4 4 We should note that the matter of just how widely held this “justified, true belief” account of knowledge was prior to the 1960s – when it was famously challenged by Ed Gettier (1963) – is somewhat contentious. Gettier himself thought that Ayer and Chisholm, as well as Plato, embraced the account, and this has been often taken for granted. Rosa Antognazza (2015) and Julien Dutant (2015) have recently argued that the received version of the history of the justified, true belief account is in fact inaccurate.
5 5 See, especially, Williamson (2000).
6 6 This idea is often expressed as: there is no empirical knowledge, where empirical knowledge is knowledge whose sources derive in some way from sense experience.
7 7 In the Meditations, Descartes begins – in Meditation One – by raising two famous skeptical scenarios, one involving dreaming, and another involving an evil genius. The Descartes of this first Meditation was a skeptic in despair. But, and this is why we note that referring to Descartes as a skeptic is a bit misleading, Descartes' skeptical peril was merely temporary. By Meditation Two he already believes he has found the key to overcoming the skeptical challenges he'd previously posed.
8 8 This is an adaptation of a description of a skeptical case by Crispin Wright (2007, p. 27).
9 9 This bit of reasoning, as we'll see in Chapter 11, relies on what is called the “closure principle”; roughly, this principle says that if one knows something, p, and competently deduces something else, q, from p, while retaining one's knowledge that p, then one knows that q. As a brief exercise, think a moment about this principle and its implications for whether you can know you have a hand if you don't know you're not a victim of the Simulation scenario.
10 10 See, for example, Williamson (2000, pp. 2–5; 2017, pp. 163–165).
11 11 This “direction of fit” language owes a debt most notably to Anscombe (1957) and has been developed in various ways by (along with Williamson), Searle (1983), Humberstone (1992), Smith (1994), and Velleman (2000), among others.
12 12 For related discussion, see our treatment of direct realism in Chapter 2.
1 THE REGRESS PROBLEM
1.1 Introduction: A Thought Experiment
1.1 Imagine that a team of scientists develops a device that can scan your brain and record everything you believe. You put on the special helmet, the device scans your brain, and the scientists print it all out so you can take home Your Book of Beliefs. Thumbing through the pages, you come across many beliefs you expected to find in Your Book of Beliefs. You also discover some beliefs you didn't expect to find in there – for example, beliefs that play a role in guiding your behavior but which are for the first time being brought to your attention for critical inspection.1 For better or worse, none of your beliefs has escaped detection by this remarkable helmet (not even the embarrassing ones).
1.2 Your Book of Beliefs is, in one sense at least, very useful. You find out, once and for all, everything you believe – which is very helpful to know! But you realize something important is missing. You notice there is nothing anywhere in Your Book of Beliefs that tells you which of your beliefs are actually worth keeping and which ought to be abandoned.
1.3 If you've read a bit of psychology, you probably know that certain kinds of beliefs can be helpful to have simply because thinking about them makes you feel better about yourself, allows you to cope effectively with stressful experiences, etc. Such beliefs might be good to have simply because having them helps us get by.
1.4 While it might be nice to know which beliefs can help you to get by or find peace, the very fact that you're reading an epistemology book suggests you might not care only about whether your beliefs are useful to you in this way. If you have an inquiring mind, you might also be interested in having beliefs that actually match up with how things are, regardless of whether having them makes you feel happy or comfortable or helps you cope.
1.5 Let's assume you're like this, and so you want to work out which of your beliefs are worth keeping and which ought to be abandoned from the specific point of view (the epistemic point of view of interest in epistemology) where what matters is things like getting to the truth and having knowledge. That is, you want to sort your epistemically justified beliefs from your epistemically unjustified beliefs – and not to have them have them unhelpfully lumped all together (as they presently are in the book the scientists have given you).
1.6 So you begin creating a new book: Your Book of (Epistemically) Justified Beliefs.2 Unfortunately, the scientists who created the helmet are simply not willing or able to help you fill out this second book. (They say that, as scientists, they are “in the business of describing, not evaluating”.) When they scan your brain, the helmet is simply unable to detect things anything that philosophers call normative – like good and bad, right and wrong, justified and unjustified.3 It simply includes in the book whatever beliefs you in fact do have, for better or worse. If you want to know which beliefs from Your Book of Beliefs belong in Your Book of Justified Beliefs (where being “justified” is a normative matter), you need to do some epistemology, which is the area of philosophy that studies this kind of thing. Epistemology, if done well, can help you figure out not only which (if any) beliefs you have are epistemically justified, but also which ones are known, and even how much knowledge you have.
1.7 But where to start? Here it helps to take things slowly. In order to figure out which beliefs from Your Book of Beliefs should make it in to Your Book of Justified Beliefs, you'll obviously need to apply some kind of sorting method.4
1.8 Fortunately, you already have a decent grip – before doing much or any epistemology – of which beliefs of yours seem already like the best candidates for justified beliefs (and which ones don't). Looking through Your Book of Beliefs, you notice the first two entries as:
B1 (Belief 1). Rental prices will continue to increase in London in the coming year.
B2. There are ghosts.
You are fairly confident that B1 is justified and that B2 is not, and this is helpful because if whatever sorting method or rule you apply doesn't get these rather easy cases right, it's – like flipping a coin – probably not a very good way to sort the justified from the unjustified beliefs.5
1.9 At any rate, it seems like something must account for why B1 and B2 differ in their being justified.6