Authoritative Knowledge
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Authoritative Knowledge Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock1 Received: 30 August 2019 / Accepted: 17 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper investigates ‘authoritative knowledge’, a neglected species of practical knowledge gained on the basis of exercising practical authority. I argue that, like perceptual knowledge, authoritative knowledge is non-inferential. I then present a broadly reliabilist account of the process by which authority yields knowledge, and use this account to address certain objections. Keywords Authority · Non-inferential knowledge · Practical knowledge You may recognize the following picture:
If you do not recognize it, you might have good guesses as to what it represents: a hat, a slug, or a falling tent, perhaps. Of course, all of these guesses are wrong. As we learn from the opening pages of The Little Prince (de Saint-Exupéry 2001 [1943]), the picture represents a boa constrictor eating an elephant. We are so told by the author of the picture, who draws a second one to help us, unimaginative adults, appreciate the true nature of his drawing:
* Juan S. Piñeros Glasscock [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Georgia State University, P.O. Box 3994, Atlanta, GA 30302‑3994, USA
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J. S. Piñeros Glasscock
Suppose that you are one of the unimaginative adults in the story, and that the author shows you the first picture. You say, ‘What a nice hat,’ and he replies, ‘It’s not a hat; it’s a boa eating an elephant’. The child’s assertion is clearly true—but I want to claim something stronger: I want to claim that this assertion expresses knowledge, a knowledge of a special type that the author has precisely in virtue of his authority as the author of the picture. I shall thus call it ‘authoritative knowledge’. This paper aims to offer an account of authoritative knowledge. I shall approach the topic from within the Reidean tradition in epistemology. A central tenet of this tradition is that there is a set of privileged sources of information whose deliverances give us direct (non-inferential) knowledge of the world. The traditional list of sources includes perception, memory, testimony, reasoning, and reflection. Let’s call these ‘basic knowledge sources’. A basic knowledge source is not an infallible source of knowledge. For instance, we can employ our perceptual systems and fail to gain knowledge (say, because our vision is blurry). Rather, what is distinctive about basic knowledge sources is that we can gain knowledge directly on their basis: in the right circumstances, engaging such systems is sufficient to gain knowledge. I shall argue that authority is an unrecognized basic knowledge source. If authority yields knowledge in some way analogous to the direct way in which sources like perception and memory give us knowledge, that is an important epistemological finding.1 After all, the philosophical study of authority has predominantly fallen to ethicists and political philosophers, receiving little attention by epistemologists, unlike o
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