Knowledge, Certainty, and Exaggeration

As I explained the other day, I am inclined to accept Butchvarov's view of knowledge as the impossibility of error. If I know that p, then it is not enough that I have a justified true belief that p; I must have a true belief whose justification rules out the possibility of error. Anything short of this is just not knowledge. But then what are we to say about the knowledge claims that people routinely make, claims that that don't come near satisfying this exacting requirement? We won't say that they are mere beliefs, for many of them will be rationally held beliefs. For example, an air traveler who claims to know that he will be in New York tomorrow has a rational belief that will in all probability turn out to be true; but by Butchvarov's lights, a true belief for which one has reasons does not amount to knowledge unless the reasons entail the belief's truth. Since the air traveler's reasons for believing he will be in New York tomorrow do not entail his being there tomorrow, his belief, though rational, is not a case of knowledge. How then do we explain his use of the word 'know'? Should we say that there is a weak sense of 'know' as rational true belief short of certainty?

One idea, also from Butchvarov (The Concept of Knowledge, pp. 54-61), is that the various loose claims of knowledge can be understood as cases of exaggeration. But I'll try to develop this idea in my own way.

 

People often say things that are literally false in order to convey important information in a lively way. I once heard a doctor on a radio show say seriously that one cannot have too low a cholesterol level. Taken literally, this is spectacularly false, as false as saying that one cannot be too thin or too rich or have too low a heart rate or drink too much water. (See Hyponatremia: How to Kill Yourself by Drinking Water.)  But the good doctor was not joking or bullshitting or trying to say something false in order to induce death in his listeners; his aim was to help them by conveying a truth in an emphatic,colorful, attention-getting way. He was exaggerating for a good purpose. He uttered a sentence which, literally interpreted, expresses a false proposition, a proposition so obviously false that no normal listener could take it to be the proposition intended, and which every normal listener would take as exaggerated way of stating the sober truth that most people need to reduce their cholesterol levels.

Or suppose a coach or teacher says to his charges, "There is no limit to what you can achieve." This is plainly false, but the exaggeration is arguably justifiable since it serves to inspire and encourage. So it may be with ordinary knowledge claims. The chess coach who says to his student, "I know you can win the tournament" is exaggerating. He is using 'know' to express his strong conviction that the student has an excellent chance at winning while at the same time encouraging the student to do his best. But if anything is obvious it is that the coach does not know that the student will win.  The coach may not even think that the student has a good chance of winning. 

In the case of the air traveler who claims to know that he will be in New York tomorrow, he too is saying something literally false: obviously, he does not know he will be in New York tomorrow. What he is doing is exaggerating in a pragmatically useful way. He is building up his own confidence. After all, there is 'no percentage' in a practical person's dwelling on what could go wrong when the chances of disaster are slight. Practical living involves an element of 'bluster'; thus one confidently claims to know all sorts of things which, soberly viewed from a theoretical perspective, one cannot know.

If this is right, then there is only one legitimate epistemic sense of 'know,' the stringent sense as impossibility of mistake, and no weak epistemic sense. This seems to imply that there are no analogical epistemic senses of the term. But we shall have to think about this some more.

Comments

[bob koepp]

I tend to think that the concept of knowledge is an absolute concept, similar in this respect to the concept of flat. It's only "in thought" that we encounter such things; in the world of experience, things only approximate, more or less, to the "ideal". I haven't yet read Butchvarov's book, so I'm not sure if he considers this view, and perhaps even rejects it.

[Alan Rhoda]

Hi Bill,

I hope you're new year's off to a good start.

I like the idea that knowledge that p, in the strict sense, entails infallibility with respect to p. And I agree with you that we often use the term "knowledge" in a loose or non-strict sense. I'm not sure about your concluding paragraph, however.

You say: "If this is right, then there is only one legitimate epistemic sense of 'know,' the stringent sense as impossibility of mistake, and no weak epistemic sense." (my emphasis)

I don't think that follows. The thesis that knowledge in the sense entails infallibility does not automatically delegitimize non-strict senses of knowledge, such as mere JTB. While the latter does not qualify as knowledge without qualification, it is nevertheless an epistemically significant concept, one that bears genuine affinity with knowledge in the strict sense.

Knowledge, I'm inclined to think, is an analogical concept. Paradigm or idealized cases correspond to knowledge in the strict sense. But there are less-than-ideal cases that depart by degrees from the paradigm along various dimensions. These cases aren't instances of knowledge without qualification, but they are relevantly knowledge-like, such that looser uses of the term "knowledge" may be contextually appropriate.

[David Brightly]

Bill,

When we speak of exaggeration we usually have in mind some quality, be it beauty, intelligence, etc, which has a natural scale along which comparisons of less than and greater than can be made. To exaggerate is to assert a greater beauty, say, than one believes. You and Butchvarov speak as if knowledge were some maximal point at the end of such a scale. My question is: If a loose knowledge claim is an exaggeration, what is it an exaggeration of?