Perceptual Knowledge, Discrimination, and Closure
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Perceptual Knowledge, Discrimination, and Closure Santiago Echeverri1 Received: 14 February 2018 / Accepted: 7 November 2018 © Springer Nature B.V. 2018
Abstract Carter and Pritchard (Philos Stud 173(4):969–990, 2016) and Pritchard (Noûs 44(2):245–268, 2010, Epistemological disjunctivism, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, Epistemic angst: radical scepticism and the groundlessness of our believing, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2016) have tried to reconcile the intuition that perceptual knowledge requires only limited discriminatory abilities with the closure principle. To this end, they have introduced two theoretical innovations: a contrast between two ways of introducing error-possibilities and a distinction between discriminating and favoring evidence. I argue that their solution faces the “sufficiency problem”: it is unclear whether the evidence that is normally available to adult humans is sufficient to retain knowledge of the entailing proposition and come to know the entailed proposition. I submit that, on either infallibilist or fallibilist views of evidence, Carter and Pritchard have set the bar for deductive knowledge too low. At the end, I offer an alternative solution. I suggest that the knowledgeretention condition of the closure principle is not satisfied in zebra-like scenarios. Consider a version of Fred Dretske’s (1970) famous zebra scenario: The zebra scenario Julia is in the zoo and gets a good look at a zebra in a pen clearly marked ‘zebra’. Julia has normal vision, lacks expertise in zoology, and has performed no special checks on the animal. Given that the observation conditions are normal, Julia comes to know that that animal is a zebra. Carter and Pritchard (2016) and Pritchard (2010, 2012, 2016) have used this scenario to formulate two seemingly incompatible ideas: the intuition that Julia’s perceptual knowledge of the zebra requires only limited discriminatory abilities and the intuition that Julia can add to what she knows by competent deduction.
* Santiago Echeverri [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, New York University (NYU), 5 Washington Place, New York, NY 10003, USA
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The first intuition is at the heart of a family of views known as ‘relevant alternatives accounts of knowledge’. Carter and Pritchard spell out that intuition as follows: “in order to know a proposition, p, what is required is that one is able to rule out all those not-p alternatives that are (in some sense to be specified) relevant” (Carter and Pritchard 2016: 970). A proposition, q, is an alternative to p just in case q is a logical contrary of p (Vogel 1999: 155). Thus, in order to know p, it is only required that one can rule out a proper subset of the logical contraries of p. Let us call this the ‘relevant alternatives intuition’.1 In the case of perception, there is a natural way of fleshing out the relevant alternatives intuition: to be able to rule out an alternative is to be able to make perceptual discriminations between the targe
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