‘A clairvoyant lacks knowledge, even if clairvoyance is reliable. A five-year old child, however, can know that the door is shut or that the television is on.’ Discuss.

Essay

A clairvoyant can be said to have knowledge in exactly the same way that a five-year old child can know simple propositions about the world – on the basis of reliable belief-forming processes. There is no important difference between the circumstances of the clairvoyant and the child, and consequently the two questions of whether each has knowledge go together. In this essay, I defend a reliabilist analysis of knowledge by challenging the soundness of intuitions that would lead one to hold that a clairvoyant lacks knowledge whilst simultaneously claiming that a five-year old child can know simple propositions. First, I present the reliabilist case for a clairvoyant possessing knowledge, before outlining and accommodating objections. I will then draw out in detail the parallels between the child and the clairvoyant, and explain why it is implausible for an internalist to assert that a five-year old child has awareness of or access to justification for their belief that the door is shut or that the television is on. As a result, I conclude that even if one is not a reliabilist, one ought to accept that a clairvoyant can be said to have knowledge – and as a corollary, that an intuitive attachment to the notion that a clairvoyant lacks knowledge is wholly insufficient grounds for rejecting reliabilism.

The reliabilist account is one approach to providing an analysis of knowledge – that is, a non-trivial set of conditions relating to a subject S and proposition p which are individually necessary and jointly sufficient for the truth of the proposition “S knows p”. For a reliabilist, the analysis is as follows (Goldman 1979):

This view is similar to the classical analysis of knowledge as justified true belief (JTB), and simply provides a modification of what is required for justification. In particular, whilst on the JTB account an agent must internally possess adequate reasons to justify their belief, the reliabilist takes an impersonal, external view: it must merely be the case that there is, in fact, a reliable process which generated the agent’s belief (Nagel 2014, 61). Therefore, according to a reliabilist, it is perfectly possible for an agent to possess knowledge without being able to identify justifications for their true beliefs, or even grasping the existence of the process which brought those beliefs about. We shall presently return to explore the advantage that this creates for a reliabilist in supporting the claim that a five-year old can have knowledge, but we must first examine the relationship between the reliability condition (c) and clairvoyancy.

Modern epistemologists’ interest in reliabilism was prompted by a desire to address the so-called Gettier cases which posed problems for the classical view (Poston 2008). These counterexamples sought to undermine the JTB account by providing circumstances in which that analysis’s conditions for S to know p were met, but the agent in question intuitively seemed not to know the proposition under consideration (Gettier 1963). Employing similar tactics, BonJour (1980) attacked reliabilism through a series of thought experiments involving clairvoyancy, which attempted to demonstrate that all the requirements of a reliabilist account could be met without an agent intuitively appearing to possessing knowledge. The first putative counterexample given is as follows:

The reliabilist conditions appear to be met. Samantha believes the President is in New York City, which is true, and the belief comes about as a result of a reliable cognitive process, namely clairvoyancy. Despite this, according to BonJour, Samantha cannot be said to know that the President was in New York City, because of her total disregard for the compelling evidence against that proposition.

Does this demonstrate that a clairvoyant lacks knowledge, and work as a refutation of the reliabilist account? Certainly not. For one thing, BonJour's intuition here is less self-evident than he suggests – my considered judgement is that it seems as though Samantha does indeed know that the President is in New York City, and describing the situation thus is wholly in line with my intuitive conception of knowledge. Little progress can be made on this front of the disagreement without establishing why precisely knowledge is valuable over and above true belief, though. Without specific motivations underlying the project of analysing knowledge, the conflict between intuitions here simply reduces to a semantic debate around whether to draw the boundary between knowledge and not-knowledge in one particular location or another (Williamson 2002, 31). More importantly, then, I submit that in the case of Samantha, the reliabilist conditions are not actually met. BonJour incorrectly assumes that Samantha’s belief-generating process comprises her powers of clairvoyancy alone, when in reality her decision to ignore the overwhelming counterevidence constitutes another integral part of the procedure. It is this lackadaisical discarding of other information which leads Samantha to hold the belief that the President is in New York City, which therefore cannot be said to have arisen as a result of reliable cognitive processes (Nagel 2014, 70).

This response in defence of the clairvoyant can be avoided by reformulating the scenario, as done in a somewhat more convincing subsequent example (BonJour 1980):

Here, the reliabilist conditions are unambiguously met, and BonJour once more asserts that there is no knowledge possessed by the agent. Rather than giving a bare denial of this assertion, I present a structurally identical thought experiment to debunk the misplaced intuition that Norman lacks knowledge, as in Zalabardo (2012):

It seems entirely natural to conclude that Roxanne knows the note is an A, even though she, like Norman, would not be able to provide justification for her belief. The fact that unease at acknowledging the agent has knowledge appears only in the case of Norman suggests that this intuition is influenced by an ingrained suspicion of the authenticity of supernatural powers, as opposed to a considered position in support of internalist approaches to justification. Indeed, our wariness of clairvoyancy is a direct result of the fact that, in the real world, clairvoyancy just is not a reliable belief-generating process (Nagel 2014, 69). Taken together, these arguments demonstrate first that it is entirely plausible that a clairvoyant possesses knowledge even without having access to justifying reasons, and that intuitions against this should not be taken as strong evidence against reliabilist analyses of knowledge.

I now turn to the connection between the clairvoyant and the five-year old child. As noted, internalist accounts of justification demand that an agent can become aware of the basis of their belief in order for it to qualify as knowledge (Nagel 2014, 61). On the strong access account, S must be able to become aware that a particular object is the basis for their belief p, whilst on the weak account, S must be able to become aware of that particular object, but not necessarily the fact that it is the basis for the belief p (Papas 2014). Under both of these accounts, though, it is not clear how a five-year old could possess knowledge. A young child is exceedingly unlikely to have the requisite cognitive self-awareness to be able to become aware that their beliefs about the state of the world are based on sensory input data, or even to have an awareness of their perceptual powers in a manner any more detailed than a realisation that different beliefs about the world appear in their mind at different times. The five-year old child bears a similar relationship to vision as Norman and Roxanne do with their clairvoyancy and perfect pitch – in attempting to deny that the latter group has knowledge, the internalist cannot coherently maintain that the former possesses it. It can be seen, therefore, that without an appeal to externalism, the epistemologist would struggle to explain how it is possible for a five-year old to know that the door is shut or the television is on.

So, to conclude, it is inconsistent to argue that a five-year old child possesses knowledge but a reliable clairvoyant does not. If clairvoyancy exists and is exercised ordinarily as a perceptual power on equal footing with vision and hearing, then it is clearly fallacious to argue that clairvoyants lack knowledge in the way that those justifying their beliefs using traditional senses are said to possess it. Even in cases such as those presented by BonJour, where agents are allegedly being subjectively irrational by paying heed to their clairvoyancy-derived beliefs, it is less than obvious that the clairvoyant lacks knowledge. Whilst one of course could, if minded to do so, insist on a conception of knowledge which would definitionally exclude clairvoyants, adopting this hardline internalist position would preclude one from maintaining the seemingly commonsense view that a five-year old can know simple propositions to be true. Because of the inability of a young child to provide justifying reasons for their beliefs, the two questions of knowledge rise and fall together. For the reasons outlined above, it seems clear that both the clairvoyant and the child can have knowledge formed from their respective reliable belief-generating processes.

Bibliography

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