Abstract
In “Useful False Beliefs,” Peter Klein argues that the justification required for knowledge can contain a false belief essentially. When this happens, the agent arrives at her conclusion via a chain of inference that includes a false belief. He illustrates his argument with cases that depend on apparent memory, testimony, recorded empirical evidence, and observation-based calculation. If the agent’s inferential path is close enough to a route that contains only truths, Klein maintains, her conclusion is justified. Still, he intimates, reliance on a falsehood is an epistemic defect, even if not a fatal one. All things considered, it is preferable to take the epistemic high road and rely only on truths. I will argue, however, that sometimes inferring via a falsehood is an epistemic strength. Reliance on a falsehood enables the agent to marshal epistemic resources by excluding from her reasoning irrelevant complications that would blind her to the relation between her evidence and her conclusion.
I am grateful to Samuel Elgin, Robert Shope, and Cherie Braden for useful discussions of the issues raised in this chapter.
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Notes
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In Klein’s presentation, the Ptolemaic Astronomer has his students make the calculation, based on what they have been taught. If teaching is testimony, this is an instance of useful falsehoods’ figuring in knowledge based on testimony as well. I simplified the case. Placing the inferential burden on the students is, for my purposes, an unnecessary epicycle.
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Or is in a position to know. We are here talking only about the justification condition on knowledge .
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“Some might prefer to limit the scope of propositions to the contents of beliefs because, they claim, the contents of perceptions and memories are neither true nor false. Those contents might be deemed accurate or inaccurate, rather than true or false. While understanding that reluctance to take my rather permissive view of the scope of ‘proposition’, I will use ‘proposition’ to designate the full class of mental contents, for the sake of ease of presentation. Nothing in the argument depends upon that choice” (Klein 2008, 27n4). I am not convinced that construing considerations that are not truth-apt as propositions is so innocuous. But here my point concerns propositions that uncontroversially are truth-apt. My question is whether the standard criterion for individuating those propositions is sufficiently fine-grained to properly characterize belief contents like them.
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Another aside: Although I have put the point in terms of contemporary metaphysics, one can get the same fine-grained using Israel Scheffler’s inscriptionalism. It is not obvious that we need to inflate our metaphysics to get the resources we need to properly individuate belief contents (see Scheffler 1955). Nor is it obvious that we need to inflate our metaphysics to get non-causal dependency relations. The resources developed in Goodman’s Structure of Appearance suffice (see Goodman 1977).
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Normally I rely on L. Jonathan Cohen’s notion of acceptance rather than belief. An agent accepts that p just in case she is willing to use p as a basis for assertoric inference or action when her ends are cognitive (Cohen 1992). Here I speak of beliefs in order to bring my position into contact with Klein’s. But belief seems not to be the relevant attitude when we ask how thought experiments and idealizations function epistemically. So talk of belief is rather out of character for me.
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Elgin, C.Z. (2019). Epistemically Useful Falsehoods. In: Fitelson, B., Borges, R., Braden, C. (eds) Themes from Klein. Synthese Library, vol 404. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04522-7_3
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