but which is not now being considered, it connotes the property, possessed by however well-justified and well-founded ascriptions of knowledge (and judgements of objective certainty) of being ‘in principle’ open to being overridden by further evidence, should such evidence emerge. To a certain extent like a defeasible legal ‘presumption’, a well-grounded claim to perceptual knowledge that is ‘defeasible’ in this sense is a judgement that, unless we come to know of a defeating consideration that raises a doubt, has a full right to stand (but as proven rather than, as in the legal sense, merely ‘presumed’). In this sense the deliverances of any cognitive faculty that is fallible (and all are) are defeasible. Whatever may lie out there that would defeat the judgement if it were known, however, as long as it is not known, the judgement is undefeated. To say that it is defeasible, indeed, implies that the burden of proof is on the side of doubt. 15 (1) There is a justification for h which has been overridden =def. There is a body of evidence e and a body of evidence e´ such that e is true and e justifies h, and e´ is true and the conjunction of e and e´ does not justify h. (2) A justification is defeasible =def. There is a body of evidence e such that e is true and e justifies h and this justification may be overridden (Chisholm 1964: 148–9). 16 Both ways of employing the term ‘evidence’ seem to be reflected in ordinary usage. Compare (1) ‘There is absolutely no evidence that Smith is the murderer’ with the possible response (2) ‘There is plenty of evidence, I’ll warrant, which we’d find if we searched his house more thoroughly’. (1) and (2) could both be true in the senses intended.

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In another sense, however, even if it is taken that ‘defeaters’ only defeat when they are known—that is, when they can serve to ground doubt—‘defeasible’ has been taken to connote the property, possessed by only some deliverances of cognitive faculties, justifications of belief, and reasonable ascriptions of knowledge, of being open to being overridden just because and in so far as there are actually existing potential defeaters out there. If there is no such potential defeater, the justification or judgement is ‘indefeasible’. Thus, in accordance with the first understanding of ‘evidence’ and ‘defeasible’, one externalist definition of knowledge (or of belief with ‘knowledge-grade’ justification) has been proposed as ‘undefeated justified belief ’, while another form of externalist ‘defeasibility theory of knowledge’ explains or defines knowledge, in accordance with the second understanding, as ‘indefeasibly justified belief ’. These two purported definitions or analyses of knowledge boil down to much the same thing, given the different conceptions of what is to be counted as ‘evidence’, and so what it is for a knowledgeclaim to be actually ‘defeated’. The point of each is the claim, much like Dretske’s, that the status of a justification or claim to knowledge depends on there being no defeaters out there, whether or not that is known.17

The ‘problem of misleading defeaters’ Advocates of either account were pressed by critics to discuss the relevance of ‘misleading defeaters’ such as, if they came to be known, would ‘override’ or cast into doubt a previously well-based claim to knowledge that P, even though P is in fact true. Returning to our example, suppose that Philip has no twin but, for a joke, has told a friend, Brian, that he has an identical twin, James, who is about to visit. (He plans to pretend to be ‘James’ when Brian next calls.) Were I to meet Brian and be told what Philip had said to him, that ‘further evidence’ might serve to ‘override’ the basis for my judgement that it is certain that I saw Philip. Does that mean that, even if I don’t in fact 17 Independent expressions of each of these two forms of ‘defeasibility’ theory appeared in The Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy of 1998. Thus the article ‘Epistemology, History of ’ explains it thus: ‘where one is justified in believing a proposition p on the basis of evidence e, one’s justification is defeated when there is a true proposition q, such that the conjunction (e&q) does not justify p. The defeasibility analysis would then be that knowledge is justified, true, undefeated belief.’ (Pappas  1998.) However, in the article ‘Knowledge, Defeasibility Theory of ’, the theory is otherwise epitomised: ‘justification [may be] defective as a source of knowledge. According to the defeasibility theory of knowledge, the defect involved can be characterized in terms of evidence that the subject does not possess which overrides, or defeats, the subject’s prima facie justification for belief. Thus the account holds that knowledge is indefeasibly justified true belief.’ (Swain 1998.) Swain recognizes that the term has a legal origin, but does not draw the conclusion that it is best understood normatively as relating to burden of proof, nor is this clearly stated elsewhere in the Encyclopedia at that date, when, perhaps, externalism ruled. However, another reference book earlier in that decade had made the situation clearer. The very brief article ‘defeasibility’ in A Companion to Epistemology (Dancy and Sosa 1992) states: ‘Various philosophically interesting senses of “defeasible” correspond to different senses in which there “could” be defeating evidence, e.g. because it is logically possible that there is evidence that, combined with our present evidence, makes p less warranted, or because there actually are past or future events whose discovery, combined with our present evidence, would make p less warranted, etc.’ (my italics) (Hunter 1992). I have explained in section 5.5 the sense I take to be most appropriate in epistemology, but here I am interested in the philosophical motives that lie behind the adoption of other senses.

178 Knowing and Seeing talk to Brian, my claim to knowledge has been defeated (or is defeasible, on the other understanding of ‘defeat’ and ‘defeasible’)?18 The view that it does—the view that the bare fact that (1) Brian was told, and believes, that Philip has an identical twin overrides my justification for taking myself to know that Philip was in his garden—faces the question why, in that case, the bare fact (2) that Brian was misinformed as a joke does not serve to neutralize just that effect of (1). To take another case, suppose that Philip does have an identical (once visually indistinguishable) twin, James, who, due to a recent injury, now looks quite unlike him. Is the fact that Philip has a biologically identical twin staying with him a (potential) defeater of my assumption that I saw that Philip was in his garden, whereas the fact that he has an identical twin who has suffered a radical change of appearance is not a (potential) defeater? Or does the fact that James is now visually unlike Philip mean that Philip’s having a biologically identical twin is not, after all, a (potential) defeater? Indeed, whenever the evidence we have is ambivalent, so that there are reasons on both sides of a question of fact, there are always facts that, if we knew them, would neutralize the ‘misleading evidence’ that gives us good reasons for affording some degree of probability to the false conclusion. Accordingly, every fact such as, had it been known and taken into consideration in isolation as fresh evidence, would have afforded good reason to regard an otherwise well-founded or justified19 true belief as less than certain will always be accompanied by facts that, if we had also known them, would have neutralized that misleading evidence.20 On the other hand, it surely is the case that misleading evidence (or apparent evidence) can ‘defeat’ ascriptions of knowledge— that is, render objectively uncertain well-grounded true belief previously and reasonably taken to be certain. Where, then, should we draw the line, if we wish to make determinate the implication of Dretske’s ontological position that it is a necessary condition of knowledge (one that we cannot know to be fulfilled) that there are no unknown facts out there of a kind capable of serving as ‘defeaters’ and so incompatible with the ascription of the knowledge? How do we characterize in general terms the kind of unknown states of affairs that (so Dretske tells us) must not obtain if any particular ascription of knowledge, however well-founded or justified, is to be true? Simply to say that there must be no such facts as would override our grounds for an ascription of knowledge, if, in addition to our current evidence, we came to know of them in isolation, seems to let too much into that class of potential defeaters. But if we replace ‘in isolation’ with ‘in the full context of other currently unknown facts’, the formula seems to let in too little—indeed nothing at all, if what is supposed known is in fact true. 18 This example raises another interesting question. What if I am prepared to dismiss his story, rightly trusting my own eyes and recognitional capacity? Does basic primary knowledge have priority, as it were? That, no doubt, depends on the case. 19 To avoid certain Gettier objections irrelevant to the present point, add ‘grounded only in veridical experience and essentially supported by no false premises or assumptions’. 20 A point made long ago by Klein 1980.

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The source of the ‘problem’ That is only a problem, to which, unsurprisingly, no satisfying answer has been given, for those pursuing a certain kind of definition of knowledge in the form of a list of its necessary and sufficient conditions, understood as a general account of what has to be the case for it to be true, for any S and any P, that S knows that P. The source of the supposed problem, I would suggest, lies with just that approach. It is assumed that a central aim in theory of knowledge is to achieve a kind of general ontology of knowledge, a definition of knowledge in terms of how precisely the actual world has to be at time T in order for any ascription of knowledge at time T to be true. Given that assumption, it may seem obvious that a satisfactory account of knowledge that P must include a condition that ensures that there is no unknown fact that, if known, could raise a reasonable doubt whether P. The difficulty under consideration is that of stating such a condition in terms that draw the necessary determinate, ontological line between the circumstances that are incompatible and those that are compatible with an ascription of knowledge. If, however, we give up the assumption that we should be seeking an analysis of knowledge in terms of what is in common to all cases of knowledge (an assumption that in any case, among other shortcomings, fails to allow for the crucial distinction and relation between primary and secondary knowledge), and if we focus on the conditions, not of knowledge, but of a well-founded ascription of knowledge, the difficulty can be resolved. A soundly based judgement that one has knowledge that P is by implication a judgement that it is certain that P—that is, its ground is precisely the experience and available evidence that grounds the latter judgement. Both judgements are ‘defeasible’ in the sense that, in principle, further information might so change the body of available evidence, perhaps even casting doubt on deliverances of the senses, as to justify the judgement that it is epistemically at least possible that not-P. My suggestion is that it is a mistake to suppose that a being with a God’s-eye view of all that is the case could by some principle distinguish facts that are, from facts that aren’t, potential defeaters of a particular ascription of knowledge in order to determine whether the alleged necessary condition of knowledge is fulfilled that there are no facts of the former kind. To say that if there is to be knowledge that P, there must be no potential defeaters out there thus adds nothing to the point that it is a condition of the truth of a well-founded ascription of knowledge that it does not come about at some later time that fresh facts emerge that, given all that we know, renders what had been judged certain uncertain. And that simply is the point that ascriptions of knowledge, however well-founded, are (in the particular sense for which I argued in Chapter 5, section 5.5) ‘defeasible’. The time to consider whether a well-founded ascription of knowledge is actually defeated, then, is when potentially relevant further information is available and can be brought into the totality of the evidence taken into account, a totality that in real life is likely to be indefinitely more than will be mentioned in a little story about twins but, at the same time, necessarily, will not include such inaccessible facts—inaccessible, that is

180 Knowing and Seeing to say, to the fictional protagonist—as can be arbitrarily built into such a story, and which are therefore, of course, ‘known’ by us, the storytellers. Thus Philip’s twin James in our story can be made, by fiat, such a twin as is visually indistinguishable from Philip, but there are, of course, plenty of other ways of distinguishing things not readily distinguishable by eye.

6.5 How Do We Know that Our Faculties Are Reliable? So internalism rules! Or does it? There might seem to be a question still to be answered, one at least implicit in much sceptical argument and suggested by the very term ‘reliabilism’: namely, how do we know that our faculties are reliable? We cannot be perceptually or intuitively aware of the general reliability of the senses, since reliability is a dispositional property, manifested over time, not one that can be perceived or intuited. But any attempt to support belief in the senses’ reliability by appeal to experience over time will only be cogent if we know that past beliefs in deliverances of the senses have been true, a judgement that presupposes that the senses in question have been operating reliably in each case (not to speak of the reliability of memory). In other words, it can be argued that all attempts to establish the reliability of our faculties in general will be unacceptably circular, presupposing the reliability of our faculties. The sceptic will conclude that we cannot know anything. The externalist is likely to conclude that, unless the sceptic is right, our having knowledge that P depends only on our having the true belief that P together with the fact that the faculties that have delivered that true belief reliably deliver true beliefs. We need not (indeed, cannot) have knowledge of that fact. Externalist ‘reliabilism’, it might seem, survives.

Must an appeal to evidence that our senses are reliable be circular? It might be argued that that particular externalist response is internally inconsistent, since if all that is necessary for knowledge is reliably engendered true belief, then it could well be that we do know that our faculties are in general reliable, provided that we have what is in fact a reliably engendered true belief that they are. And most of us do surely have that belief, and, as the externalist should agree, it may well be reliably engendered. But perhaps all that the externalist means, or needs to mean, is that we don’t have knowledge as the internalist thinks of it—our ineluctible trust in our (for example) senses’ general reliability is not justified by reasons or evidence, even if, being itself reliably engendered, it is in fact ‘knowledge’—an answer that leaves us with the question how externalists can be as sure as they usually are that there is any such thing as knowledge as they describe it. A more straightforward objection to a sceptical conclusion of the circularity argument is that in fact hardly anything in human life, alas, is more familiar than the difference between faculties—sight, hearing, memory, for example—that for most individuals work fairly well and pretty reliably (give or take some readily identified, often well-known and reliably engendered illusions, rather rare hallucinations and considerably more

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frequent ‘false memories’) and the same faculties when they are impaired, failing and unreliable. Even the question of the general reliability of human memory, for example, or of particular senses, is up for objective, scientific consideration based on carefully collected and assessed evidence. Memory of events, or the capacity for recognizing people briefly seen, when systematically tested, has been shown to be much rougher, less accurate, more influenced by the need for a narrative and more vulnerable to suggestion than has generally been assumed in ordinary life—for example, with unfortunate consequences for innocent people, in courts of law. As for individual senses, many of their deliverances and corresponding perceptual judgements can be affected by circumstances, as the heard direction of sounds is liable to be significantly and sometimes misleadingly influenced by the visible environment, or as straight lines equal in length will unfailingly look unequal in the presence of certain other lines. The point is that, even if it is a complicated matter in some cases, the unreliability of faculties—and so the extent of their reliability—can be perfectly well and objectively charted. Knowledge of reliability and knowledge of unreliability stand or fall together. The sceptic, presumably, has them fall together, along with the rest of our knowledge of human life, perhaps dismissing the present point as a merely ‘Moorean’ appeal to common sense. But an externalist who is inclined to accept the sceptical argument that we cannot know that our faculties are reliable (or, at least, know that we know that they are) might perhaps be embarrassed to assert that we cannot know, or be justified in believing, when and how far they are unreliable. Nevertheless, the circularity argument lends a certain charm to the idea that we do not know, but simply presume, that our senses are reliable. It might even be suggested that such an essentially unjustifiable presumption is simply the mark of a basic cognitive faculty, and that there is no more to be said.

Sosa’s remedy: reflective knowledge There is a version of ‘reliabilism’, however, that purports to allow room for that presumption to be justified. It accepts the externalist principle that, even in the case of perceptual knowledge, it is not a condition of one’s knowing that P that one also knows that all conditions of one’s knowing that P are fulfilled. In particular, it is not necessary to know or even consciously believe that the faculties delivering the knowledge that P are reliable. At the same time it holds that there is nothing viciously circular in reasoning from particular cases of perceptual knowledge to the second-order conclusion that the faculties that deliver perceptual knowledge are in general reliable. Such an argument may be supposed strictly inductive, or to involve an appeal to the coherence of the deliverances of the senses and the best explanation of that coherence. Ernest Sosa, who has developed such a line of thought, draws a distinction between two kinds of knowledge.21 On the one hand there is basic ‘animal knowledge’, the subject of which unquestioningly and unselfconsciously accepts the deliverances of the senses—that is to say, has appropriate, and appropriately caused, perceptual beliefs. 21 Sosa 2009.

182 Knowing and Seeing On the other hand, there is second-order ‘reflective knowledge’, the subject of which has, as it were, confirmed their animal knowledge by rational assessment of the senses’ deliverances of animal knowledge over time. For animal knowledge all that matters is that the senses are reliable sources of true belief, but reflective knowledge requires reason to believe that that is so, with the whole range of our basic animal knowledge as evidence. Such a position combines the general externalist move with a commonsense acceptance of the possibility of forming a well-founded judgement as to the general reliability (and occasional or frequent unreliability) of our faculties, so allowing the possibility of knowing that we know. Sosa works hard to rebut the charge, but the taint of circularity remains. Given the assumptions of his position, how do we know that our animal knowledge is indeed some kind of knowledge without already knowing that it is the product of reliable faculties? How do we circumvent the need to know the former in order justifiably to employ cases of animal knowledge as evidence for the second-order, reflective judgement that our faculties are reliable? Indeed, how is justifying the conclusion that the deliverances of the senses are reliable sources of information by appealing to the deliverances of the senses in the past any different from justifying the conclusion that the speedometer of one’s car is reliable by appealing to nothing but its readings over time, and to no other independent evidence of the speed of the car at particular times?22 What evidence independent of the deliverances of the senses could we have that the senses have been reliable sources of knowledge? Sosa’s ‘animal knowledge’ is consciously analogous to Descartes’s ‘natural belief ’, but his move to reflective knowledge without Descartes’s appeal to an a priori endorsement of our faculties seems too much like trying to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps. Descartes at least postulates a divinely gifted stepladder. As the last question indicates, it is (of course) the comprehensive, sweeping character of the sceptic’s challenge that makes it impossible to meet it on its own terms, and is one of its features that differentiate the sceptical doubt from any ordinary doubt, resoluble by further enquiry, that might arise with respect to certain deliverances of particular faculties, whether a faculty of a particular person or of human beings in general. To accept that challenge on its own terms is in effect to accept the model of the homunculus within, spirit or brain, who needs reasons to justify trust in the messages (or ‘information’) delivered by the senses from outside in order to move from natural belief to knowledge—justification, that is to say, for the belief that ‘appearances’ are indeed appearances of reality. Sosa’s form of reliabilism purports to meet the challenge, but the externalist move he makes with respect to ‘animal knowledge’ already, it is arguable, concedes too much to the sceptic, more than can be clawed back by the idea that the ‘reflective’ subject nevertheless somehow manages to recognize cases of animal knowledge as cases of knowledge, and so rationally to conclude that they are the product of reliable faculties. 22 As argued by White 2014.

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Indeed, Sosa’s position might seem intended less as an appropriate response to the sceptic than as a concession to common sense, serving to soften the hard, implausible suggestion implicit in the externalist argument that it is never possible to know that the objective conditions of knowledge that P are fulfilled, and so to know that one knows that P. Sosa’s conception of ‘reflective knowledge’ purports to allow for our ‘knowing that we know’, but makes it not only a logically but also a psychologically second-order and relatively sophisticated supplement to perceptual knowledge, available only to sufficiently reflective human beings, rather than an absolutely characteristic, built-in feature of ordinary, conscious, ‘animal’ perceptual knowledge.

Learning to use is learning to trust What more needs to be said? On the one hand there is the persuasive sceptical thought that any appeal to experience to justify trust in the deliverances of the senses will be circular, and therefore ineffective; on the other hand it would seem to fly in the face of common sense to deny that we know that, for most of us, our senses and memory are on the whole pretty reliable. This knowledge can’t simply be given, moreover, in the immediate content of our sense experiences since reliability is a dispositional property. We learn that a tool or a witness is trustworthy from experience over time. So how do we come by the knowledge on which our trust in the deliverances of the senses is grounded? An answer, I would suggest, is that we grow into it. Its being well-founded is not a matter of our being able to give reasons or justification, but of something more primitive, which is not to say that it is more mysterious. There is clearly no perfect analogy for an infant’s learning to use or, better, simply coming to use and trust its senses in combination with its growing control of its body and actions in order to interact effectively with its environment. A possible model, which is more than a mere analogy, is with ‘learning’ or, rather, (since the notion of learning tends to have misleading assumptions built into it, whether behaviourist or intellectualist) growing into the ability to perform a natural activity such as walking or running or competently handling material objects or, indeed, speaking. The confidence with which an older child steps out or otherwise acts on and within its environment, a confidence built on the development of natural skills, is coextensive, indeed interdependent, with the confidence it places in its cognitive grasp of things around it—in the ‘deliverances of the senses’. The development of both is grounded in skills acquired or confirmed by a natural progression as the infant finds its feet, literally and metaphorically, in its material environment. There may have been a kind of trial, error, and adjustment in the infant’s coming to be cognitively at home in its environment, but certainly no articulate reasoning such that it might be appropriate to raise the question of its logical form—for example, whether it is formally inductive or, rather, reasoning to the best explanation (‘abductive’). The child can be said to have ‘learnt’ how to deal with—find its way about—its environment, just as it can be said to have ‘learnt’ to perform such an action, for which it is naturally so well adapted and to which it is naturally inclined, as walking or running or talking. But there is a certain absurdity in

184 Knowing and Seeing the suggestion that the infant has learnt that it has an environment, indeed a body, and somehow inferred that its senses give pretty reliable access to that environment, and are not globally and systematically misleading or unreliable in the way envisaged as a possibility by the sceptic. Coming to full use of its senses and coming to trust them are one and the same process in the child’s development. And as, in learning to do things, it learns some of what it can, and some of what it can’t do, so in coming to the use of its senses it at the same time comes to know something, at least, of their limitations. A possibly helpful, if imperfect analogy may be drawn with another, less fundamental topic in epistemology, the question of the grounds for trusting testimony.23 If we meet a stranger who warns us about some incident they have just seen further down the road then, other things being equal, we normally believe them. Trust in testimony is fairly easily defeasible, since, as even a child may soon come to learn, people are imperfectly observant, have imperfect memories, are imperfectly honest, suffer from delusions, are liable to tease, and so forth. What is asserted may itself give reason to distrust the assertion. Nevertheless, although it is easy to be too trusting, such defeasible general trust in presumed informants exists in normal human beings. It is difficult to imagine what life would be like without it, and the behaviour and attitude towards others of someone who had lost it completely would appear eccentric, paranoid, and certainly less than normally effective. It is a traditional view that this trust is inductively grounded on past experience, as if we trust others because we have found that, unless specifically motivated to do otherwise, people tend to tell the truth as they judge it to be. But it has often been pointed out (for example, in Austin 1946) that the epistemology of testimony can’t be that simple. For one thing, how would we know that people are saying something, telling us something, unless we understood the language in which they speak? And how would we have learnt a language, and learnt how things said purport to relate to the world, except in situations in which we could latch onto the appropriateness and point of things said—in which, for example, (to be very rough) we learnt the meaning of predicates, indeed what an assertion is, from assertions that are true? Aided, no doubt, by innate inclination, emotional attachment, and a natural social sensitivity, in learning to understand speech a child as it were painlessly and without reflective reasoning acquires that grounded trust in what others say that is a condition of language, of human social life, and of lying (although human beings are not the only species capable of deceitful acts). That analogy suggests that, at an even more basic epistemic level, in coming to employ its senses and to be at home in the world the child acquires a grounded trust in its faculties, a trust that we all have and that, in combination with the perspicuous source of perceptual awareness in the objects of that awareness, lies behind the authority of the deliverances of the senses. No further reflective reasoning is required, since 23 As, in his way, Lewis notes when he asks rhetorically, ‘What (non-circular) argument supports our reliance on perception, on memory, and on testimony?’

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‘animal’ cognitive intercourse with the world has already done the trick. Intelligence may be employed in many ways in a child’s making sense of the world, but it is no more behind its trust in its cognitive faculties than it is behind its trust in its legs when it has ‘learnt’ to walk and run. Any later attempt to gather or list ‘evidence’ for the conclusion that the trust is, after all, justified, that our senses and memory are in general reliable, or that we perceive independent objects, will appear, and be, circular and pointless. That is not to deny, of course, that the child may soon acquire evidence that its faculties are in some respects and in certain conditions unreliable and their deliverances (often reliably) misleading, or to imply that systematic investigation of the extent and limits of the reliability of our cognitive faculties is also absurd. For in order to establish such evidence and conduct such an investigation it is possible, as well as necessary, to draw on the perspicuous deliverances of the senses and memory.

6.6 Perception, Internalism, and ‘Disjunctivism’ The status of ordinary conscious perceptual knowledge as the paradigm of ‘primary knowledge’, on the present account, is owed to two closely related features. First, it is acquired by direct cognitive contact with its object, and, second, it is ‘perspicuous’ in the sense that, in acquiring it, we ipso facto know that, and how, we come to have it. We are aware of that immediate cognitive contact. Despite the intimate connection between them in the case of primary knowledge, however, these features, as so identified, are separable in cases of secondary knowledge. Direct cognitive contact of a kind occurs without perspicuity in unconscious perception, as in subliminal perception and blindsight.24 Conversely, a level of perspicuity—knowing how you know—can exist without direct cognitive contact, as in the case of knowledge acquired by conscious inference from evidence, or from testimony. To argue, as I have, that no secondary knowledge is possible without some primary knowledge is to adopt a fundamentally ‘internalist’ theory of knowledge, but without going as far as those, in the tradition examined in Chapter 1, who held that, strictly speaking, only what I have called primary knowledge ‘deserves the name of knowledge’. Although, as far as I know, this distinction between primary and secondary knowledge has not been drawn previously25 in analytic philosophy in an explicit or formal way, there are other internalists who recognize that perceptual knowledge is both acquired through direct cognitive contact with its object and perspicuous. Indeed, John McDowell, whose conceptualist view was critically discussed in Chapter  3,26 is 24 There can also be unconscious recall of primary knowledge. In remembering what was originally conscious perceptual knowledge we may lose the knowledge of how—or even that—we came to possess it. Primary knowledge, it may therefore seem, can become secondary. But memory—the retention of knowledge—is a complex subject. 25 Previously, that is, to my drawing it many years ago in discussion of Locke’s theory of knowledge (Ayers 1991, I: 136–44, 180–92, and 301–4). 26 Chapter 3, sections 3.3–4.

186 Knowing and Seeing emphatically explicit on both counts. We differ, however, in our accounts of the faculties or capacities required for direct cognitive access to the world and in our explanations of perspicuity, both of which, very consciously writing in the conceptualist tradition, McDowell assigns to ‘reason’, that is to the possession of language and conceptual capacities, and to a kind of consequentially possible rational appreciation of the significance of sense experience. The explanation offered in this book, on the other hand, is chiefly in terms of the overall content of perception—to perceivers’ being perceptually, rather than articulately or reflectively, aware that, and of how, their environment is physically impinging on them, on their senses. ‘Reason’ doesn’t come into it.

Is the perceptual relation irreducible? As a way into further engagement with the views of other internalists (that of McDowell in particular, since his theory has already received some discussion) this section will return to the question of how best to think of the perceptual relation, given that perception is direct apprehension of independent reality. Does that mean that, as a number of analytic philosophers currently argue (and as I have agreed27), sense experiences, understood as psychological or mental states or events, are in some sense irreducibly relational? The argument against that proposal is not recondite. If perception is a relation between subject and object, it is a relation that exists specifically because of the way the perceiving subject is—on what is going on in the subject—rather than on how it is with the object. The object is acting on the subject, that is true—for example by reflecting light that happens to go into the subject’s eyes, or by pressing into the subject’s body or resisting pressure applied by the subject. But these contributions by the object to the perceptual relation are simply aspects of its general effect on its environment, not in any way specific to its being perceived. It is perceived just because the perceiver possesses mechanisms and a neural system sensitive to certain aspects or elements of that general effect and issuing in the perceptual experience—in the perceiver’s conscious awareness of the object. It may therefore seem to follow that the perceptual relation can be subject to a two-part analysis as that process within the perceiver (or rather, perhaps, the final neural part of it that is the physical aspect or basis of the representational event in consciousness itself) together with the condition that that conscious event is in fact an effect of an appropriate external object impacting on the subject’s sensory system in a normal way. Those who favour such an analysis (or ‘causal theory’) of perception are likely to appeal to the theoretical possibility that the brain-state of somebody who perceives a tree in front of them could in principle be reproduced physically by other means, such as drugs or appropriate electrical stimulus, when there is no tree there, or it could be a pathological effect of disease. Hallucinations do happen as a result of illness or drugs or simple sleepiness, and, even if none of them is in fact quite like, or even very like a 27 Chapter 4, section 4.2.

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normal perceptual experience, they can give rise to corresponding beliefs in the confused. There is no reason in principle, it is said, why there could not be a ‘perfect’ hallucination, physiologically and phenomenally exactly like a normal perceptual state. We can imagine an experiment in which quite unconfused and well-informed subjects are sometimes made to perceive a cube in front of them, and are at other times subjected to a hallucinatory experience as of a cube by appropriate stimulation or manipulation of their brains, and are found incapable of distinguishing one sort of experience from the other. But if there is, or could be, such a physical and mental state or event in common to perception and hallucination—the intentional or representational state or occurrence of there seeming to be a cube in front of one, for example— mustn’t the difference between the perceptual state or event and the hallucinatory state or event simply be a matter of their different causation? So can’t perceptual experience be analysed or defined as that common mental, representational ‘seeming’ when it happens to be caused by the represented object in the normal way through the operation of the mechanisms of sense? As this view might be put, the conscious sensory experience, an intentional or representational psychological state or event that is physically an event in the brain, is common to perception and to hallucination (or at least to the logically possible ‘perfect’ hallucination), and it is its being perceptual (veridical or ‘factive’) rather than merely sensory that is relational, the relation being simply its causal relation to an appropriate distal cause, to its ‘truth-maker’. Another kind of cause would make just such an experience, subjectively and physiologically in all respects the same, hallucinatory. The main reason why advocates of a ‘direct realist’ understanding of perceptual awareness may object to this sort of story is not that they would necessarily deny that there could ‘in principle’ be a hallucinatory experience subjectively indistinguishable from a perceptual experience, or even that the physiological basis of the former could involve an event in the brain that was in relevant respects qualitatively identical to one constituting the physiological basis of the latter, but that the ‘analysis’ is completely misleading with respect to the epistemic significance of the difference between perception and hallucination. It plays into the hands of the sceptic by suggesting that what we are immediately aware of in perception is not, say, a cube in front us, but its seeming that, or looking as if, there is a cube in front of us, so that what sense experience supplies is simply a premise from which we have to infer that we are enjoying a perceptual rather than hallucinatory seeming—that is, that it has one kind of cause rather than another. The sceptic will say that no such inference is justified. The externalist will agree, but claim that the inference is unnecessary because the experience supplies knowledge provided that it is in fact caused (in the normal, ‘right’ way) by a cube. Even an internalist who accepts the model may postulate a principle warranting the default position of taking its seeming that there is a cube as grounds for belief that there is a cube, at least in the absence of special reasons for doubt. Crispin Wright argues for a position of this last kind in a series of articles, offering suggestions as to how such a defeasible ‘hinge’ principle or assumption, such as the assumption that our senses are

188 Knowing and Seeing reliable, might itself be warranted—for example, pragmatically.28 But all three positions might seem to conflict with the idea that sense perception is direct cognitive access to independent objects and the way the world is—or at least with the direct realist thought that if you clearly perceive a cube before you, you don’t need any further warrant for a judgement that there is a cube before you. (Wright argues that even if perception is direct access to its objects, the subject still needs a general warrant for judging that one is thus accessing the objects rather than hallucinating.)

Disjunctivism In recent years arguments for and against direct realism have often been centred on so-called ‘disjunctivism’, the proposal that we should not think of such a statement as ‘There seems to be a cube in front of me’ as asserting the occurrence of an ‘experience’ such as is a common element in perception of a cube and hallucination of a cube— what McDowell calls the ‘highest common factor’ view of it. The statement should rather be understood, so it is proposed, as equivalent to something like the disjunction ‘Either I am perceiving a cube or I am victim of a hallucination or illusory experience as of a cube’. That is, it should be understood as the assertion that I am having one or other of two entirely different, if phenomenally similar, kinds of experience. If such a disjunction is offered as a formal ‘analysis’ of what is asserted, it is seriously unconvincing. Such a ‘seems to be’ or ‘looks as if ’ sentence is probably a lot less likely to be uttered in a situation in which the possibility of hallucination or even illusion is being at all envisaged, than in a situation (for example) in which the speaker simply can’t see or feel the shape of an object clearly or comprehensively enough to be certain about it. Indeed, there is a wide, perhaps open-ended range of fairly disparate situations in which a speaker may resile from ‘I see that such and such is the case’ to ‘It seems/ looks as if such and such is the case’, sometimes because there is one of many possible reasons to have some doubt as to what is purportedly seen, sometimes simply to describe a recognized illusion (‘It looks as if the equal lines are different lengths’), and so forth. There is no reason to suppose that the sentence is correspondingly multiply ambiguous. The real point of disjunctivism, however, lies not with its status as a bit of semantic analysis but, to be rough, with its role in emphasizing that perception— veridical experience, direct awareness of our environment—is conceptually or ontologically prior to falsidical experience in the sense that the latter is, as it were, failure to perceive, failed sense experience. The possibility of an appearance as of a cube before one, when there is in fact no cube there, is parasitic on the possibility— indeed, actuality—of our directly perceiving a cube as and where it is. Our faculties are fallible, but the idea that their deliverances can be misleading presupposes that in general they are not—else why would their deliverances ever mislead?29 28 Wright  2002,  2003,  2004, 2007, and 2014. The notion of a ‘hinge proposition’ comes from Wittgenstein  1969. A useful overview and assessment of the debate between Wright and McDowell is Byrne 2014. 29 McDowell 2009a: 230 makes a closely related claim: ‘In order to find it intelligible that experience has objective purport at all, we must be able to make sense of an epistemically distinguished class of experiences,

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It may seem inappropriate to describe hallucination in particular, any more than dreaming, as the failure or misleading deliverance of a perceptual faculty, but that itself reflects the point, consonant with the spirit of disjunctivism, that from a common-sense point of view or, for that matter, from the point of view of empirical psychology (if that is different), the claim that perception and hallucination are entirely different kinds of events in a person’s mental life is surely right and reasonable. They are events that not only have very different epistemic significance—one is the successful exercise of an evolved cognitive faculty, the other pathological or due to some malfunction—but by the same token cannot be supposed to overlap physiologically more than partially. Hallucinations, often the effect of drugs, can be fairly reliably induced in other ways, for example by sensory deprivation, when brain scanning may indicate, for example, that some part of the brain involved in vision is active in visual hallucination, as is also true in visual imagination and dreaming. Its functioning in hallucination is, however, far from normal, since it is operating independently of the usual prompts and checks by input from the sense organs. Subjectively, too, hallucinations generally fall far short of sustained perceptual experience. Convincing hallucinations can occur, but commonly, and significantly, when the subject is in a state between dreaming and waking.30

Scepticism and disjunctivism All such considerations, however, will be water off the sceptic’s back, at least the sceptic prepared to envisage the possibility that our senses are systematically unreliable, and to doubt whether they ever put us in touch with an independent world. What such a sceptic is interested in is the ‘in principle’ possibility of the ‘perfect’ hallucination, or quasi-hallucination, just like perceptual experience, a possibility that is conceded, or seems to be conceded, by at least some disjunctivists. A ‘perfect’ hallucination is, presumably, one that will do the required sceptical work. A hallucination that is only momentarily and in some respect (e.g. visually) subjectively ‘just like’ perception, and so is soon and easily revealed for the hallucination it is—if that is not already recognized by the subject at the time it occurs—will not be enough. Such a sceptic needs to postulate a hallucination that not only lasts and lasts, but is also ‘as of ’ a world with which the subject experiences themselves as if interacting, both purely physically and in integrated, multi-sensory perception itself—a world, moreover, in all of a world’s causally orderly complexity and detail.31 In effect, the ‘perfect’ hallucination must replicate everything about perceptual experience and its content that would normally put the burden of proof lastingly on the side of doubt. We are now, clearly, deep into those in which (. . . [in] the visual case) one sees how things are . . . . Experiences in which it merely looks to one that things are thus and so are experiences that misleadingly present themselves as belonging to that epistemically distinguished class. . . . If one acknowledges that experiences have objective purport, one cannot consistently refuse to make sense of the idea of experiences in which objective facts are directly available to perception.’ 30 For a discussion of actual hallucination, see e.g. Thompson 2018: 135–53. 31 See Chapter 5, section 5.2, footnote 6.

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deceitful demon, brain-in-a-vat territory, and perhaps more than enough has already been said in this book about that. If it is allowed, however, that disjunctivism does not rule out the ‘in principle’ possibility of a ‘perfect’ hallucinatory experience that is subjectively indiscriminable from a perceptual experience, can the disjunctivist approach nevertheless supply an effective response to scepticism? Disjunctivists tend to say that it is not their intention to refute the sceptic by ruling out the possibility of error, or by supplying some kind of warrant for ignoring it, but rather to replace that way of thinking about perception and how it gives us knowledge of the world that makes the sceptical argument attractive. McDowell, for example, offers a ‘diagnosis’ of scepticism with respect to perceptual knowledge as expressing ‘an inability to make sense of the idea of direct perceptual access to facts about the environment’, an inability he takes to be founded on the ‘highest common factor’ conception of sense experience that puts someone who sees a cube on the same epistemic footing, with respect to the judgement that there is a cube before them, as someone who (perfectly) hallucinates a cube—both judgements being based on the purportedly ‘inconclusive’ reason that there looks to be a cube there. As a paid-up ‘direct realist’, I have no doubt that McDowell is right to excoriate that misleading view of perceptual belief. It is also true that something like that view, in so far as it subordinates the senses to reason, would have been attractive to Descartes independently of the sceptical argument, as being well in place in the non-sceptical, broadly Platonic rationalism that he was forging. Nevertheless, there is a certain problem with McDowell’s offering such an assumption as a ‘diagnosis’ of the source of Cartesian scepticism. That is because that view of the epistemic significance of perception is not, dialectically, an initial assumption of Descartes’s sceptical argument, but a supposed truth revealed in and through his employment of that argument in the Platonic cause of ‘leading the mind away from the senses’. If anything specific to ‘Cartesian scepticism’ calls for a ‘diagnosis’, it is the independent plausibility of that argument—independent, that is to say, of the fact that it might serve the purposes of a certain kind of philosopher, whether rationalist, externalist, contextualist, or an advocate for the theory of ‘hinge’ principles, to be able to say that unless their favoured theory is true, the sceptical conclusion is true. If it was not independently persuasive, the sceptical argument would have no such ‘methodological’ value to them, and would certainly not be as successful as it is at persuading first-term philosophy students that we don’t really know that the material world exists. Since the plausibility of Descartes’s argument, then, is certainly not attributable to its validity, it is necessary to identify what is wrong with it, and why that fallacy has tended to escape notice and appropriate assessment—that is, to explain the argument’s illusory force. That is what I have so far tried to do in Part II, and believe that I have done. It may indeed be true that, as McDowell says in criticism of Wright, quoting Stroud, ‘the worst thing one can do with the traditional question about our knowledge of the world is to try to answer it’, if ‘trying to answer it’ is taken to mean seeking a principle or piece of reasoning to justify moving from ‘appearance’ to reality. But

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McDowell’s ‘diagnosis’, appropriate as it may be as a critical comment on the way that question is formed, arguably falls short of an explanation of the invalidity and illusory force of the argument traditionally employed to raise it.

Disjunctivism and defeasibility In Chapter 3, section 3.3, an argument of McDowell’s was recorded that had previously appeared in an employment of the disjunctive account of ‘seeming’ statements. Here is a part of that quoted argument again: If a perceptual state makes a feature of the environment present to a perceiver’s rationally self-conscious awareness, there is no possibility, compatibly with someone’s being in that state, that things are not as the state would warrant her believing that they are, in a belief that would simply register the presence of that feature of the environment. The warrant for a belief that the state provides is indefeasible; it cannot be undermined.32

In the earlier article, the same claim is associated with the defence of disjunctivism against Wright’s objection that it is ‘dialectically ineffectual’ against the sceptical argument. Wright argues that since, whether or not perceptual experience is direct access to features of the environment, the sceptic can still appeal to the subjective indiscriminability of perceptual and hallucinatory experience, the disjunctivist analysis does nothing to weaken Wright’s view that we normally rely on a defeasible presumption in favour of the former in justifying judgements based on perception. McDowell responds: The point of the disjunctive conception is that if one undergoes an experience that belongs on the ‘good’ side of the disjunction, that warrants one in believing—indeed presents one with an opportunity to know—that things are as the experience reveals things to be. When one’s perceptual faculties ‘engage the material world directly’, as Wright puts it, the result—a case of an environmental state of affairs directly present to one in experience—constitutes one’s being justified in making the associated perceptual claim. It is hard to see how any other kind of justification could have a stronger claim to the title ‘canonical’. And this justification is not defeasible. If someone sees that P, it cannot fail to be the case that P. So if one accepts the disjunctive conception, one is not at liberty to go on supposing that ‘the canonical justification of perceptual belief proceeds through a defeasible inferential base’. (McDowell 2009d: 234-5)

These passages have features that call for comment, most obviously the use of ‘defeasible’. Wright evidently supposes that, if perceptual belief or the claim to have perceptual knowledge is ‘defeasible’, it must be reliant on a defeasible presumptive principle in the way of legal defeasibilty, a principle that needs justification. As I have argued in Chapter 5, section 5.5, that is a mistake. It is because of the very nature and content of perceptual experience, as examined in Chapter 2, and not because of some presumptive principle, that the burden of proof is from the first firmly on the doubter. To reiterate an analogy, trust in sense experience no more relies on a principle of inference than 32 McDowell 2011: 44–5. The view is further explicated in McDowell 2009d.

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trust in my understanding of, for example, the principle of identity relies on a defeasible principle of inference that if I (seem to) understand why a proposition is necessarily true, then it is true. That is why ‘special reasons’ are needed to undermine trust in a deliverance of the senses. The doubter needs to show that it is at least an epistemic possibility that the experience is misleading. Wright’s conception of defeasibility here is at least of a piece with his defence of the idea of ‘hinge’ principles. McDowell’s use of the notion in these passages, however, is less obviously consistent with his general ‘internalist’ stance. In his eagerness to insist that perceptual experience, although fallible, is normally enough to justify belief, he employs the model (discussed in section 6.4) that is more appropriate to externalism, involving a ‘God’s-eye view’ of what it is for a deliverance of the senses to be ‘defeasible’.33 Only if the experience is on the ‘bad’ side of the disjunction does he allow it to be ‘defeasible’. If it is on the ‘good’ side, it is, for him, ‘indefeasible’, and only if it is on the good side does it warrant or justify belief. If it is on the bad side, it at best (as McDowell puts it elsewhere) excuses belief. All this breaks the link between defeasibility and fallibility. On a better understanding of defeasibility, as I have argued, it is an ‘in principle’ property, such that since all our faculties are fallible, all their deliverances are defeasible—that is, they are ‘in principle’ open to defeat by ‘special reasons’, should such come to light. McDowell’s conception of defeasibility would also seem in danger of departing from an ‘internalist’ view of perceptual knowledge, with the apparent suggestion that whether one’s belief is warranted or merely excused, and so whether it constitutes knowledge, might depend on something that, ex hypothesi, the subject is not in a position to determine. It is not surprising if at least one careful commentator sees this as an externalist element in McDowell’s disjunctivist position, even proposing that McDowell’s view might have achieved ‘the holy grail of epistemology’ by bridging the gap between externalism and internalism.34 That seems to be an implication, however, that McDowell would wish to avoid, and here he calls on the notion of perception as ‘direct presence in experience’ or, as he put it in 2011, presence ‘to a perceiver’s rationally self-conscious awareness’. That somewhat convoluted notion (discussed above in Chapter 3, section 3.3) seems intended to build into a concept of perception (or ‘perceptual presence’) the condition that if we truly claim to perceive that P, there is no epistemic possibility that not-P. That, presumably, is why he claims that such perceptual ‘justification is not defeasible. If someone sees that P, it cannot fail to be the case that P.’ But for a claim to perceptual knowledge to be that safe, not only must there be no epistemic possibility of defeat relative to the evidence available now, the claim must be indefeasible by fresh evidence in the future. Hence the strong whiff of externalism, since McDowell in effect tries to make it a condition of ‘perceptual presence’ that there are, so to speak, no potential defeaters out there. But that move, as when made by externalists, bumps up against the possibility of 33 See this chapter, section 6.2.

34 Prichard 2012: 1, et passim.

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‘misleading defeaters’.35 Considerations that make it epistemically possible that not-P, even when it is true that P and one has seen that P, might always ‘in principle’ arise to defeat a claim to knowledge and certainty. Truth does not entail that there are no potential ‘misleading defeaters’ out there. So not even successfully seeing how things are can make a claim to knowledge ‘indefeasible’, although anyone who wants to defeat a claim to perceptual knowledge (or a claim that something is certain) so grounded had better come up with a good ‘special reason’. A much simpler and, in my view, far more satisfactory internalist account of perceptual knowledge than McDowell’s runs as follows. Our perceptual system delivers knowledge of the world by putting us in direct, non-inferential and perspicuous contact with our environment. It is perspicuous (or ‘luminous’) in that the knowledge of our environment that it grounds includes knowledge of how we are cognitively related to our environment. So we know how and that we know—logically secondorder knowledge is given along with the first-order knowledge. Our perceptual system, however, is fallible in all sorts of ways, major and minor, so that its deliverances are defeasible. But that does not mean that what it delivers is not in general certain— indeed, the very notion of defeasibility, as applied to our natural perceptual judgements, should be taken to imply that those judgements are properly regarded as certain, and as constituting knowledge, in the absence of ‘special reasons’ to suppose it epistemically possible that they are false. Only such reasons can ‘defeat’ the defeasible judgement. That is to say, if a claim to knowledge and certainty that is grounded on sense experience is doubted, the burden of proof is on the side of doubt. The story of the ‘Cartesian’ sceptical argument with respect to perceptual knowledge (an argument that existed long before Descartes) is the story of a failed attempt comprehensively, with respect to all well-grounded claims to knowledge, to switch the burden of proof from the side of doubt to the side of the knowledge-claims. Those taken in by the illusory force of the sceptical argument are, for reasons ranging from pure naïvety to over-dedication to sophisticated theory, insensitive to the significance of the fact that the ‘error-possibilities’ advanced by the sceptic are not epistemic possibilities, with a probability greater than zero.

35 See Chapter 6, section 6.4.

Conclusions The aim of this book has been to give an account of what knowledge is that does justice to the insights embodied in the traditional exclusive distinction of kind between knowledge and belief. According to that long-accepted doctrine, as expounded and explained in Chapter 1, knowledge—real knowledge—is paradigmatically a direct cognitive relation to its object, reality or truth, such that when we are in that relationship, we know that we are. What is ‘known’ is simply evident—possessing ‘evidence’ in the primary sense. What is ‘believed’ is judged to be so on the basis of ‘extraneous’ evidence—‘evidence’ in the secondary sense, evidence for what is not in itself evident. Better evidence in the latter sense cannot turn ‘belief ’ into ‘knowledge’. Both knowledge and belief are species of what Aquinas calls ‘thinking with assent’, but what is going on in the subject, and the faculty employed, is specifically different in each case. Typical of the language in which the distinction is drawn, not least by Platonic rationalists otherwise inclined, or bound, to denigrate the deliverances of sense, is the characterization of knowing, or coming to know, as ‘seeing’ what is the case. ‘Believing’ differs from ‘knowing’ as inferring that Socrates is in the room differs from seeing that he is. In Chapter  2, a phenomenological analysis of perception, consonant with the evidence of current psychology of perception, led to a main conclusion of the book that perceptual knowledge does indeed fit such an account of knowledge, if not in quite the ways traditionally supposed. The phenomenal integration of the senses, largely ignored or misunderstood until recently but now eagerly explored by neuropsychologists, calls decisively for recognition that, as common sense assumes, the immediate object of perceptual awareness is independent reality, including oneself, and not some ‘internal’ image or representation in mind or brain. At the same time it was demonstrated in that chapter that in being perceptually aware of our environment as our environment, we are at the same time perceptually aware of how it is that we are aware of it—not, of course, at the neurophysiological level, but at the level at which we perceive anything. Normal perceptual knowledge is in a certain sense ‘perspicuous’. In acquiring it, we are normally, ipso facto, acquiring perceptual knowledge of how, and that, we are acquiring it—of how our environment is impinging on our senses, and of how we can bring our senses to bear on that environment. It is therefore not surprising that seeing what is the case stood for so long in philosophy as a paradigm of coming to know what is the case, as it still does in everyday thought and talk.

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Accordingly, a distinction between primary and secondary knowledge was drawn at the end of Chapter 2 more or less at the point at which knowledge and belief were traditionally distinguished. It was further argued that without primary knowledge, there could be no knowledge or, for that matter, belief. In order to know anything, we must in at least some cases of knowledge be in a direct cognitive relation to the object of knowledge, and know that we are. The distinction between primary and secondary knowledge goes some way towards explaining the difficulties faced by those analytic epistemologists who have for more than half a century searched in vain for a non-circular, explanatory definition of knowledge that fits each and every case of what intuitively is to be accounted ‘knowledge’. Primary knowledge, in particular perceptual knowledge, constitutes the paradigm to which other cases of what we are prepared to call ‘knowledge’ are in various ways analogous. Knowledge achieved by directly understanding why a proposition is necessarily true (for example, that if a = b, and b = c, then a = c) is, despite differences, broadly analogous in both the significant ways: not only is our knowledge acquired by unmediated cognitive access to its object, it is also the case that in acquiring it we are aware of how we are doing so. Knowledge achieved by argument to the best or, rather, the only epistemically possible explanation is analogous in a different way, in that the inference itself embodies knowledge of our cognitive-cum-causal relation to the object of knowledge, although that relation is not direct. What we know is certain, and we know how we know. Other cases of secondary knowledge may be ‘unconscious’ and such that we do not know how or that we know, so that the analogy with the paradigm is weaker. If this explanation is correct of how it is that the everyday conception of knowledge brings a wide range of cases of cognition under the same terminological umbrella, then it would follow that any attempt at a definition of knowledge, even if some property present in every case of knowledge was successfully identified, would fail to explain what knowledge is essentially. In order to understand what knowledge is, one of the things we need to understand is why the ‘knowledge’ gained by blindsight, or the knowledge manifested by diffident students who take themselves to be merely guessing the answers to forced-choice questions, lies towards the fringe of what counts as knowledge, a significant distance from the paradigms. Such examples are accordingly useless as evidence that knowing that and how you know is irrelevant to the question of what knowledge is. In Chapter 3 the idealist or conceptualist tradition is considered, chiefly because there are conceptualists in the analytic tradition who, unlike the classical idealists and like the present author, take sense perception to be a direct cognitive relation to independent reality, as well as supposing perceptual knowledge to be such that, in acquiring it, we know that we do so. The arguments of a current advocate of such a view, John McDowell, are critically examined. The difference between his view and that advanced in Chapter  2 lies in his intellectualist explanation both of what is involved in being in direct cognitive contact with reality, and of how it is that perceptual knowledge is ‘perspicuous’. Drawing on Wilfred Sellars’s conception of ‘the space of

196 Knowing and Seeing reasons’, he ascribes both to the possession of language. He holds that a scheme of concepts embodied in language has a necessary role in putting us in epistemic contact with reality, and that the perspicuity of perceptual knowledge can be explained by a kind of reflective rationality. No reference is made in his explanation to the specific content or phenomenology of perception. Argument was presented against his views, and for the need to recognize the possibility of inarticulate, non-conceptual or preconceptual perceptual content and knowledge, as well, indeed, as prelinguistic rationality or intelligence, in explanation of the possibility of language. Consideration of the epistemology of the individuation and classification of material things, in striking contrast to the concept-dependent individuation and classification of ‘modes’, was then brought in support of this message—evidence in the deep structure of language that counts decisively against the dogma of comprehensive conceptualism. The somewhat intricate discussion of Chapter 4 is an inquiry into the possible significance of the different grammatical constructions in which verbs cognate to, respectively, ‘know’, ‘believe’, and ‘see’ occur—the different kind of grammatical object they can take. That suggested that since knowledge—at least, knowledge of the world— is, like perception, a cognitive-cum-causal relation to reality (to what Plato called ‘to on’, ‘what is’, and identified as the object of knowledge), a certain priority might be accorded to constructions in which the object of knowledge is indeed something that is a denizen of the world of time, space, and causality. Since neither propositions, the objects of belief, nor even facts are plausibly regarded as such objects, that would give priority, in effect, to ‘knowledge by acquaintance’—to ‘knowing X’ over ‘knowing that P’. That suggestion runs counter to the extraordinary and, arguably, pernicious emphasis on constructions of the ‘know that . . .’ and even ‘perceive that . . .’ form that is given centre stage by many analytic epistemologists—as in the arguments of McDowell, Dretske and Williamson. However, on reflection, it is concluded that it is no accident that ordinary languages contain a variety of constructions involving these verbs, and all have their complementary functions. The same goes for the seemingly different conceptions or ‘senses’ of ‘the evidence’ that we all happily employ in ordinary life. Such differences are not grounds for treating ‘know’ or ‘the evidence’ as simply ambiguous. The philosophical task is to understand how the variety of uses of such terms all work together, not to give priority, as Williamson does, to what is supposed the philosophically best motivated or revealing construction or conception. It is the complementary variety, when understood, that is revealing. In Part II, Chapters 5 and 6 approach the question of what knowledge is through a consideration of sceptical argument and its ‘methodological’ employment in current analytic epistemology. The discussion rounds out the account of knowledge in important ways. Chapter 5 establishes the intuitive connection between knowledge and certainty, a connection called into question by some recent theory of knowledge. It does so, firstly, by focusing on the failure of the sceptic to offer ‘error possibilities’ that are genuine epistemic possibilities in the light of all available evidence, the usual requirement for ‘defeating’ claims to knowledge that P. The view that philosophical scepticism should

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be excused this requirement, whether because it is calling attention to the general unpredictability of events and existence of ‘unknown unknowns’, or because it stands outside our usual practices and assumptions in ‘external’ judgement on them, as it were from scratch, was considered and rejected. In a discussion of the relation between judgements of probability and judgements of certainty, a difference was noted. Although both are relative to the evidence available in a particular situation, well-grounded judgements of probability and positive judgements of epistemic possibility are ‘safe’ in a way and to an extent that such judgements of certainty and negative judgements of epistemic possibility (in this, unsurprisingly, like ascriptions of knowledge) are not. In other words, perfectly well-grounded judgements of certainty and ascriptions of knowledge are alike ‘defeasible’ by fresh evidence in ways in which judgements of probability that properly take all the available evidence into account are not. The point connects with criticism of responses to scepticism that propose that high probability is sufficient for knowledge—so-called ‘fallibilism’ and the associated view, ‘contextualism’. It was concluded that such theories are incoherent, as well as unduly reliant on the assumption that the sceptical argument has more than illusory force. The key notion of defeasibility was considered in the light of its origin and use in legal theory, its use as a logical term, and its current use in general argumentation theory. It was concluded that it should be employed in epistemology in a very particular ‘in principle’ sense, one in which judgements can be certain and proven ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ and yet be ‘defeasible’. Even a priori (e.g. mathematical) judgements are defeasible in so far as the deliverances of any fallible faculty are ‘in principle’ open to question on the basis of further reasons or reasoning. A feature of the concept of defeasibility in law, however, is crucially important in epistemology, not least with respect to the characterization of perceptual judgements as ‘defeasible’. That is its connection with the notion of burden of proof. To make an assertion is to take on a burden of proof—that is, a conversational obligation to answer the question, ‘How do you know that?’ Such an answer as ‘I saw it happen’ transfers the burden onto the questioner. That is because perceiving is more than believing. It is, as established in Chapter 2, a way of coming to know that carries with it knowledge of ‘how one knows’. The sceptic, however, is in effect questioning the deliverances of his own senses—and inviting us to question ours. But these come with their own credentials, presenting us, within the whole object of our awareness, with the answer to the question, ‘How do I know?’ That is why, right from the start, the burden of proof is on the sceptic, a burden the sceptic signally fails to carry by offering ‘error possibilities’ with no good reason to suppose them genuine epistemic possibilities relatively to current experience and available evidence—that is, no good reason to suppose them relevant to questions of certainty and knowledge. Chapter 6 looks at ‘externalist’ theory of knowledge and an ‘internalist’ response, ‘disjunctivism’. After an account of the distinction between epistemological externalism and internalism, some lessons are drawn from argument advanced in support of

198 Knowing and Seeing ‘externalism’ by the doyen of externalists, Fred Dretske, complemented by consideration of conceptions of defeasibility advanced by other externalists and closely related to his argument. Like Descartes, Dretske employs the sceptical argument ‘methodologically’, presenting externalism as the only alternative to scepticism. Apart from the notably uncritical respect accorded to philosophical scepticism, two features in particular of such argument for externalist theory of knowledge stand out. First, it is assumed that the aim of epistemology is to come up with an account of what knowledge is in the form of a definition satisfied by each and every case of what is properly and reasonably called ‘knowledge’, an assumption already rejected in Part I. Second, it is supposed that such an account will take the form of a certain ontology of what it is to know something, a general account of the basic ‘natural’ facts on which any fact of the form S knows that P supervenes. The externalist’s account of knowledge is composed as if from a God’s-eye, omniscient view of just how the world has to be if and when S knows that P. There is, or seems to be, no room in such an account for the close intuitive link between claims to know that such and such is the case and claims that, on the available evidence, it is certain that such and such is the case. It is therefore unsurprising that such accounts come to grief on the problem of ‘misleading defeaters’. Without these assumptions, and the mistaken idea that the sceptical argument has more than illusory force, externalist theory of knowledge loses its charms. Nevertheless further consideration is accorded in Chapter  6 to ‘reliabilism’, the currently most popular form of externalist epistemology (to the extent that the term might seem virtually interchangeable with ‘externalism’), and to a related line of sceptical argument not so far discussed. That leads into an answer to the question of how we know that our cognitive faculties are (fairly) reliable, and how it is that our justification for supposing that they are is not circular. Put briefly and crudely, it is suggested that an infant’s coming to the use of its cognitive faculties is its growing into certain skills in relation to its environment, done in conjunction with its growing into the capacity for controlled interaction with that environment. ‘Learning’ to use and trust its faculties is comparable to, and closely associated with, its ‘learning’ to act—to reach out for things, to walk and to run. Neither should be thought of as rational achievements by a homunculus within, acquiring reasons to trust information coming from outside, and reasons to expect certain means to achieve certain ends—reasons open to question by the sceptic. To ask what reasons we have for trusting our faculties is rather like asking a passing hiker what reasons they have for supposing that they can walk. If the latter question even deserves an answer, I suppose that it is ‘I am doing so’. Before leaving the topic of externalism, it is worth reflecting that one reason for holding that it must be possible to give a straightforward ‘ontological’ definition or account of knowledge in terms of natural properties is that there might seem to be an incompatibility between the idea that there is a strong link between knowing that P and its being certain that P relatively to the available evidence—the link between knowing and being fully justified—and the at least equally attractive view that whether

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S knows that P is a plain matter of fact, a matter of whether there is the appropriate natural relation between S and the fact1 that P. A question of probability relative to the available evidence (It is certain that P = The probability that not-P is zero), like any question of justification, may seem too normative to be a plain matter of fact. One consideration that should serve to weaken this sense of an incoherence in our ordinary conception of knowledge is that the language in which we talk about the mind, whether in animals or human beings, is permeated with similarly epistemically and logically ‘normative’ language. The very notion of a faculty is thus normative, and yet complex scientific inquiry into the question whether octopuses or corvids are intelligent, or into the extent of their intelligence, is concerned with a matter of natural fact. It has often been thought that, in any such inquiry, the normative notion needs to be left behind, replaced by a purely factual, behavioural ‘definition’, or a definition entirely in terms of its evolutionary consequences, so that we can arrive at an ‘objective’ conclusion. But if we take such a step, we may only have to meet with a new behaviour to feel the need to hold such a definition up against a more everyday, ‘normative’ conception that in any case would have guided the originally stipulated definition. The idea that such a ‘normative’ judgement cannot ascribe an entirely natural attribute encourages, not only the ambition, characteristic of epistemological externalism, to free the language used in an ‘objective’ account of cognition from the taint of normativity, but the opposite, neo-Kantian attempt to explain that possibility as allowed by the difference made by the possession of language and articulate rationality. It is true that some such ‘normative’ ascriptions of natural properties may only be appropriate when the subject possesses language, as in the case of a judgement that some person has a natural capacity for mathematics, or is good at spotting invalid arguments. That is not true in general, however, of ascriptions either of intelligence or of knowledge. Some intelligence, at least, and quite a lot of inarticulate knowledge, not least perceptual knowledge, are preconditions of the acquisition of language. It is not the possession of language or culture by the subject that brings normativity into accounts of the mind and cognition. That point, as was seen in Chapter 3, is relevant to the position of John McDowell, further thoughts on whose arguments bring Chapter 6, and the book, to an end. Here the main topic is ‘disjunctivism’, a view invented half a century ago in opposition to causal analyses of the perceptual relation. It is held by disjunctivists that, so far from ‘S perceives X’ being reducible to something on the lines of ‘S is subject to a sensory representational state as of X that is caused in the right kind of way by X’, ‘S is subject to a sensory representational state as of X’ is analysable as something like ‘S is either perceiving X or suffering from an illusion or hallucination as of X’. The point of the proposal is that, in some sense, the perceptual relation is irreducible, as, indeed, I have argued that the knowledge relation is irreducible. Perception of reality 1 To be more precise, the state of affairs that is the ‘truth-maker’ of the proposition that P.

200 Knowing and Seeing is prior to mere ‘appearance’, which is failed perception. (‘Perception first!’, just as Williamson says ‘Knowledge first!’) While that point is wholly consonant with the argument of this book, as a piece of semantic analysis the ‘disjunctive analysis’ is unconvincing. McDowell’s exposition of disjunctivism raises another point, however, comment on which fills out the criticism of his position that was presented in Chapter 3. The gist of this part of his argument, if I understand it, is something like this. We should not think of perception as if the subject has to make a more or less risky inference from a premise about appearance to a conclusion about reality. The disjunctive analysis enables us to avoid this picture, since if the first disjunct is true, our experience constitutes direct cognitive contact with reality—our ‘perceptual state makes a feature of the environment present to [our] rationally self-conscious awareness’—and no risk is involved in simply accepting what the experience gives. Our perceptual judgement is therefore ‘indefeasible’. Whether inadvertently or by design, this move introduces into McDowell’s argument a distinctly ‘externalist’ line of thought and, in particular, an externalist conception of defeasibility that is open to the usual objections. It will be clear that the most significant positive contribution to the argument of this book is made in Chapter 2, with the phenomenological analysis of perceptual content that leads into the distinction between primary and secondary knowledge. That chapter provides much of the basis for further argument, both positive and critical. Hardly less important for that argument, however, is the explanation offered in Part 2 of the relationships between certainty, fallibility, and, taken in the sense most appropriate to epistemology, ‘defeasibility’. The whole argument, I hope, contributes to an understanding of what knowledge is. Another hope, however, is that the reader will be sufficiently impressed by the subject-matter of Chapter 1 to feel that there is truth in the view that, as Stephen Jay Gould has put it, we ‘should study the past for the simplest of reasons–to increase our ‘sample size’ in modes of thought, for we need all the help we can get.’

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Index Action see perception, of acting; sense experience, integration with action Actionability 155–6 Animals 70, 73, 76–8, 81 Argumentation theory 161 see also defeasibility Aristotle 11, 70–1, 87, 93–4 Attention 38 Austin, J.L. 160 Bayne, Tim 50n.32 Belief ambiguity of ‘belief ’ 14n.35 as opposed to knowledge 3–19 objects of 7–8, 15, 95–100 Berkeley 41–2, 43n.16 Blindsight 26, 166–7 Brain in a vat 138–9 Burden of proof 141, 143, 152, see also defeasibility Burthogge, Richard 74n.6 Clark, Austen 48n.26 Coherence theory of knowledge 143 Conceptualism 70–91, 106, 195–6 and rationality 71, 75–6, 78 as transcendental idealism 72 in analytic philosophy 73 objections to 76–8, 82–3 (see also Individuation) origins of 71 see also Individuation and classification; McDowell, John Content, conceptual and perceptual 77–8 Contextualism 152–5 and scepticism 155 high and low stakes 153, 156 objections to 153–7 Criterion of truth 29–31, 74–5 Davidson, Donald 74–5 Defeasibility 152, 157–63 in law 157 in everyday argument 158–60 in epistemology 159–62 of deliverances of the senses 160 of a priori judgement 135–6 and fallibility 162–3, 176, 192 and certainty 162, 193 externalist conceptions of 166, 192–3

and misleading defeaters 80, 150–1, 175–7, 192–3 Descartes 16 Platonism of 8n.14, 17 sceptical argument of 133–7 Direct realism 48, 86, 170, 187–8, 194 Disjunctivism 188 and defeasibility 191 and fallibility 192 and scepticism 189 as semantic analysis 188 Dretske, Fred 169–73 Epicurean epistemology 12 Evans, Gareth 77 Evidence and knowledge 115–18, 147n.22 and propositions 117–19 of necessary truth 63 of the senses 34–5, 62–3 senses of ‘evidence’ 34, 66–7, 115–16, 118–19, 194 Externalism, epistemological assumptions of 165–6, 179, 198 and defeasibility 174, 176, 191 and denial of ‘closure’ 173 and problem of misleading defeaters 177–9, 192–3 and internalism 164 and scepticism 165, 167, 169–73 Facts 75, 95, 97, 99, 113–14, 119, 121–4 see also ‘that S is P’ Faculties, reliability of our 180–3 and ‘reflective knowledge’ 181 and scepticism 169, 173, 189 how known 183, 198–9 Faith 15, 19–22 Fallibilism 145–6, 149 and scepticism 145, 151–2 objections to 145, 151 Fallibility see Infallibility; Defeasibility Fine, Gail 4–5 Foundationalism 144 Frege, Gottlob 73 Gassendi, Pierre 19 Gerson, Lloyd P. 4–5 Gettier, Edmund 4 Guessing 98–9

210 index Hallucination 186–8, 190 Hinge principles 187–8 Hobbes, Thomas 19 Hume, David 22, 53 Hurley, Susan 60 Ideas 16–17, 36n.4 Individuation and classification 86–93 of material objects (‘bottom-up’) 87–9 of ‘modes’ (top down) 91 and compound terms 93–4 and phenomenology of perception 86 of events and states of affairs 123–5 Infallibility 25 distinguished from certainty 144–5 Infants 84, 183 Inference to the best explanation 64–7, 117, 168 Intentional content and object see Phenomenology of perception Kant, Immanuel 72, 94 KK Principle, the 24, 28, 62–3, 115–16, 147n.22 Knowledge agent’s 50–2 and certainty 66–7, 137–8, 145–6, 148–50, 196–7 and normativity 198–9 as irreducible relation 102, 186 as union of subject and object 13–14, 16n.38, 36n.4 background 171–2 by acquaintance 125–8 by description 126–8 causal theories of 165 confirmation of 32, 153, 157 degrees of 19, 31 indefinability of 195 objects of 7–8, 15, 121–4 see also ‘that S is P’ perspicuity of 193–5, see also KK Principle, the; evidence primary and secondary 26, 61–8, 114, 142–3, 155, 185, 195 ‘standard analysis’ of 3–5, 32 why and how 110n.23 (see also understanding) Leibniz, G.W. 18 Locke, John 19–22, 41–2 Malebranche 4 McDowell, John 74–84, 195–6, 200 and direct realism 185–6, 188n.29 on disjunctivism see Disjunctivism compared with Strawson 84 on ‘indefeasible warrant’ 80–1 on ‘perceptual presence’ 76, 79–80, 192–3 on scepticism 190–1 on ‘space of reasons’ 75–6

on perspicuity of perceptual knowledge 81–2, 185–6 second thoughts of 82 Mechanism, corpuscularian 22–4, 52 Memory 64 Memory factual and episodic 106–7, 125–6 Memory 185n.24 Molyneux Problem 41 Multimodal perception see Sense experience, integration of Naturalism 23, 165 see also Externalism Neoplatonist epistemology 13 Noe, Alva 60 O’Callaghan, Casey 48 O’Dea, John 60 Ordinary language and philosophy 95–7 Pain 47n.24 Perception as irreducible relation 185 see also disjunctivism causal theory of 186–7 see also Reliabilism; Externalism controlled exploratory 58 cross-modal, multimodal, amodal see sense experience, integration of of one’s acting 44, 50 of mechanical causality 48–52 of solidity (resistance) 52 of space, as common object of the senses 45, 48, 56 of the causality of perception 53–8 phenomenology of see Phenomenology of perception subliminal 50n.32 Phenomenology of perception 36–9, 86, 104–5 Plato 5–10 analogies of cave and sun 8n.18 and idealism 71 Meno 9 Republic 5–6 Theaetetus 10, 109n.22 Timaeus 24n.73, 25 Plotinus 13 Point of view 37–8, 40–1 Pragmatism 73 Prichard, Duncan 139n.7 Primary and secondary knowledge see knowledge, primary and secondary Primary and secondary qualities 37 Probability relation to certainty and possibility 147 relativity to available evidence 21–2, 118–19, 147–9 see also ‘Fallibilism’

index Propositions 97, 100, 103–4 see also ‘that S is P’ Proprioception 41, 43, 61 Quine, W.V.O. 74 Reason, illusions of 146–7, 149 Recognition 64, 76–7, 82, 107, 140, 168, 171 Reference 97–8, 101–3 Reliabilism, objections to 167–8, 173, see also Externalism Ryle, Gilbert 106–7 Scepticism ‘Cartesian’ argument for 133 about our faculties 180–3 about the past 136–7, 174–5 ancient 12, 29 and burden of proof 193, 197–8 see also Defeasibility and coherence theory of knowledge 143–4 and the ‘external view’ 142 appealing to ‘unknown unknowns’ 140–1 appealing to facts 138–9, 174–5 appealing to fantasy 140, 142, 174–5 illusory force of 134–6, 190–1 Sedley, David 9–10 Sellars, Wilfred 75–6 Sense experience authority of 34 see also Defeasibility integration of 40–5 integration with action 42, 44

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limitations of 36–9 objects and content of see Phenomenology of perception qualitative character of 35, 48n.26, 62 Sosa, Ernest 181 Space of reasons, the 75–6, 195–6 Spinoza, Baruch 17–18 Stoic epistemology 12–13 Strawson, Peter 73, 84 Stroud, Barry 142, 160n.38 Testimony 184 ‘that S is P’ as nominalized sentence 96, 99–100 as object of ‘believe’ 97, 100 as object of ‘know’ 97–9, 102, 116, 121–8, 171 as object of ‘recognize’ and ‘understand’ 107 as object of verbs of perception 104–5, 110–12, 171 Thomas Aquinas 14 Truths 99 Understanding 63–4, 78–9, 107, 110n.23 Vendler, Zeno 8 Weiskrantz, Lawrence 166n.3 Wiggins, David 89–90 Williamson, Timothy 95, 99–100, 102, 106, 111n.25, 115–19, 125–6 Wright, Crispin 187–8, 191–2