Folk Epistemology as Normative Social Cognition

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2010

Folk epistemology refers to a range of cognitive skills that involve epistemic concepts such as knowledge and truth. As human beings we are able to assess the truth of an utterance by another agent or whether an inference someone makes is valid. We can evaluate to what extent sources we acquire information from are reliable and whether new information we acquire should lead to belief revision. We consistently produce, in particular, epistemic evaluations. We can judge, for instance, that: "p is true", "it is probable that p", "A is justified in thinking that p", "B is trustworthy when she says that p", or "C is lying". Epistemology is the normative study of how such epistemic evaluations should be made. By contrast, the study of folk epistemology focuses on epistemic evaluations that people actually make and on the processes that produce them. It is a descriptive research project on the beliefs and intuitions people have about knowledge, truth, reasons and other epistemic notions, as well as a research project on the psychological and cognitive processes that sustain them. We use the term "folk epistemology" to specify that the scope of this notion is not just epistemology as traditionally understood by philosophers, but the epistemology that reflects how people make epistemic evaluations; the term "folk" also refers to an established tradition in psychology that investigates "naive" or "folk" theories that ground the cognition of specific domains: folk physics, for instance, as the cognition of physical objects, or folk psychology, as the cognitive ability to ascribe intentions, beliefs and desires to others. Research on folk epistemology, or folk epistemologies, spans the study of the form and content of epistemic evaluations, as well as their cognitive underpinnings.

Epistemologists, like other philosophers, sometimes try to convince us of the truth of their claims about the nature of knowledge by appeals to our epistemic intuitions. Sometimes intuitions are gathered and deployed against an epistemological theory: as, for example, when our intuitive judgement that the subject in a Gettier case fails to know what he justifiably and truly believes is used to undermine the view that knowledge is justified true belief. Othertimes intuitions are gathered and deployed in support of an epistemological theory: as, for example, when the same intuition about the Gettier case is used to support the view that knowledge is true belief that could not easily have been wrong. In a more sophisticated way (which I shall describe in more detail), contextualists about knowledge have made appeal to epistemic intuitions a central part of the arguments they offer in support of their view. Appeals to intuition, then, are central to the current methodology of epistemology. 2 Recently the place of appeals to intuition in epistemology has been challenged: Hilary Kornblith (2002) has argued that the proper task of epistemology is not to gather and systematise our intuitions, and has championed a naturalistic methodology for epistemology in which intuition has a marginal role; and Brian Weatherson (2003) has argued that the deployment of intuitively generated counterexamples against an epistemological theory is methodologically suspect, and that in particular our intuitions about Gettier cases provide a poor reason to reject the justified true belief account of knowledge. In this paper I too challenge the legitimacy of appeals to intuition in epistemology; but I try to go beyond the way the debate is structured at present-split into pro-intuition and anti-intuition camps. In this paper I begin a new inquiry into the nature of the everyday capacity we have ascribe and to reason about knowledge-folk epistemology. I show why this enquiry is necessary to resolve the pro-intuition versus anti-intuition debate, and I show why it is interesting in its own right-why investigating our folk epistemological competence should be seen as an important part of epistemology. I Folk Epistemology 3 1 Intuition and theory in epistemology The ways in which our pretheoretic intuitions about knowledge might interact with one's theory of knowledge are various. Our intuitions take different forms: we can have intuitions about the intension of knowledge, such as when it seems to us that knowledge implies belief, or that knowledge implies truth; we can have intuitions about the extension of knowledge, such as when it seems that the subject in a Gettier case fails to know. 1 The ways epistemic intuitions interact with epistemological theory also take different forms. Sometimes intuition conflicts with theory, such as when the intuitive judgement that the Gettier subject fails to know conflicts with the implication of the justified true belief theory of knowledge that he does know. 2 Othertimes intuition fits with theory, such as when the intuition about the Gettier subject fits with the theory that knowledge is true belief that could not easily have been wrong. 1 Edward Craig (1990: 1) characterises Gettier cases as cases about which our intuitions about the intension of knowledge and our intuitions about the extension of knowledge conflict. 2 This is an example of conflict between theory and intuitions about the extension of knowledge. 4 To epistemologists, intuitions about knowledge and their conflict or fit with theory represent a valuable methodological resource with which to evaluate theories of knowledge. Tending to trust intuition, epistemologists have taken conflict with intuition to constitute a prima facie case against a theory, and to take fit with intuition to constitute a prima facie case in support of a theory. Recently, some philosophers have begun to question whether we should be taking intuition at face value in this way, and have criticised the tendency of epistemologists to trust epistemic intuitions. Brian Weatherson's paper "What Good are Counterexamples?" (2003) is central in this movement. Weatherson focuses on cases of conflict between theory and intuition; he points out that "…there is no agreement across the sub-disciplines of philosophy about what to do when intuition and theory clash. In epistemology, particularly the theory of knowledge, and in parts of metaphysics, particularly in the theory of causation, it is almost universally assumed that intuition trumps theory." (2003: 31) Weatherson goes on to argue that it is a mistake to always allow intuition to trump theory: theories can have virtues that provide strong reasons to favour theory over intuition when the two come into conflict. Focusing on the clash between the justified true belief account of knowledge (hereafter the JTB theory) 5 and our intuitions about Gettier cases (hereafter Gettier intuitions), he argues that we should reject Gettier intuitions because they conflict with the JTB account-an account that possesses many theoretical virtues. I agree with Weatherson's view of the conflict between the JTB theory and Gettier intuitions, but Weatherson's critique of the methodology of appeals to intuition only goes so far. In particular it does not say any more about why our Gettier intuitions should not be trusted than just that they conflict with a promising theory (in this case, the JTB theory); it would be good to know something about the intuitions themselves-about their nature and origin-that would tell us why they are misleading guide to the nature of knowledge. Having such understanding of the nature and origin of our epistemic intuitions is especially important because Weatherson's approach on its own only gives us a way of assessing the trustworthiness of intuitions that conflict with theory; it does not provide us with any way to assess those pretheoretic intuitions that fit with theory. When intuitions conflict with theory, we are forced to choose between the two, and so knowing whether the intuitions are trustworthy becomes especially urgent; but when intuitions fit with theory, although there

Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2010

Among the results of recent investigation of epistemic intuitions by experimental philosophers is the finding that epistemic intuitions show cultural variability between subjects of Western, East Asian and Indian Sub-continent origins. In this paper I ask whether the finding of this variation is evidence of cross-cultural variation in the folk-epistemological competences that give rise to these intuitions—in particular whether there is evidence of variation in subjects’ explicit or implicit theories of knowledge. I argue that positing cross-cultural variation in subjects’ implicit theories of knowledge is not the only possible explanation of the intuitions, and I suggest other explanations, including the hypothesis that each subject’s implicit theory of knowledge might contain a heterogeneous set of heuristics for ascribing knowledge. Variation in intuitions, then, might be the result of within-subject heterogeneity rather than across-subject heterogeneity.

The question, What is Folk Epistemology (FE)?, is a question receiving increasing attention, but one that still awaits a sustained answer. In the present work by Mikkel Gerken, On Folk Epistemology: How we Think and Talk about Knowledge (Oxford University Press, 2017) we have a somewhat different question discussed: What should FE be?

New Ideas in Psychology, 2002

Folk epistemology: An introduction Recently, two strands of research in developmental psychology have come together to produce an interesting new field of study-for want of a better term, folk epistemology-the child's theory of mind and adolescent epistemological development. The current double issue of New Ideas in Psychology is devoted to exploring this new hybrid field.

We report the results of four empirical studies designed to investigate the extent to which an epistemic closure principle for knowledge is reflected in folk epistemology. Previous work by Turri (2015a) suggested that our shared epistemic practices may only include a source-relative closure principle—one that applies to perceptual beliefs but not to inferential beliefs. We argue that the results of our studies provide reason for thinking that individuals are making a performance error when their knowledge attributions and denials conflict with the closure principle. When we used research materials that overcome what we think are difficulties with Turri's original materials, we found that participants did not reject closure. Furthermore, when we presented Turri's original materials to non-philosophers with expertise in deductive reasoning (viz., professional mathematicians), they endorsed closure for both perceptual and inferential beliefs. Our results suggest that an unrestricted closure principle—one that applies to all beliefs, regardless of their source—provides a better model of folk patterns of knowledge attribution than a source-relative closure principle.

According to the epistemic closure principle, if someone knows some proposition P and also knows that P entails Q, she knows Q as well. This principle is often defended by appealing to its intuitiveness. But only recently was epistemic closure put to the empirical test: Turri ran experiments in which closure is (allegedly) violated in folk knowledge ascriptions surprisingly often. We disagree with this diagnosis. It is by no means obvious which experimentally testable hypothesis proponents of epistemic closure should accept. In this paper we formulate and test a hypothesis different from Turri's. We argue that our hypothesis is more apt for empirically testing epistemic closure. In a series of experiments we manipulated the strength of entailment between two propositions and found that the stronger the entailment was, the lower was the proportion of participants who violated closure, indicating that folk knowledge ascriptions are sensitive to entailment. We conclude that closure is a principle of folk epistemology after all.

Episteme, 2016

As a strategy for exploring the relationship between understanding and knowledge, we consider whether epistemic luck – which is typically thought to undermine knowledge – undermines understanding. Questions about the etiology of understanding have also been at the heart of recent theoretical debates within epistemology. Kvanvig (2003) put forward the argument that there could be lucky understanding and produced an example that he deemed persuasive. Grimm (2006) responded with a case that, he argued, demonstrated that there could not be lucky understanding. In this paper, we empirically examine how…

2010

Folk epistemology refers to a range of cognitive skills that involve epistemic concepts such as knowledge and truth. As human beings we are able to assess the truth of an utterance by another agent or whether an inference someone makes is valid. We can evaluate to what extent sources we acquire information from are reliable and whether new information we acquire should lead to belief revision. We consistently produce, in particular, epistemic evaluations. We can judge, for instance, that: “p is true”, “it is probable that p”, “A is justified in thinking that p”, “B is trustworthy when she says that p”, or “C is lying”. Epistemology is the normative study of how such epistemic evaluations should be made. By contrast, the study of folk epistemology focuses on epistemic evaluations that people actually make and on the processes that produce them. It is a descriptive research project on the beliefs and intuitions people have about knowledge, truth, reasons and other epistemic notions, a...

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2004

Analytic philosophers have long used a priori methods to characterize folk concepts like knowledge, belief, and wrongness. Recently, researchers have begun to exploit social scientific methodologies to characterize such folk concepts. One line of work has explored folk intuitions on cases that are disputed within philosophy. A second approach, with potentially more radical implications, applies the methods of cross-cultural psychology to philosophical intuitions. Recent work suggests that people in different cultures have systematically different intuitions surrounding folk concepts like wrong, knows, and refers.