On Kvanvig S Argument Against Reliabilism

Reply to Kvanvig on the Swamping Problem for Reliabilism

Erik J. Olsson

1. Introduction

Most contemporary epistemologists agree that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief, and many argue that process reliabilism is unable to account for this fact. In Goldman and Olsson (2008), we suggested that there is a weak sense of “knowing”, in which knowing simply consists in believing truly. In this weak sense, knowing isn’t more valuable than believing truly. We also conceded, of course, that there is a stronger sense of “knowledge” that involves more than true belief and is more valuable. In the article, we explored two ways in which process reliabilism can account for the extra value of knowledge. First, we observed that reliabilist knowing has greater value than mere true belief because it makes future true belief more likely. We concluded however that on this approach, which we called the “conditional probability solution” for reasons that will be clear as we proceed, the greater value is only attained normally, not in every single concrete case. We offered a psychological explanation of why some people think that knowledge attains its distinctive value always, appealing to a general psychological process of value autonomization whereby a reliable process comes to be regarded as valuable in itself.

In a new paper entitled “Further thoughts on the swamping problem” (to appear), Jonathan Kvanvig targetsboth our approaches to the value problem. My aim in this paper is to assess the force of Kvanvig’s objections to the conditional probability solution, which is the solution that I happen to prefer.[1] I will be concerned with responding to Kvanvig in a way that exhausts the resources of that proposed solution.

2. The swamping problem

According to process reliabilism, a subject S knows that p if and only if (1) p is true, (2) S believes p to be true, (3) S’s belief that p was produced through a reliable process, and (4) a suitable anti-Gettier clause is satisfied. Recently a number of authors have argued that process reliabilism cannot account for the greater value of knowledge over mere true belief. Here is a representative quotation from Richard Swinburne (1999):

Now clearly it is a good thing that our beliefs satisfy the reliabilist requirement, for the fact that they do means that … they will probably be true. But, if a given belief of mine is true, I cannot see that it is any more worth having for satisfying the reliabilist requirement. So long as the belief is true, the fact that the process which produced it usually produces true belief does not seem to make that belief any more worth having. (58).

Thus, the value of reliability seems, in a sense, to be “swamped” by the value of truth. Once the latter is in place, the former adds no value, so that the combination of truth and reliable acquisition is no more valuable than truth itself. Similar swamping arguments have been presented by Ward Jones, Linda Zagzebski (1996, 2000, 2003), Wayne Riggs (2002), Jonathan.Kvanvig (2003), Ernest Sosa (2003) and others.

One could of course respond that it is satisfaction of the anti-Gettier clause that gives knowledge is unique value, not satisfaction of the reliability clause. But chances are that a reliabilist would not be very happy with a defense along these lines. After all, the characteristic feature of the reliabilist approach is precisely the insistence on reliable acquisition, and it would therefore be unfortunate if this very feature failed to add value in the presence of true belief. This is the rationale for focusing the following discussion on so-called “simple reliabilism”, i.e., reliabilism without an anti-Gettier clause.

Thus the swamping argument, as endorsed by Swinburne and others, may be presented schematically as follows:

(S1) Knowledge equals reliably produced true belief (simple reliabilism).

(S2) If a given belief is true, its value will not be raised by the fact that it was reliably produced.

(S3) Hence: knowledge is no more valuable than unreliably produced true belief.

Since (S3) is a highly counterintuitive conclusion and the argument appears valid, one of the premises must be false. As we have seen, (S2), the characteristic swamping premise, is taken to be obviously true by many authors writing on this subject. It derives support from an appeal to the following further principle:

(Veritism) All that matters in inquiry is the acquisition of true belief.

If S’s belief is true all that matters in inquiry is the acquisition of true belief, then learning that S’s belief was reliably produce does not add value, just as (S2) says. Hence, the swamping problem can be seen as arising from combining reliabilism with veritism.Instead, the most common reaction is to reject (S1),that knowledge equals reliably acquired true belief. But do we have to be so negative? I think not.

3. The conditional probability solution

The main idea behind the conditional probability solution is that a true belief that was reliably produced is a better indicator of future true belief than a mere true belief is. In other words, the probability of S’s having more beliefs (of a similar kind) in the future is greater, given that S knows that p in the reliabilist sense, than it is, given that S merely believes truly that p. This is a claim about conditional probability, whence the name “conditional probability solution”. Probability should here be interpreted objectively.

We illustrated this solution in connection with a modern version of Plato’s Larissa example:

Suppose you are driving to Larissa but are at loss as to which turns to take at various crossroads. On the way to Larissa there are two forks. If you choose correctly on both occasions, you will get to Larissa on time. If not, you will be late at best. Your only assistance in forming beliefs about the right ways to turn is the on-board computerized navigation system. We consider two situations differing only in that the navigation system is reliable in Situation 1 and unreliable in Situation 2. We assume that in both cases the navigation system tells you correctly how to turn at the first crossroads. In the first scenario this is to be expected, because the system is reliable. In the second it happens by chance. Suppose the correct information at the first crossroads is “The best route to Larissa is to the right”. Hence in both situations you believe truly that the road to Larissa is to the right (p) after receiving the information. On the simple reliabilist account of knowledge, you have knowledge that p in Situation 1 but not in Situation 2. This difference also makes Situation 1 a more valuable situation than Situation 2. The reason is that the conditional probability of getting the correct information at the second crossroads is greater conditional on the navigation system being reliable than conditional on the navigation system being unreliable.

How does this approach solve the swamping problem for process reliabilism?The proposal obviously does not deny (S1), the premise that knowledge is reliably acquired true belief. On the contrary, it purports to show how that premise can be retained in the face of the swamping threat. And it also does not deny (S2), the characteristic swamping premises, for it does not deny that the value of a true belief is not raised by assuming that it was reliably produced. What it does deny is the validity of the inference from (S1) and (S2) to the conclusion that knowledge is no more valuable than mere true belief.What it proposes isthat knowledge can be more valuable than mere true belief even if the constituent belief is not thereby made more valuable. This is so because a state of knowledge can be more valuable than a state of mere true belief: a state of knowledge is also a state of reliable acquisition and as such it is valuable not only as an indicator of the truth of the belief thus acquired but also as an indicator of the production of further true beliefs (of a similar kind), namely true beliefs resulting from reapplications of the reliable method in question. This is the reason why knowledge is more valuable than mere true beliefeven if the truth of both the premises employed by the swamping argument is granted.[2]

What is the basis for the higher probability of future true belief conditional on knowledge as opposed to conditional on mere true belief? How can the truth of this conditional claim be explained? It is true, we maintained, in virtue of certain empirical regularities which we referred to as non-uniqueness, cross-temporal access, learning and generality. By non-uniqueness,the same kind of problem will tend to arise again and again. Once you encounter a problem of a certain type, you are likely to encounter a problem of the same type at some later point. In the Larissa case, the question of what is the best turn for driving to Larissa was raised more than once. By cross-temporal access, a method that was used once will tend to be available also when the same type of problem arises in the future. In the example, the navigation system which was used at the first crossroads was available also when the same type of navigation problem arose at the second cross roads. By the learning assumption, if a particular method solves a problem once, and you have no reason to believe that it did so unsuccessfully, then you will tend to use the same method again, if available. In the Larissa case, the navigation method was available also at the second crossroads, and since you had no reason to believe that it failed at the first crossroads, you used it again. Finally, by the generality assumption, if a method is reliable at time t, it will tend to be reliable also at a later time t´, as was also the case in our Larissa story.On the basis of these empirical regularities, which we claim hold normally in the actual world, knowledge will tend to promote future true belief in a way that mere true belief will not.

In our paper, we added that while the conditions of non-uniqueness, cross-temporal access, learning and generally normally hold, they do not do so always. Thus there will be cases where a problem arises only once, where a method that was available once, is available no more, where a method that was unproblematically employed is nevertheless not used again, and so on. This does not affect our general claim that knowledge enhances probability of future true belief any more than the fact that there are sick birds affects the general claim that birds fly. But it does mean that there will be particular cases in which knowledge is no more valuable than mere true belief. In our view, this is as it should be: the claim that knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief is a defeasible claim in the sense that the claim is true even though there are special cases in which knowledge fails to attain its distinctive value. Let us now turn to Kvanvig’s objections.

4. Kvanvig’s critique

Kvanvig’s critique centers on another version of the swamping argument. Consider the following example:

Suppose I want chocolate. I google to find places close to me. I get two webpages: one entitled “places that sell chocolate in Waco”; the other “places likely to sell chocolate in Waco”. We may assume accuracy for both lists, and that the second list is generated from correlations: places that sell food are likely to sell chocolate, places that sell hard candy are too, etc. … We then note [that] … [i]f all I care about is chocolate, it would be no better to use the list of places that both sell chocolate and are likely to than to use the list of places that sell chocolate.

By the same token, Kvanvig thinks that it would be no better to believe in the list of places that both sell chocolate and are likely to than to believe in the list of places that sell chocolate. In other words, it would be no better to believe that the first list is accurate and that the second list is accurate than it would to believe that the first list is accurate.

Kvanvig concludes this part of the argumentation by observing that “truth plus likelihood of truth is not preferable to truth alone” (21). Hence a standard justified true belief (JTB) theory of knowledge that identifies justification with likelihood of truth will be subject to a swamping problem. Therefore, “one better not identify justification with statistical likelihood of truth” (21).

But how is this relevant to process reliabilism? It would be relevant were such a theory to identify “being reliably acquired” with “being likely to be true”, but,as Kvanvig is well aware, no known reliabilist theory does make that identification. Kvanvig thinks that his reasoning raises a problem for reliabilism nonetheless:

After all, if objective probability itself succumbs to the swamping problem, why would the fact that there is an etiological relationship to a process or method responsible for that probability relieve the theory of the problem? Such a causal relationship to methods or process doesn’t seem to be the kind of feature that adds value beyond the value of true belief, so there is no apparent reason here to think that ordinary process reliabilism is in a better condition with respect to the swamping problem than is the simple objective probability theory [i.e. the theory that equates knowledge with true belief that is objectively likely to be true].

He notes, however, that both the conditional probability solution and the solution that focuses on value autonomization “go beyond the identification of justification with objective likelihood of truth, and thus provide some hope of avoiding the swamping problem” (23). Even so, Kvanvig thinks that, in the case of the conditional probability solution,this initial hope is difficult to sustain:

Once we appreciate the nature of te swamping problem as a problem concerning properties of belief that are non-additive of value in the presence of true belief, it becomes hard to see how the above proposal is helpful at all. In the analogy involving chocolate, I don’t even know how to begin thinking about applying this idea to new businesses of the same type, conditional on the first list (places that sell chocolate) and the third list (places that both sell chocolate and are likely to)

It is not difficult to see why it is difficult to apply the conditional probability solution to Kvanvig’s chocolate analogy. In focusing exclusively on the objective likelihood of the belief produced,that analogy abstracts from everything about a reliable process that doesn’t amount to that process indicating the truth of the belief to which it gave rise. Our proposal, by contrast,seeks to identify a value in reliable acquisition that goes beyondthe value such a process has in virtue of indicating the truth of the belief it produced. Our suggestion, again,centers on the idea of reliable acquisition indicatingnot only the truth of the belief thus acquired but indicating also the future acquisition of true beliefs (of the same kind). Since Kvanvig’s chocolate example excludes our proposal from the start, and does so without independent justification, far from providing a counter example to our view it begs the question against it.

This takes us to Kvanvig’s second point which concerns the fact that the truth of our claim that the probability of future true beliefs is greater conditional on knowledge than conditional on mere true belief hinges on certain contingent regularities, namely those of non-uniqueness, cross-temporal access, learning and generality. Kvanvig offers the following interpretation of our view:

So the claim really isn’t that the conditional inequality explains the value of knowledge over that of true belief. The claim is, rather, that when certain contingent features are in place, we should expect the conditional probability of future true beliefs to be higher, given that one knows rather than one merely truly believes.

He continues:

This response, however, fails to come to grips with the core of the swamping problem. As we have seen, once the relevant controls are in place, we should expect, always and necessarily, for knowledge to be a value-enhancing characteristic of a state of true belief, not just such a characteristic when the person is likely to use the same method in the future and the world hasn’t changed so … what was reliable in the past is no longer so. To uncover the special value of knowledge, we have to control for interaction by values outside the purely cognitive sphere, but once we do so, we should find that knowledge is special. It is not only special when the future resembles the past and when people retain their dispositions across time of how to find out what the world is like. Perhaps we are stuck having to adopt such a revisionary account of the value of knowledge, but we shouldn’t offer such an account and pretend that it is not radically revisionary.

Rather than engaging in detailed criticism of these passages, which I believe to some extent misrepresent the conditional probability solution, I will focus on what I take to be the main issue. The starting point of the whole discussion of the value of knowledge is the following observation which was apparently first made by Plato:

(VK) Knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief.

This principle is the point of departure for most investigations into the value of knowledge simply because it is something upon which most of us can agree. Moreover, most epistemologists also agree on the following more specific value principle.