Knowledge and normality
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Knowledge and normality Joachim Horvath2 · Jennifer Nado1 Received: 17 March 2020 / Accepted: 3 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In this paper, we propose a general constraint on theories of knowledge that we call ‘normalism’. Normalism is a view about the epistemic threshold that separates knowledge from mere true belief; its basic claim is that one knows only if one has at least a normal amount of epistemic support for one’s belief. We argue that something like normalism is required to do full justice to the normative role of knowledge in many key everyday practices, such as assertion, inquiry, and testimony. The view of normality we employ to flesh out this claim is inspired by experimental work on the folk notion of normality, which suggests that folk judgments of what is ‘normal’ are based upon both statistical averages as well as normative ideals within the relevant target domain. Adopting this notion of normality to set the threshold for knowledge results in a view upon which knowledge is routinely available on an everyday basis without being a merely trivial achievement. We explore several interesting consequences of this view, including the implication that the threshold for knowing may change as, e.g., the ease of availability of information in an epistemic community changes over time. The result is a ‘shifty’ view of knowledge which nonetheless retains more stability than standard contextualist or pragmatic encroachment approaches. Keywords Knowledge · Conceptual engineering · Epistemology · Normality
1 Introduction Most contemporary epistemologists agree that we know lots of things: we know our own names, we know where we live and go to work, we know that grass is green, that snow is white, and that tomatoes are red. Most of the things we know are quite mundane everyday propositions, as in the examples just given. Most would agree, then, that knowledge isn’t a spectacular kind of intellectual achievement, but rather an
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Jennifer Nado [email protected]
1
University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, Hong Kong
2
Ruhr University Bochum, Bochum, Germany
123
Synthese
everyday cognitive commodity that provides the informational underpinnings of most of what we do and aim for in our daily lives. Any acceptable theory of knowledge should thus imply that knowledge is ‘within cognitive reach’ and available to us on a regular, everyday basis. Let us call this general perspective the pedestrian approach to knowledge. The vast majority of mainstream epistemology since the 20th century assumes the pedestrian approach. But there is an alternative way to think about knowledge, often associated with Descartes or the skeptics, that makes knowledge extremely difficult or even impossible to achieve in normal human life (see, e.g., Descartes 2017; Unger 1975). In order to know a proposition P, on this understanding, one must satisfy some extremely high epistemic standard, such as being unable to doubt that P, being certain that P is true, or being infallible vis-à-vis P’s truth. Moreover, there is ev
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