Jennifer Lackey

Why we don’t deserve credit for everything we know

A view of knowledge—what I call the Deserving Credit View of Knowledge(DCVK)—found in much of the recent epistemological literature, particularly among so-called virtue epistemologists, centres around the thesis that knowledge is something for which a subject deserves credit. Indeed, this is said to be the central difference between those true beliefs that qualify as knowledge and those that are true merely by luck—the former, unlike the latter, are achievements of the subject and are thereby creditable to her. Moreover, it is often further noted that deserving credit is what explains the additional value that knowledge has over merely lucky true belief. In this paper, I argue that the general conception of knowledge found in the DCVK is fundamentally incorrect. In particular, I show that deserving credit cannot be what distinguishes knowledge from merely lucky true belief since knowledge is not something for which a subject always deserves credit.

Testimonial Knowledge and Transmission

We often talk about knowledge being transmitted via testimony. This suggests a picture of testimony with striking similarities to memory. For instance, it is often assumed that neither is a generative source of knowledge: while the former transmits knowledge from one speaker to another, the latter preserves beliefs from one time to another. These considerations give rise to a stronger and a weaker thesis regarding the transmission of testimonial knowledge. The stronger thesis is that each speaker in a chain of testimonial transmission must know that p in order to pass this knowledge to a hearer. The weaker thesis is that at least the first speaker must know that p in order for any hearer in the chain to come to know that p via testimony. I argue that both theses are false, and hence testimony, unlike memory, can be a generative source of knowledge.

What Luck is Not

In this paper, I critically examine the two dominant views of the concept of luck in the current literature: lack of control accounts and modal accounts. In particular, I argue that the conditions proposed by such views—that is, a lack of control and the absence of counterfactual robustness—are neither necessary nor sufficient for an events being lucky. Hence, I conclude that the two main accounts in the current literature both fail to capture what is distinctive of, and central to, the concept of luck.

What Is Justified Group Belief

This essay raises new objections to the two dominant approaches to understanding the justification of group beliefs—inflationary views, where groups are treated as entities that can float freely from the epistemic status of their members’ beliefs, and deflationary views, where justified group belief is understood as nothing more than the aggregation of the justified beliefs of the groups members. If this essay is right, we need to look in an altogether different place for an adequate account of justified group belief. From these objections emerges the skeleton of the positive view that this essay goes on to develop and defend, called the group epistemic agent account: groups are epistemic agents in their own right, with justified beliefs that respond to both evidence and normative requirements that arise only at the group level but that are nonetheless importantly constrained by the epistemic status of the beliefs of their individual members.

The Virtues of Testimony

Ernest Sosa’s views on testimony and testimonial knowledge are rich, insightful, and subtle and have been developed in a number of papers and chapters spanning over 20 years. He has made important contributions to many of the central debates in this area of philosophy, but here I will limit my discussion to only three of them. I should say at the outset that though there is much that I agree with in Sosa’s writings, I will focus mostly on our areas of disagreement in what follows.

Introduction: Perspectives on Testimony

Almost everything we know depends in some way on testimony.Without the ability to learn from others, it would be virtually impossible for any individual person to know much beyond what has come within the scope of her immediate perceptual environment. The fruits of science, history, geography – all of these would be beyond our grasp, as would much of what we know about ourselves. We do not, after all, perceive that we belong to one family rather than to another – this is something we are told. Despite the overwhelming importance of testimony, it has been neglected to a large extent in the philosophical tradition. Arguably, this has resulted from a general sense that our other cognitive faculties, such as perception, are more basic and therefore ought to be the primary focus of our investigations. In recent years, however, the idea that testimony is of secondary importance has been forcefully challenged, and new ways of thinking of testimony have been fruitfully explored by a number of philosophers. The present issue of Episteme aims to build on this body of work and to broaden it by incorporating insights from three different groups of people: philosophers who have already done considerable work in social epistemology, philosophers who are for the first time applying their work in other areas of epistemology to testimony, and psychologists who study the development of our ability to learn from others. The papers in this issue, with one exception, were delivered at the fourth annual Episteme conference, held at Rutgers University in June, 2007.