FINAL DRAFT – 6/1/2001
Metaskepticism: Meditations in Ethno-Epistemology[1]
Throughout the 20th century, an enormous
amount of intellectual fuel was spent debating the merits of a class of
skeptical arguments which purport to show that knowledge of the external world
is not possible. These arguments, whose
origins can be traced back to Descartes, played an important role in the work
of some of the leading philosophers of the 20th century, including
Russell, Moore and Wittgenstein, and they continue to engage the interest of
contemporary philosophers. (e.g., Cohen 1999, DeRose 1995, Hill 1996, Klein
1981, Lewis 1996, McGinn 1993, Nozick 1981, Schiffer 1996, Unger 1975, Williams
1996) Typically, these arguments make
use of one or more premises which the philosophers proposing them take to be
intuitively obvious. Beyond an appeal
to intuition, little or no defense is offered, and in many cases it is hard to
see what else could be said in support of these premises. A number of authors have suggested that the
intuitions undergirding these skeptical arguments are universal – shared
by everyone (or almost everyone) who thinks reflectively about knowledge. In this paper we will offer some evidence
indicating that they are far from universal. Rather, the evidence suggests that many of the intuitions
epistemologists invoke vary with the cultural background, socio-economic status
and educational background of the person offering the intuition. And this, we will argue, is bad news for the
skeptical arguments that rely on those intuitions. The evidence may also be bad news for skepticism itself – not
because it shows that skepticism is false, but rather because, if we
accept one prominent account of the link between epistemic intuitions and
epistemic concepts, it indicates that skepticism may be much less interesting
and much less worrisome than philosophers have taken it to be.
Here’s how we propose to proceed. In Section 1, we’ll begin by characterizing
and offering a few examples of the sorts of skeptical arguments that are the
targets of our critique. We will also
assemble a few quotes from leading philosophers which suggest that they think
the intuitions on which the arguments rely are, near enough, universal. In Section 2, we’ll present some evidence
indicating that intuitions of the sort that have loomed large in the
philosophical literature for the last forty years vary systematically with
culture and socio-economic status. The
examples we’ll focus on in Section 2 typically do not play a role in skeptical
arguments, and it might be suggested that intuitions which do play a role in skeptical arguments are less subject
to cultural variation. Indeed, it might
be thought that they form part of a universal core of epistemic intuitions. We think the hypothesis that there is such a
universal core deserves to be explored seriously, and in Section 3 we will
present some evidence that is compatible with that hypothesis. However, as we’ll show in Section 4, there
is good reason to think that if there is a universal core, it does not include
a number of the intuitions that play a central role in skeptical
arguments. In Section 5, we’ll
argue that the evidence we’ve presented suggests that the appeal of skeptical
arguments is culturally local and that this fact justifies a kind of
“meta-skepticism” since it suggests that crucial premises in the arguments for
skepticism are not to be trusted. We’ll
also take up one possible response to our argument for meta-skepticism. This response maintains that differences in
epistemic intuitions are evidence for differences in epistemic concepts. If that’s right, then the fact that people
in other cultures don’t share our skeptical intuitions does not cast any doubt
on the truth of our intuitions, since their intuitions aren’t really about what
we call ‘knowledge’ at all. But this
response, we’ll argue, engenders another kind of meta-skepticism. For while it may fend off the challenge to
the premises of skeptical arguments, it raises serious doubts about the
importance of the conclusions.
1. Skeptical Arguments,
Skeptical Intuitions and Universality
The kind of skeptical
argument on which we’ll be focusing might be called Cartesian.[2] These arguments rely essentially on
an intuition that we do not, or perhaps even cannot, know that some skeptical
hypothesis does not obtain.[3] What makes the hypothesis skeptical is that
its truth is inconsistent with some propositions we ordinarily would take
ourselves to know, although the hypothesis seems to be consistent with all our
evidence for those propositions. The
intuition serves as a major premise in a skeptical argument to the effect that
we do not, or perhaps even cannot, have knowledge of the propositions that we
ordinarily take ourselves to have. The ur-example of the sort of skeptical
hypothesis we have in mind is the evil genius of Meditations I, while in
contemporary epistemology the most widely discussed example may be the
brain-in-vat hypothesis discussed below.
We’ll use the term skeptical intuition for an intuition that we
do not know the falsity of such a skeptical hypothesis. We believe that these
skeptical intuitions are the driving force behind the modern concern with this
brand of skepticism.[4]
An example of the sort of skeptical argument we have in mind is stated with characteristic succinctness by Stephen Schiffer.
(1) I don’t
know that I’m not a BIV (i.e., a bodiless brain in a vat who has been caused to
have just those sensory experiences I’ve had).
(2) If I
don’t know that I’m not a BIV, then I don’t know that I have hands.
_______________________
(3) I don’t
know that I have hands (Schiffer 1996, 317; numbering added).
Schiffer
does not pause to offer any reasons to accept either of the premises,
presumably because he thinks they are intuitively obvious. Keith DeRose, in his discussion of the
argument, is only slightly more forthcoming.
To convince us of the plausibility of the premises of the BIV argument,
DeRose rephrases the premises and adds a pair of rhetorical questions aimed at
bringing out the intuition that the premises are obviously true.
[H]owever improbable or even bizarre it may seem to
suppose that I am a BIV, it also seems that I don’t know that I’m not one. How could I know such a thing?…. [I]t also seems that if, for all I know, I
am a BIV, then I don’t know that I have hands.
How could I know that I have hands if, for all I know, I’m bodiless (and
therefore handless)? (DeRose 1995, p.
2.)
Elsewhere,
DeRose’s appeal to intuition is more explicit.
In the Introduction to a collection of essays on skepticism, he
sketches the Argument from Skeptical Hypothesis as follows:
1. I don’t know that not-H.
2. If I don’t know that not-H, then I don’t know
that O
So,
C. I don’t know that O.
And
he goes on to say that “the skeptical argument really is powerful… The argument
is clearly valid… and each of its premises, considered on its own, enjoys a
good deal of intuitive support” (DeRose 1999, 2-3; emphasis added).
The following passage from Stewart Cohen (1999) provides another example of the sort of skeptical argument we have in mind. It is also a clear illustration of the central role that appeal to intuition has played in recent discussions of skepticism.
Suppose, to use Dretske’s example, that you are at the zoo looking at
the Zebra exhibit. Consider the
possibility that what you see is not a zebra but rather a cleverly-disguised
mule. Though you may have some reason
to deny you are looking at a cleverly-disguised mule, it seems wrong to say you
know you are not looking at a cleverly-disguised mule. After all, that’s just how it would look if
it were a cleverly disguised mule.
The skeptic then appeals to
a deductive closure principle for knowledge:
(C) If S knows P and S knows
that P entails Q, then S knows Q.
This principle has considerable intuitive force. Now, let P be some proposition I claim to know and let H be a
skeptical alternative to P. Then from
the closure principle, we can derive
(1) If I know P, then I know
not-H
Put this together with
(2) I do not know not-H
and it follows that
(3) I know P.
is false….
To
respond to the deductive closure argument, a fallibilist must deny either
premise (1) or premise (2). The
problem … is that both of these premises are intuitively quite appealing. Then again, many instances of (3), the
denial of the conclusion of the argument, seem intuitively compelling. This has led some to argue that we can
reject one premise of the skeptical argument by appealing to the conjunction of
(3) and the other premise. Some
proponents of the relevant alternatives theory argue that our strong intuitions
supporting (2) and (3) just show that (1) (and therefore the closure principle)
is false. As Dretske has argued, the
fact that it is very intuitive both that I know that I see a zebra, and that I
fail to know I do not see a cleverly-disguised mule just shows that the closure
principle is false.…. Each view we have considered attempts to exploit
intuitions favorable to it. The skeptic
appeals to (1) and (2) to deny (3). The
relevant alternatives theorist appeals to (2) and (3) to deny (1). And the Moorean appeals to (1) and (3) to
deny (2). (Cohen 1999, 62,
emphasis added).
In
the philosophical literature on skepticism, it is often suggested that both
skeptical intuitions and the skeptical conclusions they apparently entail are
universally shared. In The
Significance of Philosophical Skepticism, Barry Stroud maintains that
skepticism
appeals to something deep in our nature and seems to raise a real problem about the human condition. It is natural to feel that either we must accept the literal truth of the conclusion that we can know nothing about the world around us, or else we must somehow show that it is not true (Stroud 1984, 39).
Similarly, Colin McGinn takes
skepticism to be a universal feature lurking in human thought:
Common
sense takes knowledge to be both possible and widespread, simply part of
life. People (and some animals) are
assumed to know a great many things across a broad range of subject-matters…
But it takes very little reflection, or prompting, to cast all this into
serious doubt: we quickly come to feel
that the concept lacks the kind of broad and ready application we earlier took
for granted. Skeptical thoughts occur
readily and with considerable force, soon leading us to declare that, after
all, we know little or nothing. The
concept strikes us as containing the seeds of its own destruction, by requiring
the satisfaction of conditions that are palpably unsatisfied. Ontogenetically, the concept of knowledge
comes into play during the first three or four years, but it is apt to lose its
moorings during adolescence, when reflection intrudes. Then it is commonly asserted, with the air
of the platitudinous, that of course nobody ever really knows
anything. How could they, given the
content of the concept and the facts of epistemic life? Philosophical scepticism thus seems endemic
to the use of epistemic concepts: to
reflect on the concept of knowledge is immediately to question its
application. Not surprisingly, then,
scepticism arose early in the history of philosophical thought and has
continued to exercise a powerful hold on it.
I hazard the anthropological conjecture that every culture has its
sceptics, silent though they may be.
There is something primitive and inevitable about sceptical doubt. It runs deep in human thought. The question
is whether it can be overcome, and by what means (McGinn 1993, 107-8).
McGinn not only thinks that skepticism is “primitive and
inevitable” he also claims that the skeptical challenge is so overwhelming that
we must be cognitively incapable of finding a satisfactory reply. (1993; see also Nagel 1986).[5] Clearly, many philosophers think that the epistemic intuitions that underlie
skeptical arguments are widely shared, and this is an important part of the
reason that the skeptical arguments are supposed to have such an enduring
importance.
2.
Epistemology as Ethnography
One of us has long been intrigued by the possibility
that different groups of people might have very different epistemic
intuitions (Stich, 1988, 1990), and a few years ago we learned of two research
projects in cross-cultural psychology which suggested that systematic diversity
in epistemic intuitions was more than a mere possibility. In one of these projects, Richard Nisbett
and his collaborators (Nisbett, 2001) have found large and systematic
differences between East Asians and Westerners[6]
on a long list of quite basic cognitive processes including perception,
attention and memory. These groups also
differ in the way they go about describing, predicting and explaining events,
in the way they categorize objects and in the way they revise beliefs in the
face of new arguments and evidence.
Nisbett and his colleagues maintain that these differences “can be
loosely grouped together under the heading of holistic vs. analytic
thought.” Holistic thought, which
predominates among East Asians, is characterized as “involving an orientation
to the context or field as a whole, including attention to relationships between
a focal object and the field, and a preference for explaining and predicting
events on the basis of such relationships.”
Analytic thought, the prevailing pattern among Westerners, is
characterized as “involving detachment of the object from its context, a
tendency to focus on attributes of the object in order to assign it to
categories, and a preference for using rules about the categories to explain
and predict the object’s behavior.” (Nisbett et al. 2001, p. 293) Westerners also have a stronger sense of
agency and independence, while East Asians have a much stronger commitment to
social harmony. In East Asian society,
the individual feels “very much a part of a large and complex social organism …
where behavioral prescriptions must be followed and role obligations adhered to
scrupulously.” (Nisbett et al. 2001, pp. 292-293) As a result of these differences, Nisbett and his colleagues
maintain, there is considerable cultural variation in the epistemic
practices in these two cultural traditions – people in the two cultures
form beliefs and categories, construct arguments, and draw inferences in
significantly different ways. Of
course, this does not show that there are also cross-cultural differences in
epistemic intuitions. But it
does suggest that it is a serious empirical possibility, and that it might be
worth finding out whether these differences in epistemic practices are
associated with parallel differences in epistemic intuitions.
The second research project that attracted our
attention looked explicitly at intuitions, though they were moral rather
than epistemic intuitions. In an
intriguing series of studies, Jonathan Haidt and his collaborators explored the extent to which moral
intuitions about events in which no one is harmed track judgments about disgust
in people from different cultural and socioeconomic groups (Haidt et al.
1993). For their study they
constructed a set of brief stories about victimless activities that were
intended to trigger the emotion of disgust.
They presented these stories to subjects using a structured interview
technique designed to determine whether the subjects found the activities
described to be disgusting and also to elicit the subjects’ moral intuitions
about the activities. For instance, in
one story, a family’s dog is run over and killed by a car, and the family
decides to eat the dog. The interviews
were administered to both high and low socio-economic status (SES) subjects in
Philadelphia and in two cities in Brazil.
Though the cultural differences were relatively small, Haidt and
colleagues found large differences in moral intuitions between social
classes. Low-SES subjects tend to think
that eating your dog is seriously morally wrong; high SES subjects don’t. Much the same pattern was found with the
other scenarios used in the study.
Though neither of these studies directly addresses
the issue of group differences in epistemic intuition, the results they
reported led us to think that the following pair of hypotheses might well be
true:
Hypothesis 1: Epistemic intuitions vary from culture to culture.
Hypothesis 2: Epistemic intuitions vary from one socioeconomic group to
another.
Another
hypothesis was suggested by anecdotal rather than experimental evidence. It has
often seemed to us that students’ epistemic intuitions change as they take more
philosophy courses, and we have often suspected that we and our colleagues
were, in effect, teaching neophyte philosophers to have intuitions that are in
line with those of more senior members of the profession. Or perhaps we are not modifying intuitions
at all but simply weeding out students whose intuitions are not
mainstream. If either of these is the
case, then the intuitions that we use in our philosophical work are not those
of the man and woman in the street, but those of a highly trained and
self-selecting community. These
speculations led to:
Hypothesis 3: Epistemic intuitions vary
as a function of how many philosophy courses a person has had.
For the last two years, we have been conducting a series
of experiments designed to test these hypotheses. In
designing our experiments, we wanted our intuition probes – the cases that we
would ask subjects to judge – to be similar to cases that have actually been
used in the recent literature in epistemology.
Would different groups show significantly different responses to
standard epistemic thought experiments?
The answer, it seems, is yes. While the results we have so far are
preliminary, they are sufficient, we think, to suggest that there are
substantial and systematic differences in the epistemic intuitions of people in
different cultures and socioeconomic groups.
In Weinberg, Nichols & Stich
(forthcoming), we present a detailed account of our studies and results. For present purposes, it will suffice to
sketch a few of the highlights.
The
internalism/externalism debate has been central to analytic epistemology for
decades. Internalism with respect to some
epistemically evaluative property (e.g., knowledge) is the view that only factors within an agent’s
introspective grasp can be relevant to whether the agent’s beliefs have that
property. Other factors beyond the
scope of introspection, such as the reliability of the psychological mechanisms
that actually produced the belief, are epistemically external to the
agent. In our experiments, we included
a number of “Truetemp” cases inspired
by Lehrer (1990), designed to explore whether externalist/internalist dimensions
of our subjects’ intuitions differed in subjects with different cultural
backgrounds. Here is one of the
questions we presented to our subjects:
One day Charles is
suddenly knocked out by a falling rock, and his brain becomes re–wired so that
he is always absolutely right whenever he estimates the temperature where he
is. Charles is completely unaware that his brain has been altered in this way.
A few weeks later, this brain re–wiring leads him to believe that it is 71
degrees in his room. Apart from his estimation, he has no other reasons to
think that it is 71 degrees. In fact, it is at that time 71 degrees in his
room. Does Charles really know that it was 71 degrees in the room, or does he
only believe it?
REALLY KNOWS ONLY BELIEVES
In this intuition probe, Charles’ belief is produced by a reliable mechanism, but it is stipulated that he is completely unaware of this reliability. This makes his reliability epistemically external. Therefore, to the extent that a subject population is unwilling to attribute knowledge in this case, we have evidence that suggests that the group’s ‘folk epistemology’ is internalist. Since the mechanism that leads to Charles’ belief is not shared by other members of his community, Nisbett’s work suggests that East Asians (EAs), with their strong commitment to social harmony, might be less inclined than individualistic Westerners (Ws) to count Charles’ belief as knowledge. And, indeed, we found that while both EAs and W tended to deny knowledge, EA subjects were much more likely to deny knowledge than were Ws (Fisher Exact Test, p = .02). The results are shown in Figure 1.[7]
Another category of examples that has had a
tremendous impact on analytic epistemology are “Gettier cases,” in which a
person has a true belief for which she has good evidence, though, as it
happens, the evidence is false, or only accidentally true, or in some other way
warrant-deprived. By their very
construction, these cases are in many ways quite similar to
unproblematic cases in which a person has good and true evidence for a true belief. Nisbett and his colleagues have shown that
EAs are more inclined than Ws to make categorical judgments on the basis of
similarity; Ws, on the other hand, are
more disposed to focus on causation in describing the world and classifying
things. (Norenzayan, Nisbett, Smith, & Kim 1999; Watanabe 1998 & 1999).
In many Gettier cases, there is a break in the causal link from the fact
that makes the agent’s belief true to her evidence for that belief. This suggests that EAs might be much less
inclined than Ws to withhold the attribution of knowledge in Gettier
cases. And, indeed, they are.
The intuition probe we used to explore cultural
differences on Gettier cases was the following:
Bob has a friend, Jill,
who has driven a Buick for many years.
Bob therefore thinks that Jill drives an American car. He is not aware, however, that her Buick has
recently been stolen, and he is also not aware that Jill has replaced it with a
Pontiac, which is a different kind of American car. Does Bob really know that Jill drives an American car, or does he
only believe it?
REALLY KNOWS ONLY BELIEVES
This probe produced a striking difference between the groups (Fisher Exact Test, p = .006). While a large majority of Ws give the standard answer in the philosophical literature, viz. “Only Believes,” a majority of EAs have the opposite intuition – they said that Bob really knows. The results are shown in Figure 2.
The data we’ve presented so far suggests that
Westerners and East Asians have significantly different epistemic
intuitions. What about people in other
cultures? We know of no experimental
studies of cross cultural differences in epistemic practices that are as
rich and detailed as those of Nisbett and his colleagues. However, for some years Richard Shweder and
his colleagues have been assembling evidence indicating that the thought
processes of some groups of people on the Indian sub-continent are quite
different from those of Westerners. (Shweder, 1991) In some respects, the account of Indian thought that Shweder
offers is rather similar to the account that Nisbett offers of East Asian
thought – holism looms large in both accounts – though in other respects they
are quite different. So one might
suspect that the epistemic intuitions of people from the Indian sub-continent
(SCs) would be in some ways similar to those of EAs. And indeed they are. Like
the EA subjects, SC subjects were much more likely than W subjects to attribute
knowledge in a Gettier case (Fisher Exact Test, p = .002). The SC results on the Gettier case are shown
in Figure 3.
When we first analyzed these data, we found them
quite unsettling, since it seemed perfectly obvious to us that the people in
Gettier cases don’t have knowledge.
But the results from our studies suggest that an important part of the
explanation of our own clear intuitions about these cases is the fact that we
were raised in a Western culture.
Nisbett was likewise surprised by his findings of cross-cultural
differences in epistemic practices. In
a recent review article, Nisbett and colleagues write:
Almost two decades ago, Richard E. Nisbett wrote a book with Lee Ross entitled, modestly, Human Inference (Nisbett & Ross, 1980). Roy D’Andrade, a distinguished cognitive anthropologist, read the book and told … Nisbett he thought it was a “good ethnography.” The author was shocked and dismayed. But we now wholeheartedly agree with D’Andrade’s contention about the limits of research conducted in a single culture. Psychologists who choose not to do cross-cultural psychology may have chosen to be ethnographers instead (Nisbett et al. 2001, p. 307).
Our results suggest that
philosophers who rely on their own intuitions about matters epistemic, and those
of their colleagues, may have inadvertently made a similar choice. They too have chosen to be ethnographers;
what they are doing is ethno-epistemology.
3. The Core Epistemology Hypothesis
If epistemic intuitions are indeed culturally local, it poses a threat to the claim that skepticism is “primitive and inevitable.” For to the extent that Western skepticism relies on culturally local intuitions, its appeal will also be culturally local. But the evidence reported in Section 2 poses only an indirect threat to arguments for skepticism, for while that evidence indicates that some epistemic intuitions may be culturally local, we have not yet offered any evidence about the sort of skeptical intuitions that play a crucial role in arguments for skepticism. Philosophers who think that skepticism’s appeal is universal might suggest that while Gettier intuitions and Truetemp intuitions are culturally local, skeptical intuitions are less variable. Indeed, for all we have said, skeptical intuitions might be part of a universal core of epistemic intuitions, a core shared by just about everyone.
The hypothesis that there may be a core set of universal epistemic intuitions is one that we think deserves careful empirical scrutiny. In our own studies, we found that on one crucial probe, there were no statistically significant differences among any of the groups we looked at. For all of our subject groups we included a question designed to determine whether subjects treat mere subjective certainty as knowledge. The question we used was the following:
Dave likes to play a game
with flipping a coin. He sometimes gets a “special feeling” that the next flip
will come out heads. When he gets this “special feeling”, he is right about
half the time, and wrong about half the time. Just before the next flip, Dave
gets that “special feeling”, and the feeling leads him to believe that the coin
will land heads. He flips the coin, and it does land heads. Did Dave really
know that the coin was going to land heads, or did he only believe it?
REALLY KNOWS ONLY BELIEVES
As
shown in Figure 4, there was no significant difference between the Western and
East Asian subjects on this question (Fisher Exact Test, p = .78); similarly,
in our studies of socio-economic groups, we found no difference on this
question between high and low SES groups (Fisher Exact Test, p = .294). [8] In all groups almost none of our subjects
judged that this was a case of knowledge.
Though
obviously much more research is needed, these results are compatible with the
hypothesis that some epistemic intuitions are universal.
4. The
Ethnography of Skeptical Intuitions
If
there is a universal core of epistemic intuitions, are skeptical intuitions
among them? In this section we’ll offer
evidence suggesting that, for some skeptical intuitions at least, the answer is no”. In
section 2, we set out three hypotheses about potential sources of diversity in
epistemic intuitions. We proposed that
epistemic intuitions might vary as a function of culture, SES,
and philosophical training. Data
we have recently collected indicates that skeptical intuitions vary as a
function of all of these factors.
We
will begin with the data on different SES groups. For these studies, the experimenter approached adults near
various commercial venues in downtown New Brunswick, New Jersey, and offered
adults a fast food restaurant gift certificate for participating in the
study. Following Haidt (and much other
research in social psychology), we used years of education to distinguish low and
high SES groups. One of the probes
given to these subjects was based on the example from Fred Dretske’s work that
Cohen mentions in the passage we quoted earlier.
Pat is at the zoo with his son,
and when they come to the zebra cage, Pat points to the animal and says,
“that’s a zebra.” Pat is right –– it is a zebra. However, given the distance
the spectators are from the cage, Pat would not be able to tell the difference
between a real zebra and a mule that is cleverly disguised to look like a
zebra. And if the animal had really been a cleverly disguised mule, Pat still
would have thought that it was a zebra. Does Pat really know that the animal is
a zebra, or does he only believe that it is?
REALLY KNOWS ONLY BELIEVES
Although
a majority of both groups maintained that Pat “only believes,” Low SES subjects
were significantly more likely to say that Pat “really knows” (Fisher Exact
Test, p = .038). The results are shown
in Figure 5.
This
finding suggests that there is an important difference in the extent to which
skeptical intuitions can be found in different SES groups. One possible explanation of this difference
is that high SES subjects are willing to accept much weaker
“knowledge-defeaters” than low SES subjects because low SES subjects have lower
minimum standards for knowledge. This
explanation is supported by another result we obtained. We presented low and high SES subjects with
a scenario in which a person has a true belief, though the evidence he relied
on might have been fabricated. The
probe goes as follows:
It’s clear that smoking
cigarettes increases the likelihood of getting cancer. However, there is now a great deal of
evidence that just using nicotine by itself without smoking (for instance, by
taking a nicotine pill) does not increase the likelihood of getting
cancer. Jim knows about this evidence
and as a result, he believes that using nicotine does not increase the
likelihood of getting cancer. It is
possible that the tobacco companies dishonestly made up and publicized this
evidence that using nicotine does not increase the likelihood of cancer, and
that the evidence is really false and misleading. Now, the tobacco companies did not actually make up this
evidence, but Jim is not aware of this fact.
Does Jim really know that using nicotine doesn’t increase the likelihood
of getting cancer, or does he only believe it?
REALLY KNOWS ONLY BELIEVES
Once
again, we found that responses vary significantly as a function of SES (Fisher
Exact Test, p = .007). The results are shown in Figure 6.
These
data, like the data in Figure 5, indicate that there are significant
differences between SES groups in their tendencies toward skeptical intuitions,
and both findings are compatible with the hypothesis that high SES groups
cleave to higher minimum standards of knowledge than low SES groups.
In our cross-cultural studies, we
presented students with another variant of Dretske’s zebra case:
Mike is a young man
visiting the zoo with his son, and when they come to the zebra cage, Mike
points to the animal and says, “that’s a zebra.” Mike is right –– it is a zebra.
However, as the older people in his community know, there are lots of
ways that people can be tricked into believing things that aren’t true. Indeed, the older people in the community
know that it’s possible that zoo authorities could cleverly disguise mules to
look just like zebras, and people viewing the animals would not be able to tell
the difference. If the animal that Mike
called a zebra had really been such a cleverly painted mule, Mike still would
have thought that it was a zebra. Does
Mike really know that the animal is a zebra, or does he only believe that it
is?
REALLY KNOWS ONLY
BELIEVES
Using this probe, we found a significant difference between Western and Subcontinental subjects. (Fisher Exact Test, p = .049) (Figure 7).
One possible explanation of
these data is that SCs, like low SES Westerners, regard knowledge as less
demanding than do High SES Westerners.
And in fact we found that SC subjects were also more likely than Ws to
attribute knowledge in the conspiracy case (Fisher Exact Test, p = .025). The results are shown in
Figure 8.
SC
and Low SES subjects thus appear to be significantly less susceptible to
skeptical intuitions, at least in these cases.
These findings contrast sharply with our evidence on EAs. We
did not find significant differences between EAs and High SES Ws on
either the Zebra case or the Conspiracy case.[9]
In section 2, we proposed, as our
third hypothesis, that epistemic intuitions might vary as a function of the
number of philosophy courses one had taken.
Though no data relevant to this third hypothesis was presented in our
earlier paper on epistemic intuitions (Weinberg, et al., forthcoming) we have
recently completed a study that provides some support for this hypothesis. In that study we presented subjects with a
series of epistemic intuition probes, and we divided the subjects into two
groups: subjects who had taken few philosophy courses (2 or less) and subjects
who had taken many philosophy courses (3 or more). There were 48 students in the “low philosophy” group and 15 in
the “high philosophy” group. One of the
probes we presented was a Brain-in-a-vat scenario. The probe reads as follows:
George
and Omar are roommates, and enjoy having late-night ‘philosophical’
discussions. One such night Omar
argues, “At some point in time, by, like, the year 2300, the medical and
computer sciences will be able to simulate the real world very convincingly. They will be able to grow a brain without a
body, and hook it up to a supercomputer in just the right way so that the brain
has experiences exactly as if it were a real person walking around in a real
world, talking to other people, and so on.
And so the brain would believe it was a real person walking around in a
real world, etc., except that it would be wrong – it’s just stuck in a virtual
world, with no actual legs to walk and with no other actual people to talk
to. And here’s the thing: how could you
ever tell that it isn’t really the year 2300 now, and that you’re not really a
virtual-reality brain? If you were a
virtual-reality brain, after all, everything would look and feel exactly the
same to you as it does now!”
George
thinks for a minute, and then replies: “But, look, here are my legs”. He points down to his legs. “If I were a virtual-reality brain, I
wouldn’t have any legs really – I’d only really be just a disembodied
brain. But I know I have legs – just
look at them! – so I must be a real person, and not a virtual-reality brain,
because only real people have real legs.
So I’ll continue to believe that I’m not a virtual-reality brain.”
George
and Omar are actually real humans in the actual real world today, and so
neither of them are virtual-reality brains, which means that George’s belief is
true. But does George know that he is
not a virtual-reality brain, or does he only believe it?
REALLY KNOWS ONLY
BELIEVES
We
found a quite significant difference between Low & High Philosophy groups
on this probe (Fisher Exact Test, p = .016).
The evidence indicates that
students with less philosophy are more likely to claim that the person knows
he’s not a brain in a vat. The results are presented in figure 9.
This
suggests that the propensity for skeptical intuitions varies significantly as a
function of exposure to philosophy.
Indeed, so far this skeptical intuition case is the only probe on
which we have found significant differences between students as a function of
how many philosophy classes they have had.
5.
Some Meta-Skeptical Conclusions
What
conclusions can be drawn from these studies?
The first and most obvious conclusion is that, though the empirical
exploration of epistemic intuitions, and of philosophical intuitions more
generally, is still in its infancy, the evidence currently available suggests
that all three of our initial hypotheses may well be true. Epistemic intuitions, including skeptical
intuitions, appear to vary systematically as a function of the cultural
background, the socio-economic status
and the number of philosophy courses taken by the person whose intuitions are
being elicited. We want to emphasize
that all the results we have reported should be regarded as quite preliminary. To make a suitably rich and compelling case
for our hypotheses, it will be important to replicate and extend the findings
we have reported. But our data thus far
certainly lend support to the claim that there is a great deal of diversity in
epistemic intuitions, and that a substantial part of that diversity is due to
differences in cultural background, SES and philosophical training.
If
that’s right, and if, as we contended in section 1, the defense of many of the
premises used in arguments for skepticism comes to rest on an explicit or
implicit appeal to intuition, then we can also conclude that the appeal of
these skeptical arguments will be much more local than many philosophers
suppose. For if people in different
cultural and SES groups and people who have had little or no philosophical
training do not share “our” intuitions (i.e. the intuitions of the
typical analytic philosopher who is white, Western, high SES and has had lots
of philosophical training) then they are unlikely to be as convinced or
distressed as “we” are by arguments whose premises seem plausible only
if one has the intuitions common in our very small cultural and intellectual
tribe. Pace McGinn’s
“anthropological conjecture,” skepticism is neither primitive nor
inevitable. And pace Stroud
there is no reason to think that skepticism “appeals to something deep in our
nature.” Rather, it seems, its appeal
is very much a product of our culture, our social status and our
education!
We do not, of course, deny that some people
(ourselves included!) find it very hard to loosen the grip of skeptical
intuitions. Along with most high SES
Western philosophers, we find many skeptical intuitions to be obvious and
compelling. However, we are inclined to
think that the lesson to be drawn from our cross-cultural studies is that,
however obvious they may seem, these intuitions are simply not to be
trusted. If the epistemic intuitions of
people in different groups disagree, they can’t all be true. The fact that epistemic intuitions vary
systematically with culture and SES indicates that these intuitions are caused
(in part) by culturally local phenomena.
And there is no reason to think that the culturally local phenomena that
cause our intuitions track the truth any better than the culturally
local phenomena that cause intuitions that differ from ours. Our predicament is in some ways analogous to
the predicament of a person who is raised in a homogeneous and deeply religious
culture and finds the truth of certain religious claims to be obvious or
compelling. When such a person
discovers that other people do not share his intuitions, he may well come to
wonder why his intuitions are any more likely to be true than theirs. On second thought, our situation is a bit
worse. The religious person might rest
content with the thought that, for some reason or other God has chosen to cause
his group to have religious intuitions that track the truth. Few philosophers will rest content with the
parallel thought about their epistemic intuitions.
We are not, we should stress, defending a
generalized skepticism that challenges the use of all intuitions in
philosophy. Rather, our skepticism is
focused on those intuitions that differ systematically from one social group to
another. There is, of course, a sense
in which the philosophical literature on skepticism also supports the
conclusion that some of our epistemic intuitions are not to be trusted, since,
as the quote from Cohen in Section 1 illustrates, much of that literature is
devoted to showing that our epistemic intuitions appear to support a logically
inconsistent set of propositions, and to arguing about which of these
intuitions should be ignored. But our
findings raise a quite different problem.
For even if some individual or group had a completely consistent set of
intuitions, the fact that these intuitions are determined, to a significant
degree, by one’s cultural, SES and educational background, and the fact that
people in other groups have systematically different intuitions, raises the
question of why the folks who have these consistent intuitions should trust any
of them.
One way in which a philosopher might resist our contention that the systematic cultural variation in epistemic intuitions indicates that these intuitions are not to be trusted would be to argue that intuitive differences of the sort that we’ve reported are an indication that the people offering the intuitions have different epistemic concepts. In his recent book, From Metaphysics to Ethics, Frank Jackson clearly endorses the view that people whose epistemic intuitions differ on philosophically important cases should be counted as having different epistemic concepts.
I have occasionally run across people who resolutely resist the Gettier cases. Sometimes it has seemed right to accuse them of confusion… but sometimes it is clear that they are not confused; what we then learn from the stand-off is simply that they use the word ‘knowledge’ to cover different cases from most of us. In these cases it is, it seems to me, misguided to accuse them of error (unless they go on to say that their concept of knowledge is ours). (Jackson, 1998, 32)
So
for Jackson, (unconfused) East Asians or Indians who insist that the people
described in Gettier cases do have knowledge are not disagreeing with
those of us who think they don’t.
Rather, they are simply using the term ‘knowledge’ to express a
different concept. And, in all
likelihood, an East Asian or Indian is right to insist that (as he uses
the term) people in Gettier cases do have knowledge, just as, in all likelihood, we are
right to insist that (as we use the term), they don’t. Though Jackson focuses on the example of
Gettier cases, we think it is clear that he would say much the same about
people who react differently to the sorts of skeptical intuition probes
discussed in section 4. Those people,
too, if they are not simply confused, should be viewed as having different
epistemic concepts. Thus there is no
real disagreement between people who react differently to skeptical intuition
probes, and in all likelihood their intuitions are all true.
There
is, of course, a substantial literature on concepts and concept individuation
(see, for example, Margolis & Laurence, 1999), and many of the leading
contributors to that literature would strongly disagree with Jackson’s claim
that people who have different intuitions about Gettier cases have different
concepts of knowledge. (See, for example, Fodor 1998) We have no allegiance to
any theory of concepts or to any account of concept individuation. But we think it is of considerable interest to
simply assume, for argument’s
sake, that
Jackson is right, and to ask what follows.
One important consequence of this
assumption is that it undermines our attempt to argue from the results of our
cross cultural studies of epistemic intuition to the conclusion that those
intuitions are not to be trusted.
Crucial to our argument was the claim that, since epistemic intuitions
of people in different groups disagree, they can’t all be true. But if Jackson is right about concepts, then
our subjects are not really disagreeing at all; they are simply using the word
‘knowledge’ (or ‘know’) to express different concepts. So their intuitively supported claims about
knowledge (or, to be more precise, about what they call ‘knowledge’),
including those claims used in arguments for skepticism, can all be
true, and as Jackson would have it, in all likelihood they are.
But while Jackson’s account of
concept individuation makes it easier to maintain that the premises of
skeptical arguments are true, it makes it harder to see why the conclusions of
those arguments are interesting or worrisome.
To see the point, we need only note that, if Jackson is right about
concepts and if we are right about the influence of culture, SES and
philosophical training on epistemic intuitions, then it follows that the term
‘knowledge’ is used to express lots of concepts. East Asians, Indians and High SES Westerners
all have different concepts; High and Low SES Westerners have different
concepts; people who have studied lots of philosophy and people who have
studied no philosophy have different concepts.
And that, no doubt, is just the tip of the iceberg. Moreover, these concepts don’t simply differ
in intension, they differ in extension – they apply to different
classes of actual and possible cases.
In the philosophical tradition, skepticism is taken
to be worrisome because it denies that knowledge is possible, and that’s bad
because knowledge, it is assumed, is something very important. On Plato’s view, “wisdom and knowledge are
the highest of human things,” (Plato (1892/1937, 352) and many people, both
philosophers and ordinary folk, would agree.
But obviously, if there are many concepts of knowledge, and if these
concepts have different extensions, it can’t be the case that all of
them are the highest of human things.
If Jackson is right about concepts, then the arguments for skepticism in
the philosophical tradition pose a serious challenge to the possibility of
having what High SES, white Westerners with lots of philosophical training call
‘knowledge’. But those arguments give
us no reason to think that we can’t have what other people – East Asians,
Indians, Low SES people, or scientists who have never studied philosophy –
would call ‘knowledge’. And, of course,
those skeptical arguments give us no reason at all to think that what High SES
white Western philosophers call ‘knowledge’ is any better, or more important,
or more desirable, or more useful than what these other folks call ‘knowledge’,
or that it is any closer to “the highest of human things.” Without some reason to think that what
white, Western, High SES philosophers call ‘knowledge’ is any more valuable,
desirable, or useful than any of the other commodities that other groups call
‘knowledge’ it is hard to see why we should care if we can’t have it.
Let us close with a brief review of the main themes
of the paper. Arguments for skepticism
have occupied a central place in Western philosophy. And it’s easy to see why. Skeptical arguments threaten
dramatic conclusions from premises that are intuitively compelling to many
philosophers, including the three of us. A number of Western philosophers
maintain that the intuitions invoked in skeptical arguments have nothing to do
with being Western or a philosopher. Rather, these intuitions are
regarded as intrinsic to human nature and cross-culturally universal. We’ve argued that our
evidence poses a serious challenge to this universalist stance. Our data
suggest that some of the most familiar
skeptical intuitions are far from universal – they vary as a function of
culture, SES, and educational background. We find that this evidence
generates a nagging sense that our own skeptical intuitions are parochial
vestiges of our culture and education.
Had we been raised in a different culture or SES group or had a
different educational background, we would have been much less likely to find
these intuitions compelling. This historical arbitrariness of our
skeptical intuitions leads us to be skeptical that we can trust these
intuitions to be true; for we see no reason to think that our cultural and
intellectual tribe should be so privileged. One might, as we’ve noted,
maintain that different cultural, SES
and educational groups simply have different concepts of knowledge, and that on
our concept of knowledge, the skeptical intuitions are true. Although this response is available, it saps
the drama from the skeptical
conclusion. It’s not clear that skepticism would have held such a
grip over the minds of epistemologists if the skeptic is reduced to the claim
that the external world can’t be “known”, according to the concept of knowledge
used by the relatively small cultural group to which we happen to belong. As one of us wrote some years ago, “The best first response to the skeptic who maintains
that we cannot achieve certainty, …knowledge or what have you, is not to argue
that we can. Rather, it is to ask, so
what?” (Stich, 1990, 26)
Shaun Nichols
College of Charleston
Stephen Stich
Rutgers University
Jonathan M. Weinberg
Indiana University
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